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I turn to look at Lacie, whose eyes are so wide her lashes disappear behind her glasses frames.

“It appears,” I say slowly, “the problem is bigger than I thought.”

EIGHTEENLacie

I sink onto the stairs, staring into the crypt beneath the chapel. Sims’s husk of a body has slumped into a lax heap, little more than a sack of blackened skin and liquified bones.

I stare past him, at the dark, shadowed boreholes in the damp mud floor. The distinct scent of old spilled blood wafts in the air. The holes drive straight through the stone, like … like cicada wasp nests, only large enough to fit adult men. Dirt is piled against the back wall of the crypt, slathered across upside-down crosses and riddling the charred plaques of dead university presidents’ graves.

And the smell. The smell like rotting skin, like chlorine gone rancid, like knotted hair in a shower drain seething with lice.

Marcella’s holding herself strangely against the wall, her back rigid, her head bowed. She’s trying to keep something inside of her, I think. All my other thoughts are swallowed by the screaming between my ears. Everything is too sharp, too real, memories jumbling with reality, thoughts and words dripping together so I don’t know if I’m telling a story or simply recalling it.

I remember joining my father in tending to the crypts beneath our family’s church, just once—a basilica the next town over. It hadn’t been cleaned in years, and there’d been a flood after a particularly bad Tennessee storm season. I remember the priest leaving us at the top of the stairs, and then the memories grow hazy. I remember how it stank of rot. How I wanted to climb out of my own skin when I touched the slimy walls, and how my father grabbed my wrist and held it fast. No child of mine shirks repentance.

And after, how I’d scrubbed and scrubbed and scrubbed that hand of grave dirt and cobwebs and algae until my fingertips bled.

No child of mine needs to see a shrink.

No child of mine is fucked up in the head.

No child of mine is autistic.

Marcella has turned at some point, I don’t know when because time isn’t running in a straight line anymore; it wallows and winces and crawls and leaps, but she’s apologizing.

“Oh little lamb, you’re worth more than this.”

Impossible to think so.

I pry my eyes from Marcella and force myself to take another step until I’m on the grave dirt. I make a soft sound of panic as my feet crunch pebbles and filth. Oh god, the nausea. I turn and breathe through my mouth fast, my heart pumping blood so fast I’m seeing stars.

“Lacie, it’s alright.”

But it’s not. I force air through clenched teeth and look at her, my fists knotted hard. Memory recedes with a bite of pain as I scratch open the half-moon scabs on my palms.

“What is this? What are we dealing with?” My voice sounds alien and crushed. “You should know,” I snipe, and if it hurt her, my weak attempt at a slap, she doesn’t let on.

Instead, she puts a hand on my hip to pull me skin to skin, cradles my head in the crook of her neck and the spiced smell of her perfume. “We should tip Sims into a hole and—”

“No,” I snap, “I won’t. I can’t. I can’t—”

“We have to. We’ve brought him beneath the arched doorways, through the hallowed halls of the church. It might just be enough to kill him truly dead. But we have to slot—”

“Marcella,” I cry. “No! No, I won’t do this. It’s too much.”

“You must want this to end, Lacie darling. Help me, and at least that’s one dead monster. We’ll fill him over.” She holds me at arms’ length and gives me a sharp smile.

My teeth chatter. When did that start happening?

“You’re in shock, Lacie. And I cannot believe, for one, that this is what did it.”

Heat gathers in my chest. “Is it any surprise,” I spit, “that the thing that scares me most is that we are not nearly through this trial? That there are more dangers out there, not least of which is you?”

“Don’t be testy,” she croons. Marcella sighs, bends down, and starts dragging Sims toward a hole. “If you won’t, I will. Of course, it’s better when a living creature does this, but I guess we’ll see.”

“I don’t want to see,” I protest, but my voice sounds petulant like a child’s and I hate it. But I don’t know how else to act. I don’t want to do this penance. I want to go back to sleep and wake up and find this all a horrible nightmare.

But then, a voice whispers in the back of my mind, Marcella wouldn’t be real.