Just Like Home(96)

“No,” she said at last. “I’m not a good person.”

And with that, she gave in.

With savage satisfaction, she slammed his face forward into the floor. She put her full weight into smashing his head hard as she could, trying with all her might to break the floorboards her father laid back before Vera was born.

But of course, the floorboards were strong and the joinery was tight and the spaces between the wood were filled with decades of dust and skin and blood and sweat and breath, and the Crowder House held strong.

James Duvall broke first.





CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN


Something vital left Duvall with the final crack of his forehead against the wood. All the blood that fell out of him sank into the woodgrain right away, the House drinking him down. Cleaning itself up before a mess could exist at all.

Duvall didn’t move. He didn’t struggle. But Vera could not believe he was dead, not yet. There was always the possibility that the wind was knocked out of him, that he was stunned, that he was faking. And beyond that, she didn’t want to be finished yet—an urgent mouth yawned open inside her and she wanted to fill it, wanted to feel what it was like to finally get what she needed, wanted to stop fighting it.

She finally knew what it was like, and she’d never felt anything so perfect in her whole life. She didn’t want to lose the sweet delicious electric rush of it. She didn’t want to let it end too soon.

Vera slammed Duvall’s face into the floor over and over, flushing with a bright hum of heat at the way it softened, lost in the increasingly wet sound of his flesh slapping into the wood. Her breath came fast, too fast, and she couldn’t seem to find a way to slow it down again. She didn’t want to slow it down again.

Finally she collapsed, gasping, her face buried in the back of Duvall’s hair. She breathed in the smell of him, the raw smell that was under the smoke and the paint that had kept the truth of him hidden away from her all this time.

Clean sweat and fresh blood.

“Vera?” the Crowder House said. It stood over the two of them, tall and strong inside the loose pile of skin that had once been Daphne Crowder. “Are you okay?”

“I’m okay,” she panted. She’d never been so okay in her life.

“Do you want help getting up?”

Vera wasn’t sure that her legs would hold her. “I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t know what to do now.”

“Of course you know what to do,” the Crowder House replied. “You’ve got this. And I believe in you.”

It was right. Vera’s breath caught in her throat, and when it came again, it was slow and easy. The frenzy that had taken over her as she’d crushed Duvall’s face into the floorboards drained out of her, replaced by certainty.

This was her home. She knew how to take care of it. She knew how to keep it safe.

There was no time to waste.

Vera struggled upright on trembling legs. She got a grip under Duvall’s armpits, an inverted mirror of the way he’d caught her when he was trying to drag her away. Vera bent her knees and took a step backward, dragging his limp form across the entryway and toward the basement where he’d been working all morning. Her belly fluttered when she glanced down and saw the pulp of his face.

She wanted to go again.

“Can you help me?” she grunted.

“I’m not very strong,” the Crowder House said apologetically. “That’s why I couldn’t just fight him off myself. But I can do this.” The basement door swung open and stayed that way as Vera tugged Duvall across the entryway. “Do you want the light on?”

“Yes,” Vera replied, because she needed to see. The light clicked on, and Vera stood at the top of the basement stairs, breathless, Duvall stretched out limp behind her. She saw what he had been doing down there, and she couldn’t believe that she hadn’t known the scope of the violation sooner. She had only ventured behind the basement door once since coming home.

On that day, she now realized, she had seen the very beginning of Duvall’s work: that long, deep gouge in the ceiling, behind the pipes.

They were everywhere now. The walls had been brutalized, scarred with long deep trenches, ranging from a few inches to a few feet long. “Oh, no,” Vera whispered, reaching unconsciously toward the far-off wall. “What did he do to you?”

“I wish you didn’t have to see,” the Crowder House replied softly. “I wish you’d never had to see any of it.”

Duvall’s corpse tumbled down the stairs to the floor of the basement with the heavy loose-limbed inevitability of dropped groceries. Vera didn’t wait to see him land; by the time she heard his flesh slap against the plexiglass that covered the cement floor, she was already turning off the light. She closed the door tight behind her, letting it lock all on its own.

The heat of killing Duvall was fading, replaced by concrete certainty: she’d done the right thing. Even if she’d been driven by her own urges, she’d done the right thing.

Duvall was a monster. She’d saved the house from him. She’d saved them both. Her father would have been proud of her.

Vera rested her hands on the House’s shoulders, staring into the warm liquid eyes beneath the loose skin of what had once been her mother’s face. “It’s done. He’s gone. He can’t hurt you anymore.” Vera’s fingers sank into the thin fabric of her mother’s nightgown with too much ease, and sick heat flared in the back of her throat. The fabric under her hands began to darken. She pulled back, looked at her palms. They were slick with dark grease. “Oh. I’m sorry—”