‘I can’t!’
‘Well, maybe Mommy will go too far this time,’ I said, ‘and we will die.’ This neat solution had never occurred to me before. ‘Ted! I just had an idea!’
But Teddy was gone. He had found his door.
Ted
The air changed around me, somehow. I was standing by the front door to our house. But there was no street, no forest, no oak tree. Instead everything was white like the inside of a cloud. It wasn’t scary. It felt safe. I opened the door and stepped into the house, which was shrouded in a warm, dim calm. I locked the door behind me, quickly.Thunk, thunk, thunk. Mommy couldn’t come here, I knew.
The air was suddenly filled with the sound of purring. A soft tail stroked my legs. I looked down and caught my breath. I could hardly believe it. I was staring into a pair of beautiful green eyes, the size and shape of cocktail olives. She regarded me, delicate ears alert and questioning. I crouched and reached for her, half expecting her to vanish into nothing. Her coat was like silky coal. I stroked her, ran my finger down the slice of white on her chest.
‘Hi, kitty,’ I said, and she purred. ‘Hi, Olivia.’ She weaved herself in a figure of eight about my legs. I went to the living room, where the light was yellow-warm and the couch was soft, and took her on my lap. The house looked almost exactly like the one upstairs – it was just a little different. The cold blue rug I had always hated was orange down here, a beautiful deep shade, like the sun settling on a winter highway.
As I sat on the couch stroking Olivia, I heard it. The long, even passage of breath, great flanks rising and falling. I wasn’t afraid. I peered into the shadows and I saw him, lying in a great pile, watching me with eyes like lamps. I offered out my hand and Night-time came padding out of the dark.
So I got my kitty in the end. Actually it was even better than I had hoped, because I got two.
And that’s how I found the inside place. I can go down when I like, but it’s easier if I use the freezer as the door. I guess I could have made the inside place a castle or a mansion or something. But how would I know where everything was, in a castle or a mansion?
I am Big Ted now but Little Teddy is still here. When I go away, it’s because he has come forward. He does not use the face in the same way that grown-ups use their faces. So he can look scary. But he would never hurt anyone. It was Little Teddy who picked up the blue scarf and tried to give it back to the lady as she sat crying in her car, in the parking lot of the bar. She screamed when she saw Little Teddy. He ran after her, but she drove away fast through the rain.
Lauren
Ted was gone and all the pain that had been shared between us rushed into me. I had not known the body was capable of standing so much. I tried to follow him down, inside. But he had locked the door against me. I wonder if he could hear me screaming, from down there. I expect he could.
Mommy put us back in our little bed when she was done. The gauze was itchy over the stitches but I knew better than to scratch. The room was full of moving shadow and the mouse’s pink eyes gleamed where it watched from its cage.
I’m scared, I tried to tell Teddy. Teddy didn’t answer. He was deep in a good place full of black tails and green eyes and soft coats. I tried not to cry but I couldn’t help it.
I felt Ted soften towards me. ‘You can sleep now, Lauren,’ he said. ‘Someone else will watch.’
I heard the pad of great paws as Night-time came upstairs. I sank into the soft black.
I was woken in the morning by his weeping. Ted had found Snowball’s bloody bones in the cage. He was so sorry about it. ‘Poor Snowball,’ he whispered over and over. ‘It isn’t fair.’ He criedmore about that mouse than he did about the new little railway of black sutures that ran down our back. He wasn’t there when it was done, I guess. He didn’t feel it. I did, each one.
Ted knew it wasn’t Night-time’s fault. Night-time was just obeying his nature. Ted told Mommy that the mouse got out of its cage, and a stray cat got it. It was true, in a way. Of course, Mommy didn’t believe him. She took Teddy to the woods and told him to hide who he was. She thought he had a hunger in him. Ted was afraid that she would find a way to take Olivia and Night-time away. (And then it would be just me and him. He didn’t wantthat.) So he let her think it was the old sickness, the one her father had, the one who kept his pets in the crypt beneath theiliz.
I had begun to understand what Ted could not – what he would not allow himself to know. Each time the thought bobbed up he pushed it down harder, harder. Up it came again like a cork or a corpse surfacing. The sickness had indeed been passed down, though not to Ted. I wonder what the people of Locronan would say, if you asked them why they cast Mommy out. Maybe they have a different story to hers. Maybe it wasn’t her father who had the sickness.
At school they sensed that something had changed in Ted. He was like a mask with no one behind. Everyone stopped talking to him. He didn’t care. He could go inside, now, with the kitties. For the first time he could recall, he told me, he did not feel alone.
To me, who had been with him for all of Mommy’s repairs. He said that tome.
Teddy began calling the inside house his weekend place, because there was no work or school down there. Soon he found that he could add to it. He couldn’t keep his job at the auto shop in Auburn, so he made a basement where he could work on engines. He liked engines. It was a good workshop, full of tools inshining boxes and the scent of motor oil. He put white socks in the drawers, the kind that Mommy would never let him wear, because she said they were for girls. He put a window in the ceiling on the landing, where he could watch the sky all night, if he wanted, but no one could look back at him except the moon. He fixed the music box and put the Russian dolls back on the mantelpiece. Down here, he can fix everything he breaks. The picture of Mommy and Daddy can never be taken off the wall. Olivia walked through it all, her tail held curious and high. He made sure she had a peephole all her own. For her, it is always winter outside: Ted’s favourite season.
Ted made sure that Night-time only hunted downstairs, after the thing with Snowball. He put lots of mice in the weekend place to keep Night-time happy. Ted didn’t want any more suffering.
He added an attic, which he kept locked. He could put memories and thoughts in there and close the door. He didn’t like some of the inhabitants of the house. The long-fingered, green things, which had once been boys. He was afraid that the green boys were the ones who went missing from the lake. But that was just fine, because he put them in the attic, too. Sometimes they could be heard in the night, dragging their bony stick fingers on the boards, and weeping.
The more time Teddy spent inside, the clearer and more detailed it got. Soon he found that he could go there whenever he wanted. He began to lose time, there. The TV played anything he wanted. He could even watch what was happening in the upstairs house. If he saw something good was happening, like Mommy had got ice cream, he could open the front door and he would be up there again. Usually he found himself lying in the freezer in the acid-scented dark, with the air holes shining above him like stars. He went up less and less as the years went on.
More and more, he left me alone with Mommy. When sheangled the light just so, Teddy went down to the weekend place and stroked his kitty.
I came to hate that smug cat. Ted knew it. Sometimes when I tried to come down he kept me suspended between the two places, in the black, vinegar-smelling freezer, because the cat was downstairs. Then when she went away it was my turn. If I did something he didn’t like, he found he could keep me in the dark freezer all the time.
I can’t come forward fully when we’re outside the house, unless Ted lets me. I can do little things – scribble a note, maybe, on the inside of some leggings, or make him lose concentration for a couple seconds. And of course it has to be stuff that doesn’t require the use of working legs. I don’t know why Ted’s broken mind made me like this but it did. He has to carry me through the world, maimed and powerless. I think that’s why he sometimes forgets that it was my strength that kept us alive.
Ted couldn’t say boo to a goose, or so I thought. I soon found out how wrong I was.
