his head gently, told him I loved him, and said good night, hoping things might be better in the morning. As if it ever works like that. Tomorrow is always a new day, but there’s never any reason to think it will be a better one.
Later, I lay in my own bedroom, shifting from side to side, trying to settle. I couldn’t bear the distance that was growing between us. Even worse was the fact that I had no idea how to stop it from increasing, never mind close it. And lying there in the dark, I also kept remembering the rasping voice Jake had put on, and shivering each time I did.
I want to scare you.
The boy in the floor.
But as unnerving as that had been, for some reason it was his drawing of the butterflies that bothered me more. The garage was padlocked. There was no way Jake could have been in there without my knowledge. And yet I’d looked at the picture over and over, and there was no mistaking them. Somehow, he’d seen them. But how and where?
It was a coincidence, of course; it had to be. Maybe the butterflies were more common than I realized—the ones in the garage must have arrived from somewhere, after all. Obviously, I had tried to talk to Jake about them too. Equally obviously, he had refused to answer me. And so, as I tossed and turned, trying to sleep, I realized the mystery of the butterflies came down to the same thing as the argument itself. I’d just have to hope it would be better in the morning.
Glass smashing.
A man shouting.
My mother screaming.
Wake up, Tom.
Wake up now.
Someone shook my foot.
I jerked awake, soaked with sweat, my heart hammering in my chest. The bedroom was pitch-black and quiet—still the middle of the night. Jake was standing at the bottom of the bed again, a black silhouette against the darkness behind him. I rubbed my face.
“Jake?” I said quietly.
No reply. I couldn’t see his face, but his upper body was moving gently from side to side, swaying on his feet like a metronome. I frowned.
“Are you awake?”
Again, there was no answer. I sat up in bed, wondering what the best thing to do was. If he was sleepwalking, should I wake him gently, or try to steer him, still asleep, back to his room? But then my eyes adapted a little better to the darkness and the silhouette grew clearer. His hair was wrong. It was much longer than it should have been, and it seemed to be splayed out to one side.
And …
Someone was whispering.
But the figure at the end of the bed, still swaying ever so slowly from side to side, was entirely silent. The sound I could hear was coming from somewhere else in the house.
I looked to my left. The open bedroom door gave me a view of the dark hallway. It was empty, but I thought the whispering was coming from somewhere out there.
“Jake—”
But when I looked back, the silhouette at the end of my bed had disappeared and the room was empty.
I rubbed the sleep from my face, then slid across the cold side of the bed and padded quietly out into the hall. The whispering was a little louder out here. While I couldn’t make out any words, it was obvious now that I was hearing two voices: a hushed conversation, with one participant slightly gruffer than the other. Jake was talking to himself again. I moved instinctively toward his room, but then glanced down the stairs and froze where I stood.
My son was at the bottom, sitting by the front door. A soft wedge of streetlight was cutting around the edge of the curtains in my office to the side, staining his tousled hair orange. His legs were curled up underneath him, and his head was against the door, with one hand pressed there beside it. In the other, resting against his leg, were the spare keys I kept on the desk in the office.
I listened.
“I’m not sure,” Jake whispered.
The reply was the gruffer voice I’d heard.
“I’ll look after you, I promise.”
“I’m not sure.”
“Let me in, Jake.”
My son moved his hand toward the mail slot in the door. That was when I noticed that it was being pushed open from the outside. There were fingers there. My heart leaped at the sight of them. Four thin, pale fingers, poking through among the spidery black bristles, holding the mail slot open.