I didn’t know what was wrong with me. I sat for a while on the sofa, trying to cry out the feeling of being throttled and compressed by impossibility, until Josh brought me a mug of some kind of herb tea that put me to sleep. When I woke it was late afternoon. He’d spread a blanket over me. And the instant my surroundings entered my mind I jolted, staring around to see what the imp-thing had been doing while I slept. There was no sign of it. Just the usual pale wood and tan drapes, the musty gold carpet, those garish flowers. We’ll redecorate, Josh had said. Was he planning to attack the place with spray paint?
To my taste, there was nothing he could do that wouldn’t count as home improvement. I could hear him scuffling around somewhere; maybe he had started with his room.
Now that I was rested, more mentally together, I felt sure that everything he’d said was madness. Not that I thought Josh was crazy, exactly; just constructing a very complicated system of denial. I’d been wrong to get mad; no one plays games with their own mind that way unless they’ve been driven to it. But of course Mitch and Emma would come home, and learn the truth, and kick me to the curb. Sputtering with indignation. They would welcome an excuse to keep us apart, free Josh from my unwholesome influence. I knew that. As for what we’d seen? I couldn’t guess what that thing was, not now. I’d figure it out later.
“Ke-ezzz-zer!” Josh trilled. He dashed up the half-flight of stairs leading down to the bedrooms, practically skipped across to me. He had his makeup on thicker than ever, concealer slapped over those bruises, and he’d been messing with his hair, puffing and feathering it. “Are you feeling better now?”
“You’re the one who just got out of the hospital,” I pointed out.
“Well, sure. But I think it’s easier for me anyway.” He crouched down by the sofa and got in my face. Blasted me with his grin at close range. “Kezzer, if you’re okay now? Then I need you to do something for me. Go out to a café or something? I need the house to myself. Just for a few hours.”
That was when I noticed that the scuffling noise down the hallway hadn’t stopped. My heart tripped. I did my best to ignore the sounds, but they kept on, dry and whispery and insistent.
“I’m not totally sure you should be alone,” I said. With whatever that is.
“Oh Kezzer, of course I should! And how am I supposed to make a fabulous surprise dinner to welcome myself home if you’re sitting there watching me? Spoiler alert!”
“You’re making your own welcome-home dinner?” I asked—though in fact he’d said something about this earlier, wanting to cook tonight. And my cooking is abysmal, while his is at least okay. “We still have enough money left that we could go out, as long as we don’t go crazy.” Mitch had left me cash for groceries, and so far I’d been careful with it.
“I don’t want to go anywhere! Kezzer, I won’t feel like I’m a hundred percent home until we have a real celebration, right here, together. Right now I only feel like I’m, oh, eighty-five percent home. I wish we had champagne!”
I didn’t much like the idea of Josh drinking, not after last time. But if we were staying in it might be okay. I wanted to make him happy, if I could.
The noise down the hall went on, like a crumpled paper stuck to the bottom of my thoughts, dragging and muttering. A singsong rasp, crisp and hypnotic. I knew Josh was hearing it too, but somehow we’d entered into a silent agreement that everything was fine, that that sneaking horror was an acceptable presence.
“If Hadley is around, she’ll probably buy a bottle for us.” Hadley was a friend, or friend-ish, who worked at the bookstore, and she was twenty-one; she thought Josh was so amusing that she would indulge him. The truth was, I didn’t entirely mind having an excuse to get out of here. “I’ll see what I can do. And you need money to go shopping, right? It’s all on my dresser. Under the shepherdess.”
The shepherdess was one of Josh’s altered objects: a porcelain figurine of a damsel clutching a lamb he’d bought at Goodwill, then half-encased in a chrysalis of resin-dipped cocktail umbrellas, webs made of discarded jewelry, rhinestones, blobs of paint. He’d given it to me for my last birthday and it was both horrible and awesome.
Josh pulled and prodded and badgered me to my feet, then paused to squeeze me again. “I already found it.” He dug in his pocket and handed me a twenty, then put on an exaggerated pout. “For the champagne? Don’t you dare come back here without it!”
He was kidding, but he’d also feel hurt if I didn’t.
I got my shoes and my bowler hat and left, even though I had a feeling in my stomach as if it had been lined with tinfoil, crinkling and sour and sharp. A feeling too much like I’d had when I’d watched him dancing with those people I was supposed to be so polite to. If I ran into them, that is. So did that mean they were still in town somewhere? What did Josh know?
The suburban streets spread out in front of me, soft with gusting branches, with wisteria cascading off trellises. The lawns were clipped and neon green, the shadows a blue encroachment on the ground. Peace and prosperity, even if a few of those houses had been seized by banks and were sitting empty, their yards starting to fray. Textbook American Dream, give or take.
But the feeling of wrongness, of difference, that had overcome our house yesterday—it was out here now too. There was nothing I could put my finger on, but the wrongness was spreading. Maybe the shadows seemed a bit too active. Maybe there was a vital quality to the air, like something fermenting. And even though it was a beautiful day, no one seemed to be around.
I’d been expecting some relief, getting outside for a while, but that clearly wasn’t happening. I got out my phone to text Hadley; if she was working today, she wouldn’t care about running into the liquor store when she was on break. It was just three doors down from the bookshop.
I turned the phone on. And it screamed.
Not like a person, exactly; more like a teakettle squalling and babbling through its steam. A piercing hiss that hinted at garbled words, at radios lost in rubble. I flung it away, and it landed on that luminous grass, still piping away at a frantic pitch. It sounded like the voice of something small and not quite human, in terrible pain.
For a while I stood in a world that had ground to a halt, watching my phone where it lay on the grass: its ordinary black plastic shell, its blue screen, but transmitting that hellish little voice. I was sure now that there were words somewhere in the stream of sound, but I couldn’t understand them. I could guess, though: the voice was begging me to do something.
I dared myself to pick the phone back up: reached down for it, but yanked my hand away before it made contact. Then I tried to tell myself that it was Josh, pranking me somehow. I was still in view of our front windows. I looked to see if he was there, smiling slyly.
All I saw was the yellow siding, the tan drapes. A twitch at the fabric’s hem.
It wasn’t Josh watching me, but something was. Panic hit me with a metallic snap and I bolted, my feet pounding for three blocks before I thought that if I had a reason to be afraid, then it wasn’t safe for Josh either. I wheeled to a stop and stood there gasping, my hand clutching a lamppost.
Unless it was safe for him. He’d seemed perfectly secure and confident. When the imp-thing had fanned up out of the glass flowers, he hadn’t flinched. Still, I thought of going back for him. I thought of telling him we had to run away. Even if that meant we wound up sleeping in a cardboard box under a freeway off-ramp.
I imagined myself saying all that to him, and also being him as he listened to me. I could hear how ridiculous I sounded in his ears, how he felt somewhere between bemused and impatient. Kezzer, I thought I’d explained things to you? There’s nothing to worry about. Now, go buy my damned champagne.
It felt like a mistake—and everything, everything I did felt like an even bigger mistake than whatever I’d done just before, my failures endlessly inflating and swallowing one another—but I went on. Walking toward downtown. The streets were still unnervingly empty, no cars went by, but at last I saw a few people—children playing in a yard, a man weeding—though always in the distance. I couldn’t hear my phone anymore, that part was good.
Downtown consisted of two blandly cute streets at right angles to each other, over by the college. Full of bars and cafés for the students, mostly, though townies like us went to them too. An art-house theater, a ratty gallery full of smeary, huge-titted nudes hanging over a window display of bongs, a Thai restaurant. The usual, for a town with a big state university like this. And the bookstore, right on Grand Street.
Which was dark, its front door locked. I couldn’t remember what day of the week it was, but since the bookstore had a sign saying it was open seven days, that shouldn’t matter anyway. I stood with my back to its window for a moment, wondering what to do next. A small group of college kids sauntered past, oversized backpacks sagging from their shoulders. They struck me as exceptionally ugly people, their faces weirdly elongated, or much too big, or flat in unexpected places. One of them fixed me with a sidelong look, his eyes skidding deeper into their corners to stay on my face. He grinned.
Something in his backpack was squirming. The canvas bulged and jumped.
I told myself that he was smuggling a puppy into his dorm room. Doing something fairly innocuous. Though he should at least leave the bag unzipped. Let it breathe.
Once they were gone—which took much too long—I walked over to the liquor store. I had a fake ID, but it was too crappy to work if anyone looked closely. And besides, the owner knew me by sight; his son had been in my year at school.
So I’d try to brazen it out. The worst he’d do was laugh at me.
The lights were on, the door chimed as I stepped through. But there was no one behind the counter. I waited—maybe the owner was in back?—until time seemed to sway in my head. The bottles gleamed in their long rows, the overhead lamps reflecting again and again, and I began to imagine that those rebounding lights were tiny, shining people swarming over everything.
Then I snapped out of it, and the lights were just lights again. I didn’t know how long I’d been standing there, but it felt like a while, and still no one had appeared.
When I was younger—thirteen, fourteen—I’d shoplifted routinely. I was good at it and never got caught, but it upset Josh so much—What if someone sees you, Kezzer, what if the clerk has to pay for whatever you’ve stolen, what if Mitch and Emma find out and send you away?—that I’d stopped completely. Now, though, lifting a bottle of champagne seemed like the obvious thing to do. If I left the twenty to pay for it, it wouldn’t be so bad.
The bottle I chose was marked $17.99. I was even allowing for sales tax, so Josh couldn’t possibly get angry. I tucked the money under the register and helped myself to a shopping bag. Turned to go.
The boy in the white jacket was watching me through the window. The one from the grove, the same one who’d led Josh away. The one I’d mentally rehearsed murdering, in lavish detail. He didn’t have his entourage with him this time, and he looked much less handsome by daylight: sickly pale, even faintly gray. There was something off about the angles of his face, as if the bones were slightly out of joint. He still had great hair, I’d give him that, mahogany brown and as thick as plumage. He was stylish enough too, with the big jacket and the same black leather leggings he’d been wearing that night.
Josh had been clear in his instructions: I was supposed to be very, very polite to this scumbag. I thought of smashing the end off my bottle of champagne and seeing how polite I could be with the part that was left. My legs trembled with the kick of adrenaline. The boy in the white jacket smiled at me: a patient curling of his lips, as if he could see his blood frothing in my thoughts. As if the image was thoroughly charming.
I went to meet him, bells jangling at my back.
“The lovely Ksenia Adderley!” he said. “Now that I see you again, it’s clear how absurd it was to take you for a young man. It’s a fetching hat, that one, but it threw me. I hope you’re settling in all right?”
I grimaced at hearing my name; he wasn’t supposed to know it. But then it came to me that Josh must have told him at some point during his three days of captivity. Must have let it slip in a drugged stupor. It wasn’t his fault.
“Josh has a bad habit of standing up for shitheads like you,” I said. “Who’ve hurt him, or molested him, or whatever the hell you did. He won’t take it the right way, if I get arrested for your murder.”
The champagne was still in the bag, but I realized I was holding the bottle by its neck, so tightly I was surprised it didn’t shatter. One vicious swing, down on the top of his head: that might do it, with any luck. It would be twenty bucks well spent.
“It’s the thought that counts, Ksenia,” he said. In that repulsively courtly tone I’d noticed when we first met. His voice was high for a man, reedy; a syrupy whine. “So we can both take my murder as already accomplished, the blood long since swallowed by the earth, roses bursting on the spot. And we can say you’ve served out your long years in prison, and at last been freed, and now we’ve met again.”
I’d thought at first that he might be in high school or college. A freshman at most. Then I’d thought, no, older than that. But now I got the sense that both those guesses were way off. In the light his skin had an ashy, faceted look, not youthful at all. One of those forty-five-year-olds who can sometimes pass? Up close I could see that his eyes were an unnaturally bright, pale green, as sour as stomach acid.
“Who are you, anyway?”
“That’s all behind us, now. We can meet as old friends, and recall the time I stole your brother from you, albeit temporarily, and how you gouged out my eyes with a broken bottle to avenge him. We can laugh about it together, remembering how your hands were gloved in gore up to the elbows. Wax nostalgic as the hours wear on; oh, Ksenia, what a little savage you once were! And now that that’s established, may I accompany you on your walk?”
The awful thing was that I almost said yes. It was like his words had seeped inside me, coated my thoughts in grease. “Like hell. Who are you?”
He shrugged, his white jacket lifting in a cloudlike puff with the gesture. The question didn’t interest him. His nose was long and bony, his cheekbones too prominent.
“Another time, then. I’ll show you the sights.”
He bent in and kissed me on the cheek, and somehow I lacked the presence of mind to break his jaw. I just stood there and took it, from this kidnapper, this filth, this almost-certainly rapist. Exactly like when I’d been eleven, I was paralyzed and stupid, speechless as a rock. The boy-slim man in the white jacket turned to walk off.
The feeling of his lips stayed with me. A cool, dry hush, hush on skin that shrieked and burned.