Just Like Home(81)

Vera took a step closer, wrapping her hands around the mug that was almost too hot to hold, letting the heat distract her from the awful, strange sound of her mother’s breathing. Wondering what Daphne’s angle was. “I don’t know,” she said evenly. “I suppose that if the papers want to talk to me, I’ll just say the same things I told Hammett Duvall. I’ll say that I didn’t know about it.”

Daphne shook her head slowly. “They won’t believe you,” she replied. She sat back hard against her throne of pillows, her eyes hooded, her bottom lip dripping gray ooze onto her chest. Her hands gripped the bedsheets as tight as a throat as she stared Vera down. “You’ll get into so much trouble, Vera. You’ll get into so much trouble if they start asking questions about you, about Brandon, about what happened to him down in the basement that night—”

“Wait,” Vera said, hating the childish lump in her throat for the way it distorted her voice. She looked down into the deep, rich, dark brown of the coffee, trying to find comfort there. She was so tired, too tired for this. Too tired to keep fighting. “Stop. You can’t—you can’t just decide that we’re going to talk about it. You’ve never been willing to talk to me about Brandon before.”

“It’s different now,” Daphne said.

“What’s different now? Just because you’re dying, we get to pretend … what? What is it?”

Daphne wasn’t looking at Vera anymore. She was looking away, discomfort taut in every line of her body. She seemed, somehow, to be comprehensively clenched.

She was looking at the floor.

In the same moment Vera realized where Daphne’s eyes were pointed, she heard the thing anew. The soft sound that had been vibrating beneath their conversation, the scraping sound that had seemed like the broken breath inside her mother’s chest, the sound that she suddenly recognized as distinctly and violently Other.

“Daphne? What is that?” Vera whispered.

Daphne’s gaze remained fixed firmly on the floor in the corner of the room, right where the wall between the dining room and the entryway ended. She flinched, just barely, at the steady, slow scrape that came from the room below. “It’s him,” she said, her voice high with pain. The chandelier rattled softly overhead.

“Who?”

“We don’t have long,” Daphne replied, tearing her gaze away from the corner of the room, suddenly vulnerable in a way Vera had never experienced. She sounded like someone else entirely, just then. “Please.”

“Please?” Vera whispered, her eyes flicking back to the corner where Daphne had been staring.

In that moment it became clear: Daphne knew. She knew about the haunting, the thing that came in the night, she knew about whatever it was. “Tell me. Tell me what it is, Daphne. We can deal with it together. Is it—” Her voice broke. “Is it Dad?”

Daphne didn’t reply for a long time. Vera looked up, only to see that her mother’s face was suddenly placid, her hands still. Her eyes were still locked on the corner of the room. When she spoke, her voice was terribly quiet and terribly even.

“Vera. Do you think you could get me a lemonade?”

Vera stared at her hard for a long time before turning on her heel and marching into the kitchen. She dropped her mug of coffee into the sink, no longer able to stomach the smell of it. She didn’t need it anymore anyway. Her fatigue was gone, dissolved by that sound and her mother’s awareness of it. Replaced by something else.

She should have been terrified by the noise that had distracted Daphne, by the presence of something in the house that could move her bed and scrape along the insides of the walls and ruin the conversation they’d needed to have for so long. She should have been afraid.

But she wasn’t afraid. She was pissed.

And she was hungry.

She was so, so hungry. The longer she was home, the harder it was to keep fighting that hunger down. To keep pretending it wasn’t there. She swallowed hard, trying to keep it at bay. Trying, trying, trying.

She opened the refrigerator and stood before the rows of bottles. All those smiling lemons. The one she took out looked just like all the others, but when she went to set it down on the counter, it stuck just a little to her skin, just enough to make it difficult to let go.

When she looked at her hand, she found that a smear of something thick and dark and clotted clung to her, filling the creases in her palm.

Vera bit down hard on her tongue. She washed her hand fast and rough, using dishsoap and her fingernails to scour every trace of whatever-it-was from her skin. The substance had a familiar texture and stubbornness.

She would not under any circumstances allow herself to think of it as grease.

The grease wasn’t real, she reminded herself as she dug her nails into the flesh of her palm. It never had been. It was her father’s delusion. People weren’t grease-filled monsters. They were human beings, filled with warm red blood that spilled over your hands and onto the floor and down the basement drain.

They weren’t filled with cold dark grease that got under your fingernails and smelled like lemonade.

It wasn’t real.

The sound of footsteps drifted in from the other room, heavy boots on hardwood. Vera could hear her mother murmuring, the soft sound of James Duvall’s reply. She closed her eyes and swore softly under her breath. Not him. Not now.