Chapter 2
THE NIGHT SHE FORGOT
The door had been locked for sixteen years.
Mara knew this because she had watched her father nail it shut.
At least, she thought she had.
She stood on the landing with one hand pressed against the white-painted wood, listening to something scratch on the other side. The sound came in short, irregular bursts, like fingernails dragging across plaster.
Behind her, Daniel said nothing.
That frightened her more than the scratching.
“Daniel.”
He stared at the door.
“Tell me what you meant downstairs.”
His jaw tightened.
“Mara, we need to get out of here.”
“Not until you tell me what you know.”
“Look at the door.”
“I am looking at the door.”
“No.” He grabbed her wrist. “Actually look at it.”
She followed his gaze.
The paint around the brass handle had begun to blister. Tiny beads of moisture gathered along the edges, darkening the wood. Something had been written across the surface, so faintly that she initially mistook it for scratches.
Letters.
MARA ELLISON.
Beneath her name, another line appeared.
DANIEL ELLISON.
Then, slowly, a third line emerged.
HELEN ELLISON.
The scratching stopped.
A woman's voice whispered from behind the door.
“Three is too many.”
Daniel stumbled backward.
Mara caught his arm before he could fall.
“What does that mean?” she demanded.
“I don't know.”
“Daniel.”
“I said I don't know!”
His shout traveled down the staircase and disappeared into the house.
For a moment, they stood facing each other, breathing too quickly.
Then a sound came from downstairs.
A telephone ringing.
Both siblings turned.
The house had no working landline. Mara had checked the kitchen and hallway when they arrived, partly because the solicitor had mentioned an old telephone connection and partly because she didn't trust anything in Blackthorn House that still appeared functional.
The ringing continued.
Once.
Twice.
Three times.
Daniel pulled out his mobile phone.
“No signal.”
Mara's phone displayed the same message.
The ringing stopped.
A woman's voice floated up from the ground floor.
“Mara? Darling? Come downstairs.”
Their mother sounded perfectly calm.
Almost amused.
“Your brother is hungry.”
Daniel went rigid.
Mara felt his fingernails digging into her sleeve.
That was what Helen used to say when Mara spent too long hiding in her bedroom as a child. She would call from the kitchen, telling Mara to bring her brother down for lunch.
A small, ordinary memory.
The sort that should have been impossible to counterfeit.
“It's not her,” Mara whispered.
Daniel nodded, but his eyes had filled with tears.
Downstairs, something laughed.
Not Helen.
A child's laugh, high and breathless, followed by the sound of running feet.
Mara grabbed Daniel's hand.
“We're leaving.”
They ran.
The staircase groaned beneath their weight. Mara reached the ground floor first, cutting across the hall toward the front door. She seized the brass handle and pulled.
It didn't move.
She tried again.
The door rattled in its frame.
“Help me!”
Daniel threw his shoulder against it.
The impact shuddered through the hall.
Nothing.
Mara shoved the bolt back, turned the handle, and pulled with both hands. The door remained firmly shut, as if someone on the other side had braced their entire body against it.
“Move.”
Daniel stepped aside.
Mara drove her heel into the lower panel.
Pain shot through her ankle.
The door didn't even creak.
Behind them, the telephone began ringing again.
This time, the sound came from the library.
Mara looked at Daniel.
“Don't answer it.”
“I wasn't planning to.”
The ringing stopped.
A click followed.
Then their father's voice filled the hallway.
“Mara?”
Her stomach dropped.
Peter Ellison had been dead for three years.
She had identified his body at the hospital. She had signed the paperwork. She had stood beside Daniel at the funeral while rain soaked through her coat and their father's friends murmured condolences they couldn't possibly mean.
She had watched them lower his coffin into the ground.
Yet there he was, sounding impatient and tired, as if he had just returned from work.
“Mara, sweetheart. Open the door.”
Daniel began shaking his head.
“No,” he whispered. “No, no, no.”
Their father's voice softened.
“I know you're upset with me.”
Mara's fingers curled into fists.
“I should have told you the truth,” the voice continued. “About your mother. About that night.”
Daniel covered his ears.
“Shut up!”
The telephone clicked again.
Then came a sound Mara had not heard since childhood.
Three slow knocks.
From inside the front door.
Peter's voice dropped to a whisper.
“Let me in. It's cold out here.”
Mara backed away.
The door handle turned.
Once.
Twice.
Then stopped.
A wet sound traveled across the wood, followed by a long, exhausted sigh.
“Mara,” her father whispered. “You promised.”
Something in her chest gave way.
Not because she believed him.
Because she remembered.
A promise made in a dark hallway. A hand clamped around hers. Her own voice crying, I'm sorry, Daddy, I'm sorry.
She pressed both palms against her ears.
The telephone rang once more.
Then the house fell silent.
Daniel was staring at her.
“What promise?”
Mara lowered her hands.
“I don't know.”
“You do.”
“I said I don't know!”
He flinched.
The look on his face brought her back to herself. She swallowed, trying to force air into her lungs.
“Daniel, listen. Whatever you heard, whatever you think you remember, we need to get out of here and find someone who can help us.”
“Who? Thomas?”
“Anyone.”
“He already knew.”
“Knew what?”
“That this would happen.”
Mara opened her mouth.
Daniel pointed toward the library.
“He gave you that key because he knew the house would start talking. He knew it would use Mum's voice.”
“He warned me not to trust it.”
“And you listened to the tape anyway.”
The accusation landed harder than it should have.
Mara looked away.
Daniel laughed once, without humor.
“That's what you always do. You decide something is worth the risk, and everyone else gets dragged along.”
“That's not fair.”
“No? Then tell me why Dad used to lock you in the basement.”
Mara stopped breathing.
The words hung between them.
Daniel seemed to regret saying them almost immediately, but he didn't take them back.
“What did you say?”
He looked toward the staircase.
“Nothing.”
“You said Dad locked me in the basement.”
“I was little.”
“You remember that?”
“I remember hearing you.”
“Hearing me where?”
His eyes moved to hers.
“Behind the door.”
Mara felt the hall tilt.
A memory flickered.
A bare bulb swinging from a wire.
The smell of wet soil.
Her father's shoes on the stairs.
And a voice telling her that good girls didn't lie.
She blinked.
The image vanished.
“Daniel,” she whispered. “What happened that night?”
He shook his head.
“I don't know all of it.”
“But you know something.”
“I was eight. I was scared. I remember Mum screaming, and then Dad telling me to go to my room.”
“What was she screaming about?”
He pressed his lips together.
“About you.”
Mara stepped back as if he had struck her.
For years, she had remembered her mother as gentle. Helen had been the one who smoothed Mara's hair after nightmares, who slipped sweets into her schoolbag, who sang while washing dishes.
She could remember her mother's hands.
Her perfume.
The little crescent scar on her wrist.
But she could not remember the last time she had seen her alive.
“Why didn't you tell me?”
“Because you said I was making it up.”
“When?”
“When I was thirteen. I asked you about the basement, and you told me I had nightmares.”
Mara stared at him.
She had no memory of that conversation.
Not one.
Daniel wiped his face with his sleeve.
“You don't remember anything, do you?”
She wanted to tell him that she remembered everything important.
Their mother leaving.
Their father becoming a different man.
The long years afterward, when Daniel had learned to stop asking questions because every question made their father angrier.
But the words wouldn't come.
Because a small, terrible part of her suspected he was right.
The house had not invented every memory.
Some of them had been waiting inside her all along.
A door slammed upstairs.
Both siblings looked toward the ceiling.
Then came footsteps.
Slow, heavy footsteps crossing the upper landing.
Someone was walking toward the staircase.
Daniel seized Mara's hand.
“We need another exit.”
“The kitchen has a back door.”
“Then let's go.”
They crossed the hall together, keeping close to the walls. Mara glanced at the library as they passed.
The door stood open.
The old telephone sat on the writing desk.
Its black receiver hung over the edge, swinging gently.
She could have sworn she heard breathing through it.
Mara forced herself to keep walking.
The kitchen was colder than the rest of the house. Their breath showed faintly in front of them, and the windows had fogged from the inside.
Daniel reached the back door.
He pulled the handle.
It opened immediately.
For one beautiful second, Mara felt relief so intense that her knees nearly gave way.
Beyond the threshold lay the garden, the ruined greenhouse, and the narrow path leading to the iron gate.
Daniel stepped outside.
Mara followed.
The air smelled of wet leaves and earth. Somewhere in the trees, a bird called.
They hurried down the garden path.
Then Daniel stopped.
“What?” Mara asked.
He pointed toward the greenhouse.
A little girl stood behind the broken glass.
She wore a white dress.
A red ribbon circled her wrist.
Her dark hair hung loosely around her shoulders, and her face was turned toward the house.
Mara couldn't see her features clearly, but she knew the shape of her shoulders. The angle of her head. The way she stood with her weight on one foot.
She had seen that posture in photographs.
She had seen it in the mirror.
“Don't go near her,” Daniel whispered.
The girl turned.
Even from a distance, Mara could see the pale oval of her face.
Then the girl raised her hand and tapped the greenhouse glass.
Twice.
She paused.
Then tapped a third time.
Mara's heart slammed against her ribs.
The girl smiled.
It was the smile from the photograph in the library.
The smile belonging to the little girl identified as the second Mara.
Daniel backed away.
“Run.”
They ran toward the gate.
Mara heard the greenhouse door open behind them.
She did not turn around.
The garden path seemed longer than it had been on the way in. The iron gate appeared to recede with every step. Branches scraped her shoulders, and the soles of her shoes slipped on the wet stones.
Daniel reached the gate first.
He grabbed the bars and shook them.
“It's locked!”
Mara fumbled for her phone, though she knew there would be no signal. She could call emergency services, perhaps, if she reached the road.
“Look for the key,” she said.
“There's no keyhole!”
He was right.
The gate had no lock.
It had no visible latch, either.
It simply refused to open.
Mara gripped the bars and pulled until the metal bit into her palms.
Behind them, the little girl began to sing.
A lullaby.
Helen's lullaby.
The melody slipped between the trees, sweet and slow, with one note always slightly wrong.
Mara knew every word.
She had forgotten them for years.
Now they returned so clearly that she could hear her mother's voice beside her ear.
Sleep, little sparrow.
Close your eyes.
If the house should call you,
Let it tell its lies.
Mara released the gate.
“Daniel, do you remember that song?”
He was staring over her shoulder.
“Mara.”
“What?”
“Look at the house.”
Every window in Blackthorn House was illuminated.
Not with electric light.
With the warm, trembling glow of candles.
Figures stood behind the glass.
Dozens of them.
Men and women. Children. Faces pressed close to the windows, their mouths moving as if they were speaking to the siblings outside.
In the upstairs window above the entrance, Helen stood perfectly still.
Beside her was Peter.
And between them, holding both their hands, stood a little girl in a white dress.
Mara couldn't look away.
The girl's face was hers.
Not similar.
Not reminiscent.
Hers.
The same eyes. The same mouth. The same small scar beneath the chin.
The girl lifted her free hand and pressed it against the window.
Mara felt something cold touch her own chin.
She stumbled backward.
The sensation vanished.
“Get away from the gate,” Daniel said.
She barely heard him.
The girl's lips moved.
Mara leaned forward despite herself.
No sound reached her across the garden.
But she understood the words.
I remember you.
Then every candle in the house went out.
The garden plunged into darkness.
Something moved behind them.
Daniel shouted.
Mara spun around.
The little girl stood directly in front of her.
She was no longer behind the greenhouse glass.
She stood on the path, close enough that Mara could see the tiny beads of water clinging to her eyelashes.
Her white dress was stained with soil.
The red ribbon around her wrist was tied in a neat bow.
Mara couldn't move.
The girl's eyes traveled over her face with an expression of almost unbearable sadness.
“You got so big,” she whispered.
Mara's mouth opened.
The girl reached up and touched the scar beneath Mara's chin.
“Does it still hurt?”
Mara jerked away.
The girl's fingers were freezing.
“Who are you?”
The child tilted her head.
“I'm the one you left.”
Daniel grabbed Mara's arm.
“Don't talk to it.”
The little girl glanced at him.
For the first time, her expression changed.
She looked angry.
“You weren't supposed to bring him.”
Daniel's grip tightened.
“Bring me where?”
The girl smiled at him.
“You promised you wouldn't tell.”
Mara stared at her.
“Tell what?”
The girl turned back to Mara.
Then she began to cry.
Not loudly.
Not dramatically.
Just two thin trails of tears sliding down a face that should have belonged to Mara herself.
“You said you'd come back for me,” she whispered.
A memory opened.
Not gradually.
Not like a door.
Like a wound.
Mara was eleven years old.
She was standing in a dark room beneath Blackthorn House, wearing a white dress that smelled of smoke. Her bare feet were muddy. Her hands were shaking.
A little girl stood on the other side of a wooden door.
The same girl.
The same face.
The same red ribbon.
Mara could hear her crying.
Behind her, Helen was screaming.
And her father was holding a hammer.
The memory vanished.
Mara staggered, gasping.
Daniel caught her before she fell.
“What did you see?”
She couldn't answer.
The little girl stepped closer.
“Tell him,” she whispered.
Mara shook her head.
“Tell him what you did.”
“No.”
The child's expression hardened.
“You said you would.”
“Stop.”
“You said you would let me out.”
“Stop!”
The girl's mouth opened.
A deep, wet sound emerged from her throat, something too large to belong to a child's body.
Then the skin around her eyes began to split.
Not bleed.
Split.
As if the face itself were a thin mask stretched over something struggling to escape.
Daniel pulled Mara backward.
They stumbled against the gate.
The child stopped moving.
Her face returned to normal.
She looked at Mara with the same patient sadness as before.
“It's all right,” she whispered. “You don't have to remember yet.”
Then she pointed toward the house.
“Grandma kept the rest downstairs.”
The garden lights flickered.
The girl disappeared.
For several seconds, Mara and Daniel remained pressed against the gate, neither of them able to speak.
Then the back door of Blackthorn House opened.
Warm yellow light spilled across the garden path.
A man stood in the doorway.
Tall. Broad-shouldered. Wearing a dark coat.
Mara recognized him before he stepped into the light.
Her father.
Peter Ellison looked exactly as he had in the last photograph taken before his death. His hair was neatly combed. His face was clean-shaven. His expression held that familiar mixture of exhaustion and disappointment.
He raised one hand.
“Mara.”
Daniel made a strangled sound.
Peter looked at him.
“Danny. Come inside, son. Your sister has had a difficult day.”
Mara's stomach turned.
The man took one step into the garden.
“Don't make this harder than it needs to be.”
Mara stared at him.
“You're dead.”
Peter smiled sadly.
“That's what they told you.”
“Daniel saw your body.”
“Daniel was eight years old. He saw what people wanted him to see.”
The words struck with the cold precision of a key turning in a lock.
Mara felt Daniel shaking beside her.
Peter held out his hand.
“Come here, sweetheart.”
Mara remembered that hand.
It had held hers crossing streets. It had brushed her hair away from her face when she was sick. It had gripped her wrist so tightly that her fingers went numb.
She remembered the basement.
The hammer.
The screaming.
And the promise.
“No,” she said.
Her father's smile faded.
For the first time, the face in the doorway looked wrong.
The skin around his mouth stretched too far when he spoke. His eyes reflected no light. Beneath the collar of his coat, something moved as if a second body were trying to turn inside the first.
“Then we'll have to do this the difficult way.”
The back door slammed.
Every window in the house went dark.
A bell rang somewhere beneath the ground.
Once.
Twice.
Three times.
Then the earth beneath Mara's feet shuddered.
From deep below Blackthorn House came a sound like a hundred people drawing breath at once.
Daniel seized her hand.
“Mara, whatever you remember, don't tell it.”
She turned toward him.
“What?”
His face was wet with tears.
“You have to understand. Mum didn't disappear because of Dad.”
He swallowed hard.
“She disappeared because of you.”
A metallic click sounded behind them.
The gate swung open.
Beyond it lay the narrow lane, the road, and the distant lights of Bellwether.
Freedom.
Mara looked at Daniel.
He was crying too hard to speak.
For one moment, she could have run.
She could have left the house behind, called the police, and spent the rest of her life trying to convince herself that none of this had happened.
Instead, she looked toward the dark mansion.
Somewhere beneath its foundations, a child was waiting.
And for the first time in sixteen years, Mara remembered what she had promised.
She let go of Daniel's hand.
“I'm going back inside.”
Daniel stared at her.
“No.”
“I have to know what happened.”
“No, Mara. You don't understand.”
“Then tell me.”
He looked toward the house.
The back door opened again.
This time, no one stood in the doorway.
From the darkness inside came a child's voice.
“Mara?”
A pause.
Then another voice answered it.
Mara's own.
“I'm coming.”
Daniel went completely still.
Because the voice from inside the house had spoken before Mara had.
And from somewhere deep beneath the earth, something began pounding against a door.