She slams both hands against the wallpaper to shove him back in and water saturates her palms as if the plaster has been soaked; as if it is drowning.
this isn’t real I’ve been poisoned I’m crazy I’m hallucinating this isn’t—
You called for him. You called for Jude.
The wail in her throat feels deadened, drowned, as she stumbles backward, watching the face sink back into the wall. Then there is nothing.
She only realizes then that the screaming has stopped.
She hurls herself back to the dining room, tripping in her desperate haste, dry-heaving sobs crawling up her throat, not wanting to see.
Needing to see.
The bloodied hammer, the skull shattered like a sugar egg—
please don’t be, please don’t—
Around her, the house pulses, lurid and quick, a clock counting down, a heartbeat on the cusp of flatlining.
As she skids to a stop, she sees the hole Bren has torn open, wide enough for him to fit his head and shoulders inside the house’s skeleton and wrench something out of the dark. Black water throbs sluggishly from the hole, the smell of it like death and corruption.
From the house’s festered cavity of a mouth, Bren drags out a child.
He collapses instantly, Jude clutched to his blood-soaked chest, his despair a living thing engulfing them both. He rocks Jude carefully, cradling him with such tender reverence.
Tears run down her cheeks, soft and hot, and her mouth is filled with salt.
She takes a stumbling step forward.
They are a painting done only in charcoals, the little boy and the monster who helped make him, the way they curve into each other, their spines turned to green wood and flowers growing out of their split wrists. Bren palms Jude’s filthy cheeks, presses his mouth to Jude’s temple as his eyes squeeze shut and he cries. Silently, gratefully.
“Jude.” Her voice cracks.
They look up.
Bren tightens his arms about Jude, protective and fierce, and tiltstheir bodies away from her. All she can do is stand there, forlorn and unwanted. At least it is a familiar feeling.
Then Jude peeks around Bren’s arm, those dark, winsome eyes looking for her in the dark. He still holds his mangled toy rabbit.
Elodie sinks carefully to her knees and stretches out her arms. “Baby, come to Mama.”
Something flickers on his face, uncertainty, worry, his chin dimpling as his bottom lip quivers. Only moonlight streaks across the floor, enough to bathe the angles of their faces silver.
Bren’s breathing hard, his hand going to his chest as his face contorts. “I won.”
“Please…Pleaselet us go. I’ll say nothing. I’ll never tell.”
Bren closes his eyes and then bends close to Jude’s ear. “Everything’s going to be okay. I know you’re scared… It’s okay to be scared. But I’m going to fix everything, and you’ll be safe with me, all right?”
“Jude, come to Mama.” Her arms are still outstretched. “We’ll go far, far away from this scary house and nothing will ever hurt you again. I—I promise.”
It’s the tremble, the stammer, the lie in it that makes Bren look at her with such devastated anguish that she hates him for the way he makes her feel.
“You need,” he says, slow and ragged, “to let him go. You are the worst thing for him.”
“No—”
“Elodie.” His voice is steady now, a calm settling over him. “You can’t have him.”
