We're All Mad Here: The Violent and Dead, #2

By Shayna Krishnasamy

The next beautifully unsettling novel in Shayna Krishnasamy's haunting The Violent and Dead series...

 

It's been three years since the horrifying events at Claymore Manor school, and Anna Maron has moved on with her life. She attends university in Toronto and spends most of her time alone, avoiding the shadows. She's resolved to let sleeping ghosts lie.

 

Only some ghosts won't sleep.

 

Now her troubled cousin Lucia—newly released from a psych ward—has gone missing, and Anna is the only one who can find her. But to do so, Anna must let herself be drawn into the darkness of Lucia's life, and face the damage the "gift" they share has done—a journey that lies somewhere between horror and madness.

In this beautifully chilling second book of her contemporary gothic series, author Shayna Krishnasamy draws us back into the haunting world of two young women bound by blood and driven to the very edges of this world... and the one beyond.

 

Praise for Come When I Call You

 

"A disturbing story of obsession and jealousy"—For the Love of Books

 

"...so good you can't stop reading it"—The Overstuffed Bookshelf

 

"Krishnasamy's writing will draw you in as the characters come vividly to life, making it nearly impossible to put this book down"—DarkestwingsReads

• Language: English
• Publisher: Shayna Krishnasamy
• Release date: Jun 29, 2021
• ISBN: 9781775078340

Book preview

1

The fog was thick the night I decided to follow them. It was difficult at first to keep them in sight—I was trying to be stealthy, keeping far back and letting the crowd fill in the space between us, just in case he was to turn back, just in case he felt some niggling guilt—but once they turned off Bloor, the sidewalk emptying like somebody had yelled Fire!, it wasn’t really so hard, fog or not. There was nowhere for them to hide.

The air had been full of rain that wouldn’t fall all August long. It was the thing that summer, the thing to complain about among the hungry, cynical students who frequented the grocery and dollar and book stores I went to—not my friends exactly, but people my own age who wore multiple patterned scarves and brass jewelry and might be going to the University of Toronto like me, people I didn’t speak to, nor did I want to, but who populated my world nonetheless. Their plaintive sighs and howls of annoyance about how sweat beaded on your skin, even indoors; how well-ironed hair reverted to frizz in seconds; how humidity wasn’t the word. It didn’t even cover it—they flowed around and through me until later I would find myself shifting uncomfortably in my seat, unsettled without quite knowing why, until I reminded myself that I hadn’t spoken to any of them directly. I’d only overheard their sympathetic groans, their overlarge irritation. I hadn’t shared the shape of my sweat stains or let them lift my heavy hair from my neck. I had remained untouched.

It was a strange time, the whole city engulfed in a kind of fever. I wasn’t really myself, overcome by the empty end-of-summer days, all that time when I was meant to be studying but wasn’t, going around lightheaded, filled with the frantic feeling of a new school year coming and wanting to accomplish so much before it did, while steadily ignoring my summer courses, and all that fog rolling in every night, beckoning me out, creating a kind of paradise for those like me, who enjoyed anonymity, the comforting veil separating you from them.

The streets were murky and eerily lit in misty orange and white due to the traffic lights, and there was a rash of terrible car accidents, but it didn’t stop me from venturing out. I enjoyed walking the city streets, watching people materialize out of the fog ahead of me like apparitions—though they were not, I reminded myself repeatedly. They were not—knowing that we were all chiefly concerned with avoiding one another, the world a shadowy obstacle course all of a sudden, everyone’s head bowed, watching the feet of the one ahead, trying to be careful.

I had been walking around in a daze for nearly an hour when I spotted them coming out of one of those restaurants that clustered around the corner of Yonge and Dundas, those flashy chains with the non-threatening menus and garish, enormous frozen cocktails. At first, I thought I was seeing things—his head from the back had no real defining characteristics—until she exclaimed about something and they came up short, both turning to peer into a store window, the lighted display brightening their faces, and I felt something. Or close to something. Something enough to lift me out of my brain-dead wandering and push me to follow them like some urban creeper with a camera around her neck, the long range lens at the ready.

I would have recognized Tyler Galloway’s profile anywhere. He was my boyfriend after all.

As I watched him slip his hand under the hemline of the dress of the girl on his arm—I saw this sordid move in flashes of clarity through the fog, her bare legs suddenly visible, his hand moving higher and higher—I realized I’d felt this moment coming all week. As I’d doddled around my room, unable to get going, sweaty and restless and staring out the window for hours on end, there had been a sinking feeling, a something bad is coming kind of indigestion that I’d been steadily trying to ignore. And now, with this obvious confirmation, I wondered what other disaster was waiting for me right around the bend—because these things were never isolated. When my life imploded it did so in a cluster bomb of ruin. This much I’d learned. This much I knew better than anyone.

When they reached his building I hung back, watching from the bus shelter across the street—which was glass, of course, and wasn’t shielding me from view in the least, but when had Tyler ever looked in the direction of the bus shelter? Tyler didn’t take the bus. Tyler believed buses were for the destitute, drunks, and single mothers working as house cleaners. As if on cue, the mist dissipated and I was given a perfect view of their embrace at the door, a shot straight out of a romantic comedy, her hands gripping his arms as he bent her slightly backward, the way her dress clung to her ass provocatively as she followed him inside.

He held the door to the lobby open for her. He’d never held a door open for me in the five months we’d been together.

I stepped onto the street determinedly, almost ragefully—which was amusing considering what I was feeling was closer to curiosity than rage, a sort of waiting around feeling. The feeling you feel while the real feeling develops inside you, except there was no real feeling yet. I wondered what it would be once it came.

The fog was much thicker all of a sudden, as if it was trying to bar my way, like a mother’s warning—Anna, think about what you’re doing—an attempt to give me a chance to make a better choice.

But I hadn’t been making better choices for a very long time.

---

I found the key to Tyler’s apartment easily enough, taped to the back of the planter at the bend in the hallway, though he’d never told me where it was. It was such an obvious hiding place, clichéd even, and so perfectly Tyler to hide his spare key in the first place, as though he was living in a small town and he might tell his pal, coming by to watch the game on a Thursday night, Just let yourself in. The key’s under the mat. It was this attitude of Tyler’s that had interested me in him to begin with, this disassociation from the realities of the world, and his utter disbelief that crime could ever happen to somebody like him, though he was a law student and should have been far more familiar with the reality of the city’s nasty underbelly—oh how I wished I could be a fly on the wall when he had to defend his first real criminal, a nice drug dealer, or a smug rapist. The look on his face alone.

Tyler took things, and people, at face value—a trait I’d come to believe would have suited him much more to police work than the law, not that he would ever take such a hands-on type of job. Tyler believed, in that white, male, dare I say entitled, way of his father’s and his father’s father, that everything would work out for him. Tyler didn’t ask too many questions, and I didn’t give too many answers, and that’s what had worked so well about us. His oddly rosy view of the world had been the perfect wall for me to hide behind, and when I told him about my parents’ recent divorce—mostly amicable, though I’d played up a vindictive angle just for kicks—he’d reacted as though I’d just revealed that a branch of my family had been decimated by a raging flood, his voice lowered for days and sweetly thoughtful gifts doled out whenever I saw him. It never occurred to him that I might have worse tragedies to share, hidden scars. Nothing quite so shocking ever occurred to Tyler.

He would never have imagined that he didn’t really know his girlfriend at all.

Though, standing in his sparse living room, staring at his pile of multi-coloured video game controllers, and listening to the spirited moans of his anonymous playmate—when had he ever elicited a sound of that decibel, or even that enthusiasm, from me?—I began to wonder if perhaps I didn’t know him either.

His apartment was small and sparsely furnished, with an audacious view of the lake from its seventeenth-floor vantage point, but not much else to offer. He had a leather couch, a beaten-up coffee table he’d gotten from his brother—the one Tyler disdainfully referred to as the nice guy who was always being preyed upon by self-serving women—and, naturally, an enormous flat screen TV, but no other furniture besides the bed set. All of his textbooks, his pretentious vinyl jazz records, his file folders brought home from his summer internship at the firm, even his clothes, sat in sad piles along the walls, yearning for the bookcases and dresser drawers they would never find. There would be nothing to hide behind if either of them decided to pop out of the room for a post-coital drink of water, and the idea of being caught there—all peeping-Tom and wronged woman and desperate stalker rolled into one—gave me the kind of thrill I usually could only manage vicariously, a second hand story kind of excitement. I was so unused to taking action, to doing something rather than following the much easier downhill path of not doing—as I’d recently been not studying for the final exams of my summer classes, and not calling my mother, and not forcing myself to speak out loud at least once a day—that the moment took on a sheen of unreality. It helped that the screams from the other room had taken on an unnatural pitch, like the intermittent shriek of some exotic bird loose from the zoo, and that their clothes sat side by side in front of the gaping bedroom door in two identical puddles—as though they’d been scared right out of their duds like some pair of cartoon weasels, their eyeballs popping, their tongues hanging out of their mouths, though what on earth could have caused such fright, I would not consider.

This was all too ridiculous to be real. Too glaringly obvious. Too tragic movie of the week.

Which explained why, squinting through the doorway at the dual writhing bodies on the name brand duvet cover I’d found for seventy percent off, my silhouette clearly visible to either of them if they happened to look up—though infuriatingly, they did not—I didn’t feel hurried, or the tiniest bit embarrassed—even when she got on top and I could see her bare breasts quite clearly, how they were smaller than mine, and slightly misaligned, the left one drooping just enough to be noticeable. Instead I felt once again the naughty thrill of being where I shouldn’t, and nothing whatsoever of the much more typical anger, the throw-a-video-game-controller-at-you-and-your-lover fury Tyler certainly deserved. And so I stayed longer than I should have, watching to the point of boredom, until finally, as she tossed her thin blonde hair, I was able to identify her as Caitlyn Myers, a flighty girl who had stood up in an Intro to Film course I’d taken last semester and exclaimed, in tears, that she hated movies because they always seemed to be making fun of her (and when the teacher asked how, she cried out, her long bangs blowing away from her face with the force of her outrage, With their Obscurity and their Melancholia!, before fleeing the classroom altogether).

Caitlyn Myers, who Tyler and I had come to refer to as Miss Happy and Explicit. Caitlyn Myers who was so widely mocked by not only the film geeks but all manner of students that her notoriety nearly eclipsed that of the guy who’d slept with the Dean of Economics, who was in her sixties, for a coveted TA position and a free parking space. Caitlyn Myers who wore t-shirts patterned with little flowers. Caitlyn Fucking Myers?

Turning away from the doorway, I rubbed at my eyes with both hands—as if to rid myself of everything I’d seen in the last five minutes—then headed for the door I’d left hanging wide open, allowing Caitlyn’s throaty repetition of Tyler’s and the Lord’s names (separately and sometimes in combination) to float out into the hall. It was all a little bit of a letdown, though I knew I had only myself to blame. The scene I could have created—the screams and sheets clutched to chests and righteous accusations and tearful apologies—all of it had been entirely in my grasp and I’d let it go without the slightest fight, without so much as a shrug.

Looking around the darkened room, I recalled an argument Tyler and I had had the week before, a trivial, throwaway kind of fight brought on mainly by the heat and boredom—or perhaps, also, by the fact that one of us was screwing a freckled sociology major who dotted her i’s with hearts. The fight had been about Tyler’s car, a black four-door of middling status—Hyundai? Audi? Whatever—and the fact that he always talked to it as if they were having sex (e.g. She knows how she wants to be treated. Oh yeah, girl, that’s right. Give me what I want. Get me there hard and fast). Jealous? Tyler had scoffed as I rolled my eyes. Then later, in bed, he used some of the very same lines, as if this tragically unimaginative dirty talk was what I’d been waiting for all along. And I let him do it too, because it seemed to excite him so, because in his own misguided and mildly misogynistic way he was trying to please me.

I grabbed his car keys on the way out and didn’t close the door.

---

The fog met me out front like a lover. I found the car at the end of the street, parallel parked with irritating perfection, and pulled out into traffic without checking my blind spot, imagining with vicious satisfaction Tyler’s reaction if he’d been in the car with me—that taken aback horror, that passive aggressive intake of breath. I ground the gears on purpose and ate all the candy in the glove box, leaving the wrappers, sticky with toffee, all over his leather seats.

It was difficult to focus on a destination at first. I found myself driving in lazy circles and slowing down unexpectedly like a first-time john prowling for a good-time girl, or an insecure student driver. Then I turned onto Mount Pleasant, the car seeming to glide out from under me, taking pleasure in the long curving expanse of road. As though I’d suddenly nudged some food at the long dormant monster in my gut, I felt a sudden roaring of action in my blood, a violent urge to press my foot down on the pedal, to quite literally floor it, fog be damned.

I sped across the city, zipping around streetcars with the precision and urgency of an ambulance driver, the car vibrating beneath me as I pushed it to its limits, a look of great intensity on my face—which, when I saw it reflected back at me in the tinted window, caused me to flinch as though I saw some stranger there. But it was only me.

I drove all the way to the cemetery, circled it, and then took Yonge back down at a slower pace, like a ship that sets sail with great promise on an exploratory mission but returns with no tigers, no Chinese gold, no chests full of foreign spices. The city was stunningly empty for the hour, and for some reason it was this seeming desolation that unhinged me as I drove past the gaudy fast-food chains and cheque cashing places. The deserted streets sent me into an alarm bell state of panic, as though I’d missed the sirens and any second the bombs would begin to fall.

Without quite knowing how I’d gotten there, I eventually found myself looking up at the familiar staircase of the Gerstein library, having driven there by rote, like a robot with a homing beacon glowing in its chest, that push to return to the familiar. I parked crookedly, with one tire on the curb, and climbed the stairs.

The hall was quiet and dim, and as I crossed the floor my footsteps echoed. It was still a few minutes before closing, though it being summer and the weekend, the building already had the hollow, dusty feeling of an after-hours break-in. I headed straight for the third floor stacks, passing between the bookcases laden with old volumes, my fingers making tracks through the dust like gashes through skin. Already I felt calmer. Libraries were my refuge, my perfect hiding place. Within their walls my mind fell into a gentle rhythm, my thoughts became orderly, like playing cards shuffled into a neat deck. Even in recent weeks when my study hours had crumbled to nothing, and each time I stepped through the doors I felt the obligatory pinch of guilt, I still came anyway, listening to the scratch of pens on paper, the mumbling of Dewey decimal numbers as I walked the aisles, fingering the weathered spines. At times, I imagined that each old tome was a tombstone, the pages within bursting with the secrets of the dead. I liked the idea of being surrounded by row upon row of other people’s secrets, of enveloping myself in them.

There was safety in numbers.

My desk was in an alcove by a large window—it wasn’t really my desk but I still gave other students the evil eye when they sat there, even if I wasn’t there to study, like some obsessive cleaning lady who can’t stand the owners of the house using her perfectly stacked towels. Sitting down on the table, my legs dangling, I watched the fog pressing against the windowpane like a beggar trying to get in. I spread my fingers on the window, the glass cold beneath my palm, focusing my gaze at that space between my thumb and forefinger, but there was nothing to see but mist. All of a sudden, I felt quite silly for being there minutes before closing time, with no real aim but the calming of my own disordered fears, like a little girl clinging to her teddy bear and hiding in the closet on the first day of school. My roommate Heidi dealt with life this way, running off to Laos or Mykonos or Wichita to escape her overbearing parents, her dismal marks, her dying plants, and the mildly hostile girl who lived in the attic. And the last thing I wanted was to be like Heidi. Heidi cried when she smudged her nail polish before it dried.

I slid to my feet, then teetered dizzily and leaned against the window with my shoulder. I tried to remember when I’d last eaten but couldn’t—had it been the greasy cheese sandwich or the day-old pizza? Wait, what day of the week was it?—and it was as I pushed away from the window (glancing back as if I wanted to thank the stranger who had caught me) that I noticed, out of the corner of my eye, something reflected in the glass. Something moving.

I was still a little unsteady and my reaction time was slow. By the time I turned my head there was nothing to see but the carrel next to mine and the tables beside it, the snoozing bookcases filled with heavy, dusty texts, everything still and silent. The dull yellow lighting left ghastly shadows across the books and I tried to convince myself that this was what I’d seen, but it was no use. I felt uneasy sitting by myself in the half-dark now, my precious tranquility spoiled. Even the library couldn’t save me tonight.

As turned to go, I caught a glimpse of the movement again, with my own eyes this time and straight on. It was high above me to the right, at the top of the bookcase that held the thick astronomy texts. Standing very still in a staunch refusal of fear, I squinted up at the topmost shelves, my mind careening through the wildest possibilities of what might be up there: pigeons, mutant spiders, rampaging monkeys. I craned my neck and circled the bookcase. The space beyond the top shelf was utterly dark at both ends and in the middle, just below the ceiling light, I could clearly see there was nothing up there.

Still, a familiar feeling came over me as I stood between the bookcases in the semi-dark. It was as though something had been distilled into the air, a scent I could only just detect, repellant and yet intoxicating, like a blade dragging against my skin. I couldn’t budge from the spot, my limbs tightening, my eyes darting continually back to the top of the bookcase. I began to wish I hadn’t come to the library that night at all, that I’d stayed at Tyler’s apartment, curled on the couch listening to the sound of something like love. At least there I would have known who I was pretending to be—the jilted woman, the boring throwaway, the trusting dupe. Here, listening to the quiet minutes dripping by, I began to feel that I was losing some essential part of myself.

I realized the feeling that had come over me was expectation.

The library was as quiet as the dead. Glancing down the aisle toward the freedom of the walkway and the stairs beyond, I had the impression that the darkness was closing in. I began to drift toward the end of the aisle with wobbly steps, like a sleepwalker or a careful drunk, the fear I’d been keeping so fiercely at bay seeping out of my pores at last.

Once I reached the end and faced out at the rows of empty tables, I felt a moderate relief, as though I’d just clambered to safety, emerging unharmed from a collapsed mine or a sinkhole, my refusal to look back taken as a sign or bravery instead of what it really was—absolute terror. I kept walking, one step and then another, each one its own negation of what I’d seen, each footstep a no, no, no, no.

As I came to the last table my hand strayed over a book lying open and I paused, reading the title at the top of the page. It was a habit that used to exasperate my mother, forever turning back to find me lingering by the used book rack or the bookcase at a dinner party, always making her late—Not every book is worth reading, darling. One day you’ll get pulled into the wrong book and I’ll have my revenge!

I read the title at the top of the page once, then twice, then a third time, my eyes moving from left to right like a struggling grade-schooler, sounding out the letters. The volume itself was painfully familiar, its cover a faded brown. Without turning it over I could picture the title printed across the front in dark lettering.

THE CRUCIBLE

At Claymore Manor, the boarding school I’d briefly attended, my roommate Penelope had won the role of Abigail one semester and we’d rehearsed her lines together for hours, passing the book back and forth, until it was tattered from all the yanking and Penelope’s tendency to crumple the pages when she got a line wrong. She’d even thrown it at me once. I remembered fingering the fading bruise in my hairline when I’d returned the book to the library, late, after Penelope died.

Idly, I flipped the book open and it landed easily on a much-read page, where one line was underlined in red, three times.

MARY WARREN: I never saw no spirits.

I stared at the words, a sinking feeling in my gut. Lucia, my cousin who had visited me at the Manor that fateful Christmas, had never called them spirits. But whatever you called them, she did see them, as did I, though I hadn’t in so long, had not spoken to a soul about it in so long, that even to think of it turned my stomach. Lucia saw the dead, and they followed her as they never did me, they tortured her as they never did me, and it was the dead and Lucia’s constant fight with them that had caused her to push Penelope out of an attic window, though why all this was coming to me now, I couldn’t say. I could only flip through the pages of the book, searching for more underlined passages, listening to my own breathing in my ears as it came shorter and faster, like the sound of a man who’s just realized the water is rising and he will soon drown. When I lifted my palm from the table it left an imprint dripping with wet.

And then, another marked passage.

ELIZABETH: She wants me dead. I knew all week it would come to this!

Just a threat in a book, nothing to do with me. Nothing at all, except why this book, why these passages, why this moment with the dark creeping at my back and that feeling I’d been shoving off that something bad was coming? Maybe the bad wasn’t Tyler and Caitlyn after all. Maybe it was still coming.

All composure dropped, openly panting like