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“It’s so empty.” Stellan didn’t sound surprised.
My gaze rose to his sharply, and he stuck his hands in his pockets, looking abashed.
“I used to sneak into the house,” he admitted. “I was so convinced that you and the Demon had done something to Sophia. It just made no sense... The way she was gone and so were you on the same night. For a while, when I read the journals, I hoped maybe you'd run away together instead of her being dead. But I realize how stupid that is. Land of wishful thinking.”
He sounded bitter at himself.
“You used to sneak in here?”
He nodded. “I figured that Sophia died here. It was the closest I could get to her... My mother's always said, she'll start to heal when she has a grave she can go to. But I think that might always feel empty. I feel like... I feel her ghost here.”
He managed the faintest smile. “If her ghost is here, I bet she's happy to see you.”
I'd been suspicious by nature because of my entire life, and so while part of my heart twisted with sympathy for Stellan, the other part–the part that imagined how he had paced these rooms imagining his sister's death--I just thought, maybe he planned to take his revenge for Sophia here. He could leave my ghost here with hers… forever. If someone had killed one of the people I loved, that's the kind of way I'd want to kill them. It seemed like maybe it would bring some closure, although I started to think that closure was a lie.
I shifted, feeling for my knife, although Stellan was carrying his gun. I’d have to get lucky to bring him down before he killed me.
“Are you all right?” Stellan asked, then frowned at himself. “I guess that’s a stupid question. Who could be all right down here?”
There used to be an operating table in the middle of the room. The basement was soundproofed. But while my father had often played down here, this hadn’t been where he kept his victims.
“This isn’t all of it.” My voice came out a whisper. I didn’t want to go further down into the basement with a man who might try to kill me. “My father installed a sub-basement. I don’t think the police ever found it.”
He hadn’t bothered to clean that up. He liked to leave something behind in every house. He liked the idea of families going on with their lives, never knowing they were decorating their Christmas trees or eating cereal above a torture chamber.
Stellan swallowed.
“I never went back in there that night,” I said. “I helped him… clean up this floor. I went out to…”
Stellan’s gaze sharpened at the implication. He prompted me, “What did you do that night, Aurora?”
I shook my head.
“Tell me.” His voice was sharp as a whip crack.
“I dumped the body,” I said. “It was a man. A man he’d been holding here. My father said it was my fault because…because I got so close to you, because we had to move so soon. But he would’ve killed him anyway, eventually.”
“Of course he would have,” Stellan said. “That man was dead when he entered the doors. That’s not your fault.”
I stared at him, wondering if he was just saying what I wanted to hear. Did Stellan really believe that? Because I’d told myself that a hundred times, but I didn’t believe it.
“And maybe,” he said, swallowing, “my sister was dead from the time she left my house that night to go save you.”
His voice twisted bitterly on the wordssave you.
My eyes suddenly felt hot, and I turned away from him. I wanted desperately to go back in time, to slip out to see Sophia before she could come to see me. As my vision blurred, I moved toward the secret door, my movements quick and resolute, my posture perfect so Stellan wouldn’t see how much he devastated me, so easily.
I’d rather take the risk he knifed me in the back than have him see me cry right now.
I opened the secret panel that led down to the sub-basement. After we moved in, my father had spent days pretending to go to work for the benefit of the neighbors, only to instead come down and destroy the original basement floor, to dig down and create a new sub-basement.
The opening yawned at my feet, dark and terrifying. He’d locked me down here sometimes. When he’d had a victim, they would beg me for help, and I’d ignore them because if I showed any sign of mercy, or even acknowledged they were human, the Demon would make me torture them myself. And when they finally died, I couldn’t even feel relief for their release from pain.
Because I was always afraid I’d be next.
I pinched my hand between my thumb and finger, the sharpness of the pain reminding me I was still alive, and tried to stay grounded in my body. Even if—just like when I used to disassociate when I was a kid—I didn’t want to be here anymore.
“Aurora?” Stellan asked, his voice seeming to come from a long way away. I couldn’t tell if he sounded concerned or if he was just prompting me to get on with it.
