The last writer, p.17
The Last Writer, page 17
I, like Zara, didn’t have evidence, but I had more than enough coincidences in a row to keep me putting one foot in front of the other. Clues left like breadcrumbs to keep me searching. I shoved the skeleton keys deep in my pocket and then palmed the cool metal of the letter opener in my back pocket.
“Thax?” I called again, before groaning softly and then turning and crawling into the walls of the trunk and through the bottom. My feet hooked on the rungs of an old ladder and I held on tightly as I made my way down into the dark depths.
Holding my breath when I passed damp rocks with mold and mildew slicking the sides, I moved faster, hoping the bottom of the tunnel was near. I sighed with relief when after the very next rung my feet landed on solid ground.
Soft drips echoed from the darkness.
My eyes adjusted to the dim light shining down from the open trunk. I considered for a moment that I should close the trunk door behind me, so I at least had my have a heads up, but I didn’t have the heart to crawl back up the rotting ladder. I turned, knowing my mistake may be fatal, but charged through the darkness anyway.
My sneakers slipped on the damp rock under my feet, eyes adjusting more and more as the tunnel, which was barely wide enough for me to pass through shoulder-to-shoulder, began to widen. A dim yellow light flickered just out of my line of sight, and I rushed forward, eager to reach whatever final destination may be at the end of this tunnel.
Maybe Thax had come exactly this way—maybe this exited out into the sewer pipes of Shelter Island. Maybe I was steps away from my freedom.
Awareness tingled through me, feet pushing me as I prayed for Thax and freedom at the end of the tunnel. The stone walls opened up more abruptly then, a small domed area—like an earth-and-stone version of the atrium at the library—only where that one sang with birds and life, this suffocated with silence and darkness.
I could see now that the dim yellow light was reflecting from a tunnel pointed in the opposite direction to the one I’d come through. Like the spokes of a wheel, I counted four tunnels hollowed out under the estate of Usher House and Gardens.
An entire world under its feet.
“Thax?” I called into the tunnel with the light. I waited, straining for a reply, when one came in the guise of a scratching noise. My fear dialed up, but the light beckoned, the possibility of Thax or an exit or both was too powerful to turn me around.
I took cutout steps forward, tentative and quiet, until my patience evaporated and I took a few more quickened steps.
I could now tell the light shone from a small doorway. I hovered just at the edge of the shadows, ready to slip inside when the loud scraping noise returned, followed by a soft grunt. I wasn’t alone. I prayed Thax was just on the other side. I crept closer to the stone, hiding myself deeper in the shadow as I listened and waited, measuring my breaths to control my violent heartbeat.
And then, the door thudded closed.
I was shrouded in darkness, again.
PAST
Zara - Winter 1964
“Yarrow, my love, you’re too good to me.” I leaned into my brother, our shoulders touching as the small gathering of media and entertainment journalists snapped away with their cameras. A morning show crew had just presented us with a Happy 16th Birthday cake on live camera for a few million of our closest television fans to see.
Yarrow remained wooden at my side.
He spoke little these days, but I think that was part of his act. We each had one. We’d become known as the Usher House Twins, and a lot worse depending on if you were local to Shelter Island.
The islanders had creepy and sometimes downright sinister names for us, but they were only reacting how they were meant to; more than writing, the governess had a talent for spinning a living narrative.
The day the new Yara was born was the day the real Zara died.
It was me that was buried six feet under, reality I’d lost touch with long ago as I became the thing required to put Usher House on the Hollywood map.
Thankfully, the few scenes of Lilies in the Cellar that were required for Yarrow and I to film were all on-site at Usher House, many external shots of the house and Yarrow and I walking hand-in-hand in our matching uniforms. It was all eerily similar to life, and yet so not.
The days that the director and producers were at Usher, Mother made sure the foster children were cleaned and scrubbed and spent all day deep in arithmetic and science texts. Those days, the kids often complained, were the worst. They may have been deprived of sunshine and fresh air in the cellar, but without the governess’s overshadowing presence, they found freedom.
A reporter interrupted my thoughts then. “Yara, the head of the production company said in an interview last week that he anticipated offering you a starring role in the next film, is that official and are you ready to take on a leading role in such a dark film franchise?”
“Nothing has been signed yet,” the governess interjected before I could answer. “Look for a press release shortly, but at this time nothing is in writing.”
“What do you say to the critics that have commented on the possibly improper relationship between the twins, Ms. Usher?”
The governess’s spine stiffened, her eyes turning hard as nails. “I will not entertain such impropriety. Shame on you and your publication for propagating such immoral drivel.”
“Have you started writing the follow-up to Lilies in the Cellar yet?” Another journalist thrust a recorder into the governess’s face.
“I have not,” she spit.
“Do you have a title?”
“I’m considering a few. You’ll have to read The Times piece when it comes out next week, I gave their interviewer a lot of juicy behind-the-scenes Hollywood details.”
The journalist rambled into the next question: “Can you tell us why the last director has decided not to be involved in the sequel?”
The governess’s eyebrow arched. “Aren’t you quite the little investigative journalist? Well, I’ll give you a hint, the best is yet to come.”
The journalist frowned but scribbled her reply down on his notepad.
“Now, the children have to get to their morning lessons, we appreciate the Happy Birthday gifts and wishes for the twins, but no rest for the wicked.”
I forced the manufactured smile on my face as I held the stuffed animals and balloons in one hand, the gift the governess had given Yarrow to give me in the other: a silver letter opener with All My Love, Y engraved along one finely-wrought edge.
That was the other thing about becoming Yara: my birthday was no longer my own. None of the days were.
“Come along my little lilies,” the governess cooed as she ushered us through the gates and down the main path to the front of the house.
I hovered close to Yarrow as we walked, camera shutters snapping behind us. I leaned my head on my brother’s shoulder and laced my fingers with his. The camera clicks came to a hot crescendo and I could almost imagine the smirk on Mother’s face as the media ate us up.
The Usher House Twins.
A name fit for a book cover.
Mother’s voice lowered an octave, her steps slowing. “Yarrow has informed me that your father called while you were doing your interview. He saw you on television live, isn’t that wonderful? He can’t make it to the island for your birthday but he promised to call back later.”
I knew the call wouldn’t come, they never did.
The governess reached the top of the steps, regal in her black skirt and black, beaded vest. A shiver slipped down my spine when her smile twitched up as she caught my eye. “Beautiful.”
She waved to the photographers one last time before turning and disappearing into the darkness of Usher House. Yarrow and I lingered an extra moment, letting the small crowd eat up the last moments before they scurried to their desks and wrote weird opinion pieces about the eccentric twins of Usher House. We were becoming a bit of a sensation, even if it was for sinister reasons.
Our lives had turned upside down since moving to Usher, each day unlike the one that came before.
“I’m starving,” Yarrow complained.
I didn’t reply. I was accustomed to not eating to keep my weight down so Yarrow and I were better matched on camera. We stepped over the threshold of the house and I dropped my arm from Yarrow’s elbow. I ran a hand through my hair and frowned when a few white strands came out between my fingers. “I miss Yara.”
Yarrow’s eyes narrowed on mine, a look of anger crossing his fine features before he spit, “Who?”
And with that he turned, long white hair pin-straight down his back as he crossed into the kitchen, the sound of the fridge door opening a moment later.
I climbed the stairs with tears in my eyes, unable to keep my hands out of my hair now that it was officially falling out.
I’d had so much trouble bleaching my roots before the premier last week, I’d used two rounds of peroxide and left it on a little too long. I was now leaving a trail of white-gold strands around the house like silvery, bleached breadcrumbs.
A bald spot had begun to form behind my ear and the skin was pink and raw from a chemical burn.
Numbness crawled through my skin and sunk deeper into the marrow of my bones every day.
I fingered the tiny pair of black birds in my pocket, their feathers thinning much like my hair. I’d carried them every day through the filming of the movie and the press engagements, held them close to my cheek and cried into them at night as I thought about Nate and Yara and even my father, unaware of so much behind the stone walls of his library.
The library is his fortress, Usher House, our dungeon.
Did he know about Lilies in Cellar?
Sure, who didn’t? But he’d never come to a premier or Usher House at all. Mother said it was because he didn’t care, but secretly I wondered if she’d even told him. I’d gotten so desperate after the loss of Yara that I’d scribbled up a letter to him and snuck out of the house in the middle of the night to mail it. I couldn’t find a stamp, so I’d left two quarters stolen from the governess’s office on top of the small white envelope sitting on the steps of the post office building.
I never knew if the words of desperation reached him in the city, because no answer ever came.
But it didn’t stop me from dreaming that someday he would come save all of us from this nightmare. Yarrow and I could raise the rest of the foster kids among the New York Public Library stacks and live a life that would resemble something more normal than anything on Shelter Island.
A wry grin crossed my face as I thought about my first impressions of tiny, idyllic Shelter Island when we’d first landed here on the ferry the first day. Its downtown, sweet and quaint, the villagers even sweeter. The governess had found a way to taint all that goodness in this story somehow.
Just days after Lilies in the Cellar was published, it achieved the #1 spot on the New York Times bestsellers list and every citizen of the island and their long-lost fifth cousins came for regular walks by the house. Usher was suddenly on the map again.
Soon tourists were coming from far and wide, some adventurous ones even attempted to climb the gate, but Carnegie and Astor kept them at bay as they paced the walls and kept onlookers out. I knew the buzz in the village, many on Shelter Island spread rumors that the horrifying stories that unfolded in the book were all true, all had happened under the roof at Usher.
I hadn’t even read the book, the governess had forbidden any of us from touching it and kept the only few copies in the house under lock and key in her office. But I knew the terror that existed between its pages must be truly horrible, from the way the faces of the onlookers dropped when Yarrow or I stepped outside. Some even shouted questions that I couldn't quite understand, but I knew that someday, it would all make sense.
I turned my attention back to the cracked mirror, wiping at my cheeks with the tiny wipes soaked in alcohol my mother kept stocked at my vanity. Every day I wore makeup to lighten my skin tone, and every evening as the sun went down, I sat here and scrubbed my flesh until it was raw to remove any last traces of the sister I’d become.
I didn’t recognize her, the girl with the bleached hair and strained smile.
The reflection in the mirror gazed back blankly, all traces of life snuffed out.
I was just about to change into my sleep gown and skip another meal in favor of a book from the library, when another thought occurred to me.
Long ago, and for safety reasons, I’d stolen the governess’s skeleton key and had a replica made at the hardware counter in the village. I’d looped it lovingly with one of Yara’s baby-pink hair ribbons and the tiny finger bone I’d found my first day in the garden. I slipped them into my pocket and moved swiftly down the stairs. The house was silent and moving easily, I crossed the hallway that led to the governess’s office. Only darkness slipped out from under the door, so I knew it must be vacant.
Trying the knob, I opened it easily and slipped inside.
My eyes crawled across the bookshelves in search of a copy of Lilies in the Cellar to bring back to my room. After searching the shelves I tried the cupboards beneath, relieved when I found a stack of dozens, all with a tiny sticker on the front advertising that they were signed by the author.
Zahara Usher, #1 New York Times Bestselling Author
I rolled my eyes as I snagged the first copy and shoved it under my arm. I slipped out of the room as easily as I’d come, surprised I hadn’t needed my secret skeleton key at all to swipe my signed copy of the book that was inspired by my life.
I wondered if writing the story of someone without their permission was legal.
Was it my story though? It looked like it from the outside, but it didn’t feel like it. At least not yet. I‘d grown up in the library, and my life had become a book. Or rather, someone's life. In a weird way I’d come to think of myself as a hybrid human—part Yara and part Zara, neither me and fully me just the same.
I picked my way through the fading light of evening, following the tall hedges and smiling softly when Carnegie and Astor sniffed me out. They trotted up, greeting me with wagging tails as they nuzzled into my thigh. I patted each of them, quietly grateful for their company as I opened the gates to the garden and followed the pathway I’d been walking for over a year now.
I reached the fountain and settled myself against the cold stone, angling myself so the last remaining rays of light lit the opening page of my book.
Ten little lilies lined up in the snow, one tumbled down to shattered bones
The next little lily broke its back, and the third little lily's petals turned black
The fifth little lily wept no no no, so the sixth little lily had to go
The seventh little lily ran to cliff’s edge, and the eighth little lily is already dead
The ninth little lily remains for all to see, as the tenth little lily ran from the screams
I crammed my eyelids closed, already feeling the cut of the words like a rose’s thorn.
I sighed, then opened my eyes, vowing to get through these pages tonight no matter what it took me. It felt like the key to unlocking this weird representation of my future.
I read until my eyes hurt, until tears streamed down my face, until I read about a fifteen-year-old boy that was stolen.
Not by thugs, but by Usher.
By the time I’d finished reading the first one-hundred pages, I didn’t need to read more.
I knew why she’d bothered to lock it up, demanded we not read the words it contained, the accusations it leveled, and horrors it justified.
The governess was a murderer.
According to these pages, and as long as Nate was the teen boy she wrote about in the book, his ending had been violent and disruptive, in many ways just like his life was meant to be. He’d crashed into my life briefly and left a lasting imprint, and now his unmarked grave lay buried somewhere under these hedges and rose bushes, the House of Usher forever looming.
“Oh! Yara, what are you doing out here so late? And barefoot? You know better than that.” The governess’s grave reprimand sliced through my skin like barbed wire.
“You have no right to—to—anything!”
Her face twisted, malice settling in every wrinkle and crack. “Pardon me?”
“You’re a monster!” I threw the stupid paperback at her. Her elegant demeanor cracked and her eyes registered the cover. “You’re a monster and you found a way to monetize the horror you inflicted on every kid you met!”
“You’re out of line,” she sneered, breaking a nearby thorn branch.
I knew she was preparing to whip me, she’d done it more times than I could count with a yardstick or belt when we lived at the library.
“How long have you been killing the kids?”
“Killing them? How could you say that? I’ve been saving them from their miserable lives. I’ve given them a chance here, playmates, and fame, what more could a child want?”
“A life,” I whispered, fighting back angry tears.
“I was just telling Walton that the head nurse asked me to stop by the orphanage and take a few more young ones off of her hands, but if you care that much about it, I won’t. And as for the runaways—”
“They haven’t all been runaways.” I thought back to all the kids that’d come before.
“Of course they have. I was telling Truman’s doctor friend in the city that the vitamins I have don’t seem powerful enough, so he’s promised to send me a shipment of these extremely potent supplements he swears by. I think it will really help turn around the kids working in the lily cellar.”
“Who is Truman?” I brimmed.
“Oh, I forgot to tell you, Truman is the new director, he’s all the rage in the city right now—he’s just finished writing a true crime thriller that’s going to take everyone by storm. He has the perfect voice to direct the follow-up to Lilies in the Cellar. I want to dig deeper and really stretch creative boundaries with this book. My agent says I need to outdo myself, so it needs to be much darker too.”
