PART 1
The New World
1
She was awakened by the monster knocking at the door.
Lily knows better than most how unlikely it is that this is real. Through her years of training and now her days in the courtroom providing expert testimony on psychological states of mind, she has learned how shaky the recollections of children can be. And she was only six when it happened. The age when certain things get stuck in the net of real memory, and other things you try to sell yourself on having happened but are in fact made up, turned into convincing bits of dream.
What is verifiably known is that Lily was small for her age, green-eyed, her straight black hair snarled into a nest. The sole survivor. And there was the body, of course. Her motherâs.
She rereads the documents the authorities submitted the same way others return to old love letters or family photo albums, tracing the outlines of faces. Itâs an act of remembrance, but something more too. Sheâs looking for the missing link. Because though the coroner and police reports seem decisive enough, plausible enough, she can see all the ways the facts were stretched to connect to other facts with long strings of theory in between. It was a story assembled to close a file. A terrible, but not unprecedented, northern tale of an animal attack: a creature of considerable sizeâa bear, almost certainly, drawn by scents of cooked meat and human sweatâhad forced its way into their cabin a couple hundred miles short of the Arctic Circle in Alaska and torn her mother apart, leaving Lily undiscovered in her bedroom, where sheâd hidden from the screams.
Acceptable on the face of it, as such stories are designed to be. Yet there was so much that wasnât known it made for a narrative that collapsed upon itself at the merest prodding. Why, for instance, had the bear not eaten her mother? Where could it have gone that the hunters who went after it only a day later failed to find its tracks?
The most puzzling part was how she made it out of the woods.
Three miles to the only road that led, after a two-hour drive, to Fairbanks. The trail to the cabin a set of muddy ruts in summer, but in the subzero depths of February impossible to reach except by snowmobile, and her motherâs Kawasaki remained untouched at the site. When and why did she eventually leave the cabin? How did she get through the woods all on her own?
The year she turned thirty Lily spent her summer vacation conducting an investigation of her own. She traveled north to see the cabin for herself and walked from the site through an aspen forest to the rusting trailer her mother had called their âsecret place.â She spoke with all the people she could find who were mentioned in the reports.
That was how she came to meet one of the hunters whoâd assisted on the case. An old man by the time she took a seat next to the bed where he lay in an old-age home for Native Americans in Anchorage. A man old enough to have nothing to lose and grateful for the visit of a young woman.
âMy name is Lily,â she told him. âLily Dominick? When I was a girlââ
âI remember you.â
âYou do?â
âThe one the bear didnât touch.â He shook his head with a kind of sad amusement, as if at the recollection of a practical joke gone wrong. âExcept it wasnât a bear.â
âHow do you know?â
âMarks in the snow,â he answered, running his fingers through the air to indicate legs. âFrom the cabin to some birch about a quarter mile in. And not bear tracks either.â
âThat wasnât in the report.â
âIt wouldnât be. I told the dumb suit about itâthe federal investigatorâbut he didnât even bother looking because he said the snow had blown it clear. But I saw them fine. Not a machine, not snowshoes. Not boots.â
âThen what?â
He smiled and showed her the half dozen stumps of his teeth. âThe closest thing? What I told the dumb suit? A horse.â
âA horse,â Lily repeated. It wasnât a question. It was to hear from her own mouth something at once impossible and deeply known.
âThe suits never put that in any of the write-ups. âTo avoid embarrassment.â Mine, I guess,â the old man said. âBecause thereâs no wild horses in Alaska. And no kept horse could have made it through snow that deep even if one had been hauled up that far. It couldnât have gotten in, which means it couldnât have gotten out.â
It left the question of what happened to be answered by a hypothesis supported by a patchwork of forensics and animal behavior testimony. Lily had been of little help. Deemed unreliable given her age, and traumatized by the shock of losing her only parent. What made her version of events all the more dismissible was the obvious fantasy sheâd created. Sheâd spoken of the dark outline of a ghoul bent over her motherâs form, followed by the appearance of a magical creature that carried her out of the bush on its back. Being a psychiatrist now, Lily knew it to be true: children made things up all the time, not only for pleasure, but sometimes to survive.
Even today she âremembersâ things from that night. A handful of details recalled with the clarity of a lived event.
She was awakened by the monster knocking at the door.
She thinks of it as this, as a monster, because she knows it wasnât a bear. Because bears donât knock before entering. Because the one difference between animals and people is that animals donât murder, they hunt.
Because she saw it.
2
No matter the weather, Dr. Lily Dominick walks to work every day. Up Second Avenue from her apartment and across the Robert F. Kennedy Bridge to the broad flats of playing fields and institutional campuses of Randalls Island. From there, the most direct way to the Kirby Forensic Psychiatric Center would be to follow the service road that runs beneath the interstate, but Lily keeps to the river instead, sharing the pathway with only the most serious runners and a handful of bored nannies pushing strollers. It takes a little longer, but she always arrives early. There is nothing in her life to make her late.
On this morning, a blue-domed October wonder, she stops to take in the island of Manhattan she canât help but see, from this south-facing perspective, as a primary school class picture arranged according to height: the stubby apartment buildings and anonymous housing projects growing into the show-offy towers of Midtown. Yet itâs not the view that holds her. She looks across the churning water at the smallest building of them allâright up front, where she was made to stand surrounded by strangers in the classroom pictures of her youthâand tries to assess herself as she might the accused she puts questions to at work.
Why is the cabin with you today?
Because of my dream last night.
The old dream. The one you havenât had in years.
Itâs been a while, yes.
The dream of riding a white horse through the woods after your mother died?
Not died. Killed. And I donât think it was a dream. I donât think it was a horse.
Even now? You still think it actually happened? You still believe in magic?
Lily doesnât have an answer for these last questions. Which makes her like most of her clients. They can tell you what they saw, how they did it, what arguments the voices in their heads made. But whether any of it was real? Itâs like asking a child if the thing living under their bed is real.
She has a gift for the job. One that goes beyond her exceptional performances on exams and the workaholism that was mistaken for ambition but was in fact the comfort she felt walking the asylumâs halls. She finds a music in the shouted obscenities and hellish moans emitted from the cells. And then there are the clients themselves. Mutilators, stalkers, worshippers of their own churches of the occult. Malignant souls that most, including her colleagues, largely regard as beyond understanding. Yet Lily doesnât see them that way. She can enter the burnt forests and rubbled cities of their minds and find the pathway to their intentions, the core of their wants buried under ash and rock.
âWhy did you do it?â she asks as the final query in most of her interviews.
âI donât know,â the murderer or rapist replies.
âI do,â Lily says.
She starts walking again, toward the pale brick walls of the Kirby ahead of her, its plainness and enormity not even trying to hide the madhouse that it is. Most of the people she works with, the social workers and orderlies, regularly call the building ugly, or as one bow-tied district attorney who repeatedly hits on her and she repeatedly denies likes to put it, âthe Pandemonium on Hell Gate Circle.â Lily couldnât disagree more. It was true that where she worked was the sort of place you never wanted to end up. Thatâs why she thought it architecturally honest for it to appear that way. It looked like hell for a reason.
There were so many other positions Lily could have pursued, cushy appointments where sheâd refer violent offenders to public institutions like the Kirby but wouldnât have to deal with them directly. Safe and sound. But that was never what she was looking for. It was satisfying to find something you had an affinity for in a university lecture hall, but once she arrived at the Kirby she found it electrifying to practice it in the field. Lily had a special talent for hearing echoes of the demonic voices in the thoughts of her clients, a kind of empathy that her supervisor, Dr. Edmundston, believed marked her for even greater success than sheâd already enjoyed in her first few years out, though he admitted that it frightened him a little sometimes. It frightened Lily a little sometimes too. But although the Kirby represented the grimiest corner of psychiatric work, Lily found everything she needed in it. She took home more than enough money for a single woman in a less-than-great apartment who doesnât go out much. And she had never wanted the work to be safe.
You couldnât admit to it, it was unprofessional, it was wrong, but Lily finds stimulation, something almost like arousal, in glimpsing the most diseased minds. Itâs like looking over the edge of a cliff. If you get close enough, you can feel what it would be like to take one more step and have the world slip out from under you.
A runner rushes toward her.
One of the gaunt marathoners who circle the cityâs edges day and night. Usually they pass without noticing sheâs there. But this one, a woman with dark hair tied into a braid that lashes against one shoulder and then the other with each stride, looks directly at her.
There were only a couple of photos ever taken as far as she knew, waxy squares issued from the lips of Polaroid cameras. Pictures of a woman she would compare her own likeness to and sometimes see herself, sometimes not. But as the running woman glances back as she passes, Lily recognizes her.
The running woman looks exactly like her mother.
3
What are you? Some kind of psycho?
Dr. Lily Dominick punches in her security code at the staff entrance as she mentally edits the indictment that has ticker-taped through her mind.
What are you? Some kindâ
Some kind of what?
How would the assistant director of Forensic Psychiatry at one of the leading maximum security institutions of its kind diagnose herself? She knows where to start, anyway. Symptoms. First, a dream from the night before involving her rescue on the back of a white beast. This morning, the memory of a monster as it stood in a pool of blood on the threshold of the cabinâs door. And just now, the hallucination of her mother in the face of a stranger.
She canât do it. Itâs impossible for Lily to see herself as a cl...