The Children on the Hill(84)

Where she was put to death, then brought back to life with a new name. A new identity.

Vi looked at the lighter in her hand, the flame still burning, guiding her like a torch, the butterfly sparkling.

Did the butterfly remember what it meant to be a caterpillar?

Sometimes, Vi thought. Sometimes it did.

That caterpillar was still inside but transformed, now so much greater than itself.

Vi left the room without looking back, shut the door, and turned out the lights.





Lizzy

August 21, 2019




WE WERE NEARLY there now.

I could feel an electric charge, a thrum building as we got closer.

A storm was settling in over the valley. The sky darkened and opened up, heavy drops of rain thumping on the roof of the van.

The air felt thick and heavy.

The inside of the windshield fogged.

I slowed, squinting at the highway. I put on my turn signal and got off at exit 10, where the green and white sign said: FAYEVILLE.

“So you’re saying your sister is Violet Hildreth, Patient S? Like the Patient S?”

I gripped the wheel tightly, eyes darting from the road to the GPS map.

The windshield wipers were slapping back and forth, back and forth, the defroster blasting air to try to clear the glass.

I had spent most of the nearly two-hour drive so far telling Skink about the Inn, about how I was once a girl named Iris, and about Vi and Eric and Gran.

“Yes,” I said. “She’s Patient S.”

“Wow. I read the book, like, a hundred times. And I’ve got a DVD of the movie. I know all about it. What Patient S did—killing her family and everything.”

I shook my head. “You know what Julia wrote. But she left a lot out, and some of what was in there was wrong. Just guesses.”

“But she used Dr. Hildreth’s papers, right?”

“She only had one file. The only one left. The others were all destroyed.”

“How’d she get it?”

“I gave it to her,” I said.

“No way!”

I nodded. “I packed it the night the police took Eric and me from the house.” I looked out the windshield at the rain pouring down in sheets, making it look as if the world itself were melting.

“Wait.” Skink frowned. “So if she’s Patient S, then where did you come from? Did you ever find out?”

“No,” I said. “Anything that might have told me who I was was destroyed.”

I squinted into the rain, eyes on the two lanes of rural highway in front of me. It was getting dark.

I knew we should wait until morning, make a better plan and go in with daylight on our side. I knew we should wait—but if we waited, we might be too late.

“In the movie,” Skink said, “there’s that scene near the end, all those children escaping the rooms in the basement at the Inn. Did that really happen?”

I cringed a little. I’d never been able to make it through the whole movie, but I’d seen enough to know it was a loose interpretation of the truth—a Hollywood version with lots of special effects and pretty girls in makeup playing the patients.

“No. Violet and I were the only two kids in the Inn that night. It was just us.”

Skink was quiet for a while. He had The Book of Monsters balanced on his lap and was looking through it as we drove.

I kept my eyes on the road, slowed when I came to a sharp curve.

Skink, lit by the reading light, was tapping his fingers on the book. “What does she mean when she says she ‘transforms’ the girls?” he asked.

“I don’t know.”

He nodded, closed the monster book, and looked around.

“So this is Fayeville, huh?” We were passing by a grocery store and a Dollar General. “I’ve actually never been here. Some friends and I in high school, we talked about coming down here and looking for the Inn, but my friends chickened out, said it was haunted and cursed.”

I forced a smile. “I’m sure it is.”

“In the movie, Fayeville looked bigger than this. A little more cheerful too.”

I shook my head and sighed.

We passed a gas station, the post office, Fayeville General Store. We drove by another gas station with a Dunkin’ Donuts attached. A vape shop. A sign for the town dump and recycling center.

At a bend in the road, I slowed. There, on the right, was a falling-down sign for the Hollywood Drive-In.

One giant screen was mostly intact, but big squares of it were missing, showing only wooden scaffolding behind. The screen on the other side had completely collapsed. The ticket booth was boarded over with plywood tagged with graffiti, the driveway chained off.

“How much farther?” Skink asked.

“We’re almost there.”

Passing the drive-in, we continued down Main Street for another mile, then turned right onto Forest Hill Drive. At least, I thought it was Forest Hill Drive. The GPS told me it was, but no street sign marked it. The trees had grown, nearly overtaking the entrance to the dirt road, making it hard to spot.

The road was in terrible shape: hardly a road at all. More like a dried-out old riverbed. The van bumped slowly over the rocks, and I swerved around the worst ruts and a fallen tree partially blocking the road.

“Are you sure this is right?” Skink asked.