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The world had been quiet for Ruby, once upon a time.
Isn’t that how all stories begin?
She’d opened her eyes and looked around at her family, and they seemed like tiny figurines all lined up in a perfect row. Her father, the professor, who spoke languages she’d never even heard of. Her mother, the homemaker, who seemed to be forever cooking.
And little Annie, the one whose eyes were always wide with glee whenever Ruby would come home from Girl Scouts or school, always running to give her a big hug.
Their names even sounded the same – Rube-y, Ann-ey, the sing-song way they would say it to each other.
Perfect. The picture perfect family who had everything, even a little cabin up in the woods that they liked to call their “summer home” so that they sounded fancy.
Of course, they had never quite fit in when they’d gone to school. Annie had been too bookish, too smart – girls weren’t supposed to be smart.
And Ruby, she had just been too… odd.
Her art teacher had called Professor Knowby with concern after finding Ruby sitting in the back of class, eyes shut and hands up, in front of a canvas as she said strange words in another language. She’d said she was trying to “call them up” and wouldn’t elaborate.
Professor Knowby had watched her after that, acting as if he wasn’t. He’d begun to ask her questions about anything she had seen or heard, anything she smelled.
She told him she had just been playing with her friends; that her friends had pitched in quarters to buy a Ouija board from the thrift shop and she had wanted to play along.
“I want to be like the other girls, Dad,” she’d told him, and Annie had looked at her suspiciously.
Annie seemed to know that Ruby wasn’t like the other girls and didn’t want to be.
But that part came later.
***
High school came on far too quick. One moment it was hair-brushing and double-dutch, the next second note-passing and fights in the lunchroom, complete with hair-pulling and vitriol.
Annie spent most of her time in the library, reading and researching. Being Daddy’s little girl.
Ruby couldn’t help but feel jealous. She’d been in high school first, after all. She was the senior when Annie was solely a sophomore. But it was Annie who craned in while their father was reading about the Necronomicon, Annie who their mother asked for advice on new places to travel. Ruby had been traded in for a newer, better model.
It had been Annie, first, and that had been bad enough. Their father called her to his side to ask for her opinion when he had once asked for Ruby.
She’d been left to sit in rooms, writing her own fates on fortune tellers and opening/closing, opening/closing, never getting the answer that she hoped for.
The week before Ruby was set to graduate, however, Annie was old news, too.
Now, their father sat with the Necronomicon placed in front of him on a work-bench, on his knees for hours as he mulled over every page, moving his mouth silently. The girls would walk on either side of him, trying to place a hand on his shoulder, to tell him about something neat that they had done at school.
He never seemed to hear.
***
Ruby walked across the stage with her diploma in hand, telling herself that she would not cry. After all, she hadn’t expected them to come. There was a new dig, one in Indonesia that had been promised to unearth even more information on Kandar. The professor – Ruby didn’t even think of him as “her father” anymore, simply the professor – had said he would be back next Friday.
Annie stood, slumped over her chair, and waved listlessly as they called Ruby’s name.
They were never going to remember them now, might as well just get used to it. It wasn’t as if it was supposed to matter – now Ruby was going to be an adult, free to make her own path.
But she hadn’t applied to any colleges, hadn’t even taken the SAT.
She had other ideas. She had other plans.
As Pomp and Circumstance played over again, she waved to Annie and smiled. Her little sister would understand soon; she was doing it for her, too.
***
It was probably marketed as a gun cabinet, but Professor Knowby’s sole rifle wasn’t locked inside it (that was down the basement, in the middle of an old truck – he didn’t hunt much anymore).
The cabin had been the easy part; the key was still in a jar by the front door, the same way it always was. It hadn’t taken long for Ruby to drive up, over the rickety little bridge like they’d done every year since she was three years old.
But she had never done it alone.
Now, she could hear all the sounds of the cabin that she had never really noticed before – the way the door creaked open and shut, the whistling wind nibbling at the edges of the tattered curtains like it was a squirrel or a groundhog or whatever lived out in these woods.
She slid a hand against the side of the cabinet – her father had never been all that inventive with his hiding places. There, taped with duct tape, was the key.
She slid it into the cabinet and pulled it to the side, watching as the safe popped open.
The book was warm in her hands now, like a hot water bottle, pulsing almost.
It fell open, as if of its own accord, pages flipping and speaking to her, giving her the strength to read the words, to summon them all.
To become one with them.
Ruby heard someone screaming, and it may have been her. Or it may have been the voice she had heard all along, the one calling her out to the crisp, sweet darkness.
***
Miss Previtt was always smiling when students came to her with problems, and Ruby liked her instantly. The glasses on her face made her look that much more caring, open, and genuine.
Especially with Brandy Barr.
Ruby watched as her hand touched Brandy’s shoulder, as she listened to her talk about her classes, about drama with her friend Rachel, about how much she wished she could get out of Elk Grove.
Silly little teenage complaints; nothing that really mattered.
A tap, tap, tapping in the back of Ruby’s head went ignored.
There was no need to look back. That girl was dead.
But Miss Previtt? She would do quite nicely.