“Shall we go repeat ourselves?” he said.
She forced a smile as she slipped her arm through his. They would repeat the last lines from their prior conversation, then kiss, then continue as though they had never been interrupted in the first place. They walked once more through the archway to the apple orchard, their feet crushing the cool grass. They walked that center path where Linda had told Tristan about her family and her cat. Linda tried to keep her hands from shaking as Tristan interlaced their fingers. The ornamental lights shone so bright she couldn’t see the stars above.
This time, Linda didn’t touch the trees’ rubbery wood, but she recalled that texture, like healed wounds on fresh skin. She avoided touching the apples that dangled from the trees and lay rotting on the ground, recalling their strange insides spread out on the floor of the den.
“Thanks for being so understanding about my family,” she said, as she had said that night, and she pulled at Tristan’s hand, tugging him closer.
“Everyone has their demons.” He bent to her, and their lips met for an instant. When he pulled back, he left his hand on her waist. It was clammy. He pulled her into a hug, using the gesture to whisper into her ear. “I would never let you win,” he said.
Linda frowned. She caught herself and moved free from him, forcing that smile to return, but her stomach twisted at the idea that he still believed she wanted him. As she turned away and ran down the path, light shifted in the leaves and sent little dancing shadows like bruises across her. Her heel sunk into too-soft dirt, sending her toward the bushes between two trees, and though she caught her balance, her shoe popped off, held aloft by the soil. When she yanked it free, it made a sickening sucking sound. Tristan called after her, said her name in that twee twang. She stepped back into the brush. The terrible fruit brushed the top of her head as she knelt into the dirt. It stunk of rot. Not the rot of apples, but like pus and blood, an infected wound.
Tristan screamed. Linda heard him fall, a great thud. Then another crunch, like teeth biting into bone. He screamed harder, a shrill sound she’d not heard him make before. “Get it off me!” he called out in his new falsetto. “Help! Someone! Get it— Not my face! Not my face!” Linda shook herself free from the momentary fear that had gripped her and bounded from her hiding spot to see something attacking him. Tristan pawed at whatever it was in defense, careful to protect his face at all costs. Then Deja was there with a rock in her hand, and the thing was dead on the ground within seconds. For a moment, Linda wondered if Deja might bring the rock down upon Tristan next. Her heart throbbing, she rushed forward as though to stop it. The paranoia faded as quickly as it had come.
“What the hell was that?” Linda inspected Tristan’s unconscious body. “Oh, my God. Is he okay?” She started to kneel.
“Get away from him!” Deja kicked a cloud of dirt at Linda. Linda fell back onto her ass. A jolt of pain shot up her spine. “Tatum, take her inside, now!”
The cameraman offered Linda his hand. As he pulled her away, she peered back over her shoulder, angling for a final glimpse. Tristan’s shoulder gushed blood despite the bunched fabric Deja pressed against it.
The dead creature sprawled on the ground was white with gray veins running through its outer surface, the sheen of its skin reflecting the spotlights above. It had rodent-like ears and a long snout. It looked like an abomination of a possum, something one might find stitched together in a curio shop, its paws and mouth bloodied with Tristan’s carnage.
Chapter Thirty
Sabrina
“He didn’t seem suicidal,” Charity said as they carried Brandon’s body between them through the passage in the wall. Sabrina walked backward, hoping like hell she didn’t trip and send Brandon’s body flying. Or worse, falling on top of her. They’d considered leaving the body and telling Deja, but Sabrina feared whoever had done this to him might catch wind of their conversation and retrieve him. Or worse, that he might disappear, through the house’s will or his own.
“The man had nothing,” Sabrina said, talking herself down. The bruising around his neck was a common indicator of suicide, but it was also an indicator of being choked. “One-liners and platitudes and nothing else in that brain of his.”
“Sure, but why would that lead him to—”
The other night, Sabrina had heard yelling in the yard between Linda and Brandon. At the time, she’d thought little of it. She even felt a sense of pride that her friend would give the creep a taste of his own toxic medicine. Now, she couldn’t shake the thought that her friend might have taken it too far. It was far-fetched, but so was the situation she found herself in.
She frowned as they ducked through the tiny door, holding steady to the body even as its gases leaked and spread their filthy perfume. Kneeling on the floor, she yanked at Brandon’s shoulder. A bone popped as he flew through the hole all at once, landing with a splat. Sabrina held her breath and begged herself not to barf. Beside her, Charity swallowed hard.
“Let’s drag him the rest of the way,” Sabrina offered, looping her arms under his pits.
“Can we?” Charity said. “I thought you’d never fucking ask.”
• • •
Even right before she left for the show, Sabrina’s house smelled like death. Her father’s illness was incurable, because it was unnameable. The doctors shrugged after too many tests, claiming it had to be some sort of autoimmune disease. One recommended them to a specialist they couldn’t afford, and that was the end of his medical journey.
If asked, he claimed his sickness was a curse.
As Sabrina dragged Brandon’s body along the dark path, she remembered the X-rays she’d stared at as a little girl and how she promised she’d learn one day to read them. It wouldn’t have mattered. Her father wouldn’t believe anyone but his deceased wife. After all, it was she who swore he’d never love again as she wasted away on her deathbed.
A wave of cold flowed through her. Every night at the end, her mom recited the names of the people who had wronged her. She claimed that her voice breathed the omen of death. Her little curses, as silly as her intentions and her crystals. Only a little girl then, Sabrina longed for the rosy-smelling balms her mother would spread over Sabrina’s chest to bring love, or the cardamom cookies that were supposed to translate a mother’s love into the bodies of her children. Those were the memories that made Sabrina cling to her mother even when, in anger, she breathed Sabrina’s name.
Their father claimed he would have left a long time ago if he could only walk out the door. He called himself powerless to their mother’s energy even before he became too ill to move.
And like her mother’s intentions and energies, maybe this—Brandon’s death—was something supernatural. Maybe the house was at fault: for her crawling through it; for the oozes; for the nightly noises; for her mistakenly breaking into Tristan’s room while under some spell cast by its walls; for everything.
But if that were true, then it was all true, and the control she once imagined she had over her life was a facade.
Sabrina tugged on the body, sweat coating her forehead as her resolve gave way.
No. Someone had done this to Brandon. Those tapes had betrayed her. This season’s villain was the most dangerous in the show’s history: an actual murderer, cold-blooded, the kind who pretended to be a friend.
Chapter Thirty-One
Linda
As Tatum tugged Linda along, Deja struggled to drag Tristan across the ground into the manor. Tatum pushed at Linda’s back, urging her to keep moving forward. Dazed, Linda placed one foot in front of the other along the path. Her head was floaty, fogged the way it used to get on the roughest evenings with her father. Tatum kept stride beside her, his hand clamped around her upper arm. Any other man, any other moment, she would have stomped his foot until he let go, but her knees were so weak, she appreciated the stability.
Once Linda reached the front doors, her shiver had transformed to a full-body shake. Her teeth chattered. When she glanced down to make sure she was still standing, her dress was covered in dirt.
She climbed the stairs, her legs with each step threatening to give out from under her. Tatum followed behind with his handheld camera. In her bedroom, she dressed in the casual clothes in which she’d arrived, then followed her old footsteps toward a voice in the parlor, where Marion tossed darts at the wall, her skin dull and pallid even as her stance seemed stronger.
“Where’s Tristan?” Marion asked. She turned as soon as Linda entered. “You two were on a date.”
Linda swallowed the lump in her throat.
“Did you see a ghost?” Marion said.
“Tristan’s hurt.” The words felt like a cough. “We were attacked. He’s bleeding. A lot.”
“Oh, my God.” Marion clutched at her chest. “Where is he?”
