As soon as it lets go, Archie pivots and lunges away. He manages to cover twenty feet in three steps before he loses his balance and falls. It takes him what feels like minutes to hit the ground. Even then he doesn’t get his hands out in time. He expects to hit vegetation, soft ground. So he’s surprised when his head smacks hard against something on the way down. He sees stars, but somehow manages to end up on his hands and knees in the dirt. He’s lost his mask. He’s no longer bathed in pink light, so he grapples with a hand for what he’s hit, both to figure out what it is and to hold on to something. The information comes to him in fragments. A dog-sized figure. Cast in concrete. Batlike wings. Tucked among the plants like a garden gnome. Archie can just make out its silhouette through the thickening haze: a gargoyle—hunched and waiting for meat.

Archie feels blood dripping down the side of his face. He clings to the wing of the statue, trying to stay upright, but the garden is rotating around him, the inertia pulling him away. He loses hold and sinks backward into the foliage.

He knows the symptoms of a concussion.

But the ringing in his ears is making it hard to think. He can feel his consciousness fading.

Susan. He has to remember. He says her name again and again as the blackness takes him, until her name stops making sense, until he can’t remember anymore where he was going or why.

The sky above him is like velvet.

Where was he going?

He can feel the plants under and around him, soft leaves and earth under his fingers. His eyes are closed. But he can still see an image. It’s like a photograph on the inside of his eyelids: the gargoyle lamps on either side of the stairs leading down to the boathouse. He can smell the lake.

That’s where he was going.

The boathouse.

He has to get down the stairs to the boathouse.

He doesn’t remember why.

Chapter 45

CHAPTER

45

Susan’s ear hurt. It had taken fourteen stitches to close the skin over the cartilage where Karim had sliced her with the knife. Now she’d never be an earring model. They hadn’t spared on bandages—the entire side of her head was enveloped in gauze and tape. Her left arm was in a sling. She looked like she’d just gotten back from World War I.

Susan ran a finger along the edge of the bandage on her head. The tape itched and she couldn’t really hear out of that ear.

Her mother said something.

“What?” Susan asked, turning to peer at Bliss, who sat in a hospital armchair, knitting with neon-pink yarn.

“Don’t pick at it,” Bliss said.