Do me a favor, would you?
Move the stone a little nearer to me.
I like to keep it close.
TEN
MOXIE WAS GROWLING.
I opened my eyes. She was at the foot of our bed, hackles raised.
I’d been dreaming about our old house in Woodstock; my mother’s house. I was a child again, walking through the dim rooms like a ghost. Nothing was where I remembered. There were doors where there shouldn’t be, and I couldn’t find my bedroom. I was looking for a place to hide. A good place where she wouldn’t find me.
Who do you think you are?she was saying, as she hunted me from room to room.
Only it wasn’t my mother. Not really.
She floated rather than walked, and her voice, it was like the sizzle of sparklers on the Fourth of July, the buzzing of insects.
She was wearing a horrible pink dress trimmed with gold.
The same dress worn by the new glass angel hanging in our living room.
But she was no angel.
The dress had turned to a shiny, hardened carapace.
Her abdomen was stretched out, bulbous, and she had six legs that skittered along the floor and wall as she moved toward me.
She was speaking to me, but I couldn’t understand her words anymore. They came out in a low droning buzz.
I opened my eyes and looked at the clock: 3:03.
I sat up and gulped in a breath of air, told myself I was safe. I was an adult, safe in my bedroom with my husband snoring softly beside me.
Moxie was still on alert at the foot of our bed, growling deep and low, as if to say,You really thought you could be safe?
I shook Mark awake. “Moxie hears something.”
“Must be a deer outside,” Mark said, rolling over. “Shh, Moxie. Good girl.” He sat up, reached down to give her a reassuring pat, then lay back down and plopped a pillow over his head.
Moxie sprang off the bed and started out the bedroom door, still growling. She stepped tentatively as if she was very much afraid of whatever was out there.
The giant insect-woman-angel thing in the pink dress.
Did I hear buzzing from downstairs? Or was that just Moxie’s growl?
The floor, the whole house, seemed to vibrate with the droning buzz.
“Mark?” I said, shaking him again.
“Just a deer,” he mumbled. “You know that dog and deer.”
But when there was a deer in the yard, Moxie would bark and jump at the window.
This was different.
This was somethingin the house.
