Buster’s Warning in the Small Hours

“She was crawling, Mark,” I murmured. My voice shook as I tried to make him understand. “You watched it happen on the camera.”

He glanced back at me, his face tight with worry. “Sarah, please. She’s standing right here. She’s okay. That camera uses cheap infrared. It must have distorted what you saw.”

Lily kept chewing her granola bar, shifting her bare feet against the kitchen tile. She looked so ordinary that I almost wanted to believe him. My phone, though, pressed against my pocket, and the muffled crying I had heard from underground still rang in my head.

I had to find out who was wearing my daughter’s face.

I circled the island and crouched beside Mark. Then I softened my expression and reached for Lily’s unoccupied hand. The skin felt icy beneath my fingers.

“Sweetheart, do you remember when you fell off your bike last summer and scraped your knee?” I asked, keeping my voice even.

She nodded without stopping her slow chewing. “Yes.”

“Do you remember the song I sang while I cleaned the scrape in the bathroom?”

Mark gave me a puzzled look. He didn’t know what I was doing. It was a test, and Lily and I had shared the answer since she was tiny: whenever she cried, I sang “You Are My Sunshine.”

Lily’s jaw went still. Her blue eyes fixed on me, empty of the softness I knew.

“You didn’t sing to me, Sarah,” she said.

My lungs seemed to seize. I couldn’t make myself move.

“You cried instead,” she went on. Her voice carried a composed, adult steadiness that belonged nowhere in a child’s mouth. “You sat beside the bathtub in the old house after your father left. You were crying, and I told you to stop being weak because tears do not pay the mortgage.”

Mark lurched away from her. He hit the floor hard, then scrambled backward, his face drained of color.

I knew those words. My mother had spoken them to me in 1996, in the bathroom of our Connecticut house. Lily hadn’t even been born yet.

A narrow smile touched Lily’s mouth. I recognized it from my mother, the satisfied expression she wore after winning an argument. Without another word, she turned and headed out of the kitchen toward the stairs.

“Mark,” I gasped, clutching his shirt and trying to pull him upright. “That’s my mother. She’s speaking through Lily.”

He couldn’t answer. His gaze stayed locked on the open archway, and his chest jerked with each panicked breath. Whatever doubt he’d held was gone. Terror had taken its place.

“Keep watch on the stairs,” I said, my voice suddenly firm. Fear gave way to the need to protect my real daughter, wherever she was. “Don’t let her come back down. I’m looking for my mother’s journal.”

I left before he could respond. Instead of taking the main staircase, I hurried up the back stairs toward the guest room, then moved carefully along the upper hallway, my heart pounding.

A door stood ajar. From beyond it came Lily’s soft humming—not a tune from a cartoon, but the slow hymn my mother used to play on Sunday mornings.

I needed the leather journal. If my mother had removed it from the silver box in my closet, she must have concealed it somewhere in the house.

I entered my bedroom and shut the door behind me. The silver box sat in the closet, still open. Inside, on its velvet lining, lay the single baby tooth.

I stared at it, remembering my mother’s stories and the strange things she had kept hidden. The tooth might have made some kind of connection. I had no way to know for certain.

If she had hidden the tooth here, where had she put the journal?

My mother had trusted nobody. While she was alive, she tucked her valuables into ordinary, embarrassing hiding places where people wouldn’t think to look. She used to stash emergency money in empty prescription bottles and leave them in the bathroom wastebasket.

I hurried to Lily’s bathroom and lifted the little wicker bin from beneath the sink. It held crumpled tissues and hollow toothpaste tubes. I tipped the contents onto the floor.

There was nothing.

I returned to the hallway, trying to work out how to search without alerting the thing inside my daughter. The humming had shifted. It was coming from the guest room at the far end, not Lily’s bedroom.

The entity was moving through the house.

I slipped into Lily’s room and eased the door closed behind me. Lavender shampoo lingered in the air, but beneath it was another smell: damp, metallic earth turned freshly from the ground.

I searched everywhere. I lifted the mattress and checked beneath it, then emptied the toy chest. After that, I pulled open the dresser drawers and flung aside pink shirts and neatly folded jeans.

My hands trembled so badly that I kept losing my grip on whatever I picked up. Still, I searched each drawer, desperate to find the journal before the thing could find me.

At last, I tugged the bottom drawer all the way out and set it aside. On the dusty carpet, hidden beneath Lily’s dresser, lay my mother’s missing leather-bound journal.