Райли Сейгер - Home Before Dark - A Novel

Baneberry Hall ends up being empty.

For how long, I have no idea.

Which is why I take a page from my father’s book.

Literally.

I rip the page straight out of the copy on the kitchen table and tear it into small pieces. It feels good. I’ve never defaced a copy of the Book before, and the satisfaction I get in doing so now makes me wish I’d started years ago.

I think of my father as I slip a scrap of paper into the crack of the front door, wondering if he’d be amused to see me doing something he wrote about in the Book. Probably not. If anything, I suspect he’d be disappointed that I broke my promise about never returning to Baneberry Hall.

I tried mightily not to disappoint him. Even though by age nine I’d pegged him as a liar, I still sought his approval at every turn. Maybe it stemmed from a sense that if I proved myself enough, he’d eventually deem me worthy of knowing the truth about the Book. Or maybe it was just typical broken-family rebellion. Since I knew I’d never live up to my mother’s lofty standards, I aimed for the much-lower bar set by my father.

That doesn’t mean he wasn’t a good father. He was, in many ways, a terrific dad, and not just because he spoiled me rotten. He was attentive and kind. He never talked down to me, like my mother did. And he never, ever underestimated me.

Growing up, I was given lists of books to read, movies to see, albums to listen to. Things no one would suggest for a teenager. Bergman films. Miles Davis records. Tolstoy and Joyce and Pynchon. Each one was a sign he thought I was capable of opening my mind and expanding my horizons. And even though I had zero interest in jazz or Gravity’s Rainbow , I tried my best to appreciate his tastes. My father believed in me, and I didn’t want to let him down.

I disappointed him anyway. When I went to college and decided to study design and not journalism or English lit, dashing his dreams of having another writer in the family. When I quit the boring-but-stable design job I had since graduation to start the company with Allie.

That one began a period of ups and downs that lasted until my father’s death. He once told me our relationship was like a rose. Beautiful, yes, but it came with thorns. I liken it to the weather. It was always changing. Icy seasons. Warm spells. Months when we’d talk almost every day and long sections of radio silence.

Most of it was my doing, each phase dictated by my relationship to the Book. If I made it through a few months without being associated with House of Horrors , I’d treat my father like he was my best friend. But the moment the Book and I would inevitably be pushed together again—like the time I was ambushed by a tabloid reporter on its twentieth anniversary—I’d turn cool, even bitter.

Meanwhile, my father began his retreat from the world, cloistering himself in his apartment with his beloved books and classic films. Once a ubiquitous interview subject, willing to be quoted about anything from the supernatural to the publishing industry, he cut himself off from all media. For a long time, I thought he’d grown tired of living with the lie he had created and no longer wanted anything to do with it. His correspondence with Brian Prince suggests otherwise.

Our relationship changed when he got sick. His cancer was aggressive, sinking its teeth into him quickly and without reprieve. There wasn’t time for any more pettiness on my part. I needed to be there for him, and I was, right to the very end.

By midnight, there’s a scrap of the Book tucked into the front door and every window.

I go to my room.

I lock the door.

I put the knife I’ve been carrying on the nightstand next to the bed.

My final act for the night is to take a Valium, crawl under the covers, and try to sleep, even though I already know it’s not going to arrive easily, if at all.

JULY 2 Day 7

I didn’t sleep all night. As the minutes ticked by, accumulating into hours, I lay awake, staring at the ceiling, wondering if, when, how someone could get inside. The night was full of noises, all of them innocent. Yet that didn’t keep me from thinking each one was the intruder returning for another round. I thought about the stone wall and wrought-iron gate at the end of the driveway and how I had once scoffed at their existence. Now I wished they were higher.

By the time the darkness of night had started to soften into dawn, my thoughts turned to something else.

Thud.

There it was.

I looked at the clock: 4:54 a.m. Right on schedule.

Abandoning the notion of getting any sleep, I slipped out of bed—quietly, so as not to wake Jess and Maggie, who had spent another night with us. I crept downstairs and was immediately greeted by the site of the chandelier at full glow, a fact that seemed impossible. I’d made a point of making sure it was off before going to bed the night before.

Fearing an intruder had once again been inside the house, I hurried to the front door. The thread remained taut across it. The chalk line on the floor was undisturbed. The bit of index card was still wedged between door and frame.

Secure in the knowledge the door hadn’t been breached, I went down to the kitchen, made a pot of extra-strong coffee, and poured it into a mug roughly the size of a soup bowl. After taking a few eye-opening gulps, I returned to the rest of the house and methodically checked all the windows. They were the same as the door—completely undisturbed.

No one was there.

No one but us chickens.

My grandmother had used that phrase, back when I was a boy and my cousins would play hide-and-seek in the hulking barn behind her house. Because I was the youngest and smallest, it was Gram who’d hide with me, pulling me into her arms and shrinking her surprisingly spry body behind hay bales or in dark cubbyholes that always smelled of leather and motor oil. When one of my cousins came looking, calling out to see if anyone was there, Gram would always reply, “No one but us chickens!”

Security check complete, I returned to the kitchen and grabbed my coffee mug. As I took a sip, I noticed white dust sprinkling the tabletop. Sitting among it were small chunks of gray rubble.

Then I felt it.

Something inside the mug.

Small and whip thin.

It lashed against my upper lip before scraping my front teeth, slimy and foul-tasting.

I jerked the mug away from my mouth. The coffee I hadn’t been able to swallow streamed down my chin. The liquid I did swallow came back up in a gurgling, choking cough.

I peered into the mug. A circular ripple spread across the coffee’s surface and splashed against the mug’s rim. I tilted the mug, and the thing inside breached the surface—a slick shimmer of gray rising and falling in the mud-brown liquid.

I dropped the mug and backed away from the table as coffee rushed across its surface. Riding the wave, like some small sea serpent washing ashore, was a baby snake.

It squirmed along the table, tracing a sinuous path through the spilled coffee. I stared at it, dumbfounded and disgusted. My stomach roiled so much I had to clamp a hand over my mouth.

Looking up, I saw a hole in the ceiling’s plaster that was roughly the size of a shot glass. Two more baby snakes slipped through it and fell onto the table. Their landing sounded like two fat raindrops hitting a windshield.

I scrambled to find something to contain them. A bowl. Tupperware. Anything. I was rooting through a cupboard, my back turned to the table, when something else landed with a sickening splat.

I turned around slowly, dreading to see what I already knew I’d find there.

A fourth snake.

Not a baby.

Fully grown and more than a foot long, it had landed on its back, exposing a belly as red as baneberries. It flipped over, and I saw twin stripes the color of rust running down its back, just like the snake I’d found in the Indigo Room the day we moved in.