Harrow Lake Read online

  Dial Books

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, New York

  Copyright © 2020 by Kat Ellis

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Ellis, Kat, author.

  Title: Harrow Lake / Kat Ellis.

  Description: New York : Dial Books, [2020] |

  Summary: “Lola Nox is sent to live with her estranged maternal grandmother in the mining town where her horror movie director father’s most iconic film was set, when paranormal incidents and whispers of a century-old monster make her question if she’ll make it out alive”—Provided by publisher.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2019038738 (print) | LCCN 2019038739 (ebook) | ISBN 9781984814531 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781984814548 (ebook)

  Subjects: CYAC: Monsters—Fiction. | Fathers and daughters—Fiction. | Child abuse—Fiction. | Secrets—Fiction. | Horror films—Fiction.

  Classification: LCC PZ7.E473555 Har 2020 (print) | LCC PZ7.E473555 (ebook) | DDC [Fic]—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019038738

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019038739

  This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

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  For Ian

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Transcript of Interview with Nolan Nox

  One Year Earlier

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  One Year Later

  Transcript of Interview with Nolan Nox—Contd.

  Two Years Later . . .

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  TRANSCRIPT OF INTERVIEW WITH NOLAN NOX, DIRECTOR OF NIGHTJAR, FOR SCREAM SCREEN MAGAZINE (NIGHTJAR TWENTIETH-ANNIVERSARY SPECIAL FEATURE)

  CJL: C. J. Lahey, columnist with Scream Screen

  NN: Nolan Nox, director of Nightjar

  CJL: Thanks for agreeing to talk with me for Scream Screen’s Nightjar twentieth-anniversary special feature, Nolan—do you mind if I call you Nolan?

  NN: How about this: I’ll let you call me Nolan like we’re old pals, and you won’t say a damn word about me smoking while we do this. I’m sick of you people telling me I’m not allowed to smoke in my own office.

  CJL: [Laughs] Deal. So, it’s twenty years since Nightjar first whipped horror fans into a frenzy worldwide. What do you think it is, exactly, about this movie that really fired up such an intense and long-lasting reaction from fans?

  NN: [Pause] That’s really what you want to ask me? Nightjar won dozens of awards, including two Oscars, and you want me to tell you why my film is good?

  CJL: Okay, let’s take a different approach. [Pause] In Nightjar, we see a small Prohibition-era town cut off from civilization by a freak storm—we’re talking fallen trees, floods, a contaminated water supply, and all roads out of town blocked. Nightjar’s inhabitants are starving, and they’re caught up in this spiraling sense of panic and superstition and fear. That claustrophobic tension you created within the film demanded the perfect setting, and to this day fans still flock to the town of Harrow Lake, Indiana, where you filmed Nightjar—maybe looking to capture their own little slice of Nightjar terror. What was it about Harrow Lake that made you choose it for your backdrop?

  NN: Harrow Lake had hardly changed since the late twenties. As a mining town, it was almost destroyed by some kind of ground disturbance back then, leaving half of it buried under a landslide and the other turned to Swiss cheese with these gaping craters in the hillside. They had to totally rebuild and I guess they couldn’t afford to modernize it after that, which was lucky for us. Everything there—the houses, the stores, even the damn people—was in mint 1920s condition. Then there were the caves, of course. When I went with the scout to see Harrow Lake, I just knew. It was perfect.

  CJL: You mentioned the caves just now—those are some of my favorite scenes—but filming there didn’t quite go according to plan, did it?

  NN: [Pause] I assume you’re referring to Moss.

  CJL: Well, yeah. It’s kind of unusual for one of the crew to disappear during filming, isn’t it? [Laughs]

  NN: Ron Moss was a competent cameraman, and a valued member of my crew. His disappearance wasn’t unusual, it was tragic—and damned inconvenient.

  CJL: Oh, I didn’t mean to make light of it. But could you describe what happened leading up to his disappearance?

  NN: Are you sure your readers will want to know all this? We’re retreading a lot of old ground here. [Pause] All right. We were nearing the end of our filming schedule for the caves and had just wrapped the scene where Little Bird is cannibalized by the starving villagers. The crew were getting packed up to move on to the next location when we heard noises coming from inside the caves—strange clicking sounds. I’d never heard anything like it. Anyway, one of the other crew members noticed Moss was no longer with us, and all his equipment was just lying there on the grass where he’d been filming. I’m talking expensive kit, and Moss wasn’t the type to dump it and wander off. We searched as far as we could, but saw no sign of him. By that point, the noises had stopped, and we called in the local authorities to carry out a proper search. They didn’t find him.

  CJL: But they did find human remains.

  NN: [Sighs] Those were nothing to do with Moss. The ruin of the church where we were filming was inside a sinkhole. It had collapsed when the ground shifted a century before. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out the bones they found in the caves were from back then—either from the graveyard next to the church, or from someone who got caught in the landslide.

  CJL: So you don’t believe in Harrow Lake’s local legend, then?

  NN: You mean Mister Jitters? Don’t be ridiculous. There’s no hundred-year-old monster eating the locals, and there never was. Harrow Lake is just a small town that got hit by a terrible disaster and never fully recovered. I’m not surprised they explained it away with some paranormal nonsense—curses
and whatnot. It’s easier than admitting they mined too deep into their own hillside and damn near buried themselves. [Pause] Actually, cut that last part. People who live in these hick towns are so quick to take offense, and I can’t be bothered dealing with the hate mail.

  CJL: Sure. Go again, whenever you’re ready.

  NN: Okay. [Pause] I’m not sure what exactly we heard in the caves that night. That clicking . . . maybe it was some natural phenomenon, maybe not. All I know is that I never saw anything unusual in or near the caves, and I have no reason to believe Moss’s disappearance was anything other than an accident. We’ll probably never know exactly what happened there. Look, these stories—small-town legends about monsters or demons or evil spirits—they’re all just an excuse for people to avoid seeing the real monsters all around them. It’s a way to shatter the proverbial mirror. That’s why I make the movies I do: I’m reconstructing the mirror. [Pause] Make sure you use that, all right? That’s a damn good quote.

  CJL: [Laughs] Oh, I will. But just to pick up on a point there: Don’t you think it’s a little coincidental—beyond coincidental, in fact—that your daughter also disappeared when she visited Harrow Lake last year?

  NN: I don’t want to talk about Lola.

  CJL: But isn’t it strange that—

  NN: I thought we were here to discuss Nightjar. Let’s leave my daughter out of this and move on.

  CJL: But—

  NN: That wasn’t a suggestion. [Pause] Let’s take five. Maybe you can use that time to pull your head out of your ass and start asking me relevant questions.

  [PART ONE OF TRANSCRIPT ENDS]

  ONE YEAR EARLIER

  LOLA

  CHAPTER ONE

  I bury my secrets in a potted plant on West Seventeenth Street. There’s nobody inside the brightly lit lobby of the apartment building next to me, and only a couple of people farther along the street. A man and a woman. From their loud, slurred voices, I guess they’ve just rolled out of Bar Qua. They’re not interested in a seventeen-year-old girl loitering next to an overly primped topiary.

  I shove three things into the dirt. Nothing too shocking, really: a keychain, a lighter, and a lurid pink lipstick.

  The keychain I stole from some guy. I saw a girl give it to him outside the public library, and there was something about the heat in her cheeks that made me tell my tutor I was going to use the restroom, and I followed the boy inside. The moment he took his jacket off, I grabbed the keychain from his pocket.

  It’s not fancy or expensive, only a silver letter D. I just wanted to see if I could get away with it.

  The cigar lighter is Nolan’s—my dad’s. I took it because I knew it would piss him off. That’s a good, solid reason, right? It’s gold, and has the looping double N of his initials engraved on the casing. I’m sorry I didn’t guess he would accuse and then fire the housekeeper when the lighter failed to show up, but I didn’t, and he did, and so it became a secret.

  The pink lipstick is my newest acquisition. I stole it tonight from the restroom of Bar Qua—the same bar the couple up the street just stumbled out of. I just couldn’t resist hiding one last secret before leaving New York behind.

  I don’t always take things that aren’t mine. I usually just scribble my secrets on scraps of paper and bury those. But I’ve been stealing more and more over the last few weeks. Small things, like a pen or a pair of sunglasses left on a restaurant table. Easily missed. Easily slipped into a pocket or purse. I know this isn’t a healthy development or anything, but at least it is a development. My life doesn’t have many of those. And it’s good to have a hobby, I guess.

  There was a farewell party going on in the bar. This guy with hard, over-gelled hair and a loose tie was at the center of it all. I hung around, having a few drinks, eating hors d’oeuvres, daring someone to notice me.

  Look at me. Go on, look.

  But they didn’t know that I’m the daughter of a legend. All they saw was a strange girl not talking to anyone. Then came the inevitable frown from Mr. Hard Hair, the exchange of raised eyebrows with Ms. Chardonnay and Ms. Lipstick Teeth: Do you know her? No, you? No. And then the subtle shift in temperature as that group of connected people closed ranks and froze me out.

  Of course they didn’t recognize me. Nobody ever does unless I’m next to Nolan. He trots me out all the time at parties. Industry parties. Parties where people know him well enough that they wouldn’t dream of taking my picture or paying me more than the most fleeting of glances, because everybody knows that you don’t cross Nolan Nox.

  Twenty minutes after Mr. Hard Hair and Ms. Chardonnay and Ms. Lipstick Teeth looked me straight in the eye, I’d be surprised if even one of them remembered seeing me.

  After being dismissed, I wandered to the restroom and saw the garish pink lipstick sitting next to the sink. Two young women—one of them the owner of the lipstick, I guess—were involved in a very animated discussion about some older woman named Celine Reynard who was, by all accounts, a two-faced bitch. I washed my hands and pretended to smooth my hair in the mirror.

  “And the whole time, she was screwing Joanna’s teenage son behind her back! Can you imagine?”

  I could imagine—quite vividly, which I probably shouldn’t have. Celine, who I’d decided was probably elegantly gray-haired and svelte, with some pimply kid energetically grinding away while Joanna went about her day, making business calls or cooking a lasagna or driving to the liquor store or whatever mothers do, totally oblivious to the skin show going on behind her back.

  Maybe Joanna should pay a little more attention to her son.

  “What did you do?” the other woman asked.

  The first woman shrugged. “What could I do? I wasn’t going to be the one to tell Joanna and have Celine call me a liar to my face.”

  She used washing her hands as an excuse to break eye contact, her nostrils flaring. Was she lying? Her neck had started to turn blotchy.

  Before I could make up my mind, the other woman changed the subject to a boring update on her home renovations, so I tuned out. I was about to leave when my gaze snagged on the lipstick sitting next to the sink. Casually, I reached out and slipped it into my pocket. Walked to the door. Let the throbbing music of the bar swallow me.

  And they didn’t even glance my way. They were as oblivious as poor Joanna. But did that make me Celine Reynard—stealthy rogue, breaking all the rules? Or was I Joanna’s sweaty son, craving attention? I search the cracks in the sidewalk for an answer. If it’s there, it’s buried too deep for me to see.

  It isn’t the car itself, but the harsh screech of its tires that catches my attention. My heart sinks. It’s Nolan’s car, though I doubt he’s inside. This is confirmed when the driver’s-side window rolls down and my father’s assistant glares out at me. “Get in the car, Lola!”

  “Hey, Larry,” I monotone, making no move to get in. I tilt my head and tap my chin. “Did you do something new with your beard?”

  He hasn’t, of course. His beard is probably exactly the same as when he first grew it in kindergarten. Larry Brown is a short, stocky man with black hair covering pretty much every part of him you can see. I saw a documentary once about some guy who absorbed his twin in utero, but it kept growing inside him like a tumor until it was the size of a raccoon. When they cut it out, the tumor-twin was this mass of flesh with hair and teeth growing out of it.

  That’s what I think of when I see Larry.

  “Nolan texted me, said to come find you,” he says, ignoring the beard thing.

  “He texted you? Nolan doesn’t text.”

  “Well, he did tonight,” Larry snaps. I stifle a wince. For Nolan to text Larry rather than call, he must be too incandescent with rage to actually speak. And I caused that. “Damn it, Lola! You know you shouldn’t be here. He’ll be out of his mind worrying about you.” He sighs. He’s an aggressive sigher. I guess I’ve messed
up his plans for the night, whatever they were. “What were you thinking?”

  “Oh, Larry,” I drawl, channeling Lestat from Interview with the Vampire. “I thought only of oblivion, of course.”

  It’s easy for me to slide into another persona like this. I watch way too many movies.

  If Larry gets the reference, he gives no sign of it. He’s probably too distracted by the vein pulsing all the way up the middle of his forehead.

  I bite my lip, but stop as soon as I notice I’m doing it. Nolan would tell me I look like an airhead. Not Optimal.

  “How did you find me?” I ask.

  “You took Nolan’s key card. I tracked the chip in it.”

  Damn. I didn’t know he could do that.

  “I don’t want to go back yet,” I say. “Can’t I just have a little while longer?”

  Just a little more time, a little more air, and I’ll be fine. I only need a little bit more . . .

  “Lola, for the love of . . . no. Just get in the car.”

  Down the street, the drunk couple have become long-reaching shadows. If I ran after them, told them a strange guy was following me, would they let me go with them? Maybe for an hour, or a night? Or would they pretend not to hear, and keep walking?

  Larry leans against the steering wheel. The horn blares. Larry acts like he meant to do it. “Now, Lola.”

  I could do it. Just run . . .

  I get in the car. The door locks snap into place as Larry starts the engine. I stare at him in the rearview mirror, holding his gaze as I push the button to raise the privacy partition. He mutters something that sounds like “damn stupid teenagers” and shakes his head, breaking eye contact before the screen does it for him.

  Lights flash past the window as we hurtle between the high-rises of Hudson Yards. My eyes blur, and I start listing all the best things to say when I see Nolan. If I can just figure out a few Optimal things to distract him, I might survive the night. I mean, sure, he’ll be angry that I left the apartment on my own and without his permission. But he won’t really want a fight, not while all his energy is focused on his new project—and not when we’re about to be stuck with each other on an eight-hour flight. Besides, it was kind of his fault for not telling me we were moving again.