Just Like Home(9)

It wouldn’t work. The lights were still on. She’d never once in her life been able to sleep with the lights on. That wasn’t going to change now, just because she was in a room where she’d prefer not to be in the dark. Just because she didn’t like the idea of turning that light off.

Vera knew she was being ridiculous. She knew it. But her mother was next door, dying, and a ravenous stranger was living in the backyard and her bedroom door still didn’t have a lock on it, and she couldn’t shake the feeling that she should really, really keep the light on.

Vera refused to bend to a feeling like that last one. She got up out of the bed fast and angry. She stalked across the room, turned the light off with a too-loud slap at the switch. Back in bed, even faster, rattling the bedframe, back under the flat sheet with no blanket, her palm still stinging from where she’d struck the wall. Furious at herself for reasons she couldn’t have articulated even if she’d tried.

The familiar room was full of an unfamiliar quiet. There must have been a storm overhead, because almost no light at all came through her bedroom windows. It may as well have been midnight at the bottom of the ocean.

Vera didn’t like any of it, but the deep fatigue of the drive and the day won out over her vigilance.

It wasn’t long before the adrenaline drained out of her, a retreating tide that left deep, heavy exhaustion behind it. Sleep wrapped itself snug around her wrists and ankles and waist and pulled her down hard against the mattress.

Vera’s last thought before sleeping was of how silly she’d been to be frightened.

This was the Crowder House. The house her father built.

There was nothing to be afraid of here.





CHAPTER FOUR


Vera is eleven years old and she is afraid.

There are noises again.

They woke her up a few minutes ago. Thumps and scrapes and scrabbles, and once a dull wet slap. The noises are coming from under her bed and she is sure, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that they are the result of Something Bad.

Vera still has one ear pressed to her pillow. Her pillowcase has foxes on it. Her hair is long and blond and it fans across the fox pillow in a meander of tangles. This is the last summer she will sleep with the fox pillowcase. It’s for little kids and she wants something more mature soon—not grown-up, she doesn’t say that anymore. She says ‘mature’ or she says ‘adult.’ She wants something more mature soon, but the fox pillowcase stays cool even on the nights when her open bedroom window lets in nothing but stickiness and katydid sounds, so for now it can stay.

She knows that the sounds outside her window are katydids and not cicadas, because her father told her that cicadas mostly make noise during the day while katydids mostly make noise at night. Her mother calls both noises ‘that racket’ and closes up her own bedroom windows to keep that racket out.

The noises that are coming from under the bed are louder than that racket. That’s how Vera knows that the sound is closer to her than the bugs are.

The bugs are outside. The sounds are inside. They’re inside for sure.

Vera eyes the vague shapes that are scattered throughout the bedroom. The shapes are black against the ambient gray of the darkness, which is cut only by a vague notion of moonlight from outside and the insubstantial glow of Vera’s nightlight. That nightlight is beside the bedroom door, a hundred miles away.

Vera always tells herself that the nightlight is there so she can see the door in the dark, so she doesn’t trip over the piles of clothes that now in the darkness look like unknowable hungry gape-mouthed monsters. She tells herself that she isn’t scared of the dark. She’s too mature for that kind of thing. She’s outgrown it.

There is Something Bad under the bed and it’s making those sounds. She’s certain that if she moves, the Bad thing will know she is awake. If it knows she is awake it will get her.

That’s how these things work: they wait until a person is awake enough to be scared, they wait until a person is conscious enough to hope for mercy, and then they don’t give any mercy at all.

Did one of the vague shadows on the bedroom floor move? Vera tries to remember if she left a pile of clothes in that spot, that very spot. Surely she doesn’t own so many clothes that they could make such a huge black shape on the floor so close to the foot of her bed. Does she?

She can’t get to the door now. If she tried, she would have to do two impossible things: get out from under the covers, and let her feet touch the floor. She can’t do that. If her foot touches the floor next to her bed then something will reach out lightning-fast and grasp her ankle, and then it will have her.

There’s a long, slow scrape from just beneath her head.

Vera breathes through her nose, only through her nose, short shallow breaths that she hopes will be the right kind of quiet. But then she has second thoughts. She’s pretty sure that she usually sleeps with her mouth open. Has the thing under the bed been there for so long that it will recognize the difference between her asleep-breathing and her awake-breathing?

The noises are getting closer to her, she’s sure of it.

A sound like scrabbling claws reverberates through the wall above her pillow, and she makes tight fists in the cotton of her summer quilt. The cotton wicks the sweat away from her palms. Her sheets wick sweat away from the rest of her. There’s a lot of sweat, all of a sudden. She bites down on her pillowcase, trying not to make a sound, trying not to let it know that she’s awake.