by configuring a scary image. Well, I would deal with this right now. Once, I had turned to the chest of drawers when it called me a slut and told it to shut up. And it did. It never spoke again. So I squeezed my eyes closed and stood there with my hands making fists and repeated my mantra.
“You are not there,” I hissed. “You are not there. You are a figment of my imagination. When I open my eyes you will be gone.”
I opened my eyes.
But she—or it—was right there, just inches from my face. I staggered backward, gasping, terror wringing all the air from my lungs. She was more creature than human. Her skin was purple and mottled, her hair was covered in slimy leaves and weeds, and I could see the black bodies of beetles wriggling in the tangles. Her teeth were black, piranha-like fangs in gray gums. But worst of all were her eyes—they were black and bulbous as a frog’s, so dark they looked like holes.
I fell to the ground, shaking and sobbing. When I looked again the light was on, and the woman was gone. I was curled up in the fetal position and trembling all over, the sight of that horrible face emblazoned on my mind. Someone said, “Sophie,” and I gave a loud shriek, jerking away from the hand that was stretched out to me. But then I saw a flash of blonde hair, and a small, worried face.
It was Gaia, and she was bent over me, asking if I was all right.
I tried to adult, but right then I was mired in deepest primal terror, so instead of dusting myself off with a beaming Mary Poppins smile and assuring my charge that I was quite fine, darling, and let us have some milk and cookies before bedtime, I pressed my face into my hands and sobbed my heart out.
Gaia wrapped her arms around me and kissed my head.
“It’s OK,” Gaia whispered. “I saw her, too.”
23
someone else knows
NOW
I took Gaia straight up to my bed. I knew there was no way of getting her to sleep on her own after what had just happened, and to be honest, I didn’t want to sleep alone. I tried to wake Coco, but she was fast asleep and determined to remain that way, so I turned on the video baby camera and brought the monitor into my room. Then I locked the door and barricaded it with the chest of drawers.
I was hyperalert and rigid with terror, my eyes locked on the shadows outside my bedroom window. I tried to wrestle the scene in the kitchen into some kind of sense. I had seen this woman a few times now, and if Gaia had seen her, too, then I wasn’t hallucinating. But that didn’t necessarily mean she was a shade from the Underworld, sent to torment us for the wrongs of our fathers. No, it meant that quite possibly she was some drifter who was sleeping underneath the house, along with the thousand or so insects and rodents that preferred the warm spots between the house and its foundations to the forest. I didn’t blame them. And I’d overheard Tom go on about something called “right to roam,” which was a big deal in Norway and meant that he couldn’t stick a Private Property sign anywhere on the site. He got really annoyed about that.
Of course, none of this rationale explained the state of the woman’s face, but it was dark—maybe I hadn’t seen properly. Either way, I was going to protect these girls. That was my mission, and I had chosen to accept it.
All of this kind of reasoning helped me stop convulsing with fear, but didn’t make me sleepy in the least, so I picked up my laptop and began to work on my novel.
“What are you doing?” Gaia said after a few moments, disturbed by the light of my screen.
I looked up from my laptop and tried to find an answer that would persuade her to go back to bed, fast. My brain wasn’t working, so she took my openmouthed silence as a signal to skip across the room and peer into my laptop screen.
“Are you sending an e-mail?” she asked. “About the Sad Lady?”
Her face was fixed in an earnest, utterly fearless expression. She meant the woman we’d both seen.
A deep sigh. “Why do you think she likes our house so much?”
“Maybe it was her house,” I said without thinking. Then,