All the Inside Howling (Hollow Folk #2)(81)

I was so close. My stomach rolled and tossed. My throat clenched. All my aches and pains ricocheted inside, like someone had let off fireworks in a steel vault. I could almost reach him, I could almost—

Ignoring the pain in my scalp, I twisted my head back towards him. Dad drew back in surprise, but I caught his ear and a handful of hair. He yelped. For a moment, rage broke through his mask, and his big fist with that big belt buckle came up, ready to rearrange my face. But by then it was too late.

I was touching him. I was looking into his eyes. I . . . pushed.

The familiar sensation of doubling returned: I had felt it with Frankie and with DeHaven, the sense of being pulled between two places, of bouncing back and forth like a ping-pong ball in a world championship. It lasted only an instant, though, because now I understood: there was a door, there had always been a door. But there was also a bridge. Bridges and doors, although very different, do the same thing: they connect two places. Me, on one end. On the other, Dad. Now that I understood, now that I could feel that separation, the distance was nothing. The struggle of being drawn in opposite directions ended. I flashed across that distance. It might have been millimeters, less than millimeters: the distance between skin and skin. It might have been galaxies, universes, creation.

And then I was there, floating in the darkness of Dad’s psyche. I recognized the darkness from Frankie’s mind, from the first time I had come close to experiencing this. What could I do? I wasn’t sure. I didn’t think I could, as Becca had suggested, fry his brain. I didn’t think I could manipulate him like a puppet the way Mr. Big Empty did with Tony and with DeHaven. Whatever I could do was here, in this place. I could look through his memories. I could see all the bad things. I could stir them up like a whirlwind through a trailer park, spinning debris into the air, every hateful, cruel, nasty thing he had done. I could sift through them with a comb and see, through his eyes, all the times he had picked up the belt. For a moment, I hesitated. There was something cruel about what I was going to do, and a part of me said no, not this, this isn’t the way.

But it was a very small voice, and this had been years in the coming. This had been my whole life, all of it coming to this moment, and now I was the one with the power, now I was the one with the upper hand, now I was the one with the—

—belt—

—with the chance to avenge myself. And so I did. I knew how to do this, I knew it instinctively, from when I’d done it to Gage, and to Austin, and to Emmett. It was like a whirlwind, a twister, a cyclone, a tornado: set the right pieces in place, high pressure, low pressure, warm air, cold air, give everything a stir and let hell fly.

And hell did fly. This was bigger, this was better, this was stronger than anything I’d ever done before. Everything before—Gage, Austin, Emmett—that had been small-time stuff, domestic, like a run-down vacuum cleaner. This, though, this was the Kansas kind of storm, the Dorothy kind of storm, a storm that rips you out of this world and into the next. I loved it. I didn’t have arms in this place, I didn’t have a body, but I wanted to spin with my face tilted up, taking in the nightmare I had created.

I could feel myself weakening. I was exhausted and hurt physically, and what I had done in here, in Dad’s mind, was beyond anything I had tried before. Already the edges of this place were starting to feather and rustle, and in a moment or two, I would be pulled back to my body. The storm I had started, though, would continue. I hoped it would blow for the rest of his fucking life.

But as the chaos and debris of his worst memories, of all his guilt and shame and self-hate, spun around me, I noticed something. Something at the center of this darkness, something that, even without a sense of body, I sensed he held close, tucked to his chest, arms folded carefully around it. Something treasured and kept safe from the storm pushing in.

I drifted closer, fighting the pull towards my body, fighting my weariness. It was like fighting an outgoing tide. Everything seemed to slip out from under me, and I struggled against it, fighting towards that single thought, that memory, glinting like a gold dollar at the bottom of an outhouse.

The drag on me became stronger, and I felt myself giving way, but I cast myself towards that flash of light one last time. I brushed its edge, and for a moment, I glimpsed the memory that my dad clutched.

It was a hospital room. A small, country hospital: I could tell that much from the curtains, which were printed with gardenias and obviously hand-sewn, and from the broken quilting of trees and fields beyond the window. A man, a young man with long blond hair and a ragged t-shirt and torn jeans, leaned over the hospital bed. And in the hospital bed was a woman with strawberry curls, and she and the young man were bending over something she held in her arms, something—

And then that psychic tide carried me into the darkness.





For a moment, I didn’t know where I was. My scalp ached—my whole body ached— and my mouth tasted like I’d been chewing nails. Then my eyes adjusted to the weak light, and I stared into Dad’s empty face. He was still breathing, hoarse rattling breaths, and his eyes flickered once and then in mechanical blinks. A line of drool ran from the corner of his mouth and dropped, warm and heavy, onto my arm. I released him. There was something terrifying about the lack of expression in his face, and so I ripped myself free of his grip, feeling a flash of pain in my scalp as I tore out tangles of hair in my hurry. When I was free, I scrambled off the sofa. Dad tumbled to the ground, falling to lie on his side, motionless except for those pained breaths and the occasional quiver of his eyelids.