Chapter Thirteen

THIRTEEN

Four Septembers ago, the screaming started in earnest as well. Hal could sleep through a freight train’s barreling through an air horn factory, and he was snoring next to me as if nothing were amiss. I was wide awake, watching moonlight glisten off the blood cascading down our walls. If you looked with enough imagination, you could envision shapes in the shadows on the blood, like you were cloud gazing. I thought I saw an approximation of Edvard Munch’s The Scream on one of the rivulets, but there was a chance I just had screaming on the brain, given the circumstances.

We hadn’t contacted the church or even found Father Cyrus yet, but we would in just a few short days. Until then, there was nothing but the screaming.

Hal gave a snort and rolled over, his shoulder digging into my arm. I felt a stab of irritation at his body for behaving properly. I hadn’t slept in three days.

The nightly moaning and shrieking and screaming and Help us, Margaret were unnerving at first, but after a few nights of all that, it became more tedious than anything else. The lack of sleep certainly wasn’t helping.

“To hell with this,” I said, shoving Hal off me and hoisting myself from the bed. If I was going to be wide awake, I might as well be wide awake downstairs, having tea in the kitchen. The screaming wasn’t any louder or quieter down there, so it didn’t make much of a difference where I was. Interestingly, the screaming was equal in volume throughout the house, which seemed to suggest that it wasn’t coming from one place in particular but rather was emanating from the house itself. Everything was screaming, which also happened to be how I felt about the headache I had been nursing for the past few days.

As I neared the bottom of the stairs, several of the pale children who periodically pointed towards the basement door darted in front of me and I nearly leapt back up the stairs. I sighed, frustrated more at myself than at them. I should have known better than to let those children—pranksters, as I had started calling them—give me such a fright. Even if they didn’t ordinarily run. Or yell. He’s coming. I took a nice, deep breath before I resumed descending the stairs, more cautious this time, in case the pranksters decided to pull anything else.

It was when I reached the first floor and turned towards the kitchen that I saw him. The basement door was open and standing in front of it was what looked like a man, but not quite right. He was impossibly skinny and tall, too tall—even the brittle manner in which he hunched over couldn’t hide his height. He was pale as moonlight, with whips of tangled white hair twisting in clumps around his milky scalp and angry red lesions dotting his skin like craters. His limbs, which looked too long for his body, were skinny and twisted as tree branches. His whole body seemed to be twitching out of time with itself, flickering like an old movie.

I froze, staring at him. I didn’t yet know who this man was, but I knew he was the reason I didn’t like going into the basement.

His head lolled about on his shoulders, his gaze drifting absently around the hallway until finally coming to rest on me. His eyes, milk white and red rimmed, met mine.

Having never encountered a similar situation before, I wasn’t sure what to do. I stood there, motionless. The world blinked into silence, as if someone had hit pause on a CD player. The only noise was the thrumming of my heartbeat in my ears.

The man turned his twitching body towards me. His hunch lessened and he expanded upwards, glaring down at me even from so far away.

Tentatively, I inched my heel backwards.

His legs were stick-thin and unsteady as a marionette’s as he started moving towards me. He jerked and twitched, his skinny arms reaching for nothing. Yes, there was quite a number of sores on his body. I could see that clearly as he moved closer.

Run?I suggested to my legs, but the air hung heavy, dreamlike, and my muscles were reluctant to comply.

The man flew to life, spasming body lurching forward, his too-long limbs twisting into right angles as his narrow frame convulsed across the floor. With his movements, the screaming sprang back into sound and pounded into my ears from all around me. The man’s eyes were wide, and his mouth was open, a handful of rotting teeth bared to me, and I heard his breath rasping as he came at me, at me, at me.

“Shit.”My body finally remembered how to work, and my feet sputtered backwards, carrying me swiftly towards the front door. I wasn’t so foolish as to turn my back on this man, not when I could see his spindly fingers reaching out like talons as he raced towards me. For a wild second, I thought he was going to catch me. I felt the sharp jab of the doorknob in my back. I clutched at it with both hands, madly trying to unlock the door and turn the knob with sweaty fingers as this nightmare of a man closed in on me.

Somehow, I got the door open, screaming as I threw myself outside. I slammed the door in the man’s raging, oozing face and everything went silent. No screams, no rasping breath. Nothing but the sound of my own shaky breathing and the chirping of crickets. I took a few steps back, my eyes darting to a front window. It seemed peaceful inside. But things weren’t always what they seemed.

There was a chance everything would be fine if I went back in, but I wasn’t about to risk it. It was chilly outside and my pajamas were thin, but I was nowhere near being in danger of freezing to death and nothing was coming for me out here. Besides, the night air was pleasant enough, the wet smell of earth thick around me, and the stars shone in the sky, reminding me that there were calm constants everywhere. I wrapped my arms around myself and sank down in one of the rocking chairs (we had just bought them a month earlier), letting my breathing return to normal. Who the hell was that? What did he want? I tested out various answers in my mind, none of them particularly reassuring.

I sat there until the sky turned a pale blue and the birds awoke to resume their mission of crashing against the windows and dropping dead. Soon, Edie came waddling down the driveway, wide hips bouncing and hand waving in an enthusiastic greeting.

“What are you doing up so early?” she chirped before getting a closer look at me. “Oh no, Margaret—what’s wrong?”

I had known Edie for only a few months at this point, and I was just starting to consider her a vague acquaintance instead of a minor annoyance. Hal certainly disliked her, and I had to admit that she stopped by awfully frequently for my taste, but I was out of practice with having friendships. Looking back, I don’t think I’d had a true friend in years. I barely even spoke to Noelle anymore, and she was my own sister.

It’s a funny thing about being alone. You never really notice it when it’s happening. You’re aware that nobody else is there, but you’re so busy with yourself and the little things you do to occupy your time—the painting, the housework, the occasional errand. And then there was Hal, obviously; he counted for something. But as with wading into cold water, you acclimate to the relative solitude until it doesn’t even bother you anymore. You don’t realize that your hands and toes have grown numb until there is a sudden burst of warmth that sends needles through your extremities. That is to say, Edie’s single question was enough to jolt me into the realization that, for the past several years, I’d had no one.

I’m ashamed to admit it, but I started crying.

Edie rushed over to me in a bustle of maternal concern. “Tell me all about it,” she said.

There are some things you just don’t talk about. It’s not that people don’t ask, but rather that they don’t want to know, not if they want to keep seeing you as a sane, rational human being. The things that went on in this house—the blood, the screaming, the pranksters, that tall man with his wooden limbs and needle fingers—nobody wanted to hear about them, let alone go on talking to you afterwards. No, best to keep quiet, to handle these things internally.

“Just let it out, Margaret,” Edie said.

And, much to my surprise, I did.

It felt like a fever breaking, like setting down a heavy object after carrying it for miles and miles, like finally reaching the shore after a long, cold swim. Once I started talking, I couldn’t stop. By the time I finished, Edie was sitting in the rocking chair next to me, staring at me with unblinking eyes.

At this point, Hal believed only about a third of the words that came out of my mouth. He saw the blood, but wondered if it wasn’t some sort of leak. He barely heard the screaming, what with his Olympic-level heavy sleeping. He saw the pranksters only out of the corners of his eyes as they fled from him. There was Elias, but this early on in our time here, I was used to not being believed.

“Wow,” Edie said. “You’ve been dealing with a lot, Margaret.”

“Yes,” I said, feeling my headache lessen for the first time in days. “I suppose I have.” I shook my head, wiping at the remaining tears in my eyes. “It’s not so bad, though. I’ve got it under control.”

Edie looked at me like I’d told her I could jump to the moon. “It’s hell, Margaret. No one deserves to live like this, to go through all that,” she said. “At the very least, nobody deserves to go through it on their own.”

I could feel my tears wanting to start up again, but I swallowed them down. I had grown accustomed to solo trips through hell over the years. It seemed counterintuitive to invite company. “Thank you,” I heard myself say, and I was surprised to find that I meant it.

Edie smiled. She seemed to understand, in a way. She asked me about the pranksters, what I knew about them, what I thought they were on about. I didn’t have a lot of answers.

“Do you think they mean you harm?” Edie asked.

I considered. “The housekeeper—Fredricka—I don’t think she does,” I said. “She just seems like she wants to be helpful. The folks in the upstairs bedrooms are a sight, but I don’t think they want to hurt me. I think they’re just upset. That boy—the one with the face? He hurts, but I think he just doesn’t like his personal space invaded.”

“Who does?”

“The children don’t seem like they want to hurt either,” I said. “I think they’re trying to tell me something.”

“And what about that man,” Edie asked, “the one who chased you?”

“I think he’s a problem,” I said. “I think he wants to hurt.” I thought for a minute. “I wonder if he’s what the children are trying to warn me about.”

Edie looked afraid. “Do you think you’ll move out? You and Hal?”

I felt a stab of affection for her and realized that I might miss her if I left, even with all her visiting and meddling. We might just be friends.

I grinned at her. “They’ll have to drag me out of here in handcuffs,” I said. Edie looked relieved.

Inside, I could hear Hal shuffling around, calling my name. It was unusual for him to wake up and not know where I was. “I’m out here,” I called, “with Edie.” That would keep him inside.

We rocked for a moment in silence. I would need to go inside and start breakfast soon.

“Do you think we should get in touch with a church?” I asked Edie.

Edie shrugged. “Couldn’t hurt.”