The keys in her face are both the carrot and the stick. Tyler jangles them again.
“Come on, Jess,” he says, and she almost bites his fingers. He doesn’t notice. “Don’t you want a good story?”
“A story for who?” Jess mutters. But she lets him coax her hand out of the borrowed jacket pocket, his fingers wrapped around hers like tentacles. They don’t feel familiar. Her skin is warm and known, but his is colder, his calloused fingertips alien against her palm. It’s a familiar disconnect, this inability to reconcile what she’d imagined with reality.
“You’re not scared, are you?” Tyler asks, pulling her up the first of three sagging steps. His brown hair curls up around the edges of the knit winter cap, which she finds far more endearing than his voice or his hands.
“Maybe a little,” Jess admits, looking at the hair above his eyes. “But we made it here, so I guess we have to keep going.”
He grins. “That we do.”
She follows him up to the front door. It’s locked, but he has stolen the key. Perks of being a realtor’s son. Jess watches him fumble with the knob; he’s the one who put foreclosure trysts in her mind, but this door is new to him. It would be. The house has been abandoned for so long that you’d only know of it if someone told you, and no one told Tyler before Jess herself. She made sure of that.
It isn’t old, like she expected. Built in the 1950s, maybe, just a nondescript stack of beige and white and fading blue. From the outside, it could be in any neighborhood. Any family could live here, allowing it to slide into graceful, well-intentioned neglect.
But it doesn’t feel that way once Tyler gets the door open.
The air of the foyer tastes stale inside her mouth. Jess crosses in front of Tyler, her hand retreating back inside the pocket of his jacket. She finds a hole in the lining, worries at it with her index finger. She can feel her jeans pocket through the fabric, and the small, solid object there. Her fingers brush it, then flinch away.
Tyler pulls the door shut behind them and flips the lock. Jess looks back, startled, and he winks. “Now we’re safe.”
Then he turns to face the house with her, its innards splayed out – no furniture, no art, no life – and Jess’s stomach twists. All day, this moment has waited for her. She moved towards it inexorably, and now the door behind her is closed. She is alone with Tyler in a house no one owns, and there is no going back.
She’s painfully aware of her senses. It’s a method of self-preservation, probably. She has a better handle on what exists outside of herself than in. All right, Jess thinks as Tyler’s hand appears on the small of her back, what is here?
It’s cool. Not as cold as outside, but still chilly enough that she’s glad of the coat. Tyler will be hoping for an alternative source of warmth.
Everything is quiet. Jess lives with her parents and her little sister, and it’s been a long time since she was in a silent house. Her footsteps, Tyler’s low voice, it all feels sacrilegious. She breathes in through her nose. Something smells faintly earthy. Mildew? Black mold? A den in the basement or the attic where some animal hopes to kip until spring?
“Let’s explore,” Tyler murmurs, his mouth very close to her ear. She isn’t sure what there is to explore, really, since this place is meant to be deserted. If there is an animal, Jess doesn’t want to interrupt. Still, she can feel his hand slipping lower on her back and so she takes a step down the short hallway. There’s a staircase directly ahead, and a doorless room to their left.
“This way,” Jess suggests. She wants to clear the first floor before the trap winches shut. She moves away from Tyler’s sea monster fingers and crosses her arms over her breasts. Together, they walk through the foyer and into what would be a living room if it had any furniture.
The earthy scent is stronger in here. Jess pauses. Her nostrils flare and contract, exploring the smell and then rejecting it – it’s wet, somehow, and there’s a thread of sweetness reminding her of compost.
“What is that?” Tyler asks. His nose is wrinkled, too. Jess shakes her head. She imagines a body, an addict. Someone broke in and died in this house, fleshy organs turning from human to not. The odor is cavernous.
Tyler leads her forward with faint pressure on the back of her upper arm, his sharp nose pointed like a hunting dog’s. Around them, the silence seems to move and flow; it seeps into her lungs with unnerving physicality. “Maybe we should just go,” Jess says, even though it took so much to get here; there will always be more time. Tyler doesn’t release her arm.
“Yeah, just,” he starts, and then cuts off as they push through a doorway into the kitchen.
At first, Jess genuinely cannot tell what she’s looking at.
Her mind says “it’s a woman,” and she follows that train. It does look like a woman. She’s in the corner, next to the sink and boxed in by an unplugged refrigerator. Her face is angled down, long rusty hair draping past her shoulders and obscuring everything from the clavicle up. But Tyler isn’t looking at her clavicle, and neither is Jess, because the woman is naked.
She stands with her feet close together and her arms at her sides, elbows bent in a graceful curve so that her hands just hide the apex of her thighs. Her smooth, white waist curves up from the swell of bare hips, and Tyler and Jess are both entranced. She is carved of gray marble, pale but solid, her nipples the color of dusky roses.
She is the source of the smell.
Jess knows it immediately. This room is permeated by it, no longer a scent but a musk. Tyler would look frozen from farther away, but he’s so close she can feel the way his breath shudders in his chest. He’s almost vibrating, torn between standing still and swaying forward. “Hello?” he says.
She doesn’t expect a response. Jess doesn’t have a word for what they’re looking at, but somewhere underneath the blank there is ghost, just like somewhere underneath the musk there is decay. “Don’t,” Jess begins, just as the woman in the corner makes a noise.
Not words. A sigh.
But Jess sees the hair move. Brownish tendrils waft out, then back towards the downturned face. A breath. Breathing.
Tyler moves before Jess can stop him, his eyes fixed on the perfect breasts, the flare of ribs. So perfect. Too perfect. “Wait,” Jess says, but she says it softly and he doesn’t hear. Tyler’s hands go out, perhaps to rub the woman’s arms or to draw her into him. He doesn’t look back, doesn’t seem to remember Jess is there at all.
Before he touches her, the woman sinks. Her slender legs bend at the knee, thighs folding down towards the cabinet at the backs of her calves, folding into the cabinet. Only it’s not a cabinet at all. It’s a hole.
The woman’s long, thin fingers unfurl. Jess sees a flash of smooth marbled skin, and then Tyler screams.
The woman has him by the head, her hands gripping either side of his skull as he scrabbles at her forearms. She tilts her face up towards his, her torso now waist-level with him, legs buried up to mid-thigh in the hole. Tyler slips and falls hard. His knees crack audibly as he hits the ground. Jess starts forward, shocked, and then she sees what Tyler saw and she is screaming too.
There is no face.
Tyler struggles but the thing’s grip is strong. Something splinters in him and his cries reach a new pitch. He’s on his stomach now, hands wrapped around the pale wrists as he thrashes and kicks. Jess watches dumbly as the thing without eyes – or nose, or mouth – retreats further into the dark. Now that her wide hips have vanished, a little light slips past and Jess sees a row of sharp gleams in the shadows underneath the house. In an instant, she understands that the woman is not the monster.
The woman is the bait.
Another crunch and Tyler goes quiet. Though his legs still kick half-heartedly, the fight is over and with a brutal, shocking speed, the faceless thing drags him through the hole by his head. Tyler’s shoulders catch and so it twists him, hands grasping clumsily at his back and arms, and manages to force him through at an angle. In another minute, Jess is alone.
She holds her breath, her whole body full of that horrible scent. She is a bottle for it, a carrier in which it will ferment. She can’t move.
There are sounds coming from the dark. She thinks of the zoo her sister loves. The big cats, feeding.
She still hears it as a white figure slides back through the hole, scraping lightly against the linoleum floor and extending upwards like a girl-shaped periscope. The hands curl against pale, spotless thighs. Reddish-brown strands fall across a blank disk. Jess lets out her breath and the figure in the corner does the same, a weeping willow sigh. The cabinet is concealed once more, unless you look for it. And why would you, with such beauty up above?
Jess turns, her hands deep in Tyler’s jacket pockets. The lure stays where it is. She – the thing beneath the house – has what she wants.
Jess has to leave the door unlocked, as Tyler’s keys went with him underneath. That’s all right, she thinks. In fact, perhaps it is even polite. After all, everything exotic has a caretaker.
When she gets home, she takes Tyler’s jacket and folds it into a neatly wadded square for easy burning. She pulls the hypodermic from her jeans pocket, still full of enough methadone to kill a grown man (and certainly a teenaged boy), and buries it in the soil of a potted plant. It cost her too much to throw away. Then, Jess goes upstairs and knocks on her little sister’s door.
“Are you awake?” she asks, gently. There is no response, but the door opens when she tries the knob. Her sister is in bed already, the covers pulled up to her chin so no limb goes unprotected. She’s fourteen, but she’s been acting more like a child these last few weeks, an abrupt shift. Jess understands, of course. Boys like Tyler aren’t interested in children.
She kneels beside the bed and studies her sister’s round face, the eyes screwed shut. “Don’t worry,” Jess whispers, because now Tyler isn’t interested in anything at all. “I got him.”
Bio Note
Jaq Evans is a marketing writer by day and a hopeless horror/science fiction nerd by night. (Other hobbies include rock scrambling, campfires, and experimental cocktails.) More short sto
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