Chapter Nineteen

NINETEEN

The next morning (or, rather, early afternoon), Katherine sat groggily at the kitchen table, nursing her third cup of tea while I washed dishes. That is, I did something akin to washing dishes. I wasn’t putting a lot of thought or effort into it, but I was rubbing a sponge over a dish and that was in the ballpark, anyway.

“I didn’t think I had that much to drink,” Katherine said. “I thought I only had two glasses. Maybe three. But I feel like shit.”

I wondered if I ought to have slipped her only one DoZZZe-Rite tablet, given the whiskey and all. Still, it was nice to have a bit of time when Katherine wasn’t dragging me along on her little investigation. More freedom to deal with the pranksters without any pesky but valid questions. I said nothing.

I had actually drifted off to sleep for a moment or two the night before, despite the screaming. I fell into a dream almost immediately, a terrible dream that Master Vale had found Katherine and had her pinned to the floor, gnarled hand planted firmly on her chest, pressing her down. His rotted teeth bore down on her in a manic grin. When she parted her lips to scream, he hissed a stream of flies into her open mouth and she started gagging. That thing was happening to me where I couldn’t move or scream, like I was floating in a vat of honey. I heard a little croak escape my mouth and Master Vale’s oozing head snapped in my direction, and all of a sudden it was Hal’s face, broken and wrong. He howled at me and Katherine howled through the flies and her head was split in two like Fredricka’s and finally, finally, I howled back and jerked into consciousness and was awake, likely forever.

No matter. I had chores to do.

This morning had brought the arrival of another one of Angelica’s friends—a boy named either Thomas or Tobias. I could never remember. He was a lanky lad with a mess of dark hair and a dirty face cut through with vertical lines from his tears. One of his arms had been removed in a very haphazard and imprecise manner. His remaining arm could still point, though. I spotted him on the second-floor landing while cleaning the blood a little lower down the stairwell than I would have liked. I expected only one more of Angelica’s friends—I had completely forgotten that one’s name—to show up this month, and we would have a real full house. That would be a touch overwhelming, but it wasn’t anything I hadn’t dealt with before.

“Have you been washing that one dish this whole time?” Katherine asked, finally rising far enough out of her funk to be perceptive. I looked down. Why, yes, I had been. There wasn’t even soap on the sponge. But the tap was running, and it wasn’t blood coming out. Small favors.

“No,” I lied. I dried off the probably not-clean dish, and went to put it back in the cabinet. Inside the cabinet was a pile of dirt. Wonderful. I set the dish next to the dirt. I would deal with that later.

Katherine rubbed her forehead, staring down into her half-empty teacup. “There’s not enough caffeine in this shit,” she said.

This morning, the tea bags had been outside on the rocking chairs. At least I had known to look for them.

“You don’t have an aspirin, do you?” Katherine asked. “I checked the medicine cabinet upstairs but there was just a bunch of spoons in there. Why do you keep spoons in there, by the way?”

Goddamnit, Fredricka.

“I think I have some in the master bathroom,” I said. I darted down the hallway, hoping to avoid both her question and the chance of her following me upstairs. There was actually only about a twenty percent chance that the aspirin was still in the bathroom instead of, say, crammed behind the hot water heater, and my search would go better without Katherine hovering behind me, that concerned expression planted on her face. With all my remaining mental faculties dedicated to figuring out where the hell the aspirin might be, I turned towards the stairs without looking where I was going. I hadn’t even realized I’d walked straight into Elias until I heard the jet-engine noise and felt the cold blackness overtake me.

I was in time, however, to watch his fangs sink into my forearm.

“Jesus Christ,”I shouted before I could stop myself. Saying things out loud again. I clamped a hand over my mouth, as if that would take the words back from the air.

Elias’ biting me produced an effect slightly different from whenever any of the other pranksters touched me. I didn’t see the world through his eyes like with Fredricka or feel what it felt like when he died like with the other little pranksters but instead just sank into a pit of blackness and anger. I imagine that was still what it was like when he died, but it was a bit trickier to grasp. It also made it very difficult to focus. I tried to tug my arm from his mouth, but he had latched on tight, and his fangs sank deeper into my skin with each twist of my forearm. In between flickers of angry blackness, I could see blood pooling between his teeth, dripping onto the floor. Shit shit shit.

“Mom, what happened?” Katherine was running down the hall towards me.

Shit.

Shit.

Shit.

“Katherine—no.” My voice sounded too panicked to claim nothing had happened. The blackness was still flickering in and out. I shook my head, trying to stay rooted in the here and now. “Nothing happened. Don’t worry.”

But Katherine was already around the corner.

Elias was still latched onto my arm. I was half in the now and half in the then, trying with all my might to focus on Elias and his fangs while remnants of an inky void and directionless rage danced behind my eyes.

“What is— Holy shit, Mom,” Katherine said, her eyes wide.

“Katherine,” I said, blinking away the blackness, “I can explain. You don’t need to be afraid. I didn’t want you to know. But it’s okay.” I looked down at Elias, who was making a noise like fading propellers. “It’s all okay.”

“What the fuck happened to your arm?” Katherine shouted, moving towards me, hands out to grab my arm.

“No,”I said, my free hand outstretched to stop her. The blackness flickered around me, and I was only somewhat sure where Katherine was even standing. “Don’t come any closer. I mean, it’s safe. Don’t worry. Just?.?.?.” I tried to back away, but Elias still had ahold of me and he wasn’t budging, the bastard. Although if he was intent on continuing to bite me, at least he wouldn’t be biting Katherine. Silver lining.

“What do you mean, it’s safe?” Katherine asked, not paying attention to my warnings, confusing as they admittedly were. “You’re bleeding all over the place. How the hell did you cut yourself?” Her eyes darted all around me.

I blinked, looking down at Elias. The burning holes of Elias’ eyes seemed to meet mine, although it was hard to tell for sure, especially when the image was interspersed with strobes of void and rage. “Do you not?.?.?.” I blinked some more. “Do you not see him?”

Katherine looked at me like I was speaking German. “See who, Mom?”

“I?.?.?.” My brain was foggy. None of this made sense. Elias was right there, plain as day, very real and very toothy. He growled at me, his lips curling, revealing more of my blood caught in his gums. Yep, he was there all right. As for me, I was only partially there, still caught in limbo between Elias’ angry past and my confused present.

“Who are you talking about, Mom?” Katherine moved closer. I jumped back the best I could, given the trap my arm was in. My hand was still out flat, practically touching Katherine’s stomach to keep her away.

“It’s nothing,” I said too quickly. “But don’t come closer. Please.” To my left, I could see the other pranksters drifting over. Angelica and Julian and Charles and Constance and Thomas or Tobias or whoever. My eyes darted to them, then back to Katherine. Could she not see them either?

“What are you looking at, Mom?” Katherine asked, her worried gaze following mine. “Did you see someone in here?” She strode past me to peer into the living room, walking right through the line of pranksters. They parted like the seas for her but kept their eyes on me.

She couldn’t see them.

I stared at them in disbelief, almost forgetting about Elias on my arm. Almost.

“Mom, there’s no one here,” Katherine said. “You have to tell me what happened. How did you hurt your arm?” She grabbed at my forearm with both hands, yanking it from Elias’ mouth painfully and bringing me back into the here and now, the dark and the anger a rapidly fading memory. Elias made that noise and bared his fangs again, turning his nightmare maw towards Katherine.

“NO,”I yelled, pushing Katherine out of the way. Elias’ teeth gnashed against air and he howled in rage, finally disappearing into himself and letting us be for the moment.

“What the fuck, Mom?” Katherine snapped, stumbling backwards. “I’m just trying to help you. Did you?.?.?.” She had the look in her eyes that Hal and I must have had when we confronted her about smoking cigarettes as a teenager. “Did you do this to yourself?”

Jesus Christ. This was all out of hand now. “Of course not.”

Katherine had me by the other arm, the one that wasn’t bleeding. “I’m not fucking around, Mom. There’s nothing here that could have cut you. I’ll ask you again.” Her eyes were fire. “Did you do this to yourself?”

“I didn’t?.?.?. I would never .?.?.” But what could I tell her? It wasn’t like telling her about Elias—the little dead boy she couldn’t see who bit me sometimes—would buy me any more sanity credits in her eyes. She had me between a real rock and a hard place here, and my brain was still trying to turn its grinding wheels around everything that was happening, and Christ, my arm stung.

And Christ, my arm was really bleeding now.

“Christ,”I said.

Katherine looked down at my arm. “Oh, fuck,” she said. “Okay, where is your first aid kit?” Not waiting for my answer, she tightened her grip on my arm and dragged me up the stairs, towards the bathroom. “We need to get that cleaned up. Do you have hydrogen peroxide? I don’t know if you’ll need stitches. If you do, I’m taking you to the emergency room right now.”

“This is all?.?.?. silly,” I said, fully aware that it wasn’t particularly silly but unable to think of anything else to say. I watched my blood drip onto the stairs as we ascended. The irony was palpable.

The pranksters stayed at the bottom of the stairs, watching us.

“I’m not joking,” Katherine was saying. “If I think for even one second that you need stitches, I am— Jesus fucking Christ.” Katherine stopped so abruptly in the door of the bathroom that I nearly tripped into her back. She stood at the door, eyes wide, mouth gaping.

In the bathroom sink, piled in a haphazard, glistening stack, was every single knife from the kitchen drawers. Paring knives, butcher knives, carving knives, even a butter knife.

I ran a hand over my forehead. “Goddamnit, Fredricka,” I said.

Katherine turned to face me, her expression a mix of confusion and fear. She pointed at herself. “I’m Katherine,” she said.

“Yes, I know that, dear,” I said, brushing past her to gather up the knives. I hoped that Fredricka hadn’t filled the kitchen drawers with dirt too, or I wouldn’t know where to put these.

Katherine darted in front of me, blocking me from approaching the sink. “Stay the fuck away from those,” she said. She pushed me back to the bathroom door. She looked around, considering what her next move ought to be, before yanking a towel—one of the nice guest ones—off the rack and gathering the knives into it one by one.

“Careful,” I said.

“You’re one to talk,” she snapped. She wrapped the towel around the knives and held it away from her body in a fist. She stared at it for a moment, unsure what to do next, before pushing past me and disappearing into her room. It would seem that the knives would be living in there for the time being, although given the propensity for things to move around in this house, it was unlikely to make much of a difference.

Katherine emerged from her room, knifeless. “Don’t even think about going in there after them,” she said, pointing a finger at me. She started down the stairs. “Are there any knives left in the kitchen?” she called up to me. She didn’t wait for a response.

Meanwhile, I was alone in the bathroom, bleeding all over the floor. I stared down at my arm without really seeing it. What had happened just now?

Fredricka appeared in the doorway, holding a lamp. “Does ma’am require assistance?”

“Jesus, Fredricka,” I said. “What the hell was with the knives?”

Fredricka ignored the question. “Can I help?” she asked.

I sighed. “You can help me get cleaned up, I suppose.”

“Of course, ma’am,” Fredricka said. She dropped the lamp and it shattered.

“What the hell was that?”Katherine yelled from downstairs.

I flinched. “Nothing,” I called out. Fredricka moved past me and started rummaging through the cabinets. Looking for bandages, I hoped.

I heard Katherine walking back down the hallway, towards the stairs. “I heard something crash.”

I turned to Fredricka. “Get out of here,” I hissed.

Fredricka pulled a box of gauze out from under the sink, not looking at me. “Ma’am’s daughter cannot see me.”

She might have been right about that, but I didn’t want to risk it. “I’m serious, Fredricka. Get out of here. You’re going to spook—”

“Who are you talking to?” Katherine said from the doorway.

I turned to look at Katherine, then turned my head behind me to look at Fredricka. She stood by the sink, still and stoic. See? her expression seemed to say.

“I?.?.?.” I wasn’t sure how to explain much of this.

“And what the hell is going on in the kitchen?” Katherine said. “Nothing is where it’s supposed to be. Why the hell are your socks in the utensil drawer? And where the hell are the utensils? Why are you moving things around?”

I closed my eyes, thinking. I hoped that Fredricka could somehow sense the curses I was hurling at her in my mind. “I?.?.?.”

“Fuck. You’re bleeding everywhere.” Katherine finally remembered my arm. She noticed the gauze on the counter. “Oh, good,” she said, pulling me over towards the sink. Fredricka stepped out of her way. Katherine didn’t see her.

“Do you have any hydrogen peroxide?” Katherine asked.

I looked over at Fredricka. Well?

“In the attic,” Fredricka said.

“No,” I said to Katherine. “I don’t think I have any.”

Katherine turned the faucet on full blast. She grabbed my bloodied arm. “This is going to suck,” she said.

And it did.