Page 81 of Play Nice

I open it to find guts.

Purple gore.

Jelly. The jar is on its side, lid off. Smeared all over, spotted with fuzzy white mold.

I slam the door shut.

My eyes find the bread on the counter. It’s also covered in mold, so much it’s practically bursting out of the plastic.

It is horrifically humid, but even still, this is a freakish amount of mold. And without Dad, there’s no one to call to clean this up on my behalf.

I tie a bandanna around my face to cover my nose and mouth, and then I toss the bread into a garbage bag, reluctantly move on to the fridge. I turn on some music while I scrub, but it doesn’t make the experience any more tolerable. Moldy, sticky, disgusting. I ruin two sponges and go through an entire bottle of lemon-scented Lysol. The fridge now legitimately sparkles, but as far as I’m concerned, it’ll never be clean again.

When I finish up in the kitchen, I take a long shower. The water temperature fluctuates between piping hot and freezing cold. There’s no comfort to be found, even after I towel off and get dressed and sit on the couch. I’m sweating, then I’m shivering, so I get a blanket, then I’m sweating again.

The humidity reaches its breaking point, and it starts to pour. I get up to close the sliding doors. I pause to watch the rain, listen to the meaty drops pound against the house. It almost conceals the sound. The long dragging footsteps. Almost.

I’m too afraid to turn around.

My eyes peel wide, won’t blink. My neck is stiff. Head stuck. The only part of me that moves are my lips, my teeth, my jaw—they tremble and chatter.

I stare straight ahead at my own reflection in the sliding glass doors. Out of the corner of my eye, I notice something else. A silhouette. A shadow beyond me, in the room behind me.

I know this shadow is too big to belong to me, to be mine. And its shape…my brain can’t quite make sense of it.

There’s a flash of lightning, followed by a low rumble of thunder, and in its wake comes quiet. An eerie silence.

I finally turn, slowly, to face the other side of the room.

There’s no one there. Nothing. Except for the book, which is still on the table. Though in a different spot on the table. Maybe. I’m not sure where I left it. I don’t remember.

I walk over and pick it up. It falls open to a section I haven’t read before.

This copy isn’t annotated by my mother.

But it is annotated.

Father Bernard had given me a list of contacts to reach out to, to further inspect the house and corroborate his assessment of demonic possession.

The first call I made was to a team of paranormal investigators out of Baltimore. They agreed to take the case if I paid for their travel. I borrowed the money from my sister, not telling her what it was for. I was embarrassed, ashamed—which was made all the worse when the team arrived a month after my initial call. Four men with an excessive amount of “equipment,” with muddy boots they didn’t bother to remove.

They trampled through the house, holding up their devices, their toys.

“Well, there’s definitely something here,” one of the men said, pulling up his jeans. “Strongest in that downstairs bedroom. It’s not aggressive enough to be demonic, in my opinion.”

“What do you mean, ‘aggressive’?”

“Demons scratch, bite, gouge. Growl, snarl. It’s more targeted. Demons, they generally possess people, not places.”

WEAR ANY SKIN

WANT HOUSE SKIN

“But Father Bernard said—”

He held up a hand, the rudest way to interrupt a person. “He referred you to us for a second opinion. Priests, they only deal in exorcisms. We deal with all supernatural interferences. If you only eat chicken, everything is chicken.”

The rest of his crew was already packing up.