The Last House on Needless Street by Catriona Ward (guided reading books .TXT) 📕

As I sat on the couch stroking Olivia, I heard it. The long, even passage of breath, great flanks rising and falling. I wasn’t afraid. I peered into the shadows and I saw him, lying in a great pile, watching me with eyes like lamps. I offered out my hand and Night-time came padding out of the dark.

So I got my kitty in the end. Actually it was even better than I had hoped, because I got two.

And that’s how I found the inside place. I can go down when I like, but it’s easier if I use the freezer as the door. I guess I could have made the inside place a castle or a mansion or something. But how would I know where everything was, in a castle or a mansion?

I am Big Ted now but Little Teddy is still here. When I go away, it’s because he has come forward. He does not use the face in the same way that grown-ups use their faces. So he can look scary. But he would never hurt anyone. It was Little Teddy who picked up the blue scarf and tried to give it back to the lady as she sat crying in her car, in the parking lot of the bar. She screamed when she saw Little Teddy. He ran after her, but she drove away fast through the rain.

Lauren

Ted was gone and all the pain that had been shared between us rushed into me. I had not known the body was capable of standing so much. I tried to follow him down, inside. But he had locked the door against me. I wonder if he could hear me screaming, from down there. I expect he could.

Mommy put us back in our little bed when she was done. The gauze was itchy over the stitches but I knew better than to scratch. The room was full of moving shadow and the mouse’s pink eyes gleamed where it watched from its cage.

I’m scared, I tried to tell Teddy. Teddy didn’t answer. He was deep in a good place full of black tails and green eyes and soft coats. I tried not to cry but I couldn’t help it.

I felt Ted soften towards me. ‘You can sleep now, Lauren,’ he said. ‘Someone else will watch.’

I heard the pad of great paws as Night-time came upstairs. I sank into the soft black.

I was woken in the morning by his weeping. Ted had found Snowball’s bloody bones in the cage. He was so sorry about it. ‘Poor Snowball,’ he whispered over and over. ‘It isn’t fair.’ He cried more about that mouse than he did about the new little railway of black sutures that ran down our back. He wasn’t there when it was done, I guess. He didn’t feel it. I did, each one.

Ted knew it wasn’t Night-time’s fault. Night-time was just obeying his nature. Ted told Mommy that the mouse got out of its cage, and a stray cat got it. It was true, in a way. Of course, Mommy didn’t believe him. She took Teddy to the woods and told him to hide who he was. She thought he had a hunger in him. Ted was afraid that she would find a way to take Olivia and Night-time away. (And then it would be just me and him. He didn’t want that.) So he let her think it was the old sickness, the one her father had, the one who kept his pets in the crypt beneath the iliz.

I had begun to understand what Ted could not – what he would not allow himself to know. Each time the thought bobbed up he pushed it down harder, harder. Up it came again like a cork or a corpse surfacing. The sickness had indeed been passed down, though not to Ted. I wonder what the people of Locronan would say, if you asked them why they cast Mommy out. Maybe they have a different story to hers. Maybe it wasn’t her father who had the sickness.

At school they sensed that something had changed in Ted. He was like a mask with no one behind. Everyone stopped talking to him. He didn’t care. He could go inside, now, with the kitties. For the first time he could recall, he told me, he did not feel alone.

To me, who had been with him for all of Mommy’s repairs. He said that to me.

Teddy began calling the inside house his weekend place, because there was no work or school down there. Soon he found that he could add to it. He couldn’t keep his job at the auto shop in Auburn, so he made a basement where he could work on engines. He liked engines. It was a good workshop, full of tools in shining boxes and the scent of motor oil. He put white socks in the drawers, the kind that Mommy would never let him wear, because she said they were for girls. He put a window in the ceiling on the landing, where he could watch the sky all night, if he wanted, but no one could look back at him except the moon. He fixed the music box and put the Russian dolls back on the mantelpiece. Down here, he can fix everything he breaks. The picture of Mommy and Daddy can never be taken off the wall. Olivia walked through it all, her tail held curious and high. He made sure she had a peephole all her own. For her, it is always winter outside: Ted’s favourite season.

Ted made sure that Night-time only hunted downstairs, after the thing with Snowball. He put lots of mice in the weekend place to keep Night-time happy. Ted didn’t want any more suffering.

He added an attic, which he kept locked. He could put memories and thoughts in there and close the door. He didn’t like some of the inhabitants of the house. The long-fingered, green things, which had