Chapter 23 - The Shadow with My Eyes
A tall, painfully thin figure stepped out of the darkness of the service tunnel.
She wore a moth-eaten woolen coat that had belonged to our father thirty years ago. Her head was partially wrapped in linen bandages, but where the skin showed, it was scarred by botched childhood surgical attempts to correct a severe craniofacial deformity. Yet her eyes—piercing, crystalline hazel—were identical to mine.
She held an old 1911 military pistol in her right hand. In her left, she held a battered Polaroid camera.
"You look so healthy," Evelyn whispered, her voice a strange mix of childlike longing and terrifying predatory rage. "The sun was good to you, David."
"Evelyn... put the gun down," I said softly, my hands trembling as I kept my weapon trained on her torso. "We can help you. There are doctors. You don't have to live in the dark anymore. The mansion is gone. Our mother is dead. There’s nobody left to hide you."
A dry, horrifying laugh rattled in her chest. "Doctors? I spent thirty years with our mother’s doctors carving into my jaw, trying to make me look like a proper Hartwell daughter! They didn't want to fix me. They wanted to erase me."
She took a step forward. The halogen lantern cast our long, distorted shadows across the subway tiles behind us. For a fleeting second, our silhouettes looked like two halves of a single, broken person.
"I don't want the sun, David," she said, her voice dropping to a deathly calm. "I don't belong up there. But Noah does. Noah has our mother’s hands. He has your eyes. And he has Elena’s voice."
My heart stopped. "What did you say?"
"You left them at the bed-and-breakfast in Oakridge, didn't you?" Evelyn tilted her head, a grotesque smile pulling at the stitched corner of her lips. "Room 14. The corner room with the balcony facing the orchard."
She reached into her coat pocket and tossed a small object across the concrete floor.
May you like
It tumbled through the puddle of water and stopped against the toe of my boot.
It was Elena’s wedding ring. The gold band we had bought together after the cellar door was opened ten years ago.
