“Okay.” Adya’s mouth twisted at the corners. “That’s a deeply terrifying thought.”
“What if it’s Nate? No one has seen him since he checked out of the hospital. What if Whitehall has been keeping him here all this time?”
Adya frowned. “Why?”
“I don’t know, but I’m sure there’s a reason.”
“I’m not so sure,” Adya said. “I’ve been casting out for Nate Schiller for days now. If he was here, I’d feel him.”
Delaney didn’t answer. Her attention had caught on the painting, several pieces clicking into place. The work was amateur—nothing at all like the professional pieces she’d seen in the lateral Boston gallery—but the feel of it was unmistakable.
Her stomach hooked. Somewhere in the kitchen, Dr. Whitehall was setting out platters of food, making small talk with his students. Whitehall, who’d threatened to expel her. Whitehall, who’d warned her away from Colton. Whitehall, who’d chastised her for interfering in Nate’s case.
Whitehall, whose wife was a ghost.
“I’m going to go upstairs and look for Nate,” she said.
Turning on her heel, she pushed out of the chuffing heat of the living room. Behind her, she heard the muffle of Adya’s voice calling out her name, swallowed up in the inscrutable noise of chattering students.
Upstairs, the hall was the same carpeted hush. The walls were the same paneled dark. Everything smelled like an antiseptic clean. Bleach, strong enough to make her eyes water. And beneath it, something sour. Something dead.
She pushed her way into the very first room she found. The space was tight and small, the furniture covered with sheets. In the window the sun had begun to set, leaving the room disfigured in shadow, the remaining dregs of gold bleeding through the sheets until they turned sheer and pale, their innards skeletal against the dusk.
“Nate?”
“He’s not here,” sang a voice. She turned, startled, and saw no one. The door was still shut. The room was quiet. “He’s not anywhere. Poor little dead boy, all gone, gone away.”
Something moved through the space. Unseen, shuffling. It ruffled the sheets in its wake. The shadows climbed the walls, made oblong beneath the sinking sun, and she was given the distinct sense that the dead were doing their best to claw their way free of this room where she’d brought them.
Out.
Out.
We want out.
The smell of rot clung to the air. In the clutter, something laughed.
“So pretty, so neat,” sang the voice, nearer now than before. “So good and sweet to eat.”
“Who are you?” She inched her way backward, moving toward the door. In the bowels of the room, something clattered to the floor. A sheet fell away, revealing the paint-splattered wood of an artist’s easel.
“Who,” sang the voice. “Who? Who are we? We are you.”
She reached behind her, fumbling for a doorknob. “That doesn’t make any sense.”
“Oh yes, it does. It makes perfect sense, little sweet, little flower, little pretty-itty Wednesday. We live together, he and I, like you live together, you and it. Tucked away inside. Nibbling like varmint.” A giggle, shrill. “Only I am suckling on the teat of decay and you are going to live forever. My mad, forever kin. A girl made god. How the demon boy must worship at your feet.”
Closer, closer. It dragged itself over the floor, pulling itself like a body clawing out of a grave.
And then it stood.
She clapped her hand over her mouth, stifling a scream.
It was a man, or what was left of a man. His head was concave, bashed in as if by a heavy object. His face was shrunken, skeletal, skin rotted to bone in places. His clothes were a shredded mess, arms pocked by road rash. Silver hair rose in broken clumps along his scalp.
Brethren, crooned the thing in her bones.There you are.
“What are you?”
