Chapter 11

“Empty,” Miriam murmured to herself as watched her reflection play over the foggy surface of the bathroom mirror.  “I am not empty…”

With the back of her hand, she cleared a circle through the steam left behind from her shower, and eyed herself critically.

She frowned at the dark brown eyes staring pensively into the glass, the light brown hair that fell in limp curls over shoulders and the pale skin gleaming in the steam.

In one word?  She could be summed up as…plain.  Maybe cute—but in a childish way.

Noting more.

With a sigh, she pinched some color into her cheeks and tried her best imitation of a happy smile.

Hi, she thought pulling her upper lip back from her teeth.  I’m Miriam and I am not empty.  I smile and act normal all the time.

She tried to appear happy…

And didn’t even come close.

The light didn’t reach her eyes, and the ‘smile’ came out looking more pained than anything.

Reaching for a brush, she smoothed her hair back into a ponytail and tried again.

Hi!  She thought cheerfully.  I am not an empty soul.

This time seemed a little less stiff than before, but there was no life in it.  Her mouth looked odd stretched into a grin.

The expression seemed…

Fake, Miriam thought disgustedly.

There was no spark behind the eyes.  No warmth in it.

For lack of a better word, she just looked empty.

Annoyed, she tossed the brush onto the counter and just twisted her wet hair into a messy bun.  Then, she padded out of the bathroom on bare feet, wrapped in nothing more than a fluffy white robe.

What the hell did Eliot know anyway?  She thought with a grimace.  He certainly didn’t know her.

She wasn’t empty.

In fact, these days she seemed filled to the brim with emotion.   More than it seemed possible to bear without exploding.

In fact, the only thing ‘empty’ around here…was her house.

The wide hallway was dark, full of shadows, as she wandered down to her bedroom. Through a crack in the curtains, she caught sight of a pitch-dark sky covered in a horizon of navy clouds from behind a window.

Snow still drifted down in light batches.  If enough fell overnight, school might have been delayed or even canceled tomorrow.

The roads were probably a mess, she realized, cutting out all possibility of her father coming home tonight.  A part of her couldn’t help wondering if Eliot had even made it to the hospital okay…

Stop, she scolded herself, shaking her head.

Eliot was a creep.  He didn’t deserve any of her worry.

But no matter how hard she tried to tell herself that, those soulless red eyes kept popping into her mind.

Constantly.

In desperate need of a distraction, she slipped into her bedroom, changed into a pair of sweats and dug some old homework out of her backpack.

It was boring stuff, equations, times tables, vocabulary words…

But, time and time again she found herself drifting off stare into space, thinking of Lizzie Marexsson and her weird foster brother.

Eliot.

Chewing on the end of her pen, she tried to come up with a good word that could describe him.

Creepy, maybe?

Odd?

Strange?

But even those words didn’t seem dangerous enough.

Reaching under her desk, she thumbed through a stack of books for an old thesaurus and flipped it open to the section of words begining with d.

Dangerous.  The synonyms were words like, unsafe, hazardous, risky, daring, threatening.

Yes, she thought with a nod.  Unsafe seemed like the perfect word to describe him, and that unsettling way he stared deep into her eyes could only be described as…threatening.

But, at the same time.

Trying to peg him as only dangerous irritated her for some reason—it was like trying to shove square block through a round hole.

The words just didn’t fit.

Alarming seemed like a better description.

That and maybe mysterious…

He had accused her of wearing a mask, but Miriam couldn’t help thinking that he was the one wearing one; a frightening, mask of horror to scare everyone away.

Keep them from ever getting too close.

She could picture him growling, ‘ggrrr, stay away.  I’ll bite if you come closer.’

But a part of her didn’t think that he would.

She couldn’t help wondering if he had tried to frighten her at the café on purpose.  Scare her badly enough, so that the next she crossed his path she’d promptly turn and run away in the opposite direction.

Save him the trouble of having anyone get near enough to peek beneath the mask.

Or, she decided, he could have just been a major creep.

Staring into space, Miriam tried to guess just which one it was.  Creep, or…something else?

She was so wrapped up in her thoughts, that she barely heard the front door creak open downstairs.

An icy chill, slicing through the house’s artificial heat, was her only warning that something was wrong.  She shivered, crossing her arms over her chest—but when the cool air raised goosebumps along her skin, it was already too late.

With a thud that echoed against the ceiling, someone mounted the bottom step.

Thump!

She jumped, and her pen flew from her hand to skitter across the floor. Heart pounding, she lurched to her feet.

Her thoughts turned automatically to the broken front door.  She had no idea how it had happened—perhaps her father had come home last night while she’d been asleep and twisted it too hard?

But her heart sank as she remembered that it had locked just fine when she’d left for school that morning.

It was only after Eliot had dropped her off that she realized it had been damaged at all.  Maybe someone had broken in?  She wondered halfheartedly.

But, this was Wafter’s Point, for God’s sakes—not the city.

A likelier scenario was that someone had just gotten stuck in the snow and needed to use the phone, she thought desperately.

But, whoever was there, steadily creeping up the steps didn’t exactly seem like a friendly but lost neighbor.

They didn’t announce themselves, for one.

“Dad?”  She called from the doorway.

Maybe he had come home early after all?

There was no answer, and with a heavy heart she was forced to admit that weirdoes could exist anywhere.  Even here, in the middle of nowhere.

Especially in the middle of nowhere.

Creak, creak creak, when the fourth step from the bottom.  Followed by a creeeaaak from the fifth and the sixth…

“D-dad?”  She called again in a halfhearted whisper.

Once again, there was no answer, but she was already stumbling back until her back hit the wall.  Her legs tremble as she ran through the options of what to do in events of home invasion.

Don’t panic, everyone always said.

Keep calm, get to a safe place.

But those things sounded so much easier in theory.

In reality, panicking seemed like a much better option.  She twisted on her heel and darted into her bedroom, slamming the door shut and locking it with a twist of her wrist.

She backed away, ears straining above the thump of her pulse to hear the sounds of more footsteps.

Creeeaaak, went the middle stair, followed by the soft scuffle of someone stopping short.

Miriam could almost picture them tilting their head, surprised to find that this big, looming Victorian wasn’t so empty after all.

If they were just some punk kid, or an idiot looking for a good time, she figured they would have turned tail and run by now.

Party’s over.

They certainly wouldn’t have taken another step, soft and quiet, as though they were trying their hardest not to make a sound, now that they knew she knew they were there.

Cellphone, Mariam thought in a dull moment of clarity.  She darted to the side of her bed and kicked open her backpack.  Her fingers shook as she dug out the tiny pink phone and tried to punch in the number of…

Who?  She thought helplessly.

She and her father lived on the edge of town.  It took her a good twenty minutes just for her to walk to school—and that was with the added benefit of several shortcuts through the woods.

The trip could take twice as long by car, if the roads were crappy enough.  Which seemed highly likely, she realized after a quick glance out of the window.

Thick clumps of snow blotted out everything in eerie whiteness.  She’d be lucky if someone managed to reach the house in a hour.

Heart heavy, she began to dial the number to her uncle’s—only to have the entire phone slip from her fingers as another soft thud startled her so badly that her entire body went rigid.

Easy girl, she tried to console herself.  The wind might have just blown the door open.

Yeah, that was it, she thought with a frantic nod.  All she could have been hearing was the broken front door slamming against the wall in the throes of the snowstorm.

Either way, there was no one she could call who would be able to help in time.

Be a big girl, Miriam.

With a swallow, she reached under her bed for the baseball bat she kept there—just in case.  The large house had stood empty for so long that only god knew what kinds of critters had since called the floorboards their home.

She’d always kept the bat as a secret weapon just in case a mouse decided to venture into her room unannounced.

Though, whatever was making the sounds outside her door sounded much larger than a mere mouse.

Her fingers scrapped the handle as she hefted it in one hand and used the other to cautiously undo the lock of the door.

You’ve picked the wrong house, whatever you are, she thought with a gulp.  I’m not some helpless little girl.

Her fingers slipped, proving the very opposite, as the bat lurched from her hands to roll across the floor.  Down, it rolled, bouncing around the curve in the hall that blocked her vision of the top of the staircase.

Miriam felt sick as she heard it begin to thump, thump, thump down the stairs.  A part of her wanted nothing more than to run back into her room, curl up into a ball and hide.

But a stupider part was willing to take the risk just to prove to herself that she wasn’t chicken.

With her stomach twisting into knots, she lurched forward to face whatever waited there.  She rounded the corner, clenching her hands into fists.  Heart heavy, she strained her gaze through the dark.

And there, right at the top of the steps was…

Nothing.

Her hand fumbled for the light switch, proving her senses to be true.

There was no one there.  Nothing but the cobwebs still coating the oak bannister.

Down at the bottom of the stairs, she could see her bat dancing across the floor of the foyer only to smash into a stack of boxes.

Way to go Miriam, she thought with a sigh.

The front door was even still closed she, saw as she marched dejectedly down the stairs.  Still, to be on the safe side, she dragged a few boxes in front of it as a barricade.

Just in case.

There wasn’t even snow tracked across the floor.  Though…it was cold.  Much colder than it should have been with the heat on full blast.

With a shrug, she just wrote it off as a malfunctioning furnace and headed into kitchen to check the hot water.  It was cold in there as well.  She shivered as her bare toes touched the icy wooden floor.

The knob of the faucet felt like an icicle as she twisted the hot water on.

She let her fingers dangle in the water, waiting for it to warm up, and unconsciously caught herself staring out of the window—where, through the falling snow, glowed a bright orange spot of light through the trees.

Almost as if someone had turned on the lights of one of the nearby houses.

Which was…odd, to say the least.

Miriam could have sworn that her father had said the other homes in this neighborhood—all sprawling Victorians like theirs—were all empty.  It was the reason they had gotten this one for so cheap.

The place was deserted.

Miriam knew that besides hers, there were three other houses, all situated in a semi-circle, separated by a thin grove of oaks that was supposed to be a ‘beautiful sight’ in the summer, according to the real estate agent.

Now, it was just plain creepy—like a giant graveyard of three-story tombstones.

Each one seemed to hold a different story.  From the large, square brick house in the back corner, to the light blue with green trim across the way…down to the house that was lit now.

A sprawling black, gothic style Victorian trimmed in spooky gray, right behind hers.  Miriam remembered feeling relived, the day they first moved in, when she realized that it wasn’t the one her father had bought,

It looked like a haunted mansion—something only a craggy old witch might be drawn to, with an eerie charm that reminded her of a final resting place for mournful ghosts.

She had never seen any sign of life from behind the dusty windows—until now.  The bright light glowed, undeniable proof that someone was there.  Wandering the dusty corridors and flipping on the dusty light fixtures.

She didn’t remember seeing anyone there during the day—and most people didn’t choose to move in during the middle of a snowstorm.

At night, for that matter.

She flinched as heat seared her fingers, realizing that she still held them beneath the faucet, where the water had since warmed to boiling hot.

So the heater wasn’t busted then.

Frowning, Miriam turned away from the counter…and her eyes just happened to catch sight of a smooth puddle of wetness gleaming across the floor in the glare of the light.

Make that several puddles.  Each was roughly the size and shape of someone’s wet footprint tracking into the foyer.

She glanced up, eyes drawn almost by their own will to the shadowy corner by the back door …and for the first time, she caught sight of him.

A boy with jet black hair to match the ebony eyes that seemed to cut deep into her soul.

“Hello,” in said in a voice like dry ice.  “I just wanted a drink.”

He raised the two empty wineglasses in his hands for emphasis.

But his eyes weren’t on the faucet—or even the fridge sitting in the opposite corner.

They were glued to one place, and one place only—with a look that could only be described as hungry.

Her throat.