Page 62

61

Triage and Sojourn

Owen woke up when a cockroach was trying to get into his ear. It got halfway in, its front legs scrambling against his eardrum. It hurt—a sharp ache. With it, a sound like crumpling aluminum foil deep in the well of his skull. He gasped, his lips tacky with his own blood, and panicked as he reached for the bug and couldn’t get a grip on it. He realized, I’m pushing it in farther, I’m mashing it up and smashing it deeper into my ear, oh god, oh fuck, oh god —but then he managed to finally grip its hind end and unmoor it from his ear canal.

He threw it as far as he could. He heard it tick-a-tack against the wall somewhere before scurrying away.

Owen sat up. Panting.

Everything hurt, and he was alone.

Hasty, probably incomplete damage report: Owen knew his lip was split. It felt fat and numb for the most part, like a microwaved slug. But in the middle of it he could feel the cleft, the crusted blood, and it hurt like battery acid. He had all his teeth. His jaw ached. He couldn’t breathe through his nose—it felt like his nostrils were stuffed up with cotton, which meant they were probably stoppered up with plugs of blood instead. His one eye felt swollen and he could neither open nor close it and wasn’t really sure which was which anyway because it was dark in here. Totally dark now, and as he stood, he realized that Nick must’ve broken the bulb. Glass crunched like little bones. Owen wanted to cry but didn’t really have it in him. Among the shards, he found no lighter. Nick must’ve taken that, too. Shit.

—

He ate. Idly and without joy. He brushed aside cockroaches and found some of the cereal, so that’s where he started. More of the Cap’n Crunch. No crunch berries, just the shitty yellow mouth-scouring bricks of stale sweetness.

Slowly he pulled himself up and found some other food.

Some of it, much of it, filled with more roaches. Where had they come from? Were they another trick of the house?

He ate potato chips. Cheese puffs. Wheat bread. Peanut butter. None of it good. All of it well past its time—none of it tasted moldy, but it didn’t matter. He found plastic bottles of water, too, and drank a bunch of those. His stomach hurt. But not as bad as his face and head, so whatever.

Anger laced through him, cinching his heart tighter and tighter.

He wasn’t ready to think about it. Not all the way, not yet. All he knew was that Nick had fucked them all over. And Owen wanted to kill him.

It felt eerily clarifying. Like his brain wasn’t on an anxiety loop. He didn’t feel that crushing tightness in his chest, didn’t feel the need to chew his fingers down to the bone. He just wanted to find Nick and beat him to death.

Half dizzy, he opened the door and cycled rooms till he got to a bathroom.

—

Big bathroom. Opulent and gaudy. Walk-in glass shower and lots of gold, fake gold, whatever. In the corner sat a jetted tub, and an infant floated dead there, face down in soapy water, bloated like a wet loaf of bread. Skin gray like a plastic bag from a grocery store.

It’s not real, it’s not real, it’s not real, Owen thought, but again, something there nagged at him, needled at him, something pulling on the fabric of his brain like a dog pulling the stuffing from a dog toy.

Because it was real, wasn’t it?

These things in these rooms, they happened.

The dead baby in this room was not a dead baby now, but it was, once—someone, somewhere, killed their infant in this room, or got high in an adjacent room while their kid drowned, or had their babysitter kill the kid while they were out running errands, or, or, or.

It was true, once. These rooms were real to someone.

Just because it was a show didn’t mean it was fiction .

This was not a game. It was a true crime documentary. These were more than just ghosts—they were memories. Rooms of tragedy and terror built into this living house. Stolen and conjured anew for whatever dark purpose it served.

Just like how his father was dead, but he saw his father.

The house stole that room from him, and built it here.

They were all wandering through the ghosts of bad houses, weren’t they? Through the rooms papered with awful memories, carpeted by tears and by blood.

All of it pushed on him, pushing at the center of his forehead first like a pressing thumb, then like a power drill. Vibrating his skull, opening up a tender, red-rimmed hole . Let me in. Let all the awfulness in, Nailbiter .

Home was supposed to be a place of safety and comfort. But it wasn’t for him. Leaving school every day made his guts tighten, his legs cramp as if they didn’t want to carry him home. Owen knew the sound of his father’s Chevy Blazer the way a faithful dog did—it lived in him, that sound, and whenever he heard it in the driveway, he always ran to his room and locked the door. Not because his father would come in and beat him, no. But he’d find Owen eventually. He’d berate him. Make him feel small and worthless. Because you were small and worthless, he thought. Are small and worthless even still. Was that his own thought? Or an intrusion by the house? Or worst of all, was it his father’s thought? Played from a speaker mounted on the inside of his own skull?

It doesn’t matter.

He tried putting it out of mind.

Still woozy, he washed his face. Might have a concussion, he thought. His mouth tasted like blood and cheese puffs.

Nick had come here. Knew what this place was. And led them all to it. He was poisoned by it and wanted to poison them in turn.

I hate him. I hate him. I hate him.

These thoughts chewed at Owen like rats. Pushing into him, like roaches into his ears. Behind him, the dead infant struggled in the tub water. A flurry of bubbles burping up. Ignore it. Don’t look. He wanted to find Nick. Wanted to kill Nick. Beat his head into a red mess the same as he tried to do to Owen.

Owen eased both of the blood plugs free from his nose. They looked like caterpillars of dried meat. Fresh blood flowed. Fuck .

He stuffed toilet paper up there to stop it up.

The dead infant twitched, one hand splashing.

Shut up, shut up, shut up .

He looked at himself in the mirror.

His face was wrecked. Swollen and misshapen like an old Halloween pumpkin. Ugly as you deserve, he thought. Nick should’ve killed you. You deserve it. But you’re still here and you’ll find him and kill him first . He felt something crawling around inside his head. Settling in. Putting up shelves. Hanging photos of its family. Magnets on the fucking fridge and everything.

—

Still woozy, he leaned on a doorjamb and cycled rooms, dancing unsteadily in and out of each doorway, dizzier and dizzier with each turn of the ever-changing maze:

—The Too Many Guns Room—

—The Broken Wall and Broken Bottles Room—

—The Hanging Man in His Home Office Room, his toes tickling the keys of his laptop—

—The Dead Rabbits Room—

—The Flashback Home Theater Room, screen showing a penknife filleting flaps of skin off pale, exposed biceps—

—The Garage with No Garage Door Room—

—The Stuffed Animals with Real Eyes Room—

—The Deafening Arcade Room—

—The Neat-and-Nifty Storage Room, everything in its place, neatly arranged, 1990s vacuum, Tupperware, plastic bins, various wicker baskets, a glass pickle jar with a severed hand floating in the brine—

—The Blood Spatter Music Room, teenager playing an electric guitar, fingers ruined and bloody, the blood spraying with every power chord, rock on, kid—

—The Black Mold Bedroom—

—and then, finally, Owen stepped through one door, sweat slicking his brow, his heart thundering in his chest. His mind felt as though it were swimming outside of him, alongside his body as it moved. It was a long hallway clad in art nouveau wallpaper, green-and-gold leaves layered upon leaves layered upon leaves and as he looked up, he saw two others at the other end of the hall, walking away from him. At first he thought, What ghosts are you —

But they were no ghosts.

Lore. Hamish.

I found you .

Lore was already at the door at the far end of the hall.

Owen called out to her—

But his voice was a strangled croak, the weak bleat of a frog under a crushing foot. Darkness bled inward from the edges of his vision as he staggered forward, calling out again—“ Lore. Hamish. ”—but once again the voice was weak, too weak, run across a rasp until it was just sawdust. He reached for them. Willed his arm to stretch out like Mister Fantastic, shrinking the hallway with his mind as if they were on one of those moving walkways at the airport. He fell to his knees. Owen imagined them getting closer to him but still they opened the door at the other end of the hall. They went through it. They escaped me. They weren’t getting closer to him at all. Just a hallucination, he thought. They’re not even here. They’re not even real. The door at the far end began to close. He launched himself to his feet once more, crying out as he hard-charged down the hallway, the green-and-gold leaves to his left and right peeling off the wall toward him, like the scales of a great beast rippling, and he reached the door and threw it open—

Beyond that door waited a finished basement. Wood paneling and a beat-up couch, and Lore and Hamish were nowhere to be found.

Owen stepped through it, still alone.