Page 6
My mother used to say curiosity was an ugly trait in a woman, the kind of thing that made us hard to marry. She never mentioned it also made us hard to kill, but I figured that one out myself. Staring up at the building glowing at the end of the street, I decided she might have had a point buried somewhere under all that gin and resentment.
HOUSE OF FREAKS burned across the front in hot pink neon. No address. No advertisements. No ticket booth with some bored teenager checking IDs. Three weeks ago, this was an abandoned theater with plywood nailed over the windows and enough city violations taped to the doors to double as wallpaper. Then the trucks came in the middle of the night. By morning, the plywood was gone. By the next evening, velvet ropes stretched around the block. Tonight, nearly three hundred people were ahead of me in line, all because of a black envelope that showed up on select doorsteps exactly seven days ago.
Mine included.
I pulled it out of my purse again, even though I’d memorized every word weeks ago. Heavy black paper. Hot pink lettering. My name across the front in handwriting too elegant for anyone I actually knew.
ZINNIA.
No last name. The House already knew me well enough to skip the formalities.
Inside had been a single admission card and four lines.
The House has chosen its audience.
Doors open at midnight.
Come alone.
Leave your fear at home.
Under that, handwritten in the same pink ink, something I doubted anyone else got:
We know what you’re looking for.
That line was the entire reason I was standing on this sidewalk instead of home with a glass of wine and my judgment intact. Not because I was brave. Definitely not because I was stupid, though the line between the two had gotten harder to defend by the hour.
Six years ago my sister disappeared. The last photograph anyone ever took of her was snapped outside this place. That’s why I came.
I shouldn’t still have that photograph. The police certainly stopped caring about it years ago. To them, Dahlia was just another twenty-two-year-old who packed a bag, drained her savings, and wanted a different life. No blood. No body. No struggle. No evidence of anything except a woman who vanished the same way thousands of people do every year for reasons that have nothing to do with monsters.
Except Dahlia wouldn’t have left me. I knew how that sounded. I’d read enough true-crime forums to recognize denial when I was the one wearing it. Everyone insisted their missing person wouldn’t have left, until it turned out they would, and did, and were now very happy under a new name in Sarasota. Dahlia and I weren’t normal sisters. Whatever we had wasn’t built to end in silence.
Our father disappeared before I could read. Our mother spent most of our childhood cycling through men who loved her temporarily and bottles that loved her permanently. Dahlia raised me in the gap between them. She taught me to braid my hair at six and drive at fifteen, three years before I was legally allowed. She taught me how to lie to landlords when rent was late and how to stretch twenty dollars into four days of food for two people. She sat through my parent-teacher conferences when she was barely old enough to sign the permission slip herself. When I got into college, she was the first person I called, screaming so loud the neighbors complained.
The last thing she ever said to me was, I’ll call you tomorrow, Zin.
She never did.
I’d spent six years looking for tomorrow. Tonight I intended to find it, or at least find out why it never came.
“You planning on going in sometime tonight, or are you just going to stand there radiating dread for the rest of the evening?”
I glanced at the woman who’d sidled up next to me. A silver dress barely covered her thighs; a black feathered mask hid her face; and a man’s hand wrapped around her waist. His mask was a deer skull, antlers and all. Subtlety apparently hadn’t made the guest list.
“Eventually,” I said.
She smiled under the feathers. “First time?”
“That obvious?”
“You’re staring at the building like it’s about to eat you.”
I looked back at the neon and shrugged. “Maybe it will.”
Her smile flickered. The man beside her laughed, low and delighted, like someone who found the idea appealing rather than alarming.
I didn’t laugh. People had disappeared from places the House had occupied. Not enough to make national news, not enough to trend longer than a day before some celebrity scandal buried it, but enough that if you went looking you could find the shape of a pattern. Boston. Chicago. New Orleans. Seattle. Savannah. Every couple of years the House showed up somewhere new, spent a month bleeding a city of its money and its most curious people, and then vanished. Almost every time, someone vanished with it.
