Just Like Home(75)
She pushes the blade in just a little further. Brandon’s stomach clenches tight around the metal like a fist, and his arms strain against the bike locks, but he doesn’t scream. Vera loves him even more for doing what she asked. She knows, then, that she’s doing the right thing.
It only takes a moment for the grease to start oozing up around the knife. She catches some in her hand. It’s slippery and dark and wet and as warm as beach sand in summer. Triumph swells in Vera’s chest.
This is it. This is the thing that’s been changing him into a stranger.
Brandon’s head lolls to one side. His belly flexes around the blade as he vomits. More grease surges up out of him, leaking around the edges of the knife, and it runs down his side. Soon, there’s a dark ribbon stretching long and wide between him and the drain in the floor. She can never see this level of detail clearly enough through the peephole, not with the way the fisheye lens distorts things, and she peers at that ribbon. She frowns at it.
Because the fluorescent lights are gleaming off it and it doesn’t look like grease at all.
This isn’t right. This can’t be right.
Vera runs a finger through it, painting a long stripe of red across Brandon’s skin. When it’s coming out of him, it looks so dark, but when it spreads out, it just looks like blood.
She’s gotten it wrong. Somehow she’s gotten it wrong. She hasn’t tapped the reservoir of rot inside her friend. She’s not saving him at all.
She pulls the knife out and lets it clatter to the floor. This is the wrong choice—she knows right away, because the blood is coming faster now, so much of it. Too much of it. The weight of her mistake expands inside her like water filling a balloon. She looks up at his rapidly graying face, dizzy with panic.
“Hang on,” she whispers, scrambling to her feet. “Hang on, okay? I’m going to fix this, just—just wait here.”
She runs up the stairs and turns off the lights—she feels bad about leaving Brandon in the dark, but it’s only for a minute, he’ll be okay. She unlocks the door too fast to be careful. She closes it behind her silently, then races past her bedroom door and up the inside stairs, skipping the fourth step that creaks. She darts down the upstairs hallway as quiet as she can. She only stops when she’s reached the hall door to her parents’ bedroom.
She holds her breath, pressing her ear to the door. Her heartbeat thuds hard and fast. After a long time—too much time, she has to move quicker than this, she has to get back to Brandon—she gently turns the doorknob and eases it open.
The bedroom is a monochrome landscape of gray in the muted moonlight that filters through the curtains. Her parents’ bed looms in the middle of that darkness, dense and vast. Vera hesitates at the foot of it, caught by the strangely powerful feeling of observing her parents when they don’t know she’s there. But Brandon’s blood is sticky on her fingers and the terror of leaving him alone in the basement shakes her out of it, and she darts toward the side of the bed nearest to the closets.
“Dad,” she whispers, quiet as she can. He doesn’t move. “Dad,” she whispers again, no louder this time than the first, tapping him on the shoulder and leaving a dark smear behind. She blinks away tears and taps him harder. “Dad, wake up. Please. Please wake up.”
Francis draws a sudden, sharp breath, his eyes flashing open. He doesn’t recognize her right away and that alone would be enough to make the tears spill over—Vera has never seen her father look at her this way, like she’s a stranger—but then he sits up and rubs his eyes and asks her what’s wrong. She can’t think of where to start, everything she comes up with is too big to say out loud and all she can seem to do is cry.
“What’s all this about?” he whispers, then looks back at Daphne, who is stirring in her sleep. “Let’s—let’s go somewhere else,” he says, the sleep sloughing away from his voice.
He slips out of bed and leads her into the hall on silent feet. He closes the bedroom door behind him without a sound, the same way Vera’s learned to close doors at night, and then he turns around and Vera knows that he’s about to ask her what’s going on and she knows that she won’t be able to answer so she doesn’t try.
She just holds up her bloody hands, and she watches him understand.
“Is any of that yours?” he asks. When she shakes her head, he doesn’t look surprised. His hands twitch at his sides. “Okay,” he says, his voice steady the way Vera knew it would be. “Okay. Show me.”
By the time they reach the basement, Vera has stopped crying. Her father is with her now and he’ll know how to fix what she’s done. The second the basement door is shut behind them, she turns the light on and races down the stairs. She’s taking them two at a time, careful to keep from tripping or slipping or falling. She’s trying to be fast and careful, both at once, so she keeps her eyes on her feet until she’s two-thirds of the way down the stairs.
That’s when she glances up at Brandon. What she sees stops her in her tracks.
Something is with him.
It’s hunched over him, kneeling right in the middle of his pooling blood, its back curled over like a snail’s shell. It looks like a tall kid or maybe a small adult, long-limbed and skinny. Vera can’t make out any more details than that because the thing crouched over Brandon is hidden in shadow—but that shouldn’t be possible, since it’s right in the middle of the room, and the light is right overhead, bright as anything.