Page 66 of The Sisters of Crimson House

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The bungalow was an ogre, a woodland creature crouching in the dark. Shadows like scratches raked across the exterior, courtesy of a yellow full moon hanging above the crepe myrtles. Charley stood in the driveway, watching the house like it might come to life. It made her sad, thinking about her childhood home this way, that she was floating between a haunted house she’d been desperate to maintain and one she’d been torn from against her will. She knew it had been sold and almost immediately placed on the rental market. Now it no longer resembled the cozy home of her youth.

A front windowpane was cracked, like the house was frozen mid-wink, a joke she didn’t get. She startled at the sound of leaves scraping along the sidewalk, pushed by a breeze, and she was acutely aware of Celeste standing behind her. Acutely aware of how much noise her aunt was not making by just standing there like a ghost. Charley made her way toward the front door, toward the devil she didn’t know rather than the one lingering behind her. She placed her hand on the door handle and pulled it toward her, unsurprised to find it unlocked. She had known the house would be open, waiting for her. She and Celeste went inside.

The house was dark, devoid of furniture. No leather couch with the tears her mom had unsuccessfully tried to camouflage with a knit blanket. No dining table that hosted a thousand lunches and homework sessions, games of Uno. The house had been scrubbed of proof they had been normal some of the time. Done normal family things.

It was not nostalgia that hit her next but a sickeningly sweet smell that made her wince. Cinnamon and vanilla and pumpkin—smells that should work in concert but not be overpowering like this. Like she had walked to her house and detoured into a Bed Bath and Beyond.

A slight noise from upstairs.

“Miranda?” called Charley. Not waiting for a response, Charley immediately went for the stairs. She reached the landing, the house dark but muscle memory propelling her forward. She walked past her old room, willing herself not to look inside. Miranda’s room was at the end of the hall. The door was shut, a faint light flickering just under the frame.

“Miranda?” she called again. No answer. She turned the door handle, surprised this time to find that it opened easily. The Miranda she knew always kept her door locked. The Miranda she didn’t know sat on the floor of her old bedroom, hugging her knees to her chest. She sat before a virtual wall of candles, white, orange, yellow, all lit and flickering like a Halloween display. Like a vanilla candle factory explosion. It would be funny—pathetic, really, a child’s attempt at a shrine—if not for the scribbling all over the walls.

Awake. Awaken. I AM AWAKE. Words carved into her door, her sister whispered them now.

“Miranda,” Charley said.

Miranda turned slowly, her expression stricken in the candlelight.

“Wait!” ordered Celeste, pulling Charley back as Miranda staggered to her feet.

“How!” Miranda cried, her body trembling from the shock.

“The dreamer will not wake when there is beauty in dreaming,” said Celeste, her voice a strange singsong, steady despite moving into the room like a storm. She looked at her cowering niece carefully, like she was evaluating a wild animal. “It’s Miranda,” she pronounced, satisfied, turning to Charley like her job was done.

But what did she even mean? Charley did not recognize the frightened girl in front of her.

“How are you here?” Miranda repeated, her voice a whisper, her eyes not the tortured black of a monster but a watered-down blue as her body racked with sobs.

“What did you do?” Charley asked her sister, taking in the candles, the childish scribblings on the wall. This insane campsite in her childhood house threatened to unmoor her. Sy had been telling her the truth. Miranda had been here, hiding away, and for how long? “Why did you lie to me?” she said, her fury building. The months spent grieving the mystery that was her sister. Her radio silence. Had she been mere miles from Crimson House, achingly close but tauntingly just out of reach? Charley, the queen of the con, and she’d been played for a fool.

“You’re always lying to me!” she said, seething. The last time she’d spoken these words to her sister, Miranda had tried to kill her. But Charley didn’t care. She needed to understand so this moment wouldn’t be the thing that finally broke her hold on her sanity.

“Charlotte,” said Celeste softly, placing her hand on Charley’s.

Charley whirled on her aunt. “Don’t,” she barked, placing herself between her sister and aunt, a stalemate between two terrifying choices.

“How?” repeated Miranda, shaking as she cowered from her aunt. “Charley, is she real?”

Charley’s heart sank. Celeste may have pronounced this person as Miranda, but there was no trace of the person Charley knew her to be.

“I’m very much real, sweetheart,” said Celeste gently.

“Celeste, what’s wrong with her?” Charley asked, finding her voice. Her eyes burned with tears, and she cursed that hidden chest of emotions she kept under lock and key. She would not cry. Not in front of the woman who’d chosen to tear her family apart. Not when she’d left them all alone.

“She is being hunted. Like we all are. It’s not safe here,” said Celeste, her face a carving in the candlelight.

“That’s because you’re here,” howled Miranda. “You need to leave.”

“Miranda,” Celeste said, impatient, taking a step toward her niece when Charley cut her off again.

“She doesn’t want you here. You heard her. Neither do I.” Charley relished the pain that radiated on Celeste’s face.

“You don’t understand,” she said quietly.

“I understand that you kept my sister away from me for years. That you left me and your own mother to fend for ourselves. Maybe the occasional check to buy us off from your guilt. But then even those stopped coming,” Charley said, feeling years of bitterness unspool within her. “You left us.”