Julie drives straight to Claire’s house. She knows that the responsible thing would be to go to her father or to track down Mr. Vickery and alert the committee to what happened. But she doesn’t trust the committee to do anything about it other than file a report. Besides, it might be nothing. It might just be the ranting of monsters.
Or it might be everything. Julie wants to make sure Claire is all
right.
She pulls into Claire’s driveway and climbs out of her car. The wind billows and gusts and roars through the trees. Still no rain, though there’s a distant rumble of thunder, a flicker of lightning.
A hurricane a hundred years ago almost wiped out the town. Is this another hurricane, making its slow way across the Gulf? No, of course not, it would have been on the news, and Julie’s mom would have forced her to spend the afternoon hammering plywood boards onto the windows.
Julie takes a deep breath and walks up to the front door. Her blood rushes through her ears. She’s more nervous right now, pressing her thumb against Claire’s doorbell, than she ever was standing in front of Aldraa.
The doorbell echoes through the house. Julie shifts her weight, wipes her sweaty palms on the back of her shorts.
No one answers.
Dread tightens inside her chest. She rings the doorbell again. Something’s wrong. She’s sure of it.
She’s about to leave the porch to try knocking on Claire’s window when she hears footsteps on the other side of the door. She freezes in place. The door creaks open. Wind pushes against the screen door, making it rattle in its frame.
Mrs. Sudek peers out at her. Julie shrinks back, startled by the gauntness of Mrs. Sudek’s features. She didn’t look that bad the last time Julie was here.
“What do you want?” Mrs. Sudek barks.
“Is Claire here?” Julie asks. “I need to speak—”
“No.” Her voice cuts through Julie like a knife. “She doesn’t want to speak with you.”
Julie almost falls apart right there on Mrs. Sudek’s porch. But she squares her shoulders and forces back her sorrow and says, “I thought you said she isn’t here.”
Mrs. Sudek glares at her, eyes glittering.
“Which is it?” Julie asks, fortified by her own boldness. “Is she not here or does she not want to speak with me?”
The air crackles.
Mrs. Sudek’s face slides in and out of the shadows. “She’s not here,” she says. “She’s with Audrey Duchesne. She doesn’t want to see you anymore.”
The door slams shut. Julie slumps against the bricks, taking deep gasping breaths, trying not to cry.
She doesn’t want to see you anymore.
She’s with Audrey Duchesne.
Julie stiffens. Does she really believe Audrey Duchesne is a danger? That she’s anything more than a pretty cheerleader leading a pretty, perfect life?
Her thoughts swirl around, thick and indistinct. She suddenly has the refrain to “Leader of the Pack” stuck in her head.
This isn’t about Claire not wanting her. This is about Claire being in danger. And maybe Lawrence too, if Audrey’s been toying with him. At least Lawrence knows how to shoot a gun.
Julie gets into her car and roars backward down the driveway. Claire’s house stands sentinel against the bruised sky as she drives down the street, the wind rocking against her car. She hopes she can remember the way to Audrey’s house—Claire pointed it out to her when she and Claire drove by it one afternoon, on their way to the beach, and Claire said, “Oh, that’s where Audrey lives.” It’s close by, Julie remembers that.
She drives for five minutes, leaning close over the steering wheel. Her music slams around inside her head, and she hits EJECT on the tape player, although the silence isn’t any better. It feels pounding and hollow, like the inside of a cave.
She turns down a side street, thinking the arch of trees looks familiar.
And then she sees it. Audrey’s house.
She drives past it, slowing to take in the whole thing. It’s a nice house, new, built of white brick, with a big porch and a basketball hoop in the driveway. The most normal house in the world.
She parks in front of the neighbors’ house, behind an ugly tan pickup. She climbs out and closes the door and leans against the car hood, squinting across at Audrey’s perfectly mown lawn. It’s the brilliant green of Astroturf, striking against the crackling yellow grass of the neighbors.
Julie takes a deep breath and walks away from her car. She clutches her keys tight in one hand, the metal edges digging into her palm. The damp wind whips her hair into her eyes.
She hopes there’s nothing here—that nothing is wrong with Audrey, period, that she’s normal. But she doesn’t think she is.
Julie steps onto the porch. Brilliant pink roses grow along the railing, and the cloying scent of them makes her dizzy. She takes a deep breath and presses her thumb against the doorbell.
No one answers.
Julie waits, listening to the howling of the wind. She rings the doorbell three more times. Nothing. Not even the sound of footsteps inside.
She knows she ought to leave. Just walk back down the sidewalk and climb into her car and drive away. Go to her dad, tell him what Aldraa said, let the adults deal with it. She can even feel something tugging at her, drawing her away from the house. A sort of magnetic field.
She turns around and goes down the first step. The pecan tree in the front yard shimmers from the wind.
But Julie wants answers. She wants more than the sound of a doorbell echoing through an empty house.
She walks around the side of the house, her heart hammering up near her throat. The neighbors’ house is shrouded in overgrown shrubs—she can’t see their windows, so she figures she can’t be seen either. And if anyone does see her, and they ask her why she’s sneaking around—she’ll say she’s on monster-hunting business.
Technically, she is.
Julie finds a gate, part of a big wooden privacy fence, leading into Audrey’s backyard. She undoes the latch, and the wind catches the gate and slams it open, revealing a huge yard lined around the edges with tropical flowers.
She eases in, slides the door shut. Stops. Listens.
All she hears is the wind.
She creeps forward, past a greenhouse built into the side of the house proper. The backyard is lush and well-manicured. A vegetable garden sits in the corner, thick with green beans and tomato plants and squash. The sight of it makes Julie shudder—it’s wrong, almost impossible. Most gardens have gone to seed this late in the summer. It’s too hot for them.
A picture window looks out at the garden. Inside the house, the lights are switched off. A few feet away from the window a wooden door bangs in its frame. There’s no lock. Julie goes up to it and cracks it open: It leads into a garage.
An empty garage.
She nudges the door open a bit farther. The air in the garage is stale and musty, like the doors haven’t been open for a long time. Julie steps inside. No car out front, no cars in here—
No one’s home.
She’s about to turn around and leave, give up, when she notices an arrow of light running along the cement. The lights points to a door.
A door hanging slightly open.
Julie stares at it for a long time. The door leads inside the house.
No one’s home.
She knows she shouldn’t do this. She knows it’s illegal, and not in the way that going seventy-five on the highway is illegal, either. But she’s not going to steal anything. And the door’s hanging open. If she gets caught, she can just say that she came by looking for Claire.
The narrow triangle of light beckons her closer. Her curiosity bubbles up, shot through with a sick sense of dread. She wants to see inside that house the way you want to see what’s going to happen next in a horror movie.
With her toe, Julie pushes the door open.
It swings out, revealing a kitchen decorated in black and white. The light is on, bright and garish.
“Hello?” Julie calls out. “Is anyone home?”
She steps inside. It’s freezing in here, that unnatural cold that can only be produced by an AC. She shuts the door and looks around. The kitchen doesn’t seem as if it’s ever been used. The white tiles gleam in the light; the floor doesn’t even have streaks from a mop.
She moves forward, into the living room. More black and white. “Hello!” she calls out. Her voice almost echoes. “I didn’t mean to just come in.”
Although of course she did. Not that it matters—her words are met with a weird, vibrating silence.
She slips off her shoes before walking onto the carpet; it’s pure white, and she figures she’s already tracked mud into the kitchen. Her feet pad softly as she paces forward, past the couch and the big TV. Yesterday’s newspaper sits folded on the coffee table, angled just so, the way you’d expect to see in a furniture ad.
Carefully, she walks down a hallway. The lights are off, and even though there are no windows, it seems darker than it ought to. She follows it until she comes to the foyer, which doubles as a landing for the stairs.
“Hello?” she says, although she doesn’t expect an answer.
Her heart’s pounding. She knows she ought to go back, but she wants to see Audrey’s bedroom. She wants to find proof that Audrey has always been here, that she swung on the swing set and sang at the talent show and hopped around on the sidelines for the football team. Julie wants proof that Andrey’s not an astronaut.
This is insane. Julie knows that. But she goes up the stairs anyway. They creak beneath her weight. She realizes she’s holding her breath and lets out a long exhalation when she reaches the top landing.
The ceiling is holed with skylights; it’s much brighter than downstairs. Julie closes her eyes, tries to steady her heartbeat.
There. A door at the end of the hallway hangs open, revealing a room painted pink. She can only assume it belongs to Audrey.
She moves toward it. But as she does, she passes another open door. And she sees something out of the corner of her eye and her heart jolts and she looks—
And she screams.
The silence after her scream echoes around the house. Julie stares into the room, unable to move, her thoughts swooning.
Bodies.
There are bodies in there.
Claire, Julie thinks, and that’s enough. She rushes forward, horror calcifying inside her. The bodies lie in a heap at the center of the room, tossed aside like dolls. There’s no blood and no sign of a struggle: In fact, this is a playroom, and all the toys in the room are lined up neatly on shelves, not a single one out of place.
Julie falls to her knees beside the bodies. They’re just a tangle of limbs and hair and clothes, and Julie can’t tell where anyone starts or ends. She hears a strange rhythmic gasping and realizes that it’s her, that she’s hyperventilating. The room starts to spin. She throws out one hand to steady herself and accidentally hits the bodies. One of them tumbles over onto its back. Julie screams and scrabbles backward, hands over feet.
It’s not Claire.
It’s not Audrey either, but an older woman, with hair styled like the mom from an old fifties TV show. Her eyes are open, but it takes Julie a moment, in her panic, to realize there’s something wrong with them—they have no irises, no pupils. They’re just white. Blank.
Trembling, Julie reaches forward and lets two fingers hover over the woman’s neck. She doesn’t want to touch her. But she has to know—
She sets her fingers under the woman’s jawline, feeling for a pulse.
And she snatches her fingers away.
It’s there. The woman’s heart is still beating.
Julie takes a deep breath, tries again. She makes sure she has her fingers arranged properly, so that she doesn’t mistake her own pulse for this woman’s. But no, it’s definitely coming from the woman: a rhythm beating against the thin skin of her neck. Something’s off about it, though. It’s strong and sure but not the steady drumbeat she expects to feel. It’s a vibration, not a beat, a lilting, musical purr that rises and falls like winter winds.
Julie drags her hand away. She stares at the bodies, her horror slowly giving way to confusion. The other two bodies are a man and a boy, and they both look like they’re from the fifties as well, with old-fashioned haircuts and clean-cut looks.
Except for their eyes. Nothing but white.
She checks their pulses too. They each have one. Strong. Sure. Strangely musical.
Julie crawls back over the lush carpet until she bumps up against one of the shelves of toys. Action figures shower down around her, but she hardly notices: Her eyes are still pinned on the family tangled up in the center of the room.
Julie stares at the bodies, terrified, with no idea what to do next.
Audrey never swung on that swing set. Inside this house, with those bodies lying in a pile like dolls—Julie’s sure of it. This is Audrey’s family, isn’t it? A fake family. Pod people for parents.
Julie inches up to standing, running her hands over the shelf, not caring when she knocks over more action figures. The bodies don’t move at all. Julie isn’t sure she even sees their chests rising and falling.
Aldraa’s voice echoes inside her head: Our town is in danger. Stop the astronaut.
Julie takes a deep breath. She has to find Claire. Lawrence too.
Then she runs down the stairs, through the living room, out of the house.