There was no family processing when they got home, no together time in the living room, asking what happened or how she was. Both of her parents moved to resume their nightly routine, but she stopped them with a calm, forceful, “Gavin didn’t do this.”
Silence rang back to her.
“I know you think that,” she pressed onward. “I know Dr. McNeill thinks that too. I know you said something to Gavin in the waiting room. I heard you yelling at him. But you’ve seen him now. His hands are huge. If he’d grabbed my arm, he would have done much worse than this burn.”
“They said your arm was. . . torn,” her father hissed, repulsed by her injury. “Pieces of your skin, just gone.”
And with those words, beneath her bandage, beneath the painkiller, her arm ached. “That doesn’t mean he did it.”
“Well, if you would tell someone the truth about what happened—”
“You wouldn’t believe me, Dad.”
Her father gave her a lingering, scandalized look before retiring to his post in the family room to watch the news.
“Try not to sleep on your left side, dear,” her mother chirped as she headed upstairs to read. “And make sure you wash your hands and face before bed. God knows what you’ve been touching all day.”
? ? ?
The Blue house grew quiet just after eleven. It was quiet in that way Delilah now recognized as normal, as a house sitting truly still. There were the noises of pipes tapping and vents blowing warm air, but no phantom heartbeats, no shifting, settling, or spying. She comforted herself with the explanation that maybe the spirits of the house—the life, the poltergeist, whatever was inside it—could move from object to object, from place to place underground or in wires, but the life itself wasn’t contagious. It couldn’t really spread.
But how does it work? Delilah thought idly. And then, more hysterically, as the pain medication was slowly wearing off and her arm throbbed, on fire with every heartbeat:
How does it hear us?
How does it follow us?
What is it, inside, that brings this crazy, menacing space to life?
She hadn’t yet given the “how” much thought, and in the moment here, so many weeks after she should have considered it, it seemed so stupidly naive to just be thrilled by the miracle of its existence. But with the first inkling—in the private darkness of her thoughts—that she might someday need to destroy the house, she realized she would need to figure out how.
She closed her eyes, considering what she knew:
The house, and everything inside it, was alive.
The house followed them to the park, through some network of grass and roots and trees.
The house could possess objects that Gavin would take with him—the tricycle, little things he could put in his pockets. The sweater she wore to the house had been possessed. It wasn’t a dream.
Something had happened to her father when he’d veered onto the property. Maybe the house possessed Dave the grocer, too. Had it tried to get into her mind that first day? What were those shadow fingertips she’d felt pressing in at her temples? Had they been trying to possess her? Was it angrier that Gavin wanted to be with her, or that it couldn’t control her?
Could the house control anything that came onto its property? How far out of town could it spread?
Her heartbeat thundered a roaring storm in her chest. She had to talk to Gavin.