* * *
“IT’S ME, ISN’T it?” Iris said when she looked up at last. Her eyes were glazed over, pupils huge and sparkling, as if they weren’t even her eyes at all but the eyes of a doll or a stuffed animal. “I’m Patient S.”
Vi nodded.
“I did these things?” Her voice shook. She looked down at her hands as if they weren’t her own. “I killed my parents? My sister?”
Sister. She’d had an actual flesh-and-blood sister. A sister she’d killed.
“What Gran and Dr. Hutchins did to you… it’s…” Vi struggled for the right words.
Wrong? Criminal?
Outside, they heard a howl.
They both froze, eyes locked.
Another howl.
“Crap,” Vi said. The Monster Club call. “I’ll get him to go away.” She went to her window and opened it. Eric was down there in the yard holding a flashlight. He’d decided to come out of his room after all.
“Not now,” Vi called down.
“But it’s time,” he yelled up.
Shit. The monster hunt. She had forgotten all about the damn monster hunt.
“We can’t,” she said.
“What do you mean? What about the Ghoul? It’s the full moon,” Eric reminded her. “This is our chance.”
“We can’t,” she repeated.
“I did what you told me to do last night. I got in trouble for you!” He glared up at her.
Behind her, Iris stood. She went to the closet, got a dark hooded sweatshirt. “We should go,” she said, a girl on autopilot, speaking and moving like a sleepwalker.
“No. We don’t have to. Not tonight,” Vi said.
“But Eric’s waiting.”
Vi tried to argue, tried to stop her, but Iris was on her way downstairs and out the door and then it was too late.
* * *
THE MOON WAS a bright orange-red, hanging low and huge in the sky.
It was a damp, cold night—too cold for July. Vi shivered despite her sweatshirt. She wanted to go home. To take Iris home and talk about everything, make a plan for what they should do next.
Eric was telling them that he’d found some footprints down by the creek: footprints that definitely weren’t theirs. “I think it’s the Ghoul. When I saw him, he had these big boots that looked like they had fur on them. Like animal skin.”
He was leading them through the woods, followed by Vi and then Iris last. Vi kept turning back to look at her, but Iris’s eyes wouldn’t meet hers. They were focused on the ground.
Crunch, crunch, crunch went their feet through old leaves, twigs. They stumbled and shuffled their way forward, crushing ferns, tripping over roots and stones.
Eric was swinging the light, scanning, always lighting the way up ahead to make sure it was safe, that the Ghoul wasn’t there, waiting for them with sharp teeth and claws.
They heard the creek before they saw it, and soon they were right by the bank. In the spring it ran deeper and faster, but at this time of year it was barely a foot in the deepest places. Some years it stopped running altogether by midsummer.
The water was black and sparkling under the beam from Eric’s flashlight.
He looked down, shone the beam around in the mud along the edge until he found the strange footprints. “See, they’re not ours. These come from boots with a smooth sole. It’s the Ghoul.”