Dedication

To Stephen Barbara,

for your ultimate bad-assery and your belief in this book.

Contents

Dedication

Part One

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Part Two

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Fifteen

Sixteen

Seventeen

Eighteen

Nineteen

Twenty

Twenty-One

Twenty-Two

Part Three

Twenty-Three

Twenty-Four

Twenty-Five

Twenty-Six

Twenty-Seven

Twenty-Eight

Twenty-Nine

Thirty

Part Four

Thirty-One

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About the Author

Credits

Copyright

About the Publisher

PART ONE

All that we see or seem

Is but a dream within a dream.

—Edgar Allan Poe

Afterward, Dea blamed it all on Toby. She knew it wasn’t nice to blame a cat. It was definitely immature. But that was life: one big chain reaction, a series of sparks and explosions.

Always, explosions.

If Toby hadn’t clawed through the screen door, she would never have met so-and-so, she would never have said such-and-such, she would never have done blah, blah, blah. She’d still be slogging through dumb algebra homework in Fielding, Indiana, getting picked last in gym class and ignored in the cafeteria.

Funny how Fielding, Indiana, didn’t seem so bad anymore. Or maybe it just didn’t seem important. Not after the cops and the disappearance. Not after the men with no faces and the city in the sand.

Not after the monsters started showing up in the mirror.

Definitely not after Connor.

ONE

“Freaks.” An empty can of Coke ricocheted off Odea’s backpack and landed in the dirt. Inside the car, several girls laughed, a sound like the distant twittering of birds. Then Tucker Wallace’s truck continued grinding and bumping down Route 9, kicking up dust and exhaust.

“Thank you!” Gollum shouted. She scooped up the can and dribbled a few drops of soda in the dirt. “Thoughtful,” she said to Dea. “Too bad they forgot to leave us anything to drink.”

“I’m sure it was just an oversight,” Dea said.

“You know, for an evil hell spawn, Hailey’s got pretty good aim. Maybe she should try out for the basketball team.”

Dea laughed, imagining Hailey Madison, whose sole form of exercise came, according to rumors, from showing off various parts of her anatomy to different horny senior boys beneath the bleachers, running up and down a basketball court. She liked that about Gollum, arguably the only person in Fielding more unpopular than Dea was. She couldn’t be fazed. She turned everything into a joke.

Gollum always said it was because she’d grown up on a working dairy farm, dirt poor, with five brothers. After you’ve shoveled shit at five in the morning in December, she always said, you learn how to keep things in perspective.

They kept walking. It was hot for September. The fields were full of withered corn and sun-bleached grass and the occasional spray of white wildflowers, floating like foam on the surface of a golden ocean. The sky was pale, practically white, like someone had forgotten to vacuum the dust out of the blue.

Even by Fielding standards, the Donahues’ house was in the middle of nowhere. There were only four properties within shouting distance: a house that belonged to an ancient alcoholic Dea had never seen; Daniel Robbins’s house, which was bordered on all sides by a chicken wire fence and bore a dozen No Trespassing signs; the Warrenby Dairy Farm, which sprawled over three hundred acres (“all of them useless,” Gollum liked to say); and a large brick colonial almost directly across the street that had been vacant since Odea and her mother had moved in.

But today, as Odea and Gollum got closer, Dea saw the yard of the colonial house was littered with cardboard boxes and furniture sheathed in plastic. There was a big U-Haul truck parked in the driveway. A woman was standing on the front porch, sorting through cartons as though looking for something specific. She straightened up, smiling, when she spotted Dea. She was wearing jeans and a short-sleeved white T-shirt and she had blond hair tied neatly in a ponytail. She was just the right amount of fat for a mom.

Dea felt a sharp stab of jealousy.

Before the woman could say anything, a man’s voice called to her from inside and she turned and entered the house. Dea was relieved. She would have had nothing to say by way of greeting. Welcome to Fielding, pimple of Indiana. Watch out for roadkill.

“Think they got lost?” Gollum asked, adjusting her glasses. Everything Gollum owned was a hand-me-down or picked from the Salvation Army, and was either a little too big, too small, or just slightly out of fashion. Gollum, real name Eleanor Warrenby, had earned her nickname in third grade, when she’d made the mistake of wearing her older brother’s Lord of the Rings T-shirt to school too many days in a row. When she’d first explained this to Dea, Dea had been stupid enough to ask why she hadn’t just worn a different shirt. Gollum had looked at her like she was insane, squinting from behind her too-big glasses.

“Didn’t have any,” she’d said matter-of-factly, and Dea had been ashamed.

“Think we should tell them to run?” Dea said, and now it was Gollum who laughed, a honking laugh that belonged to a person way bigger than she was.

They’d reached Dea’s gate, which was crowded with climbing leaf and honeysuckle, so much of it the small bronze plaque nailed to the wood was almost completely concealed: HISTORICAL LANDMARK SOCIETY, BUILT 1885, RESTORED 1990.

“If you’re bored this weekend . . .” Gollum trailed off, like she always did, leaving the invitation unspoken: I’m right down the road. Gollum and Dea had been walking to and from the bus stop together since January, when Dea had moved to Fielding in the middle of sophomore year. They sat next to each other in class and ate together at lunch. But they’d never once hung out after school, and Dea hadn’t seen Gollum at all except in passing over the summer.

Dea’s fault. Dea’s problem.

And she could never, ever explain why.

“Bored? In Fielding?” Dea pretended to be shocked. “Never.” She didn’t want to have to make up an excuse, and Gollum never pushed her for one, which was one of the things she liked best about Gollum.

The Donahues’ house was the exact replica of a farm that had existed there over a hundred years ago. It was restored to look completely original—silo and all—even though not a splinter of the original house remained. For two decades, the house was a museum, but by the time Dea and her mom rented it, the place had been shuttered for a few years. Dea figured no one wanted to walk through a past that looked exactly like the present, and vice versa.

A simulacrum: that’s what it was called when something was made to resemble something else. Dea’s mother had taught her the word. Her mother loved simulacra of any kind: plastic sushi designed to look like the real thing, kettles concealed within the plaster model of a roosting chicken, clock faces that were actually cabinets.