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The paint is fresh. There are flowers planted at the base. They have bright yellow centers and thick, fleshy purple petals. Dark crimson veins spider over them. Their leaves are blunted spades, splayed out over the dirt in a way that makes it look like the flowers are pulling, pushing themselves free of the soil.
“Whatisthis?” Trina asks.
“Seven times through,” Kyle says, and I nod. He continues. “The notebook said seven times through, then you’re free. So we have to walk through the town seven times before we get to the next gate.”
“That... sounds right,” Anthony says. “In a twisted logic sort of way.”
“Easy enough,” I say, trying to stay upbeat. It doesn’t exactly come naturally to me, and Anthony gives me a skeptical look. “That’s twice. This is the third time. Four more after. We can do that.” Becca used to be the one who talked everyone into things. I was her second-in-command. I’m not used to playing leader, but I know we need one. “Stick together, don’t dawdle, and watch each other’s backs.”
“You got it, boss,” Anthony says. Mel snorts, but she’s bouncing on the balls of her feet, ready to move, and when I start out, the others follow.
The light is dim but strengthening. We don’t need our flashlights to see the buildings up ahead anymore. The stone iswhitewashed; the wood painted. Flower beds grow in front of all the houses, the same purple flowers, the same bright yellow centers.
“It looks nice,” Trina says. “It doesn’t—it doesn’t look dangerous.”
“I think everything here is dangerous,” Anthony says.
We’re passing the first house when I see her: a girl in the window, framed between two crisp white curtains. She stands as if she’s watching us—except her back is turned, a brown plait running straight down between her shoulder blades, a blue ribbon at the end. Her hands are lifted to her face, cupped gently, covering her eyes, her nose, her mouth, so that I can’t see anything but the curve of her jaw, the pink shell of her ear.
I grab Anthony’s hand. My voice crouches at the back of my mouth, but I force it out. “There’s someone there,” I whisper.
“They’re in all the buildings,” Mel says. She’s right. Every building has at least one figure. Men. Women. Children. Three in one window, a mother and two children. Hands over their faces. Turned away from us. Their clothes are old-fashioned, white and gray. Wide sleeves for the women, button-up shirts or suit jackets for the men. They don’t move as we pass. Don’t turn to look or leave the windows. I count seven. Twelve. Seventeen. And still more. Yet the silence of the place remains, as if we are the only things breathing here.
“Who are they?” Trina asks. “Are they the people that—are they ghosts?”
“Only two people died in the fire that destroyed Briar Glen,” Vanessa says, almost contemptuous.
“They can’t be people like us,” Trina says. “People like Isaac.”
“No,” I say. “I don’t think so.”
“I’m not sure they’re people at all,” Mel says, and no one disagrees.
There is writing on the well again. Crammed together, almost illegible. I make out DAHUT and BLOOD and GATE and little else, because none of us want to stop, and I don’t want to start reading again and leave us spellbound with those silent, still people all around us.
“Hurry,” Miranda whispers. She’s watching the horizon. I don’t know if she’s talking to me or whispering to herself.
The edge of town. The empty road. The cemetery. Trina moans, a sound of frustration and fear and foreboding, but we keep going, entering the town once more.
They aren’t in the houses any longer. They’re outside them. Some of them stand on their porches. Or between the houses. Standing with their hands over their faces, their backs to us. Farther off, among the trees, I see a woman standing, her hair blowing in the wind. Her ribbon has come loose; it dances away. She makes no move to capture it.
A crow caws. We seize into stillness, startled like a herd of deer. The bird flaps into sight, stoops in the air, and lands on the broad shoulder of a bearded man. It cocks its head at us, tilting its beak aside to fix us with one black, canny eye. And then it plunges its beak into the man’s neck.
It stabs, and stabs again, the way a shorebird spears a fish on its beak. The man doesn’t move. Doesn’t even flinch. Blood and bits of skin fly out as the bird shakes its beak and drives it in again, making a gurgling, cawing noise.
“Oh God,” Trina whispers. “Oh God.”
The crow gets hold of something long and stringy and red. It pulls and pulls and the thing—the tendon, the ligament, the bit of flesh—stretches, pulling away, dripping blood, until it comes free with a sucking, tearing sound, and blood gushes from the wound, pours down the man’s neck and his shoulder and seeps into his gray shirt, and still he doesn’t move, he doesn’t scream. The bird tips its head, and the meat slides down its gullet.
We run. I don’t know who moves first. It doesn’t matter. We run together, away from the man and away from the crow, past the others standing, faces hidden. We run through the center of the town.
The words are spilling down the sides of the well, tangling up with each other. I don’t look at them. We just have to get out of here.
And then we stumble to a stop, grabbing at each other, heaving for breath.
A man stands at the edge of town, square in the middle of the road just a stone’s throw away from us. His clothes are black. He looks like a priest, but the book clasped under his arm is not a Bible. The symbol etched on the cover shows concentric circles, thin, one inside the other inside the other. I can’t count them from here, but I have a guess at their number. The wind catches the ribbons that thread between the pages of the book, making them flutter.
“They haven’t done anything to us,” I whisper. “They haven’t hurt us. They just stand there. Let’s—let’s keep going.”
