Chapter 20

20

When my father started getting sick, I would often wake to find him standing at the foot of my bed, watching me. The first dozen times it happened, I startled awake in the darkness and yelped for my mother. Cate would come and tell Gabe to go back to bed, then hold me in her arms until I stopped shaking and fell back to sleep.

“Papa is just sleepwalking,” she tried to convince me. The first few times, I believed her—but Gabe kept coming back, and each time I woke, his expression was darker, filled with more fear and loathing than the last. Eventually, I stopped screaming. I would open my eyes in the dark and find him there. I would watch, expressionless, as tears slipped down his cheeks, my tiny heart shivering inside my chest.

Sometimes, after he died, I had nightmares about him in which he stood at the end of my bed with a weapon and watched me with those cold, hate-filled eyes.

Why did someone who was supposed to love me look at me like that?

When I woke in that house in another world and saw a figure in the room, drowned in shadow, I didn’t cry out. I stared at it, at him, the tall man who wore a bull’s skull to hide his face.

I watched him as he watched me with dead black eyes and felt a flicker of recognition at the rage and hatred radiating from him.

I scrabbled back and tried to sit up. Too slow. Tyler lifted his head from where he slept, but the man was already on me. He stank of death and acrid smoke. Beneath the bone mask he wore, half shattered now by the shot Agnes took, I caught glimpses of skin, teeth, eyes: a man. Just a man. He grabbed a handful of my hair. I grunted and kicked him in the groin. The man loosened his grip and I rolled out from beneath him, my broken ribs stabbing a needle of pain that left me unable to breathe. Tyler was standing now, looking on with wide eyes.

“The gun!” I gasped as I crawled away, toward the front door. I tried to stand, but the pain in my lungs was too sharp. Tyler was yelling. Then hands twisted their way into my hair again. The man slammed me forward. My forehead smacked against the floor and my vision shuddered. Tyler was struggling with the shotgun. I dug my fingernails into the man’s skin, but it was dry and rancid, and he didn’t seem to notice the pain. He yanked me up and began dragging me out of the house, toward the water. I tried to catch my breath, tried to untangle my hair from his grip.

Tyler followed behind me, still fumbling with the shotgun. The man was hauling me through the mud, toward the water’s edge.

Finally, finally, Tyler pumped the shotgun and pointed it in my direction.

“Shoot him,” I rasped. “Shoot him.”

There was a pop of gunfire. Shots punched into the trees around me, but if they hit the man, they had no effect on him. The violence with which he handled me was horrifying. We hit the water. I thrashed, sucking in mud and water. Tyler shot again. This time, the shot hit him full in the face, entirely shattering the bone mask. For a split second, I saw the man’s face, the face he’d been trying to hide from me. Then he let me go and melted into the mist. I sank beneath the surface, breathless and panicked as I swam away, sure he would come back for another go. I broke the surface and sucked in air and screamed “Help!” I wasn’t far from land. Tyler was already thrashing through the water and trees toward me, and then I was in his arms, being tugged back toward the muddy bank.

“Move, move, move, move, move,” he was saying. I kicked my legs hard.

“Did you kill him?” I asked—but how could you kill a man who was already dead?

“No,” Tyler said as he dragged me back onto land. There was blood everywhere. My blood, I realized, slipping out of a wound on my forehead.

“You’re alive, you’re alive, you’re alive,” Tyler said as he squeezed my face, crushed me to his chest, squeezed my face again. Then he was on his feet once more, shotgun aimed into the marsh. “Where is he? Did you see where he went?”

“I don’t know,” I said between coughs. I was shaking. The taste of mud and marsh water lingered in my mouth, and there was an oily feeling all through me. I wanted to cry and vomit to get it out, but I could do neither. “I don’t know. I just—he let me go. I saw his face. I saw his face. I know who he is.”

A shadow moved between the trees, sending ripples across the water toward us.

“Fuck off!” Tyler yelled at the forest. He tried to help me stand, but the mud was slick, and I slipped backward, gasping as pain rocketed through my broken ribs again.

For a few tight breaths, it seemed as though nothing would happen. We watched and waited. I thought: Maybe he won’t come. And then he came.

He no longer bothered with his disguise. He emerged from the water in his true form, and I saw him fully for the first time. His eyes were dark sacs and his lower jaw hung loose, at an odd angle, from where Tyler had shot him. The skin of his face was decaying to reveal stripped-bare bone and teeth. His skin was webbed with pockets of decay, and his hair was tangled with water weeds. I could see exposed tendons in each of his joints. The inside of his mouth was black as ink.

I put my hand to my lips.

“Gabe,” I said quietly through my fingers.

Gabriel Hollow. My father.

He moved toward me slowly, the eyes he kept trained on me bulging from his skull. My chin was shaking. Tears slipped down my cheeks, but I didn’t run, didn’t look away.

“Run,” Tyler whispered as he backed away, but where could I run?

I breathed steadily and kept my eyes on him. No sudden movements. Perhaps he expected me to run, to fight, and I was doing neither of those things. He was so close now I could smell the dead-flesh stench of his breath.

Then Rosie was there, in front of me. Tyler must have draped her in Vivi’s old coat while I slept, because it now hung loose about her shoulders. She screamed, a defensive animal scream that kept going and going.

My father stopped to look at her, his focus on me broken.

“I have them,” he said—then he backed away and was swallowed by the mist.

“What the hell is going on?” Tyler demanded as he helped me stand.

“We have to dig up the grave,” I said to him shakily. “I want to know who’s in there. I need to know.”

“That’s what you want to talk about right now?! The grave?! Your dead father has been trying to kill you! Your dead father kidnapped your sisters!”

“Please,” I said. “My ribs are broken. I need your help.”

“No. Absolutely not. I shan’t.” But Rosie was already tugging him toward the gravestone, and he followed her through the mud back to the side of the house.

We dug with our hands, the three of us.

It didn’t take long to find them, despite Tyler’s swearing and complaints. They weren’t buried deep, under less than a foot of earth. I knelt by the grave and pulled damp soil back with my left hand as Tyler and Rosie dug, my broken ribs demanding to be felt.

They were wrapped in a blanket, together. We coaxed them from the earth, loosening them slowly, but the soil gave them up easily, as though it wanted them gone. As though they didn’t belong in this place. We placed them gently on the earth by the hole we had dug. I unfurled one side of the blanket and then the other, my heart beating furiously as I wondered who was buried in the shallow grave marked with my sisters’ names.

With my name.

There were three of them. Three small bodies, each turned mostly to forest now. Their bones were twisted roots and all of the soft parts of them—eyes, mouth—were thick with carrion flowers, but they were still in the shape of people. Still had teeth, still had fingernails. They were the bodies of children, curled up together. Each of them wore an identical heart-shaped gold locket dangling from what remained of their necks. I held the necklace of the smallest and wiped the mud away with my thumb to reveal the engraving beneath.

IRIS, it read. The body it belonged to was missing its two front baby teeth. I unclipped the locket from the dead girl’s neck and held it up for Tyler to see.

“What does it mean?” Tyler asked as he watched the gold heart spin slowly in the half-light.

“It means . . .” I looked up at him. “I’m not Iris Hollow.”