“He’ll come with the shadows,” she sings, “to take your fears away, he’ll guide you like a father, he’ll take away the pain.”
Something about the scene is terrible to watch, and I notice with revulsion that Cathy is wet. A putrid smell rises from her, and I realize that she has messed herself.
She’s terrified.
And dirty—she’s filthy.
And then I notice other things.
Her hands are shaking.
Her hair is oily.
Her spoiled dress is dry—she’s been here awhile.
And no one has come looking for her.
And there are dolls everywhere… sackcloth dolls—the Creeper Man—everywhere. I stumble back, horrified. Dolls piled in the corners. Dolls nailed to the walls. Dolls dangling from the beams. Dolls scattered on the floor farther off into the shadows.
There are hundreds, all of them sightless and smiling.
“Oh my God.”
“He’ll take it back I know it, he’ll take away this curse. He’ll say he’s sorry, truly. This can’t get any worse—” She breaks off her thread with her teeth, leaving a muddy line across her face like an elongated grimace, then she lights a candle and places the pathetic effigy beside it.
And then she reaches into her basket and pulls free more straw, and another piece of sackcloth, and begins again.
“Three little girls knelt by an alder to summon a man to be their protector. The little girls found their game hard to bear when their protector turned and gave them a scare.…”
I bend down until I am looking at this child and everything comes out. “You made me think it was me. You told me I was to blame. But you brought this curse down on us. On our family. And now he has Nori, too. And you were always insane. Weren’t you?”
I realize that it no longer matters.
Cathy is gone.
Nori is gone.
And I don’t have any answers.
“Stop this.”
Gowan is beside me, standing in the shadows.
“Gowan?”
“Stop getting distracted.”
“What?”
He grabs my arm and yanks me to my feet
and I’m back in the cave.
He puts a gentle hand on my shoulder, like a warm blanket
and I am facing the cave opening.
Or is it the other way around—am I on the inside of the cave, looking out at the forest-manor? Standing before me is the tall, thin, blind man, and he is smiling—too wide to be natural.
I blink
and he is a tree.
I blink
and I’m back in the bright version of La Baume. A sharp pain in my cheek and now I’m in the woods. Gowan is standing over me, shaking me. “SILLA!”
The pain again.
He slapped me.
I don’t know what’s real anymore.
I look up at him. “I always told you I was crazy.”
27
—. — — —
Try to hold your stomach tight
till those feelings pass
close your eyes and think of light
the darkness doesn’t last.
BROKEN BOOK ENTRY
There are secrets that I have forgotten. Like some kind of power that’s inside me, eating away at me, like a cloud hanging over my head, haunting my every move. Like a shadow. And if I could rid myself of them once and for all, I would. Isn’t it obvious? Was that not the point of this book? As though by putting them down I would make them less alive? Make them less real—or at least get them out of me. Out of my head. But it’s pointless. All of it is. Because now I’ve got nothing but those secrets. And I’m forgetting them. It’s just… it seems important. The garden is dead. The house is dead. And we are all nothings inside it.
“You have to eat. You have to.”
I shake my head. Can’t he see it’s useless? My body won’t allow it. “I can’t.”
He growls as he turns away, throwing out his hands in frustration. Then he whirls on me. “Do you want to save yourself?” he yells. “Stop getting distracted with things that don’t matter!”
I open my mouth to reply, but it stretches wide and round, expanding into a dark chasm, and I am stepping through it, back into the dank cave. The Creeper Man’s lair.
He’s toying with me.
“Open your eyes,” Gowan whispers.
The water, dripping somewhere in the distance, echoes louder than before. The cave is, if it’s possible, even darker. Still. Too still.
A bundle of cloth lays ten paces away from me. I glance back at Gowan, but he is just watching me.
“Stop getting distracted,” he whispers. “You have to face this.”
I step forward, and though there is nothing to see but a bundle of—blanket? cloth? curtains?—my legs are weak and I stumble.
I
fall
to my knees when I realize. When I see. It’s not a bundle of cloth.
“No,” I choke.
NO.
My whole being shouts the word. Rejects the sight. Fights this reality.
“No… No. No. No.” My hands are rigid like claws. “NO!”
It’s a tiny, little, dried-out husk. A dehydrated thing that used to be a child.
It’s Nori. Nori is lying on the floor of an impossible cave, deep along the corridor that is also Python Wood.
And she is dead.
More than dead.
She’s a shriveled husk of a little girl, her mouth open and glaring, her eyes sunken and leathery.