She Never Left Read online

  She Never Left

  CM Harris

  One More Chapter

  a division of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

  1 London Bridge Street

  London SE1 9GF

  www.harpercollins.co.uk

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  First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2021

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  Copyright © CM Harris 2021

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  Cover design by Lucy Bennett © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2021

  Cover photographs: Shutterstock.com

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  CM Harris asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

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  A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library

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  This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

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  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

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  Source ISBN: 9780008472849

  Ebook Edition © November 2021 ISBN: 9780008472832

  Version: 2021-08-25

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Acknowledgments

  Thank you for reading…

  About the Author

  One More Chapter...

  About the Publisher

  For the Elim Girls

  (whether you want it or not)

  I am out with lanterns, looking for myself.

  — Emily Dickinson

  Chapter One

  Ketchum, Illinois

  Two Decades Ago

  The girl waved goodbye to her friends and pointed the ten-speed toward the center of The Thicket. Girdled by fog, the forest appeared to levitate before her. Warm air closed in, bringing with it the sweet scent of pine sap. The girl grinned wide with the strangest notion, a complete satisfaction for once, and sensed there would never be another night like this one.

  She was right.

  The Thicket opened to her like the gullet of a whale, the hard-packed dirt its depressed tongue. As the bike’s narrow tires stuttered in and out of rain ruts and across exposed tree roots, she remotely questioned the logic of this short cut. She’d been showing off for the other kids. Oh, I’m not afraid of the dark. But now the moon had disappeared and the only light in the woods gleamed from an amber pinpoint halfway in.

  Branches clawed at her as she sped past them. The faster she rode, the more the distant limbs vibrated and smudged as if motioning for her to come further. She plowed through a spider web and its strands clung to the hairs of her arms and eyelashes. She let out a screech and flicked something meaty from her shoulder. But she was doing it, really doing it! In fact, she could even close her eyes and stay on the trail without veering off. She cackled at her newfound ability.

  The Thicket laughed back. A coyote, she reckoned.

  When she opened her eyes again, the amber light was gone. Out. Disappeared. Relocated. Definitely not where it had been before.

  The bike’s momentum halted in an instant as her front tire struck something hard and simply refused to roll over it. The girl’s butt lifted from the saddle. She sailed through branches—the black of the woods, the deep velvet blue of the sky, the black of the woods again—all of it a sickening spin until she landed with a thud on her face and chest.

  Eat dirt.

  Um, yeah, she got the meaning of it now. Gritty clay stuck to her teeth, thick as peanut butter. The girl spat it out and kept spitting until saliva ran down her chin. She rolled woozily back onto a bed of pine needles, blood dripping from her stinging knees and palms, shorts torn at the inseam from one hell of a cartwheel. Nearby, her bike lay tangled in tree limbs, the front wheel spinning off-kilter. The ground tilted. She pulled herself up on stinging palms, leaned back on a rotten stump to get her bearings, then wiped her chin with the back of her hand.

  She looked around for the amber light to orient herself.

  It was still out, still gone.

  Around her, the crooked forest faintly glowed with that gooey fungus she and the other kids had smeared on their skin so they could see each other in the near dark. Foxfire, one of the boys called it. Its pale-green slime still striped her forearms.

  A high-pitched buzz rang in her ear. The whir of the county road faded. The scent of licorice grew stronger than when the kids first discovered the cache of fungus. It sickened her now. Do you get nauseous with a concussion? She needed to rest a moment, come to her senses; then she could push her busted bike home. Crap, she was going to be in so much trouble for being out this late—her driver’s permit revoked, maybe even her allowance cut.

  She shivered in the gathering fog. At least it cleared her mind a bit.

  The dewy grass by her legs fluttered; something small and slight wound through the blades. She squinted. A colony of ants on the move? Difficult to tell by the faint glowing light. She craned her neck back and the tops of the conifer trees spun. Stars had come out, but they blurred into stripes.

  All around, the splotches of fungus pulsed.

  She shuddered and considered calling out for her friends, running back to them before they rode too far away. Just forget the shortcut, leave the bike, suffer the consequences with Mom and Dad. She tried to push up from the ground, but her brain sloshed in her skull with the effort and she slumped back. Hopefully, the ants wouldn’t bite her; hopefully, they would march around this giant blocking their path.

  She rubbed her eyes and blinked.

  That’s no ant colony.

  Her lips parted as a small black tendril tapped at the skin of her thigh. She thought of a tiny fairy in an old fable with arms like burnt matchsticks, knocking at a neighbor’s toadstool. Her skin tingled with a slight electric current. The buzz in one ear rolled into the other, rumbling and pinging as if she were underwater.

  The forest clarified, growing brighter. The effect was like switching on her brother’s night-vision goggles. But instead of a green cast, everything glowed amber. Rabbits huddled where shadows used to be. A deer stood rapt between trees, its antlers crosshatching the limbs for camouflage. Down the path she’d just ridden, a fox loped off toward the bean fields. As a leering white opossum waddled past, three babies on its back, the soft crunch of leaves and pine needles tickled her eardrums. r />
  The tendril advanced. It climbed her bare leg, winding around it three times, and found the deep scrape on her knee. She drew in a great gasp of air, but as pale webbing bubbled up across the wound, the scream died in her throat. She’d forgotten how. Not an hour before, she had played an epic game of Ghost in the Graveyard and savored the terror of the chase, her squeals ripping through the air. But now her jaw hung mute, eyes watering from the refusal to blink. Her torn skin stopped stinging. The once oozing blood rapidly dried from bright to dark, then cracked and crumbled away. Her kneecap faded to a chalky hue. Her eyes grew wider, dry mouth gulping in fascination. She sat up straight. The webbing had repaired her.

  More tendrils came scouting, more than she could watch all at once. In their wake, foamy pale webs knit across her limbs. She lifted her hands for a moment, but they dropped back to the dirt as if ten times their weight. The tendrils fastened them to exposed tree roots for safekeeping.

  Far off in the woods, something moved through the trees, something glowing higher and brighter than the fungus. It floated toward her with the bobbing weightlessness and transparency of a sea creature. True fear finally hit with an electric shock through her spine, brief and all-confirming. The tendrils wrapped tighter. She fell limp—a rabbit resigned.

  And then she saw the boy. He stood stiffly, watching her and the growing webwork, the whites of his eyes wide and bright with fascination. It was the kid from her class, the weird one no one hung out with. If she could think of his name, she would call out to him, but she couldn’t place it. She’d known him since kindergarten! She tried to call up the rest of her friends’ names but could not. She wasn’t even sure of her own name anymore.

  It didn’t matter.

  She shook her head and it lolled on her shoulders. The webs dried her tears and knit her eyes shut. The tendrils found her ears, her nostrils. She let out a wry little huff, bundled there like a mummy.

  There is no point in mourning, child. This is what you wished for, after all.

  The girl burst into laughter and didn’t stop laughing until the tendrils entered her throat.

  Soon after, the foxfire burned out and the amber pinpoint deep in the woods lit up once more. And the boy who had watched backed slowly out of The Thicket until he felt safe enough to take his eyes off the woods and sprint for home.

  As for the deer, the bugs, and coyotes, they all returned to the task of staying alive another night.

  Chapter Two

  Chicago

  Last Spring

  I stood in a trance on the Blue Line platform, waiting for the train that would drag me away from my horror show of a presentation. Hot wind from the tunnel bellowed a sour breeze of urine and ketchup across my sweating skin, like the breath of an oncoming dragon, its belly full of passengers. Down the east end of the tunnel: darkness. And from the west: light from the street above flickering on the rails. There gleamed freedom in that light, freedom beyond this trapdoor I’d fashioned for myself. I am a child of the woods and I don’t belong here, though I keep trying to deny it.

  I yearned to close my eyes but didn’t trust the crowd. Just a week before, a man had pushed another onto the tracks, and a passing train brutally ground him into a bloody twist and decapitated him at the archway. I yearned to close my eyes, but I didn’t trust my memories.

  Standing next to an iron beam, one of many that must carry the weight of this city, a street musician strummed her acoustic and crooned Carly Simon’s “Nobody Does It Better”. Passersby threw coins and dollars into her open guitar case, which was all red velour inside. If my train hadn’t just hissed up, I would have gladly paid her ten dollars to stop echoing it throughout this subterranean passageway.

  My phone buzzed. I nudged my way onto the train, grabbed a handle, and checked the texts from my boss:

  DAVID: Sorry I had to come down so hard, kiddo.

  (No, he wasn’t.)

  JANE: I understand.

  * * *

  DAVID: I have faith in you.

  (No, he didn’t.)

  JANE: I know.

  Someday, when I rewind this shattering year for the entertainment of my fellow patients, I will leave out the alternate routes I could have taken on this exact day. Whether for expediency or self-preservation, I won’t be sure, but only the FBI and the DNR will know of my many blunders and where I might have put a stop to it all.

  My first mistake was not walking out of that meeting at Stuben Fisher Literary before promising the world. I wasn’t fit to present a damn thing that afternoon. The morning had already started with a nightmare about my stalker. And true to form, his latest email had arrived with an annoying buzz during the sketchiest pitch of my career. Harrying me in my dreams was bad enough; my inbox unconscionable. I didn’t think I could hate Lincoln Metzger any more at that moment. Stupid me.

  While my boss, David Stuben, and the rest of the staff had sat around the conference table reading my client’s sample pages, I’d shot a glance at my phone notifications.

  That was my second mistake.

  Good morning, my love. Sleep well?

  — Lincoln

  A pinch between my eyes; something rotten ascending my throat. More than my breakfast bowl not sitting right. Fear gone bad; fear congealed to resentment.

  If you make me angry enough, I’ll fight back. Make me angry enough and I’ll have my cousin murder you in her next novel.

  My phone buzzed again.

  Ignore it.

  David interrupted the reverberating silence. “That’s all we get?”

  I jerked, sweat gathering on my upper lip. “What? Oh, yes, for now.” At this rate, I’d soak my favorite silk blouse by the end of the meeting. I sat there woodenly, fighting the urge to raise my arms.

  “Three pages, Jane? Really?” He spun the papers across the conference room table. The other agents and interns shrank from them as if I’d laced the pages with anthrax. “That got TJ Render an advance?”

  “Actually, no. We got an advance for the synopsis.”

  David closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose between his fingers. His voice grew low and measured. “Where is the stalker you promised?”

  I sneered at my phone. “Oh, he’s coming, believe me—”

  “And what’s with the fungus?” He walked across the broad lofted room, old floorboards creaking, to the whiteboard hanging from exposed brick.

  “Um, well, magic mushrooms feature prominently”—I wiped my lip—“in the story.” I knew how it sounded and tried not to cringe. More heat rose in my cheeks.

  David uncapped a marker and scrawled The Thicket in orange, next to the other client projects. The abrupt squeak of the wet felt, the chemical smell, that color—God, that color—twisted a new knot in my gut. A few of my cohorts flickered smiles of support. The intern responded to tweets on his phone.

  Rarely did we all gather like this, in the rehabbed wing of a 1920s warehouse just off Lumber Street. Most of the agents worked from home now, save for David, me, and the occasional intern. But I hadn’t left my shabby small town for the big city only to work out of a stuffy apartment when I could overlook the rippling jade of the Chicago River. Still, the eyes of the other agents asked: I changed out of my pajamas for this?

  I’d soon understand that David had meant this get-together to be a celebration of sorts, and we had thrown him off his narrative. TJ and I excel at that.

  David capped the marker. He ran a hand through his cropped gray hair and crossed his arms. “And she’s going on vacation with an advance hanging out there.”

  “No! It’s … for research. And reconnaissance.”

  He blinked with a condescending pity that sunk me. Kind of like the look my ex-boyfriend used to flick in my direction when he realized I sucked at finance, just like he thought a girl should.

  The others sipped their coffees and teas, and jotted fake notes.

  “Jane, you need more from this client. TJ’s got to go deeper or, well, I don’t think we can keep
her on. She’s too niche.”

  “Trust me,” I said, nodding at the pages, “this is deep for her. She knew that girl.”

  We both knew that girl. And I hadn’t thought about her in years. Until this morning.

  David raised an eyebrow at the desperate gleam in my eye. The others traded cloudy glances. They’d never seen me this shaken.

  I raised my hands, risking armpit exposure. “We are going deep. I promise.” I hoped.

  TJ would kill me. Her bloody heart lay in those pages, torn from her chest. And here I had stolen it, tossed it on the poker table like a stack of chips. But dammit, TJ owed me. She owed both of us. She’d been M.I.A. for two damn weeks. What did she expect me to do?

  Allergic to stress, I wrung my itching fingers. “David, it’s her thriller about where we grew up. This is the one.” I could picture TJ’s face: a soft hurt blooming into fury. She didn’t know I’d scoured her laptop that morning for something—anything—to bring here today. Heck, I would write the whole manuscript for her if I had to. All she would need to do was slap her name on it, once she got over her outrage.