House of Skin (30 page)

Emily pulled away and spoke his name. Staring into her unbelieving face, thoughts of Annabel vanished.

“What is it?”

“Over there,” Emily said and pointed with a trembling finger. “There was someone in the window.”

He followed her gaze. “What are—”

“A woman,” Emily said, a hand massaging her throat. “She was staring at me like she wanted to kill me.”
 

August, 1983

Barbara’s screams went on into the night.

She hated Myles for taking her to the basement. The midwife argued for the hospital, but he’d shouted her down. The midwife told him Barbara would be more comfortable in her bed and Myles told her he’d be damned if he’d have her bleeding all over his sheets. He’d fathered the child, so she’d damn well do what he said. He reminded the midwife he’d also paid for her, and poked the old woman in the chest to drive home his point.

Barbara asked for painkillers; Myles refused. Barbara asked for Sam, and Myles smacked her in the mouth. Half the night she wept. By dawn the head was visible, Barbara fully dilated. Forty-five minutes of pushing and the old woman wrapped the bloody baby girl in a wool blanket, scooped a finger through the baby’s mouth to get rid of the slime.

Myles’s attitude changed then, and what Barbara had feared—his being disappointed if the child were a girl—never materialized. Instead, he stared at the baby, fascinated. He and Annabel had never conceived, though he never doubted his ability to father a child. Barbara wondered how he could be so sure, but wrote it off to his supreme arrogance. She’d been shattered when the doctor told her she was pregnant, but now, as she accepted the baby from the harried old woman, she forgot all about Myles and Sam and illegitimacy and lost herself in the little girl’s stunning green eyes.

“Julia Grace,” Barbara said, and holding the baby to her chest, wept.

They walked through the forest, Emily making sarcastic comments about Indiana.

They’d eaten lunch at one of Shadeland’s two Chinese restaurants. She’d said the soup tasted like dishwater, that it was nothing like the place in Memphis she frequented. He said the selection wasn’t as varied in a small town as it was in a city of two million, and she said you’re not kidding.

Then they sat in silence.

It was the way all their conversations seemed to go. It dawned on him that she’d come to Watermere not to check on him, not to assure herself of his well-being, but to retrieve him, to rescue him from the sticks and deliver him to the city, to his old job and his old life, and she was disappointed he didn’t need rescuing. She did not like the way his face had emerged from its cocoon of fat. His hair, short and styled rather than longer and askew, bothered her. She said it made him look like he thought he was still in his twenties.

That pissed him off.

She loved reminding him of the passage of time, as though he weren’t aware of it without her pointing it out. In times past she’d used his age as a means of scaring him into a marriage proposal. She’d joked about the two of them standing at the altar on walkers, having a nursing home ceremony. Now, she was using the same tactic for an end more cruel. His youth was gone, she was reminding him, his workout regime and new image were a desperate attempt at recapturing it.

It was terribly ironic.

For years she had harped on his lack of cardiovascular fitness, his lack of ambition, and now that he was doing something about it, making the most of the time and resources he had, she was criticizing him.

He was thinking of how unfair she was being when she gasped with delight and left him on the forest path. She was already through the break in the trees before he realized where she was going.

Feeling a trifle light-headed, he followed her into the graveyard.

And damned if she didn’t head right to Annabel’s tombstone. He lingered near the mouth of the trail and hoped she’d lose interest. But the marker had grabbed her the way it had him, and soon she was calling him over, insisting he take a look at it with her.

He made his way past the smaller markers—several of them guarded by surly crows—and suppressed an irrational fear of her finding out about the novel. She was saying something about how disrespectful it was for people to desecrate so elegant a gravestone, but what got his attention was the way the designs on the marker had gotten clearer since earlier that day. Now not only were the name and dates unscathed, the rest of the carvings had largely recovered as well.

Near the bottom, inches above the sharp rectangular base were two designs. On the right side of the marker was a full moon peeking out of a bank of clouds. On the left was a woman’s face, and when he bent to touch it Emily said something that he missed. His breathing slowed and as his feet edged backward through thickening grass, Emily put out a hand, and though he knew she was speaking he no longer heard her voice.

He walked out of the cemetery and down the forest trail. Though she spoke sharply, her words were a muddled haze. He saw a woman in a white gown, her blue eyes bloodshot above her gaunt cheeks. He saw a younger, dark-haired woman who reminded him of Julia. He heard them shouting at one another, and when he returned to the den and the typewriter, he recorded what they said.

Chapter Eighteen

Emily stood outside the house, irresolute. After finally finding Paul locked away inside the office, she rapped on the door and asked him why he’d left her in the forest. He refused to answer her questions or even acknowledge her presence. She’d stood outside the office door listening to the typewriter keys clack away far too rapidly—Paul had always been a hunt-and-peck typist who’d be lucky to crank out thirty words a minute. Finally, she gave up and came outside.

Now, without anything else to do, she decided to take a shower. Her pores were a horror of oil and travel grime, and if she didn’t wash up soon, she’d go crazy in her own skin. In fact, she was already feeling a little unstable, the sedatives she’d taken reacting with her regular heart medicine. She knew she shouldn’t mix the two, but darn it she needed to calm down.

Emily turned and regarded the old house, the solid red brick that had lasted over a hundred years and would likely last several hundred more. The water, when she’d gotten a drink from the tap, had tasted surprisingly pure. The shower water would be no different.

She thought of the face in the window, the woman’s hateful eyes.

Though a shiver plaited down her spine at the memory, her reason nevertheless won out. Even if, she thought as she climbed the porch steps, there was some backwoods voyeur wandering around, the woman was unlikely to bother Emily while she showered.

She went in and stopped at the first bathroom she found. Just off the kitchen, adjacent to what looked like a servant or guest bedroom, she found a tiny but perfectly good toilet, sink and shower stall.
Well
, she thought,
the tinier the better. Fewer places for vermin to hide
. She’d heard them earlier, skulking in the shadows of the ballroom, and had no desire for a further encounter.

Quickly, she retrieved her black travel tote from the kitchen table and returned to the little room. The décor left much to be desired: pink wallpaper with a paisley design, chocolate brown pedestal sink and toilet, a hazy glass shower stall with more than a little rust creeping up its metal frame. An odd falling sensation tumbled through her, and she grasped the sink edge to steady herself. God, she better not mix her meds anymore. Though she’d never experimented with drugs, she supposed this weird, unsettled sensation was how they made a person feel.

When the room stopped tilting, she opened the shower door and looked with repugnance at the swirling rust stain, the ancient drain grate gone black with age. Emily twisted on the hot and cold knobs and was pleasantly surprised at the clearness of the water that spewed forth. Within moments the water was hot enough to steam up the mirror. All the better. She had no desire to see any more than she already had of the room. Renovating it would be, she decided, one of the first jobs she tackled at Watermere.

The clean white towel she’d brought curled in a ball on the edge of the sink, Emily peeled off her shirt and stepped out of her jeans. The steamy air was exhilarating on her bare skin. God, how she’d been craving a shower. The smell of the hot water, lazy and faintly metallic, routed the dank scent of must that had until now predominated. Her bra unclasped and hung over a towel rod, she drew down her underwear and tossed them aside. Immediately the drowsy mist moistened her pubic hair. The sultry air caressed the skin of her bare buttocks. Emily reached out and rubbed clear a circle on the mirror. The condensation wetted her hand, but rather than drying it on the towel, she slowly drew her palm along her belly, just under the navel. Her nipples hardened.

Making sure the lock on the doorknob was fixed in place, she crossed to the shower and gradually made her way under the scalding water. Ordinarily she hated too-hot showers, but this one felt sublime. The painful needling on her skin, the steam filling her lungs and nearly stealing her breath… God, it was so good it was all she could do not to faint. One hand braced on the white wall beside the showerhead, she leaned forward and took her time with it, her right hand kneading her breasts. Her fingers crawled down her tummy, massaging. The delicious burning water sprayed over her forehead, her eyelids, pure sweet runnels of it lapping over her lips, her teeth. She drank in the tropical spray, the wall upon which she leaned changing, growing pliant, rubbery, the warm surface writhing beneath her fingertips—

Emily froze.

She opened her eyes and saw the outline of a face and a large pair of hands reaching toward her. She opened her mouth to scream but couldn’t.

She watched the large finger shapes in the wall swelling and closing over her hand, the face pressing forward, leering, the pupilless eyes mere inches from her own, the showerhead itself bowing up from the strain of the undulating wall.

Emily screamed.

She pulled away, and in the moment before her elbow crashed against the stall door, she saw—she
felt
—the large fingers pulling her hand into the wall, the staring face grinning in triumph.

Emily landed on the pink tile and dove for the door. Her wet fingers fumbled about the lock for an eternity before she ripped open the door and dashed to the foyer. She’d never in her life been out of doors without clothes on, but she scarcely noticed her nakedness as she sprinted over the biting gravel driveway to the Camry. Her hands were shaking so wildly she was barely able to work the ignition, and she cut the wheel too severely as she swerved out of the garage. The edge of the driver’s side bumper scraped against the wooden garage as she arrowed the Camry toward the lane, the car sluing as rocks spattered the surrounding grass.

She had to calm down, had to corral her galloping heart. She’d escaped, that was what mattered. If she spiraled out of control now, she would only have herself to blame.

There
, she thought as she pulled onto the empty country road.
That was better. Safe and away from the house, from the staring, ravenous face and those horrible writhing hands
.

Then, a thought jolted through her, and Emily’s foot recoiled from the accelerator. The Camry decelerated quickly, the gravel road grabbing her tires as if refusing to let Emily leave. She stopped the car, moved the gearshift to park.

What on earth was she doing?
 

She thought of the sedative her doctor had prescribed…Zolpidem, that had been its name. He gave it to her for insomnia, but when she looked it up on the Internet she learned it also had hallucinogenic qualities. And that didn’t even take into account how it might interact with her heart medication, her birth control.

So what was more likely? That she’d experienced an upsetting—and incredibly vivid—hallucination brought on by prescription drugs or that a monstrous male figure living in the walls of Watermere caught her masturbating?

She slumped forward on the wheel, a weary laughter taking hold. To think she’d nearly thrown away this new life with Paul because of a fluky drug reaction. Was she really so skittish? She continued to laugh as she pointed the car toward the shoulder and began the process of turning around. By the time she was heading back to Watermere, she’d all but managed to discount the idea that there were spirits inside the old house, that there’d been rubbery hands growing out of the tile walls. As the Camry moved down the lane, she was able to dismiss nearly every detail of the hallucination.

But try as she would, the leering white face would not completely fade.

Timmons and McLaughlin sat across from Sam, and Sam could tell by their faces that they’d rather be discussing anything but the disappearance of Daryl Applegate. Though no one could stand the guy, his vanishing had clearly shaken both deputies.

He couldn’t blame them.

Sam knew they’d come up with the same thing—nothing—that it was a waste of time, but he knew he wouldn’t get much done today anyway, so what was the use of pretending it wasn’t on all their minds? He wished he’d met them somewhere other than the police station. Lately, he hated coming here, as though the dual disappearances of Brand and Applegate were proof he didn’t belong here, didn’t deserve the job.