Then I see it.
It’s two stories. There’s a porch running around its front and a little way onto the sides. Its blue paint has faded and peeled until it’s almost gray. Its front yard is dead and brown. The four front windows—two on each floor—are broken. They’re black holes. We’ve never seen what’s inside. We’ve never gotten close enough to do so. A rusty PRIVATE PROPERTY KEEP OUT sign hangs crooked on the wire mesh fence but that’s not why we hang back.
Zhan and I stand there for a few minutes. The squirrels are still and silent, and I know without looking that it isn’t because they’re afraid. They’re beyond fear.
Finally Zhan drops into a crouch and sets down the trap, points the front at the gap where the gate used to be before it rusted off its hinges. He opens the trap. I lose the fight against the shiver that wants to roll through me; there’s sweat trickling down between my shoulder blades, but that’s not where the shiver is coming from.
The house is staring at me. At both of us.
The squirrels walk out of the trap. They aren’t moving in that funny little hop that squirrels do. They’re walking, one foot in front of the other, stiff. They’re little squirrel zombies. They walk through the gate without hesitation, up the broken pavement of the front path and right up to the door.
Here’s the thing about the door: It’s there. And it’s not.
They walk right up to it and through it. It never opens.
No sound. No movement.
“Every fuckin’ time,” Zhan murmurs. I nod.
Zhan picks up the trap. We back away. Twenty yards clear and we turn and walk back the way we came. Neither of us says a word.
The house has always been there. Or it was there when we moved here, which was before I can remember anything, so as far as I’m concerned that’s always.
Zhan and I have been friends since I was old enough to have friends and he’s been my hero since I was old enough to have heroes. A lot of this is because he accepted me from the first when a lot of other kids laughed and called names and threw rocks and never gave me a moment’s peace at school—most particularly the ever-present trio of Kyle Patterson, who has hated me for reasons of his own since the third grade, Jake McDonnell, who’s his best friend, and Drew Carter, who usually just tags along because he has nothing better to do—because of my hair and the clothes I insisted on wearing and how I bristled every time anyone called me her. I could never have explained to them why I wanted these things; they just felt right in a world that was nothing but wrong. But Zhan, if he didn’t understand, at least accepted without question or complaint. For Zhan, I just was. I am.
Like the house.
I was ten when Zhan first took me to the house. He had caught a neighbor’s cat, a mangy thing that always came after us with claws fully extended. It hissed and yowled in the trap but then it walked through the front gate and we never saw it again.
Zhan swore me to secrecy. I swore.
That was three years ago. In those three years Zhan has never answered any of my questions, not where it came from, what it really is, how he found out about it, or whether or not we could kill it. I think if there were answers, Zhan would give them to me.
Later in the woods, after we’ve fed the house, he sticks a hot dog into fire we made in a ring of stones and holds it out to me when it’s split down the middle and steaming. The light is touching his face with soft, shifting fingers. I look at him and I hope—oh, God, I hope—that he can’t see what I’m thinking.
I knew I was in love with Zhan a year after he showed me the house. I think the house is why it happened. He shared a secret with me. It made me want to share all of mine.
It’s getting tough to do the twice-a-week-sneaking-out thing.
Back in summer it was easier. We could get away for entire days, spend the morning tossing a baseball back and forth in the dusty lot two blocks from our street, check the traps, feed the house, and devote the rest of the afternoon to shooting crows with an air rifle from the bushes that surround the parking lot of the Los Vientos industrial park. In the summer it’s pretty empty so no one runs us off. But I think Zhan always enjoys that part more than I do.
Regardless, it’s not summer anymore. School’s back in session, never mind how hot it is and will be for at least two more months, and it’s not all that hard to go truant from lunch with all of us crowded into the blacktop yard—blasting heat at us—but we’re running a little bit of a risk every time.
Thank Christ no one really cares. That fucking dyke and her faggot friend. Neither of us is especially popular, so okay, we have each other.
We have each other. I love how that sounds.
Here we are again. This time it’s three chipmunks, walking in stately procession up the path. Zhan and I are standing close enough to touch. I glance at him—it always feels hard to look away from the house, dangerous even, but I can manage it for him—and for the first time I wonder How much longer are we going to do this?
What would happen if we stopped?
I don’t know why Zhan started feeding the house. But in bed that night I start thinking about the steady plod all the animals do up to that not-there door. And I think about how hard it is to look away from the house, how hard it is to even keep from going there, the way we’ll get around almost any obstacle to do it.
It calls us.
I fall asleep thinking about it there in the dark, alive, hungry, waiting for the next time we bring it meat.
I dream about it. It’s not a good dream.
I’m standing where Zhan and I always stand, looking at the house. But it’s not like it usually is. We never go to the house after dark but it’s dark now, starless and moonless. And I’m alone.
Except I’m not. Because the house is there. And while I know that every time we stare at it, it’s staring back . . . I’ve never felt it like this before. It’s this dark hulk sitting there, and while it’s not moving I feel like it is. Creeping closer to me. Reaching out.
The front yard is full of bones.
We’ve never seen it like that. The house leaves nothing. It takes everything in. Flesh, bone, blood. Light. Air. I want to turn around and walk away. Run away, maybe. But I can’t. My muscles are locked. And instead I find myself walking forward in that walk that hundreds of animals have been forced into before me. Bones crunch under my feet. The air is weirdly hot.
What are you? Where did you come from?
I reach out and put my hand through the door, and I feel it disappear into the nothing beyond.
“I wonder if it was from some kind of experiment.”
Zhan grunts and passes over the cigarette we’re sharing. It’s an off day for us—at least as far as the house is concerned—and we’re sitting on the concrete wall outside the abandoned Sunoco, drinking flat soda, smoking. Watching the sunset. My hand brushes his when I take the cigarette, and he isn’t looking at me.
I can’t decide which is harder to stop thinking about, Zhan or the goddamn house—and maybe they can’t be separated. Maybe neither can exist without the other.
But it’s been a while and I should really figure it out.
“I mean,” I persist, “like maybe it’s like a black hole or something? Like a scientist was doing shit and it went wrong.”
Another grunt.
“Or maybe it’s haunted,” I say. “I read about something like that. Haunted houses. People go into them, never get seen again.”
Zhan takes the cigarette back and taps ash onto the asphalt. “Whatever, man.”
No, not whatever. But I’m not irritated with him. I’m irritated with the house. I get the sense, subtle but increasingly hard to ignore, that we don’t talk about it because it doesn’t want us to.
“You know it’s not haunted,” Zhan says after about ten minutes of silence. I jump, and then I stretch my arm back to scratch at a fake itch on my shoulder blade so he won’t think I was startled, but it probably doesn’t work.
“You know it’s not, Tom. Tha
t shit is alive.”
It never really feels like autumn, but the days get shorter. I don’t ask Zhan about the house, not for a while. If it really is trying to silence me, I give up and let myself be silenced. I’m thinking about other things. I’m getting to the point where every week I can feel myself changing, getting older. Two weeks ago I looked at myself in the mirror and I’m getting tits, shit, still small but I can feel them coming. Mom took me out to get a couple of sports bras. I got them one size too small and so far it’s working okay. I’m still flat. And Mom doesn’t seem like she cares what I do. She watched me come out of the changing room and look at myself and all she did was ask me if the bras were okay.
Not asking questions is a kind of support, isn’t it?
Whatever. Zhan. And the Winter Formal is coming up and last year I wouldn’t have ever thought about going because I’m that fucking dyke but now I’m fantasizing about it, me in a tux and Zhan in a tux, matching pair except he’s taller with longer hair, and we’d dance in the dots of mirrorball light and everyone would leave us alone.
I don’t even know why I want this. I wish I could stop. I wish the house would make me quiet about this like it does about itself.
Maybe the animals don’t die. Maybe they go somewhere better. Maybe that’s why none of them ever come back.
“We’re moving.”
It takes me a minute to get it. We’re walking to school, taking our circuitous route that sends us through the blacktop yard, and I get lost in the rhythm of my own steps.
He’s moving. Well, aren’t we both? Together?
Then, “The fuck you mean?”
“End of the month.” He kicks a rock into the scrubby grass. “Dad’s got a new job. He told me this morning.”
“You can’t,” I say. It comes out without me thinking. It’s a statement of fact, like what he just said. He can’t. Of course he can’t. We’re a matched pair, like when I think about dancing with him; we go together. We don’t make any sense apart.
He huffs a laugh. “Yeah, well.”
We’re at the fence. We’re through the fence, where some of our classmates are heading inside and the others are screaming all around us in those play screams that escalate out of control; one person starts being loud and then everyone gets louder and louder until no one can hear anything anymore but no one shuts up. I stop and I stare at him. He stops and stares back. His hair is falling in his face. I can only see one black eye. He has crow’s eyes. Like the crows he shoots.
“I don’t want you to.” I take a breath, and I latch onto the only argument I can think of that isn’t about what I want, because I don’t think what I want ever carries a lot of weight. “What about the house?”
He shrugs. “That’ll be on you, I guess.”
“I can’t. I don’t have the traps.”
“I’ll give them to you.”
“I can’t.” I’m so close to crying. I’ve never cried in front of him. I hate it so much. “I can’t, I can’t, I don’t want you to.” Jesus Christ, I sound like a two-year-old, and he’s just looking at me and he’s like the goddamn house, I have no idea what the hell he’s thinking.
I was working up to asking him to the Formal. Like a joke. Be my date. And he’d take it as a joke and we’d spend the whole night smirking at everyone like we’re too cool for them instead of the other way round, and we probably wouldn’t even dance but you know? I think I would have been okay with that. But it’s not like it even matters now.
“I have to.” And for those three words he sounds so gentle that suddenly I’m sobbing and pushing myself forward, my arms going around his skinny frame, those tits that I don’t like and don’t want pressing against his chest.
I don’t mean to kiss him but I do. I don’t really mean to do anything. Like ever. Shit just happens. He’s happening. He tastes like cigarettes and toothpaste.
Oh, God, he’s kissing me back.
We just stand there. If I could hold onto this it wouldn’t even matter. Now I’m the house and I’m pulling him into me. Stay here. Stay in me. I’ll never let you go. Not a single part of you, not even your bones.
All around me the screams are rising into a surprised, mocking crescendo.
We get a day of peace, like a gift. Then they come for me.
I’m walking home. Isn’t that always when shit like this happens? People get mugged. Raped. Dragged into vans and never seen again. None of that is what happens to me, but one moment the sidewalk ahead of me is clear and the next it’s crowded with guys. Looking at me. Clenching their fists.
Kyle, Jake, and Drew. They’re big enough to count as a crowd.
I stop. On some level I suppose I expected this. I took a risk; more often than not risks have costs. And I was getting too lucky with not getting beaten up much anymore. But I look at them there in the twilight and I have this awful feeling that today I’m in for more than an average beating.
I can’t run. Their legs are longer. But I take a step back anyway. I’m still blocks from home. If I screamed I’m not sure anyone would come to the door.
“Hi, Tessa.”
That gets me bristling. I think of that cat, his fur all bushed out and his lips drawn back from his teeth; he always looked like a snake. Maybe I can be like that.
Jake tips his chin toward me. It would be easier if he was sneering or something; instead he just looks cold. “So you were making out with your girlfriend the other day. That was real fucking sweet, Tessa.”
“I’m not Tessa.” They use my name like a punch. Names shouldn’t get used like that. No one should be able to use them like that. I feel guilty for letting them. “The fuck you guys want?”
“We want your girlfriend,” Kyle says, and he sounds like he’s doing me a favor, telling me. “You know where she is. We wanna see you make out again. It was real hot, Tess.”
I shake my head, but Drew steps forward and grabs me by the arm and squeezes so hard I feel my bones grind and I choke back a cry. I’m getting a sense of it, what’s looming in front of me out of the dark. Behind them. It’s more than them. Bigger. Nastier. Driving them. Do they know? Would they care if they did? There’s something like that behind everything like this that anyone does anywhere in the world. I don’t think people can do things like this on their own. Not that people are fundamentally good or any shit like that but just because I honestly don’t think people are strong enough for this kind of bad.
I’m trying to figure a way past this, and I’m not smart enough to wriggle free no matter how much I wish I was—but I think I might be strong enough for a different kind of bad.
I have no idea if this will work. Probably it won’t. They aren’t like Zhan and me. They haven’t been called.
But I incline my head down the street, breathing hard. I hurt. It’s hard to think over the hurt; I’m sort of impressed that I can do it at all. “Okay. I was . . . I was gonna meet him. I’ll take you. Just don’t hurt us, okay?”
It sounds lame. They laugh. I don’t expect anything but more hurt. We all know, there’s this kind of understanding between all four of us, even if none of us acknowledge it. I think gazelles have this kind of understanding with lions.
I start walking. Drew doesn’t let go of my arm. I swallow down the pain. All I’m thinking about is black empty spaces, open to the night. And the day. And always.
Kyle frowns. Drew gives my arm a hard wrench and this time I do cry out. They’re not happy. I knew they wouldn’t be happy.
“The fuck is this?”
We’re standing a few yards away from the gate. It’s full dark now and the streetlights make everything look orange and too hard and just plain weird. Nothing is the right shape.
But the house looks exactly the same as it does in the daylight.
“I was meeting him here,” I gasp. “He’s here. I swear.”
We’re not close enough. That has to be it. Please, let that be it.
“So where is he? She,” Jake corrects with a glance back at Kyle.
A little nervous. I get it; this is a conceit he came up with and they’re following his lead like when dogs want to make someone happy. But at this point it’s sort of ridiculous and I have to bite my lip to keep from laughing. They’d hate that. They’d hurt me even worse and they wouldn’t wait for Zhan to do it.
Zhan is at home.
No one is coming for me.
So I point toward the house with my free hand. “He’s in there. We go in there to drink sometimes.”
Jake and Drew look like they at least sort of buy it, but Kyle is staring at me with narrow eyes. Shit, he doesn’t. Shit. Not that I really thought this would work, but shit.
Kyle nods toward Jake. “Get in there and check it out.”
And then I know I’m screwed. There are two ways this can go and neither of them help me.
Jake will go in there and whatever gets the animals won’t work on him because he’s not that bright but he’s still human and it doesn’t work on humans the same way. And inside he’ll find nothing. Just an abandoned house with broken furniture and peeling wallpaper and whatnot.
Or Jake will go in there and not come out. And then Drew and Kyle will be pissed at me beyond what I can imagine now. Pissed and maybe scared. And we’re really close to the woods, and the woods go back a long way from the road. They get deep.
For the first time it occurs to me that I might not make it home tonight.
Jake starts walking. I can’t breathe. He’s three yards from the gate. Then two. It won’t work on him. He’s not walking the way the animals do. He’s still got that I can fuck you up swagger. One.
He steps through.
And nothing changes.
I want to yell. Scream for help, for all the good it’ll do me. These are the last few minutes before something black and awful hits me in the face. I can’t avoid it, I can’t duck. I can just stare and wait for it.
My gaze hits the windows. Those black, empty holes in space. And I swear one of them flickers out of existence for a split second and then back in again.
The Year's Best Dark Fantasy & Horror, 2014 Edition Page 60