Chapter 3: The Neighbor Who Saw Too Much
The clock in the hallway ticked past eleven forty. Renee had not moved from the floor.
Her back rested against the coat closet door. The hardwood was cold through her socks, and she had turned the heat down before she left, so the house sat at sixty-four degrees and would not warm up. She drank water from a mason glass instead of wine. Each swallow sounded loud in the dark.
The chain was up. It was a heavy brass chain, the kind her father had installed, and it sat snug in its slot. The deadbolt was thrown. The knob lock was turned. Three locks for a door she had walked through ten thousand times without thinking about it once.
She kept the phone in her left hand with the screen at low brightness against her thigh. Three times she had thumbed nine and one and held her finger over the second one. Three times she had put the phone down. What was she supposed to say to a dispatcher at midnight? My neighbor has no reflection. My friend stayed behind and I watched her get bitten through a window, and now I'm fine, I'm just sitting here on the floor.
They would send someone with a flashlight. They would shine it on Amy's face and Amy would smile and say the right things, and the officer would glance at Renee the way people did when they decided you were the problem.
The knock came at eleven forty-six.
Three soft taps, unhurried, the sound of knuckles on painted wood.
Renee stopped breathing.
"Renee?" Danielle's voice, sweet and slurred, drawn out like she had been drinking all night. "Honey. I know you're up. Your kitchen light's on."
Renee put one hand flat on the floor to steady herself. She stood slowly, and her calves cramped, and she crossed the six feet of hallway without making a sound.
"Danielle?"
"Mm-hm." A shuffling step. "It's cold out here. Will you let me in?"
Renee pressed both palms on the door, eye level with the chain. The wood was cool. Danielle smelled of Amy's house, of that thick sweet wine, and underneath it something like wet pennies.
"Where's Amy?"
"Home. She went to bed." Danielle giggled. The giggle ran a little long and a little low. "She said you'd be scared. She said you'd sit in the dark and be scared."
"What do you want?"
"I want to come in. It's my house too, kind of." Another giggle. "I mean, we're neighbors. I brought you your bowl back. From the soup."
Renee closed her eyes. The soup bowl had been on her counter for a week. Danielle would never have remembered that at midnight, drunk.
"Are you okay?"
"Never better." Danielle's voice went soft and pleased. "Renee, honestly. I feel amazing. I've never felt like this."
Cold crawled up Renee's forearms. She reached for the peephole and slid the brass cover aside with two fingers, careful not to let it snap.
Danielle stood on the porch under the fixture, barefoot in the wet grass, three feet back from the door. Same blouse. Same shoulder bag. Her dark hair was flat on one side like she had been lying down. She was smiling up at the door with her chin lifted, the way you smile at a camera.
The smile kept going past the corners of her mouth.
Her lips had pulled wide, wider than the muscle in a face could comfortably hold, and her gums showed, and her teeth were longer than they had been at dinner. They were slick and pale, and the two at the corners were coming down over her lower lip while she breathed.
Renee stepped away from the door. She turned, and the hallway mirror caught her.
There she was. Windbreaker still on, hair flat on her forehead, mouth open. Behind her, in the glass, the front door stood closed with its chain snug, and the porch light showed under it in a thin gold seam.
The porch behind her was empty. No Danielle. No bag, no wet feet in the grass. Only her own reflection and the long dark hallway going back to the kitchen.
"Renee." The voice came through the door at a different pitch. Lower. Patient. "Renee, I can smell you."
The chain rattled once, a small testing tug. The knob turned a quarter inch and stopped hard.
Renee's throat closed. She backed down the hallway with her arms out, one hand brushing the wall for balance, and she kept her eyes on the door the whole way. In the kitchen she yanked open the block and took the biggest knife, the eight inch one with the black handle, and then she stood at the counter with her back to the refrigerator and her phone in her other hand.
She hit the three digits and pressed call. The screen dimmed. Nothing rang. The little wheel spun beside the word connecting, and spun, and spun.
The knocking started again, softer this time, at the back door off the kitchen.
Then her phone lit up in her hand with a name she had saved years ago with a heart next to it. Amy. The message was three words long.
She's still hungry.
The words sat on the screen until it dimmed. Renee read them twice, then a third time, and the words did not change. She's still hungry. The little heart beside Amy's name looked obscene.
The knob on the back door turned.
Not a quarter inch this time. It turned all the way, slow and smooth, the full travel, and the latch inside the strike plate clicked as the bolt slid back. The door was still shut. The door was unlocked now.
Renee dropped the knife.
It hit the tile flat and then bounced, and the eight inches of steel rang off the floor twice before it slid under the dishwasher. Her hands were shaking so hard she couldn't have picked it up again anyway. She went down after it, one knee, both knees, palms slapping the cold floor, and the phone went skittering out of her grip across the tile and under the stove.
"Renee?" Danielle's voice came through the back door, inches from the wood, warm and thick. "Honey, what was that?"
Renee crawled.
She went sideways along the cabinet run with her shoulder against the drawer pulls, and the handle of the oven caught her hip and she kept moving. The dining room was a black rectangle past the kitchen. She could get to the stairs, get to her bedroom, get the door shut, and then what? Then it wouldn't matter, because a locked bedroom door in a house with a thing already inside was just a smaller room to die in.
The pantry. The door to the pantry stood three feet away with the light off, a narrow slot of a room with shelves on three sides.
The back door opened. Not fast. It swung on its hinge and dragged across the mat and stopped.
Wet feet crossed her kitchen floor. Bare. Every step made a small tacky sound, like a heel being peeled off tile, and Renee knew that sound from her own house and hated it now. Water on linoleum. Danielle had walked to the porch through the grass with no shoes on.
"Renee."
She got her hand around the pantry door and pulled herself in. The shelves were at her back. The bag of flour went over and burst on the floor and she put her knee in it. She reached out and drew the door shut with two fingers on the edge, and the door did not catch, because the pantry latch had been broken since spring and she had never fixed it. It sat in the frame, two inches ajar.
Through the gap she could see the kitchen.
Danielle stood at the counter with her back to the window, and the window was dark and the glass reflected nothing. There was no shape in it. No hair, no blouse, no shoulder against the black. Just the room, the counter, the fruit bowl, and the moonlight.
Her shoulder bag was gone. She must have dropped it in the yard.
She lifted her head and tested the air, the way you'd test a room for gas. She snuffed twice, quick, wet, and her face tipped toward the pantry and then away again.
"You left the front door chained," Danielle said. "That's smart. Amy said you'd do that."
Renee pressed her back into the shelf and the shelf bit her spine. She could hear her own pulse in her ears, slow and heavy, which was strange, because she felt like she was running.
"Amy said you saw." Danielle walked along the counter. She put her fingers on the bowl of soup she had brought back last week, and she turned it a quarter turn, and turned it back. "She said you'd peek in the window. She said you're the one who looks."
The stairs creaked. Something upstairs.
Renee's whole body went cold from the scalp down. The stairs went up from the front hall, and she was the only person in this house.
"I told her you wouldn't call anyone, though." Danielle's voice moved. She was at the fridge now, and she opened it, and the light caught her, and Renee saw her in a square of white.
The blouse, the hair flat on one side, the shoulder bag missing. Her chin was slick down to the collar, and it was not wine, and the marks at her throat were two small dark punctures ringed in bruise.
She stood in the fridge light and smiled at nothing with her gums showing.
"You want to know something?" Danielle took a bottle of water off the door and drank the whole thing and set the empty down. "I can hear you. I can hear the little valves in your heart and the spit in your throat. It's so loud."
Renee's hand found something on the shelf by her hip. A jar. She got her fingers around it and lifted it and held it against her chest and did not breathe.
"Renee, honey, come out." Danielle shut the fridge and the room went dark again. "I'm not going to hurt you. That's not what I came over for."
She walked. Not toward the pantry. Past it, into the dining room, and the floorboards took her weight one at a time, and the sound went on a long way, which meant she wasn't alone, because one person walking does not make a house sound like that.
The cell phone rang under the stove.
It rang. Three times. Renee watched the little screen light up the baseboard, and she watched Danielle come back into the kitchen and stop over top of it with her bare feet spread. Then it stopped ringing, and the voicemail picked up, and the little screen said one new message.
Danielle crouched. She reached under the stove with her whole arm to the elbow and pulled the phone out and looked at the name on it.
She turned it around so the screen faced the pantry door.
Amy.
"Where do you think you're going, Renee?" Danielle said softly, into the dark, over the phone she was holding like a card.
Upstairs, the bedroom door opened. Renee heard the latch, and then the creak of it swinging in, and the wood rub of someone sitting down on the edge of her mattress.
The stairs creaked a third time, closer together now, weight coming down with a hand on the rail.
Danielle tipped her head toward the sound. She was still crouched by the stove with Renee's phone in her fist. She set it down on the tile, face up, and the screen threw a blue square of light under her chin.
"Company," she said.
Renee watched through the two-inch gap in the pantry door. Flour dusted her knee and the cuff of her windbreaker. She had both hands around a quart jar of last summer's tomatoes, and the glass was cold against her sternum.
Danielle stood up. She stretched with her arms overhead, and her spine made a chain of small wet clicks. Then she turned toward the pantry the way a dog turns, not looking at it so much as leaning her whole attention against it.
She snuffed the air twice.
"You can stop holding your breath," she said. "It doesn't work. You go quiet, and then you have to breathe, and when you breathe I hear the air drag over your teeth."
A bar of moonlight came through the window over the sink and lay across her mouth. It caught the two long canines at the corners, slick and pale, and the points of them hung past her lower lip.
She came across the linoleum without hurrying. Her wet footprints went dark to gray behind her.
"Renee, sweetie." She crouched at the gap, one knee down, and the moonlight slid up her face. Her eyes had gone the flat red of a coal. There was a thin black slit down the middle of each one. "I know where you're hiding. I can hear you. I can hear the little valves in your heart going, and I can hear the spit in your throat every time you swallow. No matter where you'd have hidden, I would have found you. You could be in the attic, you could be under the porch, you could be down the street in somebody else's bathtub. I'd have walked to you."
Renee's fingers tightened on the jar. The lid dug into her palm.
"Do you know what I can hear right now?" Danielle said. "You're not breathing through your nose. You're breathing through your mouth, in through your teeth, and it's so loud it's like somebody left a faucet on."
She put her fingertips on the edge of the pantry door and pushed it a half inch wider. The broken latch scraped.
"Now come out," she said. "Come out and let me show you how wonderful it feels. To be like me. To be like Amy."
The floorboards in the dining room took a weight. Then another, longer one, moving along the length of the table toward the kitchen.
Renee saw it happen in the gap. Danielle did not stand up or turn. She just smiled wider and shifted her shoulder, making room at the door.
Amy came in from the black dining room and stopped beside her.
She was barefoot too. She had on the green silk robe from her bedroom, tied loose, and her hair was down and brighter than Renee remembered, red going to copper where the moonlight crossed it. Her skin had gone a soft gray, like the inside of a shell. Her ears came to little points above her hair.
And the window behind her, the one that showed the yard and the fence and the dark yard beyond, showed all of that and none of her.
Amy looked past Danielle, straight into the pantry gap, and her eyes caught the light and threw it back.
"Hello, honey," she said.
Renee's mouth was dry. She had to work at the words. "What did you do to her?"
Amy stepped over Danielle's wet footprints and put one hand flat on the pantry door.
"I gave her a gift," she said. "The same one I got, except mine came from a stranger on a sidewalk, and it hurt, and I was alone." Her voice was low and easy, the voice she used on the phone with the utility company, the voice that made you agree to things. "Danielle got hers from someone who loves her. She got it warm. On my couch, with wine."
"She didn't ask for it."
"She said yes with her whole throat," Amy said. "She leaned in. You saw her at dinner. She was leaning the entire night."
Danielle reached up and touched Amy's wrist and left her hand there. Her fingernails were gray at the beds. The punctures on her neck had already closed to two dark scabs, ringed in violet, and she kept stroking them with her thumb without seeming to know she was doing it.
"Do you remember the mirror in my hallway?" Amy said.
Renee said nothing.
"You stood in front of it and your legs went to water, and I walked you back into the room, and you drank nothing and said nothing." Amy's head tilted. "You're the only person who's ever looked at me and kept looking. That's rarer than you think."
Danielle said, "I told her you wouldn't call anybody."
"She didn't," Amy said. "Her phone's on the floor over there and it says one new message, and it's mine."
The knife was under the dishwasher. The phone was under the stove. The front door was chained and the back door was open. Renee ran the math twice and it came out the same both times.
Amy pressed her forehead to the pantry door and the wood gave a small sound against her weight.
"Are you going to come out?" she said. "Or are we coming in? I'd rather you came out. It matters to me how you come."
Renee stayed on her knees in the flour a while longer. Her heart was banging along so fast she could feel it in her back teeth. What she noticed, in that last second, was the strange part. She was not thinking about the knife anymore, or the phone, or the door.
She was thinking about how cold her own hands were, and how warm Amy's voice was, and how she had spent her whole life being the one in the room who saw.
She took her hands off the jar. She set it on the shelf, upright, with the others. Then she leaned forward and put her fingers on the edge of the door and pulled it open the rest of the way herself, and the flour came up off the floor in a slow white cloud between them.