Just Like Home(95)
“He didn’t hurt me,” Vera lied, the words searing her throat on the way out.
The thing that wore Daphne’s skin smiled with naked relief. As it did, the skin at the crown of Daphne’s head stretched too far, allowing a slow trickle of gray ooze to creep down her forehead. The Crowder House tugged at the collar of Daphne’s nightgown with a soft, embarrassed noise. It pulled the fabric down over one shoulder, the elastic of the collar digging into the mottled flesh of Daphne’s upper arm.
The shoulder—Daphne’s shoulder—had split open like the skin of a ripe plum. The rot inside was seeping out, running down the arm slower than blood but quicker than maple sap. Vera could see beneath the surface of her mother’s skin, and it was all decay.
The House hadn’t been lying. There was nothing of Daphne left in there, nothing recognizable. There was only the foulness. This body, Vera knew, wasn’t Daphne’s body at all anymore. It was nothing but a costume.
Duvall let out a low, sick moan at the sight of it all. He made a sound that was like the word ‘no,’ if he’d said it underwater. He flung a hand out behind him, scrabbling for the doorknob, his boots squeaking on the worn wood of the floor.
Vera locked eyes with the House, and without looking away from it—without needing to—Vera shot out an arm and grabbed the first thing she reached.
It was Duvall’s leg.
The taut muscle of Duvall’s calf gave easily under Vera’s tight grip. The denim of his jeans made it so easy for her to keep a hold. There would be no slipping away, no matter how Duvall struggled. Vera’s fingers were hard and relentless, and when Duvall finally gave an animal grunt of pain, she pulled.
He went down hard. His leg flew out from under him, his boot winding up in Vera’s lap, his forehead meeting the floorboards with a rich and resonant crack. Duvall gasped raggedly once, twice.
Vera shuddered, her tongue pressing tight against her soft palate, her eyes snapping shut, her toes curling. “He was going to make me leave,” she said, her fingers fluttering at the booted foot in her lap. “He was going to make me leave you. But I’m not doing that. Never again.”
Duvall’s leg twitched against Vera’s, and then he was moving again, pulling himself forward with both hands. “Hgghk,” he groaned, turning his head just enough for Vera to see the blood that was steadily streaming from his ruined nose. It fell to the floor with a soft patpatpat and the wood drank it in faster than it could puddle. “Please,” Duvall groaned, dragging himself forward again.
He was going to try to get away.
The thing inside Vera’s mother made a soft, frightened noise. It was a sound Vera had heard a thousand times when she was a child, a sound that had come from the animals in the basement when Francis Crowder was doing his work.
It was the sound of anticipated pain.
At that sound, the last tether holding Vera’s self-control in place snapped. She lurched to her feet, ignoring the way the room seemed to swing wildly around her. Duvall was slowly moving across the floor toward the thing inside Daphne’s skin, the thing that loved Vera better than anyone ever had.
He was hauling himself toward the soft, vulnerable underbelly of the Crowder House, and Vera would not allow it.
She lunged at Duvall, catching him by his ankle and then falling heavily across his lower back. He grunted as the air was forced out of his lungs. Vera clambered up the length of him and he reached back to try to knock her loose, but she managed to straddle the middle of his back. As he swung for her, his arms got close enough to grab. Vera caught them only briefly before letting her knees drop onto the ropy meat of his arm. She leaned her full weight into pinning him.
The rich pop of his shoulder joints giving out reverberated up through her thighs, and at last, Vera allowed herself a moment of breathless satisfaction.
“Suh-stop,” he gasped, his voice weak. “Please.”
Vera had seen this exchange so many times. She’d watched it with her eye pressed to the peephole in her bedroom floor, and she remembered exactly what her father would have said.
“I can’t,” she echoed.
“Don’t do this,” Duvall managed, his voice strained. “Just let me go. I promise I won’t—I won’t tell anyone.”
She grabbed two fistfuls of his thick blond hair, yanking his head back until she could see the whites of his eyes. He strained to breathe through the thick, clotting blood that filled his nose.
Vera felt her lips twist into a shape that must have been ugly to behold. “You were hurting us.”
“You don’t want to kill me,” James said, and in that moment he was not a man but a thing, writhing deliciously on the end of a hook. “You don’t want—”
“Don’t tell me what I want,” Vera answered. “You have no idea what I want.”
“You want the house, right? You can have it,” he panted. “You can have the house, I’ll go.”
“It was never yours to give,” Vera growled.
“Please,” he said, his eyes wild with terror. “Please, you’re—you’re better than this. You’re not the kind of person who would do something like this. You aren’t like Francis. You’re a good person, Vera.”
She clenched her fingers around those silky fistfuls of his hair, and she breathed in the smell of him, all foul smoke and clean sweat and smooth soft skin, and she finally let herself feel the hunger she’d been fighting since the first moment she’d laid eyes on Duvall. She let herself feel it, every inch of that starved yearning, that hollow pit of need. She let herself want him exactly the way she’d been trying not to want him.