“Keith! Olivia! Kurt! Deirdre!” the monster sang while the tenants clapped their polite, half-assed claps.
Audrey crouched toward the turret and tried to make herself small.
The boys, holding Deirdre, fled from the den and down the hall while the little girl stood still. She was thinner than Audrey had thought, and not blond, after all, but a green-eyed brunette. Her throat was bleeding. She leaned toward Audrey as if to whisper a secret, but shouted instead: “Watch out. You’re it!”
Then she tore from the room and was gone. They were all gone. She couldn’t see them, but she could hear them. Her stomach slopped. The thing inside it gnawed. The man in the three-piece suit played the same C flat-E sharp combo, again and again. Jangling and discordant. Off-key, the tenants sang: “You’re it! You’re it! You’re it!”
The shoddy door creaked open. The opening made a vacuum. Pieces of the door, velvet furniture and children’s toys, collapsed upon themselves. The vacuum sucked the light, too, and stole its own reflection from her eyes. When she looked directly at it, all she saw was black.
The children shrieked. The tenants cheered: “YOU’RE IT! YOU’RE IT! YOU’RE IT!” C flat-E sharp, C flat-E sharp.
The worm got big inside her and shrank her organs small. She hated the sound of these people. She hated the sight of them. She hated the door. She hated her life.
She charged down the hall with her hands outstretched. But her body had grown bulky, and these runts were quick. They weaved just out of reach. She checked the bedrooms; empty. Then swiped under the kitchen table and sink. The walls went red as she lurched. The ceiling, too. Blood or ants or simply paint, she couldn’t tell which.
Running. Panting. So hot in here. High summer. The extra bulk she carried made it hard to breathe.
“Olly-olly Oxen free. It’s safe to come out. Don’t hide from me!” she cried. Her voice was a sweet soprano.
The children screamed. The sound didn’t echo. But maybe they weren’t screaming. Maybe they were laughing. Finally, she spotted them as they darted: Keith, then Olivia holding the glassy-eyed baby, last Kurt. She followed. Out of breath. Down the hall. It got longer. It got darker.
“Keith! Olivia! Kurt! Deirdre!” she cried, her voice more charming than an incantation. She belonged on a stage, beguiling presidents. She belonged on the other side of the door, where her adoring fans waited. If only these little bastards had never been born.
One by one, the children dove underwater. Keith. Kurt. Unmoving bodies. Olivia, holding baby Deirdre, was the last to leap. Audrey clawed the sole of her foot and pulled her back by the ankle. Braced her like a slippery fish, then squeezed her bloody throat. Thumbs in front, fingers in back. A terrible snap.
Clinking their cocktails, the tenants cheered her on in the doorway: “Kill your love. It’s the only way to open the door!”
The work was hard and thankless. The girl fought back. “She can’t breathe!” Loretta declared with glee. The man in the three-piece suit played “Heart and Soul,” off-key and dissonant, while Evvie Waugh beat his knobby cane in time.
She watched as little Ol-lovely’s eyes bulged, then kept watching, to make sure the girl wasn’t just playing dead. When she was done, she looked at her hands, which were wet with blood, then at the mirror over the sink. Clara DeLea grinned back at her, and limp in her arms was a small brunette in tan coveralls, her throat bleeding now, as if it had never stopped. Young Audrey Lucas, dead.
25
The Worm Turns
Another Monday morning at The Breve. Rise and shine!
She slid off the deflated air mattress. The dream departed fast. Acute panic remained. Had she hurt someone? Would she hurt someone?
Her body ached. Her knees, her hips, her shoulders, even the sockets of her eyes hurt. She stretched her hands along the floor. They sank into something wet—the tub! But then, no, it was only the rotten hole in the floor…. Had it grown? It looked about three inches wider in diameter, and its broken wood was jagged now, like teeth.
Zzzzt! Zzzzt!
As she sat up, a laser of searing pain sliced her temporal lobes in two. The separate parts throbbed out of sync like the ventricles of a heart. “Oh,” she cried out, and squeezed her skull as if holding it together. “Oh, jeez.”
She was in 14B, The Breviary, instead of Nebraska. Tears came to her eyes. What was