CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

By the time Harry showed up, I had asked Pola to take Zack home-it would not be the kind of day I'd anticipated. The only problem was, roads had worsened. Harry said even his SUV had been skidding on the road, and the only reasonable way to get back was to walk. I sat down with Pola in the den.

"Here's the thing," I told her. "There's something wrong with us. Maybe it's some kind of stress from the murder. Maybe it's something inside me. Inside Brooke, too. But I don't understand it. And my fear is that there might be... well, some kind of danger here. I have to be sensitive to Brooke's feelings in this, but I think she may be cracking up under all the pressure. And I may be also."

"Let's all go," she said. She took my hand in hers. "Let's 320

all of us just go. We can walk to town. We can walk in the snow. It might take half an hour at the most. You don't need to be here." She didn't say it with any hyperserious gaze in her eyes; she sounded perfectly practical.

And it was true, we didn't need to be there. I didn't need to be at Hawthorn.

But I could not leave my sister there in that condition.

Nor could I ignore something that had been building since I'd arrived.

I had felt the pull of the Dark Game.

I had left the island to avoid its pull. To get away from what was bad inside me.

But the hallucination of my mother-she had seemed like flesh and blood-she had seemed there.

The words from the typewriter.

Brooke's paintings.

Pola looked at me as clear-eyed as I had ever seen anyone. "Do you know that you did this to me when we were young? That you shut me out of your life even then? That you closed ranks with your brother and sister and father as if I didn't matter?"

I didn't detect anger in her voice.

Just the truth.

The absolute truth.

"I know."

She offered a weak smile. "Do what you need to do. We're going to stay here. By the fire. But if I'm going to be part of your life again, I don't want to be shut out. Ever."

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Pola and Zack remained in the house; we let Brooke sleep. Harry, Bruno, and I went to the smokehouse.

We skipped the blindfolds. Bruno and I faced each other. Closed our eyes. Harry, with his small recorder out, sat on the wood-slat floor.

I have to admit, I began laughing at first, and then Bruno did as well, as we took each other's hands.

"Want me to hypnotize you? Would that make it easier?" Harry asked.

I opened my eyes and looked at Bruno, who kept his eyes closed. "I think we need the blindfolds."

"All right, then," Harry said. He took his jacket off, then his shirt, and drew his undershirt over his head. He ripped it up into a few strips, passed them to each of us, and then put his shirt and jacket back on.

"I just feel silly," Bruno said, looking at the rag in his hand.

"Feel silly, then," Harry told him. "Did you feel silly when we were kids and you did this?"

"No," he said. "It was serious then."

"It's serious now," Harry said. "Do you want to know how serious? Let me play something for you." He held up the digital recorder. "Nemo, in my office. I put you under."

"And nothing happened," I said.

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"I lied," he said. "You did say things. Only I didn't want to face them.

But I need to know if what you told me when you were under is going to come to pass."

He pressed the play button of the recorder.

My voice.

"Harry Withers, you're going to die. Soon. You don't want to make it happen. Not again. You don't want to. You will die. Slowly. Painfully."

Clicked it off.

He shrugged. "Maybe it's bullshit. Maybe not. You used to predict things when you were under," Harry said. "You knew that my father would die of emphysema. You knew other things. This doesn't seem silly to me. I want to know everything that you know."

We began the ritual.

I didn't imagine anything, but recited the poem about the bells, and then chanted, "Here comes a candle to light you to bed, and here comes a chopper to chop off your head," repeating these lines again and again. I slipped back into them easily-as if I felt better about myself for saying them.

As if I'd wanted to say them, in the smokehouse, the way I wanted a cigarette or the way I might want a drink.

It felt like an hour went by. We stood there. We held our hands together.

Nothing.

And then it came.

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In my mind's eye. Bruno was there with me, watching. Aloud, I described what we were both seeing:

My mother.

She was naked, her womb ripped open, and her eyes ran with blood all around them. My father held her, his skin soaked with her blood as it pulsed from the thousand cuts he'd made in her.

And again, he raised the shiny crescent.

Crescent moon?

What was it?

It flashed and came down against my mother's skin.

A small, curved blade.

The blade of a scythe.

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