Chapter 22
“it’s time, pinky.” luca stood in the back garden, staring at the house with his hands on his narrow little boy hips. “Things have been weird around here lately. We need the security.”
“What do you mean weird ?”
“Well, yesterday I was pretty sure I heard a bear in the yard, but now I’m thinking it could have been a cougar, but do cougars even come this far into the city? I should have googled it. And also how to cougar-proof your property.”
Pinky laughed, but she was hiding a spiralling fear.
For the past five days, she had been watching Alice, looking for signs of—what?
That she was an aswang? As Pinky lay sleepless in her bed, listening for noises through the walls, she tried to reassure herself that she had just dreamed the whole thing.
That would make more sense, wouldn’t it?
If what she’d seen in the dimly lit basement had been a creation of her unconscious brain, an amalgam of her past and present?
She blinked to clear her head. Jesus. Fucking dreams and their wayward logic, their access to everything people have ever been afraid of.
What she saw whenever Alice left her room these days, which wasn’t often, was not a demon but a woman who wasn’t eating, whose bones were showing through her skin, who was so transparent she could have been mistaken for a sad ghost, not a demon intent on consuming human life.
“Pinky? Are you listening?”
She shook her head and smiled tightly. “Sorry. What do we need to do?”
“I have the box of cameras ready to go. Maybe you can help me set them up. I’m not tall enough, I guess.” Luca stood on his toes and stretched his arms up over his head. “See? I’m always picked last for basketball.”
“We’ll have to put a camera on the basement door. And in the garden.” Pinky squinted at the house and shivered. “And your mom’s work area, too, to protect all of her products.”
“I’m going to get Mom’s phone the next time she comes out of her room and install the app I made.” Luca began to walk toward the house. “Hang on. I’m just going to check the wi-fi. I’ll be back.”
Pinky kneeled down and pulled dandelion greens out of the lawn, her back to the house, to the shadow it cast on the grass.
The sun was warm for March, and it felt thick and familiar on the back of Pinky’s neck.
She sighed. Alice never paid attention to weeds, only ever pruning back the roses and tying up the Shasta daisies, as if the smaller insistent plants could be ignored into elimination.
Pinky knew that the invasive species would continue to grow quietly under the hosta’s wide leaves and behind the white hydrangeas until one day Alice would look out the window and see nothing but tangled blackberry brambles and noxious tansy, pollen flying through the air to touch every corner of the garden.
That is, unless Pinky pulled out the weeds herself.
As she bent further down to look at a burr stuck in the grass, she felt a spider crawling, feather light, up her spine.
She reached back to swat it away, but her fingers touched something else, something longer and more substantial.
She closed her hand around it and began to pull it forward, remembering how the children used to be fascinated with insects: the odder, the better.
Maybe looking at this gross bug will stop them from fighting for a while.
But as she pulled, she felt resistance, as if something was pulling back.
No, this was no insect. She was holding a cold human hand.
The hand twisted out of her grasp and then closed tight around her wrist. Pinky gasped, then stood and turned, freeing herself with a violent jerk.
There was no one. Just the house, the sunshine, and the shadow on the grass. The potted lavender beside the basement door. There was no spider, not even a breeze. Her eyes darted around the yard, and she groaned out loud. Was she losing her mind?
“Pinky! Luca turned off the wi-fi again . I was FaceTiming Chloe!” Luna’s voice rang out from the open windows and the cold shivers that had been creeping up Pinky’s arm quickly receded until they were no more than a tingle in the very tips of her fingers.
The whine in Luna’s voice was so real, so alive . Thank god.
Your brain is fucking you up , Pinky thought to herself. Or is it that my brain knows things I can’t see yet?
“Pinky, can you tell her that we are in the middle of a very important security project? Ow, Luna! Let go of me!”
Pinky ran into the house, never so grateful to be breaking up a fight between two screaming children. She looked behind her before picking up speed. If the garden was going to be swallowed up by whatever was growing in the shadows, so be it. Pinky wasn’t going to sacrifice herself for the clematis.