Page 68

67

An Extended Stay

They told Hamish the plan. To find Nick. To save Nick, or try, at least. The Covenant, they said to him, each intoned like an oath, like a prayer.

“Fuck that,” Hamish said, shaking his head. “No, no, no. No. He did this to us. He lied about his cancer, he lied about this place. He led us here. I mean, fuck. How can I let that go? My wife. My kids . I wanna see them again and because of him, because of that little prick—”

His voice broke under the assault of both grief and anger. Both born of the betrayal he felt. Owen understood it. Hamish had been close to Nick. The two of them shared parts of friendship that Owen and Ham couldn’t—and a lot of the time, Owen hated that. He didn’t understand that friendship wasn’t a one-to-one deal, that you didn’t have to be all in every second of every relationship like that. People got to share different parts of themselves with different people. Hamish had Nick for some of that. And now Nick had done this to them.

So Hamish said, “I’m not here to save him. I’m here to get out.”

“He didn’t know,” Owen said. “The house…it’s alive. Some kind of mind. Some kind of entity. I wasn’t myself anymore. It started to take ownership. So when he did what he did to us, who knows how much of it was Nick and how much of it was the house? We lost Matty and Nick went after him, and that’s how he got this way. So we can’t lose Nick the same way. We gotta fix it.”

Hamish scowled. “Okay. Okay, yeah. Fine. In the meantime, we just…what? We wait?”

“We survive,” Lore said.

—

They went over the rules.

The crawlspace was safe. The house couldn’t get you here.

You could get to the crawlspace through many of the rooms in the house, but not all of them. Yes, the crawlspace existed behind every wall, but that didn’t mean every wall was something you could get through. Cinder block? No way. Drywall? Absolutely.

Excursions were necessary, though. Food, water, a shower now and again. Excursions, then, couldn’t be deep into the house. They were from the crawlspace only—open the crawlspace, go into one room, never deeper. Then back into the crawlspace.

And you never did it alone . Horror movie rules applied: You were alone, the monster could get you. And the monster was all around them.

Out there, the food replenished over time. ( Like in a game, Lore noted, and Owen thought again how this place was like a simulation—maybe not one of bits and bytes, but one that ran on a program of hate, designed on the human-made locally sourced artisanal blueprint of horror. Lore also worried that maybe they shouldn’t eat the food. Same as you shouldn’t in all the myths of other lands, fairy places, and strange realms. Too late, Hamish said, eating Spam out of a can.)

—

Time passed in the nightmare house.

Days turned to another week, to two, to three. A month, now gone.

Excursions outside the crawlspace made it clear how different the crawlspace was. In the crawlspace, you might feel the house’s presence at a distance—especially while you slept. Like wolves waiting in the dark past the firelight. But in the house? That meant leaving the firelight. That means the wolves could start to hunt you.

And oh, could they ever feel the house hunting them. It was a presence. Sometimes it was far away, creeping up on them like a stalker. But eventually it surrounded them. Pressed in on them at every side. Not a physical thing you could see or touch but still, it felt physical. Like the way certain noises made your heart race, like the way heat could feel oppressive and smothering.

Then, of course, it had its tricks. Whispers in the vents. Laughter behind the walls. Ghosts of victims, ghosts of murderers, those who’d killed themselves, those who’d died from grief, those who’d perished under the weight of a difficult and unloved life, those who’d killed for the same reason, those who’d tortured because they were themselves tortured, on and on. A dead boy whose scalp had been peeled back. A woman bruised from head to toe, reaching for them, calling for help. A father straight out of the 1950s with the Ronald Reagan hair and the pipe in his mouth, his salmon pants and trim cardigan spattered in the blood of his family.

None of it real. All a show.

And they’re not even ghosts, Owen told them. The house is the ghost. The people are just the house’s memories. What it saw. What it felt. People being monsters to one another inside the walls of their home. A place that was supposed to be safe but wasn’t. So the houses went bad and joined this place. This is like Hell, but not for you, not for me. This is the hell of bad houses. Where broken, hate-poisoned places go after they die .

(Hamish said, “See, I told you this was Hell.”)

—

They watched for Nick. They used the eyeholes that had been cut out—and they cut their own when they could. They listened at the walls. They left messages for him in the rooms around their crawlspace. Messages that they loved him, and were looking for him, and to let them find him. Please, please, please.

And yet, there was no sign of him.

Which made them worry: Had he already gone again? Owen told them that the house said it would let him go if he let it in. Before they pulled him into the wall, he’d seen a door. Was that his exit? Clearly Nick had already been allowed to leave once. Had he escaped the house once more? And to what end? “To bring more people like us back into the house , ” Hamish said.

Lore added: “Maybe worse than that. Maybe to go out there and make more bad houses. More tragedy, more terror. Spread the pain like cancer. Like metastasis.”