Chapter 42
What are you doing here? I mouthed at him.
Rowan-in-the-bathroom pushed his face further into the gap in the door.
“I wanted to check in on you. Then I saw the door was open and I was worried something had happened, so I stepped inside and then I heard that… thing… and I ran and hid.” His voice was hushed and shaky. “What is it? Why does it sound like me?”
My chest went tight and my hands started to sweat. This was all my fault. I had to get him out. How in the hell was I going to get him out?
“Are you alright?” the voice called from just down the stairs.
Rowan-in-the-bathroom flinched back behind the door.
“It’s coming, it’s coming!” he whispered. “Quick, hide in here.”
The bottom step of the stairs creaked in the dark.
Rowan-in-the-bathroom reached out his hand to me.
I went to grab it, taking one hand off the axe, then stopped.
“She will hunt you.”
I remembered Fergus’s story. One mum downstairs. One in the bathroom. Who do you choose?
I put both hands back on the axe. Rowan-in-the-bathroom looked at me, panicked at first, then slowly shocked.
“Tamsin? What are you doing? Come on.”
I stepped back.
“Tamsin! Are you nuts?”
I backed away toward the stairs.
His face curdled into anger.
“You’re going to get us both killed!”
“I’m sorry,” I said, “but you’re not Rowan.”
He sank against the bathroom door. The skin around his eyes twitched.
“You really think that thing is me?”
“No,” I said. “Neither of you are Rowan. Rowan’s not here.”
The thing-that-was-not-Rowan stared at me from behind the door.
The house was suddenly still in the way a loaded, waiting, spring trap is still.
I didn’t dare blink. Didn’t dare turn my eyes away from the familiar-unfamiliar face still staring at me from the darkness of the bathroom.
His face sagged. It was something I would have read as disappointment, hopelessness, if I didn’t know better.
If there wasn’t still that strange twitching in the skin around his—its—eyes.
It was only when the first, tiny shard of glass peeked out from under its eyelids, puckering the skin at the corners, that I realised it wasn’t twitching but filling, like a coin purse.
An inky stream of splintered glass tumbled from under its eyeballs, catching in the thin skin of its eyelids.
Its mouth pulled into a perfect dark ‘oh’, too round to feel natural in any way, and shook the walls with a piercing scream.
In a scatter of glinting shards, not-Rowan lunged at me.
I forgot the use of the axe in terror and threw myself away from the imposter.
I slipped on the top step, fumbled on my own feet and tumbled down the stairs, down into the dark below where the voice was waiting for me.