Chapter 9 #2
Grip tight, but not tight enough to entice splinters, I leaned back with all my weight—and the splintered frame snapped free, taking another chunk of drywall with it.
I coughed away floating debris and examined the piece—indents, like wood burn marks, ran along the wood.
Maybe I needed to have the house tested for termites, just in case.
Gooseflesh pimpled my skin. A tangy excitement, anticipation, started to seep through my body. And maybe, just maybe, if I found the boy and brought him out, the crying would stop at night.
I ran my thumb over the divots in the polished door. For my sanity and the child’s safety, I needed to get him out of there.
And if things went south—I didn’t know what I would do. Maybe it was the fact that the creature hadn’t followed me through the door last time that hardened my resolve. If I made it to the door, we could make it through, but not the creature.
I pulled my phone from my pocket, just to check. No notifications, no missed calls. If Emma did decide to come back for the night, I didn’t expect it to be before midnight. It was still early—only ten o’clock. I had time.
My eyes drifted back to the sledgehammer. Then the door. Then back to the sledgehammer.
I grabbed the handle. At least I had this. A weapon was better than no weapon. Sledgehammer in hand, I made to open the door.
At first, the door hitched, like it was stuck, so I used my body weight to pull. The latch popped open an inch.
My breathing trembled, adrenaline already coursing through my extremities.
The icy air hit me first. Like an exhale against my cheeks, it pushed my hair away from my face, making me squint.
My hands tightened around the sledgehammer.
Slowly, I opened my eyes, part of me expecting the creature to be sitting by the door where I’d left him nearly two weeks ago.
I paused, my pulse throbbing hot in my jaw.
Harthwait had changed.
The framework of the house stood tall, crooked in the majority of places.
Holes in the brick wall gave glimpses to a withered lawn, windowsills gaped empty, vacant of their glass panes, and the ceiling—didn’t exist. Nothing but charred framework dangled above me.
It looked like the house had caught fire and only the resilient bits remained.
Plink, plink, plink.
I craned my neck back. Thunderheads crowded the sun. Raindrops careened from above, peppered the open floors, my face, the tattered and eaten gauzy curtains. A single wingback chair sat in the corner, completely untouched, even of dust.
I held my breath when movement caught my peripheral. The door drifted shut with the quietest of clicks.
Now I was alone. I was doing this. No turning back now.
I held the sledgehammer like a sword as I stepped through the parlor. Strained to listen. No child’s cries, no hurried footsteps. No claws on the floor.
I ventured into the foyer—and almost dropped the sledgehammer.
Not just the parlor had changed—everything had.
Like the house switched shirts while I was gone.
The first time, it looked abandoned, untouched for years.
But the ash made sense now: Instead of drifting from the sky, the house was eaten by it.
Somewhere along the way, the exposure to rain had soddened the boards, the floors, what little remained of the roof.
Outside, where there had been a perfectly manicured lawn, a maze of shrubbery now grew. From the house, winding pathways snaked from one end of the patch to the next. It extended farther than the eye could see, so far that it touched the horizon.
Dread crawled into my mouth, my nose, my eyes. A maze made good hiding for a boy of Haddy’s size.
This house—was it sentient? Did it pick and choose the people it let in? Was that why only I remembered the door? And why did it change inside? If I went back into the hall and stepped back in, would it show me something else again?
I stepped up to the front door. The door itself was gone, leaving only hinges.
“Haddy?” I called.
My voice echoed, echoed, echoed until it faded into nothing. Overhead, thunder rumbled.
Faint, so quick I almost missed it, the bramble in the maze rustled. Was that Haddy?
I glanced over my shoulder, left then right, just in case. No creature. It might have been the beast in the maze, not the boy. But did I want to take the chance?
“Haddy?” I called again, this time louder, more from the chest. Angry clouds shifted above me. I nearly turned back to search the rest of the house when I heard the voice.
“Landry!”
That wasn’t Haddy.
It sounded like Emma.
I hissed to myself. The innards of the maze rustled, frantic, like someone searching for a way out. How had Emma found her way in here? How’d she seen the door? Had she come home and I hadn’t noticed, or had she found it after me?
Was it really her, or did I want to take the chance that it wasn’t?
“Emma?” I called. I scrambled off the porch steps, almost rolling my ankle at the bottom. I tried to keep the sledgehammer readied, secretly damning myself for bringing it along.
I ran left, right, winding through the maze of bushes, taking turns blindly. I held my breath every few seconds, listening over the sound of my heart. “Emma!”
“Landry!”
I followed it like a kite tethered to a child’s fist.
Minutes felt like hours. Rain threatened, only to back off and sprinkle again.
I stopped, winded, sweat trickling down my arms, my middle back. By that point, the rain decided to come down in hard sheets, dripping into my eyes and down my throat. The cloud cover made it difficult to see, so I used the sledgehammer to swing down brush.
“Emma!”
“Landry?” Closer.
I rounded a corner, sledgehammer dragging, and froze.
In the middle of the path, in a pool of black rainwater, sat a little girl. Tangled, knotted red hair in a fuzzy ponytail. She wore a yellow sundress with white daisies, stained with mud and rusted red splotches. Her face too thin, her chin too sharp.
Six-year-old me.
“Landry?” she asked. Her voice changed, matured. I gasped, stumbled back, as she morphed in age. Older, older, thinner, thinner, until she stood at my height, with my same build, wearing my very clothes. They hung on her, and her eyes—they were almost sunken.
It was one thing to look in a mirror because mirrors lied. They warped things I didn’t really see, parts of myself that I didn’t like, emphasized areas that made me nauseated. But seeing myself within reaching distance was different.
I swallowed, hard. I strangled the sledgehammer, unsure if I should wield it or drop it.
“You found me,” she whispered. “How did you find me?”
If I ran, would she catch me?
“I-I—” My brain short circuited.
“You let him hurt me,” she wheezed, teeth bared.
Dirt coated her neckline, the dangling bits of fabric around her shoulders.
My shoulders. Her knees bled with hairpin scrapes.
Bruises, all over her chest, glowered through the shredded material.
I looked college age, nineteen, twenty? Years ago.
I sounded like me, moved like me, but I didn’t realize I’d looked so … tired.
I knew without asking who she was talking about.
Ivan.
Still, I tried to keep my expression dumbfounded, and took another step back. A sick, roiling sensation started in my gut. Like a wave, it traveled up, up. “Who?”
“I hate you,” she whispered. She trudged closer, only feet from me now, and gestured to herself. “Look what you did to me.” Even her nails bled, ripped from the quick. “You did this.”
I shook my head, eyes wide. “No, I didn’t.”
Her expression turned rabid. “You did!”
A surge of anger hit me. “I didn’t do anything to you!” I shouted back. Brambles and thorns poked at my back when I hit the maze wall. My feet were leaden, eyes locked on her.
“Yes, you did. You liar. All you do is lie.”
“I never lied about what he did,” I spat. Because I didn’t. Not really.
“You never told anyone!” she roared, spittle flying.
Then she lunged for me. I dropped the sledgehammer out of instinct to catch her hands—I grabbed one wrist, but she grabbed my other—the two of us, a mirror, struggling against the other’s hold.
One pushed, the other gave, only to shuffle.
Her nose came a breath from my own. Her voice warbled, broken. “You hurt me. Why did you hurt me?”
Tears welled behind my eyes. I shook my head. “I didn’t mean to.”
“Momma?”
Both of us looked to the voice.
Haddy streaked through the bramble path, only to vanish a moment later. Fast enough for me to see his tiny untucked button-up shirt and his bare feet, but nothing more.
Without warning, my doppelg?nger’s hold vanished. Just like the woman had when Haddy had touched her. Nothing but a cold kiss of air was left in her wake.
It took two seconds to gather myself, one gasping breath after another, the breaths so large that they hurt to swallow.
“Haddy!” I coughed. Rain bled into my eyes, down my cheeks, dribbled off my chin. But Haddy didn’t turn around and come back—and by the time I realized all sounds had ceased, it was too late. From the corner of my eye, something moved.
Shivering, I slowly looked to the movement. And there, through the bramble thicket, a face hovered.
A beautiful face.
Like cornered prey, I froze. Even the earth stopped turning.
“It hurts to see it, does it not?” the voice said. Not just a voice, but a man. He stepped from the thorns, slightly curled over, as if he’d been hunching. Listening. Waiting.
Gray eyes, sharp as steel. White-blond hair disheveled, short at the sides. He was sodden from the pouring rain, all the way from his unbuttoned cotton shirt to beige trousers. He wore no shoes. A beautiful grin stretched over his pink lips—before turning feline.
“Hurts, does it not, dearest? To see your sorest memories come to life?” he hummed.
Dearest. That word.
And what did he mean by memories? This was nothing close to a memory. Not once had I gotten lost in a maze as a child.
“I believe you have the wrong place, though.” The man’s jaw flexed, tightened. It was almost as sharp as his eyes. He eased closer, careful not to touch the thorns. He didn’t so much as look in the direction Haddy had gone or where my double had just evaporated.
“Who are you?” I scooted to my left, back the way I’d come. I ground my teeth to keep them from chattering.
“You need not know who I am,” he said. “Not until you tell me who you are.”
I tried to gather myself. “I was only here for the boy. He’s stuck here.”
His eyes narrowed, uncertain. Maybe he didn’t understand. Or maybe I’d chosen the wrong person to ask.
I tried again. “Maybe five or six, with blond hair and …”
His hands were stuffed casually in his pockets, but the tilt of his head told me differently. He was calculating. His eyes caught mine, stealing every ounce of oxygen from my body.
His pupils were slits. And though a moment ago they were gray, now they shifted—like an animal in the middle of a forest. Yellow, like a snake’s.
Yellow, like citrine.
This time when he smiled, it was cruel and alluring all at once. I wanted to run, but my legs didn’t obey, my feet didn’t pull from the earth.
His voice slithered into a deep timbre—the creature’s voice.
“You came back,” he crooned. A rumble, like a growl, vibrated from his throat.
I struggled to step back. “I came for the boy,” I choked. I blinked away a sudden wash of fear, of angry, terrified tears. What had I done?
As if he heard my thoughts, he chuckled. Squared his shoulders with intention.
“Oh, dearest,” he breathed. “You shouldn’t have.”