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all it took was a poke to turn this one into something completely different, something fascinating. Something alive. A creamy kind of hunger Vera’s never felt before puts an ache in her jaw and a twitch low in her belly.
Girl please don't turn into your father
“I have a system. I save the other men. I keep them from turning into monsters. When they start to go bad, I help them.”
So he only kills men
She decides right then and there to forget the question she was going to ask, about the bucket and the drills and the spiles, about the weekends her father spends away harvesting sap that never seems to make it home.
the key is stolen twice over—first, from when Vera took her father’s keychain from his nightstand and slipped it off the ring, and then again from when she told him she was going to the bathroom at the hardware store and went to the key-cutting station instead.
That's Kinda genius of a kid that age to copy a key.
The thing is a man. The man is on the ground, his arms and legs spread in an X just like the big wooden one. He is trying so hard to scream.
“I’m not the first,” the man whispers frantically. “He has a whole setup down here, he’s done this before. He has a routine, a schedule, he’s organized. And he’s crazy, he thinks he has to get something out of me, I don’t know—I’m chained up over a drain so the smell doesn’t—”
So I thought I should let you know that he’s going to kill you tomorrow. It’ll be over really soon.”
they weren’t there. Her eyes scanned the soft white landscape of the fitted sheet that hugged the mattress. The bed was bare. The blankets were gone. The topsheet and the quilt had both been tugged free of the weight of the mattress, untucked and discarded.
Daphne wouldn’t die if her lemonade was delivered a few hours late. Or maybe, Vera thought vaguely, settling back into the pillows—maybe she would die. Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad to skip to the end of all this. That was a Wrong Thought.
And he couldn’t have known that she would find the hole under the pillow-end of her bed. He couldn’t have. What kind of person would foresee that and let it happen anyway?
Only in hindsight did she recognize it for what it was—a peephole, just like the one in the front door, the one that was too high up for Vera to look out of. It was made for watching. It was made for peeking. So Vera had peeked.
It must have been intentional. Francis built his office to sit above his work. He must have wanted to see and hear what happened in the basement in his absence. She could picture him so easily, sitting at his desk, listening to the wet thumps of a man struggling to escape. If that had been intentional, he would have known that Vera could hear, wouldn’t he? He would have known that she’d know about his projects.
There was nothing down there. Not even a shadow. Not even dust. Vera frowned. There should have been dust under the bed. There had been dust under the bed last time she looked. But now, the floor shone clean.
Wonder if she watches? Wonder if she loves me the way I love her?
It had been a friendship born of proximity and convenience, pushed along by their mothers. Neither of them would have picked the other one for a best friend, given the choice. Still, that friendship had lasted for years. It had defined her childhood.
“My dad is missing,” he says,
Well we all know what happened to him
He’s not even angry when he’s working in the basement—when Vera watches him through the peephole under her bed, he mostly just seems sad.
“Thank you,” she whispers. “For warning me.”
“Nah, Vee. That house would never let you leave.”
Rereading note: He acts like he knows the house is alive. Maybe he does remember what happened that night. Of course he could have meant this metaphorically.
“I loved you. I’ll always love you. But I hated you too, at least for a time.”
There’s the thin hate we have for strangers.” At this, so fast Vera almost didn’t catch it, Daphne’s eyes flicked for just a moment to James Duvall. “And then there’s the thick, true, smothering hate we have for those we know best.
There was her brand-new bed, the mattress wrapped with blankets as tight as a birthday present. Her brand-new bed with the frame that went right down to the floor. She’d gone to sleep with that bed tucked into the corner of the room, flush against two walls. Now it was in the center of the room. Right in the middle. The head of the bed stood a good two feet away from the peephole in the floor. And the foot of the bed—the foot of the bed was propped up, high and proud. It was resting on the bottom drawer of her dresser.
Wth how'd she not feel her entire bed move?
He has no idea, Vera thinks. He’s broken, and that has to be hard, but he’s going to be so happy once he finds out that she can fix him.
Oh boy we all know where this is going...
It’s a well-built house they live in. It absorbs noise, hides light, keeps secrets. It wouldn’t betray her. Not ever.
she looks up at him, sees the raw white panic on his face. In that moment, she loves him more than she’s ever loved anyone in her whole life. He’s her best friend. She can’t let him rot from the inside. She has to save him. She has to.
She just holds up her bloody hands, and she watches him understand. “Is any of that yours?” he asks. When she shakes her head, he doesn’t look surprised.
Something is with him. It’s hunched over him, kneeling right in the middle of his pooling blood, its back curled over like a snail’s shell. It looks like a tall kid or maybe a small adult, long-limbed and skinny.
Wth is she delusional or there really is a demon around?
Wherever his skin isn’t covered in blood, it’s smeared with some gray matte substance Vera doesn’t recognize.
She can catch her father whispering the word hospital, and her mother saying just get rid of him. Her father’s voice rises above a whisper when he says only a kid
Her mom is just as bad as her father.
The third thing she knew was this: She knew that she wanted to see it.
There was one more thing she could be sure of: she hadn’t been meant to hear that.
“This house is mine. It’s my legacy. It’s my right to elevate it.”
“It’s him,” she said, her voice high with pain.
In that moment it became clear: Daphne knew. She knew about the haunting, the thing that came in the night, she knew about whatever it was.
And she was hungry. She was so, so hungry. The longer she was home, the harder it was to keep fighting that hunger down. To keep pretending it wasn’t there. She swallowed hard, trying to keep it at bay. Trying, trying, trying.
Hungry for what? Killing
James Duvall’s great work of art, illuminated at last by the summer sun. All of it ruined. Thick black ooze was smeared across each panel, long slick trails of it. As Vera came closer she could see what looked like deep, cruel fingernail grooves dug into the layers of plaster—the sculptural element Duvall was so proud of.
And now that Duvall thought the house was going to be his, she was certain. She was never going to leave. Not now that, after all these years, she was finally where she belonged.
“Watch,” Vera’s mother whispers, her fingers digging into Vera’s shoulders. “Don’t you even blink, Vera Marie Crowder. You did this.”
He’s taking the blame for what you did, so that you can have a life.” Two tendons stand out in the front of her neck. “I told him to just get rid of the boy after what you did, but he went to the hospital anyway
She needs to not be alone. So she snaps her fingers four times again, and she is not alone. It’s okay, her friend says, wrapping her up in warmth as she sobs. Hush now, Vera-baby. Hush now.
The thing that had been under her bed. The thing that was now wearing Daphne like a raincoat, hood up and buttons done.
Vera frowned. “How long has it been you talking, then?” “We were … trading, for a little while. When a new part of her started to rot, I’d help smooth things over. When it got to be bad, when I was handling things most of the time. That’s when I called you.”
That first dinner you were here for. She was saying terrible things about you having foulness in you, and you asked me to stop it. So I let her go. She was almost all gone anyway. A day at the most, I think, and then she would have been done.”
“This is why you didn’t need anything. Food, water, help going to the bathroom. This is the system you were talking about,”
In the basement that night, with Brandon? I couldn’t soak it up fast enough. I’m better with light and sound than I am with blood. I had to try to stop the bleeding instead.
So it's her own personal guardian monster-house
The dark rot that had poured out of her mother’s mouth, that had stopped her midsentence just when she’d been about to say the very worst things. The earthy smell that had filled the dining room. It had been Daphne all along.
