It Will Just Be Us

IT WILL JUST BE US

A Novel

Jo Kaplan

To Jackson and Penny for being a far cry from evil

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This novel wouldn’t be what it is without the friends and family who hold up this madhouse. My deepest appreciation to my mom and dad for having endlessly and unquestioningly supported my dream of being a writer ever since I was a weird kid writing creepy stories. Your support means more than you know.

I also want to thank my sister Mal for always being so enthusiastic about my work, even though horror isn’t her thing, and making sure I’m a part of my niece’s and nephew’s lives even from two thousand miles away. You and Marc are such great parents—don’t worry, your kids will never turn out like the one in this book.

Publishing this book, and life in general, wouldn’t be nearly as sweet without Jake, who loves me and gets me like no one else. Thanks for keeping me sane, for being a sounding board, for listening to me babble about writing, for making me laugh, for indulging in conversations consisting almost entirely of quotes from movies and TV shows, for always finishing each other’s sandwiches, and for marrying me.

This book would not have made it this far without those who did the work to actually put it in front of your eyeballs. So many thanks to my agent, Jill Marr, who is an amazing advocate. I am deeply grateful to my editor, Chelsey Emmelhainz, who knew exactly what this story needed and helped make it so much better. And thanks also to the rest of the folks at Crooked Lane!

PART ONE

THE PARABLE OF THE KNOCKER

1

In Wakefield Manor, a decaying ancestral mansion brooding on the edge of the Great Dismal Swamp in Virginia, there is a locked room. For years it has been inaccessible, closing out from the world all the aborted secrets stilled in its dormant womb. After climbing the main staircase that curves up through the house like a twisted spine, you’ll find a hallway with striped and long-faded viridian wallpaper that evokes algae-choked seafoam. On the third floor you’ll pass a linen closet, a disused nursery, a bathroom with a cracked clawfoot tub, and a wood-beamed room inhabited by broken furniture draped in white sheets. Then the hall narrows and turns a corner, its high ceiling webbed in shadow, and you are faced with a windowless passage, at the end of which lies the heavy door of distressed mahogany—and whatever lies beyond it.

What I have imagined must live in this locked room, if anything can indeed be said to live there at all, are the agonies of ghostly lives playing out on a dusty stage, the callous whispers of betrayal and the succor of revenge; creatures ineffable and unfamiliar as a lamprey must be to an amoeba, not merely vast but vastly alien, having come from either the distant past or the impenetrable future; or otherwise a black hole that invites the earth to leap inside to its death. These wonders have occupied me with indelible curiosity and, I will admit, a long-standing dread of the end of the third-floor hallway.