I turned away from the window and scanned the rest of Mother’s bedroom. There was nothing unusual at all about the room. The carpet was brown. The bedside table held nothing but a small lamp and a book: Rosemary’s Baby. No pictures hung from the walls. A second wardrobe stood to my right, the door ajar just a touch, as if it was too full to close properly.

Aware that I had wasted precious time, I walked straight over to the wardrobe and pulled open both doors.

For a second, I thought my mind was playing tricks on me. But as I continued to stare at the frightening display lining the shelves, my heartbeat quickened and my mouth grew dry.

The wardrobe was full of dolls. Every shelf was lined with them – some naked, some clothed. From the clothes rail hung more dolls. Every single one was tied to the metal pole by her hair.

They dangled there lifelessly. There must have been at least twenty crammed in there. Though every doll was different, they all had one thing in common: every single one had a photograph taped over its face – a photograph of a young woman whose eyes had been coloured in with red ink. Some photographs had been coloured in so forcefully that holes had punctured the paper revealing the dead, beady doll eyes that lay beneath. I recognized the dolls from the photographs I’d found in the attic. These dolls had been on the bed with Mother’s sister, Olivia.

The air was punched out of me. I was suffocating. I couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t hear. Couldn’t think.

My knees buckled and I fell to my hands and knees. I began to moan. Tears splatted onto the backs of my hands and I gazed at them unseeingly. My teeth found my lip and bit. Hard. Too hard. Blood came and with it the terrible, tearing truth: she was a crazy, mad woman. She had been lying about everything. I did not know her at all.

Chapter 15

I thought back to my earliest memory. It was of Mother and me making a cake together when I was four. I remembered us pretending to be witches and using our wooden spoons as wands and pretending the bowl was a cauldron and the flour and eggs and butter and sugar were lizards’ tongues and bats’ wings. I remembered her smiling, me giggling, us being happy and playing together like a real mother and daughter.

But it had all been a lie.

An immense wave of sorrow rolled through me and I curled up on my side on the bed and hugged my knees to my chest.

For a long time, I lay there, head spinning. I tried to make sense of everything, but there was no sense to be made. Sense was a thing of the past. The present overflowed with chaos and madness.