There is nothing to “figure out” when the answer is to believe her, but there seems no point in snapping at him again. She allows him to guide her out of the nursery and down the hallway to their bedroom. When she collapses on the bed, he fusses around, propping pillows under her leg to elevate it, then disappearing into the bathroom and coming back with a tall glass of water. It looks murky from the faucet, but she doesn’t care enough to send him downstairs for something cold from the fridge.
She drinks as he perches on the edge of the bed, Jude curled on his lap, still latched to him with sniffing whimpers.
“You need to listen to me,” Elodie says, low and fierce. “There is somethinginsidethe house, something dangerous.”
Bren has a hand on her ankle just above the teeth marks, and he massages slowly as he watches her, pensive and quiet. As if she’s a deranged creature midway through a mental breakdown.
“You need to believe me,” she snarls.
“Okay,” he says, but it’s so unconvincing she could scream.
“Jude is getting hurt!” She half shouts it and then sucks in a sharp breath as Jude cowers closer to Bren.
He isn’t asking for her, reaching for her, turning to her for comfort.
What the hell is the point of anything if it isn’t her that he wants?
Bren folds his arms around Jude’s shuddering body and rocks him. “Maybe you should rest for a bit.”
Her teeth are clenched, her lips bloodless. “Maybe I should walk out of this fucked-up house while I still can.”
It is the perfect thing to say, the worst thing to say. Bren looks stricken, a lonely sort of fear closing over his face before he quickly glances down, his eyes gone glossy in a way that makes her stomach clench.
“Just rest, okay?” He swallows hard.
She should make good on her threat, snatch Jude and walk out until he fixes this god-awful monster of a house, but her anger is slipping even as she tries to take fistfuls of its red, blazing glory and stoke it to a hotter burn. Her eyes have never felt so heavy, as if her long nights awake have hit all at once. Bren’s face begins to melt down his cheeks like a watercolor painting left out in the rain, and she can barely feel his hand on her ankle, stroking soothing circles with his thumb.
Her eyes close; her mouth feels chalky.
She has the sudden urge to reach out and slap him, but she isn’t sure why.
SEVENTEEN
Sawdust is stuffed down herlungs, her arms arranged gently against her sides before the first nails are driven into her bones. Through wrists, forearms, shoulders. To keep her limbs in place as they lift her inside the wall and begin to layer heavy wooden boards across her face. The hammer blows are efficient and measured, and when they lay the last board over her face, they make sure the final hammer blow drives the nail straight between her eyes.
Her screams are animal things, bloody and wet as they spasm through her chest and drown her in sick waves of sobs. It is the horrible kind of crying, uncontrollable and drowned. She screams for her son, herbaby, but darkness blots out the whole world and she can do nothing. Her face presses to rough splintered wood and she can’t move. Shecan’t move.
She is built into the house and already she begins to rot, the tinylegs of termites skittering over her eyelids and lips. Blood leaks around the nail in her forehead and a thin, black line runs into her mouth. Sweet copper, ruinous devastation.
She can still hear them on the other side, going ahead with their lives: the happy shrieks of children’s feet running down the hallway as she decays into mincemeat behind the wallpaper.
Two children. She can hear babyish chatter, but then there is Jude, older, calmer, confident as he murmurs, “It’s bath time now.”
NO—
She loses it, screaming and screaming, thrashing her nailed body in the small walled cavity, beating herself bloody as she screams for him.Don’t do this, don’t do this, I’m sorry, please please please, I can’t survive this, I need another chance, come back—
Jude Jude Jude—
Her blood oozes from the wallpaper, soft and lovely, a gorge of violent red.
The color suits the house perfectly.
Her cheeks are wet whenshe wakes up.
A foul crust coats her tongue and she gags as she rolls over and gropes for her phone. It takes her a full minute of staring in disorientated confusion at the clock on her screen before she can parse the numbers: 7:13 p.m. A silky dark has drifted across the bedroom, the air shimmering under a wintery cold as gooseflesh ripples across her arms. She crushes both palms to her temples and waits for the dizziness to pass. The brutality of waking has shaken her to the core, but maybe that’s the nightmare still lingering in spidery webs at the edge of her vision.
She scrubs at her eyes and then stares at the night-soaked bedroom.
