The Hazel Wood (The Hazel Wood #1)(16)
“Then the door of the shop slams open and this boy runs in. Eight or nine years old, pretty small. I grab up the book just in case, not actually thinking the kid would take it, or has any idea what it is. But the little shit ran up, sprayed something in my eyes—not mace, but like a cleaning product—and grabbed the book. I was so surprised I didn’t keep a good grip on it. I ran after him, but it was too late. He got into a cab that was waiting and beat it.”
I goggled at him. “Bullshit.”
“Sadly, no.”
“Why would he want that particular book? Why would a little kid even be in a rare bookstore?”
“I’m guessing someone paid him to steal it. For a while I wondered if my friend at the bookstore planned it, but he’s a friend—that felt too paranoid. So then I thought someone might’ve been tracking our emails about it. Maybe specifically tracking emails that mention Tales from the Hinterland.”
“So that’s less paranoid?”
“Good point. In my defense, I don’t really believe that. It’s just … that book. Plenty of books are out of print, but you can still find them. Tales from the Hinterland should be all over libraries, rare book rooms, eBay, but it’s not. Either someone’s been hoarding copies, or…” He shrugged meaningfully. “Or something else. You can’t even find scans of the stories online.”
He was right. There should have been more—someone should have typed the stories up, scanned them, made fan art. But there was nothing like that.
Almost nothing. I was fourteen when I found a piece of the book online, a scrap of story.
We were living in Iowa City, and my interest in Althea was my biggest secret, my only secret. Four years spent checking used bookstore shelves and searching out traces of her online, four years disdaining the books Ella tried to get me to read in favor of devouring fairy tales. The classic pantheon first, then broader. Weirder, darker. Tales from around the world. Always wondering how close they took me to Althea.
But it was in Iowa that my secret pitched over into betrayal: in Iowa I started communicating with Althea’s fans.
Fans was a word Ella spat out like a cherry pit. And it made sense: the ones I had met—my sixth-grade English teacher, the batshit grad student who accosted us at a Fairway during our first stint in New York, the biographer who tracked Ella down and tried to get to her through me, the worst possible move he could’ve made—were cartoons, nutjobs with bad breath and no lives of their own.
It was different online. There I met fans who felt like me: people who’d read the book and loved it, or who couldn’t find it but got hooked on Althea anyway. The idea of her, like a comet’s tail glimpsed just before it’s gone. I’d stay up getting dry-eyed and hungry, lost deep inside an internet rabbit hole, while Ella worked at a bar on the ped mall. She’d come home each night smelling of cheap beer and lighter fluid, and I’d slap her laptop shut, faking boredom.
She believed me, because we didn’t lie to each other. Except when we did.
My memories of Iowa are as flat as the state. A gray spring, frat houses, bright pieces of girlness discarded in gutters—glittery slip-ons, headbands, once a pair of pink terry shorts. But one night stood out, because it was the night I jumped from message board to message board, blog to blog, finally landing on a DeviantArt page featuring excerpts of Althea’s stories, painted like illuminated Bible pages.
I’d run my fingers over their pixels. They were beautiful, and more of her writing than I’d seen in one place since that day in the attic. My heart beat sideways as I clicked to enlarge a long page of “The Sea Cellar.”
I started to read. I was tipsy, a little, on nasty apple wine Ella’s then-boyfriend had made in his backyard press. It was sad and scuzzy being drunk alone, and the story felt like companionship—like reaching out to Althea for the thousandth time, and finally feeling her reach back.
The story opened on a young bride traveling a long way to her new husband’s house, and arriving to find it all lit up, but empty. I’d read a few paragraphs—the bride, the journey, the opulent, lonely house—when the light of my laptop cam switched on.
I’d stared at its apple-green eye for two hot beats, then slammed the laptop shut.
The house was silent; a frail string of tinnitus sang a warning in my ear. I’d looked at the blanks of the windows, felt eyes on my neck and sandy fear pinning me in place.
I cracked the laptop just enough to stick my thumb over the camera, then opened it the rest of the way. The green light was off, the browser was closed, and my internet history was wiped clean. I darted to the kitchen to grab a piece of black tape to stick over the camera, drew all the curtains, and lay in bed with the lights on, waiting for Ella to come home.
By then I was old enough to know Althea wasn’t really watching me. But that was when I started to wonder if someone else was.
Ella didn’t ask about the black tape, but a week later I fell asleep in front of an open thread about Althea’s use of numerology, and woke to Ella’s intake of breath, her smoky black hair in my face as she leaned over me to slam the laptop shut with her fist.
“What. The fuck. Alice.”
Ella didn’t talk that way to me. She talked that way to drunk freshmen trying to get served at her bar, and boyfriends who got shitty when she told them we were gone. Landlords with a knack for stopping by too often, and always when one or the other of us was in a towel.