The Children on the Hill(62)

Iris blinked again. “Well, who is she, then?”

“I’ve got a better question,” Vi said, standing up.

“Yeah? What’s that?”

“Who are you?”

“Me?”

Vi’s mouth went dry. She began to pace, going back and forth across the painted floorboards of her room. “Last night, when I went to the Inn, I got down into the basement, into B West.”

Iris stared at her. “But you said you couldn’t—that the key didn’t work.”

Vi swallowed hard, shook her head. “I just didn’t know how to tell you the truth. I got in and I found things out. Like I promised I would.”

It had been a terrible promise to make. A terrible promise to keep. Vi had been wondering all day if she should tell Iris the truth. She’d gone back and forth, back and forth, like a pendulum swinging.

She thought of the movie The Pit and the Pendulum. About the man strapped to the table and the pendulum swinging back and forth, getting lower down with each swing, a huge razor-sharp blade on the end.

Back and forth. Back and forth.

Like her pacing now.

Maybe Iris was better off not knowing. Ignorance was bliss, wasn’t it?

But then Vi thought of her promise. Promises meant something. Besides, if it were her, she would want to know. She would want to know the truth, no matter what.

Some secrets were too big to keep.

She had to tell.

She had to tell Iris. And she had to tell other people, too.

She had to find a way to stop Gran.

There went the snake, writhing in her belly.

“Tell me,” Iris said. She looked more awake now. And more than a little scared.

“Are you sure you want to know?” Vi asked.

Iris nodded.

Vi walked over to her desk, looked out the window above it at the lights of the Inn across the yard. Where was her grandmother? Down in the basement, in B West? Was there a new patient strapped down in one of those rooms?

She had to do this. She knew it. She had to tell people the truth. And she needed to start with Iris.

Vi flipped on her desk lamp, then went back to her bed, pulled the folder of notes she had taken from the Inn from under her mattress.

“You need to read this,” she said.

She knew she should be the one to say it, to explain what she had learned. But she felt sick when she thought of having to actually tell Iris the story.

So she laid the folder out on her desk. “Just read,” she said.

Vi sat on her bed and chewed her nails while she watched Iris work through the papers slowly. Her finger moved along beneath the words, tapping the pages.

Her eyes were glassy, expressionless.

The seconds ticked by. Soon an hour had passed.

Vi sat still, watching Iris read. She wanted to speak, to break the room’s silence, but there was nothing to say.

But what she wanted most was to step back through time, to not have gone down into the basement. To not have discovered any of this. To not be sharing the truth with Iris right now. She wanted to go back to the time when they were just sisters hunting monsters, never realizing how close the real monsters truly were.



* * *



“IT’S ME, ISN’T it?” Iris said when she looked up at last. Her eyes were glazed over, pupils huge and sparkling, as if they weren’t even her eyes at all but the eyes of a doll or a stuffed animal. “I’m Patient S.”

Vi nodded.

“I did these things?” Her voice shook. She looked down at her hands as if they weren’t her own. “I killed my parents? My sister?”

Sister. She’d had an actual flesh-and-blood sister. A sister she’d killed.

“What Gran and Dr. Hutchins did to you… it’s…” Vi struggled for the right words.

Wrong? Criminal?

Outside, they heard a howl.

They both froze, eyes locked.

Another howl.

“Crap,” Vi said. The Monster Club call. “I’ll get him to go away.” She went to her window and opened it. Eric was down there in the yard holding a flashlight. He’d decided to come out of his room after all.

“Not now,” Vi called down.

“But it’s time,” he yelled up.

Shit. The monster hunt. She had forgotten all about the damn monster hunt.

“We can’t,” she said.

“What do you mean? What about the Ghoul? It’s the full moon,” Eric reminded her. “This is our chance.”

“We can’t,” she repeated.

“I did what you told me to do last night. I got in trouble for you!” He glared up at her.

Behind her, Iris stood. She went to the closet, got a dark hooded sweatshirt. “We should go,” she said, a girl on autopilot, speaking and moving like a sleepwalker.

“No. We don’t have to. Not tonight,” Vi said.

“But Eric’s waiting.”

Vi tried to argue, tried to stop her, but Iris was on her way downstairs and out the door and then it was too late.



* * *



THE MOON WAS a bright orange-red, hanging low and huge in the sky.

It was a damp, cold night—too cold for July. Vi shivered despite her sweatshirt. She wanted to go home. To take Iris home and talk about everything, make a plan for what they should do next.