Chapter 24
It looked like a house of cards, ready to fall over if someone breathed on it too hard.
Whitewashed walls. A shallow porch. A steeply pitched roof that sagged in the middle like a broken orbital socket.
The only hint of ornamentation was the cornicing under the eaves.
Tean put the farmhouse at a hundred years old, and nobody had taken care of it for probably the last twenty.
Behind the farmhouse stood a larger—and somehow even more dilapidated—barn.
Whatever color it had once been, it was impossible to tell now.
It was just sun-bleached wood and rusted metal and a gambrel roof with a few decomposing wooden shingles.
A narrow, shingle-sided building farther back Tean pegged as a smokehouse.
A newer building—oxidized metal panels with padlocked doors—was probably equipment storage and workshop combined.
The trail they’d been following for the last forty minutes ended at a dusty ATV parked in the old farmhouse’s shadow.
“Fuck me,” Jem said.
Tean nodded.
“That place is creepy as hell.”
There weren’t any good words to respond to that, so Tean nodded again.
“Oh snap,” Jem said. “Have you ever seen The Hills Have Eyes?”
“I’m calling the police,” Tean said.
“Not yet.”
Without waiting for a response, Jem set off on a course that ran parallel to the buildings. He went about thirty yards before stopping. He watched the house. A minute passed. And then another.
“I think it’s empty.”
“Why?”
Jem shrugged. “You get a feel for it.”
Tean didn’t want to know how you got a feel for it; there were chapters in Jem’s life that he knew about only vaguely, and he also knew that a part of him had avoided learning too much about those chapters because they broke his heart.
Cowardice, most definitely. But it seemed like that was more and more the case with him these days.
All he said was “Someone drove through here in the last day or two. They’re gone now.” When Jem raised his eyebrows, Tean pointed to the twin tracks of flattened weeds that led toward the barn.
For maybe half a minute, Jem was silent. Then, shaking out the loop of paracord from his wrist, he said, “Here I go.”
“Jem—”
“If you hear me scream, or if you hear gunshots, or if you hear literally anything about snakes, call the police.”
“I’m going with you.”
“No, you need to stay out here—”
“I’m going, Jem.”
Unhappiness creased Jem’s forehead, but he said, “Let me go first.”
They approached from the back, passing a grill with collapsible legs, a boarded-over well, a clothesline still clipped with wooden pins that were white from the sun.
A room extended off the house, and it appeared to be some kind of combination of a porch and a shed—instead of a door, an opening left it exposed to the elements, and inside, it was full of what Tean could only generously describe as junk: the bulk of a decaying lawnmower, spare parts furred with orange rust, faded tarps.
It smelled like gasoline and dry rot, and an out-of-season wasp crawled lazily on a nest high in one corner.
A door connected to the house proper. It was locked, but Jem did something with a thin piece of metal and shouldered into the door, and it popped open. It wasn’t loud by any measure, but in the silence, the thud was unmistakable.
Jem held up a hand for Tean to wait, but no sound came—no shouts, no questions, not even the whisper of movement.
They stepped into a kitchen. Curtains stitched with poppies hung at the window over the sink.
The countertops were laminate, and along with the appliances, were avocado green.
A Formica table with metal banding occupied the center of the room, and yellowing newspapers, tied into bundles with baling twine, were piled on the table.
Mail spilled over the piles like a snowdrift.
The smell of old paper was overpowering, combined with an ammonia-like stink that Tean traced, after a moment, to the droppings on the table and chairs, and the chewed edges of the newspapers.
“Fuh,” Jem whispered, pulling his T-shirt over his nose.
Tean squeezed his arm once, and Jem started moving again.
A doorway to the left led into a pantry.
It was still stocked, although everything looked older than Tean: canned goods with faded labels, storage canisters of dented aluminum, even the giant buckets that Tean knew had once been the primary form of Mormon food storage, part of their plan to have a year’s supply of food held in reserve against disasters.
Across the kitchen, another door led into a bedroom.
Jem made that “Fuh” sound again, but this time, the smell that rose was unmistakably that of dog—or more likely, dogs.
The furniture was cherrywood, with spindle legs and scuffed brass fittings.
A homemade quilt covered the bed, and the mattress sagged in the middle.
On a picture rail overhead hung dozens of dolls still in their packaging.
The packaging seemed oddly bulky until Tean took a closer look and realized that each doll was accompanied by a novel—also sealed inside the plastic.
Rowena was packed with The Pirate’s Princess.
Courtney went with Savage Temptation. Sabrina held a white cane, and her book was called Sight Unseen.
Jem opened a closet, where clothes hung in dry-cleaning bags, and then moved to another door. This one led into a small bathroom. The tub was ringed with black. The sink didn’t look much better. And the less said about the toilet, the better.
They had to pass through the kitchen again to reach what had probably been called the parlor. A window looked out on the empty rangeland in front of the house. Jem checked the front door and whispered, “Locked.”
The walls were papered with flower baskets and trailing flowers, and a fireplace took up one side of the room.
A sofa and matching chairs, all of them with delicate claw feet and blue velveteen upholstery, were marked by time and use with oily splotches on the back and arms of the furniture, anywhere that hands might have touched again and again over the years.
Jem poked his head through the remaining doorway. “Dining room.”
Tean motioned to a flight of stairs.
Grimacing, Jem nodded. He started toward the stairs, and a board creaked underfoot. The sound was sharp. Tean froze. He strained to listen, but he couldn’t hear anything except the blood pounding in his ears.
Jem gave a single, tightly furious shake of his head before proceeding up the stairs again.
Tean followed, trying to avoid the spot where Jem had stepped, copying his way of moving up the stairs.
At the top, a small landing offered four doors. They all stood open, and through them, bedrooms were visible. Jem stepped into the closest one, and Tean started to follow. Then he saw the lock. On the outside of the door. He stopped.
“Jem,” he whispered.
When Jem glanced back, Tean pointed.
A moment, and then comprehension filled Jem’s face. He gave another of those furious shakes of his head and moved back into the room.
They finished quickly with that bedroom and moved to the next, and then the one after that.
The rooms were nearly identical, with little to see: dressers that still held clothing twenty or thirty years out of style, beds with homemade quilts, bare floorboards.
In one room, Tean found a pair of Reeboks under the bed, one shoe askew, as though they’d been pushed there in a hurry.
It didn’t make any sense. It was as though a family had been living here, a full household, and then, one day, had simply vanished.
And then Jem stepped into the fourth bedroom and said, “Fuck me.”
The volume, as much as the words themselves, made Tean hurry. He stopped in the doorway.
On the dresser perched a set of teeth.
It took his brain a few seconds to catch up with what he was seeing. His first, confused thought was that he was seeing some strange set of dentures. But then he realized, no, because he knew what he was looking at. He stepped closer, though, to get a better look.
“What the fuck is that?” Jem asked.
Tean didn’t touch it, but he leaned closer, caught a whiff of something decomposing, and reared back.
“It’s an anatomy model. I think—there are bits of flesh in it.
” He clamped his mouth shut and breathed slowly through his nose, and it was a moment before he said, “Jem, someone used this on—” He almost said a person, but a part of him resisted; it could have been an animal. “Someone used this.”
“Like, they bit someone with it?” Jem got closer, and he must have caught the reek because he made a face and stepped back. “Jesus Christ. It’s for anatomy?”
“It’s a model of a canine jaw. They use them in school.”
“In veterinary school?”
Tean nodded.
“And someone used it to attack someone?”
“I don’t know, but there’s biological matter on it. It needs to be tested.”
“Good fucking Lord.” Jem wiped his face. His color was bad, and then Tean remembered the scars he carried on his arm. He’d been locked up with a sick, confused dog. When he’d first met Scipio, he’d flinched every time the Lab moved.
Jem finally broke away from the model and turned to take in the rest of the room, and Tean followed him.
As in the other bedrooms, the furniture was simple.
The difference, though, was that in this room, a sleeping bag was unrolled on top of the quilt.
A thought struck Tean, and he turned again, taking in the layout of the room.
The anatomy model had been positioned exactly at the center of the dresser.
It was the only item on the expanse of wood—which, Tean noticed now, was free of dust, unlike the rest of the house.
The pink and white resin of the model stood out in stark contrast to the dresser’s dark stain.
Like a display in a museum. Or like a fetish on an altar.