The house was smaller than I remembered.
That's what everyone says about their childhood home, I know. You come back as an adult and the ceilings are lower, the hallway shorter, the kitchen table something you could lift with one hand. But I wasn't thinking about the ceilings. I was thinking that it was smaller because there were fewer people in it.
Nobody now. Just me, a flattened cardboard box, and a roll of packing tape.
The lawyer had called on a Tuesday. My father had died the Sunday before. Heart, she said. In the kitchen, standing up. I found I could picture it without any effort at all: him at the counter with the radio on, and then him on the floor with the radio still on. Nobody found him until Monday, because nobody visited him.
The house was mine now. Did I want it?
No.
Did I want to collect anything before it was cleared?
I said no to that too. Then I drove four hours to get here anyway, and even I can't explain why.
I stood in the front hall with the door open behind me and the cold coming in, and I didn't take my coat off. I listened to the house. Fridge humming. A tap dripping somewhere. And, faintly, from the kitchen, the radio. Nobody had thought to switch it off.
It wasn't the radio I was listening for.
I should explain something before this goes any further, because it's going to get confusing otherwise, and I've had a lifetime of people looking confused at me.
I'm not alone in my head.
I don't mean that the way people mean it on the internet. I don't mean I have a lot of thoughts. I mean there are seven of them, and they are not me, and they talk.
I made them up. I want to be clear about that. I was five when I made the first one, and twelve when I made the last. Every time something happened in this house that I was too small to carry, I made something that could carry it for me. A friend. A monster. Somewhere to put the thing that hurt.
I gave each of them a room. The room where it happened. That's where they live.
Not in this house — not really. In the other one. The one inside me, that I built out of this one, room by room, when I was a boy. A copy of this house, with the same hallway and the same doors, that I carry around wherever I go. When I close my eyes, I can stand in it.
That's all they are. Imaginary friends who never left.
The thing is, they don't know they're imaginary.
And after twenty years, I'm not sure I'm the one who gets to tell them.
If I told a doctor all this — and I have, more than once — they'd write something down and not let me see it. I'm not confused about what's real. I know there's nobody in the kitchen. I know the voices are mine, in the end.
I just answer them anyway. Out loud, when I'm alone. It's a bad habit, I know. The alternative is to let them talk and never answer, and I tried that once. I was nineteen. It went badly.
The first one to speak was the one that always speaks first.
Forty-one minutes, it said, from somewhere just behind my left ear. Since we parked. You said you'd be in and out in thirty.
Its voice sounds exactly like mine. Same pitch, same accent, same way of dropping the ends of words. Only happier. Lighter. As if it's never once been tired in its life.
I call it Smiler. I made it when I was ten — the face I put on at the front door every morning before school, so nobody would ask what was wrong at home. It lives at the front door still. It's the one who does the talking when I can't. It's also the one who never, ever stops.
"I know," I said.
You said thirty, said Smiler. I'm only mentioning it because Thirteen won't. Thirteen just writes it down and lets you feel bad.
"I know what I said."
Somewhere behind Smiler, quieter, I heard a small sound. Click. Like a bead sliding along the wire of an abacus.
That was Thirteen.
Thirteen counts. That's all it does. Seconds, steps, stairs, sheets, people, chances. It keeps a record of everything, and the record is always right, and it never nags, because it doesn't need to. It just slides a bead, and you know.
I'll explain the name later. It has to do with the stairs.
I started in the kitchen because it was the safest room.
That sounds strange, after everything. But every room in this house belongs to one of them, and the kitchen belongs to Mother Stitch, and she has always been kind to me.
Only to me. She has never had a kind word for anyone else in her life.
I made her when I was six, the year my mother left. I needed someone who would always fix me when I got hurt. So I made a mother out of the kind women I'd met — a dinner lady, a nurse, a teacher — and sewed them together. That's what she looks like, in the other house. A woman in a long grey dress, stitched together from other women's faces, with needles where her fingers should be.
Look at the state of it, she murmured, as I came in.
I could almost feel her moving around me. A warmth at my shoulder. The faint click of needles.
He never once cleaned behind the stove. Not once. Lived like a pig and died like one, on his own floor.
Then a pause, and her voice changed. It softened. It turned toward me, the way a lamp turns.
Poor boy, you'll get dust in your lungs. Open a window.
I opened a window.
Good boy.
There wasn't much worth taking. Mugs I didn't want. A drawer of rubber bands and dead batteries. On the fridge, under a magnet shaped like a fish, a photograph of a woman I was fairly sure was my mother.
I stood there a long time trying to see her face. It was right there. Brown hair. A blue coat. But my eyes kept sliding off it, the way they slide off the last line of a page when you're too tired to read.
Leave it, Mother Stitch said gently. Leave it there, my boy. You don't need it.
Then — not to me, but to the photograph, to the woman in the blue coat — she spoke again, in a voice I'd only ever heard her use on other people. Low and flat and full of needles.
You don't get to be on the wall. You left him here. You left him with that. Stay up there and fade with the rest of the rubbish.
And then to me, warm as bread: Come away now, love.
I left the photo where it was.
The living room was worse.
I didn't go in. I stood in the doorway with my hand flat on the frame and looked at the carpet. It was beige now. When I was small, it had been brown. I looked at the place where the armchair used to be.
And something very large shifted its weight, deep down inside me.
That was Gnash.
I made Gnash when I was seven, in this room, on the old brown carpet, the night I watched someone I loved get hurt and could do nothing about it. I was too small to stop it. So I imagined something that wasn't. Something big enough to eat the bad man. All teeth.
Gnash has been seven years old ever since. It talks like it, too.
Bad man's gone, said Gnash. Its voice was slow and deep and huge, and it said the words like a child repeating something it had overheard. Bad man's gone. Gone gone gone. Can't eat him now.
"No," I said. "You can't."
Wanted to.
"I know, bud."
Wanted to for a long time.
I took my hand off the frame. My knuckles had gone white. I didn't remember gripping that hard.
Behind my ear, a bead slid. Thirteen didn't say anything. It didn't have to.
That's four of them. I'll tell you about the others as they come. They don't all talk often.
One of them hardly ever talks at all.
I saved the stairs for last.
Twelve steps, from the hall to the upstairs landing. I knew that the way I knew my own name. Bare wood. The seventh one creaked. The eleventh had a nail sticking up that caught your socks.
At the top, the landing, and the upstairs hall. My bedroom on the left. My father's study on the right, behind a heavy door I was never once allowed to open. And at the very end of the hall, the bathroom, where the light was always on. Day and night. Even when I was little. Especially then.
I stood at the bottom with my empty box and looked up.
You know you don't have to, said Smiler.
It was right at my shoulder now, chatty, pleasant, the way it always gets when there's nobody else to talk to.
Get back in the car. Drive home. Order something greasy. Let the lawyers bag it all up. Nobody's watching. Nobody would know.
"I'd know."
Would you, though? You're very good at not knowing things. It's one of your best qualities. A pause. Also, I'd like to point out that the wallpaper is hideous. Was it always this hideous? I feel like I'd remember.
"Smiler."
I'm just making conversation. Someone has to. Thirteen only does numbers and Mother only does tutting.
I didn't answer that. I was looking at the top of the stairs. At the end of the upstairs hall, at the thin white line of light under the bathroom door.
There's one of them that lives in there. The seventh. The last one I made, the year I was twelve.
I don't talk about that one. Not even to myself.
I didn't look at the light for long.
And then, from above — from somewhere past the ceiling, past the roof, from a height that had nothing to do with this house — the voice I liked least.
I call it Lord Should. I made it at eleven. It sounds like my father did when he was disappointed in me, which was always. It lives in the study, the room I was never allowed into, and it speaks from somewhere very high above, and I have never once in my life looked up at it.
It doesn't talk often. Weeks go by, sometimes months. It doesn't need to talk often.
It waits until I'm already on the floor. And then it speaks.
You should have come back while he was alive.
I closed my eyes.
You should have called. A real son would have called. You should be able to climb a flight of stairs without whimpering about it. Look at you. Twenty-four years old.
"Okay," I said. My voice came out smaller than I wanted. "Okay. I'm going."
I put my foot on the first step.
"One."
That's a habit too. When I was eight, I believed that if I counted correctly, nothing bad would happen. If every step was counted, every tile, every stripe on the wallpaper, then the world would stay in order.
And for a while, it worked. That's the terrible thing. For a while, it really did.
"Two. Three."
Good, said Thirteen.
It was close behind my ear now. Its voice is dry and quiet and very precise, like a clerk reading out a column of figures. It counts along with me when I count — half a beat behind, like an echo in a church.
Three, it said. Good. Continue.
"Four. Five. Six."
The seventh step creaked under my foot. I'd forgotten how loud it was. My heart jumped with it.
"Seven."
And somewhere in the house — or in the other house, the one inside me — something that wasn't quite a sound. A pressure. A coldness, settling over me like a hand settling over my mouth.
That was Hush.
Hush is the oldest. I made it at five, in the closet in my bedroom, hiding in the coats while two voices shouted in the kitchen below. I imagined something in the dark that would keep me so quiet that nobody would ever find me.
Hush never speaks. Not once, in twenty years. It only ever makes things quieter.
It's the one that sat with me through all the long nights. Every closet. Every hospital waiting room. Every night through the wall when I was small, and every night alone in a flat when I wasn't. The others talk. Hush just stays.
"Eight. Nine. Ten."
The landing was close now. My old bedroom door was half open, dark inside. The closet in there would still be the same size, I thought. Big enough for a five-year-old. Not big enough for a man.
"Eleven."
The nail caught my sock. Of course it did.
"Twelve."
I lifted my foot for the landing.
And put it down on another step.
I stood very still.
I looked down. A step. Bare wood, like the others, under my shoe.
I looked up. The landing was still one step above me. My bedroom door still half open.
Error, said Thirteen.
Its voice hadn't risen. It never rises. But it had gone very fast and very flat, like a machine running too hot.
There are twelve. I have counted them four thousand, one hundred and six times. That step is not in the record.
It had happened before.
That's the thing I haven't told you yet. When I was eight, I came up these stairs one night, counting, the way I always did. And I counted thirteen.
There have only ever been twelve steps on this staircase. But that night, there were thirteen. And something terrible happened in this house that night, something I still can't look at straight. And afterwards, I made a monster whose whole job was to count everything, always, perfectly, so that I would never miss an extra step again.
I named it after the step.
"Thirteen," I said, out loud.
I meant the step. But the monster heard its name, and it started to recount — very fast, the same sum over and over, like a machine jammed on one line.
One two three four five six seven eight nine ten eleven twelve ERROR. One two three four—
And then all of them were talking at once. All six. The way they hadn't since I was twelve years old.
Error, Thirteen was saying, between counts. Flat. Relentless. Error. Recount. Error. Recount—
My boy, said Mother Stitch, my boy, my boy, come here, come to the kitchen, come to Mother—
Bad thing, said Gnash, rising, enormous, from somewhere under my ribs. BAD THING. BAD THING IN THE HOUSE—
You should have known, said Lord Should, from far above. You always should have—
Ooh, said Smiler, right at my ear, delighted, in my own voice. Now this is interesting.
Hush said nothing.
It just pressed down harder.
And one by one, they went under. Gnash's roar, smothered to a growl, and then to nothing. Mother Stitch, cut off in the middle of a word. Thirteen's jammed count, gone. Even Smiler — delighted, chattering Smiler — snapped off like a radio pulled out of the wall.
Hush can do that. It has always been able to do that. It's the oldest of them, and the coldest, and when it puts its hand over something, that something stops.
Almost anything.
From high above, the one voice it can't reach kept going. You should have known. You should have—
Hush has never once been able to reach that high.
And from the very end of the upstairs hall — from behind the bathroom door, where the light is always on — nothing.
Nothing at all.
It hadn't needed Hush to quiet it. It had never made a sound in the first place.
I don't know why that frightened me most.
I turned to go back down.
There were no stairs behind me.
There was a staircase going down, yes. Bare wood. But it didn't lead to the front hall. It went down, and down, step after step after step, much farther than the house was tall, into a dark that was very cold and smelled, absurdly, like snow.
Don't count them, said Thirteen. Hush had let it go, just enough to say that. Unknown sum. Do not engage.
I didn't mean to. I swear I didn't.
But I have been counting things my whole life, and I couldn't stop.
"Fourteen," I said.
And very far away — further than the bottom of the stairs, further than anything — someone stopped talking. In the middle of a word. The way a voice stops when a hand closes over it for good.
Where it had been, there was a space. I felt it the way you feel a step that isn't there. A gap the exact size of a person.
The step gave way beneath me, and I fell into it.
The last thing I heard in that house, in my world, was the radio in the kitchen, still playing, though no one had touched it in a week.
The last thing I felt was a hand made of coats, closing very gently over my mouth.