Just Like Home(87)

It was four thirty.

Vera could not feel her legs. She dug her fingers into the quilt that covered her lap, letting the cotton wick away the overcaffeinated sweat that was collecting on her palms. The thermos was dry and her bladder was pulsing. The taste in her mouth was indescribably foul.

It was five forty-eight in the morning, and the light in the bedroom was starting to shift. The yellow lamplight was tinted with the watery gray of an approaching morning. Vera was filled with sand. It rasped in her mouth and eyes and shoulders, sat heavy in her hips and spine.

The thing was not coming. It knew that she was in the closet and not in the bed; it knew that she was not asleep; it knew that she wanted to see it, and so it was not going to come. The things she wanted were never within reach. Her father’s knowledge and her mother’s love, friendship and romance and a decent job that would stick, the thing beneath her bed and the thing that clung to the underside of her brain like a spider. She could not summon any of it.

It was five forty-nine in the morning when Vera accepted defeat. She let her chin sink to her chest and she closed her burning eyes and she exhaled and she was so tired that she wasn’t certain she’d be able to inhale again afterward.

In the room outside the closet where Vera was trying not to cry, the bedframe creaked.

It was a long, slow creak. It was the creak of a lover settling onto the mattress in the night, heavy with liquor. It was the creak of wood begging to break.

Vera surged toward the closet door, her pulse cruelly loud, a shiver sitting at her core and staying there. Every inch of her skin was alive with sweat and anticipation. Her eyelashes brushed the slats of the closet door. She wanted to see with a hunger she hadn’t felt in years.

The bedframe creaked again. And then, as Vera watched, the corner of the bed rose from the floor.

It was not a smooth motion. It was a twitch and a shudder, like a sped-up video of something with too many legs hatching from a too-small egg. Vera couldn’t imagine how she’d slept through it the night before. The bedframe stuttered against the wood of the floor, lifting and falling with a strained rattle that made Vera’s teeth feel too close together in her mouth.

And then, slowly, painfully, the bed lifted far enough off the floor to release the thing that lived beneath it.





CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE


It was captivating. In the same moment that Vera’s hunger to see the thing was sated, a yawning pit of need opened up inside her—an unfillable chasm, an unquenchable thirst. Now that she could see it, she didn’t ever want to look away.

The thing that struggled out from underneath Vera’s brand-new bed was the color of a struggling nightcrawler, the color of a cut finger, the color of an open mouth. It was a hot, visceral pink, marbled with dark veins, aggressively flesh. All of it, every angle and color and shadow, made Vera ache with want.

Her mind struggled to accept the proportions of the thing. The fingers were so long, the joints were so many, the mouth took up so much of the head that Vera wondered how it found room to think. There were no hands, but there were fingers, six of them on each side, and those fingers ended hard and sharp enough to dig into the wood floor Vera’s father had taken the time to lay in so long ago.

The thing from beneath the bed used those digging, gouging fingers to pull itself out into the room, birthing itself from the warm dark womb between the bed and the floor.

It left a trail behind, smearing dark residue on everything it touched. Those dark veins in its skin were close to the surface, and they oozed gently as the thing moved; whatever was inside them seeped through the thing’s skin, kissing the air Vera breathed.

She knew without question what that residue would feel like. She knew how it would resist the scrub of a sponge, how hard it would be to wash from her hands and her clothes. She was almost sure that she knew how it would look dripping down her mother’s chin.

The thing’s progress was agonizing to behold. It looked too naked, yolk-wet and soft-skinned and raw. Vera wanted to know if it would quiver under her fingertips, if it would yield to a sudden, firm touch. But she didn’t have a plan, and her legs were numb, and she wanted to see what it would do.

She didn’t want to stop looking. Not yet.

So she didn’t stop. She watched as the thing finished dragging itself from under her bed, as it pulled itself up to its full height, as it stretched its blunt, rippling legs. It swiveled at the hips, rotating the meat of its head toward her pillow.

Vera watched. Vera waited.

The thing from beneath the bed did the same. It stood there, shivering, staring at her bed. It twitched at the place where a person might have a belly. There was a shadow there that might have been a thick patch of ooze and might have been a navel and might have been a hole. Vera squinted to try to see better, pressed her face right up against the slats in the closet door.

One of the slats creaked.

The thing from beneath the bed twitched at the noise, but didn’t turn. Vera held her breath, and after a moment’s stillness, the thing reached forward. It stretched out a long finger and stroked the blanket on top of the pile of clothes that was meant to be Vera.

It paused. The finger curled, snagging on the blanket. The thing bent forward over the bed. Vera could see all the glistening knobs of its spine through the flesh of its back. And then, so slowly, so gently, the thing peeled the blanket off the bed.

Vera watched from the closet as the thing realized that it was standing over a pile of clothes. She watched as it realized it had been tricked. She watched it realize that she was not where she was supposed to be. It froze, standing stock-still. It rifled through the clothes on the bed as if they’d reveal Vera, hidden in a little nest of her own dirty laundry.