‘You should sleep,’ he says to Nikki now.
She lifts her head. There’s hatred in the way she looks at him. Hatred born of shame and defeat. ‘How am I supposed to do that?’
‘It will all be over soon,’ he says. ‘The resort will be closed. The Hollows will be peaceful again. We can all go back to how things were.’
She makes a scoffing sound. ‘Until the next time.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘Even if this works—’
‘It will work.’
‘Even if this works, even if you drive the tourists away, who’s to say it won’t happen again? Another campground, another resort. Maybe worse. A logging operation. A chemical factory. Everyone who believed in the sacredness of these woods is long gone.’
‘I’m still here. Abigail’s still here.’
Again she scoffs. ‘People around here have to make a living somehow.’
‘We’ll all find other ways to live.’
‘Yeah, that’s right. Because all that matters is Abigail. You know—’
She stops herself.
‘What were you going to say?’ he demands. ‘Were you going to tell me she’s not real? That I’m crazy? Is that it?’
‘Of course you’re crazy,’ she says. ‘You took a job at the place you hate—’
‘Only so I could get access.’
‘What, access to the cabins? So you could sneak around and scare people, like we did last time? It didn’t even work.’
‘No!’ He sees spittle spray from his mouth. Forces himself to swallow, take a breath. ‘That wasn’t me,’ he tells her. ‘That was Buddy and Darlene. They took the keys from the office. I didn’t know they were doing it until I heard about them taking that woman’s heart pills.’
They had stolen them because they thought they might be uppers or downers. Something they could take or sell. As soon as he’d found out about it, he’d told them to put them back.
He hadn’t wanted the woman to die. He wasn’t a bad person. Shit, he’d even left a flashlight for Frankie and Ryan, down under the cabin. He’d shuddered to think of how deep-dark black it would be under there. He didn’t want them to suffer more than they needed to. One of his mom’s boyfriends had worked in the big abattoir near the border, and he’d talked a lot about how important it was to ensure the animals weren’t overly scared. ‘We don’t want ’em to panic before we put that bolt in their brains,’ he’d said. Crow had never forgotten that.
‘It was . . . unfortunate,’ he says, mopping sweat from his brow. Was it his fault she had such a hair-trigger heart? Buddy could hardly breathe for laughing when he came back from returning the pills, grabbing his heart and popping his eyes and hissing ‘Lucifer!’ over and over. How was Crow to know this Donna woman was a religious nut, and that turning around to find Buddy standing there in his horned-up goat mask would send her over the edge?
Nikki stares at him. ‘Unfortunate. That’s one way of putting it.’ Her eyes flash in the half-light. ‘You were sweet once,’ she says. ‘But something snapped inside you, didn’t it? When Abigail died. I wish I’d seen that twenty years ago.’ She’s talking to him quietly now. Sadly. Almost like she cares about him. ‘But I guess something snapped in all of us. Why else would we have gone along with your plan?’
He looks down at the crow mask in his lap and thinks back. He never snapped. He got wise.
And he wasn’t crazy. He was smart.
The first night he’d seen the teachers, he had been on his way to the cabin. He liked to commune with Abigail on his own, without Goat or Fox there to share her attention. He would light up a joint and sit out on the porch, starlight straining to penetrate the thick canopy of trees, and he would talk to her about his life and his worries and his hopes for the future. He told her how sorry and frustrated he was that the plan wasn’t working. He raged about the stupidity of the campers. All those kids, crashing through the woods, dropping garbage and cigarettes and chewing gum. Trampling the hallowed ground. Polluting this pure realm.
And then, when he was halfway between Penance and the cabin, close to the clearing with the flat rock, he heard voices. Grown-up voices.
He scrambled behind the trees, fearful it might be someone he knew, and immediately recognised two of the teachers he’d seen around the campground. A man and a woman, though at that point he didn’t know their names. He wouldn’t find those out until the next day.