The images and words pulled me back to the clubhouse with the cracked window and the wide pine boards on the floor, Eric and Violet at my side. I could smell the old wood, the musty scent of the building.
“Write down your favorite monster,” Vi told me that first day, handing me a paper and marker. The day they’d invited me to be part of the club. I still remembered what I’d drawn. I flipped through and found it now: my drawing of the door in B West, of Gran’s eyes looking through. MNSTR.
“Are you at the end yet?” Skink asked, and for half a second, I was unsure where I was, when I was.
It could have been Eric standing next to me, hurrying me along because we were late, late for a monster hunt.
I blinked and looked around to remind myself that I was still in the Chickering Island Campground office, sitting at the desk. Skink was bringing me a cup of coffee, and together we were trying to work out what to do next. Whatever it was, I wished like hell I could leave this boy out of it, but he was already in it. And he’d made it clear that there was no way I was going anywhere without him.
“Not yet,” I said, turning to the next page—Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde—soaking it all in.
I read the last lines:
By taking the potion, Dr. Jekyll awakened the beast, his dark side, and in the end, the dark side is stronger. The dark side wins.
And because the monster takes over, they both must die.
Skink perched himself on the edge of the desk, leaning down to read over my shoulder.
“So this girl,” Skink said. “This girl you wrote the book with, she’s your sister?”
“Yes,” I said.
He flipped the binder closed and pointed at the cover. “Are you Violet Hildreth or Iris?”
“I was Iris.”
“What was she like? Back then, I mean? I mean, did you know that she had this… this evil inside her?”
I shook my head. “No. I was supposed to be the broken one. I was the monster.”
* * *
I REMEMBERED THAT final night, together in the basement room at the Inn, how Vi closed her eyes, slipped down to the floor on her knees.
I dropped down, shook her shoulders, called her name, “Vi! Violet! Wake up, Violet!”
But when she did wake up, did open her eyes, she was not the same person.
She never would be again.
Violet Hildreth was gone.
The monster looked back at me from icy-cold eyes.
* * *
NOW I TURNED back to the book, flipped to the final entries, the new pages—so much whiter and crisper. The pages the monster herself had added in.
There are so many kinds of monsters, are there not?
Like Eric’s chimera, I am many-faced.
I contain multitudes.
For years now I have roamed the country, much like you, dear sister. Haven’t we always been each other’s shadows? Bound inexplicably.
But are we really so inexplicable, when you look at where we both came from?
We may not be sisters by birth, but the way in which we were reborn in that basement binds us more strongly than shared blood, don’t you agree?
Like you, I’m always moving, always on the run, always SEEKING.
Seeking the girls.
You know about the girls.
I seek the girls while you seek the monsters.
But do you know—have you guessed—why I do what I do?