Looking Glass Sound is the newest twisty psychological horror novel from Catriona Ward, the internationally bestselling author of The Last House on Needless Street and Sundial.
Intrigued? Well read on to discover the synopsis and an excerpt from Catriona Ward’s Looking Glass Sound, which is out now!
In a lonely cottage overlooking the windswept Maine coast, Wilder Harlow begins the last book he will ever write. It is the story of his childhood summer companions and the killer that stalked the small New England town. Of the body they found, and the horror of that discovery echoing down the decades. And of Sky, Wilder’s one-time best friend, who stole his unfinished memoir and turned it into a lurid bestselling novel, Looking Glass Sound.
But as Wilder writes, the lines between memory and fiction blur. He fears he’s losing his grip on reality when he finds notes hidden around the cottage written in Sky’s signature green ink.
Catriona Ward delivers another mind-bending and cleverly crafted tale about one man’s struggle to come to terms with the terrors of his past… before it’s too late.
In the morning I wake before my parents. I realise as soon as I put them on that my swimming shorts are way too small. I’ve grown a lot since last summer. I didn’t think of it before we left New York. So I put on some underwear and flip flops, grab a towel and slip out the back door.
The red ball of the morning sun is burning off the last sea mist. I go down the path, gravel skittering from my sandalled feet, towel slung over my shoulder.
On the beach the pebbles are already warm from the sun. I take off my glasses and rest them gently on a rock. On an impulse I slip off my underwear too and go into the sea naked. The water takes me in its glassy grip. For a second I wonder, riptide? But the sea is still and cool. It’s a homecoming. I think, I’m a sea person and I never even knew it. Even underwater I can still hear the wind singing in the rocks. And I hear a voice, too, calling. I break the surface, coughing, water streaming from my head.
A girl and a boy stand on the shore. I think they’re about my age. She wears overalls and a big floppy hat. Her hair is a deep, almost unnatural red, like blood. She wears a man’s watch on her wrist, gold and clunky. It’s way too big and it makes her wrist look very slim. I think, frick that was fast, because I am in love with her right away.
I see what she holds: a stick, with my underwear hanging off the pointed end. She wrinkles her nose in an expression of disgust. ‘What kind of pervert leaves their underwear lying around on the beach?’ Her scorn mingles perfectly with her accent – she’s English. Not the sunburned kind who throng round Times Square, but the kind I thought existed only in movies. Classy.
The wind billows in the fabric of my shorts, filling them. For a second it looks like I am still in the shorts – invisible, struggling, impaled.
‘Hey,’ the boy says. ‘He didn’t know anyone else was here.’ Heah. Is he British, too? He’s tall with an easy, open look to him. I think, it’s boys like that who get the girls. As if to confirm this thought, he puts a hand on the girl’s back. ‘Give ’em, Harper.’
Harper – it seems an odd name for a British girl but it suits her.
Maybe her parents are big readers.
Reluctantly she swings the stick around at him. He takes off his shirt, plucks the underwear off the end of the stick and wades into the shallows. He doesn’t seem to mind his shorts getting wet. ‘Stay there,’ he calls. ‘I’ll come out.’ He swims out in long slow strokes to where I bob in the centre of the cove.
‘Here you go.’ Heah ya go. Not British. He hands me my shorts. Then he swims back towards the shore. I struggle into the underwear, catching my feet in the fabric. I begin the endless swim back.
The boy is talking to the girl – she’s laughing. I think with a bite of fear, they’re laughing at me. But he puts another gentle hand on Harper’s back and turns her away, pointing inland, towards something on the cliff. I realise he’s being kind to me again, making sure I can get out of the water in privacy.
I huddle, cold, in my towel. I’d thought there was something special about this place this morning but there isn’t. The world’s the same everywhere. It’s all like school.
‘See you around,’ I say and make my way back up the path. I feel their eyes on my back and I stumble on the incline. The rocks make their evil whistling and I hurry away from the kids’ gaze and the sound, which seem part of each other. I go straight indoors and stay there until long after I hear them come up from the beach and past the cottage, long after their footsteps have faded away down the hill, towards the road.
I wonder what the relationship between them is, if they’re dating, if maybe they’re doing it. I don’t know enough about it to tell. He touches her with a casual assurance but they didn’t behave romantically towards one another – not the way the movies have led me to expect.
I had planned to journal each day, here. But I don’t want to write down what happened this morning. I wash my face over and over again with cold water before breakfast, so Mom and Dad don’t see redness around my eyes or any other traces of tears.
I want to go home so badly I can taste it. I think of my usual seat at the library in the city, near the end of one of those long tables, the lamps with their green glass shades throwing circles of warm light. Everyone helps you understand things, there.
‘Come on, sport,’ my father says. ‘Good for you to get out. You can’t sit in your room all vacation.’ So I go with him to run errands in Castine. What else am I going to do?
Waiting for him to finish at the post office, I gaze glumly at the sacks of chickenfeed piled outside the general store, wander up the main street. It’s lonely being with family sometimes.
A pickup pulls up with a screech on the other side of the street, outside a cheerful white and blue shop. Fresh Fish, reads the sign overhead. The truck is battered and rusty with panels beaten out badly where they’ve been staved in by collisions. Probably a drinker, I say to myself, knowing. A line comes to me. Living by the sea is tough on paint, and just as hard on the mind. Maybe I’ll write it down later. A thin man in a vest gets out of the truck. He busies himself with coolers and crates, and a moment later, the rich smell of raw fish reaches me. I watch the man with interest. He’s so easy in himself, unloads the truck in quick, decisive movements, every now and then spitting a thin vein of brown juice into the gutter. A man of the sea, I think. He’s weather-beaten, skin as brown as shoe leather, but his eyes are a warm blue, striking in his worn face. I imagine him living in a board shack, bleached silver by the sun and salt, down by the water, going out in his boat every day before dawn. Some tragedy lies in his past, I’m sure of it. He has a rough, sad look like a cowboy in a western. But he’s a sea cowboy, which is even cooler. I back into the shadow of a little alley. I don’t want to be seen staring.
A bell jingles, and a young woman comes out of the blue and white store and greets him, friendly. He nods back. Her eyes are swollen, her nose red. She’s been crying, I realise, and I feel a spurt of hot sympathy for her. Or maybe she has a cold. She blows her nose heartily and stuffs the Kleenex back in her pocket. She takes the crates into the jingling doorway and brings them back empty, swinging from her hand. The bell announces her exits and her entrances, jaunty. It isn’t a cold; she’s been crying, for sure. In fact she’s still crying. Fresh tears shine on her face. She dabs them dry with tiny movements.
‘Sorry,’ I hear her say to the fisherman, as if she’s offending him somehow. The man nods gently. The world is full of sorrow, his silence seems to say. Maybe they were lovers, I think, excited. Maybe he left her.
When the contents of all twelve crates are inside, she hands him a wad of bills. He takes them and turns back to the truck. As she goes into the store for the last time the Kleenex she’d dried her tears with falls from her pocket. He must see it in the corner of his eye, because he turns quickly, and picks it up before the wind can take it. The man slips the tissue into his pocket. I feel how kind it is, his act of humility, to pick the tissue up for the crying girl and take it away, so it doesn’t blow down the street and out to sea.
As if feeling my eyes on him, the man looks around, slowly surveying the street. When his eyes light on me he smiles, amused. ‘Hey,’ he says. ‘Who you hiding from?’
I come out from behind the house, bashful.
‘You want to take a ride? Help me get the next load from the dock?’ He indicates the passenger seat in a careless, amiable way. People around here don’t seem to talk much but they like to do small
kindnesses.
‘I can’t,’ I say, regretful. ‘I have to wait for my dad.’
He nods slowly, and then he gets in the truck and it roars away, up the street, in the direction of the ocean. I wish I’d gone with him now. It would have been fun to see the dock.
Someone says ‘boo!’ and I jump.
The boy from the beach says, ‘You took off pretty quick the other day.’ He looks even more relaxed and golden than I remembered. ‘I’m Nat,’ he says. ‘Nathaniel.’
‘Like Hawthorne?’
‘My last name’s Pelletier.’
‘I meant, Nathaniel Hawthorne the writer.’ He looks uncomfortable. I go on quickly, ‘I’m Wilder. It’s a weird name. You can call me Will.’ I’ve been waiting to try ‘Will’ out for a while.
‘Nah, it’s cool. Like a wrestler or something. You’re wild, but I’m wilder!’ He bares white healthy teeth in a snarl. It sits oddly on his friendly features.
‘I’m Wildah,’ I repeat, and really it doesn’t sound so bad, the way he says it. Like something from a play.
He punches me on the arm, fake mad and I laugh and he grins. ‘Don’t worry about Harper,’ he says. ‘She’s rich so she doesn’t need manners.’
I laugh again because he seems to be joking, but I think, she really didn’t seem to have any.
‘You want to swim with us later? We’re going late this afternoon.
We’ll make a fire, sit out.’
I hesitate. I want to go but I’m scared too. I don’t really know how to talk to people.
I start to tell Nat no, just as my dad comes out of the post office and beckons to me.
‘I’ve got to go,’ I say.
‘We’ll come by the bay around five,’ he calls after me, and half of me is so happy that he seems to want to be friends, and the other is unnerved because it all seems to be settled without my doing anything at all.
I won’t hang out with them, I know better. I’ll pretend I’m busy when they arrive.
