The Spite House(78)
Days earlier she noted that There are no dreams in this house, something she wrote down on two more occasions while she was still her undivided self.
The closest thing to an unclouded thought she’d had since the divide wasn’t fully her own. It belonged in part to the children that she once laughed at. The girl and the boy who had been here for decades and who whispered to her that the house could make her disappear. When she first heard them, she laughed them off as products of her imagination. When the house pulled her apart, the children did some laughing of their own.
Most recently, however, the ghost children told her something useful. That threatened to make her hopeful. They said that the dead did not always remain dead. That the little living girl who had just been in the house had died and come back.
Why can’t I get back?
Find the girl and ask her, the children told her. Yes, find the girl, seek her help. If Peter Masson wanted to help Jane, he’d have already done so. He couldn’t even be moved from his self-made prison on the top floor. But that girl could help.
Then the children of the house did something even more wonderful and terrible: They used their energy to push her out of the house, across the icy, dead space between herself and her body, and let her pretend to almost be alive again. They gave her the words to say and just enough energy to speak them. Then, when she’d done what they wanted, they drew her back into the house.
She laughed madly then, and the awful sensation of making sound without having lungs felt new again, because she had lungs a moment ago. Or was it already a day ago? A month? Time was a different thing to the dead and even the half dead. It was one of the many differences that made her ache, made her restless, angry, even spiteful.
Her laughter gave way to wailing as she returned to walking the hall where she’d parted from herself, and the stairs that sometimes seemed to number in the thousands, and every space and corner of the Masson House that she was compelled to haunt.
CHAPTER 36
Stacy
The man, Max, was getting upset with her, even though he didn’t want to show it. Stacy could tell, because he was talking louder, and he kept stopping himself to take a step back after she said something he didn’t like.
I didn’t do anything, she wanted to scream at him. Dad and Mom had taught her to respect adults, but this was different. This was a bad person. Maybe he wasn’t always this way, maybe wanting to help his wife made him be like this, but this was who he was right now. He hurt Miss Eunice. He had pointed his gun at Miss Dana and talked to her like he would hurt her even worse if she didn’t do what he said.
When they got to the skinny house, Stacy was glad to see that Dad’s car was gone. If he had been there when Max got there it would have gone very badly. If Max tried to hurt her dad she didn’t know what she would do, but it would be terrible.
She didn’t understand what he kept asking her to do. “Show her how to come back,” he said.
“Back from what?” Stacy said.
“You know,” he said, close to shouting. “Back from the other side.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Stacy said.
“You do. Back from the dead. Show her how.”
All Stacy could do was shake her head at him. He was saying things that didn’t make sense. When things died they didn’t come back, everyone knew that. Mom and Dad taught her that when Pa-Pa Fred passed. They could live on in your heart if you loved them, and they could watch over you until you saw them again way later, but they didn’t just come back like they were gone for a trip. That’s not how it worked.
Maybe if Miss Dana were there she could make him make sense, but he took her to the top floor when they got to the skinny house and told her to stay there. “I’ll hear you if you try to leave,” he said. Stacy heard Miss Dana say, “Just don’t hurt the girl. You’ll be sorry if you do.”
He made a growling sound at that, then took Stacy down to the dark hallway that went to the bathroom, where he told his wife to stay. Stacy was the only one there with them now, but she still wasn’t talking. She just stood by the door, waiting to be told what to do. She didn’t even look like she knew where she was.
“Look,” Max said, wiping his forehead, “just tell us whatever you did to come back.”
“I didn’t do anything,” Stacy said.
“Yes, you did! Stop saying you—” He stepped back again and put his hands on his hips. He had tucked his gun in his pants behind him after telling Miss Dana to stay upstairs. When his hands moved to his hips, Stacy thought he might reach for it, threaten her with it. He didn’t do that, though. He wasn’t that bad of a person. Not yet.
“Okay, let’s just start over,” he said, and once again they started over, with him struggling to sound friendly and gentle, and her still unable to understand how she was supposed to help him.
“Did I tell you I was in this house before?” he said. She nodded. Either he thought she was too dumb to remember something he already told her, or he was so upset that he forgot what he said. She noticed before that grown-ups got that way sometimes. When she was in school her teacher would get so mad at some of the boys who really misbehaved she would start to write the same words from a lesson on a chalkboard right under where she wrote it the first time. This was worse, though. Her teacher would at least catch herself halfway through. Max just kept going, telling her again about the time he met Eunice and agreed to live in the house, and how things started to go wrong.