The Invited(46)

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. . .

They’d had two bottles of wine, which would explain Helen’s pounding headache and terrible thirst. She woke up naked, disoriented. She turned her head. They were in the bare bones of the unfinished new house. On the living room floor. In the spot where their old braided rug would one day go.

One of the candles in the glass votive jar was still flickering dimly. Nate snored softly beside her. They’d zipped their two sleeping bags together, making one large bag, which now felt suffocatingly hot and damp with sweat. The plywood floor beneath them was hard, too hard to sleep on comfortably. Her back and neck ached. And she had to pee.

She unzipped her side of the sleeping bag and crawled out, searching around on the floor until she found her T-shirt and panties. The air felt startlingly frigid. She rubbed her arms, trying to brush the goose bumps away.

Something creaked behind her. The house settling, maybe?

    Did brand-new, totally unfinished houses settle?

There it was again, a loud creaking sound.

Jesus. What was that?

Her damp skin turned even more cold and clammy.

Turn around, she told herself. Just turn around.

She took in a breath, then slowly turned so that she was facing the kitchen, looking at it through the framed opening with the new beam up above. The beam from the hanging tree.

It’s the beam making the sound, she thought. The beam remembering the weight of Hattie hanging from one of the tree’s sturdiest branches.

She recalled something she read once about hangings: how unless the victim’s neck was broken with the initial drop, she would hang and slowly suffocate. A terrible way to die.

Helen felt her own throat tightening as she reached down to grab the candle and forced herself to shuffle forward, passing under the beam, moving into the kitchen, which was all shadows. The windows in the house had all been framed, but she and Nate hadn’t cut through the plywood that covered them yet, so they were dark. No views. No moonlight coming through.

It was like being in a tomb with only a dimly flickering candle.

And she wasn’t alone in here. She felt that instantly.

She could hear something.

Not creaking this time, and not Nate snoring in the other room, but the quiet breathing of someone trying not to be heard.

She turned to her right and looked in her blind spot, and her bladder nearly let go.

There was a woman there.

She was standing just to the right of the wide doorway, her back against the wall, her body right where a set of kitchen shelves would go. She wore a dirty white dress, black lace-up shoes. Helen saw the woman’s wild inky-black hair, the dark circles like bruises under her eyes, and knew exactly who she was. She knew, just looking into her eyes. She would have known her even without seeing the heavy hemp rope looped around her neck: a coarse noose like a macabre necklace, the frayed end of the rope hanging to the woman’s waist.

Hattie was here for real this time. Not some little girl playing dress up.

Helen froze. Hattie’s eyes—for this must be Hattie—were black and shimmered like the dark water at the center of the bog.

    Helen wanted to speak, to say something—Hattie’s name maybe, or just a simple hello—but there was no air in her chest, and when she opened her mouth, no sound came. She felt like a cartoon fish letting out little bubbles of air, bubbles that rose to the surface and popped without making a sound.

The air felt heavy and cold, as if Helen were wrapped in a blanket of fog. And the smell! The peaty, primordial smell of the bog with something sweet and rotten behind it.

Hattie looked up at the beam above them, the beam from the tree she’d died beneath; the tree whose branch had borne her full weight, the tree that remembered her as she must remember it.

Hattie touched the noose around her neck, ran her pale fingers over each knob of the braid like a woman praying the rosary. And, like a woman praying, Hattie moved her lips—she was speaking, whispering softly, silently almost, and Helen couldn’t make out what she was saying. She looked more and more distressed as she whispered to herself, her fingers moving along the rope, her eyes still locked on the beam.

Then she looked right at Helen and said one clear word: Jaaane.

Her voice sounded like breaking glass—no, that wasn’t quite right; it was the sound of glass being ground up, being tumbled and smashed. It was a broken, screaming, hissing sort of sound that made Helen’s bowels go icy. The sweet, rotting stench intensified.

“Jane?” Helen croaked back, her throat dry. She wanted to turn and run. To not be here with this…this creature who looked human but was clearly not of this world. Not anymore.

“Babe?”

Helen whirled around.

Nate was sitting up, looking at her. He could see Helen, but his view of the corner where Hattie stood was blocked by the wall.

“Whatcha doing?” he asked, voice thick with sleep and wine.

Helen drew a jagged breath. “Nate,” she said, trying to keep her voice calm. “Come here.”

“What is it?” He unzipped the sleeping bag and staggered forward, naked, his body pale and glowing in the dark. “Don’t tell me that porcupine found its way in here.”

“Look,” Helen said, pointing to the corner. But when her own eyes followed her finger, she saw that Hattie was gone.