Someone else is in the room. A woman stands still in the far corner, where the shadows gather. How long has she been standing there?
“Have you seen my son?” Marcia. I almost don’t recognize her—her prim composure has eroded. Her yellow spandex outfit bunches loosely around her skeletal frame. Her eyes sink into the depths of her skull, her tan faded to a parchment gray. “I can’t seem to…to find Sean. He’s hiding from me.”
How long have we been here?
Marcia turns and heads down the hall. I follow her into the kitchen. She opens the unlocked cabinet under the sink and peers in. Empty. When she notices me, she absentmindedly asks once more, “Have you seen my son?”
“Maybe he’s in here.” I point to the padlocked cabinet. I jostle the knob but it won’t budge. It’s not even wood, just cheap particleboard. “Wanna see?”
Marcia nods eagerly. We run our fingers along the cabinet door until we each find enough leverage to pull. There’s a newfound determination in Marcia, an electricity sparking in her eyes. We keep pulling and pulling.
“Put your back into it.” I feel guilty for getting her hopes up like this, but a few hard tugs and—shnk—the screws yank free from the hinges. The padlock remains secured around the handle while the door itself dangles freely, no longer mounted to the cabinet.
“Nope…No boys hiding in here.”
But Silas’s notebook is. His sickening grimoire. The binding has puckered since the last time I saw it. I push the thought of mushroom skin out of my mind as I head upstairs to my— nursery
—bedroom. I’ve made a nest for myself, plucking the pink insulation from the closet wall and padding the floor with it. The bedding is soft. I curl up in my nest and flip through the book.
What am I looking for? There’s none of his poetry. No short stories. No diary entries that offer access to his mind. It’s Silas’s handwriting, but I can barely read his scribbled litanies and recipes. Spells. Several of the symbols he sketched are now painted across the walls of the house. This is not the notebook of a healthy person. These are the rantings of a lunatic. An addict.
The crack in the closet wall is wide enough for me to reach in and deposit the notebook. I feel it’s wiser to hide it from Tobias. Nobody will know I’ve tucked it behind the— I hear a faint scrape against the plaster.
Something is in the walls.
It must be a mouse. But this sounds larger. A squirrel? It sounds like something heavier dragging itself against the Sheetrock. Is it stuck?
If I lift my arm through the crack in the wall and pluck out a few more tufts of insulation, I could probably see it. I tear a fluffy swath out, exposing a wooden beam.
The scraping is louder now. The insulation pulses. Something is pushing against it. It’s right there, whatever it is, just on the other side. I stretch my arm all the way inside the wall, blindly searching for that last tuft of insulation.
I feel it brush against my fingertips. Got it. My fingers pinch the insulation and with one swift tug, I pull it out. Just as I do, something slips and falls onto my hand. I scream as I feel it—whatever it is—scramble against my knuckles and struggle to climb back up into the crawlspace to hide. It’s soft—fleshy—doughy, almost. No fur. It almost feels like a…doll’s foot?
I yank my arm back, but I can’t let it get away. Gripping the edge of the drywall, I pull back until the plaster crumbles in my hand, widening the hole. I force my head through and peer up as quickly as I can. Don’t let it get away, don’t let it go. Bits of plaster shower down onto my face. I wince as dust scrapes my corneas, but for a split second, within the shadowy crawlspace just a few feet away from where I’m lying, I swear I see the pale leg of a baby—a baby—just above my head. Just as it slips deeper into the darkness of the wall, it turns.
A child with no eyes. No nose. Its lipless mouth opens, not as a mouth with a jaw might—there are no bones, no mandibles—but as a muscled sphincter loosens, exposing a hollow grotto at the center of its featureless face. The baby barks at me, flecks of creamy spittle showering down, then turns and crawls back into the blackness of the house’s inner cavities.
peekaboo
Tobias took my lighter away after I set Silas’s notebook on fire. I figured if I’m seeing faceless babies crawling through the walls, it’s probably high fucking time that I cut this shit out of my life. I made a bonfire in the middle of the— nursery
—using tufts of insulation. The pink cotton went up too fast—I worried it might flare out before it could burn the book, but the flames embraced its mushroom leather hide. The spongy flesh bubbled and cracked across the cover, blistering and peeling away. The smoke smelled of scorched cork.
I swear I’ll never eat another portabella for as long as I live. However long that is.
Tobias burst through the door with Adriano and they started stomping on the flames straightaway. “What the fuck,” Tobias shouted as soon as he realized what was on fire.
There wasn’t much of Silas’s notebook left. The spine survived, still holding a few shriveled strips of its fungal binding. The burnt edges curled over backward, its pages chewed through with flame.
“What were you thinking?” Tobias stamped down the fire’s dying embers, sending a last gasp of ash into the air. “You could’ve burned the whole house down!”
“Try cooking up your drug now.”
“Do you honestly think I still need the book? I am the book.” Tobias snatched Silas’s REHAB IS FOR QUITTERS lighter out of my hand. “I’ll take away your toys if you can’t act—”
I spat in his face.
Tobias kept his eyes closed long enough to wipe his cheek. “Fine. No more Ghost.”
Anxiety flooded my chest. “I—I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it.”
Tobias turned to leave, Adriano following right behind him. He wasn’t listening to me anymore. “Just, please, I need to see—” The door slammed shut before I could say Silas.
Typical Erin. Sent to my room without any dinner.
I could still feel the tremor in my hand, that familiar itch reaching through my bones. I fucked up. No Ghost means no more Silas…What’s a haunted house without its ghosts? It’s just an empty shell. I suddenly feel hollow. Dispirited.
Skrch-skrch. The scraping came from behind the walls.
I wasn’t alone.
The baby peered blindly from the cracked drywall, its features sanded down like a cemetery cherub with its granite face all but erased. Was this Sean? Marcia’s son? Had she begun to imagine him, only to slip into a nightmare halfway through? What was this thing?
“You can come out now. I’m not going to hurt you.”
It took some coaxing, but the faceless baby slowly slipped out from the wall. Before I could stop it, it scurried into my lap. The soft thing nestled into the space between my legs like a hairless cat and I had to fight against my instincts of self-preservation—of sanity—not to fling it against the wall and run for my life.
It purred. Its pudgy, spongey limbs branched out from its plump torso like tuberous roots and hugged my left thigh. It rubbed its cheek against my hip. The thing somehow smiled. I couldn’t explain the feeling that swept over me. Maybe it approximated parental love, but I don’t know what that is. All I knew was I wasn’t afraid. Not anymore. Who could be afraid of this little bundle? It rolled on its back, exposing its navel-less belly. Was I supposed to scratch its tummy?
“Coochie coo.” I tickled its belly. “Coochie-coochie-coooo.”
It giggled with delight. Something about its voice convinced me it was a spirited boy.
A he. “What’ll we call you, huh?”
* * *
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