UNSPEAKABLE THINGS

Prologue

The lonely-scream smell of that dirt basement lived with inside me.

Mostly it kept to a shadow corner of my brain, but the second I’d think Lilydale, it’d scuttle over and smother me. The smell was a predatory cave stink, the suffocating funk of a great somnolent beast that was all mouth and hunger. It had canning jars for teeth, a single string hanging off a light bulb its uvula. It waited placidly, eternally, for country kids to stumble down its backbone stairs.

It let us swing blindly for that uvula string.

Our fingers would brush against it.

light!

The relief was candy and the sun and silver dollars and the last good thing we felt before the beast swallowed us whole, digesting us for a thousand years.

###

But that’s not right.

My imagination, I’d been told, was quite a thing.

The basement wasn’t the monster.

The man was.

And he wasn’t passive. He hunted.

I hadn’t returned to Lilydale since that evening. The police and then Mom had asked if I wanted anything from my bedroom, and I’d said no. I’d been thirteen, not stupid, though a lot of people confuse the two.

Now that his funeral had called me home, that cellar stink had doubled back with a vengeance, settling like a fishhook way deep in my face where my nose met my brain. The smell crept into my sleep, even, convinced me that I was trapped in that gravedirt basement all over again. I’d thrash and yell, wake up my husband.

He’d hold me. He knew the story.

At least he thought he did.

I’d made it famous in my first novel, shared its inspiration on my cross-country book tour. Except somehow, I’d never mentioned the necklace, not to anyone, not even Noah. Maybe that piece felt too precious.

Or maybe it just made me look dumb.

I could close my eyes and picture it. The chain would be considered too heavy now but was the height of fashion in 1983, gold, same metal as the paper airplane charm hanging off it.

I’d believed that airplane necklace was my ticket out of Lilydale.

I didn’t actually think I could fly it. Big duh, as we said back then. But the boy who wore the necklace? Gabriel? I was convinced he would change everything.

And I guess he did.

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