House of Thorns

by Isabel Strychacz

Genres: YA Horror

Synopsis

In the vein of The Haunting of Hill House, a teen returns to the mysterious house from her past to search for her missing sister and uncover the truth of Brier Hall in this atmospheric and eerie modern gothic novel.

Lia Peartree is haunted—by memories, by her past, by secrets, by the ones she left behind. Five years ago, the Peartrees fled their home—the infamous ancestral Brier Hall—and never looked back. But her oldest sister went missing that night, and there’s been no sign of her since.

In the aftermath, the Peartrees are traumatized and get by however they can. Lia’s remaining sister Ali says yes to any bad idea, and Lia tries so desperately to be the perfect daughter that it’s tearing her apart. But as the five year anniversary of the night they left nears, Lia begins seeing her missing sister everywhere, and memories of Brier Hall won’t leave her alone.

When Ali disappears with no warning except a cryptic phone call—“don’t follow me when I’m gone”—Lia is sure she’s gone back to Brier Hall. Lia must go home one final time and face what haunts her in an effort to find her sisters and uncover the truth of her past.

Release date: August 20, 2024

Publisher: Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers

Print pages: 288

Sample

Chapter One

ONE

The walk through the parking lot from the car to the school’s front doors is long enough that any number of things might happen on the way, and I hate to leave anything up to chance. Once I open the car door and step onto the asphalt, it’s ninety-seven steps. Anything can happen in ninety-seven steps. The earth itself might open and swallow me whole.

Stranger things have happened.

I know this firsthand.

I peer out the window, glancing back and forth like there’s some tennis match going on, when really there’s just a quickly emptying parking lot. All the kids are milling up the stone steps and through the doors; the first bell has already rung, and the tardy bell is ticking closer, and it’s the last day of school so everyone just wants it over with already. I want it over with more than anybody, but I can’t make my fingers grab the door handle.

Come on, Lia, I scream in my head. Screaming wakes me up. Screaming, even if no one else can hear it, is a way to stop the boiling water inside from spilling over. My breath catches. It’s just ninety-seven steps.

My hands are jittery as I clench them in my lap, and I crack my knuckles, pops sounding throughout the car. I can hear my breath loud in my ears. I glance up into the rearview mirror—my face is pale and pinched, my blond hair loose around my face. It’s my eighteenth birthday today, but I barely made an effort; I could hardly drag myself out of bed. I stare at my reflection, dark blue eyes the color of the deepest part of the sea looking back. Eyes the same color as my sisters’. Ali.

Avery.

I can’t stop thinking about how I saw her today.

Her.

Avery looked seventeen years old, still, always. There I was, walking out of the coffee shop with an iced latte—the only way I was going to celebrate my birthday—in one hand and my phone in the other, and then there she was. I could feel her watching me, right in my peripherals. I’d frozen in place, cold trickling down my back despite the heat, and when I blinked she had moved. Closer. I could feel her breathing on me; a slight breeze wrapped around us and I swear a tendril of her blond hair floated around my shoulders. The knowledge that if I turned I would look her straight in the eyes was heavy on my mind.

And I couldn’t.

So instead I ran to my car, fumbling for the keys, birthday coffee falling to the asphalt, splattering everywhere. Forgotten.

And now here I am, unable to get out of my goddamn car because there’s a chance my missing—dead?—sister might be waiting for me.

Come on, Lia. My hands are shaking. I place one on the door handle and breathe out. I’m only ninety-seven steps away from the front doors.

Ninety-seven steps away from safety. Relative safety.

Because here’s another thing I know: Buildings are not as safe as people like to think. I’m not talking structurally. The flat, sun-soaked town of Daley sits right on the San Andreas Fault, after all, so one would hope these houses are sound.

I’m talking about the bones.

The memories that lie awake in the floorboards, waiting for someone to step on them. Out they come with a creak. I’m talking about the things that live inside houses, all the screams and fights and happy birthday songs and secrets told. Those things don’t leave.

Those things are dangerous.

It is ignorance, it is wishful thinking. It is the ostrich sticking its head in the sand, willfully oblivious to oncoming danger. It is the small child pulling all her limbs under the covers so the monsters can’t get her. I was that child, and here is what I learned: Houses are not safe. Homes will not protect you. The buildings simply like to pretend, to lull their prey into a false sense of security.

Sudden movement flashes by the window, followed by a sharp rap-rap on the glass, and I jump in my seat, a strangled scream never leaving my throat. Stuck.

Avery?

Amid the remaining kids hurrying into school, Diya stands at the side of my car, peering in through the window at me. Her dark hair whips around her shoulders and she shakes it back.

“The tardy bell’s about to ring!” she says through the closed window, the words muffled by glass. She then grins and shows off the bulging plastic bag dangling from her fingers. It has DALEY GAS MART emblazoned in blocky red letters on the stretched plastic. “Cupcakes!” Diya says. “Happy birthday!” Everything Diya says ends in an exclamation point, and she never asks me about my past: two of the reasons I hang out with her and her friend group. I’m on the fringes, even after years. It’s my own fault. I push them all away.

“Come on!” Diya says, and it sounds much nicer when she says it aloud than when I scream it in my mind. She cocks her head toward me, a flash of puzzlement finally crossing her face. Her eyes dart to my hand clenched on the steering wheel.

Get a grip, Lia! I scream in my head again, pinching the soft skin between my thumb and index finger until there’re little half-moon crescents from where my nails have dug in. Come on. Come ON! There’s someone waiting for me now. I have to get out of this car. My fingers are weak on the door handle. Legs: shaking. Mouth: dry. I tell myself that nothing can get me here in the parking lot of a bone-dry central California school. There’s CCTV everywhere. There’s Lori, the school security guard who holds court on her golf cart. There’s a Taco Bell and a coffee shop and the Daley Gas Mart right across the street. Super normal. Sunny. All the shadows meet their matching objects and none of them reach out toward me with sticky dark fingers. Loitering kids who are tempting both fate and the tardy bell are filming each other doing shitty kickflips off the curb. They all have faces undistorted by my memories. They are all just kids.

Everything is fine.

I get out of the car.

One step. Two. I forget that I’ve done this before, that I’ve done this multiple times a week for months now. Each time feels like the first. Each time the anxiety roots me in place, dragging me down, down…

“Hey,” says Diya, then trails off with a repeated, “Happy birthday…” Her voice dips low in uncertainty. “You okay?”

“Um. Yes,” I reply, noncommittal, flustered. My chest is still tight; I can’t talk when I can hardly breathe.

“Did someone say something?” she asks, still uncharacteristically serious.

I breathe out. Diya knows none of my inner issues, just the public ones. That’s the problem: This entire town knows the Peartree family’s public issues. A few years ago, the whole world knew, because a missing sister and fleeing from your house in the middle of the night get people’s attention. The comments used to bother me, but now I try to just ignore them. I can tell when the questions are coming; I can tell if someone recognizes me because a light comes into their eyes and you can literally see the moment the pin drops that that’s a Peartree! Now that I’m about to graduate, they tend to flip between “You’re that ghost girl, right?” and “But was it really haunted?”

It was worse before when my sister Ali was also still at school. Because upperclassmen’s questions tend to be blunt and hard-edged and not really questions at all: “Oh, Peartree. You’re Ali’s sister.”

I hate all questions equally.

“No, no, I’m fine,” I reply weakly, accepting the bag of gas station cupcakes from Diya with a small smile. She’s still looking at me all concerned, so I offer up a slip of truth. “It’s almost been five years since—since it all happened.”

“Lia—”

“Honestly,” I interrupt, “I’m fine, I promise.” I shake the bag of treats. “Thank you for these, Diya. I think I just—I don’t know. Maybe my senioritis is finally kicking in.”

Diya gives me a hesitant grin and, as I follow her up the steps, we duck our heads at the glares from the front-office staff. “That’s why your grades are still so good. My senioritis started sophomore year.”

She’s wrong; my grades are good because if I throw all my energy into homework, I don’t have as much time to think about the reality of my life and the unreality of my past. They’re good because one sister is gone, and the other is absent, and I’m the one who has to be perfect, who has to hold it together.

But I’m in pretending mode now, so I keep all this to myself and instead chatter aimlessly with Diya about birthdays and boys. Normal. Be normal.

We walk together into the O-Wing, the original building where all the English and arts classes are now held. The rest of the school looks like a prison, concrete and hulking, but not these classrooms.

Large windows and whitewashed walls cast early-morning light onto the original wooden floorboards. They’re pitted planks that creak when you walk across them. I love this building but hate the floors.

Diya and I hurry through the door of our English class right as the tardy bell goes off. The class is in a last-day-of-school uproar, everyone talking over one another and signing yearbooks. The floorboards groan with every step as I walk to my desk. Just like Brier’s had, years and years ago. Each creaking footstep brings back memories, hot and fresh, as though they’ve been waiting for a moment to make their appearance.

I try to push Brier from my mind as the wooden plank sinks slightly with an audible groan and I know that sound I know that sound I—I’ve barely been at school for two minutes and Brier is already forcing its way into my thoughts. Not now. Not again. I clench my fists, dig my nails into my palms once again. I kept them long for this very reason. To bring myself back to reality.

“Happy birthday!” sings a classmate.

I smile tightly, sliding into the desk, trying not to fidget. Trying to look normal. My fingernail polish is pink and peeling. A pink flake drifts casually to the floor.

Diya is still walking to her desk at the far side of the room, and floorboards are screaming under her. No one is screaming, Lia. My fingernails press hard, as for a single second I’m back there—there—and my head is filled with screaming. My mom’s? Ali’s? Avery’s?

Don’t think about that. Don’t think about her.

Fingernails dig harder. I clasp my hands in front of me. Hard, harder. Painfully tight. I tried to focus on that pain, turn it into a spear of clarity. I will not have a panic attack in this classroom. I will not. I already am—no, breathe. I am okay. There’s no screaming. Nothing is wrong.

I am not okay, and everything is wrong, but there is nothing I can do about it.

People are looking. Stop this. Stop this.

People are looking, and I let my hands drop to my sides, the back of one covered in red crescents, the half-moons of my fingernails.

“You okay?” murmurs Matteo, who’s sitting next to me, and he sounds like he actually wants to know.

It’s the second time I’ve been asked that in less than an hour, and it’s not even nine in the morning. I can’t read the look in his eyes—is it pity? Concern? Or maybe there is nothing there. It wouldn’t be the first time I projected stuff like this onto others. I give a brisk nod: cool, calm, collected. I don’t think he believes it.

Pull yourself together, Lia! Nails dig in harder and I breathe a long breath out, then sit up and square my shoulders. I can be fine for one class period. People pretend to be fine all the time.

The English teacher is a young woman just out of teacher training, and she obviously has her own case of senioritis. She sits behind the desk and surreptitiously texts someone as the classroom moves on around her. I feel so detached, as if I’m viewing the room from above my own body. I keep feeling the weight of eyes fall on me, and I know that just beyond the laughter and nonchalant chatting my classmates are watching me. Like I am some wild animal in a cage.

I need to get out of here.

I want to go home and bury myself under a mound of covers, but I steel myself. I don’t walk out on things—I can just imagine my mom’s face if I did. And I am a good daughter. I am the perfect daughter.

The floor creaks next to me, and although I know it’s just Matteo shifting in his desk, I jump in sudden agitation as the sound crawls through my bones, scratching its way through. Avery’s face flashes into my mind—Avery as I saw her this morning, as she crept just out of full view. The wisp of her hair curling up in the breeze, brushing my cheek. The blankness of her expression I could only see out of the corner of my eye. The shock of seeing her—no, of remembering seeing her, because of course I didn’t see her—makes every part of my body go cold. It’s the same feeling as when my sisters and I jumped off the rocks at the side of the cove into the water of Brier’s private beach. That sudden full-body immersion of ice cold that shocks you into suspension. That locks your limbs as you’re pulled under, as you sink down, down, deeper…

I gasp my way out of the water, out of the memory.

Is that salt in my mouth?

Get a grip get a grip get a GRIP—

Screw making it through class before leaving. Screw being the perfect daughter.

I’m standing before I even realize I’m standing. I was seated, I was underwater, and then suddenly I was propelled upward. I’m towering over everyone, swaying.

“Lia?” Matteo says.

“Lia?” Diya calls from across the room. I am back underwater. Her voice sounds like she’s speaking from light-years away.

“Lia?” says our teacher, finally sitting up and shoving her phone under a pile of graded final papers. “Everything okay?”

“I’m s-sorry—I have to go,” I say to her, to the room, to the air. “I feel sick.” I would never make a scene like this usually—that’s Ali’s job—but I’m a senior and I never have to see any of these people ever again if I don’t want to. I don’t care what they mutter about me behind my back.

I avoid looking down at Matteo or over at Diya, where she sits with her other friends. Her normal friends. I can’t bear to see their faces right now—I’m sure they have twin expressions of pity, of confusion, of what-the-fuck-is-wrong-with-you.

“I have to go,” I repeat, my voice dull, as if I’ve been screaming. Maybe I have been.

I don’t know much of anything anymore. Reality takes too much of my energy to be bothered with. Reality is where I’m a ghost to my own mom. Reality is where I hate my sister. Where Avery is dead. Where we’re hundreds of miles from the house that still has us in its thrall.

I don’t wait for a go-ahead. If I stay here another second, I’m worried I’ll either burst into tears or have a full-blown panic attack. I can feel the edges of panic, inky black and fathoms deep, already creeping in and winding its way around my throat, my heart, my lungs.

But that can’t happen. Not here. I turn and run out of the room, floorboards screaming as I rush over them, and let the door slam shut behind me.