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“I’m not sure of anything!” Thomas shouts, shooting up to his feet. “But urban legends and bedtime stories? I can’t be the only one who thinks this all sounds fucking delusional.” He looks down at his sister, Ashley, and Jackson, searching their eyes for the same divining rod of rationale that’s currently the only thing holding him up.

Jackson rises to his feet too, leaning in close. “It sounds crazy,” he confirms. “It makes no sense at all, but it doesn’t change what we both saw happen in the parking lot.” He leans back, sighing deeply. “There’s no logic for what’s going on here. So listening to what they might know? Well, it’s pretty much all we’ve got right now.”

He holds Thomas’s gaze for a moment longer before the shrill tap of knocking sounds at the front door again. There’s a hitch of breath between them all as they startle, though no one utters a word as they look toward the entrance; even Winnie sits quietly with her ears tucked down.

The knocking goes on longer this time, stretching out until it feels like they have all fallen into a hypnotic limbo. When the banging finally stops, the silence feels violent, and Thomas wonders if the others are also holding their breath.

Another minute passes before Jackson drops back into a seated position on the ground, where Winnie rests her head in his lap. His chest rises and falls swiftly as he leans his head back against a shelf that’s home to a variety of oatmeal and grits.

“How do we stop it?” Jackson asks, his voice just above a whisper. “Bullets don’t work, but there has to be something that does, right? Everything has to be able to die.”

Jim casts a look over his shoulder before leaning in closer. “Billy started hanging iron up around his porch. It seemed to keep any unwanted visitors from coming too close.”

“Hold on a minute,” Ashley says, her eyebrows furrowed and nose stuffy. “Whatever is knocking on the door—we’re all agreeing here that it’s a real monster out there?”

Kimi’s intense eyes seem to pin the question in place. “What else could it be?” she says.

Thomas recalls that awful screech and feels the hairs on his arms turn upward as he pictures the talons piercing through Evan’s torso like the man was made of room temperature butter.

But he realizes it now, what made him feel the most unnerved; despite it being hard to see clearly in the darkness, he could tell the creature had a humanoid fashion to it. The look was there in the shape of its face and bony limbs while it stood on two legs. In it, he saw what someone might think their own personal demon could look like, with every sin staring back hungrily.

A monster.

Jim glares back at them, wiping his shirtsleeve across the gun’s barrel. “Not that I’ve been saying it from the jump or nothing.”

The silence pierces between them again, poking holes through their flimsy bubble of disbelief. Thomas tries to recall the stories he was told as a child at bedtime—the grand, epic ones where his father always made Thomas the winning hero against any monster or foe that dared to face him. Now they all simply blur together into the image of glow-in-the-dark stars on the ceiling and the feeling of his favorite blue blanket, which at some point stopped being with him.

“But how does it—how could it look like us?” Ashley asks, voice catching as she rubs again at her puffy face. “How could it look like Evan?”

“Or like Grace,” Jim adds.

Kimi stares back at them both, opening and closing her mouth a few times as she shrugs in near desperation. “I don’t know how, okay? I just know what it is. It’s pure darkness,” she says, and for the first time since the cashier started spouting her magic story, Thomas feels a true chill course through him.

“That thing out there—it can know us,” she says. “It can know us to our very core, and once it gets even a drop of your blood, your existence is no longer your own. It belongs to the Mimic too.” She pauses, and Thomas notices then just how badly her hands are shaking.

He tries rubbing a hand down his own good arm where the chills have spread outward, leaving him wishing for something like Evan’s stupid puffer vest to wrap tightly around himself.

“Kimi, you said it catches the scent of people,” says Jackson, and next to him Winnie nudges closer. “Well, what does it smell? What the hell brings that thing out from the mountain?”

Kimi tucks her knees in close, dropping her chin atop them. For a few seconds she only stares at her shoes, a pair of beat-up black Converse with little hand-drawn scribbles on them. When she draws her eyes up to glance around at each of them, Thomas finds himself holding his breath.

“There’s really only one thing that draws out the Mimic. Only one reason it would come here tonight,” she says, and this time she doesn’t look away. “It’s found a guilty heart to take its place.”

Nine

how delicious her pain was

The memories from the night of the accident attack Jane in quick, exacting flashes, sharp as shards of glass where they land along her body. She recalls the warmth in her blood from all the whiskey and the cling of sweaty satin fabric against her thighs—remembers the stench of mildew and testosterone filling up her nose in sickening bouts. Then there was a dizzied blurriness before the entire world slipped into a gnawing black filled with too much blood and Thomas’s screams.

She blinks hard, swallowing again and again to push down the bile rising up in her throat. The air feels as though it has dropped several degrees, casting goose bumps across her arms as Kimi’s words hang in the air over their heads, a proclamation and a guillotine.

“Rattle, rattle in the dark,” Jim mutters, brushing his thinning hair back before adjusting his hat. “You remember that, Kimi? You and Grace used to sing that little song about the Mimic while jumping rope way back when.”

Kimi nods once with glazed, distant eyes, and Jane can practically see the wild toss of braids and skinned knees take shape in them.

“It was just an old rhyme all the kids used to say while playing in the woods. ‘The mountain’s bones seek out a heart,’ ” Kimi continues, as if explaining the sentiments of a folklore monster further might smooth some of the creases between brows facing back at her.

The churning in Jane’s stomach is a hurricane now, and when she dares a look at Thomas, it only causes the waves to thrash around harder.