Free The Damned by Andrew Pyper

these.
    Even when I was alive, it felt the same as now.
    I sat up on my elbows and took a full breath. It tasted like burnt toast (Dad) and, through the crack under the door, the carpet deodorizer periodically sprinkled around the house but never vacuumed up (Mom). No Ash. Not detectable in here, anyway. Come to think of it, this room was a place she rarely entered. She called it gross , “too sad for words,” a Nerd Hole. And while I could see that she was right on all counts it struck me that maybe, through some small kindness, she let it be mine. A sanctuary for the licking of wounds.
    The curtains were pulled tight over the window but the dull light that fingered out from its edges suggested it was day outside. Early morning or dusk. The Royal Oak light of Sunday afternoons.
    It was only when I swung my legs off the bed that I heard the squeak of the bedsprings and registered it as the first sound I’d heard. It held me where I stood next to the bed, trying to listen to whatever else may have been beyond the door, breathing along with me. Waiting.
    Nothing I could hear. But there was something.
    The thing you imagine when you get up in the middle of the night, wakened by what might have been a footfall downstairs. What you don’t rise to search for because you’d rather talk yourself into believing it’s not there. Except it is there. You can feel it in the stillness. The too-quiet of a creature that can hold its breath longer than you.
    I shuffled over to the window and peeped through the curtains.
    At first, it looked just the way the view from my room always looked. The corner of Farnum and Fairgrove through the branches of our side yard oak, the pavement recently slicked by rain that looked more like a glaze of oil. The cracks in the sidewalk beneath my window patterned like lightning bolts. A few blocks away, the top floor of the commercial buildings of Main Street just visible over the Quinlans’ roof.
    All of it smudged by fog. Unusual for the living Detroit. As thougha cloud had descended to ground level and absorbed all the color from the world, leaving only a palette of grays and browns, stone and sand. A mist that thickened and thinned even as I watched it. Breathing.
    When the fog lifted again, I saw what wasn’t there.
    No cars moving on the streets.
    No movement behind the neighbors’ windows.
    But the gate to our yard was open. Swinging in a nonexistent breeze. Banging against the latch but not catching, opening wide again, over and over.
    I let the curtains close. Instantly enveloped by the house’s quiet. Listening for the thing that waited for me to open the door and leave the protection of my room.
    If this was eternity then I had no choice.
    I opened the door.
    The second-floor hallway was only dimly lit, as all the other doors along its length—the bathroom, my parents’ bedroom, Ash’s room—were shut. Yet something moved out there. I felt it before I saw it. Down the stairs, the brass chandelier swayed an inch or two before it was stilled.
    Go on.
    Not a command from within. Not a voice from outside me, either.
    That’s the way it is with twins.
    Take a look around. Old times’ sake.
    I started with my parents’ room.
    The curtains closed there, too. In the airless twilight, I could make out all the things left as they were. The bed made. The glass menagerie of perfume bottles on the dresser, the Chanel No. 5s and Diors and Oscar de la Rentas still almost full, my father’s standard birthday gifts preserved like museum pieces. The full-length mirror that fattened whoever stood before it, reflecting a bowling pin–shaped me. Trembling and greasy-haired and looking even more frightened than I felt.
    I was about to close the door when I noticed the outline on the bed. A body-shaped depression left atop the sheets on the near side.As though someone had lain there not for sleep but only to recall how it felt. Followed by a clumsy