Andrew Pyper - The only child : a novel

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PRAISE FOR

THE ONLY CHILD

A seductive Gothic thriller for the modern age. Crafted with dark intrigue and cinematic drive, this mesmerizing journey into the heart of a monster is, at once, compelling, eerie, and brilliantly satisfying.

Ami McKay, author of The Witches of New York

A darkly entrancing tale that sweeps you off your feet from its first pages. Filled with deliriously clever nods to the grand Gothic tradition, The Only Child is also fiercely original, wildly provocative, and utterly satisfying, beginning to end.

Megan Abbott, bestselling author of You Will Know Me

Cleverly re-imagines the nineteenth-century gothic classics while spinning a thrilling, touching, and distinctly twenty-first-century monster story.

Paul Tremblay, author of A Head Full of Ghosts

As much a psychological inquiry as it is an adrenaline-fueled thriller, layered with menace, mystery, and startling revelations that span centuries. A book that begs to be read in one sitting, with the doors locked, the lights low, and a sharp knife and a jug of holy water within reach, just in case.

Benjamin Percy, author of Red Moon

So youre reading The Only Child, Pypers newest book, and suddenlykaboom!the story is shot like a cannon blast across a very dark sky. Exactly the sort of light we pine for.

Josh Malerman, author of Black Mad Wheel

PRAISE FOR

THE DEMONOLOGIST

Smart, thrilling, and utterly unnerving. Pypers gift is that he deeply respects his readers, yet still insists on reducing them to quivering children. I like that in a writer.

Gillian Flynn, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Gone Girl

PRAISE FOR

THE DAMNED

A master of psychological suspense.

Lisa Gardner

Pyper has more than mastered the art.... The Damned guarantees many sleepless nights.

The Globe and Mail

ALSO BY ANDREW PYPER

The Damned

The Demonologist

The Guardians

The Killing Circle

The Wildfire Season

The Trade Mission

Lost Girls

Kiss Me (Stories)

Simon & Schuster

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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 authors imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright 2017 by Andrew Pyper Enterprises, Inc.

Jacket design by Elizabeth Whitehead

Jacket image by Ilona Wellmann / Trevillion Images

Author photograph by Heidi Pyper

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Simon & Schuster Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.

First Simon & Schuster hardcover edition June 2017

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

ISBN 978-1-4767-5521-2

ISBN 978-1-4767-5539-7 (ebook)

To Heidi, Maude, and Ford

Do you not think that there are things which you cannot understand, and yet which are; that some people see things that others cannot?... Ah, it is the fault of our science that it wants to explain all; and if it explain not, then it says there is nothing to explain.

Bram Stoker, Dracula

S he 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 mothers.

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. Its an act of remembrance, but something more too. Shes 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 sizea bear, almost certainly, drawn by scents of cooked meat and human sweathad 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 shed hidden from the screams.

Acceptable on the face of it, as such stories are designed to be. Yet there was so much that wasnt 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 mothers 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 secret place. 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 whod 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.