“If that’s what you want to call it,” he said, “then go ahead. I’m here to do a job. I’d rather be friends, but if this is how you want to play it, fine. You don’t have to like me, Miss Farrow, but you’re sure as shit not going to get me fired.”
She stared up at him, silent. Always silent. Her stare was molten gold.
“I’ll see you around,” he said, and turned to go.
He was halfway to the door when the tinkle of breaking glass drew him back. He turned to find the bottle of nail polish shattered across the floor where she’d thrust it. Crybaby pink ran like mercury along the grout.
You’re right, she signed, after a beat.
“Oh yeah? About what?”
I’m not going to get you fired.A smile sharpened the corners of her mouth, as alluring as it was dangerous.I’m going to make you quit.
Vivienne was dreaming of a house.
It wasn’therhouse, though it felt more like home than anywhere else she’d ever been. Like she belonged there, rotting right along with the yellow crown molding and the warped floorboards. Sunlight streaked through the boarded windows in thin, colorless bands, so that it looked as though the entirety of the house was underwater. A sunken horror, wrapped in a shipwreck silence. The hall yawned on and on without end, so that she couldn’t tell if the distance to the basement door was very short, or very long. The steps stretched down, down, down into blackness.
Somewhere out of sight, a clock ticked away the minutes. Her legs were leaden. Her throat was sand. She couldn’t run, couldn’t scream—couldn’t do anything but stand there, staring down into the dark. Couldn’t do anything but listen as a sibilant voice slithered out from the deep.
“Vivienne.”
She sat up in bed with a start. The battery on her phone was dead, the sky outside her window a whitewashed gray. Her insides were all fuzz, her mouth sour. She hated waking up this way—unrefreshed. Out of sorts. Molly and Judd—who typically slept at the foot of her bed—were nowhere to be found, and the air in her room held still as a breath. Stretching out the aching arches of her feet, she swung herself gingerly out of bed.
Right away, she was aware that something was wrong. The floor was slick and wet, as though she’d knocked over a cup of water in the night. She wrenched her feet back with a gasp. Tendrils of mist eddied skyward in her wake. The sight stopped her heart cold. Hands shaking, she rose up onto her knees and peered over the edge of the mattress.
Water as dark and rank as oil spilled out from beneath her bed. It seemed to pulsate, seeping both down and out, until it became as vast as a sea, as bottomless as a chasm. As she watched, frozen in horror, a single bubble expanded atop the surface. It was joined by another. Another.
As though something big was rising up from the depths.
The largest of the bubbles burst with a wetpop, spattering her face.
She sat up in bed with a start.
The sky was a wet, watery yellow in her window. The dogs lay sleeping on the bed beside her. Molly lifted her head as Vivienne shifted out from beneath her tangled clump of blankets. Beside her, Judd snored lightly, his ears flat against his scalp, oblivious to her panic. She crossed the room on tiptoes, prying open the door.
Immediately, she was struck by the wrongness of it. The hall outside her room wasn’t the wide, sun-soaked space she was used to but that same rotten dark from the house in her dreams. And there, moored in the shadows, stood another Vivienne.
Four years old, her femur exposed in a bone-white shard.
“Don’t touch the water,” she warned. Her voice was a child’s soft timbre. Her teeth were razor sharp; her pupils clustered black. “That’s where He sleeps.”
Vivienne sat up in bed with a start, a cry mangled in her throat. Sweat matted her hair to the side of her face. This time, both dogs sat awake and alert, as though wary of some unseen danger. She flopped ungracefully out of bed. Dry floor. She opened the door. Empty hall. Her heart beat and beat and beat as she fumbled down the stairs, running her hands one over the other along the railing. Her skin snagged on a sharp irregularity and she leapt back, startled.
Clumps of large blue-black mussels were rooted to the varnish, like barnacles on the underside of a dock. Water lapped wetly at the bottom step. On the landing behind her, the dogs had begun to bark. She heard them faintly, as though they were entire worlds removed. Trapped behind a veil.
The water rose and rose.
“Vivienne,” said that horrible voice, “come and swim.”
She fell back hard, scrabbling for purchase on the mussel-encrusted staircase.Wake up, she willed herself.Wake up, wake up, wake up.
“Vivienne,” said that voice again, though now it sounded less like a creature and more like a boy, insistent and maybe even a little bit irritated. “MissFarrow.”
The barking careened into focus, until the sound was right on top of her. She rose to her feet, intending to race back up the steps, and collided inelegantly into the hard, flat wall of a boy.
“Ow,” said Thomas Walsh.
He was dressed for the day in a neat suit that had quite obviously been hand-selected by Philip and a ratty old tie that quite obviously hadn’t. A textbook sat wedged under one arm and in his right hand he brandished a half-eaten bagel. He looked entirely, blessedly human. There was nothing sharp about him. Nothing clawed, nothing cavernous. A swell of relief bloomed in her belly. She swallowed a lungful of air. Another. Another.
