Chapter Fourteen

FOURTEEN

The next morning, two more of Angelica’s friends—Charles and Constance—showed up on the landing of the second floor. They were new arrivals, a nice little midmonth gift on the Advent calendar of September. Charles and Constance were twins, or at least looked a lot like twins. They usually showed up together and were remarkably similar, what with their dirty hair cropped around their shoulders, their little tunics made from the same fabric, and their matching stab wounds in their stomachs, arms, and faces. Constance’s mouth was slashed open at one end, creating a garish grin that stretched nearly to her ear. They pointed downward, towards the basement door. Blood slowly leaked from all the various openings in their skin.

I’d just finished scrubbing blood from the walls and the top of the stairway and was in no mood. I shifted the bucket of bloody water I was lugging downstairs to one hand and shook my free hand at them. “Shoo,” I whispered. Behind them, I saw Blythe’s spindly fingers wrapping around the doorframe of her room, her blackened face peering out at me, mouth long and fierce. “You too,” I hissed. She yowled and slammed the door. The twins vanished inside themselves with a sob.

Honestly, everything in the house made such a racket. I hoped the sleeping pills that Katherine didn’t know she had taken had made her a sound sleeper.

In the kitchen, Fredricka had turned the table completely upside down and stacked all the chairs on top of one another. Every cabinet was flung open, and it looked like she had broken a few plates. I set the bucket down with a plop, bloody water spilling out onto the floor. Oh well. What was one more element added to this cleanup, anyway?

“Fredricka,” I called, slowly removing each chair from the stack and placing it in the center of the room, “any chance you can come help me with this?”

Fredricka appeared—or perhaps had always been—to my left, holding a plate in her hand. “Yes, ma’am?”

“This mess.” I gestured. “You made it. Can you help clean it?”

“Of course, ma’am.” Fredricka lifted the plate as if to place it in a cabinet, but was actually standing about ten feet away from the cabinets, so the plate crashed to the ground, shattering and adding to the debris.

There was my headache again, back like clockwork.

“Never mind,” I said.

“I can help,” Fredricka offered.

“You can help in October,” I said. “Right now just try your best not to do anything destructive.”

“Of course, ma’am,” Fredricka said. “I’ll make some tea.” She moved over to the stove, turned all the burners on high, and vanished. Flames leapt into the air.

Jesus Christ. I turned off the burners. I would make tea later. Right now the priority was cleaning, and Fredricka was making me feel like a dog chasing after its own tail. After returning the kitchen table and chairs to their rightful orientation (Christ, that table was heavy), I emptied the bloody water into the sink, watching the swirling mess turn red to pink to clear, and felt thankful that the pipes hadn’t been clogged with any unidentifiable chunks of flesh since that one time a few days ago. Or was it a week ago? Time was getting fuzzy.

I dried out the blood bucket and placed it under the sink, where I discovered that Fredricka had hidden a decent number of my winter sweaters. I left them there; it was best to prioritize which parts of Fredricka’s messes needed rectifying, and sweaters under the sink were a low priority. It was unclear where she had hidden the cleaning supplies that had been under the sink just this morning, but I was sure I’d find them soon.

I picked up the shards of broken dishes off the floor. It looked worse than it was—Fredricka had broken only four or five plates and I still had plenty up in the cabinets, or wherever Fredricka had moved them to. I tossed the shards into the trash, then gathered up the bag to take it outside. Charles and Constance stood in the kitchen doorway, holding hands and blocking my exit.

“Move,” I said.

“He’s down there,” they said. Constance’s mouth was bleeding.

“For the love of God.” Usually, I tried to avoid walking straight through the pranksters. They were just going about their business and I thought the act seemed rude, especially when there were more productive ways of communicating. But it was seven in the morning, and I was already tired of this. Needs must. Devil driving. All that.

I pushed through the twins, passing through their joined hands. They wailed and vanished, but not before I felt my body punctured by stab after stab after stab—invisible blades sinking into my skin in rapid, frenzied succession—and heard the faint sound of screaming that almost could have been confused with laughter. Doing this always set my body off course, and I collapsed to my knees, coughing and gagging up nothing. In my clumsiness, I dropped the trash bag, garbage and ceramic shards spilling out across the floor. “Son of a bitch,” I said to the new mess.

Angelica to my right. “He’s down there.”

So I cleaned up the mess (this one I couldn’t blame on Fredricka), carelessly tossing bits of debris and plates into the bag, now a little torn from the broken edges. Clutching the bag by its tattered top, I exited the house and tossed it into the large can outside.

The yard was absolutely riddled with dead birds.

By the time I got back into the house after cleaning up all the bird carcasses, properly rotting and thoroughly ant infested, my hands stung from a dozen tiny bites and Elias was standing by the door staring.

“Elias, I am in no mood,” I snapped.

“What?” I heard Katherine call from the living room. Goddamnit. She was awake already.

Elias gave a howl and vanished just before Katherine rounded the corner. “Who are you talking to?”

“You,” I said, forcing a smile and trying not to pick at my hands. “How did you sleep, dear?”

“Like a log,” Katherine said. “I actually still feel a little groggy.”

“I’ll make some tea,” I said.

“Jesus, Mom, what happened to your hands?” Katherine grabbed at my hands, inspecting the ant bites.

I snatched my hands back, perhaps a little too roughly. I tried to conjure back a smile. “Oh, don’t worry about it, dear. I was just outside. Gardening. I happened upon a colony of ants. They seem to have gotten the better of me.”

“You were gardening at eight in the morning?” A valid question.

“Well, you know how hot it gets at midday,” I said. It, in fact, was not particularly hot at midday anymore, not in September. “Do you prefer tea or coffee?”

“Do you even have coffee?” Katherine asked. Another valid question.

I stopped in the middle of the kitchen, remembering. “No,” I said.

“I’ll have tea, then,” Katherine said, sitting down at the kitchen table, her gaze wary. “Are you feeling okay, Mom? You seem?.?.?. scattered.”

“Oh, I’m fine, dear,” I said, picking up a rag and scrubbing at the kitchen counter. I thought I still saw a smudge from Julian’s intestines near the sink. “I must just be a little groggy from sleep too.”

“You look tired,” Katherine said. “Like, really tired.”

“Oh, I’m fine,” I said. I went to throw the rag in the trash can but realized that there wasn’t a bag in the can. Also the trash can was gone. Fredricka must have moved it sometime in the past thirty minutes or so. I looked around the room for a bit—where in the hell?—before remembering that I didn’t need to throw the rag away, could just rinse it in the sink. I chuckled at myself.

“Mom?”

Oh, right—Katherine was still there.

“Yes, dear?” I said.

“Tea?” She looked worried. She didn’t seem so much like she wanted tea but rather seemed to want to see if I was capable of making tea without burning the house down. Well, I would have her know that I was very capable of making tea.

Except the tea bags were missing.

Hands on my hips, I stood by the spot near the stove where I usually kept the tea bags. If I were Fredricka, where would I have moved them? The possibilities were limitless. She could have put them in the mailbox for all I knew.

“It’s okay, Mom. I don’t need it,” Katherine said. She stood up from the table. “Listen. I was going to go back into town today and check out some of the hotels we didn’t get to yesterday. Will you be okay here, by yourself?”

I’m not by myself,I almost said out loud. “Well, of course, dear,” I said instead. “But I can always come with you if you’d like.”

“No,” Katherine said quickly. “It really seems like you need to take it easy today. Maybe get some sleep?”

I was a little irked by her insinuation that I was not fit to accompany her on her investigation. It was accurate, but really—who was the mother here? Still, I didn’t particularly want to join her out and about today, especially not after the unusual events of the past two days. And sleep sounded marvelous.

“All right, dear,” I said, and Katherine went upstairs to shower. When she was gone, I surveyed the kitchen for the tea. “Fredricka,” I said, “where the hell did you hide the tea bags?”

“Who are you talking to?” Katherine called from upstairs.

“No one, dear.” Shit shit shit.