Page 24

My mother shouldn’t have died, it should have been me. I should have realized what was going on, I should have been strong enough. The demon was inside me first, albeit briefly, and I should have been the one to kill myself and the demon inside, not her.

But I hadn’t.

I wasn’t strong enough to fight.

And honestly, I don’t know if I would have been strong enough to throw myself in front of a moving train either. The fact was that if I had been in my mother’s shoes, if I had the choice, I may have been too much of a coward to do the right thing. Jacob had said that the young have courage. But I was only sixteen. And I had none.

“Mom,” I say softly, the ache in my heart growing and growing, adding to the weight, my body already so heavy, being pulled to the earth. “Please.”

I don’t know what else there is to say. What can I say?

Too much.

Not enough.

“I miss you,” I whisper. “I love you. I wish you were still here. That I’d wake up and come downstairs and you’d be in the kitchen with Dad. I wish we were all happy again. I wish everything was normal.”

My words float in this airless land and I feel she can’t hear me. Maybe it doesn’t matter anymore.

She starts to walk, straight into the pond. The ice melts instantly with a hiss and puffs of steam rise as her foot touches the water.

I can’t go after her. I can’t move an inch.

She gets in to her knees and slowly starts to turn her head. To look at me over her shoulder.

I suck in my breath, terrified that what I’m going to see won’t be my mother, will be a horrible demon instead.

Instead, it’s worse.

She’s my mother.

As she’s always been, as I’ve always remembered.

Just being able to look into her eyes again brings me to tears.

You’re stronger than you think, she says in her inside voice. Come find me.

“Mom,” I sob, nearly falling to my knees.

She turns her head forward, goes in further, one step at a time, until the dark water is at her throat.

You’re stronger than you think, she says again. She pauses, her head cocked, almost as if she’s listening. You need to be. To fight him.

My eyes widen. “Fight who?”

She glances at me quickly and in her eyes I see nothing but utter torment.

The one who died with me.

Her head goes under. She disappears beneath the water, only a faint ripple to tell that she was ever there.

The one who died with her?

“Mom!” I cry out and suddenly I can move. I stagger across the frozen ground, tripping over branches and low brush until I’m at the pond’s edge, beside the crooked, bare limbs of a birch tree.

I frantically peer into the water, expecting to see my mother.

A scream strangles in my throat.

My mother isn’t there.

Instead there is a girl with wisps of blonde hair cascading around her face like a veil.

It’s me.

I’m floating in the water, just underneath the surface.

Dead.

Suddenly my eyes pop open in alarm, staring right at me through the water.

My mouth opens in an underwater scream, bubbles rising, breaking the surface.

Hands, dozens of hands, some with peeling skin, some just fiber and bone, reach up, grabbing my body. Skeletal, rotten fingers digging into my hips, thighs, shoulders, arms, dragging me down and down until I’m fading before my eyes.

All I can do is stand there and watch until I’m gone, drowned in the depths.

Prisoner of the dead.

The pond is still and dark once more.

I turn around slowly, unsure where to go, what to do, the forest suddenly seeming to close in on me, growing thicker, darker.

A hand grasps my ankle.

I can’t even scream.

I’m yanked to the ground, my fingers clawing into the cold dirt, trying to hold on as I’m pulled back toward the pond.

“Come find her,” a disembodied voice says, raspy and metallic, like a monster over a radio. “And you won’t come back alone.”

***

I wake up with a jolt, my heart beating so fast in my ribcage I’m certain I’m on the cusp of it failing all together.

I open my eyes to the blackness and for one horrible second I think I’m underwater, drowning, that I’m floating in the depths of a watery Hell.

But my eyes adjust quickly.

I’m in my bedroom, the covers thrown aside, my limbs sprawled across the mattress.

I want to sigh in relief, to shed the nightmare from my heart. Fucking hell, that was a doozy.

But I can’t.

I can’t move.

Sleep paralysis, I remind myself quickly, trying to quell my racing heart. You know this happens with the syndrome. It happens all the time when you wake up. That’s what the internet doctors say.

Knowing doesn’t change anything.

I can’t move.

And I’m not alone.

Everything in me suddenly freezes, like my blood is paralyzed as well, and I’m acutely aware of everything around me, down to the molecule.