I looked up at the fire. There were two dark masses, not one. They seemed to be bent over something, their movements jerky, like wolves over a kill, tearing away flesh. Had I been wrong—were they animals? There was a strange smell as I moved closer, musky and putrid, the scent of the decaying animals we passed on our hikes.
Their dark movements against the orange-red crackling fire were hypnotizing. I drew forward like a woman under a spell. I needed to know what I was looking at.
I was close enough to peer. If I could only lean—
I stepped on a branch and it snapped with a loud crack.
The figures whirled at the noise, faces illuminated by the moonlight—
I screamed and stumbled back.
It was Ever and his father. They stared at me with vacant eyes, their faces smeared with blood, thick and dripping down their chins. There was blood everywhere, coating their hands, running up their arms. As they turned, they revealed what lay between them: a deer. Stomach split open, insides spilling out.
My eyes jumped to the blood around their mouths.
I was filled with an overwhelming sense of wrongness, what my father called the sense of sin. I begged my body to move, but my limbs were locked, terror turning me to stone.
The fire hissed and popped like a creature giving warning. Ever blinked, coming back to himself. “Ruth?”
Hearing my name in his hoarse voice unlocked me. I scrambled backward, slipping over the white stones and nearly falling in the grass. I righted myself, eyes locked on Everett’s blood-soaked face—that terrible mask of gore and beauty—and a fear beyond rational thought filled me. The sight of them—demons feasting among the flames—triggered every warning I’d ever been given about Hell, every threat screamed by my father from his balcony. It was a holy terror that seized me. In that moment I ceased to be Ruth, the rational thinker, and became my father’s creature, his weak-kneed acolyte, through and through.
I turned and took off through the yard.
“Wait!” Ever yelled.
I could’ve sworn I heard him getting to his feet. And the thought of him chasing me—strong Ever, impossibly fast—unleashed a new dimension of fear. I leapt over the rotted fence and streaked into the street, pumping my legs as fast as they would go.
It was midnight, his neighborhood was the hunting ground, and I was prey. That’s what I felt, deep in my bones: I was the deer. Running to postpone the moment Ever’s fingernails would rake across my back and I would fall, finally feeling his sharp canines deep in my neck. In that moment, in the height of my fear, it felt like some part of me had been waiting for it, secretly, since the moment I’d met him.
I ran like the Devil himself was behind me all the way home.
33
NOW
We keep the microfilm reader in the basement of the library, a place Nissa swears is haunted, though that’s not a very Christian thing to say. It’s dark and humid down here, no air conditioner and a single rickety light, but I’m willing to stay for as long as it takes. Like the sheriff, I need proof—except the evidence I’m searching for will show Everett’s innocent and someone else is behind the deaths they’d like to pin on him. The case I need to build is diametrically opposed to the sheriff’s, and it’s half for Ever’s sake, half for mine. An hour ago I searched “definition of a serial killer” on the computer, unable to help myself, and the results—the gruesome pictures and stories—made me sick. I can’t get the memory of Ever beating the man outside the Alibi out of my head. The way he’d looked doing it, that grim satisfaction, those empty eyes. Like so many of the mug shots in the search results.
I load the reader with half a year’s worth of issues of theBottom Springs Bugle, the town’s now-defunct newspaper, figuring that for thoroughness’s sake I should go back to the beginning, which means 1999, the year Everett and I were born. I’ve just pulled the first issue up on-screen when I hear heavy creaking footsteps and labored breathing, the telltale sounds of Nissa willing herself to run down the stairs.
Sure enough, the next moment she bursts into the basement with wide eyes.
“I’m surprised you’re down here,” I say, leaning back in my chair. “What about the ghosts?”
She takes in the gloomy room, which we mostly use for storage these days, as the demand for microfilm is…not high. “Figured if I hustled fast enough, no ghosts could grab me.” She side-eyes me and I can’t help but laugh. I’d forgotten how much Nissa’s presence is a balm.
“I’ll make this quick,” she says, and thrusts out a book. It’s ancient, the cover threadbare. I have to squint at the tiny gold-embossed title:Symbology of Euro-Descended Spiritual Philosophies, Vol. II. Nissa’s voice is charged with excitement. “I finally did it, Ruth. I found our symbol.”
“Youdid?” I abandon the computer.
“This is one of the books I got shipped from the LSU archive. My old colleague had to go digging. Apparently, no one’s checked out this baby for about fifteen years now, poor thing.” Nissa pats the book, then starts flipping pages, her words coming a mile a minute. “Now, I think it’s page 285… Yes, that’s right.”
“Nissa, you’re a certified genius.”
She waves the compliment away, but her cheeks tinge with pink. “Hush. There it is. In the section on French Catholicism—look.”
It’s right there in black-and-white: the same symbol Barry said had been carved over and over on the trees in the swamp. A circle between two crescent moons, their tips pointing in opposite directions.
“The book says that in some Madonna-worshipping sects that evolved out of French Catholicism—”
