Chapter 14
Chapter
Fourteen
Sam’s room contained a bed, a dresser, and little else. But the walls made up for it. Crayon markings and the remains of dried feces decorated every surface. All the windows stood open, and enormous fans faced the outside, taking most of the stench away. Most, but not all.
I stared. The chaos should’ve been meaningless, probably was meaningless to Max, but my stomach lurched at the familiarity. The walls I’d painted in my sleep had carried the same frantic patterns, but not made of shit and colored wax.
It took me a couple of tries to speak. “When did he do this?”
“It was like that when I got back from the city. I’d locked the room’s door, told him to stay with Mom and Dad, but obviously he got back in somehow. I was about to start calling shrinks again when you contacted me, so I figured I’d wait.”
Shrinks again? “He’s gone in for therapy before?”
“Yeah. Nothing serious, but he’d have…episodes, every now and then. We thought it was normal kid stuff, especially with him being so much younger than the rest of us, but it wasn’t. I just didn’t realize he wasn’t the only one having issues.”
I nodded, looking around. This definitely qualified as having issues. Maybe the housecleaners saw this room, and that was why they ran. “You mentioned an older sister. Where’s her room?”
For the first time, Max paused. “Carol Ann, yes. She doesn’t live here.”
My creep-o-meter pinged hard to the right. “But her ex-boyfriend does?”
“Well, Joe doesn’t live here in the house, either. He lives out on the lake, and he never comes around.”
Uh-oh. “So where does she live?”
He sighed. “She’s in Nebraska, at the Brightwell Clinic.”
That seemed important. “The what?”
“It’s a mental health hospital, okay?” Max’s words came quicker now, harsh and embarrassed as a flush crawled up his neck.
“But she got sick a long time ago—like seven years. And she got sick, sick. Not possessed, sick. There was no Exorcist moment like floating people or writing on the walls or anything like that.”
I winced, but he was on a roll.
“I wasn’t here, but everyone’s stories were the same. She had a mental breakdown, and we got her the best care we possibly could.”
“And then put up her boyfriend in the lake house.”
Another long breath. “Look—Joe’s a good guy. He was seriously messed up when Carol Ann had her breakdown. We felt sorry for him, and we didn’t think it would be anything permanent. He didn’t think it would be either. But time sort of passed, you know?”
“It has a way of doing that.” And though I was acting like a hard ass, I did understand.
How long ago had it been that I’d walked through the doors of that first little kid’s house, dragging all those yapping dogs, only to interrupt Rabbi Mordechai mid-exorcism?
It seemed like only yesterday. “Does she have a room where she used to sleep? Like a room you don’t use or whatever? ”
A sudden thought gripped me. Had the sister originally slept in Sam’s room? Please, no. I’d seriously puke.
Fortunately, Max pointed to the ceiling. “Yeah, it’s another flight up. But I checked it this morning, like every morning. It hasn’t been disturbed.”
I couldn’t entirely shut down my nausea as we headed to his sister’s room, but Max was correct.
The room looked like the perfect early twenties sorority girl haven: white furniture, Pottery Barn accents in bright teals and pinks, everything neat and tidy.
No bloody voodoo doll stuck with pins or Ouija board peeking out from under the bed.
The rest of the tour finished easily enough.
Big, comfortable estate house but not rudely extravagant, that felt old, not befouled, at least other than Sam’s room.
We didn’t say anything more until we reached the back of the house.
I could see it opened onto a large porch, and then I did stop.
We were standing in the kitchen, and all the accoutrements of meal making were there.
Sandwich bread, a large pot of good-smelling soup.
Vegetables, dip, and little folded-over pieces of deli meat, secured with toothpicks.
All of it sitting out, looking homey. Homey and untouched.
Like the whole house was holding its breath.
“They’re all waiting for me out there?” I asked, surprised that my voice was barely a whisper.
“I’m telling you, most of the time it’s like this. There’s an awareness that something isn’t right, but nobody seems to know when it’s going to pop up. Or how bad it’s going to be.”
Oh, it’s going to be very, very bad.
Hearing the creature’s voice again so soon jolted me, which I was sure was its point.
But instead of feeling anger, an almost absurd sense of giddiness swirled up inside me as we stepped out onto the covered back porch.
I wasn’t alone out here in the middle of nowhere with all these haunted house demons, not really.
A soft laugh curled through me. Not yet.
All my good feelings leeched away.
We carried the food outside. The porch was wide and gracious, gray-painted floorboards setting off white wicker furniture.
Still, as I was introduced to the family, I had to fight the shiver.
They looked less like people than portraits, their gazes hollow, their secrets pushed down and boxed up, then stuck in an attic corner of this creepy old house where no one could see.
They seemed to be there—but not really there at the same time. Absent in their own skin.
I frowned and tried to focus, to glean what tastes and smells I could of their histories, but my intuition wasn’t firing on any cylinders.
There was the pale, slender Judith, Max’s mother, who shivered despite the warmth and made small plates of hors d’oeuvres that everyone ate but her.
Then came the gracious, expansive father, Frank, a big man who seemed like he’d had the wind knocked out of him recently, his clothes too loose, his skin around his eyes and jaw too slack.
The wispy-bunned grandmother, Kate, glared at me even when I wasn’t looking at her, and then of course there was the tousle-haired, seven-year-old Sam, who hovered at her side, almost as if he were standing guard.
I didn’t know how he’d gotten there, but I’d already decided he was a sneaky little fuck.
I’m watching you, buddy, I thought at him, hard.
Sam pressed closer to his grandmother, and Max glanced around. “Where’s Emily?”
“Out,” croaked the old woman. I peered at her a little more closely, somehow knowing she was Dad’s mother, not Judith’s.
Like Sam, her reaction to the evil worming through this house seemed a little closer to the surface.
Even her eyes had that weird milky look, the encroachment of cataracts making her look crazier than a bed bug.
Max sighed and gestured for me to sit down. Reluctantly, I did.
Then they all stared at me. Not knowing what else to do, I launched in with my questions.
They answered in turns—when trouble started, what the worst part was—but their voices had that practiced quality of people who’d told the same story too many times to too many skeptics.
I stopped listening to their words and focused on what I could taste instead: Judith’s disappointment, Frank’s fear, Kate’s. ..nothing. She gave me nothing at all.
With her last non-answer, though, something finally stirred inside me, the same prickling of awareness I felt looking at Mrs. Klein’s hangdog house or catching the scent wafting off Claire Bickwell’s dickhead boyfriend.
The rush and tumble of possibility when I shook Max Graham’s hand, Sam’s echoing screams as I stared at his disgusting room.
Something that was all me, not the demon inside me. Something I understood.
I exhaled with more relief than I expected, but nobody noticed. I could do this, I thought. I was doing this.
And I was doing it my way.
“Everyone experiences difficult things differently,” I said, looking around the room. “Can you each tell me what the worst part has been, so far, for you?”
“Covered that,” the dad grunted, staring down at his knees.
“Oh, Frank,” Judith sighed, staring at me reproachfully as she reached over and squeezed his forearm. I refocused on the grandmother, who was back to glaring at me, while Sam stared at the far wall, his mouth puckered tight.
Then I glanced at Max.
And stopped cold. Uh-oh.
Max didn’t speak, but he watched me with a clear and unambiguous light in his eyes that made me shudder all the way to the core of my being. Working with Mordechai, I’d seen that expression a hundred different times over the years. I’d just never had it directed at me.
Directed at me, it took on a whole new weight.
Hope.
Uh-oh is right. This time, laughter spilled out around my mocking inner voice, filling up my mind, clogging my throat.
“Shut up,” I thought fiercely at the thing crawling around in me, the thing I despised but suddenly felt I needed in a way that made me slightly sick. “Just—chill for a second.”
It fell silent but didn’t leave me. Not quite.
Not yet. It ribboned through me like an arch-backed cat, equal parts reassurance and threat. For the first time, I didn’t mind it so much. If it was a demon, maybe it could help me. Maybe it was the reason why I’d been so successful at the Klein’s.
I didn’t want to think about that too much.
Instead, I exhaled, slow and careful, and kept up with my questions.
The house stayed still the whole time. There was no moaning or wailing of a host of ghostly corpses, there were no crashing dishes or clattering windowpanes.
Even Sam finally flagged, his arms around his grandma, his big eyes watching me, angry and accusing.
Eventually, the family’s answers ran together in mutters and sighs, their voices flat and echoing, as if they’d been rehearsing these responses for years.
At that point, I knew we were done. I walked back through the house with Max and out onto the wide front porch, grateful that the sun was still shining.
The whole place was quiet, save for the breeze rustling in the trees.
It looked like what I supposed it’d been for most of its existence, a peaceful idyll in the Midwest. The home of an absurdly prosperous somebody or other, and the birthplace of generations of ordinary people after that.
Until this generation, who’d gotten their asses uniformly kicked.
“What next?” Max stood too close to me, and I knew he didn’t want to let me go. But I had to get Steve’s car back. I had to get the letter written and inserted into Mordechai’s papers, with copies sent to Max and the Rockdale temple, possibly the diocese. Anyone I could think of.
What was more, I didn’t know how I felt about Max standing that close. It felt weirdly right yet completely wrong all at once, my nerves jumping at his every glance.
Not only my nerves, either. Deep inside, I felt a strange kind of awareness. The kind that had nothing to do with danger and everything to do with how close Max was, how much space he took up in the air between us.
A low, possessive growl murmured far in the back edges of my mind, almost too low to hear.
Almost.
“What, you don’t like this now?” I thought with a full-on internal smirk, feeling a sudden burst of energy that had nothing to do with the parasite and everything to do with me. It was powerful—dangerous. It was almost fun.
Then I turned to Max, and the hope in his eyes cut through me again.
“I’ll be in touch in, like, a day. Two, tops. You’ve got my number if anything happens, but otherwise I should have something for you super fast. I won’t cash the check until—”
Max waved that off with a curt hand-slash. “Cash the check. I don’t care about the money.”
I tried to give him a reassuring smile. “It’s going to be okay, Max.”
He stepped back, as if suddenly realizing that he was showing his hand too much. He glanced toward the empty paddock behind the house and shook his head. The breeze caught his curling black hair, tousling it. “From your lips to God’s ears.” He sighed.
Laughter welled up within me, low and sneering. You wish.
Still, something seemed a little off with the creature inside me.
It didn’t like Max, but it did like this house and whatever was inside the house.
It was excited, and angry, and maybe angry that it was excited, and all those feelings were spinning around inside of me, giving me strength and draining me at the same time.
It was a thing apart from me, but it was also me, I thought.
For all that I’d worked with Mordechai all these years, I didn’t really know what it meant to feel like this. I didn’t want to know.
I was terrified that I knew.
I made it home in three hours flat. Despite my urge to see the place, my desire to help, I was glad to put Max’s ever-so-extremely haunted house behind me.
Everything was okay at home—Steve was gone, but he’d left a note saying he’d be out of the house for the night.
Probably clubbing or hanging around one of the bars he’d picked up coasters from.
It was his thing lately. Either way, I had his number if I wanted to reach him.
I didn’t. Everything was quiet. I needed quiet.
It stayed that way for about another six hours.