The Spite House(44)

A scream came from two floors down. Dess. Eric punched his chest twice, trying to get his lungs working properly again, like slapping an old appliance. He was able to take a big enough breath to shout, “Hold on, Dess. I’m coming!”

Fighting through unsteady legs, he got to his feet and ran as well as he could to the far end of the hall, where the doors were indeed open.

When he made it back down to the living room, he saw that the front door of the house was open, and that his daughters were gone.





CHAPTER 20



Dess



Dess snapped awake upon hearing something close to a roar come from upstairs. She turned to where her father should be and saw he was gone. Where was he? Was that him crying out? No, that was something else. It sounded unnatural to her. As unnatural as the next thing she heard, a little girl who said, “Ooh, I love it when he’s unhappy.”

The little girl giggled and Dess jumped up, fully alert and awake. She looked around, saw no one else in the room, then recognized that she didn’t need to see a threat to respect it.

She grabbed Stacy, who was still asleep.

“Hm? What?” Stacy said.

“We have to go. Come on,” Dess said.

The other little girl, the unseen one, laughed. “Who says you can?”

With her sister in her arms, Dess faced the door, and knew that the invisible girl stood in front of it, blocking it. She felt her terrible, brutal coldness.

“My brother says your father can’t leave the hall,” the girl said. She sounded like talking mist. “What if I say you can’t leave the house?”

Stacy whimpered and hugged Dess tighter, and that brought Dess’s anger to life like a summoned monster.

“Let us out,” she said.

The girl laughed louder. Dess raised her voice. “Let us out!”

The girl stopped laughing to say, “No. You’re ours now.”

“Let us out, let us out, LETUSOUT!” Dess screamed, and she rushed the door. A blast of arctic air pushed at her, chapped her skin to the point it almost burned, but she ran through it and outside with Stacy.

The car was locked and her father had the key. She stopped and looked around for where she could go. The orphanage wasn’t an option. The woods beyond almost blended with the starless, cast-iron sky, part of a dark wall that was taller than the eye could measure. Maybe she didn’t have to go any farther. She and Stacy were out of the house, maybe that was all—

Dad’s still inside.

She turned and started to shout for her father but didn’t want to startle Stacy. She couldn’t set her sister down to go back into the house either. What then? What could she do? For the first time since her new life had begun, Dess felt tears stinging her eyes. They burned when she blinked them back. She wasn’t sad, she was angry and growing more furiously frustrated by the second. Why had Dad left them alone in the first place? Where had he gone to get himself lost or stuck?

A figure appeared in the doorway. Dess recognized it as her father, but still felt an impulse to duck behind the car and hide. It’s not really him, she thought, then pushed that out of her head. There was no reason to think that. A little over a year ago, a similar thought entered her mind when she’d been shocked to see Stacy again, and she was still ashamed of that moment. She couldn’t let that happen here, for Stacy’s sake if not her own. They were all they had and any mistrust of each other would be their downfall.

“Dad, over here,” she said, as though he couldn’t see them and wasn’t already coming toward them.

“What happened?” Eric said. “I heard a scream. Was that you?”

“We have to get out of here,” she said.

“What happened?”

“Please, let’s just go. I’ll tell you on the way. Let’s go.”

“Right. You’re right,” he said, and pulled out his keys.

“Where are we going?” Stacy said as they got in the car.

“Remember the big house we stayed in a couple nights ago?” Eric said. “I’m taking you back there.”

Dess latched on to what he said. You’re not coming back here, she wanted to scream at him, but she held it in. She knew what he would say anyway, she could map their entire argument in a second. He would say he had to come back, if not tonight then tomorrow. She would tell him he didn’t have to, and he would say she knew better. She’d insist this place was too wrong, too dangerous, and he would try to get her to pin down exactly what made it more dangerous than what they’d been doing before, the reckless things she’d been doing to earn money, the construction and security jobs he was taking specifically meant for people who couldn’t be on a company’s books, who wouldn’t require any paperwork if they met with an accident or even vanished on the job. Everything about their lives had been a risk since they’d hit the road, from the places they stayed, to the ways they made money, even the simple act of driving.

He would be convincing, yet she would remain unconvinced. She would tell him that those things were different because they were at least known, and the house was something they couldn’t understand no matter how open their minds were after all they’d been through. He would just say again that this was their best chance, their only chance, and she’d have no real way of stopping him from coming back. All she’d have was the confidence that she was right, and the frail hope that she was wrong.