‘Nope,’ she whispers to the empty room. ‘No room at the inn.’ She pushes a small bookcase in front of the broken pane, blocking it. She’ll probably have to get that fixed herself. Her landlord doesn’t seem like the type to go to any trouble. She doesn’t mind. The more he leaves her alone the better.
As an experiment, she looks around at the living room, walls brown with old cigarette smoke and corners hung with dust, and thinks, This is my home. It actually makes her laugh a little. She can’t recall the last place she felt was home. In her early teens, perhaps, when Lulu still slept in the next room, thumb locked tight between her pursed lips, emitting her light, penetrating snores.
She is surprised to discover that the gas is connected. Dee makes steak, green beans and a baked potato in the hissing white stove in the kitchen. She eats quickly and without pleasure. She can’t care about food, but she takes care of herself. She learned the importance of that the hard way. The stove still hisses after she switches it off and the kitchen smells faintly of gas. Another thing to get fixed. She’ll do it tomorrow – or maybe she will die in the night. She decides to leave it up to fate.
Dee sits cross-legged on the living-room floor as dusk falls. The night flows in, pools in the corners, spreads across the floor like a tide. She looks at the dark and the dark looks back at her. The little circles in Ted’s windows light up. Through one, colour and movement shiver – the TV, she guesses. Later the circles go dark downstairs, and for a few minutes two moons shine out upstairs. They go out at ten. Early to bed, then – no TV or book in bed either. She watches for a few moments longer. The house is dark but she cannot let go of the feeling that it is not at rest. There is something manic in its stillness. But she keeps watching and nothing happens. Her limbs are twitching with exhaustion; the dark revolves before her. She should sleep too. There is a long road ahead.
The bathroom is old white tile, mapped with cracks. A buzzing neon light hangs overhead, filled with the corpses of moths and flies. She puts blankets and pillows in the bathtub. Safest place in an earthquake, as her father used to say. Anyway, she doesn’t have a bed. Dee lays the claw-hammer down beside her on the cold tile. She closes her eyes and practises reaching for it, reinforcing the muscle memory, imagining herself just woken from sleep, imagining a dark figure looming over her.
She pictures Lulu’s face, the way expressions chased across it, clouds over the sun.
She reads Wuthering Heights. She is only a couple of pages from the end. When she finishes, she opens the book at random in the middle and continues reading. Dee only ever reads this one book. She likes to read, but you never know what books are going to do to you and she can’t afford to be taken off guard. At least the people in Wuthering Heights understand that life is a terrible choice, which you must make each day. Let me in, Catherine pleads. Let me in.
When she turns out the light the dark is rich and complete. The house breathes about her like a person, boards groaning, releasing the stored heat of the day. Stars peer through the window. The house isn’t really in the city at all – it is almost in the forest. She is so close to where it happened. The air holds the memory of the event, somehow. The particles of it are carried on the wind, lie in the earth, the old trees and dripping moss.
Her dreams are filled with burning sun and the fear of loss. Her parents walk through the desert, hand in hand, under a sky filled with stars. Dee watches as long as she can, but then the red birds take flight and the sky goes white, and the sound of their wings is a soft feathery scratching. She sits upright in the dark, heart pounding. Sweat trickles down her back and between her breasts. The sound has followed her out of the dream. From downstairs it comes again. Dee hears that it is not wings, but a scratch, like a long nail on wood.
Her palm is slippery on the rubber handle of the claw-hammer. She creeps downstairs. Each board cracks like a shot beneath her feet. The scratching continues, sharp claws or fingernails raking the wood. Dee understands that there has been some critical slippage between worlds. Let me in – let me in. Faint silver pours in through the uncurtained living-room windows. The scratching is faster now, insistent. Dee thinks she hears another sound behind the scrabbling – it is high, broken. Sobbing, perhaps. The bookcase trembles, as if the force behind it were growing in fury and in strength.
‘I’ll let you in,’ Dee whispers. She pulls the bookcase aside. It shifts with a groaning shriek. She sees what crouches outside the window, gazing in. The hammer falls to the floor. She kneels and comes face to face with it, the child, its silver-white flesh dappled in the moonlight, its mouth a black cherry, eyes gleaming like lamps, filled with the light of death, scalp stripped and wounded, where the birds have plucked the hair from her skull.
‘Come in,’ Dee whispers and puts out her hand.
The child hisses at her, an unearthly sound, and Dee gasps. Fear washes over her, so cold she thinks her heart will stop. The child’s mouth opens, her hand whips out to grasp Dee’s arm, to pull her out of this world and into whatever other awaits. Dee sees white teeth set like pearls in powerful jaws. She sees the blunt, crippled fingers. The small pale face seems to ripple in the uncertain light, as if through water.
She screams and the sound breaks the dream, or whatever it is. Dee sees that it is not a dead girl at the window. It’s a cat, jaws hissing and wide, tabby coat bleached by moonlight. The cat swipes at Dee, and she sees that it has no claws in its maimed paws. She backs away, making a soothing noise. The cat turns to flee, but looks back at Dee for a moment, pointed face eerie in the dim. Then it is gone, melted nimble into the black garden.
Dee sits back on her heels, shaking. ‘Just a stray cat,’ she says. ‘Don’t read scary books before bed, huh, Dee Dee? No big deal. Nothing to worry about.’ This is an old habit of hers – saying aloud what her dad would want to hear, while keeping her real feelings inside. There is no time to fall apart. She thinks of Lulu again and this works. Purpose calms her. Dee’s heart slows its splashy beat.
Dee looks out over the tangled growth that swarms over her back yard. It’s wild, impenetrable, scented in the night. Anything could be out there, hiding. It could creep close to the house, to the windows. And then, reaching out with a long finger … Some of the neighbours have razed their yards to the ground, she notices. Presumably to deter snakes and vermin from nesting there. Dee shivers. Ted’s yard is chaos like hers. She stares at the undergrowth that riots all over his garden. In the moonlight it seems to be moving, writhing gently. She shakes her head, nauseous. That day at the lake took almost everything from Dee but it left something in her, too. Ophidiophobia, they call it; an overwhelming fear of snakes. Dee sees them everywhere, their shadowed coils. The terror slows her mind and heart to a glacial pace.
Slowly she cups her hands and then raises them to her lips, covering her mouth like a mask. She whispers into her palms, a name and a question, over and over. Clouds scud across the moon, throwing light and shadow on her face, gleaming on the wet sheen of tears.
The next morning she resumes her post by the living-room window. She keeps the curtains drawn at all times and does not turn on lights after dark. She knows how a lit window shines like a beacon in the night. Ted does too, it seems. The plywood-covered windows make it look as if his house has turned deliberately away from her, to face the forest.
She begins to learn his habits. Sometimes he goes to the woods, and he does not return for a night, or several. Other times he goes into town, and those visits are in general shorter, sometimes lasting only hours, or an evening. Sometimes he returns very drunk. One morning he just stands in the front yard and eats what looks like a pickle spread with peanut butter. He stares ahead, blank, and his jaws move, mechanical. There are bird tables and hanging feeders in the yard, but no birds ever come. What do the birds know?
She finds out everything she can online. Ted sometimes sends in his sightings to the rare bird column in the local paper. His mother is a nurse. She is very beautiful, in an old-fashioned way that seems
divorced from such things as flesh or food. In the grainy photograph she holds her certificate in delicate fingers. County Nurse of the Year. Dee wonders what it must do to you, to have a child like Ted. Does she still love him? Where is she?
The first time Dee tries to follow Ted into the forest, he stops at the trail head and waits in the dark. She hears him breathing there. She freezes. She is sure he can hear her heart. After a time he makes a sound like a slow beast and moves away into the forest. She knows she can’t follow, not this time. He felt her there.
She is relieved despite herself. The dark forest seems full of the sliding passage of snakes. She goes home and throws up.
Dee watches the house, instead, after that. After all, it is not him she has come for. She waits, patient. Wuthering Heights lies open on her lap, but she does not look at it. She stares at the house without pause, memorises each flake of paint that peels away from the old clapboard, each rusty nail, each frond of horsetail and dandelion that bobs against its walls.
Two days later, she has almost given up. Then, beneath the cicadas and the bees and flies and the chirping of sparrows and the hum of distant lawnmowers, she hears something that sounds like the tinkle of breaking glass. Every fibre of her strains towards the sound. Did it come from Ted’s house? She is almost certain that it did. So very nearly completely certain.
Dee rises from the floor, stiff from her long vigil. She decides that she will go over there. She thought she heard a window breaking, thought of burglars, she is just being neighbourly … It is a natural action.
As she does, Ted comes along the street. His walk is deliberately careful, like someone who is drunk or hurt. He carries a plastic bag by its handles.
Dee sits down again, quickly. At the sight of him, her vision goes dim at the edges, her palms are oily-slick. The body’s reactions to fear are so similar to that of love.
Ted opens the door, moving with that eerie care. Moments later there is the sound of laughter. The TV, maybe. Through it, Dee hears a high, clear voice saying, ‘I don’t want to do algebra.’
There is the low rumble of a male voice. It could be Ted. Dee strains. Her head aches with effort. The stretch of summer air that lies between the houses now seems thick and impenetrable as dough. A young girl begins to sing a song about woodlice. In all her days of watching, Dee has seen no one but Ted come and go.
Relief and horror flood her, so strong she can taste them in her mouth like mud and water. Her worst fear and her best hope are confirmed. There is a child in that house who does not leave. That’s all you know right now, she tells herself sternly. Step by step, Dee Dee. But she cannot help it. Lauren, she thinks. Lulu. Her given name, which is Laura. Lulu, Laura, Lauren. Such close sounds, lying almost atop one another.
To Dee, in that moment, the singing girl sounds exactly like her sister. The timbre, the little catch in her voice.
Ted
‘I don’t want to do algebra.’ Lauren is pouting with that little jut of the lip that drives me crazy.
‘No dice,’ I say. ‘And no whining, you hear? It’s algebra and geography day, so no more singing, that’s what we’re doing. Kitchen table, books – now please.’ It comes out sharper than I meant it to. I’m tired and I can’t stand it when her voice gets that tone. She really picked a day. I’m a lot lower on the pills than I thought.
‘My head hurts,’ she says.
‘Well, you got to stop pulling your hair like that.’ She takes a thin strand of brown and gnaws on the end of it. Then she tugs it, hard. There are thin patches all over her skull, now. Her favourite thing is to tear hair out. Mine, hers. Makes no difference. ‘You want me to send you back early? Behave, for goodness’ sake.’
‘Sorry, Dad.’ She puts her head down over the page. She is probably not doing algebra, but at least she has the sense to pretend. We are quiet for a time, and then she says, ‘Dad?’
‘Yes?’
‘I’ll make dinner tonight. You look tired.’
‘Thank you, Lauren.’ I have to wipe a tear away before she sees it. I feel bad for being so grouchy. And I can’t help hoping that she is beginning to take an interest in food.
She makes a mess, of course. She uses every pan in the kitchen, and when she burns the bottoms the corky acrid smell fills the house.
‘Stop watching me, Dad,’ she says. ‘I can do it.’
I raise my hands and back away.
The pasta is only half cooked and the sauce is sloppy and tastes like nothing. It has little cold lumps of meat in it. I eat everything she gives me.
‘Best dinner I ever had,’ I tell her. ‘Thank you, kitten. You used the new chuck I got today?’
She nods.
‘Mmmmm,’ I say. ‘You’re not eating much.’
‘I’m not hungry,’ she says.
‘Mommy used to say, “The chef never has an appetite”,’ I tell her. ‘Your grandmother. She said that a lot. Along with, “Never call a woman insane.”’
‘She wasn’t my grandmother,’ Lauren says quietly. I let that go because she has made such an effort today.
Afterwards I clean up, which takes some time, and we settle in for a quiet evening. Lauren sits in the middle of the kitchen floor. The night seems to be getting hotter, not cooler. Our skin is misted with sweat.
‘Can I open a window, Dad?’
‘You know we can’t.’ I wish we could, though. The air is solid heat.
She makes a disgusted ugh sound and takes off her blouse. Her undershirt is dirty; we need to do some laundry round here. The dry sound of marker on paper is soothing. When the sound stops I look up. There is a sea of crayons around her, a rainbow of markers, all with their caps off.
‘Lauren!’ I say. ‘Caps back on, please. Markers don’t grow on trees.’ But she stares ahead, eyes glazed.
‘Are you OK, kitten?’ She doesn’t reply, but gives a little gasp that makes my heart almost stop. When I put my hand on her brow it’s cold and clammy, like the underside of a rock.
‘Hey,’ I say. ‘Come upstairs, I’ll put you to bed …’
She starts to answer but instead a hot stream of vomit darts from her mouth. Lauren doesn’t even try to avoid the mess, she just lies down where she is. When I try to move her, things come out that shouldn’t. I clean it up as best I can, I cool her with water, I try to give her aspirin and ibuprofen to keep her fever under control, but she throws them up straight away.
‘Come on, kitten,’ I say, but something strange is happening. My voice starts to sound very far away. A white-hot spear pierces me, runs through my guts. Things start to bubble and burn down there. Oh God. Black and red descend. We lie on the kitchen floor together, moaning as our insides twist.
Lauren and I are sick for a whole day and a night. We tremble and sweat. Time slows, stops and starts, inches by like a worm.
When it begins to lift I give her water and some sports drink thing I find in a cupboard. Later in the evening I butter saltines and feed them to her one by one. We hold on to one another.
‘Nearly time to go,’ I say to her. The roses have returned a little to her cheeks.
‘Do I have to?’ she whispers.
‘Be good,’ I say. ‘See you in a week.’ She lies still in my arms. Then she starts to scream. She scratches me and struggles. She knows I’m lying.
I hold her tight. ‘It’s for the best,’ I say. ‘Please, kitten, please don’t fight.’
But she does and I lose my temper. ‘You’re grounded until I say different,’ I say. ‘You brought this on yourself.’
My head spins, my insides are molten. But I have to know. I look in the trash, where I dumped the chuck that was spoiled when I left the refrigerator door open. The white grubs writhe in the brown mess. There is considerably less in the bag than there was this morning. Something hot comes up in my throat, but I hold it back.
I take the trash out, which I should have done right away. The world staggers, the air seems solid. I have never felt so sick.
It has
been years since Lauren tried anything like this. I feel like an idiot, because I thought we were friends. I shouldn’t have let things get so slack.
The record scratches the silence. The woman’s voice fills the air. I don’t like this song. There’s too much tambourine. But I leave it on.
I check everything carefully. The knife is in the high cupboard, where it should be. The padlock on the laptop cupboard is secure. But the metal looks ... dull, somehow, as if it has been handled a lot with sweaty palms, as if someone has been clicking through combinations. I love my daughter. But I am pretty sure she tried to poison us both.
When I count the pens and crayons, a pink marker is missing. Worse, when I go to lock them up in their cupboard, I see my list of Murder suspects lies on top of the boxes of crayons. I didn’t put it there. When I pick it up I see that another name has been added, in sickly pink marker.
Lauren, it reads in her shaky printing. This, of course, has been my fear all along.
I curl up on the couch like a woodlouse; blackness nudges the edge of my vision. My stomach writhes. Surely it all came up, surely it’s finished now. Oh God.
Olivia
I know it’s not her time but I’m peering through my peephole anyway. Love is also hope. Grey sky, patchy grass, a triangle of iced sidewalk. It looks pretty cold out there. It’s not so bad being an indoor cat on a day like this.
Behind me the TV plays. Something about dawn streets and walking. Ted leaves it on sometimes to keep me company. Sometimes the set just turns itself on. It’s pretty old. You can learn a lot from the television. I am also glad of it because it drowns out the screeching whine that is my constant companion, now. Eeeeeee, eeeee.
The Last House on Needless Street Page 10