His mouth twisted in a rueful smirk. “I’m sorry if that hurt your feelings, but what do you expect? You’re about to scare my girlfriend.”
“She’s my target. You, on the other hand, can walk away if you want to. No one’s twisting your arm to be here, Bram.”
“I have to be here. Those are the rules.”
I had hoped that talking to him would bring some clarity, peel back one of his masks so I could understand him better. But all he was doing was layering them on now. I was more lost than ever. “What kind of monster does this to his own girlfriend?”
“You don’t know anything about me.”
“This isn’t the first time you’re doing this to her either,” I continued. “The séance Fear Test at the abandoned house—Lux was scared the most.”
“She wasn’t supposed to be at that party,” Bram said, and I thought I heard remorse trickling into his voice. “It wasn’t her scene.”
“You still went through with it.”
“I tried to get her to leave.” He pinched his sleeves between his fingers, the wool looking like the hand wraps boxers use. “We fought about it at the party.”
I remembered hearing them arguing in one of the rooms upstairs. He looked at me, his gaze sharp enough to cut. “Lux and I have our problems. We fight and we break up and we get back together. But I care about her.”
“You might care about her, but you don’t love her. Not really,” I said. “You wouldn’t be doing this if you did.”
“You really want to talk about monsters?” Bram said. He dug his shoulder into the chain and leaned toward me so that we were inches apart. My first instinct was to look away, cross my arms. But I couldn’t break eye contact. He wasn’t looking at me but through me. Like he saw in me what I spent every moment trying to hide.
“I find it really interesting that you chose this for your Fear Test. Not Lux—anyone could’ve guessed you were always going to choose Lux. But the fact that we’re staging it as a home invasion.”
“This isn’t a home invasion,” I corrected him. “No one’s going to be seen—”
“You went through something awful on a quiet night in a quiet house,” Bram cut me off. “And now you’re going to put someone else through that. So yeah, let’s talk about monsters, Rachel. Let’s talk about how fucked up this is.”
I was the one who’d wanted to talk, to air things out, to take the gloves off. And now it felt like I was backed up against the ropes. Guilt tugged at my edges, making my fingers twitch, making me want to reach for my phone and call the whole test off. Was I going too far? Was this still just a game?
But I knew why I’d chosen this for my Fear Test. A part of me wanted to have all this play out—the girl in a big, scary house—and be on the other side of it. I needed to look at what had happened to me from a different angle. I had the chance to be the puppet master this time, to change the outcome, to have everything come out safe and okay. This was catharsis.
“Lux may toy with people sometimes,” Bram continued. “But don’t act like that’s not exactly what you’re doing right now.”
He finally tore his gaze away and looked straight ahead at the house where his girlfriend was moments away from being scared out of her mind. Hopefully.
“I’m nothing like Lux. Or you,” I said finally. “I would never put a game before someone I cared about.”
“Which is exactly why you don’t belong in the club.”
My fingers stopped twitching. I no longer wanted to reach for my phone. There was a reason why Bram and I never talked, and as much fun as this was, I was ready to start my Fear Test.
“When she calls you,” I said, “tell her she’s just imagining things. Make her think everything’s going to be all right.”
Giving instructions felt good. And Bram, who cared so much about this game, would have to comply. He checked his watch. Like, an actual timepiece and not something that told him now many steps he’d taken today. He stood up and walked away, leaving his swing squeaking in the wind.
32
LUX McCRAY
LUX McCRAY DIDN’T like babysitting, and she certainly didn’t need the money. But being Wyatt Salgado-Hydesmuirre’s nanny was a coveted position that she couldn’t pass up. And not because she loved Wyatt. He was a cute kid, but Lux mostly cared about his dad. Not in a gross babysitter fantasy way. Ew.
She cared because Henry Hydesmuirre was a bigwig at Condé Nast. Lux wasn’t sure what his position was exactly (COO, CFO, VP—she knew it was a combination of any of those letters). But the details didn’t matter. What mattered was that if she got along with Henry’s son, then she was good as golden to get an internship at Vogue before senior year. There were at least two other people from her school who’d interviewed for the babysitting job, but Lux had beaten them out.
The Salgado-Hydesmuirres required her services on their weekly date night, which could be anything from a movie, to a fundraiser, to a white-tie eight-course dinner gala. All Lux had to do was show up and spend about an hour with the six-year-old before putting him to bed. It’d been the same routine for the last five months: play with Wyatt and his always-new, always-expensive toys, make sure he brushed his teeth, give Sugar a chew toy to gnaw in her doggy bed, put the kid to sleep, and then, finally, text Bram to let him know the coast was clear.
She would usually wait a half hour before texting Bram. She killed the time by kicking back on the deep brown leather sofa in the living room and scrolling through IG. She spent a few seconds looking at each post, double-tapping as she went. She got to a photo of Lucia, head tilted and lips pursed. Poor filter choice, yet again, and when would this girl learn her angles? When Lux zoomed in, she could see a blazing zit that did not have enough concealer on it on the underside of Lucia’s jaw. Lux wrinkled her nose and scrolled past the post without double-tapping.
After a couple more minutes of this, she looked up and found Wyatt standing in the room. She gasped so loud that Sugar, on the doggy bed at her feet, jumped. “What are you doing here?”
“I can’t sleep,” Wyatt said.
Now the dog was out of bed too, and scampered to Wyatt’s bare feet. Soon they’d be playing together. Soon they’d be hyper. This was not good.
“Just close your eyes,” Lux said. “You’ll fall asleep before you know it.”
She prided herself on how tough she was with kids, that she wasn’t a pushover. She knew instinctively that babying Wyatt—scratching his back like he always requested, and sitting with him until his eyes fluttered shut—was the wrong approach. He was way too old for that stuff, and anyway, if she started that precedent, then she’d have to do it every time she came over. No. Tough love was the way to go. None of this coddling bullshit. No one at her house had ever given her attention when she cried. Toughness, she knew, had to be instilled at a young age.
Wyatt’s parents were always shocked when they came home and learned that the boy had gone to sleep without putting up a fight. To them, Lux was a miracle worker. She tried ever so subtly to hint that she could also work miracles fetching lattes for editors or assisting at photo shoots. But so far, no internship offer. Yet.
“It doesn’t matter if I close my eyes,” Wyatt said. “I keep hearing noises.”
“What kind of noises?”
“It sounds like someone’s tapping on my window.”
The Salgado-Hydesmuirres lived in a huge house in a neighborhood full of huge houses that looked nice, but inside they were crap.
“It’s just the cold, Wyatt.” The houses here lived and breathed, but seemed to perpetually suffer from pneumonia. Always drafty, always leaky; you couldn’t take a step without the floors moaning.
“The cold doesn’t make noise.”
“It does in this house. Now go to bed.”
Wyatt sighed and marched back upstairs in his too-small spaceship pj’s, muttering about climate change and how it wasn’t that cold out tonight anyway.
Lux went back to her phone, but it was only a c
ouple of minutes until Wyatt showed up again. The whole thing was legit getting old.
“Can you stay in my room until I fall asleep?” he asked. All her tough love crap went out the window. Now it was just about expediency. The faster he went to sleep, the faster she could text Bram, and she really needed to text Bram.
He always came over after Wyatt was asleep, but she still wasn’t sure if he would tonight. They’d had a fight.
Lux couldn’t even remember about what, just that Bram had been acting weird and then she’d said something she probably shouldn’t have and he said some things he definitely should wish he hadn’t and the whole thing had blown up.
They hadn’t spoken a word to each other at school earlier. Yeah, they’d sat at the same table for lunch like always, but they couldn’t help that. Lux and Bram were practically doing the whole cafeteria a favor just by sitting there so that people could ogle them. But although they’d had conversations with everyone around them, Lux and Bram hadn’t directly spoken. She hoped no one had noticed.
The sooner she texted Bram, the sooner their fight would be over. Hopefully.
“Okay, let’s go,” Lux told Wyatt.
She tucked the kid in again but his eyes stayed open, two giant pools of concern. “Can you check the window? Just to make sure?”
Lux forced a smile. This bedtime routine was dragging. She was going to ask for a raise. She went and pulled back the curtain. “See? Nothing there.” No one anywhere near the window, no one in the trees, no one on the sidewalk. She did spot someone in the playground, though, sitting on the swings.
Perv.
She didn’t care how nice this neighborhood was or how much yard space this house had—you couldn’t pay her to live this close to a playground. A million rugrats running around by day and the skeeviest people at night.
“Can you just stay until I fall asleep?”
Lux rolled her eyes but figured she could text Bram from here as soon as Wyatt nodded off. She took a seat in the rocking chair in the corner of Wyatt’s room. Her hand buzzed and she looked at the screen. Her heart did a little skip when she saw that it was a text from Bram. He was ready to make up, too.
Kid asleep?
Not yet. He hears monsters.
She watched the ellipses blinking.
So you told him about me? Devil emoji.
Lux grinned. It’d probably be healthier if they talked about their fight, maybe tried to work it out so it didn’t happen again. But this—pretending nothing had happened at all and sweeping it under the rug—was a million times easier. Lux was about to text back when the furious barking started. Lux groaned.
“Sugar!” Wyatt said, springing up in bed. “We left Sugar downstairs!”
“Sugar’s fine.” But even as Lux tried to get Wyatt to lie back down, Sugar wouldn’t stop whining. Eventually, she was screeching and Lux could hear the dog’s little nails pawing at the bottom of the stairs.
“You have to get her,” Wyatt said.
“Fine,” she said. “Stay in bed.”
Lux stepped into the hallway; the dog’s barks were louder there. The weird thing was, along with the barks, Lux thought she heard shushing. Like someone was trying to calm Sugar down.
When she got downstairs, Sugar was busy chewing on her toy. Lux swooped the puppy up, ready to take Sugar upstairs, but something caught her eye. She stared at Wyatt’s Star Wars action figures on the living room floor, trying to figure out why they looked so … off. And then she realized the oddest thing. Instead of lying in a heap like always, the toys were all upright, standing in a circle.
Lux kicked her foot out and the figures toppled over, some spilling far across the hardwood. Usually she hated how much noise this house made, but now she stood frozen in place, listening. For once, the creaking old house was silent.
Unease settled over Lux’s skin like a dusting of fresh snow. She had the unshakable feeling that someone was here with her. But when she looked around—through doorways and behind club chairs—there was no one.
A moment later came the noise from upstairs. Footsteps over her head. “I told you to stay in bed,” she muttered. She raced up to Wyatt’s room, secretly glad to get out of the living room. But Wyatt was in bed, sound asleep.
Lux stood in the doorway, trying to reconcile this peaceful image of him with the footsteps she’d just heard. She held Sugar closer to her chest and struggled to remember the sound exactly. Finally she convinced herself that she’d misheard it, that it must’ve been the pipes.
She closed the door to Wyatt’s room and went back downstairs. She sat on the couch with Sugar, stroking the puppy’s puffy white fur. She felt like a movie villain, but having what amounted to a breathing lump of cotton candy lying across your lap was a pretty good thing in a very old house when it was this late at night.
Then Lux heard it. The tapping noise Wyatt had described.
It wasn’t just her imagination, because Sugar perked up suddenly, her little body totally stiff, ear flaps up.
Only now, the tapping was on the living room window.
It wasn’t a knock, more of a plink, like a long fingernail was rapping slowly on the glass. Or a pebble. Was it Bram? Could he be chucking stones at the window in a warped attempt at romance? Lux went to the window and pulled back the curtain in one swift swoosh.
There was no one there.
It must have been the wind.
Throwing pebbles at the glass.
There was a new tapping, now at the door.
She swiped at her phone screen and pulled up her message thread with Bram. Was that you at the window? Are you at the door now? But when she read what she’d written, she held her thumb down to delete it all.
She sounded crazy. As much as she wished she could, Lux couldn’t sink into the couch. And she couldn’t ignore the persistent noise, which grew louder with every passing moment. She untangled her legs, placing her feet silently on the floor, and clutched Sugar. She made her way to the foyer. There couldn’t be anyone at the door.
But there was someone at the door.
Lux saw it now, the doorknob twisting first to the left, then, slowly, to the right.
“Bram?” she whispered. She got closer. “Bram?” she said more insistently, her cheek pressing against the wood. Lux wrapped her fingers around the knob. There was no resistance. She swung the door open.
No one.
She shut the door quickly, hugging Sugar to her chest. She was imagining things—this old house was making her imagine things. Like the noise she now heard above her.
Pipes. The old pipes.
But Lux was lying to herself. Anyone could tell the difference between the clanks of pipes and the groan of hundred-year-old original wood floorboards. Wyatt was asleep in his room and there was no one at the door and she was holding the only other living thing in the house. But someone was upstairs.
Lux didn’t move; she didn’t even breathe.
The noise she was hearing was footsteps again. She counted them. First four. Then two. And, after a long pause—one.
Her phone buzzed and she jumped, dropping the puppy, who let out a pitiful whimper as she scampered away, her little nails clacking on the hardwood. It was a text from Bram.
Be there soon.
How soon? She texted quickly, trying to stay calm.
Few blocks away.
I think there’s someone in here, she typed.
She waited for Bram to reply, but a new text never came and she was getting anxious.
Hurry. I keep hearing all these noises, she texted again.
Another beat that stretched excruciatingly long. She saw the dancing ellipses pop up, but then they disappeared. Her brow crinkled as she watched the screen. Finally Bram wrote back.
You’re imagining things.
Even though it was what she wanted to hear—that it was nothing—it still felt crummy to have her fears invalidated. She clenched her jaw. Just get here.
There was a broom closet between the liv
ing room and the kitchen that the family mostly kept all their untidy crap in, and Lux went to it. There was enough room inside for her to stand. She wedged herself in the dark, cramped space and listened.
After a moment, she could hear the front door opening. She strained to hear more, hoping for the sound of Bram’s voice. Maybe he’d call to her, or maybe he’d announce himself and scare off whoever was upstairs.
She shook her head. There is no one upstairs, she reminded herself. But as she listened for a sign—for something—all she heard was footsteps slowly going up the stairs.
“Bram?” she whispered. She wrapped her fingers around the doorknob, turning it slowly so that it did not make a single sound. She pushed the door open a sliver, only enough for her to peek through. She had a straight line of sight to the staircase.
There was no one there. But it must’ve been Bram. He’d gone up to check that the coast was clear, which it obviously was. She wasn’t going to stay locked in a closet. There was no order to that, no control. She pushed the door open farther and slipped out. Her socked feet padded up the staircase. Lux didn’t stop until she got to the second floor. Wyatt’s room was down the hall to the right. She knew Bram would have checked there first. She turned left and walked to the end of the hall, where the Salgado-Hydesmuirres’ master bedroom was.
When she got there, she saw a man standing with his back toward her and nearly collapsed with relief. It was Mr. Hydesmuirre. She recognized his London Fog coat. He must have come home early.
“Mr. Hydesmuirre, I’m so sorry, I didn’t—”
But when he turned around, the face she saw was not Mr. Hydesmuirre’s. It wasn’t even human. It was white, rubbery, covered in ugly scars. A mask.
Lux’s scream was so loud and so forceful it propelled her out of the room like a bottle rocket. She ran down the hall, but the man in the mask came after her.
She couldn’t let him catch her. She didn’t slow down when she got to the stairs. She continued to pump her legs, to sprint, but he was right behind her. She could feel him like she could feel the hairs rising on the back of her neck. And then she could feel two firm hands pushing into her shoulder blades.
The Mary Shelley Club Page 18
