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The Sick Boy’s Kitchen

They waited for a while in the Dying Man’s Bedroom. Sometimes they stared out at the kitchen through the open door. Sometimes Lore closed that door and waited. They might come through still, she told Hamish. We shelter in place. Like I said. We wait for them . But time bled out. The clock was ticking. The smell of this place was starting to overpower her. Hamish said he couldn’t take it either, said he was going to puke if they had to stay in here.

So through the door they went. Into the kitchen.

Lore closed the door after she stepped through, then opened it anew.

No more Dying Man’s Bedroom. On the other end of the door now waited a different bedroom. This one, almost boudoir-like—Lore would’ve thought it Victorian if she hadn’t spied an electronic alarm clock on a bedside table.

(The time read 00:00, blinking red.)

“It shifted,” she said. Trying to hide the confusion and despair in her voice.

She turned around to regard this new room.

This kitchen: a little dining nook area off to the right, just behind them. Proper kitchen off to the left, sink along the far wall (where there should have been a window, she could tell), fridge and range on the other side. It was a country-style kitchen, powder-blue cabinets and a cheap laminate countertop, and white shelves everywhere offering tons of random junk (little ceramic chicken tchotchkes and various kitschy egg timers, Precious Moments figurines, fake fruit, a jar full of rubber bands and twist ties). At the far side of the room, another door.

And in any other house, that door might have been anything from a pantry to a trash closet to a way into a garage, but here, there was no way to predict. It would go, most likely, to another room in this ever-shifting mismatched nightmare house.

It was a house, wasn’t it? Had they seen any room that was not a room from someone’s home somewhere? House, apartment, condo, whatever. All of it, places people lived. No cubicles, no factory floor, no museum displays, none of that. Everything was a bedroom, a kitchen, a bathroom, and so on.

So far, at least.

This place couldn’t be infinite. It had to loop back around, right? Had to be some way to get back to Owen and Nick. Problem was, she couldn’t communicate with them. The best move was for one of their groups to stay in place and the other to move in the hopes of finding them, but determining who would stay and who would search was impossible. They might both stay in place, or they might both roam this domestic labyrinth.

And what was this place, anyway? As in, why did it exist?

Where did it come from?

Was it even real ?

It felt real. Looked real. Smelled real. Even now she could smell odd kitchen smells. The scent of burned cookies. The odor of a trash can gone off. The slick stink of too much cleaning spray to try to cover up something foul.

These rooms are all ruined somehow .

Dead fish, rancid cake with a thumb in it, dead girl, now this.

What waited for them here in this kitchen? In the next room? In the next after that? She could feel, even now, that pressure in her head, the one that told her to go out on her own—just leave Hamish here, she could tell him she’d be back, then forge on without him. It felt like a thought someone else had put there. But at the same time, it made sense. She did well on her own. Always.

Weariness wrapped itself around her bones, slowly crushing her. Lore went to the nook table and sat down, slumping forward.

Hamish paced the room.

“I hated having to sell a place like this back in my real estate days. Like, it’s obviously well-loved and whatever, but it’s ugly and it sucks. So the most painful thing was telling the seller, You gotta get rid of all this stuff, paint it white, try to make it look a little less like the cottage of some middle-aged upstate farmer type . Every house, you just wanted them to paint the personality out of it so that the next people could see a place to put their personality into.”

“Yeah,” Lore said, barely listening.

“Owen. Nick.”

“I know,” Lore said. “They’re gone.” Or we are.

“We need to—they can’t—they’re out there and—”

“ I know .”

She scanned the room even as Hamish paced.

What stood out suddenly was the wheelchair. She almost didn’t realize it was there, since it was at the far side of the breakfast nook table—what she thought was a chair with four legs was instead a chair with two wheels. And at that place was a plastic food tray mostly empty but for bits of dried food—like maybe baby food? Something blended. Chopped. Easy to chew or gum.

Lore stood up and rounded the table to get a closer look.

Pills. There were pills in that tray. Pills of indeterminate origin—two capsules, two little tablets, a big dry horse pill. The cleaning smell was really strong over here, too, and then it hit her—

She looked around again—

Oh, god .

She knew this kitchen.

She’d seen this kitchen before.

Never been in it, no, but she’d watched enough of the documentary—which used a lot of footage from the family—to recognize it.

“This is Billy Dink’s kitchen,” she said.

Hamish froze and arched an eyebrow in confusion. “Who?”

She explained. Said that Billy Dink was a thirteen-year-old boy whose mother kept him sick on purpose, who told the world he had a number of rare conditions in order to elicit their sympathy, their money, and most of all, their attention . Because his mother, Brenda, was a narcissist monster in the throes of MSP: Munchausen syndrome by proxy. She fabricated his illnesses and kept him both sick by dosing him with various cleaning products and doped up via the pills she got from the doctor. Somehow, at some point, Billy had enough presence of mind to fight through the fog of poison and pills and realize what was happening to him—that he wasn’t born sick, but rather was made that way by his own monstrous mother . He started to hide his pills instead of swallowing them, and in a moment of clarity, he stole a serrated steak knife from one of the kitchen drawers, and on a Tuesday morning in May, just before his mother was about to talk to local reporters about her son’s condition, he stuck the knife in her neck and she died.

She died here in this room. In fact—

Lore walked into the kitchen, looking down.

The floor here was tile.

The tile was clean.

But the grout was not.

The grout had been…stained rust red in an erratic patch.

Where the blood had left her neck. Where it had pooled. Where it had used the space between tiles as canals in which to travel and spread.

“Okay,” Hamish said, confused and uninterested. On a lark, he went poking around the kitchen. Lore’s brain set to work. This was a kitchen she knew. That Greige Room was one that Hamish knew. And it had that book— her book in it.

She remembered then the message sliced into the wallpaper.

THIS PLACE HATES YOU.

She could feel that now. That was the pressure pushing itself against her—trying to push into her. Making room for itself. Making rooms for itself.

Hamish, opening a cabinet, said, “Holy shit, food—”

And she mumbled in acknowledgment as she tried to process what was happening. This room was part of a house of tragedy. Tragedy that culminated in this room, right here in the kitchen of the Dink household. Billy Dink killed his mother here. And because justice was blind in the worst way, Dink went to prison for ten years. Was still there, according to the documentary she’d watched (and the podcast she’d listened to, and the series of TikToks she’d scrolled).

Was every room they’d been in like this?

The staircase brought them here.

Then Marshie’s Room: a girl who killed herself because she was depressed and because the boy she liked was mean to her.

The cake room: somebody’s birthday that had gone really fucking wrong, ending up with a severed thumb on the cake.

The greige room: a parent, a child, killed by the father.

The bedroom: a cancer man, dying there, wheezing.

And now, this place.

The kitchen where Billy Dink was kept sick.

The kitchen where he killed his mother.

Hamish pulled out some kind of snack bag. Like potato chips, with the requisite bag crinkle. A crinkle sound that suddenly stopped. He mumbled something about them being stale.

But then…

“…Lore?” Hamish asked.

“Yeah?” she asked, distracted.

“You need to see this.”

She looked up, saw Hamish standing in front of an open cabinet. There were snacks in there. Potato chips, a bag of Hershey’s Kisses, a little plastic bin full of sundae-making gear. Lore remembered something about this. The mother, Brenda, wouldn’t she eat all the junk food in front of her son? And not share any of it except when she was using it to give him a little taste of poison?

What was so disturbing was how the mother filmed it all. Right there in the open. Not filming exactly what she was doing, no—she was filming life with Billy in order to get on the news and solicit more money, attention, love. But there were little signs in there, if you knew what to look and listen for. Like when she gave Billy a piece of chocolate and he said, “This tastes weird, Mama,” and she told him, “The pills make everything taste weird, sweet baby.” But it wasn’t the pills making it taste bad. It was the Windex. Or the drain cleaner. Or the dust of metal shavings she sometimes put in things.

But that’s not what Hamish was trying to show her.

He stood back and pulled the cabinet door wider.

Something had been etched on the inside of the door. Erratically, as if with a knife. Lore’s blood went cold as she read it.

It said:

THE HEART IS WHERE THE HOME IS.

It was Matty’s handwriting.