And the Trees Crept In(33)

I open it slowly, and it creaks, the pages hard and dusty. The cover thuds against the table as it hits, the pages fanning out, dust flying in an upward arc. The impulse comes over me again. I pick up my pen and I begin to write.

I don’t stop until the candle dies with a sigh, plunging the room into darkness. We don’t even have the generator now.

It’s only when I feel Nori tug on my skirt that I realize she’s been with me the whole time.





I stare at the apple in my hand. I am hungry. I can do this.

I have lost three teeth now, but I am sure I can still bite. Can still chew. I scratch my scalp, and my fingernails come away full of dry white skin.

All around me, the books seem to cry out their encouragements.

You can do it, Silla!

Take a bite.

Nourish your body.

Don’t be afraid.

In the bowels of the house, my father is laughing.

HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA!

I close my eyes and try to remember the sweetness of apples. To recall wanting to feel the weight of food in my stomach. Before La Baume changed. Before the thing in the woods started watching. Before my father’s voice floated up out of the hole in the entrance hall like a vile toxin.

I bite into the apple.

I chew, ignoring the creaking. Upstairs, Cath starts her pacing. Creeeeeaaaak. Creeeeeeaaaak. I chew in time to her rhythm. Creeeeeaaaak.

I swallow.

I am less hollow as I feel it slide down the insides of me. I feel it scratching me up in there as it falls, the skin of the fruit sharp as paper. Paper cuts on the inside. Skin cuts.

My stomach heaves. Once, twice.

I run to the fireplace just in time.

The apple skin cuts on the way up, too.

I sit down on the sheepskin rug and cry silently into my hands, while the masticated apple and saliva spits in the grate.

“Leave me alone,” I beg the manor. “Please, just leave me alone. I didn’t do anything to you.”

I am partly talking to him, out there in the woods. “Please… go away. You can’t be real. Please…”

The apple is nothing but ash in the grate now. It might never have been there at all.





It has been three days.

Gowan has not come.

The sickness has grown.

I am losing my hair.





SOON




I know that boy. That boy, down there, walking away through my garden. I know that boy, I do, I do. It’s getting so hard to remember, though. All these higgledy-piggledy thoughts.

It’s going to happen soon. Oh, dear, yes! It’s going to happen soon!





It happens in the night of its own accord. The wood bends and splinters and falls away, disappearing into the nothing of the hole. Darkness rises and a voice begins to hum.

When I awake, I’m lying on the edge of a bottomless pit the size of a small chair.

I teeter for a moment, undecided, and then lazily roll away.

The thing in the hole bares its teeth and reaches, but I am already gone.





Maybe I’m just very, very sick.

I read about cancer patients once.

They hallucinate. The drugs or the sickness makes them see things that aren’t really there. So maybe I’m just really, really sick.

Which begs the question: Was Gowan real? He came after the hallucinations of the man out there began.

The Creeper Man.

…

I went to ask Nori. She looked a little bit scared at first. I told her I was playing a game. She signed: Yes. Gowan went away. He went away because of you. So I guess that’s real. Unless Nori is an illusion, too. So: illness.

That’s only one of my theories about what the hell is going on.

It’s the least bad of all of them.





13


long memory



Promises made like breath on the glass,

mean nothing to those who see the time pass

lingering on in a house made of blood

he’s brought closer by Python Wood.





BROKEN BOOK ENTRY


Another theory of mine is that there is a presence in this house. Like, maybe something terrible happened here, a long time ago—the house’s secret, maybe. A murder, maybe. Or a poltergeist is locked in the walls. Maybe the house doesn’t want any of us to get away because it’s lonely, or malevolent. Maybe, over the years, it has become a sort of living house. A house brought alive by something evil—a version of a curse. Another theory to explain the unexplainable. I just want to know the truth.





Creeeeeak.

I am totally ignoring my brain.

Creeeeeeeak.

Nope.

Creeeeeeeak.

If I had a gun right now, I’d go upstairs and shoot Cath in the leg. That thought alone is enough to pull me from whatever half sleep I’ve been in. And that’s when I realize that the creeping isn’t coming from upstairs.

I wait.

Crrrrreeeeeeeeeeak.

“Cath?” I call. “Are you out there?”

Has she finally come down? After almost two years?

Thump!

That came from above me.

“Auntie?” I whisper, hunching lower in my blankets. But the creaking is not my aunt. It is not the endless pacing in the attic. It’s coming from the stairs. Like someone slowly walking up. Step by creaking step.