Chapter 24

Saoirse sees the words escaping Emmit’s mouth as if in a cartoon speech bubble, but it takes a moment to register their implications. She shakes her head, throwing his hand off her face in the process, and blinks up at him, then at the yellow house, which glows in the moonlight, recalling Stacy’s words about the noxious vapor in the basement of Lovecraft’s story.

“We’re going ... inside this house?” she asks. “Without a key?”

Emmit laughs, shoots a quick look at the vanishing tour group, and pulls her up the first couple of concrete stairs. “We are. Come on, it’ll be fun.”

Saoirse casts a wild look at the darkened windows. “How do you know someone doesn’t live here?”

But Emmit is already leading her across the scrubby crabgrass. “For one thing, look at this yard.” His voice eases the sharp sting of her panic. “And for another, friends of mine knocked on the door last Halloween and said that no one answered.”

“Those don’t strike me as nearly strong enough reasons,” Saoirse says, but they’re circling the back of the house toward a storm door dotted with black mold and rusted hinges. The windows along the back of the house are as dark as the street-facing ones. Saoirse wants to protest more earnestly, but there hasn’t been a single sign of life anywhere on the property. She follows Emmit to the storm door and watches as he pushes it open to try the knob of the heavier wooden door behind it.

“Locked,” Emmit says and turns toward the tree line. His eyes scan the yard, squinting as he looks for something in the swirling mist. Even tipsy as she is, all fuzzy-headed and floaty, Saoirse has a bad feeling about this. It’s not the thought of getting caught that bothers her; it’s that they will find a way in, that they’ll actually have to venture inside. Whatever drug she took is probably making her paranoid, but she doesn’t want to imagine what might be waiting for them inside this house, doesn’t want to see what lies, forgotten but no less hungry, in the shadow-saturated corridors of the basement. Her heart pounds like a machine on the brink of collapse, and this exacerbates her paranoia and fear.

The crash against the door is so loud, Saoirse lets out a little yelp. She turns to find Emmit grinning, a large rock in his hands, the rusted knob dangling from its socket and the door hanging open several inches.

“Whoa,” Saoirse says, but something inside her shifts, as if the drug has only now fully integrated into her system. Her fear lessens, and her paranoia is ethereal, like a bird whose call she can hear from the surrounding trees but cannot see.

What would she be doing right now if she wasn’t here with Emmit? Streaming endless, mindless episodes of shows she didn’t care about, splayed across the couch and pretending to job hunt, pretending to care about her future? Pretending she isn’t still damaged or that she’s healed from the trauma of what her life has become? That she isn’t far more affected by what Jonathan did to her than she cares to admit? Instead, she’s on this adventure, experiencing something, forging a connection. Engaging with life. Engaging with another human. Visualizing a future for herself that doesn’t consist of depression and guilt and grief and regret. Of illness and of conversations in her mind with her dead, relentless husband.

Emmit grips her hand, bringing Saoirse back to the present. Together, they step over the threshold. They stand for a moment, listening for sounds that mean they’re not alone in the house, but nothing comes.

“Come on,” Emmit whispers, and she follows him down a long hallway. At the end, they come to a large dusty room, empty of everything but a wide brick fireplace and a set of built-in bookshelves. “Abandoned,” he says excitedly. “I knew it. I knew it! ”

“But why is it abandoned?” Saoirse asks. “It’s a nice house.” She squints at him. His excitement seems greater than it should be, like breaking in wasn’t a spur-of-the-moment decision on a spur-of-the-moment ghost tour, but like he’s been hoping to get inside this house for a long, long time.

“I have my theories. Let’s keep looking around.”

They traipse in and out of rooms on the ground floor: a kitchen, a bathroom, several bedrooms, and what appears to have been a parlor, though, without furniture, it’s hard to tell for certain. Despite the perpetual emptiness of the rooms, muslin curtains—yellowed to the point where they match the house’s exterior—still hang from all the windows. The curtains let gauzy moonlight into the rooms, or perhaps it’s the orangey glow from nearby streetlamps. A trip to the second floor reveals more rooms with curtains but no furniture. In a third-floor room at the back of the house, Emmit stops short in the doorway with a gasp.

“What?” Saoirse says, trying to see around him. “What is it?”

He moves to the side, revealing a cobweb-draped rocking chair. It’s child sized. Creepy. Saoirse expects it to move on its own in a nonexistent breeze at any moment. “The previous owners must have forgotten it,” she says, trying to downplay the wrongness of this lone piece of furniture in an otherwise empty house.

“Then sit in it,” Emmit says.

“Huh?”

Emmit turns to her in the doorway. “Sit in it. I dare you.”

His expression is mischievous, playful. A chill shoots up her back at the thought of sitting in a chair that’d be at home in a film about a possessed doll, but Saoirse forces herself to shrug and crosses the room. The floorboards creak beneath her feet as if she’s making her way through a haunted house ... the kind where you pay money for admission and the sound effects are drowned out only by the teenagers’ screams.

When she reaches the chair, she brushes a layer of dust from one arm and turns back to Emmit. “Just an old abandoned chair,” she assures him. Or is she assuring herself? Because ... why does the room suddenly feel as if it’s holding its breath? Saoirse’s heart stutters, and she looks to her right. An open closet yawns from the darkness. Please be empty, Saoirse thinks, but the closet cuts into the wall beyond the opening, and it’s impossible to see into its farthest recesses.

“Did you hear something?” Emmit whispers.

Saoirse turns halfway in his direction, then decides she doesn’t want to turn her back on the closet. “I don’t think so,” she whispers back. But isn’t there a noise? Just quiet enough to where she can’t decide if it’s real or if her fear is playing tricks on her. A scratching from the back of the closet. Like claws on a paint-peeled wall. Like something creeping closer to the closet’s doorframe, ready to peer around it, to confront her, to show its face to the sickly yellow glow of the moon through the muslin-cloaked windows.

Saoirse shakes her head, clearing the fear as if it’s cobwebs, half wishing she hadn’t taken the capsule Emmit had given her, half-relieved that she had.

“Well?” Emmit asks. “Are you going to sit?”

“Yes,” she hisses. This is so dumb. Why is he daring her to do this, anyway? But perhaps the better question is: Why is she scared? It’s just an empty house on the same street she lives on. There’s nothing in the closet—or the basement, for that matter. The biggest threat in their immediate future is neighbors noting the busted door and calling the police, not some monstrous creature secreting a fungus ooze. Saoirse brushes several cobwebs from the seat, turns, and plops down in the chair.

“See,” she says smugly to Emmit. “The tour guide had it wrong, and so did Lovecraft. There’s nothing cursed about this pla—”

The unearthly chittering starts from behind her before she can finish her sentence, filling her ears within the space of one dangerously painful heartbeat. Saoirse bolts from the chair with a strangled cry but stumbles over the left runner. She catches sight of Emmit, sees that his face is a mask of shock and terror. But before she can lunge in his direction, the creature—no, creatures, for there are half a dozen of them—are all around her: dark, grotesque shapes that scrabble like monstrous hybrids of miniature humans and bulbous, hulking-shouldered things, as if creatures meant for the sea had severed previously fused appendages and have now waddled from the black depths across pale, uneven mounds of sand. Saoirse’s vision goes dark around the edges. The sound of Emmit yelling is very far away. Squeezing her eyes shut, Saoirse drops to her knees on the gritty, cobweb-dusted floor.