“What is it?” Perry asked. I heard her come up behind me.
I glanced at her over my shoulder and smiled. “Just Michael’s daily tea.”
She frowned, her face paling a bit. “Dex. What is going on here?”
I shrugged and walked over to the fridge. I opened the door.
A puff of dust blew out of it and once it cleared, I could see a dead rat inside, the black insects crawling out of it. “I guess they came from here.”
“All right,” Maximus said, irritation coloring his tone. “This is getting ridiculous. I think it’s time to leave.”
“It’s always been time to leave,” Ada said with disgust, walking around the table and heading to the hallway.
“No!” I suddenly yelled, the force of my voice surprising myself. Ada stopped in her tracks. Everyone stared at me in shock. “We’re not leaving until I find what I’m looking for!”
“Dex,” Perry said carefully. “I don’t know what’s going but someone is playing a cruel joke on you, on us. None of this shit should be here all these years later. Dex, we have to go. You’re not yourself.”
At that, Jingle Bell Rock came blaring out from the living room. Perry’s mom screamed, jumping in the air.
I ran out of the kitchen and down the hall to the living room my eyes briefly glancing at the Renoir lady. She had the head of a blackened goat.
I skidded to a stop at the entrance to the living room and felt everyone crowd behind me. Perry sucked in her breath.
The Christmas tree was lit up, a mess of cobwebs and twinkling lights. The radio was blaring and black candles were lit everywhere, inky droplets of wax gathering around their stems like they’d been burning for decades.
“The presents,” I heard Perry whisper. Under the tree, the presents were leaking shiny red blood, soaking through the wrapping paper.
All of a sudden a few thumps resounded from the ceiling, making the light fixtures swing. That was the upstairs bathroom above us.
We weren’t alone in the house.
But then again, I already knew that.
It was time for me to come home.
I turned and quickly darted up the stairs, taking them two at a time while Perry yelled for me to stop. But she was already too far away and the world was turning a little too black.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Perry
I didn’t know what happened. One minute we were staring at the Christmas display in the living room, as if the house still had electricity under all that dust, the next minute Dex had pushed past me and started sprinting up the stairs.
“Dex!” I yelled at him, trying to grab on. What had Maximus just said about not splitting up?
“Damn it,” Maximus cursed and then went up the stairs after him. I was about to but then I didn’t feel quite right about leaving my mother and sister downstairs alone.
“I think you guys should leave,” I told them but their attention wasn’t on me. It wasn’t on Dex and Maximus who had gone up the stairs. It wasn’t on the Christmas display and the presents of blood.
It was on the man standing by the window, slowly pulling the curtains shut. He was wearing a sharp suit, his back to us. There was something off about him. It was his hand, as he reached for the curtain.
It was a cloven hoof.
The curtains closed, shutting out the outside world, making the world inside turn black. I widened my eyes, trying to see better but the man was gone, disappearing into the shadows of the room
“Who the hell was that?” my mother asked, her voice soft and shaking. I looked to her and Ada. They both looked like they were going to faint.
I swallowed down the lump in my throat, my mouth feeling like it was filled with sawdust. I hadn’t even noticed how fast my heart was racing until I felt it leap against my chest.
“I don’t know,” I croaked out. “I don’t know, I don’t know.” I grabbed their hands and they both gasped from fright and I pulled them toward the front door. I didn’t know what was going on, but this was not their fight. This was Dex’s, and because it was his, it was also mine. But my mother and Ada, they had no reason to be here, no stake.
They had to go. It had been a mistake to bring them here in the first place.
I reached for the doorknob, ready to turn it and escape into the heat and sunshine that seemed like another world, but I cried out in pain instead. It was as hot as grabbing a stove top and immediately seared my skin.
“Perry!” my mom cried out, reaching for my hand. I could barely open it, it was already raw and red, burning away. “We need to get ointment on it.”
“We need to get out of here,” I told her, trying to push past the pain. “It’s fine. Let’s go out the back.” There had been a glass door leading from the kitchen into the small backyard, we had just been so enraptured by the place settings that I didn’t get a good look at it.
We hurried to the kitchen and were surprised to see that the blinds in there had been pulled shut too, shuttering us in darkness. I went straight to the backdoor and reached to open it with my good hand but Ada had already beat me to it, wrapping the end of a placemat around her palm as a precaution.
But the doorknob wouldn’t turn, no matter how hard she tried. “Fuck!” she yelled.
I expected my mother to admonish her for her language but she was looking back at the hallway. While Ada struggled, I turned and saw a little boy enter the kitchen, dressed in pajamas.
“What are you doing in my house?” he asked. He had to have been around seven years old, sandy hair, big dark eyes. He had a sharp look about him and spoke like he was highly educated for his age.
My mother and I exchange a glance.
“Uh,” I said, “you live here?”
Had we just been busted in someone else’s house?
But as much as that seemed like it, that couldn’t be it. The little boy narrowed his eyes at us and padded across the kitchen to the table where he sat down. “I’m not the only one here,” he said. “I expected dinner to be ready.” He clasped his hands in front of his plate and bowed his plate, as if he were saying grace.
My mother cleared her throat. “I think we have come in here by accident. Could you tell us the proper way out of here? The front door and this door don’t seem to be working.” Her voice was shaking but she was holding it together.
The boy kept his eyes closed and mumbled a few incomprehensible words under his breath before saying, “You can get out through my window. Upstairs. But don’t go out my brother’s, you’ll fall to your death.”
My chest tightened as the kid reached for Michael’s mug and brought it toward him.
“I wouldn’t drink that,” I told him. “Something has gone rotten in there.”
He looked at me and his eyes were completely black, like a shark’s. My mom stiffened beside me, seeing it too.
“There’s something rotten in the whole house, so as long as the door stays open.”
“What door?” Ada asked, sounding like she wished she hadn’t opened her mouth.