Just Like Home(89)

She was a Crowder. She’d finally gotten a taste of the thing that lived under the bed, and she wouldn’t rest until she’d gotten her fill.





CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO


Vera launched herself at the bedroom door with all the clumsy momentum of a punch-drunk boxer.

She let out a low, involuntary growl as her shoulder slammed into the doorframe. Before she could feel the pain of the impact, she was in the entryway. She heard a rattling moan from the dining room, where her mother was either sleeping or dead. The dining room, which was once again plunged into a dense darkness that didn’t make sense given the morning light that surely must have been streaming into the kitchen beyond.

That faint, familiar lemon smell drifted into the entryway, making Vera’s mouth water involuntarily.

There. That was where it had gone. It was beneath her mother’s bed now, maybe, or standing over Daphne in the dark it exuded. Maybe it was keeping her alive. Maybe it was killing her. The possibilities were overwhelming, and Vera would have been paralyzed with indecision if not for the sound of her mother’s voice. Just two words, a painful-sounding rasp, and Vera’s feet came unstuck.

“Don’t. Please.”

Her feet carried her across the entryway faster than she could think, and she reached an arm into the freezing wet dark of the dining room and slapped at the wall until her hand found the lightswitch. Whatever was happening, whatever exchange was about to occur between Daphne and the thing from under the bed, Vera wanted to see it. She needed to see it.

The lightswitch resisted her like a stuck zipper. She pressed on it, firm and steady, the pressure of her fingertip the kind of promise she’d only ever made to herself. After a long moment of hesitation, the darkness in the room receded away from her like a tide going out, and the lights flickered on, bright and strident. Vera blinked at the sudden illumination.

Her eyes adjusted just in time to see what was inside her mother’s mouth.

Daphne’s head was tipped back, her throat exposed to the room. Dark gray grease streamed down her chin and neck and chest. Her mouth hung open. Her jaw was dislocated and hung loose at an angle. Her throat and chest worked with the muscular contractions of a feeding snake.

Two sets of too-long, too-sharp fingers—the ones that the thing beneath the bed had used to drag itself across the floor—were clustered between her lips like flowers erupting from a vase.

A wet, guttural clicking came from somewhere deep within Daphne’s throat, or maybe it was her chest. Her torso heaved one more time. The fingers vanished between her lips, into her mouth, down her throat, and then they were gone.

Vera’s eyes traced the damp trail of thick black slickness as it followed those fingers, slipping into Daphne’s mouth and nostrils and vanishing. Daphne straightened her head and her jaw clicked back into the socket. A gentle satisfied shudder passed through her body. She folded her hands in her lap, and she gave a soft sigh.

Vera lingered in the doorway, her arms half-raised in a useless posture of aborted action.

“Mom?” she said, and even to her own ears her voice was that of a child.

“Vera?” Daphne rasped. She blinked a few times, fast, and dark smudges passed over the surface of her eyes. She frowned, and then, to Vera’s absolute shock, she bit her lip. She looked embarrassed. “I said please don’t. I didn’t want you to come in here. I—I didn’t want you to see me like that. You’re not supposed to see.”

“Oh, god,” Vera whispered.

In a gesture she had never seen before, Daphne wrung her hands, twisting her fingers together with bashful tenderness. “Oh, well. I suppose it’s too late now, isn’t it, Vera-baby?”





CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE


With hungry eyes Vera watched the thing. The thing that had been under her bed. The thing that was now wearing Daphne like a raincoat, hood up and buttons done.

The thing stared back patiently out of Daphne’s wet eyes, blinking softly. It lifted Daphne’s hand to its mouth and touched the corners, brushing away sticky gray smears as if it were tidying its lipstick. “Well. Say something,” it said in Daphne’s thick, rasping voice, and Vera knew now why the voice in the darkness of her bedroom was so familiar.

It was Daphne’s voice.

Vera had thought it was the voice of her mother’s sickness and impending death. She had thought that she’d misremembered how Daphne spoke, that long years of estrangement had eroded her memory of her mother’s timbre. But it wasn’t any of that. This was the thing from under the bed, doing the best imitation it could muster. It was wearing Daphne, and it was Daphne, and Vera couldn’t think of how to delineate the two of them in her mind.

“Get out of her. Get out,” Vera whispered. “Please.” She needed them to be two different creatures. The mother and the monster. Separate. She needed that more than she’d ever needed anything.

The thing smiled sadly with Daphne’s mouth, tilted Daphne’s head to one side. “I’d really rather not,” it said.

“Get out of my mother,” Vera answered. The thing that was wearing Daphne gave Vera a warm, bloodless smile. Vera curled her toes around the urge to smile back. “Enough of this. Come out of there. Leave her alone.” She was rooted where she stood, as though the floorboards had grown hands that were gripping her by the ankles. She remembered her sleep paralysis, the feeling of the bed pulling her down into sleep, and she wondered how often this thing had pressed her down onto the mattress with those long fingers.