The September House by Carissa Orlando

Author:Carissa Orlando [Orlando, Carissa]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2023-09-05T00:00:00+00:00

SIXTEEN

Of course, I knew that I wouldn’t be able to get any sleep while Katherine was gone. Fredricka broke a few more plates, and it was difficult to tidy up with Angelica and Julian and Charles and Constance crowding around me and periodically chanting, He’s down there. He’s down there. He’s down there. Blythe started making one hell of a racket upstairs, and when I went to her room to shush her, I found her on the ceiling, pounding both fists against the plaster and howling. I yelled at her to quiet down and she unhinged her jaw and shrieked at me before vanishing into the fireplace and I hoped that would be the end of that. While I was up there, I noticed that the black hole in the third guest room had grown considerably and seemed to be pulsing, so I just closed the door and locked it. The wall of the upstairs hallway had started bleeding a little even though it wasn’t supposed to start up again until later that night (really, was I the only person in this house who followed the rules?), so I grabbed the blood bucket and cleaned that up, and just when I finished, five big birds shattered their necks on the back window in quick succession, so I went outside to stay ahead of the curve on body disposal. All this time, Elias was hovering about five feet behind me. He followed me from room to room and hissed. I came back inside and found that Fredricka had managed to move one of my dressers into the living room and stacked the drawers in the dining room, and let me tell you, that took a long time to move back. Afterwards, I tried to take a nap on the couch but Angelica and all her friends lined up beside me and chanted, He’s down there. He’s down there. He’s down there, over and over again until I burst up and through their bodies and felt the phantom pains of stabbings and disembowelings and hammerings and whatever the hell happened to Constance’s face, and this time I actually did throw up all over the living room floor, so I had to grab the blood bucket again to clean up my own vomit and that was it for sleep for the afternoon.

That is to say, when Katherine returned home that evening, I was fairly exhausted. I sat myself on the kitchen floor and stared at nothing as I sipped the first cup of tea I’d had all day. I had finally found the tea bags about thirty minutes before. They were in the upstairs bathtub.

I was somewhat grateful that Katherine was home. The pranksters seemed to calm down when she was around. Like feral cats, they kept their distance around strangers, saving the yowling and scratching for people with whom they were familiar. I’m sure they would eventually grow comfortable with her, as they had with Edie, but for the time being, they saved their pranks until Katherine was out of the room, a welcome respite from today’s chaos.

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