“If I keep looking, I’ll have a whole beauty kit,” Linda said.
“You mean, in addition to the bathroom full of the stuff upstairs,” Charity said.
The kitchen contained the standard kitchen offerings: cooking utensils, pots, and pans. Old herbs. Linda bit her lip as she examined them, trying to recall any traditional folk remedies. Charity grabbed a tin of chamomile from a cabinet and shook it.
“Good for sleep,” she said. “Could calm Marion down.” She gestured to a bowl of garlic bulbs. “Anti-inflammatory. Couldn’t hurt.”
Linda squeezed one It felt firm. Nothing else looked familiar.
Linda picked at her lips with a sharp nail. She hadn’t found any proper medical supplies in the parts of the house she knew well, but they had yet to search the hidden hallways, the off-limits areas they’d been forbidden from exploring.
• • •
After an hour of failure, Linda arrived at the last hall—the one she had stumbled upon that contained all the rooms of stacked branches. She hadn’t noticed any furniture that first time, but she hadn’t been looking for areas where one might hide useful supplies. She led Charity to the first door, then gave her one final glance before twisting the knob open. She clicked on her flashlight. The batteries still worked. A shaft of light poured into the hall, illuminating a floor studded with nubs of rough wood.
“They’re growing,” Charity said. “Like the wood in the bathroom was.”
Entering the hall, Linda motioned Charity to follow. As her feet pressed against the knots, they seemed to sink back into the wood, then rise again.
At the first door, Linda took a deep breath and pushed it open. She shined the light inside. Whereas before she had believed the room was filled with cut branches, now she saw the truth: the branches had grown from the floor. They reached to the ceiling and twisted together as they climbed, a tangle of insistent limbs. Linda shivered, remembering the way the vine had wrapped around Brandon’s neck.
Linda passed the flashlight to Charity.
“Wow.” Charity peered in, her voice shaking. “This can’t be real.”
“Maybe not,” Linda said. Money could buy tricks as good as this.
Inside the next rooms, more branches had grown from what should have been a dead wood floor. In the third room, the branches had panicked to reach the top, the end-of-the-line, and had bent back on themselves in an orgy of limbs. The ceiling had cracked in several directions like a parched forest floor.
“This is going to bring the house down eventually,” Charity said. “Why wouldn’t the network fix this?”
“This?”
“Filing the limbs down.”
“Why does the network do or not do anything?” Linda said. “Money? A misguided sense of priorities?” Linda chewed her lip as she told Charity the only information she knew. “Brandon said Deja brought the house to the network’s attention. That it was her distant family who built it.”
“Then she’s to blame.” Charity shoved her hands in her pockets. “The next room?”
Linda opened that door. Before them, the braided tangle reached. She started to hand off the flashlight when a movement caught her eye. She frowned and paused the sway of the beam on a limb. She squinted. Between the twigs and the branches, new shoots had erupted in strange shapes. Linda knelt to get closer to one nearest the door. She shined the light. That strange familiarity returned to her, an uncanniness that made her feel sick to her stomach. The new shoot was not wood, but an arm covered in flesh ridged like bark, and at the end of the shoot was a fist.
The fist opened, and Linda screamed louder than she should have—surely the sound traveled upstairs—but she couldn’t help it. The hand’s fingers wriggled toward her. They were gruesome in their thinness. There were no nails, only more soft, fleshy bark.
Charity yanked Linda back by the shoulder. She knelt on the floor and met her knee-to-knee. “Are you okay?”
“Look.” Linda gestured.
Charity peered inside, and as she noticed the strange appendages shooting off from the branches, she jumped back and shut the door.
“Whose hands are those?” she whispered.
Linda’s balance returned. Standing, she marched with purpose to the last door and flung it open. This time, she didn’t scream. The whole room was filled with hands, and as she shone her light upon them, they flexed and turned toward her. They moved their fingers as though trying to grasp whatever humanity she had to give.
• • •
They sat on the floor outside the hall, their breath hurried and desperate as they pressed closed the door that led to such monstrosities.
“I want to get out of here,” Charity said. It was the first time Linda had heard her sound frightened.
“I do, too.” And she had since the threats, the first death, the kiss in the room that was then tainted by a swinging body. All lovely things did rot. But for once, she longed to outrun the decay.
“But also—” Charity chuckled, though there was little levity to the sound. “I’m happier right now than I’ve ever been before. It’s like…this weird contradiction of emotions. I don’t know. That doesn’t make any sense.”
“It’s like a funeral.” Linda’s father’s face appeared again in the dark.
“I haven’t been to many,” Charity said. “And not since I was a kid.”
“I went to my father’s,” Linda said. She’d never talked about it before. The words burned her throat like vodka coming back up after a bad night. “It seemed like everyone we’d ever known was there. All the people who either cared about me or claimed to. They asked me how I was. They hugged me, fetched me plates of food at the wake. At school, a counselor called me into her office once a week for three weeks, until my mom got sick, and they moved me to the foster, who homeschooled me and didn’t pay too much attention. But the funeral? After the funeral, I felt so full inside. Like, death had reaffirmed all that I’d ever heard was good about life. Love, care, affection. For a couple of days, before it became apparent my mom had disappeared mentally, I felt like I understood profound sadness and happiness at the same time.”
Charity squeezed Linda’s upper thigh with her trembling hand. “I wish I could have been there for you.”
“That’s impossible.”
“But imagine. There you are. The people who claimed to care have gone. Your mom is away. You think you’re alone. But you’re not alone. I’m with you. You need me. I wrap you up. I’m there, in your room, whenever you call. Can you see it?”
Tears formed in Linda’s eyes, but they didn’t release. Instead, that crack inside widened, and she imagined its yawning maw there to eat her alive. “I see it,” she said, and the thought was a remedy and a fear.
“Any time you think about those times, remember me. I’m there now. We’re going to get out of this together. It’s going to be better than a funeral. We’re going to try our hand at this thing. It’s going to be all the good stuff, and hardly any of the bad.”
