Little Emmett Read online

  It had been a week since Lionel’s disappearance. Eileen had yet to go home, choosing to stay with her mother for as long as she needed. Each day, however, it seemed her mother needed her more and more. Mrs. Holmes hardly left her bedroom. Eileen slipped in and out, getting her whatever she needed. That week she did most of the work around the house, enlisting as much of the children’s help as she could get. Tyler also pitched in as much as possible.

  “Hey.”

  The children startled, crouched outside Mrs. Holmes bedroom door. Tyler stood at the end of the hall. He gestured for them to get away from the door, so they did.

  ✽ ✽ ✽

  Every day, when Eileen could spare the time—usually when her mother was sleeping, which was quite a lot—she and Tyler searched the woods around the house. The children helped. But there was so much snow, it was impossible to know where Lionel could have gone. Any tracks he may have left were buried.

  ✽ ✽ ✽

  The days kept adding up, until one week turned into weeks. New storms rolled in and freshened up the old ones. No matter how much snow there was, the children weren’t likely to play in it as it was far too cold these days. And despite spending most their time indoors, the house was drearily quiet—unless you were upstairs, in which case Lionel’s delirious outbursts were replaced by his widow’s mourning.

  “I knew it was coming,” Eileen confided to them one supper. “I just didn’t think it would be something like this.”

  Christmas came and went unnoticed. The decorations remained, though they stopped turning the lights on in the evenings. The tree sat dark and forlorn in the corner of the reading room.

  Without being constantly reminded to clean up after themselves, the children’s arts and crafts littered the floor of the reading room, along with books stacked in places they didn’t belong. The kitchen table was strewn with numerous pages of Bailey’s drawings and other artifacts no one seemed to bother discarding.

  “We should just go,” Tobie said to the others one afternoon, speaking of the fort they’d abandoned in the woods months ago. “There’s nothing to do here, and if we’re supposed to wait until we can ask Irene…”

  “It’s too cold, anyway,” Jackie said. “We’d get halfway there and want to come home.”

  “So what? It’d be something to do, at least.”

  “There’s stuff to do here,” Clark said. “It’s just…”

  “Boring as shit.” Tobie lay dramatically on his side. “Sleeping all day sounds better than this.”

  “Then do it…”

  “What is this?”

  The children jumped at the sound of her voice. Clark gasped. Mrs. Holmes leaned through the reading room door, squinting her tired eyes.

  “Why is that…” she wagged a finger at the Christmas tree across the room, “… out here?”

  Jackie cleared her throat. “We put it up while you were gone.”

  “It isn’t Christmas,” Mrs. Holmes said. “Take it down.”

  Emmett shriveled as she drew her eyes over them. The Mrs. Holmes he’d seen last—the one who baked birthday cakes and read nighttime stories and pulled the covers up to their chins—was not the Mrs. Holmes who had returned to them. She was changed. Not even her physical appearance was wholly recognizable. She wasn’t sleeping, and it showed.

  She moved on, leaving them as they were, her suffocating shadow going with her. Emmett traded tense glances with the others.

  “You’d think she’d be relieved,” Tobie said. “Now she doesn’t have to worry about him anymore. Getting crazier, I mean.”

  “He was her husband,” Jackie said. “She loved him.”

  Tobie scoffed, though he had nothing else to add.

  ✽ ✽ ✽

  “I don’t feel good.”

  These were Bailey’s final words at the table one night before she puked on the floor under her chair. She’d complained the whole day she wasn’t feeling well. Queasy. Tired. Cold. Eileen dreaded what she knew was coming.

  “How are you sick?” Eileen had said, leading her by the hand out of the kitchen toward the bathroom to clean her up. “I’m the only one who even comes and goes around here… I’m not sick… Why in the world are you getting sick…”

  That night they listened to Bailey’s developing cough from across the hall. Soon she started to cry, her sweet little voice growing to a shrill, haunting whine, interrupted by more coughing, off and on. They listened as the door across the hall opened, and what sounded like Jackie’s footsteps going downstairs. Soon thereafter she returned with Eileen.

  Emmett, with that familiar, bitter longing in his heart, listened through the wall as Eileen comforted Bailey and instructed her to take her medicine. He remembered times he was sick and his mother had taken care of him. The cold, strong-scented goo she’d rub on his chest. The taste of the cough syrup…

  As he thought about these things, by impulse he leaned out of bed toward his bag and, searching for the zipper, remembered that what he reached for wouldn’t be there. Because…

  Cough, cough, cough across the hall.

  … he’d lost it.

  The door to the girls’ bedroom shut. A single pair of footsteps creaked down the hall, down the stairs. Bailey’s cough was significantly reduced. The medicine must have been fast-acting.

  Lucky for Eileen, come the following morning, Mrs. Holmes was well-stocked with plenty more.

  ✽ ✽ ✽

  There was a painful lump in his throat when he swallowed. A slight tickle when he breathed. He wobbled to his feet, stifled a cough. If not for his bladder, he’d have just fallen back into bed. He shuffled into the hall, to the bathroom. The house was quiet. He relieved himself, swaying over the toilet bowl. He took a deep breath as he finished, and that tickle in his throat grew to a raspy cough.

  As he headed back to bed, Eileen appeared at the end of the hall, head bobbing up the stairs. She stopped as she noticed him there, a hand to his chest, clearing his throat.

  All she said was, “Shit.”

  ✽ ✽ ✽

  In the early hours, Emmett rolled over in bed at the sound of someone falling out of theirs. Footsteps raced across the bedroom. The bedroom door flung open. Those footsteps swept into the hall, nearly slipping on their way out, and scurried away until what sounded like the clink of a toilet seat followed by immediate retching.

  ✽ ✽ ✽

  At dinner, rather than their usual chatter, they exchanged coughs and sneezes and sniffles. Eileen whipped up a large pot of noodle soup. It was mostly broth, which was fine because that was all the children could keep down. Eileen cleaned the kitchen, prepared the table, made the soup, wrangled the children together, and did all of this while sick herself. The children queued up at the kitchen counter as she ladled soup into their bowls, stifling coughs in the crook of her elbow while she did.

  “Thanks for the soup,” Clark said. “It’s really good.”

  “I’m glad you like it…”

  They slurped their steaming soup with shivering shoulders, each praying it would all stay down by the time they’d finished.

  ✽ ✽ ✽

  Eileen was on her hands and knees, a bucket beside her, scrubbing the floor under the kitchen table where Tobie had vomited during breakfast. She gagged as she scrubbed, struggling not to add to the mess.

  Emmett sat with Bailey on the floor just outside the kitchen, drawing like they usually did. He looked up just in time to be startled by Mrs. Holmes coming down the stairs. She looked as horrible as he felt. Her eyes were dim and raw, reluctant to see or be seen, willfully wounding anything they touched. She moved past them, pausing in the kitchen entryway as she looked between her daughter on the floor to Emmett and Bailey on the floor in the foyer.

  “What is this?” Mrs. Holmes asked.

  Eileen looked up, surprised to see her mother out of bed. “Huh?”

  “Why is there…” Mrs. Holmes shut her eyes, straining to keep her train of thought. “Everywhere… I step… is
another… mess.”

  Eileen straightened, resting her hands on her sore knees.

  “This house is falling apart,” Mrs. Holmes said, shaking her head. Her voice quavered. She took a step behind herself and rolled a pencil under her heel. Quickly she lifted her foot, as though she’d stepped on a spike. “Why are there pencils all over the floor!?” she cried. She looked accusingly at Emmett and Bailey. “There’s… shit, all over the place! The kitchen…” She turned to her daughter, arms gesturing toward the table and everything else, as though words couldn’t do it justice. “I was gone two days for… the funeral, and… ever since I’ve been back things are just… a complete…”

  “I’m sorry,” Eileen said, and dropped her washrag into the bucket. Without the strength to properly be angry, her listless voice conveyed it well enough. “I’m doing the best I can for you, mom. I’m sorry if my… my… my attention to detail, isn’t up to your standards.”

  “Well, I’m just saying—”

  “I’m here every day trying to take care of things for you because I know you’re dealing with a lot right now…” Eileen tried not to cry. “I’m sorry if my cooking, and my cleaning, and my chasing these kids around all day making sure that at least someone is paying attention to them, is preventing me from being the best at everything. I’m doing my best.”

  Mrs. Holmes sneered. “Okay. Okay. All right…”

  Eileen sobbed. Mrs. Holmes seemed not to know what else to say, though it was apparent she wouldn’t apologize or change her stance on the matter. Instead she relented, threw her hands up and carried her tired feet back upstairs, leaving them to it.

  Emmett set down his pencil. Bailey sucked her bottom lip, trying not to cry herself. Eileen saw them watching and, through her own hot-tempered tears, said, “It’s okay, you guys. Everything’s fine…”

  She got to her feet. She took the bucket to the kitchen sink and dumped it out. One of the dogs was downstairs now, whining at the front door. Eileen remained at the kitchen sink, crying freely into it. Olive or Bo, whichever it was, gave a sharp bark, pacing in circles there.

  Snorting, Eileen called over her shoulder, “Will someone please let the dog outside!”

  ✽ ✽ ✽

  The winter night peeked in at them, sleeping soundly. In their beds, in their heads, they noticed nothing. They dreamed, each of them something different, and for a while the house didn’t stir.

  Emmett dreamed of things he’d rather not have. Because, unlike the others, his dreams were not altogether dreams. He’d touched them before, with his own little hands, like they were touching him now with theirs.

  Something was at the window.

  ✽ ✽ ✽

  They followed the sidewalk through the sleeping neighborhood. A breeze rustled the leaves in the trees over their heads. It was so late—or so early—that not a single window was lit. The moon was just a halo behind the clouds.

  “Almost there,” his mother said, leading him by the hand.

  In her other hand she carried a book. Thick and weathered.

  A few more houses and they came to a stop. They stood on the curb, under the trees, facing one house in particular across the street. It was small and squat and dark. A black iron fence held its yard in safely. A lone car sat in the driveway beneath an old, rusted carport. Looking both ways, she led them soundlessly across the road, up onto the next curb. She looked at him, teeth white and full of life in the night. They made their way up the driveway toward the house, beyond the car there, shaded black from the moonlight.

  “Whose house is this?” he asked.

  “No one’s,” she answered, taking them around the back. “Ours.”

  In the backyard, the fence was lined with tall, narrow trees. They whispered and bent in the midnight breeze, cool and summery. They crept along the house. At the back door, she looked around them, at the wind in the trees, juggling the book in her arms as she produced a key, and proceeded to let them inside. She shut the door behind them, and all at once it was too silent. The breeze was gone, the sounds of the night gone with it. They stood in someone else’s kitchen, someone else’s home, in the middle of the night when they should have been in bed, in their own home. The countertops held things he’d never seen before. Belongings which weren’t their belongings. A clock ticked the time.

  “Whose house is this?” he whispered.

  She moved through the kitchen on tiptoe, as if there was a need to whisper or tiptoe in a house which apparently belonged to them. He stayed by the back door, unsure.

  “Come with me,” she said.

  On the other side of the kitchen was a closed door. She opened this as well. Behind it was a narrow staircase, traveling down into the basement. He put his hand on the handrail, taking one step at a time, resting both feet on every stair before stepping to the next. She was already at the bottom. A light switched on down below. She moved somewhere out of sight, boxes sliding, metal grating. She reappeared at the bottom of the stairs, holding something in her hand. She smiled up at him, cocked her head in a funny way.

  “Aren’t you coming?” she said.

  He wanted to turn back. He feared there might be someone there, someone sleeping above them, in their bed. They might wake up, might come investigating the open basement door, the light turned on at the bottom. They’d be caught down there, doing whatever it was they were there to do—something they shouldn’t. Why had she brought them here, he wondered? Why did she lie? She never lied, and yet he could tell now that she did. It was not like her. It was not like his mother.

  In her hands were a book and a shovel.

  ✽ ✽ ✽

  Emmett opened his eyes. He blinked, confused, heart beating fast. As he adjusted to the dark, and remembered where he was, he was relieved to be awake.

  He turned over. Sweaty, he raised his blanket, letting cool air inside, and let it billow back down. As the blanket settled over him, draped over his calming heartbeat, his eyes met something on the other side of the room which gave him pause.

  Tap, tap.

  On the glass.

  He pulled the blanket over his face. He drew his legs up, his knees to his body. He wasn’t awake after all. Still asleep. Pushed from a dream into a nightmare—

  —except if the dream had gone on long enough, it too would have become a nightmare…

  Tap, tap, tap.

  “Emmett.”

  Blind beneath his blanket, he squeezed his eyes shut harder still, in hopes that he could wake himself up for real. It’d worked in the past. He could shrink himself into nothing. His body would wink out of this existence, and with nowhere else to go—

  Tap, tap.

  Tap, tap, tap.

  “Emmett…”

  He pulled the blanket down his face slowly, past his eyes, resting on his nose, until he saw the window over Tyler’s bed. Tyler lay comfortably, asleep. Unmoved. Undisturbed. Unaware of the horrid thing just next to him, separated only by the chilled windowpane. It fogged the glass with its breath, obscuring its maddening face.

  Through the clouded glass, its face brightened, pleased to be seen by him. A wide, monstrous smile—its face opened up like a chest from ear to ear. Somewhere in its head there were eyes, watching him. They were hidden now, however, sunken in lakes of shadow by the moon at its back. It lifted a hand behind the glass and waved.

  “Emmett.”

  He hid under the blanket again. While the entity itself was different—a new form—the voice was the same as before, that night in the kitchen. Clark’s birthday. The voice followed him in the dark, it seemed, waiting to reappear only when he’d finally forgotten it. Now it was back with the same message.

  “Don’t lose me.”

  Tap, tap, tap.

  “I’m here.”

  He peeled the blanket away from his face once more, his curiosity outweighing the terror only barely.

  “That’s it. Don’t be afraid.”

  It remained at the window, hovering there—or perhaps it stood
on legs as tall as stilts in the snow, watching them sleep. That same smile took hold of it as he returned his attention. Hauntingly wide, perverse.

  “Here I am,” it said. Its curled hand let loose a single finger, long and thin, pointing into the room. “Find me, Emmett. Find me.”

  That long finger grew longer—a shadow. It melted into the room over Tyler’s sleeping body, onto the floor. It stretched over the floorboards like an ink spill, until it met the shadows beneath someone else’s bed.

  Tobie’s bed.

  “Find me.”

  Suddenly he understood. He pulled the blankets from his body and then paused, exposed, watching the figure at the window. Quietly, carefully, he placed his feet on the cold floor. The figure nodded its approval. The air chilled him. Uneasy. As he stood, a strange sound made his acquaintance, though he thought he might have heard it before. Or something similar. It traveled to him along the ground, rolled up his naked feet, his legs, like a draft from an open window, until it curled around his ears and held him there, remembering.

  Music.

  “Do you hear it?” The presence at the window put its other hand to the glass, leaning in. “Find it, Emmett. Take it.”

  He crept toward Tobie’s bed at last, and the music grew louder. Music unlike anything he’d heard before. Instruments he could never describe, incomparable. Waves of goosebumps from head to toe.

  “You mustn’t lose me,” the figure told him. “Never lose me.”

  Tobie lay on his side, hand to his open mouth. Soft breaths. Relaxed A wagging of the shadow on the floor drew Emmett’s attention away from him, to the space underneath his bed.

  He sank silently to his knees. Under the bed was a cardboard box. The music was loudest here. The floor vibrated against his bony knees from the sound, pounding and thrumming. Emmett grabbed one of the box’s flaps and was surprised by its weight as he dragged it out. Heart thumping, he looked at Tobie, still sleeping, and then to the window, at the visitor. Through the icy glass, it was turned toward him, a dark shape in the frigid night. Watching patiently.

  He opened the box. The music swelled into his downturned face like a breeze. He hesitated. Could the others hear it?