I woke up in the woods. Darkness settled around me, no moon, no stars. Just the gray sheen of a foggy sky and the tips of the tall pines stabbing into its belly.
My bare skin prickled, and I felt mud squish between my toes. I knew I shouldn’t be this cold, even wearing only a tank top and thin sweatpants. Sweat coated my skin. You didn’t sweat in dreams, did you? This felt like just before a thunderstorm back in Omaha, when the air was so close and hot you could wrap yourself in it. When tornado sirens screamed louder than thunder, and you searched the horizon, waiting for those black clouds to funnel down and touch the earth.
Except it was cold. So cold my fingers were going numb.
I started to shake as moonlight shot through a tear in the fog, bathing the woods in silver. I had gone to sleep, exhausted from jet lag and everything else. In my bed. In the manor. And I was pretty sure this wasn’t a dream. I’d never been in these woods, only glimpsed them from the boat. Mom had left Darkhaven while she was pregnant, and I was born on the mainland. I’d never seen the island with my own eyes before today.
But I was here, somehow. I glanced around, seeing shattered stumps of trees and flattened black vegetation. It looked like a foot had come from the heavens and tried to crush me, only I was still here, standing by a flowing stream, the scent of moss and mud and broken pine boughs filling my nostrils.
I turned back the way I’d ostensibly come, and saw the body.
I didn’t scream. I felt my mouth open, felt the frozen air rush in, stinging my throat raw. I gasped, heart throbbing. My brain told me I was having a panic attack—I’d had them constantly as a kid, and they feel like you’re choking and being hit by a truck at the same time. The last one had been years ago, around when I stopped having nightmares about the bathtub—but this time I couldn’t stop it. None of the techniques a dozen school shrinks had suggested worked. I fell to my knees, hands sinking into the moss, and in the moonlight they were black up to the elbow.
Blood. I was covered in it. The front of my tank top, my cheeks, my arms.
The body was a man with dark hair, tall and muscular. Or he had been. He was covered in cuts, deep wounds, burns. I could barely see his face under the destruction.
I wanted to run, more than anything. Bolt into the trees and keep running until I hit the ocean. Why was I here?
Had I done this?
I remembered my mother sobbing, as she looked at me with that naked hatred after I shuffled out of the bathroom and started putting on dry clothes. I felt something shift inside me, that wrong thing I’d known deep down was there way before she locked the door and turned on the water in that motel bathroom. I was fully awake now, and my impulse was not to run back to the manor and call the cops. It was to stumble to the stream, wash the blood off me, and roll the body under the felled trunks of trees all around us.
My panic attack was stronger than the impulse, though, and my vision started to black out. The last thing I saw before I fainted were my hands, slick and gleaming black under the moonlight, bathed in someone else’s blood.
I had managed to convince myself at the time, after that night, that it wasn’t my fault. I read everything I could find about mental illness, and built the narrative that my mother was either seriously bipolar or some stripe of schizophrenic that made her detached from reality. That she’d taken it out on me because that’s what abusive parents do. There was nothing wrong with me.
Nothing that my mother had recognized in me, and tried to get rid of.
I was a good liar, and I’d lied to myself right along with everyone else. I’d ignored stuff that didn’t fit with my little story of how I was basically normal and I just had a screwed-up life.
But now, everything I’d told myself to sleep at night was gone, and as blackness closed across my vision, my only thought was maybe Mom had been right all along.