Chapter 24
TWENTY-FOUR
When she first realized she could control her son with a simple game, he a malleable puppet and she the puppet master, she almost cried with relief.
Dread slid from her bones and pooled on the floor like a bloodletting.
She could breathe again. This was the answer to all the fights with him, the pleading and bribing and coercing, the meltdowns and head-banging and sleepless nights.
This was the way to make him love her again.
Let’s play a game.
If she cracked him open, gently, oh so gently, in her hand a silver teaspoon, his skull the fragile shell of an egg, she wonders if she’d find the answer as to why he stopped loving her.
Finally understanding him would be a balm she could lay against bruises that never faded and cuts that never healed, and they would be each other’s whole worlds. She and her little boy.
When they play a game, his face lights up at the winning. His dedication to whatever rules she spins is unshakable. In those moments when he flings himself into her arms, shrieking with joy that he won, she gets the affection that she needs to survive. So, who really wins, him or her?
It’s always her.
She just has to make him love her again, need her.
he has always loved you
She can fix everything with him if she only has another chance.
you just can’t see his affection for what it is
The lamp gives one last static flicker, and then the bulb bursts, plummeting the room into a suffocating darkness that tips down her throat with a sulfur stain.
Her whimper is small, easily stuffed back down her throat, as she pulls herself into a sitting position while the room pitches sickeningly to the left.
Weapon, she needs a weapon. A gossamer web slowly tightens about her brain, and she can’t think.
When she puts fingertips to the back of her skull, they come away slick.
“It’s okay, it’s okay.” It comes out barely above a whisper, and she doesn’t know if the unsteady reassurance is for herself or the baby gone quiet inside her belly.
Bren staggers for the bedroom door, slumping against the frame for a minute before propelling himself into the hall. He doesn’t look back. The dark swallows him.
How angry the house must be now to have almost had its fill of one of them, then to go hungry. She will offer it the rest of Bren, if only it lets her go.
Need hits her with clarity so sharp it feels like a knife sliced across her throat. She takes in a single, brittle breath and holds it.
Bren will not win this; he does not get her son.
On hands and knees, she crawls to the door, waiting for the floorboards to stop swooping beneath her before she uses the wall to claw to her feet.
Hide-and-seek, that’s what this is. Finders keepers, losers weepers.
She feels drunk as she edges down the pitch-black hallway, her breath coming in short, shallow gasps as she keeps a hand on the wallpaper for balance. It feels damp, mildew flourishing between the curves of the olive floral pattern Bren was so fond of—all the better not to see the mold.
There’s a hostile silence to all the empty bedrooms, the unfinished renovations, the holes in the walls and loose boards and gaping chasms where something has been ripped out to show the house’s spine.
No childish whimpers or scuffling feet can be heard. It’s unlike Jude to be silent; he is always unable to control his emotions.
The house has done something to him.
eaten him sucked his bones licked the inside of his perforated lungs
Elodie forces herself to hurry, but when she turns the corner, Bren is a shadow cast tall and twiggy in the dark, and he’s stumbling out of the nursery. No sign of Jude. But did he check under the bed? Behind the dollhouse?
Bren heads for the stairs, thumping down slowly, his voice a wet slur as he says, “Jude? Jude…” Blood siphons through his fingers like dancing ribbons.
He could call 911, though this would spiral into a messy domestic violence case, what with her head wound, her pregnancy, his sawn-open body, the stick-and-bone six-year-old with hollow eyes who might say everything or might say nothing.
She could show the cops the stalker shrine; Bren could tell them to look into her dead family.
But if it came down to him versus her, and who would keep Jude, she is terrified to know what a court would decide.
It has to be her. She cannot cope with a reality where Jude is his.
The end of this game tunnels deep into an endless throat of horrors, and they tilt on the edge of falling, their teeth sewn into each other, both refusing to be the one to let go.
ready or not here I come
She searches the nursery lit only by the mushroom night-light, her heartbeat hammering bruises on the inside of her chest. Her movements are repetitive yet rushed, her search chaotic as she tears the nursery apart.
Something tacky runs down the back of her neck and an iced fervor dampens her skin. She is cold, so cold, despite her coat.
Hurry, she needs to go faster. Bren is covering more ground.
But her eyes catch on the woodland bed, and her heartbeat crawls up into her throat; she could swear a baby lies in the midst of the mattress, limbs like twisted spider legs and mouth sewn shut.
She grabs fistfuls of hair and bends double with a scream. It’s not real. This is not real.
Her baby is fine. He is just asleep.
She wishes he would kick.
Downstairs, she slides her feet along the floorboards, shaky and unconfident of her step in the dark.
Evidence of her destruction is everywhere, feverish and manic, no wall left without violent slashes from the circular saw or hammer blows punched through plaster.
Mold furs every surface. Putrid water slides between seams and puddles on the floorboards.
Everywhere, she smells mildew, the toxicity of the lead, the insidious decay that they’ve swallowed down for months.
Deeper in the house, she hears Bren’s agonized breathing, his swallowed sob of rage as he surveys his house, his beautiful house that he loved so much, and the way she has destroyed it.
Her fumbling hand finds a light switch and she flicks it, but the bulb is dead. The house wants them sightless.
“Just give me Jude,” she whispers to the walls. “You can have Bren. I’ll make sure you have him all to yourself.”
A rustle sounds behind her. She whips around but only shadows melt down the wallpaper. If it was Jude, she’d know. She knows the way his heel hits floorboard; she has memorized every freckle and divot on his skin. She knows him; she made him.
She searches every nook, every corner, all the little spaces between sheet-covered furniture in half-renovated parlors, in the kitchen, under the table. In the hallway, Bren tips over, cries out as he drags himself upright again.
“Jude? Jude.” His voice is shattered. “Come on, little buddy. I’ll get you out of here, okay? I’ll get you out.”
Elodie lets herself into the downstairs bathroom, the piles of storage suddenly a minefield without light. She feels around toolboxes and paint tins and folded drop cloths that feel like leathery skin until her hand closes around the thick handle of a claw hammer.
She picks it up.
She is light as a whisper as she floats into the living room, the wood stain on the floor still sticky under her heels.
The worst holes in the walls are here, courtesy of her first bout of energy, and she can almost see things coming in and out of the gouges.
Long-legged things, stick things. Things built of twists of witchy wood and bloody string.
A hysterical laugh bubbles up her throat, and she can feel herself sinking through her skin toward the floor.
Her skeleton will be left standing alone, and she will be a smear of gore on the ground, still laughing, still laughing.
Everything feels wrong.
A small shadow skitters in the corner. She tightens her grip on the hammer and spins, but that’s when she sees the unmistakable shape on the floor—a mangled, foul toy rabbit with one eye missing, stuffing pulling from all its seams.
A small white hand snatches it and retreats into the dark corner.
“Jude.” She holds the hammer behind her back. “I know you’re scared, but Mama’s here. Mama’s got you.”
There’s a whimper, thin and rusted.
Elodie takes a step forward. “We’re playing hide-and-seek.” Her voice is so soft. “And I found you. I … win.” She holds out a hand toward the dark.
Then something crashes behind her and she jerks around, her heart in her mouth as Bren appears, gripping the doorframe and breathing hard.
“Jude.”
She whips back around to her son just in time to see him climbing into a small hole in the wall, only big enough for a child. His legs vanish inside before she can react.
But this makes no sense. She never made that hole.
Then she starts screaming.
She flings herself at the hole, reaching in as far as she can to grab for him, but only empty space greets her. Moist air closes around her fruitlessly gasping hand, as if the house breathed out a laugh.
“Jude! Jude!” She is out of her mind as she yanks at the splintered edges of the hole. “Jude, baby, come out of there! Don’t—don’t—Jude!”
The house will eat him.
The house is eating him.
Bren crashes into her, picking her up as he shoves her out of the way, and then jams his own arm into the hole. But he finds nothing. They’re both yelling for Jude, their panic merging into one contagious smear of terror.
She starts beating the wood with her fist. “He’s in the walls. He’s in— Bren, Bren. Get him out. Oh my god, get him out gethimoutgethim—”
“I’m trying.” Bren surges to his feet and starts kicking at the wall, splintering wood and plaster as he makes the hole wider.
She always thought the space between the walls too wide.
Jude will get stuck. He’ll panic. He’ll breathe in mold, lead, and rot, he’ll die in there, he’ll die, he’ll die—
“I can’t find him.” Bren whirls on her, his eyes flared wide.
She whirls on him with a strangled scream. “This is all your fault!”
“I was going to fix it!” he shouts. “I was going to fix everything, you didn’t give me a chance.
” Pain twists his face and he looks young all of a sudden—young and foolish in his agony.
He holds back a small sob as he presses a hand to his torn chest. The dark makes it impossible to see much, but adrenaline must be fast fading, and she wonders if he swallowed painkillers when he was in the kitchen or stuffed gauze into his wounds while she was distracted searching.
The moans coming from her mouth don’t feel human.
She wrenches away from him and starts feeling along the wall, as if her fingertips will brush the shape of Jude through the fibrous membrane.
Then she raises the hammer and smashes it down.
It punctures through wall; plaster dust is on her tongue.
Bren is behind her, screaming that she will hit Jude.
“He’s scared of you!” She’s still screaming at him. “You terrify him—”
“He’s never been scared of me!” he roars. “You made that up. Jesus Christ, Elodie, you’re the one who just came at him with a fucking hammer.”
Then she hears it, the tiniest keening.
Both she and Bren go perfectly still, trying to narrow down the sound. A faint scrabbling starts, stops. She could swear it’s in the kitchen, but he couldn’t crawl all that way. He couldn’t. The house is playing with them.
It has joined in the game.
“Jude?” She holds her breath, and in the dark, her eyes meet Bren’s.
Then the screaming starts.
It is in every wall.
It is all around them.
Her child is screaming and screaming, and she can’t get to him.