The House

by Christina Lauren

  “No, sir,” Dhaval said. “My dad believes in gardeners to take care of ax-related events.”

  Franklin all but ignored Dhaval. “Not sure I want you taking an ax out of the house, Delilah. Seems like a lot of trouble to be had.”

  If he only knew.

  “You can drive it over there for us,” she said, holding her breath. It was a gamble, but the odds were in her favor. Her father’s physical laziness was nearly as limitless as his antisocial tendencies.

  Delilah watched as her dad grumbled something and headed back toward the house. They had everything they needed and were about to leave when something on the workbench caught her eye. The shed was the part of the Blue family home that Delilah’s mother didn’t scour and disinfect within an inch of its life. And there, in the layer of dust covering the neglected workbench was a heart and the words “Gavin loves Delilah” written in Gavin’s handwriting.

  • • •

  In the backseat, Dhaval sat beside her and reached over to take her hand. “You okay?” he asked.

  She wasn’t.

  Vani started the car, taking a deep breath. “We’re leaving if anyone gets hurt.”

  “Okay,” lied Delilah. She wouldn’t leave until Gavin was with her.

  This is all happening too fast. But. . . why didn’t we do this sooner? This is crazy.

  “I know you think the house won’t hurt Gavin,” Vani continued, “but we’re calling the police as soon as anything seems off.”

  “If the police come, the house will crumble.” Delilah closed her eyes and took as much air into her lungs as she could manage.

  “I’m assuming the spirits are more concerned with Gavin and won’t care where we are,” Dhaval said quietly. “I think the first thing we need to do is find him.”

  “I’ll find him,” Delilah said. “You two stay just outside the gate until I bring him out.”

  Nodding, Vani glanced at them in the rearview mirror, making a left on Sycamore. “Once you bring him out, we’ll need to pull all of the spirits to where he is and then. . .” She shook her head, and for the first time Delilah could see that Vani was trying to seem far braver than she felt. “Maybe then I can banish them? I don’t know! I’ve never done this before! God, if only my mother were here.”

  “You can do it,” Delilah said. “We all can. So first we need to gather them all around us, too?”

  “Yes, jaanu.”

  With a little, terrified laugh, Delilah whispered, “They hate me.” She closed her eyes after she said it and could barely imagine what she would find when she got back to the house.

  It would be like trying to cross the gates of hell.

  It would be like walking into the ticking heart of a bomb.

  When she looked up again, Delilah caught Vani glancing at her in the rearview mirror. “We don’t have any choice, do we?” Vani said.

  Delilah sat up straighter and took a moment to check in on Dhaval. Throughout all of this, he was so quiet, so uncharacteristically thoughtful, just taking it all in. But when he met her eyes, he looked determined. . . and fearless. When her eyes caught his, she felt it like a physical shove, like he’d grabbed Delilah’s heart and reminded it how to keep beating.

  “Gavin’s in there,” he whispered. “In that crazy-ass house, Dee. It’ll hurt anyone who gets in its way. Nobody’s safe while it stands. We have to do this. I can do this.”

  “I’ll get inside and find him,” Delilah said. “It can change things around and confuse us, but at least I’ve been there before. You two stay on the sidewalk out front until you hear me call for you. No matter what, stay outside. There’s a shed in the back. That’s where I’ll take him. It’s small, but it’s probably the safest place for all of us. As soon as we get there, you’ll need to be ready.”

  Vani met her eyes once more. “We’ll be ready.”

  “And then, Dhaval?” she said, looking at her best friend.

  He looked up, dark eyes luminous in the waning sun. “Yeah?”

  “You still know how to hot-wire?”

  When Dhaval had come home from visiting his cousins in California, he’d e-mailed Delilah, bragging about how one of them had taught him how to hot-wire cars. Judging by her gasp and the way Vani’s eyes widened, her son hadn’t filled her in on that part of his vacation.

  “Sure do,” Dhaval said, grinning proudly.

  “House has the keys, so you’ll need to get the old car started. Gavin and I are going to get the hell out of town.”

  • • •

  They parked at the curb, and Delilah stepped out. The damp leaves on the ground looked like bruises, blue-gray against the drab concrete sidewalk. The once-lively yard was silent; there was no breeze, no bobbing, reaching vines; there were no birds in the trees anywhere near it, no sounds of life other than the terrified pounding of her own pulse in her ears.

  She looked up at the looming building in front of her. All at once she had the impression of looking at two separate houses: the brilliant structure it might have once been and the crooked, gloomy monstrosity it had become. The house was dark and heavy, and the thick, putrid air outside gave the impression of waterlogged wood, cracked cement, and dried-up grass.

  But the details of the house itself were hidden behind a haze of fog, and she had to step closer to get a better look. The house came into focus when she was right there, barely two feet from the iron gate, which opened easily beneath her hands with a piercing groan. Darkness sealed up behind her as she stepped onto the paved walkway, and Delilah’s confidence curdled. As she walked in, the once-thriving yard looked exactly like it would if it had been left untended for two decades. There was no green lawn, no yellow. There were no flowering trees or beds full of blooming tulips. Everything was brown. The house was run-down, dilapidated, as if all of the life—like the birds—had simply vanished.

  But Delilah knew better. She knew everything had simply gathered inside, waiting.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Him

  The first thing he’d noticed was blue sky. Not that a blue sky this time of year was out of the ordinary—it was spring, after all—but on this corner, looking down the tree-lined street to where House stood, the blue above him stood out.

  The sky above House was always dotted with puffs of dark smoke, even in summer. A steady spiral continually emanated from Chimney and dissolved away as soon as it reached the clouds. Today, however, at barely seven in the morning, every inch of the world above House was as black as night, as if something hateful had stained the sky and the morning sun was unable to penetrate the shadow.

  The ground was littered with leaves and fallen branches that crunched beneath the rubber of Gavin’s bike tires as he braked to a stop. Even in the strange, early-morning blackness, he could tell there was no smoke billowing from Chimney because there was no fire. There was always a fire. House never did anything without a reason, and Gavin knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that he was that reason. House was waiting for him.

  The sun had just started to filter through the neighbor’s trees, and though he could feel the warmth of it beginning to seep into the back of his dark hoodie and warm the tips of his ears, Gavin shivered in the eerie chill surrounding his home. He had no idea what he would find when he opened that door, but he knew it was time.

  He’d been debating not coming back at all, knowing how easy it would be to stay in the music room with Delilah, to ignore all of this and remain lost in her. They could have caught a bus later this morning, left town with very little fanfare. Maybe they would have been able to drive that unknown distance that would put them truly out of reach of House. Delilah would be eighteen in a few days. He would be eighteen in just over two weeks. He wasn’t sure which of the two of them would be less likely to find someone coming after them.

  He knew leaving would have been the smart thing. He knew he should have tried. Dhaval’s text had changed everything. But the farther away Gavin was from the music room and his conversation with Dhaval, the m
ore certain he became that House was toying with him, finding a way to mimic a woman’s voice on the phone. But if there was a chance—no matter how small—that his mom was there, inside somewhere, he had to look.

  His heart seemed to be trying to claw out of his chest. His pulse was jagged, leaping and unsteady, and it was distracting enough for Gavin to wonder whether he could take the panic of facing this dark beast in front of him.

  Closing his eyes, he struggled to steady his breaths as he made a small mental list of tasks:

  Get inside. Listen for my mother. Gather what I need and get out. Find Delilah.

  Find Delilah.

  Delilah.

  He didn’t have much in the way of possessions and had never considered himself to be overly sentimental—he’d never really felt like the things in House belonged to him anyway—but now that he was standing outside, there were a handful of items he couldn’t bear the thought of leaving behind. He wanted the Bible he’d found and he wanted the photograph of his mom. He couldn’t dream of leaving his sketchbooks behind, and if it were possible, he wanted to find the keys to the car. If he could somehow manage to get those, he could have his things and a way for them to leave town, too. Running away would be a lot easier in the Buick than on a bike.

  To be safe, he parked the bike outside Iron Gate in case the worst happened and he couldn’t get the car, and he headed for House.

  Gate didn’t open on its own the way it usually did, and so he pushed it open with a groan, coming to an abrupt stop when he stepped into the yard. Not only was Chimney silent, but the lawn looked. . . dead. Really dead, both sides. The grass was brown and brittle, and weeds grew in the cracks between the pavers that led to the front door. House looked well and truly abandoned—abandoned for years—as if his entire life had never happened.

  The vines that wound themselves around the columns on the front porch were spindly, and the purple petals of the new blossoms as delicate and dry as old paper, dropping one by one into a small pile on the top step. Gavin wasn’t sure what to make of all this, and he briefly wondered if maybe House had. . . left? Maybe his mom had come home and House was gone because he didn’t need it anymore.

  He didn’t know how to process that. On the one hand, that was the point of all of this, wasn’t it? To get away? To live his own life? So why did he feel that familiar panic? That tremor in his hands at the thought of being alone?

  “I’m home,” he called, standing in the foyer, and clenched his jaw when the urge to shout Mom? became almost too much to bear. He did his best to keep his hands steady while he unzipped his hoodie and hung it on a hook near the door. He kept his shoes on.

  Gavin looked down the hall and listened for the sound of footsteps in one of the other rooms, or from someplace upstairs. Nothing.

  “Where is everyone?” he asked, careful to keep the quiver from his voice.

  Fireplace flickered to life, the low flames sputtering around the ever-present log.

  So something was still here, but no mother stepped out of the shadows. He tried to ignore the feeling in his stomach, as if a trapdoor had opened in his diaphragm and his heart had dropped straight through.

  “Everyone okay?” He looked up the staircase at the dark hall beyond. “Things are pretty dark outside.”

  He kept his steps even as he walked to a table—careful to look like he didn’t understand why anything would be amiss—and went through a stack of mail that was sitting there. His hands shook as he flipped through the flyers and envelopes of coupons. They received junk mail and neighborhood flyers shoved into the box at the curb, but no bills. Nothing personal or that required a response had ever been delivered to House. He assumed since House didn’t really run on metered electricity or gas, and there was no cable TV, there were no bills. He didn’t even know if they paid taxes. House powered everything itself; there was nobody to pay.

  But standing here now, clinging to the unreal possibility that his mother had been here in the house, he wondered: Weren’t there some things that required a signature? Who had enrolled him in school? Who had signed off when the doctor arrived, dazed and robotic, at the door? And why had he never thought to question any of this before Delilah came into his life? Gavin always assumed his reality was different from those around him, but beneath that assumption had always been a dark, secret belief that House also made him special.

  A single word stabbed at his thoughts: How?

  How could a boy be orphaned without people all over town knowing what happened to his mother?

  How could he be so lucky that his house happened to step in and raise him?

  How could he not immediately wonder, when the house began terrorizing Delilah, if the house had also hurt his mother?

  What if House had never been good? What if he’d been here all his life, trusting and blind, and the only family he’d ever known was simply. . . evil?

  Struggling to stay calm and choking back the tight swell of tears, Gavin continued to listen for any sound of human life in the house. He dropped the stack of mail on the table and went to Kitchen, pulled down a glass, and filled it with water from the tap.

  As he drank, holding the glass with a trembling hand, Gavin tried to ignore the odd darkness outside. The resurgence of a fire in Fireplace had warmed the front rooms. A fresh plate of cookies sat on the counter. Daisies on the windowsill unfurled their petals and faced him.

  “Think I might go upstairs and get a bit more sleep,” he said.

  He reached for an apple in the crisper drawer and straightened, polishing the tender red skin on the fabric of his shirt. “I fell asleep practicing for the spring concert and have this horrible crick in my neck. A nap might do me a world of good. Maybe we can look at the sprinklers out front when I’m done? The twins aren’t looking so good.”

  The daisies nodded their heads but made no movement to reach out for him as he placed his glass in the sink.

  Gavin climbed the stairs one at a time, hoping he didn’t look as anxious as he felt. It was so quiet. There had always been an energy about House that he’d grown accustomed to, a tiny vibration, the sense of movement all around him that used to ease him to sleep at night and remind him that he wasn’t alone. He could feel it in the walls and the wood beneath his feet. He could feel it in the air. Today it was still there, but it was different.

  It was tighter. Tenser. He felt like he was trapped in the belly of a clenched muscle, knowing House would do anything to keep from hurting him but sensing its pulsing fury.

  The lights in the stairway illuminated, but they buzzed dissonantly. The stairs creaked with each step he took, somehow less solid, nearly brittle under his shoes.

  “What’s going on?” he asked, swallowing so thickly he could hear it in the eerie silence. “Are you mad at me?”

  Dread began to build in Gavin’s stomach, and he climbed the rest of the stairs quickly, his eyes on the bedroom doorway at the end of the hall, ears still straining to hear anything.

  There was a duffel bag in his closet, and Gavin thought briefly of filling it with clothes and toiletries and other things before trying to flee, but dismissed the idea just as quickly. The only reason House hadn’t snapped was because Gavin hadn’t tried to run.

  He sat on his bed, picked up his sketchbook and a short stick of charcoal, struggling to look calm and relaxed. How did he do this? How did he search House for his mother when it could see every single move he made? He’d never seen House look this way—dark and dead and sinister. Was there really any way to fool it?

  Gavin remembered the mornings he’d been grounded, how the doorknobs had vanished from the front doors, the latches had been removed from the windows. Delilah swore House morphed and physically transformed the night she came over for dinner. Was it possible there were parts of House he didn’t even know were there?

  Spotting an old box on a shelf in his room, Gavin took down a model airplane he’d never finished and muttered something about finding glue. He was able to rifle through old
drawers, peer into cabinets he hadn’t opened in ages, even check under couch cushions and beds. House even seemed happy to help, moving furniture out of his way and opening cupboards for him. He opened every closet, dragged casual fingertips down walls as he passed, feeling for any edges or bumps that shouldn’t be there.

  He found a bunch of old bottles of migraine medication that must have belonged to his mother, but no glue and no hidden rooms.

  With two hours to go before he was meant to meet Delilah, Gavin had pretty much given up hope of finding anything.

  He climbed the stairs again and headed back into his room, stopping dead in his tracks when he crossed to the bed. There, in the center of his perfectly straightened comforter, was the photo of his mom that he kept taped inside the bathroom drawer.

  House knew all along what he was looking for.

  The air cooled, the room darkening as if the sun had tucked itself behind the clouds, hiding. Pinpricks of sweat broke out along his skin, and he felt gooseflesh rise along his arms, his legs, the back of his neck.

  Outside in the distance he could see blue sky and the leaves of trees fluttering in the breeze, but close to House, everything felt dark. The yard was cast beneath a shadow. Wind whipped through the dead branches of his favorite cherry tree.

  There was a sound in the hallway behind him. Not footsteps, a growl. It was a sound that could come only from the belly of a beast—low and angry—vibrating along the boards below his bedroom and climbing up the walls. The tremor went higher and higher, like a shiver passing through the entire house.

  Gavin closed his eyes, visualized the stairs and how many steps it would take to get there.

  If he ran, he knew Bed might move and he would have to jump. Dresser might try to block the doorway. The hallway was clear, but Table was fast and could block any door it wanted. It would try to slow him down, trip him, knock him down the stairs if it had to.