Rule of Three

by Sam Ripley

Genres: Horror; Psychological Thrillers; Suspense

Synopsis

The Whisper Man meets the paranoia of The Blair Witch Project in this terrifying suspense thriller about an urban legend coming true.

That’s the one. That’s the girl who’s going to die.

I didn’t believe in the Rule of Three. Not at first. It was just one of those urban myths you hear about all the time. A story my boyfriend told me about a girl cursed by the number three. A girl whose parents had killed themselves after her sibling had died in an accident. Which meant that she was doomed to die too because that’s the Rule of Three.

Bad things always happen in threes, they say, and they are right. Because it’s happening again.

But this time the curse is coming for me. And worst of all?

It’s coming for you, too.

Release date: August 6, 2024

Publisher: Atria/Emily Bestler Books

Print pages: 320

Sample

AMY

ONE

I wasn’t always crazy, but I was never sane.

I learned this the hard way, of course, and as with all the best lessons, I understood it too late to heed it. What should I have done? Could I have changed things? The questions don’t so much swirl around my mind as circle the drain of my sanity. Which leads to another question: Would knowing what I know now have helped me at the beginning?

Maybe by the end you’ll be able to answer that.

You better hope you can.

I’m no longer scared, which is a first. I’ve spent my whole life afraid: of the world, of pain, of fear itself. Fear has been my lifelong companion, the friend I didn’t want but who never took the hint. In that way, it was my one true friend, my most loyal friend, yet now even that friend has deserted me.

I can’t say I’m at peace—the mad can never rest—but I’m content as the end draws near. I’m content because I now understand what I can do. What I should do. A final good deed. One for the road, so to speak. This, what you’re reading now, is that good deed.

You’re welcome.

But let’s not be any more morose than we need to be so early on when there’s plenty of misery to come. Let’s start with a celebration instead, a party. They’re fun, right? I’ll tell you about my birthday.

Not the most recent one. I don’t want to overburden you before you’re ready. Besides, you don’t need to know that I didn’t even notice when the clock struck midnight or that I spent the hours that followed lost in my work, in my research. Too busy to see, too determined to listen. Too focused on trying to stay alive. So there’s no point starting there.

Stay tuned for more of that fateful day later.

No, I’ll begin by telling you about the last birthday I enjoyed, the last birthday that meant something. It meant so much in so many ways.

Ready? Here comes the flashback:

Steve said, “I don’t expect you to listen to us.”

Jenny said, “But you really should.”

I wasn’t listening because my heart was racing as I tried to make sure I had everything. The holy trinity: money, makeup, and medication.

My parents were exchanging looks and gestures. A whole silent language at work. I could see them out of the corner of my eye as I checked the contents of my bag. I felt like I was forgetting something, but I was so out of practice socializing I didn’t really know what I should be taking with me. My first house party at eighteen years old.

“You’re going to be freezing,” Steve said.

“I’ll be outside for like a minute tops.”

“If you take a coat, you can take it off. You can’t put one on if you don’t have one.”

“I have a jacket.”

He gave a sort of snorting huff. “If it doesn’t cover your behind—”

“Leave it behind,” I finish, rolling my eyes. “Yeah, yeah, I know.”

“Don’t ‘yeah, yeah’ me. I’m only trying to—”

“I think you look lovely, dear,” Jenny interrupted, her soothing hand finding Steve’s arm.

I didn’t respond because I didn’t like all this talk about what I was wearing. I was self-conscious enough as it was and terrified my clothes were just as lame as I thought. Missing so much high school meant I didn’t know the rules. There was only so much magazines could teach me about the outside world.

Jenny brushed a stray hair from my shoulder. “Your father doesn’t remember what it was like to be your age because he was born a grumpy old man. At the hospital they skipped the neonatal ward and took him straight to geriatrics.”

She smiled, pleased with herself. She was on her second glass of wine already. Steve made a 

 throaty grumble of displeasure Jenny’s way, which seemed to give her a small measure of extra satisfaction. I guessed the pills were starting to kick in given the glassy sheen to her eyes. I was glad she was feeling upbeat.

In the past they would have laughed, perhaps Jenny continuing the gentle mockery for a few more barbs as Steve stumbled over his words to defend himself. No doubt I would have joined in the fun, and Maya, too, the three girls in his life ganging up and taking turns to tease him, the big cave bear. And he, in response, probably chasing us around the house as we squealed and screamed while he bellowed threats to make us pay by way of raspberries, noogies, or the dreaded wet willies.

I realized they had both fallen silent for a moment like me, as if the three of us were all thinking the same thing at the same time, momentarily lost in the identical, impossible fantasy.

Steve was first to return to reality. “Regardless of what your mother says, I do remember what it was like at your age. I remember the pressure to fit in with my friends.” He was speaking in a soft tone because he wanted me to listen to his words as if he were a peer, not a father. “When everyone else is doing something, it’s incredibly hard not to go along with it too.”

Even before, Steve had been the worrier of the two. Tonight was my first night out in forever, and it was almost like I could hear each of his thundering heartbeats. He knew once I stepped through the front door he could no longer protect me.

Jenny didn’t add to his comment, but I knew the D-word was in her thoughts too.

No, not that D. Get your mind out of the gutter.

“I’m not going to take drugs,” I told them both. “Seriously, it makes like zero sense when I have a nightstand full of them already.”

Steve’s little speech was because ecstasy was in the headlines again as the go-to tabloid bogeyman. They were concerned because they’d read horror stories of supposedly quiet, ordinary teens suddenly turning into addicts or dying at raves, boiled in their own body heat. I didn’t get why anyone would want to go to those things, take pills bought from strangers with crazy eyes, and dance all night to such awful, soulless music.

“The last thing I want to do is swallow even more pills.”

There was frustration in my voice, but I couldn’t get angry with them. I didn’t want to lose them either. I was forever telling Steve to cook with less oil. I was always telling Jenny to slow down with the wine. We were holding on to each other so tightly we didn’t realize all three of us were asphyxiating under that unbearable pressure.

I know now they were more scared than I acknowledged at the time. Steve was doing everything possible to resist asking me to please stay home. It wasn’t a coincidence that Jenny was on that early second glass of wine. I think they were always scared. I think they were so used to hiding what they really 

 felt that I wonder now if they ever showed me their true selves. I never truly recognized their pain because I was too distracted trying to cope with my own.

Grief is selfish like that.

I’d spent my middle teen years in more hospitals than classrooms, with more doctors than teachers, talking to more therapists than school friends. I could barely recall the time before that, so as I was about to leave the house, it felt like I’d been waiting my entire life to start finally living.

Not my eighteenth birthday, but my first.

“Our daughter is a smart girl,” Jenny said to Steve. Then to me, “Aren’t you, honey?”

I nodded.

Steve sighed. “I’m just pointing out that even if you say no and they make fun of you, they’ll come to respect you more.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Amy,” Jenny then said in a gentle tone, peering over her wineglass at me.

“Yeah?”

She said nothing but made a gesture that I didn’t understand for a moment, until I realized she was looking at my left wrist where my sleeve had ridden up a little. I twisted around and tugged the sleeve down over the hard ridge of discolored skin poking out. When I turned back, she’d drifted away so as not to embarrass me. She knew I hated people noticing my scars. I wore only long sleeves and kept several bracelets and bands around that wrist at all times. I had a huge collection of the things, which I wore in different combinations as and when the mood took me. They were handmade in arts-and-crafts treatment sessions. Except one. My lucky bracelet that Maya gave me. It hadn’t left my wrist since I first put it on. She’d died the next day.

“I can hear a car pulling up,” Steve said, voice full of bubbling fatherly stress. He peered out of the front window. Turned to face me, struggling to keep his expression even. “Why is there a car? Who’s driving?”

“It’s okay, it’s okay,” I tell him, rushing closer to take his hands in mine. “My friend’s dad, not her. He’s driving us all there. It’s okay, he’s just like you. He’s super careful, I promise. I promise.”

He swallowed. Tried hard to calm down. I could feel the dampness in his palms. I smiled to ease the panic in his eyes, and Steve managed to nod in return.

“Tell him it’s icier than it looks out there,” he said, struggling to keep his voice even and rational-sounding. “Temperature has plummeted this evening and it rained all afternoon.”

“I will. I swear. It’s icier than it looks, I’ll say. It rained this afternoon and the temperature’s dropped a lot since. Okay?”

He went to say more, to further emphasize the need for care, but he stopped himself. Instead,

he forced a little smile for my benefit. He didn’t want to lose another daughter, and yet he didn’t want me to take his fear out on me.

Jenny came closer. “Back by midnight.”

I resisted the urge to argue. Going out was a huge privilege and I was grateful, whatever the curfew attached to it. Besides, Jenny was being the stern one who Steve could not be. He did everything possible not to say no to me, and at my worst I would have gone too far exploiting that. I needed Jenny’s unwavering discipline as the authority figure as much as I needed Steve’s unquestioning kindness or I wouldn’t have survived. It was an excellent system, almost a tag team of sorts, and I bet it had been some strategy from my psychiatrist.

Amy needs a careful touch, I could imagine him saying, but not a weak one.

Oh, my parents were careful with me, and they were never weak. They had such resolve, and such unwavering love despite my explosive temper, pendulum mood swings, and relentless crying. I didn’t deserve them.

Jenny had already given me the speech about what kind of boys were trouble, to make sure I had my key and could recite our phone number and a thousand other things I didn’t care about. I just wanted to get out and have a good time.

I had planned that night with military precision. During the days and weeks leading up to it, I had never slept in, never acted up or argued. I ate all the food given to me, took all my meds, did all my homework, and generally behaved like those perfect kids in commercials. I wouldn’t have been allowed out otherwise. I knew I had to fake normalcy like never before, and I was determined as I had never before been. I was ready to have fun again. I was willing to attempt happiness.

And Steve and Jenny were finally prepared to trust me again.

“Promise me one thing,” Jenny said as I opened the front door.

Expecting some final lecture, I sighed. “What now?”

“That you’ll have a great time.”

“You’ve earned it,” Steve added.

It was so sweet, but it made me feel awkward. I hadn’t earned anything at all.

“Don’t wait up,” I said to change the subject, knowing full well they would be awake and anxious until the exact second I returned. But I couldn’t have that fun I so desperately needed if I was worried about them worrying.

I stepped outside, smiled and waved at my friends in the car at the end of the driveway, and was about to say goodbye to Steve and Jenny, only I didn’t get a chance because Steve suddenly wrapped his arms around me. A big hug

 because he filled a doorframe. He was like a lumbering giant. Slow and particular. There was a clumsy awkwardness about him that was so endearing. He could lift me up with one hand, yet had me open little bottle tops because he didn’t have the necessary dexterity in his massive sausage fingers. We both found such moments hilarious.

I was half crushed by the hug. I knew my friends could see me, and Steve smothered me for so long I could have died of embarrassment. I hated every second of it and wriggled out as fast as possible, pretending I failed to notice how sad that made him.

“I love you,” Jenny called after me as I rushed down the drive, so desperate to attempt happiness, to start my new life, that I didn’t even look back.

I had THE BEST time. I got drunk. I laughed. I danced. I even had my first proper, heavy breathing teenage make-out session. I mean, I know I had the best time, and yet I can’t remember how it felt. I have no emotional recollection of the party. What was the name of the boy who slid his hand into my underwear? Was I too nervous to enjoy it? I can’t even picture my friends now. Their watercolor faces are smudged by the thumb of regret; bright memory faded to monochrome.

All withers of that party, that fun, that Amy. 

All that lingers is Steve’s suffocating hug that embarrassed me and Jenny’s “I love you” that I didn’t reciprocate. Because when I returned home at midnight, truly happy for the first time in years, I found my devoted parents side by side in the garage, hanging from the ceiling by their necks.

TWO

Regrets, I’ve had way more than Sinatra. Like always calling Steve and Jenny Steve and Jenny. It was one of those stupid teenage things. I think I’d seen it in a sitcom, and it seemed rebellious and suited my need to define myself in whatever way I could. We all so badly want to be unique at that age, and yet often the most originality we can achieve is to copy someone else. They hated it, of course, but that only made me more determined to keep doing it. And then it became a habit, and by the time my sister died in the car accident it was too late to change. It still haunts me that I couldn’t give them that small kindness of hearing their only remaining daughter call them Mom and Dad.

Did they think of that when they were preparing the nooses?

Maybe I could have taken away a little of their sadness, and perhaps they wouldn’t have left me all alone.

Clarity is second only to hindsight of all the things I hate in this world.

After myself, of course.

I’m in an especially self-loathing mood. Having your stomach pumped will do that to a girl.

“I feel like a balloon with all the air forcibly sucked out.”

The doctor doesn’t look up from his clipboard. “How do you think you should feel at a time like this?”

I’m not sure how much condescension he wants me to infer from his tone, so I don’t answer.

Elizabeth is still working on the cover story. “I think one of those frat guys must’ve spiked your drink when we went for a smoke.”

Flipping a page, the doctor shakes his head a little. I’m pretty sure he’s annoyed I survived such a cocktail of alcohol, prescription drugs, and illegal narcotics. He shakes his head a lot. His nostrils flare to the point they look like they might fly away. He tuts every chance he can. Naturally, this gives me a small amount of comfort as I recover on the bed, my entire throat pulsing in waves of agony from the tubes they’ve stuck down there.

Lizzy sees me grimace. “Can’t you give her something for the pain?”

The doctor doesn’t look up. “I don’t think there’s enough room in her bloodstream for any more drugs.”

I take Lizzy’s hand. Squeeze it. “I’m okay. I just want to go home.” Seeing the pain and concern in her face hurts more than my deflated insides and raw throat. “I’ll be fine by tomorrow.”

“Indeed,” the doctor says. “Although I can’t quite believe you’re not in worse shape.”

“Why does it sound like you think this is her fault?” Lizzy barks. “She’s the victim here. Her drink was spiked.”

He finally looks up. “Would you like me to give the police a call on your behalf? I’m sure someone can be here within the hour to take a statement.”

I try not to squirm under his scrutinous gaze. “I… No, I don’t… I’m not sure what happened. I don’t know who…”

Lizzy says, “Can I take her home now or what?”

The doctor sighs. Nods in defeat.

Lizzy doesn’t know what happened, but she’s backing up my story because she knows I’m a sliver away from being locked up for my own protection. She pretends she was with me almost the entire night, that she willingly took as many drugs as I did, that I was laughing and joking the whole time—until I passed out—and had expressed no desire to kill or harm myself. The doctor doesn’t seem convinced, but maybe he’s willing to take a chance, to believe. Or perhaps he knows deep down what this was and also knows that with Lizzy backing me up there’s nothing he can really do.

Third time should have been the charm, yet I failed again like I had the previous two times.

First time: I didn’t cut deep enough. Second time: the rope frayed. Now: I threw up all those pills before they could work their magic.

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, as I’ve already mentioned, which was why I tried to copy Steve and Jenny. I figured it would be easy. Seriously, how hard can it be to hang yourself? Rope. Noose. Job done. Ignorance is bliss. I don’t weigh much, but turns out most rope isn’t all that strong. Should have gone with climbing rope, of course. Or the high-tensile stuff Steve and Jenny used. I just picked up something cheap from the DIY place. I can laugh about it now: buying cheap rope to save pennies when I was trying to kill myself. What was I trying to save the money for? One more flower at my cremation? Still, suicidal thoughts are by definition mental illness, so I try not to give myself too hard a time over the small stuff.

I’m not entirely sure what went wrong with the slit wrists. I bought the most expensive razor blades available. Closest shave possible, they claimed. No razor burn. Kissably smooth legs. Baby-soft cooch. I cut plenty deep and the right way too. No amateur bisecting cry-for-help grazes for me. No, I went along the tendons. I’ve never seen so much blood. But I woke up in the hospital. Somehow, I survived. A miracle. Thanks, oh-so-common blood type.

Tonight I can almost understand. The culmination of a prolonged period of weeping and wailing and too hard a comedown. Whatever my mental fragility, my body is pure cavewoman. Its demise requires a more determined effort. I popped everything I could lay my hands on and hoped for the best. Hope failed. Survival through laziness. Darwinism in reverse.

Define irony, Amy:

I’m too weak to overcome my own strength.

Lizzy takes me back once the condescending doctor signs the release. I’m silent the entire trip because I know if I open my mouth then all that’s going to come out of it will be sobs. I don’t want to cry for the whole journey. I don’t want her to see me like that. She must already be thinking how pathetic I am, how she wishes she never made friends with me in that first week of college.

Too late now, bitch. 

“Are you okay, hun?” she asks me.

I nod and touch my throat to show her it hurts, to explain away my silence. She buys it or doesn’t and is polite and kind enough not to challenge me on it. I don’t like to be challenged. I tend to lash out. Just don’t tell me I overreact a lot or I’ll go apeshit.

It’s a rocky ride because Lizzy’s car is a piece of trash because she’s an average person who doesn’t have piles of useful cash left behind by dead parents.

I’ve known her a long time, since we were both wayward teens. Lizzy is everything I wish I could be myself. She’s taller, slimmer, smarter, prettier, but above all else she’s normal. She had a shitty childhood growing up in care, sure, but she got over her issues and so isn’t covered in scars like me. She doesn’t have a list of prescribed medication longer than her arm. She’s the only family I have left, and oh how I miss her so much in these final weeks.

Where was I? Oh yes, I sleep for sixteen hours straight as my body recovers from all that poison.

My eyes open, and I smile.

I smile because she stands over me. The ceiling light is directly above her and gives her a halo of 60-watt light. She’s glorious.

“You look like an angel,” I say.

She laughs. “What did they give you again?”

I shrug. “You are an angel. You saved me.”

“While that’s a lovely thing to say I think the doctors should have a little of the credit.”

“They just pumped my stomach. Anyone can do that.”

“I’m not sure that’s true.”

“But you saved me. You protected me.”

She knows what I mean: she lied for me.

Glorious Lizzy stares down at me, my own personal heavenly guardian, but she looks sad. She is sad. “You meant it, didn’t you?”

I don’t answer. I can’t meet her gaze. I can’t bear this angel to think badly of me.

“Why?” she asks.

She knows why, of course. She knows all about Steve and Jenny and Maya and the hollowed-out husk of a girl they left behind. She doesn’t mean that. She means why now, why this time, what pushed me over this particular edge?

“Is it because the anniversaries are coming up?”

She’s known me long enough to know this is always a tough time of the year for me with my looming birthday. That means within the space of a few weeks it’s the anniversary of Maya’s death and the anniversary of Steve and Jenny’s suicide. Funnily enough, I didn’t feel like celebrating when I turned nineteen, and then twenty. My twenty-first will be no different.

I shrug in response, which isn’t an easy thing to do lying down and tucked under a quilt. It feels awkward. I feel awkward. I’m small. I’m nothing.

“Tell me,” she says.

There’s no insistence in her voice, no order. She wants to know because she needs to know, to know me. How can she help me if she doesn’t know me?

I blink. My cheeks dampen.

“Oh no,” she says with her soft, heavenly voice. “Don’t do that. Don’t cry. You don’t have to tell me. I’m here for you, regardless.”

She reaches down to wipe away my tears with a thumb, first one cheek then the other. Her

touch is softer than the pillow. Her touch is warmth and love, and I’m unworthy of it.

“I don’t deserve you,” I say.

“Don’t be silly. Of course you do. I just want to help you, Amy. Let me help you.”

I swallow. I nod. I need her help, but I don’t want to need it. I don’t want to be me at all.

She waits for me to speak in my own time. She doesn’t rush me.

“I miss them,” I say.

“I know,” she says.

She waits again. She has infinite patience for this patient.

I take a breath in an effort to compose myself. A ridiculous notion because I’m so far removed from composure, it’s not even funny. But I need a moment to gather myself, to find some courage to speak and some strength to actually get the words out as words and not sobs and more tears.

“I was watching TV,” I begin. “Not really watching but it was on, and I was there, so I was watching. Do you know what I mean?”

Of course she knows. She’s been there. We’ve all been there. I continue:

“There was a commercial. I wasn’t paying attention, but I could hear the music. I don’t know what the music was, but it was classical or opera or something. Lizzy, it was beautiful. It was just so lovely. I looked up at the screen. I saw the ad. It was for a car. I don’t even know what kind of car it was, but I started crying because I wondered what kind of music Maya was listening to when she was in her car when she…”

My voice cracks. I raise my hand to cover my eyes. Lizzy leans closer to hug me, but she can’t hug me while I’m lying down on my back. Instead, she climbs across me and lies down on the bed next to me so she can place an arm over me. She says nothing, but she doesn’t need to say anything because no words can change anything. They can’t take away my pain and they can’t bring Maya back and they can’t turn back time and stop Steve and Jenny hanging ropes in the garage. She holds me while I cry, and I don’t know how long I cry for because I fall asleep and when I wake she’s still lying next to me, still holding me.

“Don’t do it again,” she says. “Promise me.”

I say, “I promise,” and I’m glad she can’t see my face because she doesn’t deserve my lies as much as I don’t deserve her.

Of course, I don’t have to promise her. I don’t need to kill myself when I’m going to die anyway. All I have to do is wait.

The only problem, and it’s a significant one, is that I don’t want to die like this… doomed, cursed. Whatever.

Killing myself is one thing. That’s my choice. It’s my autonomy as a human being to decide when to end the life that is mine and mine alone. Having it decided for me is unacceptable.

Define irony again:

I want to live so I may die when I choose.

THREE

You don’t have to stay with me all day,” I say as I hand Lizzy some breakfast the next morning.

She takes her plate and shrugs as if her kindness is no big deal. Maybe it isn’t to her. Perhaps that’s just how ordinary people behave toward one another.

“I’m here, Amy,” she says with a smile. “So get used to it.”

She’s already missed several classes to look after me and doesn’t so much as mention this fact. I love her for that. Most people are so desperate for credit whenever they so much as hold open a door for someone, they can’t help themselves but remind you of the favor they’re doing, ...