Poison and Mirrors by Holly Hook

Author:Holly Hook [Hook, Holly]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 1539091511
Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform
Published: 2016-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Nine

“Where should we bury her?” a gruff voice asked in the void.

I floated through strange images and my head pounded like someone had hit it with a hammer. My eyelids fluttered and cool night air wrapped around me. I had a vague memory of glass shattering in the bathroom and of an ugly little man, but nothing else. I couldn’t think right now. My head hurt too bad for that.

“I don’t know,” another man said. I’d never heard the voice before. “This park…I don’t like it. It’s too open.”

“There are plenty of trees,” a third man chimed in. “Plenty of woods.”

The pain died off a bit and I was able to open my eyes a tiny bit. Darkness. Night. Grass tickled my nose and I wrinkled it. A large tree rose above me, reaching its branches into the sky. They looked like skeleton arms.

A dream.

That was all this was.

No.

The headache was too intense for that. The grass, too real.

And the little men stood several feet in front of me, beards hanging almost down to the grass.

They had lowered their voices to whispers now. I took a quiet breath and opened my eyes the rest of the way. The men were silhouettes against a distant streetlight. Trees rose all around us and I caught the shine of a swing set in the distance. The park. Their words matched up with my memory of it. My town had a park tucked back behind the library and it was really dark and creepy at night. Sara and I had come out here and played tag late at night back in the eighth grade. Or at least, I remembered that. It was probably false, just like everything else.

And then terror hit me.

The park would be a good place to hide a body…if they brought me back to the woods.

I turned my head. I lay on the edge of it. The forest was pure black. These little men thought I was dead and they had come out here to bury me.

I couldn’t tell the men apart but their gruff words mixed together and I could sense their tension. I counted them.

Seven.

Seven dwarves.

I gulped. These weren’t those happy singing dwarves from the Disney movie. There was no Dopey here. They were all Grumpy multiplied by ten with a bit of Jack the Ripper thrown in.

One of them wore Tony’s Adventure Time T-shirt.

The boys.

These dwarves must be the boys. The little kids who inhabited the lower level of Haven House were really these horrible creatures all along. Sara and I had been living with them and Stephanie knew about it. The Tony one had hit me with a hammer.

They thought I was dead.

It was why they were in the huddle like that.

I didn’t understand. Weren’t the dwarves supposed to protect Snow White, not kill her?

“The woods,” a dwarf said, raising his voice. “No one will be out here this late. Stephanie will bring the shovels and garbage bags shortly.”

Stephanie.

She was in on this, too. I wondered if that tea she'd brought me had been drugged.

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