Mine Page 9

  She began to back out of the forest, but the branches scratched her spine and slithered over her shoulders, seeming to clutch her close. She spun around, and she couldn’t even see her house through the thickly clustered greenery. It felt eerily similar to when she’d gotten lost in the swamp, only now, instead of thick, sucking wet, she felt the dry, scratching, snarling thorns of the forest closing in around her.

  Suddenly, she felt like a trapped animal. Like she was being purposefully blocked. She reached down for her phone and felt the long spines of a plant scrape across the skin of her arm, leaving a raised red mark. Something tickled her ankle, and when she looked down, she saw a vine curling around her foot. She yanked it away, and it stung her hand with prickers.

  A noise deeper in the forest made her freeze.

  It didn’t sound like Buddy, tentative and shivering and shy.

  It sounded thick and slow and stupid, cracking branches and shuffling through leaves.

  Panic took hold of her heart, and she ripped and tore at the twigs and vines reaching for her, stumbling backward, tripping, falling, turning, clawing away.

  “Just let me go,” she pled. “Please, just let me go!”

  Lily pushed with both arms, ferocious and fierce and unafraid of the scratches, and the branches blocking her suddenly gave way. She stumbled into her own yard. The car was gone. Her mom must have gone to pick up her dad—much later than usual. Lily took a step toward the house and stopped. She had never felt this alone. Was it worse to be outside in the dark, or inside that strange old house where she couldn’t always trust her own eyes—and where she knew roaches and spiders lurked, whether or not the ones she had seen were real? What would it feel like to turn the doorknob and find it locked?

  At least her mother had left the outside light on. The bulb beside the door cast a warm glow, and as soon as Lily stepped into its shine, she felt a little better.

  Looking out at the lake from here, she could see the fading brilliance of the dregs of sunset reflected in the flat black water. She couldn’t see the houses across the lake, thanks to a rise of cattails and water plants. But it gave her some comfort to know that they were there. And that Rachel and Kyle were nearby, looking out at the same lake and seeing something they knew, something fun to explore. She considered what her dock might have looked like covered in yellow caution tape. But the wood was so wobbly and old and rotten, she could only envision the tape in a similarly sad state, breaking away by itself, fading from a bright yellow to the color of an old man’s teeth.

  She looked down at her phone. No bars. When they had Wi-Fi again and the family computer arrived, she was going to find out exactly what had happened at this house. Surely her mom had Googled their address before they bought it, to make sure nothing horrible had happened? Sure, it was Florida, but shouldn’t people have to tell you if a house had…if someone had…if someone had died inside a house, before they sold it to you? An old man dying naturally was one thing, but a little girl? A murder?

  That was a lot scarier, and definitely not natural.

  Lily heard a rumble coming toward her, and when she looked toward the long driveway, bright lights blinded her. She threw up her arm to shield herself as the car honked cheerfully. Like anyone could be cheerful here, now.

  The car rolled to a stop. Mom and Dad got out, and Mom was carrying take-out bags. Lily could smell Chinese food, and her stomach growled. Rachel’s packaged snacks were great, but hot food was so much better.

  “I left the door unlocked,” Mom called. “Is it stuck? We need to get you a key.”

  Lily realized something, and asked her mom, “Don’t we need to have the locks changed? I mean, whoever used to live here…they don’t seem like they were…” She wanted to say sane but recognized that it wasn’t a kind thing to say. She was really just trying to ask if there was a chance Britney was still living nearby. “I just mean, what if they came back?”

  “We already told you no one’s coming back, sweetie,” her dad said with that fake cheerfulness that insulted Lily’s feelings as a kid and an actor. “We don’t need to change the locks. We’ll make some extra keys tomorrow. The realtor only gave us the one set, and it’s pretty old and beat up.”

  Mom opened the door, which did stick a little, and Lily followed the Chinese food inside. Her dad came in last, and he turned off the outside light and locked the door behind them. He’d been out of work for so long that seeing him in a suit, looking so focused and determined, made him seem like a stranger. Of course, he had felt like a stranger at home in his pajamas in Colorado, too, as he looked for jobs and grew a beard and their grocery budget dwindled and Lily’s requests for new boots got denied and she caught him frowning and kind of staring through her when he thought she wasn’t looking. He didn’t even seem to know that he was doing it.

  And Mom had picked up so many extra shifts that she’d started to lose weight and catch every cold, and then she missed the spring musical and didn’t get to see Lily star as Ariel in The Little Mermaid, and…well, that was one good thing about Florida. The family would supposedly get back to normal, whatever that was.

  Dad went to change clothes and Mom opened up the square white boxes of food. The room smelled so good that Lily almost drooled a little. She dished out her favorite, sweet and sour chicken and spring rolls, plus plenty of fluffy white rice. Their family had never been particularly formal, so Lily just grabbed her chopsticks and dug in.

  “How was work?” Lily asked her dad, following his script.

  “Good,” he answered, looking up like he was surprised that she had spoken. “Mom said you were really helpful today. That’s good—we see you toeing the line. I know the move has been hard on you and it’s no fun being stuck in the house, but I think things are going to get better.”

  He asked her about her day, and she skipped the part with the boxes and told him about fishing with Rachel and catching her first bluegill. Mom complimented her on how much work she’d gotten done, and for a moment there, Lily basked in her own little spotlight. They saw her. They were smiling at her. No drama necessary. No one mentioned anything bad that she’d done, now or in the past. No one mentioned Colorado. For now, they just were.

  It was a pretty good night.

  After dinner, Lily skipped upstairs to her room before she remembered that something might be amiss. It was odd, how she thought of it now as her room in their house, but she still didn’t feel comfortable being in the house or being in her room. Every time she came back, she knew there was a possibility that she’d find something new and strange and terrible, or that she might find her bed torn apart yet again and those harsh words scrawled in ash-gray letters.

  But nothing was wrong this time. Everything was as she’d left it. And when she tried her phone—which her mom had forgotten to reclaim—she had those same three bars. She spent the rest of the night texting with CJ, telling him about how gross the house had been and how much fun she had on the boat—but not about the horrible things that had happened to her, the impossible things she had seen. She didn’t want him to think she was going crazy. Drama was one thing, but it had to be believable. The actor’s job was to make the audience believe. And the things that were happening? It just wasn’t believable. So she left that part out.

  Instead, she told him how the house looked like it was half buried in the swamp by a giant. She told him about the strange dog that she was trying to tame, and the odd Jurassic Park beauty of the forest, and the depth of the lake and how the sunset reflected on it like fire. She told him about the funny young birds that looked like dinosaurs and the ancient turtles that looked like mossy logs and sometimes dragged themselves up out of the water and blinked their black eyes like they’d forgotten their glasses. She told him how the air felt as heavy as pound cake, and how her hair had developed a frizzy curl that it never had in Colorado.

  But she didn’t tell him
any of the scary things. She didn’t tell anyone.

  She was beginning to think maybe she’d imagined all of it.

  Until she woke up in the early morning and realized she wasn’t alone.

  14.

  The room was almost pitch dark when Lily opened her eyes. She’d had trouble going to sleep and had just awakened from a nightmare—she knew that much. She couldn’t remember the specifics, only that she had felt trapped somewhere in the dark, and that she couldn’t breathe. She sat up. Her thrashing had flung her sheet and comforter to the floor. The only light came from the moon, shining around the edges of her blinds.

  The house had air-conditioning, but it didn’t quite seem to reach her room upstairs. It was always warm up here. It reminded her of a sponge that had been wrung out but still felt damp when you touched it. And her fan wouldn’t turn on all the way. Well, it would, but then the lightbulbs rattled in their cups, and she worried that the whole thing would fall on the foot of her bed and chop off her legs, even if that seemed a bit far-fetched. So it made sense that she was covered in sweat, her hair plastered to her forehead and neck.

  “Well, that sucked,” she said.

  She was out of breath, her lungs burning as if she’d been running, or holding her breath underwater. Her heart was beating fast, and it took her a moment to feel normal again, to stop the thumping in her ears. The house’s noises weren’t familiar to her yet. It had old creaks and groans, and sometimes the branches of the oak trees rubbed against the roof. She’d even heard strange scratching and squeaks from the walls when squirrels—or possibly something worse—skittered around. But none of those noises had awakened her. The house was silent now. Too silent. It felt like it, too, was holding its breath.

  Lily put her bare feet on the floorboards. A chill crept up her legs, into her chest, down to her fingertips. But it wasn’t the numb cool of panic. It was like ice. Like that day in Colorado when the electricity had gone out and the heating had quit and she’d woken up shivering with just her frozen nose poking out from the heavy blankets.

  But there was no way anything in central Florida should have felt that way in July.

  “Hello?”

  Lily didn’t even know why she said that, like she was speaking to someone. There was no one here. Her parents were asleep. And yet she suddenly knew she was not the only one awake. She quickly pulled her feet away from the floor and back onto the bed, wrapping her arms around her knees. She told herself that there was nothing under the bed. And yet…she had never really gotten over the fear that something might be there, that a cold, clammy hand might reach out at night to stroke her bare foot should it fall carelessly out of the covers.

  A cold, clammy hand like the one that had touched her when she’d fallen in the cardboard box.

  “You wouldn’t go away. I told you to.”

  It was the tiniest whisper, barely more than the rasping brush of wind in the trees, but it was the only sound in the whole entire house, as if the house slept, as if it were a dead thing itself. The whisper was so quiet that Lily could almost pretend that she hadn’t heard it. At least until it spoke again.

  “So now we’re going to play. I’m going to show you things.”

  Lily’s eyes were adjusting to the low light now, and she scanned her room. Nothing was out of place. Except…did the shadows seem to cling strangely to the corner behind her open door? And hadn’t that door been closed when Lily had gone to sleep? She always closed her door at night. Mrs. Burrell had made the class watch a video about house fires, and after seeing how quickly an open door led to total carnage, Lily was a firm convert. And yet her door was open now. And behind it, in the triangle the door formed with her wall, the shadows seemed too deep, too dark, as if they were coalescing and taking shape.

  A strange sound came from that dark corner. A metallic jingling that was familiar somehow.

  “You took this. He needs his collar,” the whisper whined. “He runs away sometimes. His address is on the tags. They’ll bring him home.”

  That’s why the sound was so familiar—it was Buddy’s collar. And someone was playing with it. Someone who should not be here. And wasn’t that collar in a drawer downstairs?

  But Lily couldn’t speak. Whenever she tried to scream in her nightmares, her throat would go dry—and now, when she most wanted to call out to her parents, her voice stubbornly wouldn’t work. For a moment she questioned it: Was she asleep? Was this one of those dreams where she was paralyzed, and things seemed real but weren’t? She remembered a trick she had learned to tell if it was a dream or not—you just had to look at something with numbers on it, then look away and look back. In dreams, the numbers would change, or the alarm clock would disappear. Dreams couldn’t hold on to numbers. But there was nothing in her room with numbers.

  Her tongue unstuck from the roof of her mouth, and she whispered, “Am I dreaming?”

  The only answer was the annoyed jingling of metal and a dull scratch.

  “It’s not a dream,” the other voice said, but it didn’t sound so sure.

  Instead of another metallic jingle, there was a clattering thump, like the collar had been dropped onto the floorboards. Lily heard the scratching again; it grated on her nerves, harsh as nails on a chalkboard. The shadow in the corner—was something twitching there now, something more than just a shadow? Lily couldn’t move, but her eyes were still able to roll in their sockets, even as tears pricked their corners and began to creep down her cheeks like ice.

  Whatever was behind the door was moving. And it was heading toward her.

  The shadow detached from the door and rose up. Fingers appeared, all white with black at the tips, flowing through the air. Lily saw hair, dark, ragged hair, rising up as if floating. It reminded her of the Van de Graaff machine she’d seen once at a museum, the way it made her hair float as the electricity coursed harmlessly through her.

  But there was nothing harmless about this…thing.

  The shadow swirled and its shape changed and blurred, sometimes just a shadow and sometimes a child. Its eyes were dark holes, black as ink, black as lake water stirred up by the thunderstorm. The thing didn’t whisper again, but it seemed to quiver and shake like TV static. An unearthly sound filled the room, like a mixture of wind and screaming that was muffled by thick glass.

  Lily knew she was frozen, but just like in a dream, she had to try to make a sound. So she willed her mouth to move and she screamed and screamed and screamed and screamed. It seemed to go on forever, the black shadow growing and reaching for her with fingers like fern fronds slick with rain. All Lily could feel was terror and the ice-cold prickling of her own fingers and toes. She couldn’t unwrap her hands from around her knees, her body seeking to roll itself into the tiniest ball possible, to be the smallest target.

  “I want to show you,” the voice whispered.

  And then suddenly her mother was there, pushing the door open the rest of the way with a meaty thunk and flicking on the light.

  “Lily, are you okay? I heard screaming.”

  Lily’s fingers unlatched from her knees, but she didn’t dare put her feet on the ground. She scooted her back against the brass bed frame and scanned the room, checking every single corner revealed by the overhead light for any remaining spots of unnatural shadow.

  “I…,” she started. Of all the things that had just occurred, all the things that didn’t seem quite real, it was strange to think that her screaming actually was real. Because that was the part that felt the most like a dream.

  “I had a nightmare,” she finally said.

  Her mom looked blurry and exhausted, with marks like purple thumbprints under her eyes, but she smiled and pattered across the wooden floorboards to sit beside Lily and wrap her in a hug. Funny that this, finally, was the traumatic event worthy of comfort.

  “Nightmares are the worst,” her mom said. “I’ve
been having them, too.”

  “You have?” Lily asked. “What are yours about?”

  Her mom chuckled that sad adult chuckle that said Lily wouldn’t understand grown-up fears until she was having them herself. “They’re just typical stress dreams. Anxiety stuff. My teeth are falling out, or growing long roots like vines, or crumbling in my mouth like crackers. I had one where your dad turned into a werewolf. Dreams can be so weird. But they don’t always mean something. I find that comforting. What was your nightmare about?”

  “This house,” Lily said, her voice very low, almost as if she didn’t want the house to hear. “It’s just so different here. It’s like this place has secrets. In the forest and the lake and the swamp…It’s just…”

  “A different world,” her mom finished for her. “For all of us. And we didn’t have much choice about coming here, so that makes it harder.”

  “We’re the ones doing all the work, it feels like,” Lily said angrily. Something about the fact that they were the only ones awake made it feel okay to say something so brazen against her father.

  “It’s hard on Dad, too,” her mom said softly. “What happened back home…He took it hard. But he’s so determined I think he talked himself into believing that this place would be nicer. Easier.”

  “It’s not nice or easy.”

  “Believe me, I know. But hey, it’s getting better. We’re making good headway. And our storage container should arrive next week. You’ll feel different once we have everything from home. What we’re doing now…it almost feels like the Oregon Trail, doesn’t it? Traveling somewhere new and strange and not having all the things you need to be happy and feel safe there?”

  Lily just nodded. She thought, but did not say, that the defining trait of the video game Oregon Trail was that pretty much everyone died.

  “You okay now?” Mom asked. “Nightmare banished?”

  Lily licked her lips. Sure, she was twelve, but that was still young enough to be scared by nightmares, wasn’t it? “Would you mind checking behind the door? That’s where…There was…”