It’s a stagnant old room, untouched from Bren’s renovations, with bare floorboards and wallpaper blackened and peeling with age. For a second, Elodie stands there, blinking as the world seems to bend sideways as the light dims. The moth smacks harder and harder against the bulb, the tinkering click of little wings going mad making her teeth clench. Why are they even playing in this room? She shouldn’t be encouraging Jude into dangerous rooms of the house.
But she can’t remember deciding to walk in here.
She jams her palms into her eyes, trying to slow the oozing sludge of her thoughts as they spiral like rancid molasses down a drain. “Jude? Come out, come out, wherever you are.” She tries to keep her voice singsong, but the quiet of the room beats against her ears, oppressive and cloying, and suddenly she can’t breathe.
Where is her son?
Where is my goddamn son—
“Jude.”Elodie yanks the cloth right off the table, and it puddles onto the floor, with a decade’s worth of dust pluming into her face until she coughs. “Jude? Mama needs you to chase her now.”Don’t panic.But her heartbeat has begun slamming against her ribs, and she can feel meaty, animal sweat staining her skin as she spins around.
The light flickers wildly, a high-pitched whine filling the room.
His name is in her mouth again, this time close to a scream.
Except, the moth is the one screaming. She can feel it under her skin, deep in her eardrums. Her hands are over her ears before she can think as a frenetic, wild pain drives hot white needles behind her eyes.Leave.She needs to leave. She shouldn’t be here, in this part of the house. It’s not safe; it’s not—
Somethingsnaps.
Sparks explode in a shriek.
Elodie jerks to the side, just as the light fixture crashes down and slams into the exact place she was standing. The curved iron arms are dug into the floorboards like knife points.
For a second, shock leaves her frozen with her heart in her mouth as she stares at it. Then she scrambles back the way she’d come, fright slitting her open like a fish until she’s shaking so hard she can’t think. She nearlydied. Above, the hole where the fixture used to be looks down at her like a black mouth, plaster lips rimmed with an oily, oozing liquidthat slops onto the floor where she stood. Almost like it’s salivating for her.
She stares at it, still shaking so hard her teeth have begun to chatter, her heart punching its way from her chest with bruising intensity. It is in her mouth, the need to scream for Bren, until she hears a tiny mewl and spins around to see Jude standing in the doorway.
There is no way he slipped out without her seeing. She was standingright goddamn there.
She rushes over and snatches him up, backing out of the awful room where the hole in the ceiling has seemed to have grown with hungry delight.
“Are you okay?” she whispers into Jude’s hair, kissing him hard.
“I don’t like looking at it.” Jude’s mouth pulls down at the corners.
“Looking at what, baby?” She closes the door to the room and walks quickly down the hallway, trying to slow her breathing, though panic still runs like quicksilver through her veins. If she slows, if shecalms down, she’ll realize this was all her fault for being in an unfinished part of the house.
It’s just that she doesn’t remember why she was in there, almost as if she was… pulled.
“The thing in the walls.” Jude whimpers and presses his face to her shoulder while her stomach does a backward flip.
She’s letting his silly little fears get into her head is all, but she can’t shove aside the image of that wet, black-slick mouth and the ravenous way it looked at her.
Maybe it looks at Jude like that while he’s in the nursery. Alone.
It can’t look at him. What iswrongwith you?
She goes down the stairs too quickly for someone carrying a child, and when she pulls up short in the archway to the living room, she’s completely out of breath.
Bren is hard at work, oblivious to all fears and distress as he busts open a wall. The small hole Elodie poked her head into last week has widened enough that a person can step through to the arguably useless parlor on the other side. They agreed combining the rooms and opening the space would look amazing—but she didn’t realize he was doing it now. On a Sunday night. Huge, ragged slabs of plasterboard lie scattered on the floor and dust pulses in the air. He’s abandoned the power saw and has a sledgehammer in hand, smashed slivers of wreckage littering the ground before him, his arms and jeans layered in filth.
Jude coughs and Elodie fans the clouded air and tries not to breathe.
Telling Bren she was in the wrong part of the house seems pointless right now. He’ll fuss, and she doesn’t want to be fussed over. She wants him tofixthis hellhole and make it safe while she takes a scalpel to the rabid way her imagination is spinning out of control these days and cuts out the meaty, blood-soaked offending pieces.
“Dinnertime.” She is amazed at how level her voice is, how easily she hides her still galloping heartbeat. “Also, what stops the second floor from falling on your head once you take out that wall?”
“I’ve got it sorted!” Bren sounds cheerful. “I’m not smashing all the way through now. Getting a load-bearing beam delivered on Tuesday.”
