KRIS WAS THE first to emerge from the woods. A few seconds later, the small form of Violet slipped out of the trees and followed. There was no mistaking who was in charge. Kris walked with her head down and her eyes on the ground, while Violet had the tiniest hint of a spring in her step.
They passed the lake house. Several lights still burned inside, but there was no movement. It was an empty shell.
The rowboat was still floating on the dark water of the lake, the mooring rope tied to the last piling. Wooden planks squeaked softly as Kris and Violet made their way down to the end of the dock. An inch of water covered the bottom of the boat. Kris had not forgotten how she and Sadie had barely made it back to shore when the rusty hull began to crack. But this time, she would make sure to keep her weight at the edge of the boat. She was hopeful that the boat would hold long enough for them to cross the lake, get Sadie off the roof of the house and back to shore. Violet had promised Sadie would stay put until they could reach her.
Slipping the rope off the top of the wooden post, Kris threw the line into the boat before climbing carefully in. She held the boat against the dock as Violet stepped in beside her. As she had hoped, the bottom of the boat gave a bit, but no more water flooded in.
Kris pushed away from the dock and, one by one, placed the paddles into the oarlocks. She dipped the ends of the paddles below the water and slowly began to row out into the lake, careful not to put too much strain on the rusty hull.
She had lost all track of time. To the north, the stars and moon still shone brightly. But over the lake, the storm clouds were standing their ground. The heat lightning had become less frequent, although every now and then it would silently ignite the sky like a signal flare.
Mist was rising from the lake’s surface. Spectral fingers reached up into the darkness, spinning away in lazy swirls as Kris pulled the boat through.
Violet sat on the rear seat, her hands clasped demurely in her lap. She hummed softly, the tune nearly impossible to discern. But Kris knew what it was: her mother’s favorite. Violet had turned it into her siren song, the tune the girls had heard calling them to the woods, beckoning them to come play at the lake.
Her mother’s favorite song, stolen by a thing Kris had never meant to create.
But you did. The other voices had fallen silent in her mind. There was only her own. You created her. She is yours.
So, Kris realized with terrible irony, she had given the song to Violet, because Violet belonged to her, just as the missing girls belonged to her, and the devastated parents whose lives would never be the same.
For thirty years, Kris lived away from Lost Lake while a piece of her remained to haunt the town of Pacington and feed on its children. Even if she could manage to get Sadie and escape, she would be leaving Violet behind, abandoned once again, her fury growing stronger, her tongue lapping the air like a snake, desperate for the bitter taste of grief. There would be more lost girls left in Kris’s wake.
Kris lifted the paddles from the water and let the boat drift slowly to a stop. The mist settled around them. They were at the center of a cloud.
“It’s my fault,” Kris said suddenly. She turned the oars inward so that the paddles rested on the edge of the boat.
They floated in silence, the only sound that of the water lapping against the rusty hull. Overhead, a burst of white fire illuminated the sky.
Kris was hunched over, her head in her hands. For the first time since she was a child, everything made perfect sense. Her fractured mind was whole again. The pieces had all fallen into place, even the ones she had tried so hard to hide from herself. It was her puzzle, she realized. It had always been her puzzle. And it was her responsibility to put it back together, to see the picture it formed, no matter how much she wanted to look away. She had to accept her place in it.
When Kris finally raised her head, there were tears in her eyes.
“I thought I made you up,” she said.
Violet’s dark eyes glistened. Kris offered her a bittersweet smile. Violet smiled back. Her flesh did not crease. Her perfect, porcelain smoothness had returned.
“I believe in you, Violet,” Kris said.
Violet smiled wider, her lips plump and healthy, pink gums curving around the tops of straight, white teeth.
That’s her, Kris thought. That’s how I remember her. She’s so beautiful. She’s sweet and wonderful and she’s mine. She’s my friend.
“I believe in you,” Kris said again. She held out her hand.
The rusted metal groaned faintly beneath her as Violet rose from the rear seat. Carefully, she crossed the unsteady boat. Fresh water began to trickle in through an unseen crack in the hull, but it was not enough to alarm Kris. She kept her eyes on her friend, her hand stretched out and open.
Violet’s fingers slipped across Kris’s and then closed tightly around them.
She was solid. There was even a warmth to her touch.
“You’re real,” Kris said. The admission was like casting a spell.
Violet took a deep breath, and Kris realized that this was the first time she had seen the girl do so. Kris could no longer feel Violet’s phantom fingers slipping into her mind. There was only the little girl before her. Her little girl. Her friend. Her Violet.
Kris pulled Violet down into her arms and held her close. Kris’s mind tried to reject this cold, shuddering thing, to force her to push it away, but Kris held her even tighter. Violet pressed her cheek against Kris’s chest. Her body hitched as she sucked in a sharp breath, and Kris was hit with the awful understanding that Violet was crying.
It was Kris’s turn to whisper into Violet’s ear. “You’re real,” she said, and she could see herself as a little girl, sitting at the end of the dock, sobbing as her mother’s muffled howls drifted down the house. And Violet was there by her side, holding her, shushing her, taking her pain away. Kris said it over and over. “You’re real, Violet. You’re real. You’re real.”
She felt Violet’s desperate grip tighten. She saw the boat tip slightly under the girl’s weight. Violet was more real than she had ever been, more than back when Kris was a child and believed in things like magic forests and imaginary friends.
Kris was reminded of a time long ago when her father took her to Walmart and she got lost in the never-ending aisles. She had been so scared that even when an employee paged her dad, and he came rushing up to take Krissy in his arms, she had only cried harder. Somehow being reunited with him was even scarier. Because she was reminded of what had, for a few frightening minutes, been taken from her. She could feel it and hold it and fear its loss.
This was Violet, nothing more than a scared little child, clinging to the person she never wanted to lose again.
“I’m sorry,” Kris whispered in her ear. “I’m sorry I left you. I’m sorry I let myself forget you.”
Violet’s tiny body shook as she sobbed harder. She clutched at the back of Kris’s shirt.
“I just wanted to make you happy,” Violet said. Her voice was squeaky and weak. It was no longer the voice of the ancient thing that had followed Kris through the forest with a smirk. She was what Kris had imagined all those years ago.
Kris breathed in, and she could smell the scent of flowers in the little girl’s hair. “You did. You made me so happy. You let me forget all the pain and fear. But I tried to keep forgetting those things, even after you were gone. That’s the problem, Violet. I didn’t want to believe in them anymore. But they were there, just like you were here.”
She felt Violet’s grip loosen, but Kris continued to hold her tight, not willing to let her go. Not yet. Not yet.
“I believe in them now. Like I believe in you, Violet,” Kris assured her. “I know you’re real. And I can’t run from that anymore. I have to face it. I have to do something about it.”
Violet squirmed, slipping her hands between them until she was finally able to push away from Kris’s chest. She peered up at Kris in confusion, blinking away tears. Her eyes were no longer black holes. Irises rimmed her pupils. They shimmered an icy blue, like the crystal waters of Lost Lake.
“What?” Violet asked.
The loop at the end of the mooring rope dropped down over Violet’s head, and Kris pulled the slipknot tight around her neck. The prickly fibers of the rough, woven rope bit into the girl’s soft, white flesh. She tore at it, trying to get her fingers beneath it, but the rope was fastened too tightly.
“What are you doing?” Violet choked out, confused.
Without a word, Kris lifted one of the oars from the oarlock and slammed the end down on the bottom of the hull. A large crack appeared in the rusty metal. Water began to gush around their feet.
Kris raised the oar again.
“No!” Violet cried. More than ever, she sounded like a child, scared and confused, unable to gasp why she could possibly deserve what was happening to her.
The oar came down, harder this time. A large chunk of the hull fell away. Water bubbled greedily up, desperate to fill the boat.
They were sinking. The stern was dropping quickly toward the surface of the lake. The water was over their shoes. It lapped at the one drooping sock around Violet’s ankle.
Violet stared up at Kris with wide eyes, her fingers still prying helplessly at the rope around her neck.
“Why are you doing this?!” Her sweet face pinched into an awful, frightened mask. She began to cry again as panic overwhelmed her.
Water rushed over the back of the boat, filling the hull. Almost instantly, the rowboat tipped vertically. Kris and Violet tumbled into the lake. As Violet fell away, the rope went taut and yanked her violently back toward where it was tied around the boat’s upturned bow. She lashed out, desperate to grasp anything to keep her from being pulled down with the boat. Her hands found Kris, and she dug her fingernails into Kris’s shoulder, drawing blood.
Kris cried out in pain, struggling to keep her head above the water as Violet thrashed wildly. Cool lake water filled Kris’s mouth. It tasted of minerals from the rocky floor far, far below. She gasped for breath, and water filled her lungs. She retched violently. She was going to drown. Violet was going to pull her down with her.
Beside them, the upended boat was quickly slipping below the surface. Soon the bow would be under, and with it the mooring rope. Violet would be next. And then Kris. They would all be pulled to the dark depths of Lost Lake.
A single thought filled Kris’s mind:
Sadie.
She wrapped her hands around Violet’s neck and squeezed. Violet’s clear blue eyes bulged. There was still fight left in them. Her mouth opened and closed stupidly like a fish on dry land. She thrashed blindly. Nails scratched at her flesh, but Kris did not let go.
The bow of the rowboat disappeared, leaving a line of bubbles behind. The rope began to coil down into the water like a fleeing snake.
Kris pressed her mouth against Violet’s ear and whispered, “Thank you, Violet.” And then she pushed the little girl’s head down into the water. Violet fought with every last ounce of strength, managing to get her mouth above the surface just long enough to suck in a desperate breath, but Kris put all of her weight on the girl, forcing her back down.
The mooring rope snapped taut around Violet’s neck, the slipknot pulling tighter. Violet’s face was turning purple, her eyes bulging so far out of their sockets that they looked as though they would pop out. She stared up at Kris through the rippling water as the weight of the boat began to drag her down.
A lock of hair curled around Kris’s wrist.
Kris could look no longer. She closed her eyes, her hands still around Violet’s neck as she felt the girl’s body pull away from her. The little girl’s attacks weakened. Her frail body shivered one last time, then went still.
Kris replayed it in her mind: one final flash of lightning illuminated hair that was not black but red. It spread across the surface of the water like blood. She saw the green eyes, hollow, devoid of life, peering up at her with one last pleading question: Why, Mommy?
It was Sadie.
Kris gasped, loosening her grip. But she refused to open her eyes. She did not want to see the unblinking face staring up from beneath the water.
The thought had slipped out of the darkness, like the moon sliding out from behind a cloud. It infected her mind with a terrible certainty.
Violet isn’t real. She never was.
Panic gripped Kris.
“No,” she said, water splashing into her mouth as she struggled to stay afloat.
Kris felt the girl’s body slip away from her fingers. She tried to regain her hold, but the weight of the sinking boat pulled the girl down faster. Kris opened her eyes and peered down into the water, but the waves obscured her view. She could barely see the small form of a child drifting farther into the depths. Her skin was fair and familiar. Her arms dangled out before her, and Kris thought, Those hands, I’ve held those hands, I was the first to touch those fingers when she was born!
“Sadie!” Kris shrieked. She stared into the water and caught sight of a strand of hair as it spiraled down into the dark. It was red, she was sure of it. She had been blinded by her own madness.
She plunged beneath the surface, hands digging into the water, legs kicking wildly as she tried to catch up with the rapidly sinking body. Her fingertips grazed soft flesh. Kris took the girl’s face in her hands and turned it up toward her.
A barrage of images slammed into Kris’s mind like a blast of frigid, winter air. Her brain seized in their icy grip. Kris cried out in pain as the memories took hold, her scream muffled by the water around her, precious air slipping from her mouth and bubbling up toward the surface above. She clenched her eyes shut, but there was nothing she could do. She was held in this strange, brutal power, her every sense under its control.
She felt the knowledge pass over her like the sudden chill of a shadow.
The loneliness of Sarah Bell, bullied by a boy at school for no other reason than the fact that he was weak and she was strong. And so he tore that strength down, day by day, until Sarah believed the things he said. That she was ugly. That she was stupid. That his own unhappiness was somehow because of her simply existing. She cried at night, alone in her bedroom, beneath a field of purple stars cast across her ceiling from the shell of a plastic turtle, until the moment she heard the song. She followed it to a friend who promised to take her sadness away. Even as she dug at the dry earth with her bloody fingers, the flesh peeling away to expose the tips of white bone, Sarah did so because her friend promised it was part of the game, and winning the game meant finding peace.
Kris felt the girl lie down in the cool earth, and the darkness enveloped her as she—
Huddled into the hollow of the oak tree, waiting to be found. Ruby had felt safe in that tree. It was a wishing tree, her friend told her, and if she thought long and hard enough about where she wanted to go, she could leave this world behind. She would no longer feel the fear slip like a splinter beneath her skin every time Daddy began to yell in his slurred, howling voice from the living room. Sometimes he shoved her against the wall or held her facedown to the floor so hard that she thought her head would smoosh like one of the squishy toys Mommy bought her in the toy aisle at Safeway. But he never hit her. He said he would never hit her, because then people in this town would talk, and he didn’t need those sons of bitches spreading rumors behind his back. Ruby had often dreamed of running away, and then she heard the song, and she knew it was time. Her friend made her laugh. Her friend showed her the magical tree where she could wish away her fear. But if she left, the spell would be broken. So she stayed, even when she got thirsty, even when her stomach ached for food. She stayed and wished—
That someone could know the sadness she felt. Megan Adamson knew there was no reason for it. Her parents and teachers had told her as much. She had a good life. Her grandparents even said she was “spoiled” and “ungrateful.” But no matter how much she tried to ignore the sadness, it was always there, like a black cloud hanging low in a blue sky. It seemed to hover over her and no one else. But when she played with Violet, the cloud went away. She felt the warmth of the sunshine. She never, ever once wanted to cry, even when she stood at the edge of the canyon, above the jagged rocks of the chasm known as Blanton’s Pass. Megan felt a lightness within her, like she could float up into the air. Her friend had given her that. She could trust her friend, because her friend believed her. So when her friend said “Jump,” Megan jumped—
And Kris was falling through the open air, plunging down toward the rocks that jutted up out of the ground like teeth. But she wanted to be there, falling free, she wanted—
To be with her good ol’ dog Speck again, because Speck loved her more than anything in the world. Poppy heard her parents fighting, even though they thought they were being quiet enough to keep from waking her. It helped to ride Cap in the field beside her parents’ garage, but Poppy knew that the garage place was part of the problem. Buying it had been a mistake. There was not enough work in Pacington, which meant there was not enough money to pay the bills. So Mommy and Daddy argued and said nasty things that they wished they could take back. Poppy knew she was part of the problem. The food she ate and the clothes she wore and the supplies she needed for school each year, these things “cost money,” her parents said. And there was never enough money. But Violet made Poppy feel just as happy as Speck had. Violet never got angry, just like her good old dog. Violet even said there was a game they could play that would fix things with Mommy and Daddy, because Poppy would no longer be a burden. They would never have to buy food or clothes or school supplies for her again. She could even see Speck, if she promised not to break the rules. But Poppy was sneaky. She found the best hiding place of all, where no one would ever look—
In the bedroom where Melody was locked away, scratching at the walls with fingers long scabbed over, hearing the song that promised to take her pain away, to silence the whispers of the folks in town who called her family “mud bums” and “lake trash.” The words made her hate herself because she believed them. If only she could get to her friend … they could play, forever and ever, and the world that wanted to crush Melody like a moth would fade away …
Kris had a vague sense of cool water around her and of the child’s face clutched in her hands, but she was paralyzed. She floated, motionless, as the memories unfolded faster, overpowering her senses with a profound intensity. She felt a terrible energy flowing into her as she lived Sadie’s grief through her daughter’s eyes—the pain of losing her father, the fear that something could happen to her mother and she would be alone in the world, the insidious realization that her parents were not perfect people and that fate was neither nurturing nor cruel but random.
Kris’s body spasmed as her own grief returned to her, held by Violet for so many years. It had been seeping back into Kris since the day she returned to the lake house.
And then she was no longer herself. She was a different little girl, one who had known only darkness until she had heard a voice calling to her from above. She had pulled herself up through frigid waters, toward the shimmering promise of light, until she broke the surface. She was staring up at the freckled face of a ten-year-old girl, her cheeks streaked with tears. She took a breath and an intense bitterness assaulted her tongue. At the same time, the girl in the boat smiled, as if a bit of her weight had been lifted.
Kris watched through Violet’s eyes as they ran through the woods together, laughing and singing. She peered through the oval window on the second floor with dawning horror as Krissy rode away in the back of her father’s car. She knew the emptiness of being alone in the lake house as she waited for Krissy to return, and the strange, untethered sensation as time became meaningless. She tasted the flood of bitterness in her mouth as she woke after days or weeks or years. She knew Violet’s excitement as she sang the song that would bring Krissy to her, the confusion as she realized the girl with whom she was playing was a stranger, the fury of realizing she had been abandoned, the perverse joy as she began to crave the taste of that bitterness.
All of it belonged to Kris.
The temperature of the water dropped suddenly as she sank deeper. It’s shocking coldness snapped Kris out of her trance. She looked to the upturned face still clasped in her hands.
Her fear had mislead her. In that last burst of lightning, the dark hair had captured a glint of red that did not exist. This was not Sadie.
Violet’s wide, dead eyes stared back.
There was a sharp tug as the rowboat suddenly dropped faster, and Violet was yanked violently out of Kris’s grasp. The memories also released their hold. Kris blinked as if waking from a dream. She was still underwater. Her lungs ached as they cried out for air. But Kris remained for one last moment, long enough to see Violet sinking down, her black hair billowing around her pale face, dark eyes wide and staring, arms reaching up as if to embrace her long-lost friend.
Then the darkness of the lake swallowed her, and Violet was gone.
Kris broke the surface and sucked in a desperate breath. She bobbed in the water, gasping until her pulse began to steady and the pain in her lungs subsided.
The sounds of the lake faded in around her. The drone of the bullfrogs. The chirp of crickets. The rustling of leaves as a breeze blew through the dark forest along the shore.
Kris was treading water, glancing around, trying to get her bearings in the thick, white fog. The wall of mist momentarily broke apart, and Kris realized that she was staring down into the mouth of their own cove. Her lake house was somewhere in the blackness at the far end. Across from this, a light flickered like a candle. A shape moved in front of the light. Kris squinted and could barely make out the shape of a person staring back at her.
She saw, Kris thought. Vicky saw.
The mist rolled back into itself, obscuring her view.
From somewhere on the opposite side of the lake, a voice called out, “Mommy!”
Kris splashed frantically around, trying to locate the direction of the sound.
“Sadie!”
“Mommy!”
The mist was too thick. She would never find her.
Kris began to swim, kicking madly against the weight of her wet shoes as she propelled herself across the lake.
“Mommy!” Sadie called again. She was closer.
Her arms ached, but Kris gripped the water and pulled harder. The muscles in her legs burned, but she kicked faster.
She was going the right way. She knew it. She had to believe—
Her fingertips collided painfully with the side of a wooden structure. Her hand found an edge and she pulled herself up onto what felt like sandpaper covered in slick green moss.
Shingles.
The roof! She was on the roof of the house. She flopped farther onto it, the rough shingles scraping across her bare stomach as her shirt rode up. She scrambled to her knees and felt the grit take off a layer of skin.
Little hands grabbed her. A child’s face was pressed against hers.
“Mommy!” Sadie cried. “I’m sorry! I’m sorry, Mommy!”
“Oh God, baby.”
Kris pulled her daughter so tight, she feared she would squeeze the breath from her. But Sadie did not struggle. She held her mother twice as tight.