Page 40 of Home Before Dark

Part of me knows that’s completely ridiculous. The Book is fiction, despite having the wordsA True Storyslapped on its cover, right below the title. My mother said as much. Yet a tiny voice in the back of my head whispers that maybe, just maybe, I could be wrong. It’s the same voice that last night, right before Elsa Ditmer made her presence known, suggested the person inside the Indigo Room could have been Mister Shadow.

I hear it now, hissing in my ear.

You know it’s true. You’ve always known.

What makes it so unnerving is that I recognize that insistent whisper.

It’s my father. Sounding just like he did right before he died.

I hear it again when I fish the last two photos out of the box. The first is a shot of my father performing a prototypical selfie. Arm extended. Chin lowered. Swatch of bare wall in the background over his left shoulder. He stares straight at the camera, which makes it seem as if he’s looking beyond it, into the future, his eyes locking on mine through a distance of twenty-five years.

Never go back there, his voice says.It’s not safe there. Not for you.

Hoping my father’s whisper will go away if I’m not longer looking at his face, I flip to the last Polaroid. It was taken at a vertiginous angle from one of the windows that overlook the backyard. On the ground are two people entering the woods.

One of them is my mother.

The other is me at age five.

It’s exactly like the photo my father described in the Book. The one he took when he found the Polaroid camera. My gaze drifts against my will, moving to the left of the frame, simultaneously knowing and fearing what I’ll find there.

Sure enough, hugging the edge of the frame is a dark shape hiding among the trees.

It could be a tree trunk, darkened by shadow.

It could also be a person.

I can’t quite tell because the picture quality is so poor. It’s grainy and slightly out of focus, giving everything a jittery blur. Despite that, the dark form bears a distinct human shape.

But the worst part about the figure is that it’s standing near the same spot as the person I saw last night. That could be a coincidence. But the churning unease in my stomach tells me it’s not.

My father’s imaginary whisper pipes up again.

It’s Mister Shadow. You know it’s him.

But Mister Shadow isn’t real. Just like the Book isn’t real.

I continue to stare at the photo, thinking about what happened moments after it was taken. My hand flutters to my cheek, my fingertips touching the slash of smooth skin under my eye. I realize the scar is yet another bit of proof that the Book—fantastical though it may be—contains strands of truth.

I drop the pictures on the desk, where they spill across its surface. The one on top is the selfie of my father, his eyes looking right into mine, as if he already knows what I’m about to do next.

Exit the office, leaving Dane alone.

Head outside, past the truck, weaving through the equipment on the lawn, and moving around to the back of the house.

Pass the exterior wall overtaken by ivy, their tendrils climbing all the way to a second-floor window.

Push into the shadow-shrouded woods in a one-woman re-creation of my father’s photograph and hurtle down the hillside, swishing through weeds, passing bright red swaths of baneberries, tripping over tree roots.

Finally, I come to a stop at a cluster of marble blocks jutting from the earth like rotten teeth.

The cemetery.

Yet another thing my father wasn’t lying about.

Behind me, Dane calls my name. He’s in the woods now, too, catching up to me. He freezes when he sees the gravestones.

“Whoa,” he says.

---