Chapter 27
Bastian
“It’s never going to stop, Bash,” Sybil’s whines. “Never, ever, ever!”
“You’re being childish.” I look up at her over the top of my doorstop of a book. “The rain will stop. The sun will come out again. It always does.”
“Not this time.” She lifts her head from her arms, propping her chin on top of them as she stares bleakly out the window at the gray afternoon. “It’s gonna keep going until I die.”
“Not unless you’re dying tomorrow.” I lick my thumb, turn another of Pamela’s many, many, many pages. It’s so hard to focus on Samuel Richardson’s story. Probably because it feels more like a damn lecture.
I despise the amount of words in this book. I get it, okay? Pamela isn’t going to give it up for just anybody. Dude even hid in her closet, and she isn’t giving in.
So damn what?
I’d rather be reading Poe, but Evelyn refuses to keep his books in the house. She nearly caned the hide off my backside when she caught me sneaking a peek at The Pit and the Pendulum at the library.
That was the last time I was allowed to go with her.
Now Sybil and I hardly ever leave the house, except for our annual check ups and the very rare occasions where Evelyn’s deemed our behavior satisfactory enough to take us to the pond so we can watch the ducks swimming around.
We’re not allowed to feed them.
Nor may we speak to anyone else we encounter.
The latter is forbidden. The former, a reward reserved for only truly angelic beings. Unlikely we’ll ever get to experience it, seeing as Evelyn considers us the spawn of Satan.
“Think she’ll let us build an ark?” Sybil mumbles mournfully from the window.
I snap the book closed. “What are you on about now, Billy?”
“It’s flooding.”
I go stand beside her to watch the puddles forming.
She rolls her head and gives me a sorrowful glance before looking outside again. “We’ll have to take the animals, two by two, and then maybe God will—“
I cuff the back of her head. “Shut it!” I hiss. “If she hears you talking like that, no way you’ll see the sun again.”
Sybil clutches the back of her head like I lay a hammer to her skull, scowling up at me. “Now I won’t let you on my ark. You’ll drown with the rest of the sinners.”
I gape at her as she storms out of the reading room of our dark, suffocating townhouse. If she keeps on like that, Evelyn’s going to find out Sybil watches television on Sunday mornings when she’s out doing grocery shopping.
Why on earth my little sister watches the bible network instead of cartoons like a regular kid, I’ll never know.
Television is a waste of time, anyway. I’d rather read books.
I grimace down at the tome in my hands.
Okay, I’d rather read good books.
I can follow Sybil’s progress through the house as she stomps her little feet. And any second now, that sound is going to bring Evelyn down from her ivory tower in the attic.
Then we’re both deep in the shit.
“Hey. Hey!” I hurry after my sister, grabbing her thin arm. We’re in the handmade matching sweater and sweatpants Evelyn sows for us, and I grimace from the feel of the thin felt fabric.
“Stop it, Billy! You’re gonna summon The Witch,” I tell her, making my eyes big, and my voice as deep as it will go. These days, it has a mind of its own. Sybil started giggling at the dinner table last night when it suddenly got all high pitched like a girl’s.
Evelyn just told her to be quiet and eat her food, and then cast me a narrow-eyed look I didn’t like one bit.
Not. One. Damn. Bit.
Sybil’s already pale face goes so white it’s almost gray. She claps a hand over her mouth, her lime green eyes slowly rolling up to the ceiling.
We both strain to hear if the stairs leading down from the attic are about to start squeaking.
But thankfully, there’s just silence.
“You should thank your God she didn’t hear you,” I tell her.
Sybil rips her hands away, her scowl back. “Screw you, Bash.”
Then she starts stomping away again.
I try to hold back the growl of impatience, but damn it, we’ve barely seen Evelyn today, and that makes today a good day.
She’s been so busy with her new book, I’m hoping she’ll forget to eat and starve up there, and we’ll have to put on sad faces when the police come because the stench of her decomposing corpse made the neighbors complain.
Sybil gasps when I rush over and scoop her up, and looks like she wants to scream, but one big-eyed warning glare down at her, and she squeezes her lips together in a sulky line and keeps quiet.
I slow down almost immediately at the feel of her little body rattling in my arms, like chicken bones in a cloth bag.
She’s much too light for a nine-year-old.
Much, much too brittle.
There’s barely any power in her grip when she throws her arms around my neck. “Where we going?”
“I’ve got something that’ll cheer you up, Billy,” I tell her.
“You do?” she says, frowning.
I can’t blame her cynicism. She spent years believing Evelyn when the crone told her she’d get ice cream for dessert if she ate all her broccoli.
I told her there hadn’t been ice cream in the house for years. Yet Sybil was stupid or gullible enough to believe it would magically appear in the freezer at Evelyn’s command, like something out of a fairy tale.
She came around a few months back.
Watching that last shred of childish naivety wither made me loathe our witch of a mother even more. Which was astonishing, because I thought I already hated her with every fiber of my being.
I’d feel sorry for my little sister…if I didn’t force myself to finish every last disgusting green crumb on my plate at night, because I’m apparently just as gullible as she is.
“Where are we going?” Sybil whispers when we reach the kitchen door.
She knows it’s locked, so she’s stupid if she’s expecting me to go in, but she still stares forlornly at it as we pass.
Evelyn shouldn’t bother locking it. Not as if there’s anything tasty in there. The witch just does it to remind us who’s in charge. And perhaps as insurance. After all, if something should happen to her, we’d have to break down that door, or starve.
“Where, Bash?” She grips me a little tighter when I turn down the hall. There are only two doors down this passage, one of them a guest bathroom.
She gasps again, turning to burrow her head against my chest. “No, Bash. No. Not there.”
“Relax, Silly Billy. The witch is upstairs. Without her, it’s just a room.”
“No, no.” She shakes her head against me. “Please. I won’t talk about arks and sinners and floods and dying anymore, I promise. I’ll be good.”
It makes me mad as hell that she’s so scared. I should have left her in the hall, but I don’t just read epistolary conduct books out of sheer boredom. I’ve read some of Evelyn’s psychology journals too. I know all about stuff like exposure therapy.
The only way Sybil’s going to get over her fear, is to face it head on with someone she trusts.
Not sure if that someone is me, but I’m all she has.
This room isn’t locked.
Unlike the kitchen, none of us would dare to go inside here.
Usually, we’re dragged.
That’s why it makes the perfect hiding place.
I swear, my heart’s pounding a mile a minute as I fumble for the light string. An ugly amber bulb flickers on above us, and Sybil risks a quick peek over her shoulder before curling into a ball against my chest.
These stairs don’t creak like the attic stairs, and I’ve never been able to figure out why. But I’m grateful.
A dry, musty smell hits my nose when we reach the basement floor, and my stomach coils uneasily as the familiar scent triggers an almost feral flight-or-fight response inside me.
“I’m going to put you down for a second—“
“No, no, no!” Sybil grips me tighter, which still isn’t all that tight. “Promise you won’t let me go, Bash!”
This was a bad idea. I need my hands.
“You’re being silly, Billy,” I tease, keeping her suspended with one shaking arm as I brush her mousy brown hair out of her face. “The floor won’t swallow you.”
She protests with a soft moan as I let her slip down and then throws her arms around my waist. Her head barely comes up to my chest, but I’m tall for my age, and she’s…well, she’s just a sack of bones.
The boiler rumbles away to itself in the corner, the orange light from the stairs barely picking out more than its bulky silhouette in the thick, stuffy darkness.
I make sure not to look too hard at anything else in the room.
Just because I’m brave enough to come down here sometimes when I need to hide something from Evelyn, doesn’t mean this place doesn’t give me the damn heebie jeebies.
Something moves in the dark on the opposite side of the room, and if I hadn’t clapped a hand over my mouth, I’d have squealed as loudly as Sybil.
Okay, fine.
This place scares the bejesus out of me.
“Quiet!” I snap, covering her mouth. “You want The Witch to find us down here?”
“Let’s go, let’s go!” Sybil begs shrilly the moment I take my hand away. “Please, Bash. Please!”
“Shh!” I grab her by the scruff of her neck and drag her after me as I make a beeline for the dusty shelves beside the boiler. I make a detour around seeming nothing, but I could draw this room’s layout in my sleep.
“You’re gonna love this, trust me.”
“I’m nooooot,” Sybil whines, but at least she does it quietly. And she doesn’t resist, doesn’t run away.
I guess she doesn’t dare. There’s a pool of darkness between us and the stairs now. And we both know what lurks there. What I’d been so careful to avoid.
Dust coats my fingers as I hunt around in the dark, but I find what I’m looking for a second later.
Sybil’s face scrunches up as I light a match, then her green eyes go wide.
She starts to turn around, trying to look over her shoulder, but I grab her chin and wrench her face forward again, leaving dust smudges on her pale skin.
“Eyes on me, Billy.”
Her lips quiver. “I wanna go.”
“I’m cheering you up, remember?”
Tears pool in her eyes. Eyes that swivel like she wishes she could look through the back of her own skull.