“This Is Insanity…”

I left Ben in the kitchen with his reasonable explanations and his careful blindness and took the stairs two at a time.

The vacuum was running in the master bedroom. Of course it was. Of course she had gone straight to the room where I had locked Ben out, where I had touched myself after the dream, where the sheets still smelled like anger and latex and the mark Constance had left on my skin.

I pushed the door open hard enough that it bounced against the stop.

Moira stood beside the bed, vacuum wand in one hand, the other smoothing the duvet with unnecessary care. The short black dress rode high on her thighs when she bent. She looked up, unsurprised, and switched the machine off. The sudden silence felt deliberate.

“Mrs. Harmon,” she said, polite as ever. “I can come back later if you’d prefer privacy.”

“You can leave,” I answered. “Permanently. I don’t know what arrangement my husband thinks he made, but I never agreed to another woman walking through this house like she owns it. Especially one who looks…” I stopped myself before the rest of the sentence could finish. Especially one who looks the way I used to, before the stillbirth and the affair and this place started carving pieces out of me.

Moira set the vacuum aside with unhurried grace. Her expression stayed mild, almost sympathetic, but her eyes were older than the rest of her face.

“I understand,” she said. “New houses, new marriages under strain… strangers can feel like an intrusion. But I’ve been careful. I’ve kept certain things… private.”

Something in the way she said private made the hair on my arms rise.

She crossed to the tall wardrobe, opened the bottom drawer I almost never used, and lifted out a folded length of dark cloth. When she unrolled it on the bed, the contents spilled into the morning light like an accusation.

Black silicone. Thick. Veined. Obscene.

Three of them, graduated in size from merely excessive to something that made my stomach tighten with a complicated mix of recognition and dread. The largest was easily the length of my forearm, girthy enough that the thought of it forced a low, involuntary clench between my legs. They were clean, carefully wiped, and arranged with the same neatness Moira brought to everything else.

I stared.

I had never owned these.

I had never seen them before in my life.

Yet the house had apparently decided they belonged to me, and Moira had found them - scattered, she would later imply, in places Ben might have noticed - and hidden them away like a loyal secret-keeper.

“I found the first one under the bed the morning after you moved in,” she said softly, almost gently. “Another in the music room, behind the piano bench. The largest was in the basement laundry, still faintly warm. I didn’t think Dr. Harmon needed to see them. Men can be… sensitive about such collections. Especially when the marriage is already complicated.”

She looked at me with perfect, practiced innocence.

“I assumed they were yours, Mrs. Harmon. A private comfort. I only wanted to protect your privacy.”

The room felt smaller. The residual throb from the Rubber Man dream pulsed harder, as if the house itself were laughing. Black. Cock-shaped. Obscene sizes. Exactly the kind of thing the man in the latex suit might have left as a promise - or a threat.

My mouth was dry. “Those are not mine.”

Moira tilted her head. “Of course not. If you say so.” She began rolling the cloth back over them with tidy efficiency. “Shall I put them somewhere more permanent? Or would you prefer I return them to the places I found them?”

The vacuum sat silent. Downstairs Ben moved around the kitchen, oblivious. Somewhere in the walls the house waited to see what I would do with the evidence it had planted and the beautiful, knowing woman it had installed to present it.

I looked at the largest of the black shapes, at the way the morning light gleamed on the silicone head, and felt the same dark, unwilling heat that had answered Constance’s fingers and the dream’s relentless thrusts.

“Leave them,” I said, voice low. “And get out of my bedroom.”

Moira smiled, small and satisfied, as if I had given the correct answer.

“Yes, Mrs. Harmon.”

She gathered the cloth bundle, set it neatly on the nightstand like a gift, and walked past me toward the door. The scent of her - clean soap and something faintly metallic underneath - brushed my skin as she passed.

At the threshold she paused.

“If you change your mind about the help,” she said, “I’ll be downstairs. Dr. Harmon prefers the living room dusted before noon.”

Then she was gone, footsteps light and proprietary on the stairs, leaving me alone with three black, impossible cocks that the house had decided were mine, and the growing certainty that nothing in this place was going to stay hidden for long.