You Let Me In - Camilla Bruce Page 0,58

I looked up, there was a woman there, standing just inside the doors where the draft made the curtains billow.”

“Oh no.” I knew at once who that woman had to be.

“Yes … and she looked so strange, but I was too surprised to be really scared at the time. Her hair was all wild and her clothes were old and dirty; long skirts and a cape of hide. She smelled, too, like earth and something bitter, like herbs or sap from needle trees. Her eyes, though, her eyes, they were glowing, Cassie, glowing toward me in the dark … There was something familiar about her face, as if I knew her. She looked a little bit like you did before—when you were young.”

“Oh no,” I said again. A pounding pain had appeared at my temples, and the churning knot in my gut exploded. I could only imagine where this was going. “What did she say to you?”

“Well, when she saw that I was looking at her she crossed the floor and stopped right by the piano. ‘So you can see me, even uninvited,’ she said. ‘Who are you?’ I asked her, felt cold to the bone. ‘I am one of my mother’s lies,’ she replied. Why did she say that, Cassie? What did she mean?”

“I don’t know,” I lied, one of my worst. “Go on…”

“Well, she leaned in and I pulled back, and then she said, very slowly, ‘Never say I wasn’t here, my mother’s brother,’ and then she left. Just slipped out the patio doors and was gone.”

“She said that?”

“Yes.” Ferdinand slammed his mug down on the table. “What did she mean by that? Is it you that she’s talking about? Who is she? Some stray you picked up, some fellow patient from the psychiatric ward that felt kinship to you? Her eyes, though, those eyes…”

“Who do you think she was?”

He shook his head, looked at me with horror and despair. “I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know.”

“A stray?” I raised my eyebrows. “A patient?”

“What else could she be?” His voice was thin. “She couldn’t be it, could she?”

“It as in what? My daughter? A faerie?”

“Don’t say that!” His whole body began to shiver. “It’s not possible—she couldn’t be. Father has forbidden me to speak of it—”

“Has he now?”

“Who is she?” He removed his glasses to dab at his eyes with the handkerchief.

“My daughter, Mara.”

“Mara, huh?” he tested the name. “Why did she come to me?”

“She has her own reasons, I don’t always follow them.”

“Is it her, the daughter in that book?”

“Yes.”

He took a moment, put down the crumpled-up handkerchief and put his glasses back on. “I always knew Tommy wasn’t right. I always knew there was something odd about him. He didn’t feel like he was real. It still confuses me that he had everyone fooled.”

“People only see what they want to see.”

“No. Sometimes we just see, and have no choice in the matter.”

“True.”

“But what about those other stories in the book? Mother and Father and—”

“I don’t know,” I cut him off. “It was all very confusing back then. I don’t know what really happened and have long since stopped caring.”

“But Father—”

“I don’t know. She thinks so, Mara does. She is angry with him, so angry…”

He sighed deeply, drew a hand across his brow, brushing away stray strands of blond and gray. “I still have nightmares about him—your Pepper-Man.”

“He isn’t so bad. He has changed quite a bit.”

“I only remember him in my dreams—tall and thin and scary, black lips and long nails, clothes all in tatters…”

“He had been intimate with a tree for some time.”

“How can you be so flippant about it?” His gaze across the table was imploring.

“Habit,” I shrugged. “You get used to it.”

“I don’t want to get used to it.”

“Of course you don’t.”

“It’s real, though, isn’t it? It’s there!”

“Yes, it most certainly is there. I’ve been telling you that for some time now.”

* * *

Your mother would of course tell you that this kitchen table exchange of ours never happened. She would say that I’m making it all up, because I can. Because Ferdinand is dead and can never say different, and that I’m taking advantage of that.

I can’t prove her wrong.

I never recorded my conversations with my brother, and they won’t appear in any doctor’s notes. All I have is myself and my memory, which Olivia will caution you to doubt.

She will say it never happened.

I will tell you that it did.

That, and all the rest that followed.

Every single thing.

XXV

I spoke to