We shared a grin. I’d forgotten what it felt like to have friends. I liked it a
lot, and I felt bad for avoiding Ruby over the previous days. So what if her
house was strange? She was worth it. I tried to remember the phrase she’d
used on the day I’d met her: Sometimes you need to make sacrifices for good
things.
We made up our beds on the living room couches. The seats were old but
surprisingly soft, and we pushed them next to each other so that we could
both watch the TV. Ruby didn’t own any movies, but the previous family had
left their collection. We bypassed the horror films, settled on a comedy, then
snuggled into our beds to laugh for a few hours.
Ruby fell asleep before the movie finished. I turned off the TV during the
credits and lay in the dark, staring up at the ceiling and listening to the
house’s silence. Sometime after midnight, I heard a car pass the house. The
air was quiet for a handful of minutes, then another car passed. Shortly after,
a third followed.
I tried to tell myself they were different vehicles, all with their own
reasons for disturbing the quiet at such a late hour, and not a red sports car
circling the block.
I SHRUGGED SLEEP AWAY . Moonlight came through the thin curtains, giving
Marwick House an ethereal blue glow. I blinked fogginess out of my eyes
and sat up.
Someone was playing a lullaby on the piano. The tune was slow.
Ponderous. It repulsed me. It sounded full of regret and broken dreams,
almost like a dirge.
Ruby still slept in the couch next to me. She’d curled both hands around
the base of her throat, but her breathing was slow and even.
I felt like I was walking through a dream. I stood carefully, my bare feet
digging into the carpet, which needed a good vacuum to get rid of the dust.
The tune, steady and grim, floated through the house. I wanted it to stop.
More than wanted… I needed it to stop before it suffocated me .
The floorboards creaked as I crossed into the foyer. The big wall clock
ticked, but it seemed out of beat, as though its seconds had been dragged out
twice as long as they should have been. I stepped towards the music room.
The door was closed. I’d left it open earlier, hadn’t I? The wood groaned
when I pushed on it. The piano fell silent. Its last notes hung in the air,
incomplete but insistent. I pressed my hands over my ears to block out the
reverberations. They faded gradually. I began to breathe again.
A soft hiccupping, wailing noise came from the second floor. I looked
towards the ceiling. It sounded like a baby crying.
I need to wake Ruby.
My skin prickled as I stepped back into the foyer. As I passed the stairs,
the child’s cries were joined by a new sound: the jangle of chain links clinking together.
The rattle sent icy fear into my core. I froze, staring up the staircase, my
eyes hunting for motion amongst the shadows. I knew where the sounds came
from. They echoed out of the blue room at the end of the hall, with its slate-
grey curtains and eyeless dolls.
The infant’s cries softened then ceased. The chains continued to clink.
My mouth tasted like sandpaper. I pressed my sweaty palms into my pyjama
pants. It wasn’t my imagination that the chains were growing closer. Any
moment, I would see a figure walk out of the hallway and pause at the top of
the stairs, an infant clasped to her chest.
Then the chains made a sharp, inharmonious noise. They’d been pulled
taut. The figure didn’t appear. Instead, her voice drifted down to me. She’d
begun to sing a lullaby.
I pressed my hands over my ears again. The tune was familiar; it had
come from the piano just a moment before. Miserable. Grim. Then the tune
swelled, and the sadness broke into anger.
My throat was too tight to breathe. I staggered back into the lounge room
and slammed the door behind me. “Ruby. Ruby, wake up!”
I rounded the lounge chair. Ruby had rolled onto her back. Her eyes were
open, staring blindly at the ceiling, and her lips were parted a fraction. Her
hair had been mussed, strands lying over her face and tangled across the
chair’s armrest.
Blood ran from the back of her head, staining the blue pillows brown and
dripping off the cushions and onto the carpet. Tiny bone fragments washed
out with the gore. Her skull had been broken open like an egg.
He got her. I left her alone—
I couldn’t think. Couldn’t breathe. My legs lost their strength, and I fell to
my knees as a scream rose in my chest.
Ruby’s blank eyes flicked towards me. Her lips twitched. “What’s wrong,
Jo?”
The voice didn’t belong to Ruby. It had been distorted into a crackling,
gurgling slur. Somehow, the words fell perfectly in time with the morbid
lullaby coming from the second floor. I tried to scream at Ruby to stay away
from me, but she was moving, sitting up, a line of bright-red blood trickling
over her open lips—