Long Lost, стр. 43
The girl seemed to waver like the flame on a candle. “The book is . . . it was just for me. And for . . . for her.” She clutched the book with shaking fingers. “I thought it might help. I thought if I turned it all into a story . . . it might be easier to believe.”
“Wait. You wrote the book?” Fiona’s thoughts tumbled and slid, rearranging themselves. “But that means it’s not just a story. Because you know what really happened. At the end.”
“But I couldn’t . . . even on paper, I couldn’t . . .” Margaret’s voice thinned. “I erased that part,” she whispered. “No one else was ever supposed to know.”
“Until now.” Fiona rushed to finish Margaret’s thought. “But you knew we’d understand. That’s why you’ve been moving the book around, isn’t it? So we would find it, and you could finally tell the right person the whole truth?” She held out one hand. “Can I read the rest now? Please, Margaret. I’m on your side. I swear.”
But Margaret Chisholm stepped out of her reach again. “I never moved the book.”
Fiona halted. “You didn’t?”
Margaret shook her head. “That is—I only moved it back. I always brought it back here, back up to her room, where it belonged. Where it would be safe.”
Fiona stared at the trembling girl. “Then . . . who . . .”
Pixie let out a howl.
The sound pierced the air, slicing through Fiona’s words, ringing away through the empty rooms. Fiona’s skin tightened with goosebumps.
Margaret spun away. She stared, petrified, down the staircase.
The library’s double doors thumped open.
On the threshold, outlined by moonlight, loomed a black-cloaked figure.
A wave of horror crashed through Fiona’s heart.
The Searcher stepped forward. Its cloak dragged along the parquet. Its hood was too deep to reveal any hint of a face inside—if there was a face at all—but Fiona could sense something within that hood staring back at them both, holding them still with its invisible eyes.
No. The Searcher is a lie. Margaret had said so herself, in the book.
But when Fiona managed to turn her head just enough to catch the other girl with the corner of her eye, Margaret’s expression was pure terror, her face as pale and stiff as stone.
The Searcher took another step. A rush of cold air swept up the staircase, carrying the smell of damp and mud and rot.
“But it’s not real,” Fiona choked out, not sure who she was speaking to. “It isn’t real.”
The Searcher came closer still. Slowly. Slowly, as though it wanted them to wait. It wanted their dread.
Pixie gave a strangled whimper.
The Searcher reached the base of the stairs.
It set its weight on the bottom step. Fiona couldn’t glimpse a foot or a leg or anything human about it, but she thought she saw a small pool of dark water forming there, a puddle in place of a footprint. A glittering trail marked its path across the parquet.
The Searcher began to climb.
Margaret whipped toward Fiona. She thrust the book into Fiona’s shaky hands.
“Run,” she whispered, before turning and vanishing into the darkness.
For one fragment of a second, Fiona wavered in place, gripping the book. Then, without knowing where she was going or what she would do when she got there, Fiona whirled around in the opposite direction, and ran.
Chapter Twenty-Four
It’s not easy to run in the dark.
Especially through a sprawling old house that isn’t yours. Especially when fear is pounding in your chest like a fist on a locked door.
Fiona ran anyway.
She flew along the second-floor walkway, relying on the haze of moonlight to keep her from crashing straight into a wall.
At the first open doorway, she dashed inside, wheeled around, and slammed the door behind her.
She leaned against it, clutching The Lost One to her ribs.
Now what?
She was still trapped in the dark with one long-dead girl, a ghost dog, and some silent, lurching thing in a long black cloak. Could a closed door keep any of them out anyway? Fiona couldn’t even believe she was asking herself the question.
Quickly she scanned the room around her. Tall bookshelves, wood-paneled walls, one latticed window. There was no way out but the door behind her.
And now she could feel, seeping around the edges of that door, a sharpening edge of cold in the air.
Fiona pressed her back to the door as hard as she could.
A damp chill slithered around her ankles.
No, Fiona told herself. The Searcher is a lie. The Searcher is a lie.
She waited, shuddering, holding her breath.
Slowly, so slowly that it made her want to scream, the swirl of cold air faded away.
Fiona’s knees gave out. She sank to the floorboards, spine still pressed to the door.
Fumbling through her backpack, she pulled out the flashlight and switched it on, slashing its frail beam around the room. Maybe she’d find something useful: a tool, a phone, a hidden exit.
Fiona steered the beam back to her lap, where it outlined the green leather edges of the book. Margaret had pushed The Lost One into her hands. There must have been a reason—something else in the book that she was meant to notice.
She flipped rapidly through the chapters to the end.
But the end wasn’t where it had been before.
There were new pages. Waiting for her.
Heart thudding, hands shaking, Fiona began to read.
Stories are strange creatures.
Like the contents of a sealed and buried box, they exist only in the minds of those that recall them.
If a story isn’t shared, if it isn’t kept alive through the telling and retelling, it ceases to exist. If the last keeper of a tale dies without passing it along, the tale dies as well. And when a true story dies, perhaps the truth dies too.
This is a story of two sisters who did everything together.
But only one of them disappeared.
The other sealed and buried their story deep inside herself, where no one but