Mine

by Delilah S. Dawson

  “A monster?” Mom gave her a fond smile. “Someone’s been reading scary books again.”

  “Uh, yeah. You caught me,” Lily said, because that was easier than the truth.

  Mom hugged her, kissed her on the forehead with warm, dry lips, and stood up.

  “I think we need an escape today,” she said, running fingers through Lily’s hair. “Maybe ice cream or a movie?” She looked up and frowned. “Somewhere with lots of AC.”

  The tiniest fraction of Lily’s heart warmed. “That would be good.”

  Mom walked to the door and pulled it away from the wall. Lily’s heart was thumping like crazy, and it didn’t slow down when the shadows revealed a strange glimmer on the ground.

  “What’s this?” Mom asked. She leaned down and picked something up, making an all-too-familiar jingling sound.

  When she held up Buddy’s dirty old collar, every hair on Lily’s body stood up on end.

  15.

  Lily just sat there with her mouth hanging open, but then her mom shook her head. “Wait, why do you have this filthy old collar? I put it away. Have you been playing with that dog I told you not to touch?”

  In no mood to argue over it, Lily said, “Can we talk about this in the morning? Please?”

  She must have looked as exhausted and freaked out as she felt, because her mother stopped staring at her sternly, her face softened, and she came back over to stroke Lily’s hair. “I only want what’s best for you. You know that. Wild dogs can have rabies and all sorts of other diseases.”

  Lily stared into the corner behind the door and said, “They can, but he doesn’t. His name is Buddy. He used to live here, and I want to help him. He’s nice, just scared.”

  Her mother walked back toward the door with a weary sigh. “We’ll talk about it in the morning, then. Good night, sweetheart. Sleep sweet.”

  “Good night, Mom,” Lily said. But Mom was already heading downstairs, taking Buddy’s collar with her.

  Lily didn’t even try to sleep after that. If she closed her eyes, the shadow might come back. It might creep out of its corner and toward her. It might reach out with cold white hands and…Ugh. Even the thought of the collar jangling made her blood run cold. But her mother had taken it downstairs. If it showed up again tonight…

  Well, then she would know something was really, really, definitely wrong.

  She left the light on and picked up a book to read. It was an older fantasy book, one she’d heard of before. She’d even seen the movie, she thought. She looked at the name written in the front of the book, traced it with finger. Britney West. If only she could find out what had happened to Britney. Because she didn’t like what she was starting to consider.

  Had she…just met Britney?

  She didn’t go downstairs right when the sun came up, even though she was awake. She let Dad get up, listened to him showering and clanking around the kitchen as he made his coffee. It smelled good and warm and real, the scent floating up the stairs, so unlike last night’s strange cold moment in the dark. Her room was hot again, not that she liked it that way. The peculiar chill had fled with the shadows.

  Mom and Dad both left, and then Mom came back with the car as usual. Lily could hear her going inside and outside, doors opening and closing, things being dragged this way and that. She realized she hadn’t even been inside her parents’ bedroom yet. How weird, to think that there were rooms in her own house she had not yet discovered. It would have been exciting if it wasn’t so creepy.

  The house…Well, it kept its own secrets.

  When she finally came downstairs, her mom didn’t mention what had happened last night, not the nightmare and not the dirty collar. She gave Lily her usual good-morning hug and went back to work. In between bites of cereal, Lily quietly looked around for the dog collar, but it wasn’t in any of the kitchen drawers or cabinets. They were all mostly bare and empty while they waited for her family’s stuff, so it would’ve been hard to miss.

  Maybe it was in the room with her mom. Maybe there were more clues about what had happened in this house in the master bedroom. It probably had once belonged to the old man whose clothing and prescriptions she’d found in the laundry room.

  Lily rinsed out her cereal bowl and went through the door into the den, which was now completely clean and mostly empty, and yet still felt somehow alien. There was a short hallway that led to a small spare bedroom, which was still totally full of garbage—or maybe just junk, since it looked more like what you would see at a garage sale than actual trash. After Lily and her mom had cleaned it out, Dad would probably claim that room as his office, even though he would just use it for weekend napping. Considering that her closet upstairs was tiny, Lily would’ve loved a room like that, to rig up curtains and a stage and use it for practice and make a cozy reading nook. It would’ve been nice to have a little space just for herself that didn’t feel like…well, like a ghost had already claimed it.

  The hall dead-ended into the master bedroom, which had thick shag carpet that might have felt soft and luxurious the day it was installed but just felt old and dirty to Lily, as if decades’ worth of bug legs were tangled in it. She didn’t like the feeling of it touching her bare skin at all. She couldn’t believe her parents slept in there. Lily vastly preferred the plain wood floorboards upstairs.

  There was a big queen bed, but it didn’t look comfortable or welcoming. It was a brass bed, the metal ancient and tarnished. Mom and Dad’s quilt looked especially ratty on it. There was also a beat-up dresser and an old trunk, but there were no personal decorations. No family photographs that an old man might keep around, no books or wallets that would tell stories about the people who’d lived here before. Her mother had clearly given this room the same effort she had given the others—it was empty of anyone else’s memories and as clean as she could get it. Any clues about the previous occupants were in the bottom of the dumpster.

  She heard her mother muttering in the room beyond. Lily walked past two different closets to find her mom on her hands and knees, scrubbing the blackened tile of an old shower.

  “So I guess now is the time to tell you that I’ve been using your shower and your shampoo,” Mom said, trying to joke around despite the fact that Lily could tell she was upset. “My shower looks like it was last used by the Creature from the Black Lagoon.”

  “Well, at least it wasn’t the Wolfman,” Lily said. “Can you imagine the hairballs?” Emboldened by the daylight and feeling more like her old self, she curled her hands into claws and performed a growly little pantomime about the Wolfman showering, including putting on a shower cap and trying to shave.

  Her mom laughed, but she didn’t stop scrubbing. At this rate they were going to go bankrupt just buying enough yellow gloves to keep this house from being swallowed by dirt.

  “I’ve got the Wolfman bathroom covered, but can I count on you to do some more cleaning? Now that the den’s better, we can branch out. And then maybe ice cream?”

  Lily’s heart bobbed and sank. Ice cream was great, but it didn’t quite cancel out more work. She knew she had to help clean, that her mom shouldn’t have to do it all herself, but she would’ve loved to have had some free time, or maybe something bigger to look forward to, like going to the movies or to a water park. Anything but more housework.

  “I can clean, if it’s not too gross,” she said. Then, quickly and feeling a little guilty about it, she added, “No toilets.”

  “I think I have just the job for you. Have you noticed the tiny door?”

  That was a line Lily had waited her entire life to hear, right up there with Would you like the armoire that goes to Narnia? or Drink this adorable potion and follow that white rabbit.

  “There’s a tiny door?” she asked.

  Mom smiled. “Yep. I’m pretty sure it’s the space under the stairs. No promises about magical worlds, but I d
oubt you could fit many Amazon boxes under there. Still, wear gloves and take the broom. If it’s like everything else in this house…”

  “It’s going to be gross,” Lily finished for her. “Probably full of millipedes.”

  After everything she’d seen this week, still Lily couldn’t help being a little bit excited about the prospect of being the first person to see what was under the stairs. The only stairs in the house were the ones that went to her room, and she had been up and down them a hundred times without ever considering what might be in the space beneath them. It was probably just going to be more nasty hoarder garbage, but still. Garbage could be thrown away. Walls could be painted. Maybe it would be cool. Maybe she could build that reading nook she longed for that no one else could fit in and curl up in a pile of pillows to listen to musicals and text with CJ.

  She went to the kitchen for gloves, paper towels, and, yes, the broom. No way would she stick her head in a dark place without giving it a good broom poking first.

  She walked back to the staircase and checked all the walls around it, but she didn’t see a door anywhere. Behind the staircase was the spare bedroom. On the side of the staircase was a flat wall. Which meant that the tiny door her mom was talking about had to be…on the outside of the house.

  Her interest in the whole venture did a swan dive into the orchestra pit. If there was one thing she was learning about Florida, it was that anything outside was going to get destroyed—or at least grossified—by the elements. She could not forget that although she finally had a pool, it looked like a vat of acid slime that had swallowed a dead whale. Her mom had totally tricked her.

  Taking her supplies, Lily went outside and around to the back side of the house. Oh, yes. There it was, hidden behind some overgrown plants with stabby leaves—a small door, just stuck on the side of the house, adding to the building’s odd, topsy-turvy nature. The door had a keyhole and a clear glass knob, and when she turned it, it appeared to be locked. Fabulous. Now all she had to do was find a tiny key somewhere, and hopefully it wasn’t already in the bottom of the dumpster with everything else they’d swept up from the filthy floor. She even crouched down to try to look under the door, but it was pitch-black inside, and she couldn’t see anything.

  When she reported this finding to her mother, her mother just looked around her hopeless bathroom and shrugged. “Oh well. Another mystery. Narnia will have to wait. Go…be a kid or something.”

  Lily tried not to grin too hard and walked out of the room. It occurred to her that this summer she hadn’t really felt like a kid at all. They’d sprung this move on her, and she’d had only two weeks to get used to the idea and help pack up the house before they were in the car and on their way here. And since they’d been here, her world had mostly been cleaning and freaking out. Except…

  Except for Rachel.

  She went upstairs and got her phone—feeling only a little guilty that she hadn’t returned it to her mom—and sent Rachel a text to see if she wanted to hang out. Rachel texted back immediately, asking if she could come check out the new house. Lily panicked for a few minutes before deciding on honesty and telling Rachel that the house was a gross mess, and none of their stuff was here yet, so it was basically like a really nasty old hotel with no place to sit. But Rachel was apparently too curious to care.

  Lily asked her mom if Rachel could come over, and Mom was more than glad to meet the first friend she’d made in the area. She even offered to order out lunch for them, although Lily was sure that sandwiches would be fine. She ran to her bathroom, brushed out her hair, and made sure she looked okay before she went to the dock to wait. The boat turned up shortly after that, and Rachel was bubbling with excitement.

  “Oh my gosh, this place is so mysterious. It’s the only house that looks like this anywhere, I swear. Everything else is stucco this, McMansion that. But this place is just unique, you know? Thanks for letting me come over.”

  “As long as you’re ready for disappointment,” Lily said. “It really is gross. I saw this huge roach…”

  But Rachel just waved that away. “It’s Florida. Everybody has them. My mom has people come out to spray twice a month, and we still find them in the cabinets. That’s why we call them palmetto bugs. To make them sound fancy. Even if they’re gross.”

  While they were outside, Lily gave her a tour, showing her the locked door under the stairs, the bird feeder graveyard, the nasty dead pool, and the actually pretty interesting garden. They pulled down lemons right off the tree, but when they cut them open with their thumbnails, the fruit inside was pale and desiccated, and when they dared each other to taste them, the acid burned their tongues. Rachel said the pineapples were still too small to harvest, and neither girl was interested in the grapefruits.

  Rachel looked at the pool like it was actually interesting. “So this is what happens if you don’t take care of your pool,” she said. “I bet you guys get some awesome frogs in there. Have you seen any cool birds?”

  All of Lily’s insecurities about having Rachel over to visit melted away. The girl was clearly thrilled to find the silver lining in every weird offering that was on hand. She told Rachel about the big, dinosaur-like birds she’d seen in the yard one morning, acting out their odd way of walking, hopping, and flapping their wings, and Rachel launched into every fact she knew about sandhill cranes.

  They went inside and made sandwiches and ate them at the counter. Lily told Rachel about what the house had looked like when they first arrived, how you couldn’t see a single square inch of floor, and how the entire den had been so full of garbage bags and boxes that you couldn’t walk a straight line through it. Rachel asked if Lily had taken pictures, and Lily only then realized she hadn’t. What would be the point? Dad had already bought the house—it wasn’t like they could return it with the receipt just because they had proof that it sucked. Did they really have to think about how gross it had been?

  But wait. She did have a couple of pictures—of her ruined bedroom. Not that she was going to show them to Rachel and freak her out.

  As Lily showed Rachel the rest of the house, feeling less like an inhabitant and more like a tour guide of some bizarre roadside attraction, she couldn’t help thinking about what Rachel would say if she told her about all the strange things that had happened to her here. The photos in the toilet. The way the bathroom water had turned green-black and splashed out onto the carpet. The spiders in the laundry room, and the crawling thing in the boxes, and the whispering shadow, and the jingling collar in her room. Not to mention the way that her bed had been tossed and the strange writing that had been left on the mattress.

  She wanted Rachel to like her, not think that she was completely nuts, but…Well, Rachel was the one who’d brought up the caution tape and the ghost in the rain. And Rachel seemed pretty fascinated by the house’s eccentricities. Lily wanted to trust her, wanted someone to share all her experiences and fears and secrets with, but she kept chickening out. She was fine with being called a drama queen, but only when she was being dramatic on purpose—not when she was actually scared out of her mind.

  Lily was putting the plates in the dishwasher after lunch when she heard the snap of a phone camera. She looked up and caught Rachel guiltily putting her phone back in her pocket.

  “What are you doing?”

  Rachel looked down, uncertain. “Don’t think this is weird, but I like watching ghost hunter shows, and I was taking a photo to see if there were any orbs or flashes. Like”—she looked up again and met Lily’s gaze—“to see if there were any ghosts?”

  “Why?” Lily felt like she was holding her breath, waiting to hear Rachel’s answer.

  Rachel chewed on her lip. “I mean, don’t take this the wrong way, but I have a super-weird feeling. Like I’m being watched. Or is that crazy?”

  Relief flooded Lily, just to know that Rachel was reaching the same conclusions.
For the first time in days, she could draw a full breath. It made her feel stronger and more certain, finally having someone else confirm that this place was definitely not normal.

  “Actually, some really creepy stuff has been happening,” Lily finally admitted. “If you want to hear about it?”

  Rachel’s eyes lit up and she leaned in. “Yes. Please. I love scary movies, but I’ve never been anywhere haunted before. Tell me everything.”

  So they went back outside to walk around where Lily’s mom wouldn’t overhear, and Lily told her everything. The green eyes, the scrawled words, the black water, the child-shaped thing, the nightmare. Everything. Lily even showed Rachel the pics on her phone of her tossed room and those threatening words on the mattress. She kept looking to Rachel to make sure she wasn’t just getting set up for ridicule, but Rachel seemed to be taking it very seriously and asked her tons of questions about ghost stuff—cold spots, objects moving around, electrical problems.

  “Have you checked under your mattress lately?” Rachel finally asked.

  Lily’s fingertips went cold and numb. “Uh, no. Too worried about what I’ll find.” She looked back at the house, poking up at the bright blue sky like a broken brown tooth. “So…you believe me?”

  Rachel looked at the house, too, her head cocked. “Yeah, why wouldn’t I? It all adds up, doesn’t it? And…I mean, it really does feel like we’re being watched. Right? Like eyes on the back of your neck.”

  Lily did feel it—she always felt it here. “Do you want to leave? We can do something else.”

  Rachel grinned at her. “No way. I want to go see your mattress. If that’s not weird. I bet ghost-hunting equipment would go crazy here. Maybe you could set up your phone to record sounds overnight and see what happens.”

  If there were whispers or groans or whatever at night, Lily definitely didn’t want to hear them, and her parents would just accuse her of making any noises herself, but she wasn’t going to tell Rachel that. If Rachel wanted to see her bed, that was just fine. And if there was something written there?