But she clings to the comfort—as ashamed as she is to admit it’scomfort—that Jude hit Bren only last Sunday and that punch in the leg came out of nowhere. Hunger must be the only thing overruling his feelings.
Jude doesn’t like Bren.
Watching them together makes her pledge to do better, to curtail that twisted, molten spiral that ate through the weekend and made her want to punish her son. If he was justeasier, if he just loved her, if he just needed her like he used to. But it won’t matter once the new baby comes and she can spend her days spooned in bed among piles of warm, clean laundry, nursing him for hours as the world folds down and they exist in a minuscular envelope, just them together.
She will not make the same mistakes as she did with Jude.
Humming to herself, she drifts into the kitchen, rolling up the sleeves of her mint sweater, a rare foray into color when she usually chooses endless arrays of polished blacks. She’s halfway through stacking clean dishes when she feels something different about the house’s quiet. A subtle wrongness that makes her look over her shoulder with a small frown.
Maybe it’s just her own heartbeat, but she could have sworn she heard something else.
A dull, wetthud-thudcoming from the wall.
An eerie crawling sensation trickles down the back of her neck.
Setting down the sunflower dishes, she plucks up a towel and wipes her hands as she moves to the kitchen archway. Silence beats down the hall, the shadows pulling tight into the corners as if scurrying away from her.
Elodie rubs a palm against her forehead, a tightness behind her eyes that speaks of sleep exhaustion brought on by lying in bed awake with ghosts all through her head. She can’t keep doing this, letting Jude’s creepy comments about the house get to her and eat through her days. There is no beating heart in the walls. There is no mouth in the ceiling. There is nothing to see but a goddamn old house that needs more plaster and paint.
Get a grip, Elodie.
She hears thethud-thudsound again, muddied but definitely there. It hooks fingers under her jaw and tows her down the hall and into the disheveled mess of the dismantled living room. It looks even worse than it did on the weekend: half of the wall gone, shards of wood and plaster littering the floor between ladders and toolboxes, the circular saw still plugged in and resting on the floorboards.
Annoyed, she marches over and yanks the power cord from thewall. Bren should know better. The unkempt chaos of the room makes her itch, because all she can think of is the picture-perfect house he once described to her, a house for Mrs. January, shaped by his beautiful hands.
This rotted house is not that.
Something makes her take a step closer to the half of the wall he hasn’t knocked down yet. She puts her ear to it, tentative at first, then presses closer to the dusty plaster as she listens.
There’s nothing. Until—
Thud.
thudthudthudthud—
Every muscle in her body tightens, fear pulling its way into her mouth with the acrid taste of copper and ash.
“What the hell,” she whispers to herself, “is inside these walls?”
It isn’t a conscious decision to pick up the paint scraper and start chipping away at the petrified glue before peeling back wallpaper. She just starts. It’s satisfying. Like catching a sliver of skin at the edge of a thumbnail and yanking it with her teeth.
Paper tears. She rips it off and it flutters to the floor.
For a minute, she doesn’t understand what she sees. Her heartbeat quickens until she is full of a sickening, heady thrum.
Lesions cover the wall, blood blisters,pustules. One of them has busted where the paint scraper caught it, and it now leaks a pale, foul-smelling fluid. Rust smears the wall in long, red streaks.
It looks like—
Blood.
The impossibility of it makes her want to turn around and shout for Bren, but she’s alone. She’s achingly, wholly alone in this house where something foul has been hidden under wallpaper that beats like it’s covering a bloody severed heart. A frenetic urge seizes her andshe darts across the room and starts gouging that wall with the paint scraper too. When she tears back more paper, the ripping of old fibers loud against the quiet, she finds more of the stain. More lesions, more speckled rust marks that look almost furred.
She’s not breathing as she runs into the hallway, ignoring the fact this wall had been finished and papered in a deep, moody green floral pattern long before she moved in. The sharp edge of the scraper digs in too easily, as if the wall is made of a softened pudding. She claws her fingernails under the paper and rips.
This wall is the same. Bloody and wet.
She touches it, flinching at the cold, slick slime dribbling down the bared wall. Her fingers leave indents in the plaster as if it’s the meaty underside of a rotting mushroom.
