Liquid oozes in a dark stain over the floor, pocked with slimed patches of black. She shifts her foot, and the liquid clings to her in long, gelatinous strands, like the gastric juices of an open stomach wound.
That is where she is, she realizes, the bowels of the house. Her thumb shivers over the switch of the circular saw, but there’s no way it will cut through these cement walls. If they’re even cement. The longer she looks, the more they seem to undulate, the speckled light casting them in a pink, fleshy hue. If she remains here too long, she’ll be digested.
In the dark, something
breathes.
Heavy and wet and foul.
Her pulse is a wild, mad thing in her throat and it takes effort to twist around and check that the stairs are still there, a tiny pinprick of light at the top. Shadows pull fresh darkness into their mouths and their bellies distend with the pleasure of it.
Think, she mustthink. This mess of trashed furniture must date back to when his parents owned the house, but there’s no reason to lock it up. Something else is down here.
“I’m here,” she whispers to the hollowed dark. “Where are you?”
She walks carefully forward, her feet making smallpat-patsounds across the soaked floor. Shards of sharp-edged furniture reach out to scratch her bare thighs, but she barely feels it. Her eye catches something on that back workbench, an incongruous anomaly in this dust-encased space.
The laptop is open, no power cord to be seen, and it remains dead when she thumbs the on button. A neat layer of dust covers it, green and almost fluffy, and she brushes it off with her sleeve. There’s anold coffee mug, dregs petrified, and an emptied ice cream tub of what looks like used testing kits, though she doesn’t know for what. A stool is tucked to the side. She flicks on the single lamp and it pools in an insipid, tremulous glow, showing piles of papers and photographs.
She picks one up.
Even when this began, and she let the dark lure her down here, she hadn’t put words to what she thought she might find. A body had occurred to her, something petrified with skin shrunk to old, browned leather, although part of her is shocked that she even thinks that of him. But he’s never talked about girlfriends or past relationships, and the few times she’d tossed questions his way with nonchalant curiosity, he’d looked at her with absolute openness and said she was his first. First date, first crush, first love, first sex. Except, he’s twenty-three.
She’d just thought it sweet that he’d waited to fall in love before sleeping with a girl. Before him, she’d kissed a boy once, she’d had sex once, and the fact she barely remembers the boy’s face never bothers her. Toppling into the orbit of Bren had felt so right, the two of them conjoined in equal lovesick adoration, and she liked that he wasn’t more experienced than her.
A suffocated, cloying decay begins to worm down her throat, and she finds it hard to breathe as she sets the circular saw down on the workbench and stares at the printed photo of her and Jude.
It takes a second to place it: that playground near her parents’ house, overgrown with weeds and the equipment left to rust, but the swing had been Jude’s favorite. His head is tipped back, his little face lit up in ecstasy as she pushes him, and they look so young.
She has no goddamn idea who took this photo.
Mold furs the print. She flips it over to see a date penciled on the back—three years ago.
How the actual hell can he have a photo of her from three yearsago? A photo she didn’t take. A photo that no one would have taken for her, because it was only ever Jude and her, alone together.
Bile blooms in the back of her throat.
Her fingers are shaking as she looks at the next photo, and the next. All of her, her, her. At the parking lot at work. Onstage during an end-of-year performance with her little class. In front of her garage, Jude strapped into his stroller. Some are shot from far away, pixelated from being zoomed in. Others are crisp, as if the camera quality improved. Or the photographer was so much closer. They were in the audience of her ballet performances, shut inside a car across a road, walking past while her focus was on Jude.
Being with Bren is so easy. He understands her, he anticipates her, he knows what she likes, he adores her, he—
Has hundreds of photos of her locked in thefucking basement he said didn’t exist.
Tears sting her eyes and she feels herself slipping toward the edge of hyperventilating. Papers slip off the bench and flutter, featherlight, to the floor, as she scrabbles through them wildly. As if an explanation will just present in neat script on the back of a random photo. But instead she finds carefully jotted-down dates, a timeline of her all the way back when she was sixteen. There are less of those, just one or two. But the abject, spiraling panic she has looking at them is splitting her mind in half.
There she is outside the shopping mall close to her old school, her stomach straining the thin fabric of her T-shirt, a plastic shopping bag of baby clothes hanging from the crook of her elbow.
An animal wail claws up her throat. She wishes she had found a body. Not this.
If not for the dank, saturated floor, she’d have sunk to her knees and sobbed, but she holds tight to the barest sliver of strength as shegrips the edge of the workbench. She imagines him here, just before he flew out to surprise her with that magical island, stacking up the photos and powering off the computer, grabbing caulking and plaster for the door, because he no longer needed to sit down here and pine over photos. He was off to fetch the real thing to tuck into his jaws. The fact he didn’t destroy the evidence says he was too fond of it.
Didn’t he say it once?I only think of you.
But this means he found her when he was only seventeen. In the back of her mind, she can hear his aunt’s thin, fluttery voice talking about how they’d lived in Australia for a while and Bren had stayed with them. It shouldn’t be goddamn possible, but there’s no other explanation.
He has obsessed over her for six years.
Darkness presses its long, lank form against her back, breathing in sync with her, as it slowly sinks deep, deep into her skeleton.
