The Half That You See by Rebecca Rowland (best summer reads .TXT) 📕

Michael wanted to yell at him, to scream at him to not say whatever it was he was going to say, but the words stuck in his throat like a plug of concrete.

“I’m, uh, I’m going away for a little while,” Daddy said. “I’ve got to…”

He trailed off again.

“Daddy?” Michael asked. His voice was tiny. No scream in it at all.

“I’ve got to go away for work,” Daddy lied.

“Daddy?”

Daddy looked at him. “What, Champ?”

Michael thought he saw something flicker across the black surface of Daddy’s corneas, dancing just out of reach and then crouching there like a coiled snake.

That other. That thing.

They hadn’t been in this house very long. Michael had only a loose sense of time, which sometimes made hours feel like days but sometimes made months whip by like weeks. But he knew it was summer when they had moved here, and now it was the cold heart of winter.

They’d come here because of Daddy’s job. Mommy had had to quit hers, and she’d been mad about it. Michael noticed that most of the ways in which she wasn’t such a nice person got worse. The whole thing with garage sales had started after they moved.

The last house had been brand new. Michael could even remember the builders making it. He’d been three, barely old enough to form a memory. Mommy and Daddy drove him out to this big grass field covered in wildflowers, with a scrum of dark woods running behind it. “See this, Michael?” Mommy had said. “This is where we’re going to live.” He hadn’t understood. But then they’d gone back some time later, and the field was gone and there were big yellow tractors and piles of dirt and the yellowish skeleton of a house that had the tangy wood smell of a fresh-cut Christmas tree. The house was finished the next time they went back, along with others that looked just like it except for the paint. They lined all up and down the street like multi-colored blocks. Big, sweaty men carried all of their things out of the back of a big truck, and just like that, they were home.

The house they were in now was old. He didn’t know how old, but it didn’t have that fresh pine smell. It smelled like his Grammy’s house, all dirt and smoke and old clothes. It creaked and groaned. He kept finding strange things, like the face carved in the wall behind his dresser, and all the weird little markings hacked into the baseboards. When he asked Daddy about those, Daddy said there must have been a little kid who lived there before him who liked to carve on things he wasn’t supposed to. “Don’t do that,” Daddy said, and ruffled his hair, and then mom complained that someone called THE LANDLORD should have cleaned all that crap up before they moved in.

And there was the hole in the basement. A glistening black pit in the far corner, ringed by broken rocks like slanted gray teeth. A smell came out of it. Something like blood. Salt and blood.

“An old well or something,” Daddy said. “Don’t get too close to it. The ground around it might be soft.”

But when Michael asked Mommy, she smiled and said that maybe there was a witch living here before them. Maybe that hole was where she threw the bones of all the little kids she ate. Then she saw his stricken face and laughed. Laughed like she did when he fell on the porch stair.

Heavy footsteps pounding up the basement stairs.

Michael starts to move, legs working without thought. The basement door grows bigger and bigger as he approaches. It looms like a shrine, the knob at eye-level, tick-tocking back and forth like a metronome.

The pounding stops.

With a life of its own, Michael’s hand shoots out. He tells his hand to stop, begs it, but the fingers grip the knob, the wrist turns, the door swings open, and darkness floods into the light of the kitchen, turning everything hard and gray.

The thing wears one of Daddy’s suits, but it’s all stretched out and proportion-less. Long, spindly legs shoot forward like pistons, carrying the thing into the kitchen.

Michael feels his head tilting, and his gaze goes UP UP UP to the thing’s mammoth, disproportionate head. It’s covered in something wrinkly and brown like a paper bag. But alive. Two black button eyes peer out of the torn folds. Michael feels their weight pressing down into him.

“Hi!”

A voice like a wasps’ nest caught in a cloud of bug spray.

“Who’re you?”

“Who am I?” The thing bellows. No mouth, but Michael knows it’s smiling. “I’m your new Daddy!”

Daddy went to work like usual, but he didn’t come back. That was last week. When Mommy finally came out of her bedroom, her face was puffy and red. It was like a swarm of red ants attacked her in her sleep.

She made Michael breakfast, sniffing while she cooked. She didn’t look at him. Michael wanted to reach out to her, to touch her hand or her leg, to say something to make her feel better. But he was five, and he didn’t know how. And there was always that fear, lurking not quite in the back of his mind, that she would turn on him with that not-nice grin and—

“Come here, baby.”

Michael put down the pieces to the puzzle and sat still, watching her.

“Come sit with Mommy for a minute.”

There was a word that he knew, a word he learned in school, and he didn’t want to say it. But it hovered there, flitting about in the back of his throat.

“Michael…” A note of reprimand now. He stood, timid, and went to her. She sucked him into a tight, terry-cloth embrace and kissed his forehead. She stunk, like old milk and sweat socks.

“I’m sorry about all this, Champ,” she said, and her breath smelled worse than the rest of her. It was like something died in her mouth. He had