Amity (10 page)

It took another minute or two, but when my eyes could finally focus, there was Abel—no big surprise—shifting back and forth, nervous and twitchy, at the foot of the bed. His pajama pants sagged at the knees so he seemed even younger than he was. Smaller. Vulnerable, I mean.

But that didn’t change the fact that he woke me up, on purpose. My temper flared, no matter how I tried to remember
six years old
and stuff.

“You know you’re not supposed to bother me, especially first thing in the morning.” That was something my brother learned early on. The hard way.

He opened his mouth, then closed it again.

“What is it?” I asked, louder.
Why can’t you just SPIT IT OUT?
I wanted to shout. I bit my tongue, almost hard enough to draw blood, like wanting to taste it, even.

“I’m hungry.” His eyes were round.

Hungry
. That coppery blood taste in my mouth. It wasn’t real, I knew. Where did it come from? “Why didn’t you wake Mom? Or Jules?”

He shrugged. “I tried. Mommy wouldn’t get up.”

Well, fine. Sometimes that happened. Fair enough. She
wasn’t exactly a stranger to the wonders of modern medicine, and if she took something to help her sleep last night, she was probably all six feet deep in the Valley of the Dolls right about now.

“And Jules’s door is locked.”

Now I sat up real straight, peering at Abel. He wasn’t the hardiest kid, you know—not the most resilient, I mean—but he wasn’t
slow
or anything like that. So him saying that Jules had locked her door—that was weird.
Really
weird.

Because none of the bedrooms in Amity had locks on their doors.

I’d checked right away when we first arrived. Privacy is important to me, for a lot of reasons, you know. The boathouse door wasn’t the only one constantly hanging half open. I
knew
the bedrooms didn’t have locks. But whatever the kid may miss here and there, I mean, Abel wasn’t a liar. He wasn’t lying now. I would know, too—I could usually spot a lie from ten feet away.

“Her door can’t be locked, Abe.” I swung around on the bed and stood.

“But it is,” he said, like,
well, that’s that
, which I guess it was to him.

“Nope. No locks,” I insisted, moving across the floor, out the door, and down the hall to Jules’s room. Abel padded after me. I could tell he was working up to one of his righteous fits for if—
when
—he was proven wrong. I was actually sort of looking forward to it. “Look.”

I reached out, grabbed Jules’s doorknob.

I twisted it and shoved my weight forward.

The doorknob rattled in my hand. But it didn’t turn, didn’t spring open like it should have.

Like it
would
have.

If it weren’t locked.

I had one of those rare flashes of annoyance at Jules. Mainly I was jealous she figured out a way to jam her doorknob when I should have been the one to come up with that first. If I had, I’d be the one still asleep instead of standing, dumbly, in my sweatpants, waiting for the
I-told-you-so
smile to appear on Abel’s face.

But Abel knew better than that. He also knew better than to say out loud,
Well?
Though he was thinking it hard enough that it was all either of us could hear.

I glared at him. “I don’t know,” I said, running my fingers through my hair. “It didn’t have a lock on it before.” Because it
didn’t
. I’d checked it. I would have known. Would have seen.

I mean, I notice those kinds of things.

I pressed my index fingers against my temples and closed my eyes for a minute. Why was it so
bright
in the hallway? I opened them to see Abel grinning up at me. I wanted to smack him. Or worse. That sharp, metal taste filled up my mouth, again.

“I don’t know, Abel,” I said again. “Maybe it stuck in the humidity. Wood can warp in the heat, you know?”

But we both knew that was just some dumb explanation, like grown-ups make for things they can’t explain.

“Maybe,” Abel agreed, his eyes saying otherwise, and again I wanted to reach out and … 
something
.

Something not good.

I tried to push the thought back.

“Go wash up.” I choked back all the ugly things I really wanted to say to him right then. “I’ll fix you some cereal.”

Anything to get out of that hall, away from Jules’s door and the way it was mocking me. I could’ve tried going through the bathroom to get to her—should have, maybe—but by then the bloody, coppery taste running down my throat was strong enough so all I wanted was to get down to the kitchen and wash it down with a glass of water, or something.

Abel didn’t move, and the urge to rage at him, to scream and lash out, it rushed at me again. It was just so
bright
there in the hallway. Like crazy-making bright. A person couldn’t be expected to behave rationally with that kind of, I don’t know, unearthly
glow
going on. “Come on.”

He balked. “I don’t want to.”

“Too bad.” Life was full of disappointing lessons, and I could teach him all about those. I didn’t want to spend one more second in that hallway. The sunlight streaming in from the stained glass at the end of the hall was like a laser. For a minute, I wondered if it could actually cut straight through me. For a minute, I thought that wouldn’t be so weird, so impossible, I mean, here in this place.
“Go.”

He made a face. “The bathroom … smells,” he offered finally. “I don’t like it.”

Jesus. “It’s a
bathroom
,” I pointed out. “It’s not going to smell like roses.”

Abel shifted. “Not like … not like that,” he said. “There’s a … there’s a
way
, a way that it smells. Like … like something awful.”

Blood. On my tongue, in my throat, rushing through me like electricity
. “It’s a
bathroom
.”

“It smells like something … bad. Like something
wrong
,” he insisted. “I don’t like it.”

The redness flared behind my eyelids again, and I actually, physically, felt my body twitch, pitch toward him, wanting to reach out, to twist and crunch and—

But that was an
overreaction
, what the school counselor back downstate would have called a
distortion
. Abel was six. Just a kid. All he was doing was behaving like a six-year-old kid.

It was a bathroom. It smelled weird. No big deal, right? There was no godly reason in the world that my nerve endings should be humming like they were exposed, like my skin’d been peeled back in one long yank, like I was standing here, in the searing light of this hallway, with my insides on the outside, raw and runny.

I counted to three.

“It’s just a bathroom, Abel.” I forced each word past the edges of my teeth. “Maybe the pipes are rusted or something. But you still have to wash up.
Now
.”

“I—” I could tell he was thinking about protesting again, but the look on my face must have changed his mind. “Fine.” He shuffled toward the bathroom like a death row inmate, shoulders slumped, staggering slightly.

I gagged and swallowed that make-believe bucket of blood back down.

I MADE IT MAYBE ALL Of TEN FEET DOWN THE HALL BEFORE ABEL SCREAMED
, loud enough to rattle my bones and then some. Truly, the last time I could recall hearing a sound like that coming out of that kid was when he was four and dislocated his shoulder after he was caught messing around in Dad’s tool kit. Dad wasn’t too happy about that, don’t you know.

I froze in the hallway, thinking that his banshee-scream would probably wake the others, so I wouldn’t have to deal with him and his stupid breakfast after all. Or if he woke Dad, there’d be worse stuff to deal with than Abel’s breakfast. But even after a beat or two, no one came—weird, really weird—and holy
God
, the screeching wasn’t quieting down at all.

So I doubled back into the bathroom to see what was going on.

I DON’T KNOW WHAT I EXPECTED TO FIND WHEN I GOT THERE
—I guess I’d already decided that the godforsaken screaming was just Abel being a freak—so I for sure wasn’t prepared to peep into the doorway and see him crouched, tucked under the sink, rocking on the tiled floor, knees pulled up to his chest, bawling away.

“What the
hell
, Abel?” I asked, leaning down and reaching an arm out to pull him up.

He swatted me away and shrieked even louder. “I
told
you I don’t like it in here,” he gasped between sobs. “I
told
you.”

I grabbed at his wrists and dragged him to his feet. “Yeah, you told me. And I told
you
you were being crazy. So quit it right now.” I glanced around the bathroom. “There’s nothing in here to be afraid of. Unless you’ve got some hang-up about ugly vinyl shower curtains. So get over it.”

He rubbed at his snotty nose with the back of his hand. “It’s blood,” he muttered.

Blood?

I could still taste it in the back of my throat. The thing about blood is: it’s one of those
real
, tactile things that ground me, I’ve been told. And not in a good way. Blood made this moment, this situation, a little more interesting. Especially with the imaginary tang of it still coating my tongue.

“What are you talking about, Abel? Did you hurt yourself?” I reached for his hand again, but he pulled back.

He shook his head, real resolved-like. “Not me. Not
my
blood.”

“Where?” A look around the room told me he was either seeing things, or just plain lying.
Oh come on
. That voice inside me was real steady, real sure.
Come
on.

“The sink.” He kept his gaze on the floor like his head was glued that way. “When I tried to run the taps.”

I sighed. “It’s an old house, Abel. The pipes are probably rusty. What you saw was probably rust. Not blood.” Of
course
, whatever it was that he saw, it wasn’t blood. Of course not.
Come. ON
.

Never mind what
you
saw in the window that night, Connor
.

Because I was different, right? I
am
different. The way that I see things—the things that I see—they aren’t the same things that normal people see.

“Look.” I grabbed him by the shoulders and turned him so he was facing the basin, so he couldn’t look away, forcing his clenched fists back down to his sides. I took his face between my palms and swiveled it, enjoying—I have to admit this now—the pulse of his skinny neck tendons.
“Look.”

I twisted the cold water tap.

For a minute, nothing happened. Like, nothing at all, not even that gassy little puff of stale air that coughs up when old plumbing gets goosed after years of no use. I’d been so ready for a thick stream of metallic liquid that the empty moment felt swollen, full-up with badness, or something like. I held my breath, fixed on the tap, wondering if it actually
was
blood that was going to come rushing out.

Wondering if I wanted it to be.

I exhaled slow, and then there was a giant, creaking groan, and a gush of putrid … 
sludge
, that was really the best word for it, a brownish
sludge
that came streaming down in heavy chunks, filthy rainfall that was halfway between a liquid and a solid, really.

Whatever it was, it definitely wasn’t
blood
—blood wasn’t thick and clotted that way, I knew, not when it was running fresh—but this
was
repulsive. Completely disgusting, like last night’s leftovers run through the garbage disposal, taking a brief curtain call on their way to the town’s sewer system.

My stomach hitched, and I closed my eyes, trying not to react. Whatever was coming out of that tap was nasty, for sure, but it wasn’t
blood
, and I’d be damned if I was going to feed Abel’s little freak-out.

But … that
smell …
it was awful. That image of trash collecting in a drain came back to me, and I shuddered, my stomach flipping over again. The taste of blood was gone from my mouth and I actually wanted it back just then, like truly wished for it, is how bad whatever was coming out of the sink was.

All of a sudden, that image came back to me—a shotgun again, like the one I saw in that creepy half vision, half dream that first night. The one that appeared with the banging of the boathouse door, I mean. There wasn’t any banging in the bathroom—there wasn’t any sound except for pipes creaking and Abel bawling and the hiccupping gushes belching from the faucet—but I saw that shotgun just the same, and caught a whiff of gunpowder under all the stinking rot filling up the room. I pressed the heels of my palms against my eyes, but it didn’t make the image go away.

“See?” Abel tugged at the hem of my shorts. “See what I mean? It’s
blood
.”

Oh, I saw all right. It wasn’t blood, but it was
awful
, reeking of decay and dripping with … I didn’t even want to guess. I could see it clear as I could see my own hand in front of my face. Clear as I’d seen that shriveled, stripped-down corpse—
because, yeah, let’s just say it, that’s what it was, what I saw
—in the window that first night.

But it still wasn’t blood. And I couldn’t let Abel know how, whatever it
was
, it was making me want to crawl right out of my skin. I was having another
overreaction
, and I couldn’t let it show.

We had to get out of that room. The stink was making me swoon.

“It’s not blood, Abel.” A fresh wave of dizziness hit me as I forced the words out. “I told you. It’s an old house; the plumbing is funky. Probably the pipes are half rotted out—” I tripped on that word
rotted
, because, man, that was exactly what the room smelled like.

“That’s probably why we could even afford this place. Why it was so cheap. I bet the pipes are nothing but mold and rust.” And, man, oh man, why did that image make me think of a human being, a human body, all blood and guts, veins and insides? Why did it make me think of that yawning mouth, those eyeless sockets, all peering out at me from the window?