“I can’t find him.” Bren whirls on her, his eyes flared wide.
She whirls on him with a strangled scream. “This isall your fault!”
“I was going to fix it!” he shouts. “I was going to fix everything, you didn’t give me a chance.” Pain twists his face and he looks young all of a sudden—young and foolish in his agony. He holds back a small sob as he presses a hand to his torn chest. The dark makes it impossible to see much, but adrenaline must be fast fading, and she wonders if he swallowed painkillers when he was in the kitchen or stuffed gauze into his wounds while she was distracted searching.
The moans coming from her mouth don’t feel human. She wrenches away from him and starts feeling along the wall, as if her fingertips will brush the shape of Jude through the fibrous membrane. Then she raises the hammer and smashes it down. It punctures through wall; plaster dust is on her tongue. Bren is behind her, screaming that she will hit Jude.
“He’s scared of you!” She’s still screaming at him. “You terrify him—”
“He’snever been scared of me!” he roars. “You made that up. Jesus Christ, Elodie, you’re the one who just came at himwith a fucking hammer.”
Then she hears it, the tiniest keening.
Both she and Bren go perfectly still, trying to narrow down the sound. A faint scrabbling starts, stops. She could swear it’s in the kitchen, but he couldn’t crawl all that way. He couldn’t. The house is playing with them.
It has joined in the game.
“Jude?” She holds her breath, and in the dark, her eyes meet Bren’s.
Then the screaming starts.
It is in every wall.
It is all around them.
Her child is screaming and screaming, and she can’t get to him.
TWENTY-FIVE
They forget they hate eachother, that they want to rip out the other’s heart and bite off tendons with their teeth. All that matters now is getting Jude out of the walls.
“Get him out.” She is incoherent with her despair. “BREN, GET HIM OUT. GET HIM OUT.”
Bren snatches the hammer from her and shoves her aside as he feels along the walls, pressing his ear to one, then another. Too slow. They need to move faster.
She is choked by helplessness, she is ravaged by it. Something inside hersnapswith violent, bloody terror as she listens to her son’s screams; the vulnerable, childish terror of them, the shrill cadence of undiluted pain.
“Jude,Jude, listen to me.” Bren pounds his fist against a wall in thedining room, far from where Jude vanished. “You need to stay still, buddy, do you understand? Don’t move.”
Then he begins smashing open the wall.
The speed and velocity with which he moves feel surreal, as if he is a god of this place, his body saturated in offering blood. All she can think of is him wrenching the hammer out of the boards and it coming away splattered red, shattered flecks of skull on the end.
But he keeps beating the wall and she watches, a stillness falling over her like a hand over her mouth. He’s in the wrong place. The screams aren’t coming from there.
Elodie runs back to the living room where Jude disappeared and rests both her bloody hands to the wallpaper.
“Jude?” Her voice is gentle, coercing, a promise of comfort and cuddles, of shielding him until everything is all right. “I’m here. I can hear you. I can hear your heart beating.”
And then he’s there, his face pushing out against the wallpaper so she can trace the outline of his skull with her thumbs. He is alive in there, he is not devoured. The house will give him back.
But as she sobs with relief, scratching feebly at the paper to break open this membrane covering his face, she realizes he is too small to be her son.
The wallpaper twists over his covered face and she can see his mouth shape the word.
Ewo-dee.
She screams.
