Chapter 16
SIXTEEN
Her eyelids have been peeled open, the pressure behind her sockets like two fingers squeezing an overripe cherry tomato.
She lies in bed in the dark, her lungs filling with a nameless inky terror as her gaze fuses to the ceiling.
Unblinking. All she can do is stare at the mass of dark spreading above her like a water stain.
Except, this stain has a mouth rimmed with a thousand teeth, a forked tongue slowly snaking down and down as hot, lurid saliva drips off the sharpened tip.
The tongue is an inch from her blown-wide eyes. She can’t move. The scream is in her throat, her body seized in terrified paralysis.
I need to wake up, wake up wake up wake up up up up—
Air slams into her lungs and she sits bolt upright with a trembling cry, her hand reaching out for the slope of Bren in the dark.
He mumbles into his pillow, barely stirring as she digs fingernails into his shoulder.
She wants to slap him. To wrench him from the bed and force him to look up at the monster—
Except, when she slowly tilts her chin to the ceiling, there is nothing in the dark. Just the smooth expanse of the ceiling.
Her eyes feel burned dry, her heartbeat still slamming against her ribs at full throttle, and she can’t stop shaking. A nightmare, of course. But she should check on Jude. What if the thing has moved to his ceiling? What if the mouth has opened beneath his bed?
Elodie hurries through the halls, feeling her way with numb feet on cold floorboards as her heart lurches at every creak, every hiss of wind, every vicious shape hovering in the corner that turns out to be nothing.
She is soundless, as if she’s peeled a fresh skin to wear out of the shadows. Restful sleep is an untethered concept.
She must see her child.
She must be there when he needs her.
Moonlight touches the edge of the arched windows in the hallway and makes her fingers look like ghostly claws on the nursery doorknob. She twists, her breath held, but part of her doesn’t mind if he wakes because then he will cry and need comfort and she will be right there to give it.
In the dark, he is malleable. But everyone is.
The mushroom night-light casts enough glow to see most of the nursery, though shadows remain thick and amorphous in the corners. She kneels on the floor to check the cavernous gouge of darkness under his woodland bed while a small voice rattles around the back of her skull. You’re going insane.
No, she’s being careful. If someone is hurting her son, she has to see. She has to know.
Someone, some … thing.
She saw it; she knows she did.
There is something wrong with this house.
Ever since Thanksgiving, she’s been slipping into his room six or seven times a night, a fresh urgency lit within her after seeing those red marks on his thighs. But he has school today. She won’t see him for hours.
She kneels by the bed, elbows resting on his mattress, her chin propped on her fist, watching the soft rise and fall of his chest among the blankets. He stirs, his long, dark eyelashes fluttering as his sleepy mouth moves, peaceful and unconcerned of the threats she protects him from.
Someday soon he will grow up and he will love her less, until he doesn’t love her at all. Need for her will thin until she becomes a decrepit revenant in the shadows of his life while he stretches tall and fills out and becomes—
Unmanageable.
Babies don’t grow up, she thinks, they are swallowed and strangers take their places who don’t care that their mothers are bleeding out their eyes because they miss their newborns.
Movement flickers behind her, the nursery’s hinges silent as the door swings inward.
Elodie goes stiff and alert, alarm slicing through her skin.
How long she’s crouched here, she doesn’t know, but her muscles have stiffened with cold and a sharp ache throbs behind her eyes as if they’re held open by pins. Something is coming in, something is—
“Elodie?” Bren is only a shadow in the nursery doorway, his sweatshirt bulky and rumpled, his long legs prickled with gooseflesh between the hem of his boxers and his raggedy football socks. “What are you doing?”
She struggles to her feet, numb and disorientated, and grips the end of the woodland bed to steady herself. “He … He needed me.”
“But he isn’t awake.” Bren sounds sleepy and baffled, rubbing his thumb at the corner of his eye.
She hurries across the toy-strewn floor and slips out of the nursery, closing the door carefully behind her.
“There’s something—” She stops, feeling disordered and fractious, close to babbling when she knows it is crucial she sounds calm.
Her next breath is slower to hide the tremor in her voice.
“The house keeps trying to … hurt me. And Jude. There’s something wrong inside the walls, you’ve seen it.
It tried to stab me with a light fixture, and then it almost broke my hand by slamming the door on me.
I can feel it watching me all the time. There’s this mouth … Bren, you … You need to listen to me.”
In the dark, she can’t quite make out his expression. She knots her trembling hands together, her fingernails digging into her own wrists as a metallic, syrupy feeling floods her mouth.
“Okay.” He stops as if he’s feeling around for words.
She’s shivering, hovering just out of reach even though she wants to crawl into his arms, into his rib cage, into his lungs. Just to be held, safe and warm. He has to believe her.
There’s something unsure about his voice. “Why were your hands at his throat?”
She freezes.
A molasses dark coats the hall, dripping down the walls with steady tip-taps that make her skin crawl.
She stares at him. “What are you saying?”
“I don’t know what I’m saying. Maybe I—” He hesitates. “Let’s just go back to bed, okay?”
He’s going to ignore everything she said, just like that. As if they are frightened, stammering ramblings of a mad thing and he is being polite by looking away. But she doesn’t know how to push without spiraling into screaming at him, so she bites her tongue and tries not to cry.
When they return to their huge bed, he tugs her close, spooning his body to the shape of her back as if they have been carved to fit each other.
His strong arms wrap about her, one hand cupped over the baby like he always does because he loves to feel the little kicks.
She waits for his breathing to relax as he falls back into his easy, oblivious sleep.
Minutes pass. When she tries to slip free and go back to Jude’s room, his arms tighten gently around her.
He presses his face into the crook of her neck. “Sleep.”
She doesn’t feel comforted and warmed as she thought she would. She feels pinned.
All morning she’s irritable, though she blames it on the headache she hasn’t been able to shake since Thanksgiving. Her nose keeps dripping, so maybe she’s coming down with a cold. Just what she needs.
Frustration magnifies when, in the midst of battling Jude into clothes, Bren breezes past the nursery and says the preschool is closed today. He was notified. He forgot to mention it.
“It’s fine,” Elodie says, murderous. “I love being told things last minute.”
She releases Jude, who runs shrieking from the room in just his underwear and pajama shirt, gripping his rabbit by the ear so it trails behind him like a dying comet. One eye hangs by a single thread that stretches like a lurid, bloody vein.
“I’m taking today off too,” Bren says. “You can nap if you want.”
Elodie tosses the pants she’d been trying to stuff Jude into and makes her voice acidic and bright. “Sure, why don’t I just skip looking after my child today.”
“If only there were two adults in this house and one could watch the kid and the other could get some rest.” His tone stays casual, but a vein flexes in his jaw, and she doesn’t like the way he looks at her right then.
Why are you being like this? is the unsaid shout between them.
But she knows why. She should never have felt safe enough to tell him what his twisted, vicious house is doing to her.
She pushes to her feet and stalks from the nursery. “Pity you’re too obsessed with your precious house to be a reliable babysitter.”
It lands like a petty scratch, and he looks hurt, though he says nothing as she storms down to the laundry to put a load on. Soon after, she hears the drill whirr to life in the living room, and it infuriates her that she was right.
She should go demand an update on his plans to fix the rot in the walls, to open up this house’s gangrenous carcass and figure out what is truly, deeply wrong with it.
Instead, she tracks down her son to ruin his life by making him wear pants.
Jude is absolutely feral today, the prolonged absence from preschool and disruption to his normal Monday routine making him impossible to manage.
Twice he kicks her. Once he bites. When she finally pins him down to pull a warmer sweater over his head and get him into pants, he screams like he’s being murdered.
She could get Bren to—
She refuses to get Bren.
Unexplainable red welts still swell on the back of Jude’s thighs.
Any more of this and she’ll lose her shit before lunchtime, so she rummages in the kitchen drawer for electrical tape and strides upstairs to make a hopscotch on his nursery floorboards. This is what they need. A game to knit the chasm between them, to remind him that he needs his mother.
Sure enough, he crawls out from behind the dollhouse and watches her work.
She’s on her knees, ripping tape with her teeth, when he tiptoes over and leans against her back. It makes up for the wretched morning they’ve had, the soft weight of him at her spine.
“Not sure if you can play this game with me.” She sits back, skeptical of her wonky boxes. “It’s pretty hard.”
“I can! I can!”
She demonstrates how to do the correct order of jumps. In lieu of a stone, they use a small stuffed frog with beans in its belly to toss into the boxes.