“Come on, come on, we have to look,” she was saying, already on her feet, words coming rapid-fire. “If there’s any chance at all, then we have to—”
“Wait a second, we don’t know what’s—”
In there, I meant to say. Waiting for us.
But she had already run into the darkened house.
* * *
◆ ◆ ◆
I planted a hand against the wall and wobbled up to standing. Noor was fraying, and I couldn’t let her out of my sight. She had used this wild hope that V might be alive to shore herself up, to shove away the despair that threatened to crush her. But I worried it would only be doubly crushing when she was inevitably disappointed. And I could not let Noor Pradesh break.
If Murnau’s vile task had succeeded, if what I had seen materialize in that tornado was real—Caul’s face in the whirling clouds, his voice splitting the air—if he was well and truly back, then the prophecy’s most terrifying predictions had started coming true. Which meant that all peculiardom was about to be buried. God only knew what Caul was capable of now that he had consumed one of the most powerful jars from the Library of Souls, then been crushed in its collapse, and resurrected.
Born again.
I am become Death, destroyer of worlds.
However bad it was or would be, I knew one thing: The world needed Noor Pradesh. She was one of the seven. One of the peculiars whose coming was foretold, who could emancipate peculiarkind—from Caul?—who could seal the door—to what? Hell?—and as bizarre as it all sounded, it was no more bizarre than the parts of the Revelator’s prophecy that had already come to pass. I was finished doubting it. Finished doubting my own eyes, too.
This was no dream nor the last reverie of a dying mind. I was even more certain of it as I tripped over the track of the sliding door into the living room. The house was just as my friends and I had left it the last time I’d been here, a few weeks ago: hastily neatened and mostly empty, the books my father hadn’t thrown away placed back onto shelves, trash that had littered the floor stuffed into black plastic bags. The air was stale and suffocating.
Noor pinballed from corner to corner looking for V. She tore a dust sheet off the couch, then flung herself over the back to look behind it. I caught her at the window—started to say, “Noor, wait”—when a crack of thunder cut me off and made us both jump. We looked out through the rain-blurred glass. The yard was strewn with trash. The houses across the cul-de-sac were shuttered and dark. A dead neighborhood.
And still.
“That wight probably had friends,” I said. “More could come any minute.”
“Let them come.” Her eyes were shards of ice. “I’m not leaving until we search every room. Every broom closet.”
I nodded. “Me neither.”
There was no one in the bedroom. No one under the bed. It felt silly to get down on our knees and look, like kids checking for the boogeyman, but I did it anyway. There was a rectangular impression in the carpet where my grandfather had kept his old cigar box, the one I’d found after he died, filled with the snapshots that would forever change the course of my life. But there was no V, dead or alive. Not in the closet. Not in the bathroom, where Noor tore back the shower curtain to find only a bar of withered soap.
There was nothing in the guest bedroom but a stack of unused moving boxes and spots of blackening mildew on the carpet. I could feel Noor’s desperation mounting. By the time we came to the garage she was calling out for V, which was killing me, splitting my heart by the seams. I flipped on the lights.
Our eyes scanned a jumble of discarded junk and fix-it projects my grandfather never finished: two ladders, each missing a step. A boxy old television with a cracked screen. Coils of wire and rope. My grandfather’s workbench, piled with tools and woodworking magazines. I saw my ghost and his there, shoulder to shoulder under the pooled light of a gooseneck lamp, stringing red yarn across a map with pushpins. The boy thinking all the while it was only a game, a story.
The storm’s shifting pressure rattled the garage door, jolting me back into the present. I saw my grandfather’s gun cabinet, the only thing in the garage large enough to conceal a person. Noor moved first, got there before me, and yanked the handles. The doors popped open an inch and then a chain pulled taut. Someone, almost certainly my dad, had padlocked the cabinet. Through the crack we could see a row of oiled rifle barrels. The weapons that might’ve saved my grandfather, had I not taken the key.
Noor drew her head back in surprise, then turned without speaking and ran into the house. I chased her to my grandfather’s office, the only room we hadn’t searched yet. The room where Olive had stomped her feet to find a hollow-sounding spot, then rolled back the rug to discover a door in the floor and a bunker below it. A bunker that V probably knew about—and might’ve even known the code to enter.
I tried to tell Noor, to shout above the storm’s rising roar and Noor’s own shouts—Are you here? Mama, where are you?—but she couldn’t hear me and wasn’t looking, was shoving aside Abe’s empty desk and running to bang open the tiny closet, so I gave up and wrestled back the heavy carpet on my own and tried to remember where the hinged floor panel was, but I was too frantic and couldn’t seem to find it.
There was no V in the room. I decided there was no V down in the bunker, either. I couldn’t imagine her escaping here only to shelter in the bunker and shut us out. So when Noor ran out of the room I stood up and chased after her.
I found her still as a statue in the middle of the living room, breathing hard but focused. She beckoned me closer.
“What if we all came through together?” she said quietly, her eyes locked on a point in space at the edge of the room. “And we were the same distances apart that we’d been on V’s porch.” She raised her arm. “There. That’s where I woke up.” She was pointing at the corner where my grandfather’s worn recliner sat. On the floor beside it was a burned outline, vaguely Noor-shaped. “And you woke up there.” She pointed through the door to the screened porch, where my burned outline was disappearing under a spreading pool of the wight’s blood. “That’s exactly how far apart we were on V’s porch. You were handcuffed to the rail over there and I was over here.”
I felt a spark, a quickening. “And V was out in the grass.”
We both looked up at once, our eyes darting to the flapping porch screen, the overgrown yard, the tall grass by the woods where the man in the yellow raincoat had paused and looked down.
“Right there,” I whispered.
Our bodies unlocked. Together we bolted out into the storm.
V’s body looked like it had been swallowed by the earth and spat out again. She lay twisted in the grass like a tossed-away doll, arms splayed cartoonishly and legs tangled beneath her. Her gray hair was knotted and clotted with mud, her red cardigan and black dress soaked with blood and rain. She’d lost a boot, and the patched woolen sock on her unshod foot made me think, incongruously, of the wicked witch in The Wizard of Oz, the one who gets pancaked under Dorothy’s house. I locked my focus there, on what I remembered of that old acid trip of a movie, on the worn toe of V’s striped sock, so it wouldn’t wander north . . .