“Wait,” I murmured, a sudden cold sweat breaking out across my neck. “If Dad kept you locked up somewhere else for seven years, and you just escaped two weeks ago… how is your trophy here? All of your things are still locked in your bedroom at home. I look at them every day.”
My sister stood up slowly, the blanket slipping from her shoulders. Her crying had stopped. The terrified trembling in her voice vanished, replaced by a strange, hollow flatness.
“Oh,” she said quietly. “He must have brought that here recently.”
I turned around to look at her. Really look at her.
In the dim, bouncing light of the phone, I noticed the way she stood. My sister had walked with a slight, permanent limp ever since a childhood soccer injury. This woman stood perfectly straight. Her voice was identical, yes. Her face looked just like an older, gaunt version of the teenager in the photograph. But something in the syntax of her speech, the rhythm of her breath, felt entirely off.
“Who are you?” I whispered, my heart stopping for the second time that night. I backed away, my spine hitting the cold dirt wall of the cellar.
The woman smiled. It was a sad, pitying smile.
“I told you on the phone,” she said, her voice dropping an octave, losing the frantic edge entirely. “If he arrived before you… you would never know who really died at that funeral.”
From the opening above the ladder, the sound of heavy, slow footsteps echoed across the floorboards of the cabin.
A shadow blocked out the faint light from the trapdoor. A pair of heavy, mud-stained boots appeared on the top rung of the ladder.
My father began his descent into the cellar.
