“Not particularly.”
I stare at him, uncomprehending.
He rolls his eyes. “Selah, how many curious visitors do you suppose have made their way up to Maggie’s second floor to admire that display over the past week?”
“Enough for her to install a stanchion.”
“Exactly,” he says, folding his collar down. “If I had to guess, I’d say one of your podcast groupies took it. It’s probably being sold on eBay as we speak.”
I shake my head. I don’t buy it.
I don’t think he does either.
I think he’s remembering the same thing I’m remembering.
When I held the pearl inside the crypt, the torchlights flared white, and when the haze cleared, both of us saw it—a glimpse of a clock exactly like the one from that display.
That night, I review everything I know about Lily Vandenberg, a girl who was no stranger to trouble.Skinny dipping in the quarry. Graffitiing public property. Marijuana use. Underage drinking. A bit like Lola Hayes, to be honest. Only instead of living in a trailer park with her mom, she lived in a giant mansion with her parents and her brother.
She spent her childhood in the eighties.
Her teen years in the nineties.
Then she vanished off the face of the earth in 1995.
Only she didn’t really vanish.
She was a victim of the Vandenberg curse, triggered by her brother, who fell in love with my mother.
She also liked to draw. And somehow, amidst all her artwork, she captured the creepy faceless man who is—according to Rafe—Dr. Psycho.
I flip through the pages of her sketchbook.
The charcoal drawings start off normal enough. Staircases that go nowhere. Chandeliers drawn in meticulous detail. Gnarled trees with exposed roots. A few thorny roses, their petals dripping with dew.
The first disturbing image is the back of a girl, her shadow stretching long and wrong beneath her with too many limbs. It’s not terribly dark, but unsettling enough to serve as a transition, a warning of what’s to come on the pages that follow.
Grotesque monsters. Angular demons. Winged creatures that look unnervingly similar to the terrifying birds that attacked Twig, Kate, and me outside St. Fortuna’s. And on the very last page is the most disturbing sketch of them all—a girl pulling something dark out of her chest, her eyes crossed out, her mouth sewn shut. I hold it up to the light next to the drawing of the faceless man.
Somehow, Lily drew Vorat, a Hollow Walker hunting teenagers in Foggy Hollow. The same Hollow Walker who likely hunted my own mother. Maybe he’s been hunting people for centuries. Maybe all the disappearances in Randolph county between now and its beginning can be traced back to Dr. Psycho. Maybe his whole lair is filled with human bones and prisoners waiting to become bones and he has been feasting on them all.
Maybe my mother is already bones.
Even as I think the horrible thought, something stubborn rises within me. Because why? What would be the point of the seed and the plant and the visions if my mother is already dead? I feel like there has to be a point to the things I have seen, to the things that moon-eyed creature showed me. It can’t just be a coincidence.
I fall asleep staring at the sketch.
When I wake the next morning, Lily is still on my mind.
So I head to Evermore.
Not to work, but to look.
The sketchpad I took from the basement was one of several items languishing in a crate. Perhaps I missed something the first time—a clue that might explain how she drew a picture of Vorat before she was sucked inside the Overlay and killed by one of his hounds.
On my way to the bookstore, I grab biscuits from Tudor’s to share with Walt and Maggie.
“You aren’t on the schedule today,” she says over a cup of steaming tea while Walt unwraps his biscuit enthusiastically.
