Jillian had lost all of her childhood. Inside, Michael was terrified of having all of that stolen from him. But so far it seemed they wanted only the memories of women, and they had certainly had ample opportunity to steal from him. It was cold comfort. He wished he weren't so afraid. But fear wouldn't stop him. They'd been stupid, the hollow women. They wanted him to stop searching for the house on Wildwood Road, stop trying to find the lost girl. But they did not understand him, did not realize that he loved his wife enough that it could overwhelm his fear.
He did not hesitate when they came into the circle at the top of Wildwood Road and into the nighttime shadow of that house. It was just as he recalled through the haze of memory and the drunkenness of that night.
The same run-down façade with loose shutters and clapboards. The same cracked windows. The same rambling architecture, as though the builder had been unable to decide what style the house ought to be.
It isn't a house at all, really. Not anymore.
Michael parked at the curb and killed the engine, tugged out the keys, and opened his door.
It's the remains of a house. The skeleton. And those hollow women have been feeding off of its corpse.
“Let's go,” he said, shutting the door.
Jillian hesitated only a moment before climbing out. She looked over the top of the car at him, afraid to see the house, to acknowledge it. Yet there was the trace of a smile on her features.
“Pilgrim Day Camp,” she said, shivering. “I got a medal in archery, and one in swimming. They used to play music every morning when they raised the flag. We told ghost stories during sleepover nights. This older girl hit me in the stomach one time and made me throw up.”
Despite it all, Michael could not help smiling at her. The little twist that his stomach did in that moment was not of nausea, but of excitement, like the butterflies he'd always felt during the school art show.
He went to the trunk and retrieved the tire iron that was set into a clamp beside the spare. Then he glanced up at the house again and for the first time saw the car, there in the darkness of the circular drive, right in front of the door.
Who the hell?
he thought, but even as he did he saw them moving up the front steps.
Tom Barnes and his lunatic mother.
Scooter had come back to Wildwood Road after all.
J
ILLIAN STARED AT THE PEOPLE
in front of the house. Ordinary people. Not the little ghostly girl or the freaks with the fucked-up Elephant Man faces. Just ordinary people. But what were they doing here? She would have been tempted to think that this was the wrong place, that Michael had screwed up, but she could feel the pull from the house. Like something inside had cast out invisible fishing line and she was hooked through the breastbone . . . and now she was being reeled in. She was connected to this place.
That was her reason for being here. What was theirs?
“Who is that?” she asked Michael.
He tested his grip on the tire iron for a second or two, standing at the curb. Then he glanced at her and she could see that he was troubled. Jillian didn't like that. The fucker was supposed to know what was happening, was supposed to help her. Her fists clenched, nails cutting her palms again. Her upper lip curled back and her nostrils flared. Her breathing came faster and she was about to reach for his throat.
“It's her. Susan Barnes. The guy's her son. She's like you, but it happened to her a couple of years ago.”
Years of this bitterness?
she thought.
I'd have killed myself a dozen times over by then.
Jillian stared at the two on the stairs, who by now had noticed the new arrivals. The son raised a hand to wave, then lowered it quickly as though he realized how absurd such a gesture was in the shadow of that house.
The hook in her breastbone tugged harder. Jillian started across the ragged lawn. Michael began to speak, then shut his mouth and followed, still clutching the tire iron. Her fury had abated a little. The two small memories that had returned to her in the car had been enough to give her a glimpse at what she had lost, and what was supposed to fill the emptiness inside her. It made her sick to think that such idiocy was what she was missing . . . and yet she hungered for it as well. Hungered to fill that void in any way possible. Because she could feel her mind fraying at the edges. Jillian couldn't tell Michael that, but she could feel herself falling apart, crumbling into some mental abyss. Without the center, the rest could not hold.
Her pace quickened and Michael hurried to keep up with her.
The two who had parked right in the circular drive in front of the main door—and why not, since the residents of that house already knew they were coming—waited for Michael and Jillian. When they reached the steps, Jillian caught the woman glaring at her. Her eyes held a challenge.
She's trying to fuck with me,
Jillian thought.
I'll rip her goddamned throat out.
“Mr. Barnes,” Michael whispered.
The guy on the steps nodded. “Dansky.”
“I guess you believed me.” Michael shot a wary look at Jillian, perhaps getting a taste of the tension between the two women. Then he turned to Barnes again. “Couldn't have been easy, getting her out after hours.”
The man called Barnes, a square-jawed guy, late twenties, whose nose looked like it had been broken at least once, shrugged. “She's my mother,” he whispered. He reached out for her, this older woman who looked like she was old enough to be his grandmother, withered and brittle. She twisted away from his touch.
“Fuck off.”
Jillian smiled in admiration. The woman sneered, but there was some strange communication between them. They understood each other.
Barnes took a breath and reached for the front door. His mother was behind him, Michael next and Jillian last. Barnes paused with his hand on the knob and glanced back. He dropped his gaze a second, then looked up at Michael.
“What is this place, really?”
Michael looked up at the face of the crumbling old manse and then back at Barnes. “It isn't the house you have to worry about.”
The other man waited as if expecting more. When it didn't come, he grabbed the knob and tried to turn it, but it was locked. Jillian's heart pounded as though it would burst from her chest, and her breath came in short gasps. Of course it wouldn't open for him. She shoved roughly past them all, reached out for the knob, and twisted. It turned easily and the door swung open onto a shadowy foyer. The darkness within beckoned.
“Jilly, wait,” Michael whispered.
She let him go past her. The others, too. Jillian was the last one there on the front steps; she spared one final glance out at the circle, at the ordinary, familiar world. But there was nothing ordinary about it, for just across the street that little blond girl, the lost girl, the ghost, stood beneath a willow tree, its branches whipping in the wind. She was just a phantom, a gossamer thing, but Jillian could see the fear and hope in her face, even from this distance.
Then she turned her back on the lost girl and stepped inside the house at the top of Wildwood Road, leaving the door open behind her, allowing what little starlight and moonlight there was to follow her in.
The place was a kind of ghost itself.
With a shiver, Jillian realized that she felt very much at home.
T
O
M
ICHAEL IT WAS LIKE
walking into a place he had previously only seen in his dreams. He knew he had been here before, but his memory was so veiled behind the fugue of ale and magic—or whatever the hell they had done to him that night—that up until this point it had been only tatters of remembrance. Now, though . . .
The memory came back to him. The place was immaculately clean, but faded and yellowed with age, as though it had been sealed tight for a century and then opened, just for them. Michael clutched the crowbar tightly in his hand.
Jillian's breath came raggedly, and she glanced around the foyer in a series of flinches. Michael looked at Barnes and his mother. It was difficult for him to be around the woman. The lost girl who had haunted his heart and mind for almost two weeks had become so much a resident of his psyche that it was troubling to see what she was now.
He recalled his previous visit here. The memory echoed in him, along with a prickle of dread unlike anything he had felt before. The memory of that helplessness caught in his throat and for a moment he could not breathe. Tom and Susan were ahead of him, starting down the hall toward the kitchen, and now Michael hesitated, turning around to stare at the door. The way they'd come in. The way out.
He recalled that girlish laughter. Their names scrawled on the furniture upstairs. And those blackouts, when his body was not his to control.
“Shit,” he whispered.
The front door beckoned and he felt himself pulled toward it. Michael squeezed his eyes shut and pinched the bridge of his nose, then looked up at Jillian, who had paused just a few feet ahead of him and was glaring at him with bitter disapproval.
“You're not going to wimp out on me now, are you?”
Michael shook his head. Once again he squeezed the crowbar, barely conscious of it. “No.”
Tom and his mother had gone past the stairs down the hall, moving silently and cautiously investigating the open doorways on either side. Michael began to follow, sifting his memories of this place through his mind. The hall. The back dining room. The kitchen. The narrow servants' stairs at the rear of the house.
Upstairs
. His little fugue moments, his blackouts, happened all through the house, but he had been upstairs when he had seen the scrawled names and heard the voices. He paused with one hand on the finial at the bottom of the grand staircase. Jillian made a curious little noise behind him.
“Tom,” he whispered.
At the far end of the hall, almost to the kitchen, Tom Barnes turned quickly around, brows knitted in annoyance that the silence had been broken. Michael pointed up the stairs, not really caring if the others followed, and then he took the first step.
In the darkness at the top of the stairs, shadows stirred. His breath caught in his throat. A ripple of childish giggles moved through the darkness, low and distant, muffled . . . somewhere up there. Michael glanced along the hall and saw that Tom and Susan—Scooter—had started back toward the front of the house. Tom was watching him, but Susan's face was lost in the shadows as she passed between the splashes of moonlight that came through the doorways along the corridor.
Michael's nostrils flared. If this was the memory of a smell, it was an incredibly powerful memory. Not apple pie or popcorn. Not baking cookies. This was an earthier smell, something familiar and yet he could not quite . . .
“What is that smell?” he asked.
“It's New Year's Day,” Jillian whispered.
He turned to find her weeping. A tiny smile played at the edges of her lips, but there was a bone-deep melancholy in that smile as well and in the way her eyes crinkled.
“Jilly?” Michael asked, hardly daring. She was remembering something. This scent was something of hers.
“It's needles from the Christmas tree, spread all over the floor because my dad just dragged it out the door and to the curb. We always took the tree down on New Year's Day. And when I'd vacuum up the needles they would heat up and the smell would just be everywhere, so strong, like a last little gift before Christmas went away completely.”
He went to her, his free hand sliding behind her back as he gazed down at her. It was the first time in days he had touched her the way a husband touched his wife, with gentle love and comfort.
“Do you remember it? Really? You see it in your head?”
Jillian nodded slowly but her smile was turning bitter even as she did. The sour twist returned to her lips. “I do. But there's so many more. I can feel them.” She glanced around the foyer, then glared up at the shadows at the top of the stairs. “They're here. But it's like they're just out of reach.”
“Goddamn it, Dansky,” Tom Barnes hissed. “Shut her up.”
Michael shot him a hard look. If the man thought their presence here had gone unnoticed, he was an idiot. Even now he glanced upstairs once more at the shifting shadows and something silver flitted through the darkness up there. For the first time he noticed the singing. It was distant, and so low, but if he listened very carefully he could make it out. Another old jump-rope song, a local one, too. He recognized it.
“Halfway to Boston, halfway to Lynn . . .”
He didn't know how the rest went and could not make out the words, so low were the voices. The little-girl voices. Three or four of them at least, punctuated with laughter. Even nearer, perhaps just at the top of the stairs, there were whispers.
“Don't you hear that?” Tom Barnes muttered in a low voice.
Michael ignored him, glancing at Jillian. She had grown deathly pale, and she took the first step up toward the second floor, joining him there. Then she took another.
The ocean
. Michael smelled the salt of the surf, could practically hear it crashing on the rocks, though they were twenty miles from the coast. Then that smell was washed away as though by some unfelt breeze and replaced by something else.
Ripe strawberries.
So delicious a smell that his stomach growled.
Maple syrup
.
Lilacs in bloom,
the scent so strong it staggered him and he had to grasp the railing.
Then he got it at last. The scents belonged to the girls, part of those stolen memories. They might have coalesced and taken shape, but there must have been something about powerful sensory memory, olfactory and auditory, that lingered and drifted. Jillian had New Year's Day. And Scooter . . . the smells of popcorn and hot cocoa and the sound of the calliope music from the ice-cream truck, those must have been hers. They accompanied her.
And these other smells, and the jump-rope songs . . . he wondered how many girls were here, kept like the sweetest of delicacies and nibbled upon by the Virgins of Carthage. If that was truly what they were.