Unspeakable Things(79)

Cass, sweet lass, hope your summer doesn’t go too fast! I will see you around, promise.

Gabriel’s paper airplane necklace rested in my back pocket. I’d felt a slip of paper when I’d shoved it in there. I yanked out the paper, holding it up to the moonlight. It was the note I’d discovered in Dad’s studio. I had a guess what it was: Dad and Bauer’s drug sales tally sheet. It explained why they’d been spending so much time together, why Dad had told Mom him and Bauer’s “business” was earning more money than her, why Bauer had his cellar windows covered and Dad never allowed us into our own dirt basement.

They had illegal grow rooms down there.

I stepped through Goblin’s door, numb.

I found myself in his dining room. It smelled dank but sweet, like rotting fruit. The living room was to my right, kitchen to my left, with a closed basement door off the kitchen. If it was like my house, the master bedroom was straight ahead down the hall, the bathroom across from that. The second floor surely housed three small rooms with sloping ceilings matching the roofline, two with closets.

But I didn’t need to visit any of them.

The basement with its blacked-out windows was the only place Goblin would hide Gabriel.

Basements were where men kept their secrets.

I padded across the cracked linoleum of Goblin’s cluttered, dirty kitchen.

I knew I shouldn’t be there. The moon was scudding across the windows, warning me. But I couldn’t leave without being sure. If I did, Goblin would get Frank, and Gabriel would never come home, and Dad would slurp me up whole and then spit out my bones so he could keep sucking on them, just like he was doing with Sephie.

So I walked toward that basement door.

Toward the smell of too-ripe peaches.

I grasped the knob and turned it, pausing at the top of the stairs. The darkness below was so complete that it devoured sound. I heard a wheezing before I realized it was me, fear shrinking my lungs. I wanted to run, but the only thing worse than going down there would be turning back and waiting for my dad to finally make it all the way up the stairs and into my bedroom.

I snapped on my flashlight, swallowing past the sharp edges in my throat.

The bright yellow made the dark worse somehow, highlighting the absolute black on its perimeter.

I shut the basement door behind me in case Goblin returned early, and I counted every step into the deep, feeling the old wood’s warning creaks in my teeth. Seven stairs, and I was past halfway down, far enough to see the basement’s dimensions.

My blood thudding, I played the egg yolk circle of my light over the sweating walls, across the packed dirt floor. The single room was the same size as the one below my house, a root cellar more than a basement, the musty smell caking my lips and nostrils and coating my hair.

My light ran over the murky canning jars against the far wall, found the table stacked with boxes, flashed off the single bare light bulb dangling a lonely string in the center of the room, but it kept returning to that one corner, the pulsing corner, the one with the cigarette-size gash of brightness against the dirt.

I scanned for any noise that would warn me Goblin was home, but the country wind shushed everything. Even the frogs had stopped singing. I took the last six steps, pushing through fear as thick as blister skin. When I placed my foot onto dirt packed so hard that it shone like oil, I could no longer stay above the gravedirt smell and had to swim in it like cave water.

There was no protection for children down here.

My flashlight was tugging, demanding I look closer at the slit of white in that not-right corner. The only sound was the thumping of my own heart, a dark-alley pumping more terrifying than silence. The closer I got to the corner, the worse the sugar-sour smell grew. I stumbled toward it, outside of myself, tugging my body along like a reluctant puppet.

I knew what I was looking at before I reached it, but I kept walking because Ohnononoooooonooo

My stomach spasmed.

I grasped the wall to keep from falling. My hand met the rough, moist coolness of cement. I recoiled from the wet. My flashlight stayed focused on that white line in the dirt for several beats before my brain could remember the word finger

A single human finger poked out of the dirt, crooked and the color of ghosts and screams.

Gabriel’s finger.

I moaned.

The basement door whipped open, flooding the stairs in craven yellow light.

“Who’s down there?”

I bit my tongue to keep from whimpering, blood flooding my mouth with the taste of pennies. Goblin stood thirteen steps above me, framed in the bright rectangle, his shoulders hunched. He must have parked up the road, which is why I hadn’t heard him arrive, missed him entering the house, had no warning.

He would never forgive that I’d seen that finger.

I clicked off my flashlight and backed up against the damp wall. I tried to shrink into it, to become rock and dirt because you can’t hurt either, but it didn’t work. I stayed a girl made of quivering flesh.

“Who’s down there, I said.”

For a moment, an insane humming second, I considered answering him.

Just me. Cassie. I didn’t mean to see anythingIwon’ttellanyonepleaseletmego.

“I know you’re there. I can hear you breathing.”

I ate my tears, my blood flowing acid with terror.

Goblin heard my fear.

He charged down the stairs, bringing his own flashlight to poke into the corners. Its light speared me. “Heh?”