If We Were Villains: A Novel

An hour or so later I woke again, to the sound of someone banging on the door. There was a voice, too—female. Not Richard. I propped myself halfway up and Meredith stirred beside me. Whoever it was knocked again, more insistently.

“Oliver, I know you’re in there,” Filippa said. “Get up.”

She sounded hollow, like a bad recording of herself. I didn’t want her to wake Meredith, so I slid out of the bed and opened the door without bothering to find my jeans.

Filippa’s face was drawn and pale. “Get dressed,” she said. “Both of you. You need to come down to the dock. Now.”

She left, walking quickly, head bent. I stood in the doorway for a moment, surprised by her failure to make some scathing remark. Something was wrong—wrong enough that my waking up déshabillé in Meredith’s room didn’t matter. I closed the door again and began grabbing my clothes off the floor. “Meredith,” I said, urgently. “Wake up.”

We went down to the dock together, bleary-eyed and puzzled.

“What the fuck is going on?” she asked. “It’s not even light out.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Filippa seemed upset.”

“About what?”

“She didn’t say.”

We stumbled down the rickety wooden stairs built into the side of the hill in partial darkness. A soft muffled cold, like a blanket of snow, pressed in around me and made me shiver, even though I’d pulled a coat and a sweatshirt on. The steps were littered with rocks and twigs, and the danger of stumbling was so great that I kept my eyes on my feet until the last step finally flattened out and I glanced up. A few stubborn stars still peered down from a sky barely lighter than the jagged black branches of the trees. I paused as my eyes adjusted to the sunless, twilit world. Shadow shapes solidified as James, Alexander, Wren, and Filippa—all standing there on the dock, staring out at the water. I couldn’t see past them, see what it was they were looking at.

“What is it?” I said. “Guys?”

Alexander was the only one to turn my way, and he just shook his head—a tiny, labored motion.

“What’s going on?” Meredith said. There was finally a note of worry in her voice.

I pushed between James and Wren, and the vast expanse of the lake opened up in front of me, mist blurring the lines of the banks. Tiny ripples murmured around a grotesque pale shape, partly submerged where the water should have been glassy and smooth. Richard floated on his back, neck twisted unnaturally, mouth gaping, face frozen in a Greek mask of agony. Blood crawled dark and sticky across his face from the crush of tissue and bone that used to be an eye socket, a cheekbone—now cracked and broken open like an eggshell.

We stood numb and silent on the dock as the earth ceased to turn. A terrible stillness held our six warm breathing bodies and Richard—unmoving, inanimate thing—in the same unbreakable thrall. Then there was a sound, a soft groan; Richard stretched one hand feebly toward us, and the whole world lurched. Wren stifled a scream and James grabbed my arm.

“Oh, God.” He choked on the word. “He’s still alive.”