Such Dark Things Read online

  A HORRIFIC RECURRING NIGHTMARE IS THREATENING TO STEAL HER SANITY...

  Dr. Corinne Cabot is living the American dream. She’s a successful ER physician in Chicago who’s married to a handsome husband. Together they live in a charming house in the suburbs. But appearances can be deceiving—and what no one can see is Corinne’s dark past. Troubling gaps in her memory mean she recalls little about a haunting event in her life years ago that changed everything.

  She remembers only being in the house the night two people were found murdered. Her father was there, too. Now her father is in prison; she hasn’t been in contact in years. Repressing that terrifying memory has caused Corinne moments of paranoia and panic. Sometimes she thinks she sees things that aren’t there, hears words that haven’t been spoken. Or have they? She fears she may be losing her mind, unable to determine what’s real and what’s not.

  So when she senses her husband’s growing distance, she thinks she’s imagining things. She writes her suspicions off to fatigue, overwork, anything to explain what she can’t accept—that her life really isn’t what it seems.

  Courtney Evan Tate

  SUCH DARK THINGS

  To my Michelle.

  For keeping me afloat.

  To my husband.

  For being my Always.

  And to my brother-in-law, E.L.

  For everything.

  Contents

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  CHAPTER 28

  CHAPTER 29

  CHAPTER 30

  CHAPTER 31

  CHAPTER 32

  CHAPTER 33

  CHAPTER 34

  CHAPTER 35

  CHAPTER 36

  CHAPTER 37

  CHAPTER 38

  CHAPTER 39

  CHAPTER 40

  CHAPTER 41

  CHAPTER 42

  CHAPTER 43

  CHAPTER 44

  CHAPTER 45

  CHAPTER 46

  CHAPTER 47

  CHAPTER 48

  CHAPTER 49

  CHAPTER 50

  CHAPTER 51

  CHAPTER 52

  CHAPTER 53

  CHAPTER 54

  CHAPTER 55

  CHAPTER 56

  CHAPTER 57

  CHAPTER 58

  CHAPTER 59

  CHAPTER 60

  CHAPTER 61

  CHAPTER 62

  CHAPTER 63

  CHAPTER 64

  CHAPTER 65

  CHAPTER 66

  CHAPTER 67

  EPILOGUE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  PROLOGUE

  My skin is sticky with blood.

  My waistband is wet with it, and I can taste it on my lips. It’s splattered on my face, and it tastes like metal that has been rotting in the sun and rain for a hundred years. The night makes me shiver, the cool breeze rustling my hair, and for a split second, I’m back there in that house, standing in that blood. My bare toes feel the warmth of the liquid turn cool as the minutes tick past.

  Goose bumps rise on my neck, and a knot that I can’t swallow is lodged in my throat. My feet are frozen frozen frozen on the ground, and I can’t move.

  Their eyes are open and lifeless, although they stare at me.

  They see me.

  Yet they see nothing.

  I can’t breathe.

  My lips are ice, just like theirs.

  My heart is pounding and racing and stuttering, and I can’t breathe I can’t breathe I can’t breathe.

  “Corinne. You’re safe here. Corinne.”

  And just like that, I’m not there.

  I’m here.

  “There was blood all over me.” My words are stilted and fragile, like glass.

  I stare at my hand, and even though it’s clean now, I see it as it was seventeen years ago, covered in the blood of two souls—souls that were living and that aren’t anymore. It’s hard to wrap my mind around. First they were breathing, and then they weren’t. It happened in a split second. I inhale shakily.

  “Think about that moment,” the doctor instructs. “Who can you see?”

  I think on that. “Melanie is next to me on the floor. Her head is bleeding into a pool. There is so much blood that it looks black.” I close my eyes, because it had been the first time I’d seen blood like that, and it terrified me. “Joe is on the bed. His blood is splattered all over the wall. Both of them have their eyes open.”

  Staring at me.

  The emotions welling up in me are like a wave, swelling swelling swelling...until I can’t handle it anymore. The horror and the guilt and the pain are just too much.

  “I can’t do this,” I blurt out. “I’m done for the day.”

  Dr. Phillips looks at me, and he’s calm and detached.

  “Corinne, why are you here?”

  I pause. What a stupid question. “You know why I’m here.”

  I hate it when they treat me with such condescension.

  “Humor me,” he tells me. “Why are you here?”

  I grit my teeth and look away.

  He waits.

  “You’re saying that I tried to hurt myself. But I wouldn’t do that.”

  I look at him now, and he’s so fucking emotionless. I look down at my left wrist, at the bandage covering up the stitches.

  “I wouldn’t,” I insist again. “I’m a fucking physician. I wouldn’t have cut my wrist horizontally. If I really wanted to hurt myself, I would’ve known to cut vertically along the vein.”

  I finger the gauze. Beneath it, the cut throbs, evidence of something I don’t remember doing.

  “I’m not crazy,” I add. And I don’t know if I’m trying to convince Dr. Phillips or myself.

  “You’re not crazy.” He nods. “But you’ve experienced a mental break. You’re here because you need to deal with the causal underlying issue so that it won’t happen again. Right?”

  He’s a fucking asshole.

  I stare at the wall. At the whiteness, at the sterility.

  “You need some plants in here,” I tell him, avoiding the question. “Greenery puts patients at ease. All this blankness...it’s maddening.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind,” he says wryly. “Corinne...”

  I interrupt. “Dr. Cabot,” I tell him. “I’ve earned it.”

  “Dr. Cabot,” he corrects himself. “You’re right. You’ve earned it. You worked a long time to finish medical school and your residency. You’re a top ER physician. You have a life envied by everyone around you. You’ve got to take care of yourself so you can protect this life you’ve built.”

  I close my eyes. Behind my eyelids, it’s dark and safe. It’s black and warm.

  “Protect it from what?” I whisper.
<
br />   “You tell me,” he answers. “You’ve got something inside of you that is triggered now, something that creates panic and a fight-or-flight response. We know what your father did so long ago. What we don’t know is why...or what damage it has caused in you, damage that seems to be affecting you now.”

  “I don’t know, either,” I say helplessly, my eyes opening to the white walls again. “I can’t remember. I never could. You know that.”

  “I know.” Dr. Phillips nods again, and he tries to be so fucking comforting. “You have a history of dissociative behavior. You blocked out what your father did so long ago, and it stands to reason that your brain has developed that as a defense mechanism. It’s doing it again now. If we don’t get to the bottom of why your memories are being triggered now, after all of these years...you’ll never have peace. Do we agree on that?”

  Reluctantly, I nod.

  “So we have to start at the beginning. You have to stay here and focus.”

  Anger flares in me, red and hot, and I stare him down. He doesn’t blink and neither do I.

  “Focus?” I ask him, and my words are sharp and I wish they would cut him. “You think it’s as simple as sitting down and focusing? How dare you sit there and tell me what to do, when you have no idea what it’s like.”

  I stand up to leave, but the psychiatrist’s next sentence holds me in my place, freezing me.

  “Corinne, you promised Jude you’d try.”

  Jude.

  My beautiful, understanding Jude.

  I swallow hard. I did promise. And I have to follow through, even though the pain it causes me is immeasurable. I owe it to him. I’ll do it for him. Not for this psychiatrist, but for Jude.

  My body folds back into the seat, and I finger the medical bracelet circling my right wrist. Corinne Elizabeth Cabot, Female. It’s me, condensed into one stark sentence, yet I’m a stranger to myself right now. That’s why I’m here. I don’t know myself or my thoughts. My memories are foreign, blocked, nightmarish, out of control.

  “Fine.” There’s nothing else I can say.

  Dr. Phillips is quietly triumphant. “Let’s begin again. Take a deep breath and close your eyes.”

  I do, drawing the cool air in a rush over my teeth, expanding my lungs and holding it, before I let it slowly exhale. I do it again, then again.

  “Think back to that night, Dr. Cabot. Stand in that room. Tell me where your father is.”

  I envision it. I see it in my mind like it was yesterday. My father in his bloody steel-toed boots. “He’s on the porch, waiting for the police to come.”

  “He left you alone in the house with two dead bodies?”

  “Yes.”

  “He didn’t try to run?”

  “No.”

  “Okay. What did you do then?” the doctor asks me calmly, unfazed by the ugliness of my story.

  “I was stunned. I think I was in shock. My hand was bleeding.”

  Dr. Phillips looks at my hand, because I’m stroking the scar now, an unconscious nervous tic that I often do when I’m anxious. “What happened to your hand?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “Is there a lot that you don’t remember from that night?”

  “Yes. You know that.”

  “Yes, I do,” he acknowledges. “So you’re standing in the middle of a bloody crime scene because your father left you alone. What did you do then, Corinne?”

  “I looked out the window,” I tell him. “I was frozen. I couldn’t move. My feet felt like concrete, and I was afraid if I moved, my heart would explode. So I took deep breaths. I watched the trick-or-treaters walking by. I looked at the blood on my feet. I looked at the jack-o’-lanterns that were lit on porches, and the ghosts hanging in the trees. There was a full moon. There was light on my shoulders.”

  “Anything else?”

  “I stared at the street sign on the corner. All Hallows Lane.”

  “That’s ironic,” the doctor points out needlessly.

  “Yes.”

  “How long did you stand there?” His question is quiet.

  “Until they came and took me away.”

  1

  Earlier this month

  Fourteen days until Halloween

  Corinne

  There’s blood on the wall.

  It stands out starkly, a crimson slash of color streaked against white sterility. It’s easy to train my eyes on it, easy to focus on that one spot rather than the bloody mess beneath my hands.

  People like to think that death is peaceful, that it’s calm, that it’s beautiful. But from my experience, it’s not. It’s bloody, it’s hectic, it’s full of shrieking machines and fluorescent lights and chaos. It’s not pretty.

  “Dr. Cabot! It’s been six minutes.”

  Lucy looks up at me amid the blood-spattered chaos, elbow-deep in intestines, and with what appears to be brain matter on her brow. Her dark eyes are resigned because she’s been a nurse long enough to know what we have to do.

  So do I.

  It’s the story of my life.

  I pause and the defibrillating paddles in my hands suddenly weigh a million pounds apiece. The fluorescent lights are bright and blinding, washing out everything around me but for the blood and the blue curtain circling the gurney. This moment swirls and stands still amid the hospital smells and beeps, and I think of an ancient story from Greek myth.

  The Fates—three old women who spin the thread of life, measure the string and then decide when someone will die by cutting it. In this moment, I’m one of them.

  My next decision will determine a life.

  I’m one of the Fates and I’m measuring the thread and I’m cutting it.

  Snip.

  I take a breath and stare down at the broken boy in front of me, the one whose life I’m snipping away.

  In my head, I know that none of this is my fault. It wasn’t my fault that he decided to drag-race down the Dan Ryan and endanger a hundred lives other than his own. It wasn’t my fault that he chose to slam five beers in five minutes beforehand. It’s not my fault that he’s only eighteen and his mother is anxiously waiting on the other side of the double doors, waiting for me to save her son.

  It’s not my fault that I can’t.

  He stares at me now, but his blue eyes are vacuous and unseeing. They’ve been that way for six long minutes. His blond hair is plastered to his face with blood, and it’s splattered across his Live For Today T-shirt. The back of his skull is smashed in because he wasn’t wearing his seat belt, and jagged bone erupts from his hair like bright white arrowheads. Safety glass isn’t kind when a human body hurtles through it.

  This boy had his whole life in front of him, and because of one stupid decision, it’s done. He won’t be living for tomorrow... Today was all he had.

  He’s gone, and it’s time for me to wield the scissors.

  Snip.

  “Time of death, 5:57 p.m.,” I say tiredly.

  I set the paddles down and take a breath. The boy’s bloody hand dangles over the side of the gurney, so I pick it up and place it on his chest. His fingers are naturally curled inward. I straighten them, my gloved fingers lingering on his before I move my hand to close his eyelids.

  I feel relief when he isn’t staring at me anymore.

  “Go to the other one,” Lucy tells me. “I’ll talk to his mother.”

  I nod, because that’s the right thing to do, because I’m one of only two doctors in the ER right now, and the other boy is waiting for me, and he’s not beyond help like this one.

  As a physician, I’ve had to learn how to compartmentalize my emotions, to turn them off at my whim and shift gears, to go from one scenario to the next to the next, all without missing a beat. It’s a skill that I learned long ago, beginning in that god-awful house on that bloody night.
>
  I slide the curtain to another room open, and the boy inside is scared, his eyes wide and frightened and alive. He’s tall and thin and gangly, although his cheeks still have baby fat, softening the curve of the jaw that will someday be manly.

  “Am I going to die?” he asks me, and his voice is so young. He’s a little boy in a man’s body, and his hands are shaking.

  “Not today,” I tell him, shining my penlight into his eyes. “What’s your name?” He’s got blood smeared on his cheek, and I wonder briefly if it is his or his friend’s.

  “Tyler.”

  “Well, Tyler, where do you hurt?”

  He shows me, both with his words and with unspoken gestures, and I take note. He’s beaten up for sure, but not mortally wounded, although we’ll definitely check for internal bleeding just to be sure.

  “Is Jason okay?” he asks quietly, and his hand taps the side of the gurney nervously, tap tap tap.

  I hesitate.

  Tyler sees the grim answer on my face, and I don’t have to say a word.

  “Jesus.” He gulps for air and I grip his arm.

  “You’ve got a concussion,” I tell him. “I’m sending you for a CAT scan. Your collarbone is broken. I can see it poking through your shirt. Based on your level of pelvic pain, I think your hip crest is fractured. We’ll get you x-rayed. I don’t think you’ve got internal bleeding, but because of the rate of impact, I’m sending you for a sonogram just to be on the safe side.”

  He nods and his hand clutches his hip. “It hurts.”

  “I’m sure it does,” I agree. “It will take a while to recover from a fractured hip. You’ll have physical therapy, too.” I pause. “Apparently, you boys were doing a hundred miles per hour down the Dan Ryan, and not only that, but you were filming yourselves. What were you thinking?”

  He closes his eyes and drops back against the bloody sheet. “We weren’t.”

  “You were lucky,” I tell him. “You’re going to be okay.”

  “Jason’s not,” he all but whimpers.

  I shake my head and my gut contracts. “No. He’s not. I’m very sorry.”

  I honestly am. I know people make mistakes. I know they have moments when they don’t think. I see it every day right here in this room. These walls have seen thousands of people at their lowest moments. Some of them, like Tyler, get lucky. Some of them, like Jason, do not.