The Dead House - Dawn Kurtagich Page 0,57

window.

A mattress.

Wet.

Cold.

A camera, always watching.

A new kind of prison.

Merry Christmas to me.

Oh, Dee. Have you been lonely without me? I know, I missed you too. So much. While you were gone, a lot happened, but I made sure to write it down—as much of it as I could anyway. Here, see? The pages are for you.

Dee? Are you here?

I really am a ghost now, aren’t I?

Later

I’m still getting used to sleeping. Naida tells me it’s been a month and ten days since they put me back in Claydon—a month and ten days of sleeping—and I still feel like I’m vanishing every single time.

The dreams. The nightmares. The possibility that, this time, I’ll enter the Dead House. I can’t control it. These things make it impossible to lie down. The dank air, the warped steps, and the molding wallpapers have crept into my bedcovers. With every step I take towards the mattress, I hear the creak of swollen, rotten floorboards, swelling and shrinking with moisture and the air I breathe is stale and musty and the sheet under my back is the mirrored wall and the thing I’m staring at when I close my eyes is her.

The dead girl, only not grinning this time, but broken and torn like she was when, I now realize, I saw her in the Dead House mirror wall. When, for the briefest moment, I thought she was my reflection. Or was that Carly? I don’t know.

And I hear those nails snapping as she drags her torso along, her blown pupil blaring at me like a foghorn, if such things are possible. If silence can be so loud.

I can smell her rank breath in my mouth.

She couldn’t be Carly.

Dee, I wish you could hold me.

Don’t touch me.

68

34 days until the incident

Diary of Kaitlyn Johnson

Thursday, 30 December 2004, 3:45 am

Attic

I felt it, Dee—that thing people write about. That thing the girls laugh over in their rooms at night when I’m out in the cold looking in. That thing Carly’s teacher was talking about when they read Wuthering Heights last year. The burn—it really is a burn, Dee, somewhere in the solar plexus. Warm. Intolerable.

Can it be that love really does exist? Is it love? This fire in my stomach when he leaned over and touched my cheek? When he said, “You just vanished. I had no idea where you were until Naida came to tell me.” His eyes as they bored into mine, the desperate pressure of his hand on my face. “You were gone.”

His stupid bowler hat and the darkness in his eyes. The bend of his jaw, the line of his yielding lips as he leaned closer and—oh, God—kissed me. Is this love?

Please don’t think I’m stupid for crying right now, Dee, because I can’t help myself. I emailed him, and then went to the chapel after midnight, and he was there, and it was like seeing life again.

He came in with wide, urgent eyes, looking all around for me. I watched him for a moment as he strode down the aisle and checked the confessional. I was in the rafters, so I already felt as if I was flying. I was hiding—making sure that I wouldn’t be seen, like Naida said.

Then, because I had to see his face, I called to him. He was with me in a flash, hand on my cheek, hurting.

We were superior creatures, up there in the darkness while everyone else slept, so when he put his hand on mine, I felt our purposes—our existences—united in that moment. That contact.

His voice: “You were gone.”

He said the words and then he looked at me, and that fire began as soon as I saw his eyes flicker down my body. In that moment, when I knew he was looking at me in the way that men look at women and the fire lights them from inside, I became Kaitlyn Johnson. I was nothing before he noticed me, and everything is different now.

His mouth on mine, the texture of his tongue, the taste of him, his warmth in a world of such coldness—all of it felt like divinity. I wasn’t a ghost in that moment. I wasn’t nothing.

My life is different forever, Dee. I think I love him, and it doesn’t scare me. He is connected to me in this horrible life; he shares my every night, which I refuse to give up, because it means accepting that Carly is gone, as I almost did in Hell.

And maybe, just maybe, he is the