“Where are we going?” I asked.
My voice echoed. She lifted a finger to her lips, then scampered off.
At last I stepped through the fog to see her crouched in the middle of a mist-shrouded circle of misshapen dead trees.
I looked around. Did I know this place?
Familiar yet unfamiliar.
Same with the girl.
I walked over. She was throwing something onto the ground, like jacks. The mist curled around her face, shrouding it.
When she saw me, she nodded solemnly and moved back, as if to give me room. I walked over and bent down. She picked up what looked like a stubby piece of wood and held it out.
“I don’t know how to play,” I said.
“Yes, you do.”
“No, I’m sorry, I—”
“Shhh. Don’t wake them.”
“Who?”
When she said nothing, I looked around, but saw only the gnarled, fog-misted trees. I started to rise. She caught my hand and tried to tug me down.
“They’re resting,” she said.
“Who’s resting?”
The croak of a raven answered. I looked over my shoulder to see one perched on a branch, pecking at the pale bark. The girl leapt to her feet and waved her arms.
“Shoo! You aren’t supposed to be here.”
The raven fixed her with one beady eye and croaked in protest, but took flight, soaring off over our heads.
The girl sat again and threw her sticks, and I saw that the sticks were bones. Polished white finger bones.
White bones against black rock.
Black rock on the edge of a pit filled with murky water, stinking like a swamp. More rocks piled above it. A waterfall. A dry waterfall.
My garden.
The raven swooped past. The girl waved her fist at it. “Ewch i ffwrdd, bran!”
She turned to me. “The bran know better,” she said. “They aren’t to disturb the dead. It’s disrespectful.”
“The dead?”
She waved at the tree and the mist began to clear, as if swept away, and I saw that the gnarled trunk wasn’t a trunk at all. It was a corpse. Bound to a dead tree, arms spread, naked and bald, empty eye sockets, skin an oddly marbled red and white.
Then the last of the mist cleared and I saw the marble surface wasn’t skin. There was no skin.
I stumbled back and wheeled to see that every tree was the crucifix for a flayed corpse. That’s when I started to scream.
I woke up still screaming. I clapped my hands over my mouth and huddled there, heart pounding as I strained for any sign that I’d woken up the whole building. But all stayed silent.
When I closed my eyes, I saw the corpses again. I saw those horrible, flayed bodies and a half-remembered rumor about the Larsens surfaced.
I vaulted from bed and made it as far as the bathroom door before hurling my last meal onto the freshly scrubbed tiles.
I returned to bed but couldn’t get back to sleep. Each time I closed my eyes, I saw that raw muscle and sinew and—
I couldn’t get back to sleep.
I called James. I couldn’t help myself. But I did manage, halfway through dialing his number, to stop, think, and punch in his work number instead. He wouldn’t be there. That was the point. I listened to his voice message, hung up, called back, and listened again, feeling my heart rate slow, the dream fading into wisps that floated away as he asked me again to leave a message. That time I did. Just a brief, “Hey, wanted to let you know I’m okay. Hope you got the car.”
Hope you got the car. I’d broken off our engagement. I’d thrown the ring at him and stolen his car and run into the night … and that was the best I could come up with? Yes, it was.
While hearing James’s recorded voice helped, I still couldn’t sleep. Finally I broke down and took a pill. That only made things worse. Now I dozed in twilight sleep, dreams and hallucinations rolling into an endless drama. I’d see those bodies in my room, hanging from the walls, lying on the bed, sitting up and talking to me.
Then I’d see the Larsens. But I wasn’t seeing them with the corpses. It might have been better if I did. Instead I dreamed of them, laughing and teasing and singing, scooping me up and holding me tight and making me feel … wonderful. In Pamela Larsen’s arms, I felt something I never felt in my own mother’s awkward embraces. I felt adored.
It was those images that sent me back to the bathroom, over and over, until I gave up on going back to bed and just huddled on the floor, the cool tile against my cheek. Lying there, I tried to force the two images together—my birth parents and the flayed corpses. I tried to imagine them in that grove, as if the image would freeze and shatter those warm memories. But no matter how hard I tried, my brain refused to insert the Larsens into that scene.
When dawn’s light finally flooded through the glazed window, the nightmare dreams fluttered away and instead I saw that newspaper headline: “A Mother’s Desperate Jailhouse Plea.” I saw that and I knew I had to see her.
No, I had to face her.
She’d helped my father murder eight young men and women. My brain knew it. My gut refused to agree.
I now realized I’d locked away memories of a happy childhood, but I wasn’t sure if they were real memories or the inventions of a miserable, abused child. I had to face my past, which meant facing my biological parents. Or at least the one who’d reached out.
First, though, I needed to know exactly what they’d done. No more nightmares based on half-remembered stories. I needed facts. I got ready, then realized the library wouldn’t be open yet. I couldn’t stomach the thought of breakfast, so I just lay on the bed for another hour, haunted by my dreams, worried about my future.
When I opened my apartment door, I halted. Then I tried to figure out what had stopped me. A sound? A smell? A flicker of movement?
I looked down the hall. Three closed apartment doors, plus the stairwell. I inhaled. Just the faint smell of pine cleaner. I listened. Nothing. Really nothing—that church hush I’d noticed yesterday still enveloped the corridor. It was strange, actually, the silence and the peace, when I was so accustomed to the usual assault on my senses. While I still noticed smells and sounds, they didn’t seem to have the same effect on me here in Cainsville. I could say it was like the other day in Chicago, when I’d been too shocked to notice anything, but this felt different. Like stepping off a busy street into a library. Maybe it was just the difference of small town life.
But something had caught my attention out here. I stood there, feet on the lintel, unable to step into the hall.
I looked down. There was something on the floor, just outside my doorway. Some kind of dark gray powder, almost hidden on the hardwood. I bent. Scattered powder.
No, not scattered. It seemed to form lines. A pattern?
I rubbed the back of my neck. Then, after a glance down the hall, to be sure no one was watching, I hunkered down with my face almost to the floor, trying to get a better look. It might be lines. It might even be a pattern. Or I might be an idiot, prostrate on the floor, staring at dropped cigarette ash.
The more I stared, the more certain I became that it was ash. I could even detect a faint smoky smell.
I shook my head, went back into the apartment, and grabbed my brand-new dustpan and broom. I swept up the ash, dumped it, and headed off to the library.
The Internet confirmed that the Larsens had killed four couples. One was dating, two were engaged, one married. All were in their early twenties.
The Larsens themselves were only twenty-six when they’d been arrested. They’d been born on the same date, in the same Chicago hospital, delivered by the same obstetrician. The media had made much of that coincidence. I don’t know why. It only meant that their mothers had met in the maternity ward and become friends, so Pamela and Todd grew up together. To hear the tabloids tell it, though, you’d think some nurse had injected them with Serial Killer Serum in their cribs. Or practiced satanic rites on them while their mothers slept.