Page 37 of What Happened to Lucy Vale

Two

We

That was around the time that people started whispering that Lucy Vale and her mother practiced witchcraft.

In a way, it felt inevitable. We still had no solid explanation for why the Vales had chosen to live in the Faraday House.

And the Vales’ response to their intruders—the fact that they’d offered to take the podcasters on a tour of the house, and even into Nina’s old bedroom—struck some people as odd.

Even worse, Rachel Vale wasn’t looking for a church.

That was practically unheard of in southern Indiana.

With the exception of the Kornsteins and Akash’s family, everyone we knew had a church, even the families that barely went.

Church was part of life in southern Indiana—like going fishing in the summer, or buying a Christmas tree from ACRES Lawn they didn’t go to football games; they didn’t hunt, as far as we knew.

They weren’t country. But they didn’t fit in with the establishment either.

They didn’t apply to the golf club or volunteer at the historical society or turn up at the Rotary Club brunch to benefit local veterans.

And: they were vocal opponents of the new Jay Steeler Legacy Pavilion.

Then there were the Vales’ Halloween decorations, which over the course of the month had become an increasing cause for concern.

First cotton spiderwebs, slung artfully from porch rail to roof, skeined the facade.

Days later they began colonizing the azaleas like a fast-growing mold.

Plaster gravestones sprouted among the browning stalks of the perennial garden.

Skeletal arms twined between the spires of the iron fence; decapitated heads leered from their tops.

It was as if time were turning in reverse, tunneling us back toward the Faraday House of our childhood nightmares.

We had to admit the effect was impressive.

But once the Vales roped a ghost to the apple tree in the front yard, we agreed things had gone too far.

Some of us began to feel that old sense of dread when we drove past Lily Lane on the way to school, or when we turned our bikes onto Burton’s Way after leaving the Sandhus’ and saw the lamps burning in the upper windows of number 88 against a smoke-colored sky, casting miniature aureoles of light against the ever-quickening darkness.

Some of us were startled by the appearance of a silhouette against the windows and felt our breath hitch against our hearts, a sudden leap of terror, before remembering that it was only Lucy on the stairs or her mother moving around the kitchen making dinner.

But for a brief second, before the past peeled away from the present and left Lucy and her mother alone in the house, some of us forgot.

For a brief second, from out of nowhere, the certainty came down on us like the touch of a hand: that Nina and Lydia Faraday’s story wasn’t over.

That, somehow, it was happening again.

The question was: What to do about it?

Most of us didn’t really believe in witchcraft, of course.

We knew that Olivia Howard was into Wicca obviously, and we didn’t want to give her the excuse to start waving her sagebrush in our direction and talking about auras.

Crystals and nature worship was one thing.

But demon-conjuring, occult sacrifice, and satanic possession was another.

On the other hand, we all had our moments.

Our nighttime impressions of shadows shifting in our peripheral vision.

We’d heard stories: a ring of decapitated dolls turned up by groundskeepers in Byron Park; the pile of charred animal bones heaped in a mysterious crop circle that had appeared in the middle of the Topornyckys’ alfalfa field; strange rhythmic chanting deep inside the state park.

We’d heard of shadow people, and the time Ethan Courtland swore he’d seen a half man, half dog startle on his way home from the river on his dirt bike.

We knew about the handprints that had materialized suddenly on the windshield of Mr. Spinnaker’s BMW when it passed over the bridge on Old Derrick Road.

And we’d all known the sudden invading chill that gripped us out of nowhere when we rode past the abandoned cemetery on State Road 26, its splintered headstones leering like broken teeth inside a tangle of greenery.

We’d all felt our breath freeze in our lungs, convinced while alone on an empty street that we’d felt the touch of a hand to our backs, or a breath that had scraped our bare necks, or a heavy presence falling soundlessly behind us.

Plenty of us had felt it on Lily Lane, staring up at the Faraday House, waiting for Lydia’s restless ghost to appear.

We didn’t believe in witchcraft or black magic. About Satan, we were undecided. But we believed that some people believed.

And that , we knew, was dangerous.