Chapter 17
SEVENTEEN
Sawdust is stuffed down her lungs, her arms arranged gently against her sides before the first nails are driven into her bones.
Through wrists, forearms, shoulders. To keep her limbs in place as they lift her inside the wall and begin to layer heavy wooden boards across her face.
The hammer blows are efficient and measured, and when they lay the last board over her face, they make sure the final hammer blow drives the nail straight between her eyes.
Her screams are animal things, bloody and wet as they spasm through her chest and drown her in sick waves of sobs.
It is the horrible kind of crying, uncontrollable and drowned.
She screams for her son, her baby, but darkness blots out the whole world and she can do nothing.
Her face presses to rough splintered wood and she can’t move. She can’t move.
She is built into the house and already she begins to rot, the tiny legs of termites skittering over her eyelids and lips. Blood leaks around the nail in her forehead and a thin, black line runs into her mouth. Sweet copper, ruinous devastation.
She can still hear them on the other side, going ahead with their lives: the happy shrieks of children’s feet running down the hallway as she decays into mincemeat behind the wallpaper.
Two children. She can hear babyish chatter, but then there is Jude, older, calmer, confident as he murmurs, “It’s bath time now.”
NO—
She loses it, screaming and screaming, thrashing her nailed body in the small walled cavity, beating herself bloody as she screams for him. Don’t do this, don’t do this, I’m sorry, please please please, I can’t survive this, I need another chance, come back—
Jude Jude Jude—
Her blood oozes from the wallpaper, soft and lovely, a gorge of violent red.
The color suits the house perfectly.
Her cheeks are wet when she wakes up.
A foul crust coats her tongue and she gags as she rolls over and gropes for her phone.
It takes her a full minute of staring in disorientated confusion at the clock on her screen before she can parse the numbers: 7:13 p.m. A silky dark has drifted across the bedroom, the air shimmering under a wintery cold as gooseflesh ripples across her arms. She crushes both palms to her temples and waits for the dizziness to pass.
The brutality of waking has shaken her to the core, but maybe that’s the nightmare still lingering in spidery webs at the edge of her vision.
She scrubs at her eyes and then stares at the night-soaked bedroom.
Something breathes. It is darkness condensed into a black so pure it pulses in the corner.
A cold terror closes over her throat, because it looks for all the world like a body standing there, water dripping slowly onto the floorboards with a pat, pat.
Then it steps backward and dissolves into the walls.
It takes everything in her not to start crying.
She has to get out of this house.
Peeling herself from the bed takes excruciating effort, her limbs toneless and uncooperative.
She pulls on another sweater as she slips into the en suite to pee and splash cold water on her face with trembling hands.
She looks worse than harrowed, thinned in the way of unraveling things, of food left half-eaten on a plate.
Tangled curls curtain her face, limp and tacky and twisted.
She should never have slept this long.
A sleep that deep, that hard to wake from, isn’t normal. It had to have been six hours, maybe seven.
She shoves away from the sink and yanks the trash can toward her, rooting around with manic fervor. Tissues. Fistfuls of her hair pulled from the drain. Something gross wrapped in toilet paper. Old box of cold and flu meds. And … an emptied sheet of sleeping pills.
She’s going to kill him.
Downstairs, the house feels as hollowed as a stripped carcass, the shadows arched like rib bones around hallways and the floorboards iced underfoot.
Most of the lights are off. She stumbles around the usual toolboxes and ladders and work supplies stacked in the corners and spilling out of half-renovated rooms, and it feels as if the house has grown.
Rooms stretching, narrowing, swapping places, all a vindictive game to make her feel lost in this rabbit warren.
She drags herself to the living room, breathless and shaky, but she already knows what she’ll find.
The walls have been papered afresh, everything returned to the lovely florals and olive leaves and delicate embellishments that befit a sweet old, renovated house.
No trace of the red stains remains, the luminous, throbbing flesh, the pustules oozing down the wood.
The entire room smells of sanded wood floors and wallpaper paste.
Elodie considers snatching up tools, anything she can get her hands on, and ripping it all down again. If she claws back the paper with her fingernails, she’ll expose everything malevolent he’s trying to hide.
That’s what this is.
He’s not fixing anything about this house; he’s simply covering up the horrors.
Voices sound from the kitchen, cutlery ringing against plates, and she’s jolted out of her vicious focus on the walls.
Confront him.
She has to, quickly, before it’s too late.
Light spills around the archway into the kitchen and she drifts toward it, a helpless moth toward a beautiful execution, her head throbbing with such ruthless intensity she can barely think.
Water, she needs water. And then to lie down— No.
Jude has already been without her for six goddamn hours with a man she cannot trust.
In the archway, she sways, a hand up to shield her burning eyes from the abrasive, honeyed glow of the kitchen lights. The scene before her feels upside down, floors and ceiling reversed, windows blown out and the air glittering with the debris of exploded stars.
This can’t be real.
They’re having dinner, Bren and Jude, without screams or bribes or threats, both of them caught in a snapshot of domestic, cozy bliss.
Pans pile in the sink and the counters are strewn with bowls and spilled seasonings and escaped slivers of raw onion.
Half the table is covered with the usual junk accumulated over a weekend, but the other side has been cleared for stacks of plates and a bowl of fluffy rice, gravy in a milk jug, and grilled steaks still in a charred pan.
A savory, alluring smell threads through the room.
Cutlery rings against the sunflower crockery. Apple juice splashes into a glass.
Blood oozes from the steak and rings around it in a leering grin.
Jude is sitting at the table, his little legs swinging, cut-up meat on his plate. Sauce smears across his mouth and grains of rice stick to his cheeks.
He’s chattering away, putting steak in his mouth with dirty fingers.
“Hey! You’re up. Are you hungry?”
She blinks, trying to focus through the foggy glaze. Her lungs spasm, her mouth parting in a gasp, because perhaps she forgot to breathe as she watched them.
“I did steaks for dinner,” Bren’s saying. He’s at the stove, humming cheerfully as he pokes tongs into something bloody and bubbling in his pan. “Jude’s super into it.”
She strides into the kitchen and shoves Jude’s plate out of his reach while he lets out a mewl of surprise. “He can’t eat this. He’ll throw up. It’s—it’s too rich.” She slides hands under Jude’s arms. “It’s bedtime.”
Jude gives a dismayed wail. Rice sticks to his pants, and she realizes he isn’t in the same clothes she dressed him in this morning.
These are nice jeans, a mustard sweater he hasn’t irrevocably stained yet, though there’s now rice scattered across his lap and he’s dragged his cuffs through sauce. Evidence he’s been eating.
He’s been eating a lot.
Bren looks startled. “Wait, what? It’s only seven and we just started dinner. Let him finish, Elodie. This is great—look at how well he’s eating.”
“I said no.” She tries to heft Jude up, but he’s perfected the art of boneless defiance, and he slithers downward even as she tries to hold him.
A bullish fist has wrapped about her throat, and she’s struggling to see straight.
Control has slipped, gravity off center, and when Bren hovers a hand at her elbow as if he’s going to tug her away, she all but snarls at him.
“You’re making no sense.” Bren’s eyebrows draw together. “He needs the protein. You give him a handful of crackers and that’s it for the day.”
“Oh, I give him?” Her voice hurtles up a notch. “That’s all he wants to eat. I can’t force food down his throat—”
“So let him eat now since he wants to—”
“I SAID NO.” She doesn’t remember deciding to sweep her arm across the table, catching the plate of half-eaten steak, the gravy jug, the cutlery, and sending them crashing to the floor in a wild explosion.
Food splatters against the cabinets, broken plate skitters across the floor. Fury burns across her vision in a white hot brand, and she stands there, breathing ragged as her lungs heave in and out.
Bren stares at her.
Elodie yanks Jude into her arms and this time he doesn’t try to worm away. His eyes have gone saucer-huge, and a tiny, unsteady whimper starts in his throat. Her hair tangles around them both, an explosion of dank locks that cascade over Jude like a protective blanket.
“What the hell”—Bren’s voice is oddly steady—“is wrong with you?”
She can’t look at him.
“He’s not growing.” He yanks the frying pan off the stove and slams it in the sink, where steam hisses. “But you know that, right? He’s six years old, he should be growing like a weed, but I don’t think he’s even gone up an inch since I met you.”
“He’s only four.” She says it so quietly.
“Like, Jesus, he’s losing weight. He’s in the lowest percentile for weight and height, and at this point, we have to start doing tests to see if he needs growth hormones—” He catches himself.