Restless

I lay there breathing hard, staring at the ceiling, the phantom stretch of the Rubber Man still vivid between my legs. The dream clung like humidity. My nightgown was bunched around my waist; my fingers were still slick. I pulled the fabric down with a sharp, disgusted motion and sat up, heart still hammering.

The locked door remained locked. The room was empty. Yet the air felt occupied - warm, attentive, as if the walls themselves had watched me come in my sleep and approved.

I swung my legs over the side of the bed. The floorboards were cool under my bare feet, a small mercy. I needed water. Or wine. Or to walk until the residual throb faded. Anything but lying there with the memory of black latex and that silent, relentless rhythm.

The hallway was darker than it should have been. I moved quietly, past Violet’s closed door (no sound, no light), past the guest room Ben had taken after I ordered him out. His door stood ajar. A thin stripe of lamplight cut across the carpet. I paused, listening.

Soft keyboard clicks. The low murmur of his voice on a late call - or perhaps just talking to himself, the way he did when the guilt got loud. I kept walking. The anger from the music room was still banked and hot; I had no interest in another confrontation while the dream still pulsed inside me.

Downstairs the kitchen waited, exactly as I had left it. The sage Constance had pressed into my hand sat on the counter like a small, accusing bundle. I ignored it, filled a glass with cold water, and drank standing at the sink. The mark on my breast ached when the fabric of the nightgown brushed it. I pressed my palm over the bruise, hard, as if pain could erase the twin memories of Constance’s teeth and the Rubber Man’s masked breath.

A soft scrape sounded behind me.

I turned.

The back door was closed. The kitchen empty. But the air had shifted - the same charged thickness that had filled the room when Constance first stepped inside days ago. I set the glass down carefully.

“I know you’re here,” I said to the dark. My voice came out steadier than I felt. “The house. Or whatever wears it.”

No answer. Only the faint creak of settling wood, timed almost like a heartbeat.

I left the kitchen and walked the length of the ground floor without turning on lights. The music room door stood open, the piano still faintly scuffed from earlier. I did not go in. Instead I stopped at the foot of the stairs and looked up into the deeper dark of the second floor.

Something moved at the top - just a shift of shadow, too tall and too smooth to be Ben or Violet. The outline was wrong. Seamless. Featureless.

My mouth went dry.

I climbed the stairs slowly, one hand on the banister, the dream-memory of latex-covered hands pinning my wrists rising unbidden. At the landing the shadow was gone. Only the ordinary hallway remained - Ben’s door still ajar, Violet’s still shut, the master bedroom waiting with its lock I no longer trusted.

I stood there for a long moment, breathing the house’s warm, metallic breath, and felt the choice Constance had named settle over me again.

Break or heal.

Seek what you really, deeply need.

I turned toward the master bedroom, left the door unlocked behind me, and lay back down on the tangled sheets. Eyes open. Listening.

Somewhere in the walls, rubber whispered against wood.

And I waited - angry, wet, and no longer entirely myself - to see which of us would move first.