"This place has a history," Violet says, trying to keep a lid on her own unease. They look so fucking normal, stacked in suitcases, and that just seals the deal -- Mrs. Stoker with her smooth forehead and daughter in her shined-up saddle shoes and Mr. Stoker with his fucking sweater knotted around his shoulders, and this house is going to wreck them. If the house itself doesn't, its residents will. Chad's going to have a field day with dad over there, for starters, and the last thing Tate fucking needs is another girl, another secretly freaky girl in long skirts to latch on to. Irrationally, she already hates her for that -- for making her watch history repeat, and it will, Violet already knows. They're trying to escape, but their idea of running away means running away to here, and they're not going to make it.
India looks at her, dark eyes running over her like cool water.
"Oh, but everything has a history."
On the second day they have a piano brought in, a big broad baby grand. Once the movers have gone away Violet leans over it so far that her hair trails against the glossy black wood and tries to remember if she knew how to play.
Somebody -- one of the boys, maybe, probably Tate, she hasn't seen him and for that she's glad -- leaves a baby rabbit on the kitchen counter. It's been skinned or it's miscarried, at any rate it's not quite dead. One leg weakly kicks. The moment Violet sees the thing, a smear of red and pink, she's shouting for Tate, striking the wall with her first and feeling none of the satisfying connection she took for granted in life even as her throat rips raw from incoming hoarseness. He doesn't answer, and she rakes at her sleeves in annoyance, not scared any more, just pissed. This is fucking weird and pathetic. What did he expect, everybody to scream and drop plates? India's upstairs in her room and the mother's out in the gazebo chugging white wine and calling everything dreary. No points for guessing who's going to snap first.
She's just about to swipe the roll of paper towels and take care of the fucking thing herself like an unwanted PETA pamphlet when a figure moves in the doorway. She knows enough now to step back and let it happen. Charlie halts when he sees it and then he approaches, leaning over to look at the thing, hands braced on the tabletop. His face is white as wax and Violet can't read it; after a long moment he turns to the sink and presses a hand to his face, caught aback and strangely thoughtful.
At first she's afraid he's going to puke -- not really the macho type, is he, his sweater's sky-blue today -- and judging from the way he steadies himself so is he, but he never moves and all she hears is the water running and, drawn through Charlie's fingers, a muffled laugh.
Violet watches him smother the thing in a wad of paper towels, slicking up the damp, and bury it at the bottom of the bin. He's always volunteering to take the trash out.
Mom watches them from the windows, but she's holding up better than one might expect. She and Moira stick together, on the occasions when she sees them.Two years. The house is... restrained now, and maybe she can keep it that way. No touching (and especially you, Chad,) no talking unless they come around looking for you. Just watching.
They are so fucked, and yet, the balance somehow stays, the other shoe hasn't dropped yet. You don't have to be a girl psychic to figure out that it won't last, and that their uneasy truce with the residents is forever near its breaking point, but it's perennially not-quite-there, not close enough to count. Mom drinks, boy toy's got a wandering eye, and daughter's got... something wrong with her, gentlemen, place your bets. Piano-playing, French cooking, red wine and sing-alongs. Monopoly. And they haven't killed each other yet, a sure sign of a happy family.
Violet starts to see India the way India sees, and everything else falls out of focus. She can count every eyelash, every pleat and scuff. What do they have in common? Besides incompetent parenting and a general pathology. Disappointment? A sort of supernatural malaise? A vested interest in the macabre? Rape and miscarriage and suicide and dead babies and oh, maybe something like all the murder -- bleak enough for her? She wants to say that that's the house, it's not her; her own trouble is small-currency, practically pocket change, but this house is in her and she is quite literally in this house. So much for striking out on one's own. She thinks, uselessly, of telling India where to look for her body. Any of the bodies would prove her point, really. What do they have in common? A sympathy. Concord. (There's a gun under the bed in its long black bag and call it a crazy ghost sense but knowing it's there fucking burns, her existence is now the first act of a play and spoilers, everybody dies. Tate wants her to stay away. Tate can go fuck himself, when telling him to go away is so easy, and her voice is only getting stronger.)
"Photographs?" The book is at least as thick as her arm and Violet feels weird handling it, even gingerly, like her hands might smear the white paper covers.
"You can flip through there, if you like," India says graciously.
"Did you ever take photography classes?" She lies on her stomach on India's massive white coverlet, all fuzzy eyelet lace, paging through buildings, arches, featureless flowers, featureless women. Every detail hurts. "I bet you'd have a good eye."
"No. Maybe I will."
The bookshelves are too big for her sparse collection once all the junk's been cleared away; India's small collection of books is bookended by a massive pair of muddy saddle shoes but the ones on the end still slip down. Violet reads the spine as clearly as if it were right in front of her. Funeral customs, how romantic. No cigarettes. No smartphones. Does anyone in this house even own a phone? It's kind of gratifying getting lost in somebody else's past. Time's been passing the Stoker family by since before they came here.
(There's a crate of taxidermy birds in the living family room. The least the house's other residents can do is help unpack.)
Violet's still all small wounds; that's the one thing she can still do to herself, carve off chunks and barf up pills she hasn't even taken, and India turns from the blisters on her own hands to shucking up her sleeves with no word and little warning.
She takes her arm and traces down one of the cuts with the pad of a forefinger, curious, then turns it to scrape a parallel scratch with a fingernail, like she's just waiting to split it open again. She's not curious the way people are, she never looks back to Violet's face like she's examining her for what's wrong in her head. She looks at her like she does any little detailed thing, keen-eyed and lip partedly intent, fascinated, and excuse Violet for being blunt, but for once she herself isn't the freak here.
Here we go again. She feels something lurch, a corner turned.
"What the fuck is your deal? Do you need a moment?"
She can hear India draw in a puff of breath, but nothing about it sounds impressed. "There's a long and storied history of self-mortification in the Western world. I'm not one to dispute it."
Violet pulls away, irked by the other girl's reptilian calm, and coils herself up on the bed, shaking out her straight hair. She looks up at her again under thatchy eyelashes, daring her to make any more abstract pronouncements. "Yeah, well, fuck you too, little miss 'I myself am strange and unusual.'" India's look could make her wither up and die. "It's from a movie, Jesus."
She expects this to elicit a response and it doesn't, not a flicker of her eyelid. Still she gazes.
"What's that supposed to mean, anyway?"
"I mean that it doesn't bother me. You're methodical about it."
She catches herself watching her, whether or not India knows she's there. It's the easiest thing in the world not to be seen, and India is whatever it is that she is whether spread out on her bed in her schoolbooks, seldom speaking, or tracing out bedspread snow-angels when she thinks she's alone in the house. Sometimes by chance she'll turn her head, or glance to the side, and Violet starts to get paranoid she can see her there, but in terms of spectral self-control she's doing pretty well for herself keeping a lid on things, and the suspicion passes. The girl's a drawing in ink, a sullen tumbling collection of Hans Bellmer skirts and Wednesday Addams hair, all pale and all dark.
Some of Violet's roving eye is just jealousy, and she tries to hate her, manages pretty well; it's just hard not to covet her too, the way she looks, the way her clothes hang off her (like they aren't a costume, like they're only real on her -- she's not trapped tangled up in her own shabby boho-grunge affectations with patchily shaven legs) and the color of her hair. The color in her cheeks. She looks like the ghost girl here, not Violet -- elegant and stringy-haired yet intact. Speaking of ghosts, Evelyn is fading fast -- word gets around quickly in a house this crowded and the freak brother-in-law sex angle is so not the worst thing this place has seen, but it's all Violet can think about now, it's like Shakespeare porn. How they fuck, if they fuck, if they do it in mom and dad's bed, if they do it where Tate first zipped into that stupid fucking suit. When he's going to make a move on India. When he's going to get rid of Evelyn. Where. How. This house may not be hell, but everything in it is slipshod and unreal; it might as well be written in water, life grey and death greyer. The best it can hope for is some bloodstains.
The girl never makes it down to the basement, though the uncle does. She doesn't feel like passing on a friendly word of warning.
It's her who flinches first, later that night, when she can't handle rosebud lips and inky eyes and the sick roller-coaster plunge curling up in her nonexistent stomach like cancer. It's her who jumps off that cliff first, straight down.
They're on the bed, looking at photographs. Featureless nudes, featureless houses, tall grasses, macro shots of spiders. India looks intent, brushes Violet's hair back from her cheek. Her hand rests there a little too long.
"Violet," India says, "how old were you? When you came here."
"Seventeen," she says. Jesus, if she hadn't offed herself she'd be in college right now, buying big sweaters and taking lecture notes.
"When's the last time you attended school? I've never seen you there."
"Beats the hell out of me. I dropped out last year."
"And what did you come here for?"
"Here?"
In a glance India encompasses the whole room, the whole family, the whole house and surrounding environs. Violet used to be a better liar, swear to God.
"It's traditionally polite to say hello to new neighbors. You looked lonely, "
Domino topple, lurch.
"It's funny, I asked my mother before we arrived and she said there were no girls my age in the neighborhood. Which means you must have come here from somewhere else. I think you saw an opening and you took it. When you told me this house had a history, were you hoping for a guided tour?"
"I was trying to be your friend. Fucking excuse me." She sits up, then throws herself back down again, giving the bedframe a poltergeist-level kick and making it shudder.
"I don't need a friend. Why do you watch me when you think I'm not looking?"
There's nothing left between them. Their faces are very close. She can feel India's breath. (With what?)
"It's you who's been perving on me, remember -- what, do you want to scissor and make up?" Her face that isn't a face twists into a sneer, but it burns with something hotter than blood, worse than embarrassment.
"Come on," India says, "Be reasonable," and sinks down on top of her like a storm front.
Violet is surprised at herself, that she doesn't wink out of existence like a dashboard light, but she's not surprised by this at all. Violet's hands eventually find India's breasts, with profound awkwardness -- that's new, but not bad, it's definitely not bad. India is quiet and intense, and solid underneath her; Violet's fingers seem to know the way where the rest of her has hardly dreamed of going, easy and passionate, while the rest of her lags behind. Like something else is doing the acting, the desiring, and it's way too eager to get down to the sex -- she wants to fight her for this, wants to win. Maybe she's jealous, maybe all this time she's just been crazy jealous and locking it down like the biggest closet case on Team Dead Gay, because she wants to hurt her. Another lurch. Here it fucking goes. In some sick sad kind of way she wants to be her, wants to be inside of her too. Wants to sink her teeth into her lip, or maybe that's what India wants; proximity blurs them, mirrors them, and Violet is plummeting headlong.
Her white linen dress comes unbuttoned and falls back from her shoulders, like dead skin sloughing down, like the shower curtain torn away from the rail. The line between where she ends and India begins is thinner than paper and thinner than skin. She lowers her head and kisses, sucks at flesh, bites.
It's better like this, probably. Violet wouldn't know.
She sticks to the staircases and the hallways; she hides behind doors and makes herself unseen. She follows the sound of music and wishes she hadn't--
Violet can't be the only one who sees, because Evelyn Stoker breaks that piano into kindling and burns it on the lawn.
The thought starts to devour her, consuming and self-punishing. She's not any better than Tate now. She's not any better than dad. She's fucked up. She's fucked up really bad.
"Jeez, when were you gonna tell me you were banging your uncle?" Violet's voice gets sharp and jagged. "Jesus Christ, India, I knew you were crazy but that's fucked--"
"We aren't having sex," India says, all affect flattened. "And he's dead now, so I wouldn't say it matters."
"What?" Violet says, incredulous. "He's not dead, he's just creepy. And speaking of I think it fucking matters--"
He's dead, he's dead, he's fucking dead and he doesn't even know it, he's going to show up with his guts hanging out right behind her, right the fuck now. She basically fucking fed him to that thing, the least it could have done for her is finish him off conveniently--
"Violet Harmon, born 1994, died 2011," she says, fully calm. "I want you to show me."
India reaches out and takes her by the wrist. The next moment, she's holding nothing but air.
Black-and-white shoes scuff through insulation. Violet watches India, watching her.
The flies have stopped swarming but she lies there still, and her jaw's on her chest. Her eyes are gone. Her cheeks have rotted out, and with India's keen eyes you could count every baby-white tooth.
"You get it now?"
India's pale but unbowed.
"Tell me."