Just Like Home(88)

And then the thing shuddered, lifting its arms to stretch the too-many ribs of its barrel-chest, and it opened its mouth in a silent hinge-skulled scream, and it pulsed.

The room went dark.

The light went out overhead, but the darkness was more comprehensive than that, more complete. Vera’s head swam with the sudden plunge into nothing. She closed her eyes and opened them again and could not tell the difference between seeing and not-seeing. Vera swallowed back terror.

This was her house. It was hers. She would not be afraid of anything in it, not now and not ever. Not even a darkness that climbed beneath her eyelids to keep her from peeking.

She pressed her back to the wall of the closet. Her mouth filled with thick saliva at the familiar smell of sweet lemon. She couldn’t see, couldn’t breathe, couldn’t hear anything but the rush of her own heartbeat. Vera drew a breath and held it and then she shoved her hand between her thighs under the quilt and quietly, so quietly that not even she could hear, she snapped her fingers four times.

She sighed.

Except, she realized, she hadn’t sighed. She’d felt the flex of the wall under her back and she’d heard the soft relieved whisper of her own exhalation but she was still holding her breath, she was still holding it and yet there it was again, the sound of a soft gasp, close enough to taste.

She was not alone in the closet.

Terror wiped Vera’s mind clean of reason. She could not confront the thing or make a plan or think of anything but the word no so she scrabbled to her feet and she clawed for the doorknob and she burst out of the closet in a rush.

Her foot skidded from under her the moment she stepped out of the closet. It slid hard on what must have been a thick layer of whatever that slick rot was that the thing left behind on everything it touched. She regained her balance and took another careful step, squeezed her eyes shut tight because she couldn’t see anyway. She held her hands out in front of her at first and then lowered them because the thought of making contact with that wet raw flesh in the dark put a tremor across her brain that she could not bear.

“You can’t see me. You’re not supposed to see me,” a voice said in the darkness.

Vera let out a tiny, aborted shriek, clapped her hand over her mouth.

The voice was familiar, rasping and feminine, tender and hateful, so close to human. “You have to go,” the voice continued.

And then, so close to Vera’s ear that she could hear the wet click of a tongue:

“Go fast.”

Vera tried. She tried to run. She made it three steps before her foot went sliding out from under her again in an uncontrollable arc, her groin screaming with the force of a sudden high-kick she’d never be able to do without the help of physics. Her back struck the ground hard and all the air left her lungs.

When she tried to inhale again it was too thick to breathe. Her head swam and she retched and she gasped. She felt the reverberations of footfalls on the floorboards. It could only be the thing from beneath the bed, approaching on heavy feet. Vera couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe. She felt paralyzed the same way she did after a nightmare, with the darkness pressing down on her and holding her in place.

Those footfalls were near, so near, landing close to her shoulder now, and she couldn’t even breathe to scream.

Desperate for escape and starving for air, Vera’s hand moved of its own accord. Her numb fingers came together, and clumsily, barely, they snapped: one, two, three, four times.

And then the thing moved past her. She felt those footsteps shaking the floor beside her hip, and then her foot—and then came the unmistakable sound of the bedroom door cracking open.

The darkness peeled away from the room like wet bedsheets being pulled off a mattress. Vera felt it easing off her soft palate, out of her ears and her sinuses. She felt it slipping from between her fingers and shucking away from her skin, felt the sucking tug of it as it left. She felt it fall away from all the parts of her that it had been able to reach.

It was, she knew now, a physical thing, an imposition beyond a simple trick of the light. It had weight and heft. She thought of the sour wetness that had clung to her on the night her quilt first vanished beneath the bed, and she thought of the filth that was smeared across Duvall’s paintings.

Feeling it leave was the worst part of all, because she couldn’t avoid knowing how deep it had been able to go.

And then it was gone. Sunlight streamed through the bedroom windows. Vera was flat on her back a foot from the bedroom door, sucking down clean air like she’d just escaped the sea, and she was completely alone.

“No,” she choked. She rolled onto her side and pushed herself up onto her hands and knees, gasping. She wanted to vomit from the pain of the fall—her entire body clenched with the anticipation of it, with the need for it—but she set her jaw and bared her teeth at the floor beneath her palms.

It was just wood. There was nothing there, no slippery layer of grease. The thing from beneath the bed had taken it back and left, had abandoned Vera with the knowledge of it, with the sight of it etched into her memory forever. She licked her lips, chasing the thick, invasive taste of sweet lemon, but all her tongue found was her own flesh.

“No,” she repeated, her voice hoarse. She made a fist and pounded those floorboards once, then looked up at the door.

She was not going to do this again.

She was not going to spend another day in this house wondering what the night might hold, hungering for something just beyond her grasp.