Chapter 23
TWENTY-THREE
Terror is a flammable spill across her face, match lit, horror unspooling, undefined and unstoppable. Her scream cuts off as the hand blackened with blood squeezes her throat and then hurls her to the ground.
She hits hard, her gasp tipping into a wail of pure devastation. Her baby. Her baby. The back of her head hits the carpet and air punches from lungs already drowning in pools of brackish water. Jude is no longer in her arms. She lost him. No, this monster—
Took him.
“JUDE.” She scrambles backward, clawing in the dark for her son, but the single bedside lamp splutters, electricity surging on and off. She can’t see.
where is her son where is her son where is
The monster lunges for her again, and she tries to propel herself backward, kicking wildly, her body a mad thing.
Too late, she realizes her mistake. How she has backed up against the huge mahogany bed frame and boxed herself in.
The bulb flickers frantically as her spine hits the bedside table and the lamp rocks, throwing light in chaotic streaks across the room.
She is still clawing for Jude, screaming for him, trying to find him as the monster leers over her and blots out the world.
He is a thing of terror, of ruin, half of him opened up and spilling out. When Bren drops to his knees in front of her, his claw reaches out and he
s n a t c h e s
a fistful of her curls with a brutal twist. Then he slams her head against the bedside table.
The world splinters in a vicious severing of indigo and red.
Her cry is strangled, and she squeezes her eyes shut as she clutches at his wrist, trying to ease the ferocity of his grip in her hair.
But he yanks her forward, and for a sickening second, she thinks he’s going to smash her head into the bed frame hard enough to split her skull open.
Instead, he bends her neck to the side slowly, the angle unforgiving and terrifying. He will snap her neck as if she is a doll.
His jaw unhinges, and all she can see is the iridescent glow of hell in the back of his throat.
She’s sobbing, incoherent as she tries to pry his fingers from her curls. “Please don’t kill him. Please please please. He’s just a baby. He’s my baby—”
Mucous stretches in long strands from his swollen lips and splatters on her face.
this is not real it is not it is not real
A high, keening wail leaves her mouth.
“Shut. Up.” He slams her head backward again into the bedside table and pain explodes through her in a pounding wave.
She is breathless, limp, slithering toward the carpet as logic detaches and she swims in a lucid pool of agony.
“I have never hurt him,” Bren snarls. “All I ever did was try to save my son from his murderer of a mother. Because he’s my fucking son too.”
Her eyes squeeze shut, and she can’t look at him, tears slipping down her cheeks quick and sharp. If she looks she will see—
Not a monster.
Just her own monstrousness reflected back at her.
“You can’t still be alive,” she whispers.
He lets out a sound that could have been a laugh if not for how it drowns in blood. “You fucking bitch.”
In the basement, she hadn’t looked at him properly, hadn’t felt for his pulse, because it was easier to think he was dead. She needed him to be dead.
Her eyes open, spiderwebs of tears clinging to her lashes.
She stares at him.
The momentum of the circular saw sent it flying up his chest, eating up his left shoulder and then slashing his face before the blade jammed.
But it hadn’t sunk deep, not with those worn-out, bent metal teeth.
It has still slashed him; he is a catastrophe of blood and gore leaking from the torn-open wounds.
Blood soaks his shredded shirt, and it sticks to every outlined muscle of his chest, wet and glistening.
His face is hardest to look at, and she tilts her head away.
But he jerks her back toward him, his fingers twisting again until it feels like her hair will rip from her scalp.
Look at what you did.
She’s crying.
The gash on his face runs from chin to forehead, right through the middle of his left eye. The skin parts like wet lips, the blood so rich and endless that it looks black. What’s left of his eye is perforated jelly.
He will bleed out like this, though slowly. He must be upright only from adrenaline.
“It was an a-accident.” She’s babbling, choking on her own tears. “The f-faulty switch. I swear. I swear.”
“Shut the fuck up.” He yanks her forward, and their mouths are a breath apart, the ruin of his bleeding face almost touching hers. She can smell it: raw, moist flesh, the sharp taint of butchery.
He’s shaking, so close he could kiss her.
“Is this”—his voice is a low growl—“how you survive your shitty life? The lies. The delusions. I know you did this to me!”
“Bren—” It breaks in her mouth.
“SHUT UP.” He shakes her and she gasps. “I figured it out about your parents, you know.” He chokes then, blood bubbling between chapped lips.
“They were found dead only days after we left. And I know you went upstairs. I thought you were in shock that day in our kitchen when you read that article about their deaths—but you were terrified your secret would come out.”
“I’m s-sorry.”
“And I didn’t care when I realized.” He lets out a shattered laugh. “They deserved it … after what they did to my son. But I always wondered why they hated you so much. Why, Elodie? Why?”
“BECAUSE I KILLED THEIR SON FIRST.” And she screams it and she’s not sorry and she’s sobbing so hard that his grip actually loosens on her hair and she gasps with relief as she slumps to the floor.
It takes a long minute, her cheek against the carpet, flecks of his spittle and blood on her lips, for her to realize he isn’t attacking. He has sat back on his heels and just watches her. Blood pulses down the furrows of his wounds.
She pushes up on her elbows, forcing her breathing to slow, each breath measured as she bites back shuddering sobs.
“I let my little brother drown,” she says, low and terrible and sick.
“And they didn’t care that it was an accident.
They never cared. They had to h-hate someone, and it had to be me.
Even when—” She sucks in a shuddering breath.
“Even when I tried to fix it. I made Jude for myself, but also for them. And they wouldn’t even look at him. ”
He says nothing, just crouches there, breathing hard.
Defiance claws up her spine, and she straightens, tendons flexing in her wrists as she clenches her fists, her chest heaving. “All they had to do was love me too.”
“You’re insane,” he says, so quietly she almost misses it.
“You stalked me,” she snarls. “You lied to me about who you were.”
“You never gave me a chance back then!” His voice is suddenly a tunnel of rage, and he is yelling at her. “I asked friends to set us up and you blew them off. I tried to talk to you once and you walked straight past me. You didn’t even care to know my name.”
She doesn’t even remember. She could laugh right now, in a deranged, terrified way. “Why did you pretend you didn’t know my name?”
“So you’d give it to me.” His teeth are bared. “And you did.”
The look she gives him is disgusted and furious all at once. “That doesn’t mean I gave you myself! I never owed you—”
“You used me to get pregnant when I had no fucking idea. Twice. You did it twice.” His voice cracks then, and blood runs in a fresh rivulet down the corner of his mouth.
“I w-wanted a family so goddamn much, and I was so happy when you told me you were pregnant. But—you did that on purpose, didn’t you?
” He’s crying, she realizes, from his single good eye.
It makes her feel, somehow, less weak.
“Let me leave.” Her voice is almost even. “Just let me leave, and I’ll stop ruining your life. Bren, please.”
His tears have turned to racking sobs, and he’s folding in on himself now.
She could reach out and pull him into her arms, and he would let her.
His pain is overtaking his stamina. His bleeding has slowed, but his body must be going into shock, and he won’t be able to keep pushing through the agony much longer.
“I love you.” He is losing his voice, his words rusted out and hopeless. “I need you. I need someone who won’t leave, who will be my family in my house. We’ll be like my parents. But we’ll be okay.”
“We’re never going to be okay,” she whispers. “You can … find someone else. Someone better. A perfect wife.”
“No.” It’s a growl, a howl, its agony torn from a mouth festered with excruciating pain.
Part of her knows he will never let her go.
That he will tally their sins against each other and find they cancel each other out.
He could lock her in a room and then raise Jude on his own.
He is too deep into this project of delusional happiness—turning his new house, his new family, into a tomb to immortalize the legacy of what he lost. She was always intended to be a sepulcher for his grief.
She is perfect after all, she thinks. A perfect monster for this monstrous boy.
Her hand reaches out, tentative and careful, as she cups the smooth side of his face and brushes her thumb over his cheekbone.
His eyes close, his ragged breathing slowing as he takes her hand from his face and kisses it.
“Pretend,” she whispers. “Pretend you never knew me and let me go.”
Because this is her favorite game, isn’t it? She is well versed in playing it.
Pretend she didn’t hurt her husband.
Pretend she didn’t kill her family.
She kisses him, and her mouth melts into his with the tender, hungry want of deprivation. His body relaxes and he tips toward her, magnetized still.
“You can be free of me.” She says it into his open mouth, the metallic taste of him staining her tongue. “Jude and I will disappear.”
He stiffens, and she realizes her mistake too late.
She should never have mentioned Jude.
His growl is low, ferocious. “He’s my son too. You’re going to kill him.”
Panic hits like ice water to her lungs, and she can’t breathe. Her chest seizes, her mouth goes dry. But she isn’t sure who she is most horrified at: him for knowing what she would do, or herself for thinking of doing it.
“N-no,” she starts. “I would never—”
“You’ll kill him like you killed all the others.
” He suddenly surges to his feet, the cry ripping from his mouth so wolfish with fury that she shies backward, cowering against the bed.
“You know I never started the adoption paperwork for him. I got a paternity test done when I took him to the doctor. I’m going to get myself on his birth certificate, and then I’ll have fucking full rights to him.
You’re so goddamn scared he’ll spill your secrets, you’ve been torturing him to keep him silent. ”
“You’re the one killing him!” She screams it at him. “This house. This poisonous house. The mold, the lead paint, the monsters in the walls. The house will eat us alive.”
“There is nothing haunting this house!” he roars. “The haunting is you, Elodie fucking January. The haunting has always been you.”
She needs to block her ears, run, get out of here, get her son. Leave Farrows, never look back. Leave before he can steal her baby.
Molasses dread drowns her chest, and she can barely breathe through the intensity of her need to snatch Jude and run. He has been so quiet all this time. See? He is scared of Bren. He hates Bren.
There is a steady tap-tapping sound and only now she realizes it’s blood running from Bren’s torso and dripping onto the floor. Steady, continuous. He doesn’t seem to notice.
Then he looks over his shoulder. “Where’s Jude?”
The door is still wide open, the bedroom empty but for them. A trail of bloodied footsteps tracks to where Bren stands, but there is nothing else here. Not a whisper remains of Jude.
“All right, we’ll do this your way,” Bren snarls. “Let’s. Play. A. Game. First one to find Jude keeps him.”