Three-Two-One
All through town, the man watched us from the posters. I saw his face—bland as a thumb—taped to the pharmacy door, hanging behind the library’s long windows, shimmering in the heat on the windshields of parked cars. These posters always had a second image, crammed in next to the drawing of the man: a photograph of Anneliese. In the picture, Anneliese wore an ugly teal T-shirt, so tight that her baby fat mushroomed out of the sleeves. Her spaghetti-straight black hair—witches’ hair, I thought—hung in pigtails that seemed sad on a twelve-year-old. Her smile was wide and gap-toothed, and she was holding a Pekingese with the flattest face I had ever seen.
“I’m glad that snappy dog’s gone, at least,” Lucy said, pulling my braid. “Aren’t you, Daphne?”
I didn’t know how to answer that, so I moved my head in a way that I intended to look noncommittal. Lucy’s words surprised me, as her own dog had disappeared the year before. I remembered staying out late with her, helping her search the woods around the creek. We never found him.
“That thing was ugly, too,” Justine said. She tried to flatten the tip of her nose by pushing on it in a way that looked painful. She caught her own reflection in the library’s front window and began laughing, clutching her throat as if in pain.
I stretched out a smile, wondering if it seemed fake to Lucy and Justine. This was before the incident, and I was still concerned about what other people thought. I couldn’t help looking at the posters as we walked. Even after months of searches, broadcasts, pleas, I was drawn to these images, to the few details of the story I’d managed to collect. There was something in me that answered to the not knowing, that drew a line from myself to all the blank possibilities. Although Anneliese and I had been in the same class for two months, we had never exchanged a word. But Anneliese made sense to me. Even the disappearance made sense. The man seemed another thing entirely. I felt I had seen him before, but only in the vague way I recognized cereal mascots and popular cartoon characters.
The sheer number of posters fueled my obsession. They were everywhere. And I could not look at two of them without looking at another, a nice odd number to finish it off. But then I would see another, and another, and you know how that goes. It was only the odds that kept me safe, and I knew I would need them to figure things out.
“Earth to you!” Justine snapped, clapping her hands in my face. I jumped, then hated myself for doing it.
“Don’t let her get to you,” Lucy said, putting an arm around my shoulders. “She doesn’t mean anything by it.”
#
I was not sure why Lucy had invited me in the first place. Ever since the disappearance, Lucy hadn’t seemed to talk much to anyone other than Justine. It wasn’t that she could be called excluded, as everyone seemed to want her attention. No, Lucy had decided to be almost completely alone. There was power in that.
But when I’d been reading on the bus that Friday, Lucy had simply sat down next to me. She hadn’t forgotten that I liked the woods near the creek bed, too, and she asked me to come down that weekend. She wanted to know if I remembered her old treehouse.
I did remember. The last time we’d been there, more than a year before, June Gloom hung in the air like smoke. I had been holed up in my room, worried if I went out alone the fog would swallow me up and leave me lost in its haze. I had been reading one of my hardboiled novels until I heard the doorbell ring. It was Lucy, and she wanted to show me something. She wouldn’t tell me where we were going. I put on my yellow rain boots and let the cat out to annoy my sister, and Lucy and I left.
Back on the bus, Lucy had snapped me out of this memory. “Maybe you’ll actually come inside this time,” she said. “But you can’t tell anyone where you’re going—No, I mean it. My parents would lose it if they knew anyone was still using that place. Just say you’re going to the store, and we’ll meet you in front of the library.”
I had known she was lying. Lucy’s parents were rarely home, and even back when I’d spent nearly every day at her house I had almost never run into him—her father. Lucy seemed to prefer this. One of the handful of times our paths had crossed, I’d seen him from a distance. I had looked out Lucy’s upstairs window late at night and noticed him lying on the front lawn in a faded suit, motionless. I could make out little glinting shapes surrounding him, and I realized the streetlights were reflecting off the bottles. In all the time I’d spent there, I had only actually spoken to him once or twice to say goodbye. He always seemed to look through me. Lucy’s mother acknowledged my presence, but even she never really paid any attention to what we were doing. She had a thickened sadness in her face that never went away.
That day on the bus, I was torn. As soon as Lucy sat down next to me, I remembered last year, when I’d thought we were friends. I flashed back to the day we’d explored the crumbling, abandoned house at the end of my block, how I’d gripped Lucy’s hand so tightly she stopped feeling it. I had missed her more than I could admit, even to myself. And Lucy and Justine had been so close to Anneliese. Maybe they would tell me something about Anneliese, something new, something that would help to explain why and how she could have been taken.
And, there was this: Lucy and Justine were both pretty, and this meant they were special. Lucy seemed to me like one of the nymphs in my mythology books. That was how I knew they were real. Lucy had dark curly hair and a drifty way of being, like she had just wandered into the world from somewhere softer and better. Justine was very blond and very loud, but everyone else seemed to like that. I thought Justine was exhausting, but who was I to argue with everyone else?
I could not push down the thought that, maybe, being with them would mean I must be pretty, too—and that I must therefore be interesting, likeable, wise beyond my years. If I were pretty, I must also be smart. In truth, I had frizzy, bright red hair, and that was all anyone ever said about me.
#
The three of us passed the movie theater, which was playing something about a woman who liked to bake on all three screens. The movie’s poster showed an actress with big teeth standing next to a life-sized, gooey-looking cupcake. Justine pretended to lick the wall. But there were other posters too, and soon I was looking at the man again.
“Who do you think drew all these sketches?” I asked.
“They didn’t draw them all by hand, Daphne,” Justine said. “We have printers now.”
“I know. That’s what I meant,” I said, closing my eyes. Behind my eyelids, I watched giant numbers tick upwards: one, two, three, four, five, six, seven. When I opened my eyes, Lucy and Justine were smirking, and I wondered if I had been mouthing the numbers as well.
“But has anyone ever seen him?” I asked, plowing ahead. “Like, really seen this man? Not just the sketch?”
They ignored my question.
#
The three of us walked for what felt like forever. Lucy, who barely said anything, seemed to know the way by muscle memory. She was so different from the girl I had known before. Justine kept up a running commentary that did not need an audience, and I listened halfheartedly.
It was light out, which made it hard for me to see in people’s windows.
Before Anneliese, I had made a habit of walking alone at night after my parents and sister had gone to sleep. It was the windows that got me. At night, even late at night in a town like ours, I came across open windows, their rooms lit up like fireflies. I drank them in greedily, other people’s weird belongings, the way the blackness separated each room from its house—like plays staged for me and me alone. Sometimes, I could see the people, too. I would make up stories for them—how the people came to be there, and, if they weren’t there, what had pulled them away. Sometimes the kids were alone, watching television, and I knew their parents must have left them and would never come back.
“Trying to spy?”
I looked over at Lucy. “What do you mean?”
“Oh, nothing.”
Once out of town, we snaked across yellow fields that slowly gave way to darker woods.
#
I had met Lucy the year before. I was wandering the shelves of our school’s cavernous library, happy to be alone in the silence. Mr. Lee, the librarian, liked to bury himself behind a mountain of books at the reception desk, and he never came out to send me back to class. He almost never came out to do anything. Once, two seventh-graders lit a book on fire just to see if it would get him out of his chair. It did, but only after the sprinklers had gone off.
I sat in the back near the big window. I wanted to read, but I struggled to turn the pages with so many bandages on my hand. It was just after the incident with my finger. There were ten of them, still are, and that had been a problem.
I was trying to flip through The Hidden Staircase when I heard something that sounded like scissors. I’d thought I was alone. I put the book down and tiptoed through the stacks, waiting to hear the sound again. I rounded a corner and saw a brown-haired girl sitting cross-legged between the bookcases, an open book in her lap. Little paper shapes were spread out on the floor in front of her, and, I realized with horror, they had been cut from the book’s pages.
“Hi,” she said, “I knew someone else was in here.”
“Uh, hi.”
“What’s your name?”
“Daphne.”
“I’m Lucy.”
“Did you…” I started to ask, looking at the clippings.
“Oh, cut up the book? Yeah, but we can keep a secret,” she said, smiling.
She said we, as if we were already conspirators, already friends. As if all I’d had to do was turn the corner to see her and we had become linked. I wanted this to be true. I hoped she wouldn’t ask about my hand.
“I need them for my artwork,” Lucy went on, picking up a page cut into the shape of a girl.
“What kind of art?”
“Collage,” she said, slicing one of the girl’s arms off. “I need lots of different pages.”
“Are you new?” I asked.
“I start in Miss Valdes’ class today. I mean, I was supposed to,” she smirked.
“But it’s February…”
“We had to move,” Lucy said, with the air of repeating something she’d said many times before. “It was unavoidable.”
#
There, finally, we craned our necks to squint up at it, our hands outstretched to block out the setting sun. Lucy’s treehouse was very old and had once been green. Years of thick heat and sudden downpours had worn the paintjob down to haphazard splotches of color, making the dingy wood appear covered in mold. Its tree curved at a strange angle. But the structure itself looked big, and it was still higher up than any treehouse I had ever seen. Once inside, Lucy said, you could watch her aunt and uncle’s house—just a speck, really—and look across the tops of a million trees to see St. Julian’s steeple.
It took me a moment to notice the silence.
“Where’d Justine go?”
“She’ll come back. She’s just messing around.”
I turned back to the tree, counting its main branches—eight. Eight was not one of my good numbers.
“Is it swaying?”
“Not really,” Lucy said. “My dad told us not to go up there anymore, just ’cause the tree’s a tiny bit hollow at the, you know, the main part. But it’ll be fine.”
“What?” I asked, trying to put my finger on what was so uncharacteristic about her words.
Without warning, there was a quick crush of sticks behind us. I was knocked forward, someone’s arms around my neck.
“It’s gonna fall—you’re gonna die!” Justine screeched, laughing, her mouth inches from my ear. This was the first time I noticed how uniquely shrill she could be, how the register of her voice could pierce my skull like an arrow.
“Stop it!” I said, prizing myself free from Justine’s grip. I tripped over my own feet and fell, landing on my side in the dirt. I looked up at Lucy, who had a hand over her mouth.
“Didn’t know I’d scare you that much!” Justine said, beaming.
My face burned. “You didn’t!”
“Well, you’re scared of going up there, aren’t you?”
“I’m not.”
For a second, I saw myself getting up and pushing on Justine’s glasses until they shattered in her smirking face. Until they punctured her bulging eyes. But this thought faded as I sensed the old feeling rising inside me, starting in my gut and going cold around my chest. I shouldn’t have come. When I’d hesitated that morning, my sister had nearly pushed me out the door—Give me a call before you head back, OK?
Lucy stared at me. After a moment, she rolled her eyes and reached out to help me up.
“Then let’s go up already.”
She pulled me towards the tree, leaving me at the trunk as she started to climb. Lucy made it look easy. She hurried up the boards on the tree’s gnarled side, never stopping to look down. She made it to the top and pushed a rickety trapdoor open, pulled herself inside.
“Well, come on!” Lucy shouted. She lay on the treehouse floor and looked down at us.
I hesitated, my hand on one of the lower boards.
“You’re not gonna fall, Daphne,” Justine said, right behind me.
I clenched my fists, trying to ignore her. I had already counted the boards—fourteen. I was haunted by even numbers, but if I added the digits it worked out to five. I would touch every fifth board with my left hand first, and this would keep me safe until I reached the top. The second board I grabbed wobbled, but I kept going. Near the middle of the tree, my palms had become so sweaty that I started to worry I would slip off, but I gritted my teeth and concentrated on the fives. Once I was close enough, Lucy grabbed one of my hands and helped drag me inside.
I felt a rush of lightheadedness and had to swallow back the sudden taste of my breakfast. The treehouse had a strangely sweet smell, and I struggled to place it. I put a hand over my nose as I stood up. Without Justine inside there were just two of us, and two was bad. We were up so high. I leaned down towards the floor and began counting the striations in the wooden boards, trying to get to the odds. But it wasn’t working. We were up too high. I kept glancing back down to the ground every few seconds, praying Justine would finish her climb and make us three girls again, up here. Finally, she came through the trapdoor. I could not stop myself from sighing with relief.
“Did you miss me?” she asked.
I shrugged, quickly, and turned to look around at the room.
It was getting dark out and the view from the window was less beautiful than I’d imagined, but if I squinted I thought I could see the top of the church in the distance. Just outside the window, an empty wicker basket hung from a wispy rope.
Looking out made me feel dizzy, so I backed away. I was struck by the sheer volume of stuff—junk, my mother would have said—that Lucy and Justine had managed to haul inside. A big upturned cardboard box appeared to serve as a makeshift table. The box was covered in flowers—dead ones. I touched one of the dried petals, which detached in my hand. Chipped mason jars full of trinkets stood in one of the room’s corners. One jar was shattered, its contents spread across the warped floor. Careful to avoid the shards of glass, I examined the detritus: broken rocks, seashells, little plastic dolls missing arms or heads, crudely beaded necklaces, small animal bones, faded tubes of melted ChapStick, someone’s lost tooth.
I picked up one of the dolls. Its head and left arm were gone, and someone had scribbled all over its neck with a red marker. Even before these injuries, I thought, this doll had been falling apart. Its remaining limbs hung loosely from their tired plastic joints, and it was missing its clothes except for a bluish green top.
Lucy and Justine sat in the middle of the floor, already splitting a bag of trail mix and speaking so quietly that, even in the cramped room, I could not hear them.
The walls were covered in chalk drawings, with different scenes crowding and piling on top of one another. I squinted, trying to distinguish one character from the next. There were bloblike animals pedaling bicycles, big-eyed girls clutching kitchen knives, cars smashing into walls. But the most prominent drawing, I slowly realized, was a tall figure—more of a vague shape of a person than an actual drawing. It had taken me a moment to see this sketch clearly among all the scenes, but now it seemed to rise above the noise of the others. I felt a coldness at the back of my neck. The shape had just one distinguishing feature: unnaturally long, white hands tipped with clawlike fingernails. There were two little figures beside it, their girlish faces turned up towards its blank one.
“Is it him?” I asked them, pointing at the wall.
Lucy turned to me with a jolt. “Who?”
“The man, the one…the one from the posters,” I said. As soon as I said it, I wondered why I had. The thing on the wall was an outline with almost no human features.
“Do you mean the ‘bad man’ who took Anneliese?” Justine asked, with finger quotes. She looked at Lucy, and they both smirked.
I knew they teased me because they were older. Lucy was born six months before me, and Justine two months. But they had to understand the man was dangerous. It was not a question of if, I’d heard on the news. It was a question of when. When I walked to school alone, I watched the other girls—some by themselves, some in groups—and wondered which of them would be chosen. Would it be another short one like Anneliese, or maybe Brynn, who ran slowest of us all? Justine seemed out of the question. No, I thought, Justine would last a few minutes before being chucked out of the man’s car. It pleased me to think that she would not survive the impact.
There were other reasons that I thought Anneliese must have been easy to take. She had been new and, maybe, somewhat weak. She had always brought her own lunch but seemed to prefer chewing her fingernails. She came from Iowa or Idaho or Ohio, one of those blank places where I had assumed no one lived anymore. Of course, there could be no strangers in such places.
“You want to know what happened, don’t you?” Lucy asked.
“I mean, she just disappeared,” I said. “Don’t you want to know? I thought you were her friends.”
Lucy said nothing, and I felt a flash of anger. I felt so close to something. Why had they brought me here if they weren’t going to talk to me?
“Do you want to see the hollow part?” Justine asked, knocking twice on the floor with her fist. Twice.
I clenched my jaw, and quickly reached back to knock once on the wall.
“I thought you were joking,” I said, turning my attention to Lucy. “This tree isn’t really hollow, right? That wouldn’t be safe.”
“Safety first!” Lucy said, screwing up her face in an impression of our teacher. She reached out and dragged the cardboard box in the center of the room towards her, revealing a manhole-sized opening in the floor. It looked like a giant had punched a hole in the wooden slats. Lucy and Justine inched closer to it, and Lucy gestured for me to join them. That strange, sickly sweet smell intensified.
“It’s like another room,” Lucy said. “But it’s a secret. If my dad knew we were up here, messing with this, he’d take the boards off the tree.”
There was something off with what she was saying. Suddenly, I realized I had not heard her use that word before today.
Already feeling dizzy, I knelt down. I leaned forward carefully and looked into the space, my lightheadedness building. It was so dark inside that I could make out only blackness. It reminded me of a color I’d read about—a shade of black created in a lab, the darkest color in the world. It was really not so much a color as a total loss of light, like a spot torn out of the universe. My palms were sweaty against the floor. The pit was big enough that one of us could fall in, fall all the way to the bottom of the trunk, and that would be it. We couldn’t even hope to see the bottom from here. I heard Justine saying something, but it sounded far away.
“Isn’t it cool?” Lucy asked, her hand on my shoulder, guiding me closer to the pit. Her voice echoed faintly in my skull.
Weakly, I tried to pull my eyes away from the blackness. There were three of us here, a nice safe odd number—Lucy, Justine, and me. Three two one. Three two one. Three two one. It would be alright. Three two one. My attention shifted to the floor around the pit, where I noticed thin gashes in the wood. They extended out in tortured, parallel lines. My lungs realized it before my brain, and for a few seconds I stopped breathing.
The gashes had been left by fingernails.
I screamed and jumped back, falling backwards over a pile of junk.
“Anneliese—” I said, realizing I was yelling, “She’s dead! Her body’s here—she’s here, isn’t she?”
I heard an inhuman sound to my left, and whipped around to see Justine doubled over, shrieking. Justine’s eyes were squeezed shut, and I realized tears were starting to run down her face. She seemed to be struggling to breathe. I watched, frozen, as Justine fell to her knees and collapsed on the floor. As Justine thrashed around, rolling towards us, I saw that her face was contorted with laughter.
“I can’t…take it! Lucy!” Justine gasped between yelps. “I’m laughing too hard…my throat’s gonna close!”
“Christ, Justine,” Lucy said, rolling her eyes. She smiled at me. “All the spooky things in here really set you off, huh? Did you think you solved the mystery?”
Slowly, the realization began to dawn on me. It was worse than when I’d thought that I was about to die.
Lucy was staring at me, and I could not think of anything to say. This seemed to satisfy her, and her eyes lit up.
“That man you’re obsessed with, he was just some old creep—a random stranger. Just like any other creepy stranger. Did Dopey Daphne think she was Sherlock Holmes?”
“The scratches, and the dolls, and the drawings—”
For a second, she looked confused. “Scratches? I…Daphne, we tricked you,” Lucy said.
“We were sick of watching you,” Justine said. “Wandering around for weeks looking at the posters.”
“We heard you going on and on,” Lucy said. “Asking everyone in class about Anneliese, about the ‘man!’”
“I wasn’t asking everyone…”
“You were—almost every day!” Lucy said, her face flushing. “You can’t even see how annoying you are, and…and…how much people laugh at you when you’re not around. You’re so obsessed with solving something, with being nosey!”
Lucy and I stared at each other for a moment, until she simply waved, lowered herself through the trapdoor, and began the climb back to the ground. Justine stayed in her spot on the floor, her legs dangling into the pit as if it was a swimming pool.
My thoughts were racing. Had I really thought I’d solved the mystery? Could such an unremarkable, pathetic little person really have thought such a thing?
For a long moment, I stared into the pit in the middle of the floor. Justine was so close to it—half in it—already back to eating her trail mix and tossing the bits she didn’t like into the hole. Her laughter had long since trailed off, so I wouldn’t have to hear it again. Her back was to me. There were two of us now, me and Justine.
#
Back then, more than a year ago, we’d been alone at the treehouse. Lucy and me. She was trying to get me to go up with her, but there were so many evens. She grabbed me by the hand and tried to pull me towards the trunk, but I held my ground.
“You’re really afraid?” she asked. “Come on, Daphne, you’ve got to be kidding.”
“If we go up there, there’ll be two of us inside. Too many evens.”
“But this is my favorite place, and we walked all the way here! You promised!”
“I didn’t know there would be so many evens around. I can’t, Lucy.”
Lucy stomped and kicked the trunk. “I’m getting so sick of having to put up with you being afraid of everything I want to do.”
“But you’re afraid too, sometimes,” I said without thinking.
She had her back to me, but I saw her body stiffen.
“Afraid of what?”
“Nothing.”
She turned towards me, a dangerous look in her eyes. “No, Daphne, go on. Afraid of what?”
“I didn’t mean it. I’m sorry.”
“Didn’t mean what?”
“Lucy, please…”
“Tell me! Tell me or I’ll run away and leave you here to get lost in the woods!”
And I had said it, and it had started everything.
“Your father.”
Eryn Natalia grew up in California's Central Valley. She holds an M.A. in English from California State University, Fresno.
