by Ike Hamill
“Gus?” his mother called.
He heard her lips smack as she licked frosting from a finger.
“Gus?”
She crossed the room quickly. He couldn’t respond. His eyes were locked on the baby’s eyes. He saw a dim flash of red and realized that its lips were parted in a smile that was hidden by the shadows.
He lost sight of it when his mother knelt down in front of him and grabbed his shoulders.
“Gus!”
She was practically shouting.
His focus finally locked in on her eyes. As soon as they made eye contact, his mother seemed to grasp that he had seen something. She spun him around and pulled him into her tight grip—his back to her chest. She was protecting him and scanning the room. The frosting-covered wooden spoon was up in his face.
“What was it? What did you see?”
Gus’s trembling hand finally obeyed his command and he pointed a finger up at the grate.
As soon as her eyes fell on it, the vents squeaked and slammed shut.
That night, he had slept in her arms while her back was pressed to the wall. He wasn’t sure his mother got any sleep at all.
# # # #
When the sun had come up, Gus woke. He blinked away the blurriness and stared at the vent. His mother had been standing over near the bathroom door with the phone pressed to her ear.
“No,” she had said into the phone. “Yes. Okay. Thanks again, Tammy. I owe you big time.”
Gus stared at the vent, waiting for her to say something.
“You’re sick from school today. I’ll need help,” she had said.
Gus had nodded.
His mother wasn’t much for doing stuff around the house. Jerry did most of the maintenance on the place. He took care of the grounds and patrolled the house to make sure that the windows hadn’t been broken by hail and none of the siding was rotting away. She knew how to use tools though. She kept a drawer full of them. Gus had been responsible for running around to the shed, to find the materials. He had fetched the plywood, powdered plaster, and paint. Then, when Gus had worried about the baby scratching through the wood and plaster, his mother had sent him out to the barn to find a piece of scrap metal.
After they had finished, his mother had sat out on the porch, drinking a glass of water. That was when she had told him what she knew.
“You remember my orange brush?”
“The one you left at work?”
“Yes, but no. I told you that I left it at work when I realized that we weren’t going to find it here.”
At the time, Gus had been too young to guess what she was talking about.
“You see, that baby is a thief. Maybe I shouldn’t be telling you about this—maybe you’re too young—but I happen to think that it’s better if you know what to watch out for, you know?”
Gus had nodded.
“It takes six things from a person. Maybe that’s where your blue sock went. Maybe I did just miss it in the dryer. Either way, we’re not going to take any chances. We’re going to burn your other blue sock. We’ll burn the orange comb that used to go with my brush. If we think of anything else that has gone missing, we’ll burn the mates of those too. It needs things that are part of a set—six of them. We’re not going to let that baby have them.”
“Where does it go?”
“Don’t worry about that. It’s not getting into our room again. Those vents should be all sealed up, I think. If you see any others in the house, you stay away from them. Promise?”
It had been the easiest promise that Gus had ever made.
# # # #
“Gus?” Uncle Auggie asked. “All you have to do is whisper that up to your mom, okay?”
The intensity of their conversation had drawn Kate over. She knelt next to Gus, inserting herself between Auggie and his chair.
“Are you okay, Gus?”
Gus shook his head. “I don’t want to go to the vent. I’m afraid of the baby.”
Kate jerked back. “Baby?” she whispered.
“It lives in the vents,” Gus said. “It has really sharp fingernails.”
Kate was nodding. “In the vents?”
Gus nodded.
“Where is this vent?” Kate asked Auggie.
“Behind that cabinet over there.”
She turned back to Gus. “I’ll keep my eye on it too, Gus. You stay away from it.”
“Kate, come on,” Auggie said as she stood up and went back to the girls.
“Damn it,” Auggie said. “Okay, listen. Jules, you’re going to have to get their attention somehow and I’ll go whisper into the vent.”
Jules nodded. “I have an idea,” he said. “Gus, will you at least help me with that? It’s for your mom.”
Gus thought about it for a minute. He did feel bad that he wasn’t helping to warn his mother. He nodded, but said, “As long as I don’t have to…”
He didn’t have to finish. Jules shook his head. “It’s nothing like that. All you have to do is act upset and make a run for the door. I’ll call after you, but I’m guessing that Deidra and Henry will stop you. Don’t actually go through the door if they don’t get to you in time.”
Once he pictured it in his head, Gus agreed.
Chapter 38 : June
SAM CUPPED HIS HANDS around his eyes and pressed his face to the window.
“What do you see?” June asked quietly.
“Nothing. Just the yard. There’s a lot of snow. It’s almost halfway up the window.”
“It only looks like that because it blows from south to north. It plasters on all those windows. It really isn’t that tall.”
“I know that. The snow is only, maybe, twelve inches total. Maybe thirteen.”
June nodded. Jules had done the same thing when he was feeling insecure. When they were kids, Jules had been the youngest. To find his place in conversations, he would invent facts and then defend them until the end.
“You get a lot of snow at home?”
“Sure, sometimes,” he said.
June sat back in the couch. She had forgotten how comfortable it felt in Trudy’s nook. The slanting ceiling made it the perfect place to hide. She looked at the rolling static on the television. Only Trudy had been good at tuning in the TV. If they thought of something they wanted to watch, she would get up and start banging the side of the TV while she twisted and turned the antenna. Soon enough, they would be watching the show they wanted. Sometimes static would creep in from the bottom, or the picture would bend and distort, but they could always find something to watch to fill the time.
Patterns shifted in the static on the TV. Trudy always called it snow, but the snow in the window didn’t look anything like the static on the TV. It filled the world from bottom to top with unrelenting flakes. On television, the white specks danced and jittered. Sometimes shapes floated by—souls passing in the ether, unaware of the living world on the other side of the glass.
“Aunt June? Did you hear that?”
“Huh?”
She had been lost in the static.
“That voice.”
She blinked and yawned, sitting up straight. Her eyes went to the door. It was the only way in or out. If someone was coming for them, it would be coming through…
She saw a shadow pass by the light leaking under the gap in the door.
“Aunt…”
“Shh!” she hissed, putting up a hand.
The shadow grew darker and more defined, like whatever was out there was going to try to slip under the door.
Sam was curling up into a ball near the window. June rose silently and moved closer to the door. Whatever was coming for him, it had to go through her first.
This had happened once before. The last time, June had been the kid huddled near the window and Trudy had been the strong one. June remembered what Trudy had said.
“This is my nook. Nobody comes in here without my permission. You remember that, June. Even if you see a shadow under this door, you’re safe in h
ere.”
June wondered if that was still true. As a kid, she had believed it completely, but would it still hold true if Trudy wasn’t here?
June made a decision. She turned back to Sam, facing away from the door and the shadow. She spoke in a clear, loud voice.
“Nobody comes in here without Trudy’s permission, Sam, and Trudy would never let anything in here to hurt us. You have nothing to worry about.”
He nodded and then pressed his eyes shut. The boy was curled up in a ball, squeezing his knees tight to his chest.
His eyes flew open at the sound of a voice. This time, June heard it too. She rushed to the side of the couch and pulled it away from the wall.
# # # #
June caught her breath when she saw the grate in the wall. All the time that she had spent in Trudy’s nook when she was a kid, she had never known it was there.
“That’s not precisely true,” she whispered to herself.
“Huh?” Sam asked.
“Nothing,” she said. “It’s just that our Cousin Trudy, she used to talk about the vent that she would listen to. She said that she could hear what was going on down in the dining room. I never thought to wonder exactly where it was. I guess this is what she was talking about.”
“So that’s…”
“Yes. That’s probably our people in the dining room,” June said, guessing at the question.
She squeezed between the couch and the wall, maneuvering her ear as close as she could without tipping the couch up out of the way. She could hear plenty of voices murmuring, but couldn’t make out any individual words. When Sam tried to get closer, she waved him back and put a finger to her lips.
Sam obeyed.
The first thing that she could really make out was directed at her.
“June,” someone whispered. “Remember the nursery. Remember the fire. Remember the questions.”
“Auggie? Is that you? Jules? Who is that?” she called, cupping her hands around her mouth and directing the sound at the vent. “Hello?”
She listened again and heard nothing more than murmurs.
Sam crept closer. This time, she didn’t ward him off.
“I think I hear my mom, but I don’t know what she’s saying,” Sam said. “Mom? Mom!”
They waited. Sam tried calling again.
“I don’t think they can hear us,” June said. “I think they would have answered by now.”
“How can we hear them?” Sam asked.
June shrugged. Her thoughts were still wrapped around what the voice had told her. When they whispered, Auggie and Jules sounded nearly the same. Until she looked at Sam, she didn’t put the pieces together. For a while, when he was still in school, Auggie had worked over in the nursery on the Puddledock Road. As far as June knew, there had never been a fire over there. The voice wasn’t talking about that kind of nursery. They were talking about a nursery for babies, in a hospital. Looking at Sam, she remembered.
“The fire,” she whispered.
“There’s a fire?” he asked. Panic began to light up his eyes again.
“No,” she said, shaking her head quickly. “Before. Years ago. It’s not important now.”
The voice seemed to think it was important though. The voice talked about questions. It took June another minute to decipher that warning. June shifted her position so she was sitting against the side of the couch. Sam looked less frightened now—that was good. She could only hope that Gus was coping okay and that people were looking out for him.
“Who is it you look like, Sam? I can’t remember.”
“Huh?”
“Photos. You look like your dad’s grandfather, right? Am I remembering that correctly?”
“I guess,” he said. As he thought about it, he looked away and clenched and unclenched his hand. She had seen someone else do that same thing—who was it? Maybe it was Henry, or maybe it was someone she had seen in a movie or something.
“Oh, Uncle Lance. That’s what Mom says. There’s a picture of my dad and Uncle Lance standing near an old truck near a manure pile. Mom says I look just like Lance in that.”
“That’s right,” June said. Resemblance wasn’t definitive though. Even if it was, what would that mean? Henry and Deidra had always been perfect parents to Sam. They had loved him and cared for him as tenderly as any parents that June had ever seen. That other woman had been crazy. Her wild accusations after the fire in the hospital had been insane, and she had proven herself unfit to raise a child, regardless. Some of that madness was excusable—the woman had just lost her baby.
June glanced at Sam and wondered. The question of his parentage hadn’t come up in years. Why was the voice trying to make her think of it now?
Sam’s head was tilted, like he was listening to something.
The murmur was louder, but June still couldn’t make out any more distinct voices.
Sam’s eyes went wide.
“Is that true?” he asked her.
“What?” she asked, knitting her eyebrows in confusion.
“You think I’m adopted?”
“Who told you that?”
“The whispers,” Sam said, pointing at the grate.
# # # #
“They’re liars, Sam,” June said, pushing the couch back against the wall. “Don’t listen.”
“No,” Sam said, from behind her. “They said that you want to hurt me because I’m adopted.”
“Sam,” she said, turning. June never would have anticipated how upset he was. Sam had moved to the door. With one more glance over his shoulder, she was stunned by the hurt she saw in his eyes. Sam turned the knob.
“No!” June screamed.
Sam slipped through the door. It slammed shut behind him.
“Fuck,” June whispered as she ran after him.
Throwing open the door, her heart was already falling.
“Fuck,” she said. June saw exactly what she had expected—the stairs went down. There was no sign of Sam and only one thing she could do.
She descended.
After rounding the landing and rushing down the second half of the stairway, she plowed through the door at the bottom. It took a moment for her to orient herself. June was standing in the lower, back hallway. One direction would lead to the first floor of the wing. The other way would take her to the maze of sheds that led out to the barn.
“Sam?” she called.
The sound of retreating footsteps was the only answer. June closed her eyes and tilted her head, trying to decide where the sound was coming from. After a moment, she ran off towards the wing, convincing herself that Sam would have chosen that same direction. It was too cold and dark to think about running around in the sheds.
A few steps later, June knew she was right. She rounded the corner and caught the smell of smoke. There had only been one fire in the house that June knew of, and she was headed in that direction.
Chapter 39 : Auggie
AUGGIE STOOD UP AFTER Gus began moving towards the head of the table. The boy was doing a good job of it. He started out slowly, gathering everyone’s attention as he moved with determination. Jules moved past Auggie and didn’t call until he was beyond the vent.
“Gus? Where are you going?”
All eyes were on the drama. Gus looked distraught and resolved. He was going to try to leave the prison of the dining room to go look for his mom.
While that unfolded, Auggie crouched near the cabinet that blocked the vent. He prayed that June was listening.
“June,” he whispered. “Remember the nursery. Remember the fire. Remember the questions.”
He stood up just as Deidra flashed a glance his direction. Henry had stopped Gus. Deidra and Henry gathered him over to a chair next to Penny. Jules joined the three and they all told Gus that his job was to stay strong for his mother. Deidra had the patience of a saint. Auggie knew that he would already be showing frustration if he had been forced to explain the same thing to Gus multiple times.
Allison scared th
e life out of Auggie when she stood up and pointed.
“Uncle Travis! What are you doing?”
The old man cackled as he turned and saw her accusing finger pointing his direction. He had used the distraction as well. Auggie’s jaw fell open when he realized that there was a second vent in the room. This one was down near GUT’s seat, and the old man had done the same thing that Auggie had just done. He had whispered something into the vent.
Auggie didn’t have much time to ponder it.
“Is that smoke?” Jules asked.
Chaos erupted. It seemed like everyone stood up at once. Kate began to move the girls around the table towards the door. She struggled to keep them together. Isla wanted to lead the way and Millie was dragging behind. Henry picked up Penny and adjusted her awkwardly on his hip. Deidra found Gus’s hand and began to coax him out of his seat.
It seemed like everyone was talking at once.
“Calm down,” Allison said, raising her voice.
“That’s right, calm!” Auggie said. “We need to stay calm and figure out the best way to go.”
“No,” Allison said. Her tone commanded their attention. Everyone stopped and listened, even Tommy, who was moving around Travis.
“This is part of June’s second test,” she said. “It’s not a real fire, and it’s nothing that we have to concern ourselves with.”
Auggie looked to Kate. She raised her eyebrows, but her opinion was clear—it didn’t matter what Allison had to say, she wasn’t going to let their children get trapped in a burning building.
Auggie took a breath to add his opinion, but Jules beat him to it.
“She’s right,” Jules said. “We should at least wait and see if it’s real before we try to leave the room. Trying to leave almost killed Deidra.”