Phobic (27 page)

I can’t process what a cute moment this is; how easily he lifted me or how good it feels being held so near to him. Ada won’t get out of my head.

“All this stuff that’s been happening—I think it’s her way of communicating with me. She’s pleading for my help.” I continue skimming the walls when Todd reaches the landing. He crosses into my bedroom and lowers me to the floor.

“My mom said, ‘The walls know.’ What do the walls know?”

Todd turns his back to me, one hand to his forehead. I can practically hear the cogs ticking, the struggle between the logical side of his brain that he trusts, and the total limb-going-out-on that I’m asking of him. I hope the side of him that believed me after I sliced my hand open will win out.

“I don’t know what you’re seeing, but you can’t let it control you like this,” he says, almost like a lecture. “I know you think these people are real, but it’s over. They lived. They died, just like the other 107 billion people who’ve ever lived on the planet. Well, except for those of us who are still alive, but that’s irrelevant. What happened, happened. Let it go, Piper. Live your life.”

I sag on the bedpost for support, one hand at my side. “You don’t understand. I think my house is in some kind of time warp.”

Todd faces me again and folds his arms as if to say,
I’ve just gotta hear this one
.

I go on. “Like for the rest of us time is an ongoing line, right? One thing happens, then another and another. But in my house it’s like a bad horror movie that keeps playing over and over, no matter who else is there or what else is going on, their story keeps rolling.”

“Even if that was true, it has nothing to do with you.”

“Nothing to do with me?” I lift my shirt and show him the bandage. “Jordan axed my house, Todd. And it went into
me
.”

He mulls this over for a few seconds. But the smooth line of his brow gives me hope. It’s not riddled with disbelief. “Like with your hand?”

“Don’t you remember? You fell through the floor, into my basement! You just watched my hand heal itself!”

“Come on, let’s…” He saunters away, toward my dresser. “Clothes. We just need to get a few…”

The air turns chill in an instant, and all the doorknobs along the landing begin rattling. I stare at them and swallow. “Todd?”

He’s still at my dresser. “Dumb thing,” he says, jerking at the handles. The drawer won’t budge.

Growling sounds emerge from the direction of the bathroom, and an eerie, otherworldly feeling sweeps over me, pricking the hairs at my arms and neck. More than ever I don’t want to be in this freak show of a house. Todd whirls around, slapping the dresser with his hands, one on either side as if bracing himself.

In perfect synch, the vent in the room clanks as if trying to break loose, the growls deepen to snarls, and the faucet in the bathroom turns on of its own accord. Blood drips from sudden tears in the wallpaper. The drawer shoots out, knocking Todd in the stomach and sending him flying across my room.

“Todd!” I scream. I break toward him and take his hand as he pushes himself up from the floor.

“What do the walls know?” I yell, rotating, staring up at the cherubs painted on my ceiling. “Tell me!”

I’m ready to get Jordan’s axe and start hacking through walls, looking for whatever it is Mom must have hidden in them. That’s got to be what this is about. But I know I can’t.

What could Mom have hidden? I get a flash of a memory, Mom folding papers. Tucking them into manila envelopes. Tucking them…while arguing with Joel.

Again the memory that popped up before surfaces. More of it, this time.

“My boy,” Mom said as she sat on the floor, patting Joel’s arm as he hovered over her. “My blue-eyed boy.” Joel looked angry. Young, fifteen, a spike in his lip, black mesh sleeves riding along his arms under a Skinny Puppy T-shirt. Joel kicked my dollhouse, knocking the roof over. It was on its side, exposing the interior of the house. The way it always was when I’d played with it.

“I’m not your little boy anymore, Mom. I’m not stupid. I saw it. Why won’t you believe me?”

“Just because you think you saw something—” She tucked another piece of paper into the manila envelope at her side. The one on her lap she inserted
in
the dollhouse.
My
dollhouse.

“Why are you covering for him?” Joel yelled. “You’re always changing the subject. You can’t ever give me a straight answer.”

Mom paused, looking directly at Joel before placing another piece of paper in the dollhouse.
I wonder now why I’ve never seen these papers before. I played with it a lot since this happened. Have I missed something?

Mom’s eyes drifted off as if she saw something on the rug Joel didn’t. “Just because I have answers doesn’t mean you need them on you.”

After a pause, she finished fiddling with the papers on her lap, set the lid back on my dollhouse, and tossed the manila envelope into the fire flickering in the open fireplace across from my bed. Joel stood, watching flames curl over the papers, tucking them in their grasp, until he finally stormed out.

I don’t know what it is Joel saw, what question he’d been demanding answers of my mom for, but at this point that’s irrelevant. Blood is still oozing from the walls, pooling along the baseboards. This has got to stop. I search for something heavy enough to break apart the dollhouse’s walls, and unlike with my real house, this time I’m positive this won’t affect me.

I reach over to grab the heavy, ornamental brass candleholder standing beside the fireplace I no longer use. I try to lift it, but the pressure screams at my stitches.

“Help me!” I tell Todd. A loud ratcheting noise comes from behind the dollhouse in the corner, almost like Ada doesn’t want me to do what I’m about to. Still kneeling, Todd lifts it with strain, and I point.

“The dollhouse. Break it apart.”

“What?”

“Just do it!”

Todd swings. With a clatter, the antique dollhouse crumples to pieces, and with that, my room goes back to normal. The blood disappears; the wallpaper heals itself. The noises cease. Hands on his knees, Todd’s eyes snatch mine with a frightening intensity.

For a few seconds my ticking pulse is my only friend, until he finally speaks.

“Now I know you didn’t just make
that
happen.”

I droop to the floor beside him and press my quivering back against the wall. I hug my knees and rock back and forth. “Thank you,” I say with relief and a giant sigh, though I’m shaking like a flame. “Thank you for believing me.”

“So.” He handles two of the pink walls, which are in one piece. “Wanna tell me why you had me obliterate an antique?”

This dollhouse was created with care, with principle and focus to make sure every portion mirrored what life would be like in miniature. Each piece is exact, down to the painted flowers on the wallpaper, the rungs on the wooden chairs and the banisters, the tiny, hand-stitched clothing and draperies. These pieces were created with care because they were intended to be treated with it.

And now they scatter from the broken walls of an antique piece of art. The intricate baby cradle lies on its side. The tiny dishes chink in pieces like bits of shattered teeth. I played with these beautiful pieces as a child, and now I move with caution, super aware of how huge my fingers are compared to the tiny mirror. I push a drawer in its dresser, and place the staring doll back in her armchair.

Unwanted stings prick at my eyes, and I stare at the wrecked fragments of make-believe.

Shaking, I push away from him and lean over to look down into the crumbled, scattered pieces. I hope I was right. That I didn’t have him shatter my favorite thing about my
real
house. Sure enough, sticking up through one of the broken walls is a piece of paper. Chills skitter across my skin as if the temperature drops around only me. I look up to the cherubs. It could just be me, but they almost seem to be sneering.

“What—how did you know that was in there?” Todd asks, his eyes wide with surprise.

“I kept remembering an argument Mom and Joel had. Mom was putting these in here. She—maybe she knew I’d need them or something.” I try to ignore the bite of how she insisted Joel didn’t need the burden of these answers, but she apparently had no qualms whatsoever giving them to me.

“Piper.” Todd’s voice is low and lulling. “Look.”

More papers are stuffed in, poking out along the edges of the broken walls. I pry open the already-cracked base of the miniature house. Lying amid the broken pieces is a small box. The edges are browning with age, but two words peek through the layer of dust.

For Piper.

“T
odd!”

Knowing I can barely move, Todd rears back and uses his boot heel to crush through the remainder of the base. I elbow him aside and snatch for the small box, peering down on my Sharpie-written name. Only it’s not written on a box after all. It’s a book, wrapped in brown paper.

For Piper.

I don’t recognize the little swoops on the
F
or the
Ps
. I try to grasp who wrote my name there. And why they would hide it if it’s clearly for me.

“Do you think—Pipes, what if it’s from your mom?”

My arms move forward, and I grit against the pain at my side. The book feels rough to the touch. I blow on it and dust flies in a small burst, though some recoils and makes for my lungs. I cough it away, with more jags of pain, and sit on my feet.

My gaze trickles up to meet Todd’s. A smile teases his lips.

“Bust that sucker open,” he says.

My fingers tug at the brittle edges of the paper, pulling it off completely, and I release a breath.

The cover of the journal has splotches missing from the leather as if it’s been scrubbed away, and it’s tied shut with a thin leather strand. Todd sets a stack of newspaper clippings, folded to fit, on top of the book. Swallowing back the gallon of saliva building in my mouth, I rifle through them.

Surely she left me something. A letter, maybe, apologizing or explaining her actions. Or maybe just listing her love and dreams for me. After all, that’s the kind of thing parents should do when they know they’re headed to the slammer.

But it’s only newspaper clippings. Brittle and crinkly like wax paper, I unfold the first one as Todd pulls at the leather tie to open the journal.

“Hey,” Todd says, his hand on my knee. His touch courses through like an injection of heat, straight to my chest.

I scuff a hand under my nose. “I should know better than to expect some happy surprise to come from all of this,” I say, remembering the inhuman glaze of her eyes. “Who’s to say it’s from her? I mean, sure the writing on the paper was super feminine. But still, anyone could have written my name on that book.”

The fine print is in perfect rectangles surrounding the black and white picture of a hotel with a horse-drawn carriage parked out front. And then I look at the headlines on the newspaper. The date is October 1875.

Another Life Lost: Spare-Tooth Bandit Continues to Evade Authority

Elizabeth Leland’s body was found in an alleyway near Wasatch and Columnar Road early Saturday morning, hidden in a throng of mist and blood. The Bandit left his mark with his usual careless drudgery, this time devoiding his victim of her windpipe. Her belly was lacerated, as the bandit seemed to have need of her stomach as well.

We urge everyone to remain in their homes. Venture when necessary, but always in numbers. And we beseech persons with any information on the Bandit to please step forward so these atrocities may be stopped.

The black marks on the page muddle and garble the longer I stare. No, not anyone could have left these for me to find. It
had
to be my mother. I wonder if
she’d
seen Ada before she killed that man. The Spare-Tooth Bandit is Garrett—it has to be. But I still don’t know why he did this.

And Ada, you knew what was going on. Why didn’t you go to the police?

I rifle through the other papers, but it’s more of the same. Panic at the latest victims, people missing their ears, their tongues, leaving police no bread crumbs to follow.

“This is crazy-good stuff,” Todd mutters, and the words come as a slap until I realize he’s referring to the journal in his lap. I shake off the gore I keep picturing in my head.

“Swap,” I say, handing him the papers. The tea-stained pages of the journal are thicker than the notebook or printer paper I’m used to. They’re stiff like dried papier-mâché and riddled over with drawings, and thoughts in a chicken-scratch scrawl that reeks of ink-dipped quill. People don’t write this way anymore.

I read aloud. “
Discovery of ligament contribution to the mix. It seems Porthos’ hypothesis is correct. When the physiological
—” my tongue stumbles over the word, “—
elements combine, they trap the drinker in time. Never to die. But never to progress further
.”

Never to die, but trapped in time. According to this, I wonder if Garrett used people’s
parts
to make himself, like, eternal somehow. Not just him, but Ada and Thomas, too.