Hilltop House

House, Six

A person went from there to here, a child at their side; the here was better than the there but still the child cried, so . . . the parent put the child down and beat its little hide.

I do believe my corners are my most attractive features. Corners are the merging of two lines who'd surely have continued going their own ways, truncated into perfect angles. Without corners, walls could go on forever, thrusting their way into eternity. I sometimes wonder what my walls might have been like had they not been sliced and forced into ninety-degrees.

But corners are also convenient for hiding things. Cobwebs tend to form in them, and things rarely step in them. They are out of the way of traffic, be it from pets or people. In particularly dim spaces, the shadows tend to hover there, far beyond the reaches of any hanging lightbulb likely in the center of the room. And when a bulb or lamp sways a little--that's the best of all. Moving shadows. None of my inhabitants has ever been a witness to moving shadows and not felt ill at ease. Obviously, when a lamp is on its own stand, or when it is firmly attached to a wall or ceiling, I have less control, but a good flicker of a bulb can cause as much discomfort as a softly swaying one. I have complete mastery over the electricity that runs through the wires within my walls.

I wonder--do they ever consider what else is in my walls? In my floors and ceilings? If only they knew.

If I begin to play with the electricity too much, though, they'll bring in someone to have a look, and I hate nothing more than an intruder poking and prodding my private places. The mother can't be toyed with too much. She's the one with the power to bring in outsiders. But my darling--she's beginning to warm to me, I'm sure of it. I have begun to speak to her, in my way, and she does not run in terror or begin to weep. She enjoys it, I believe, as she should, and as she will continue to do.

She lies in her bed, in the dark hours, and I watch her. She's begun wearing a long gown when she sleeps, deep red, so red it is almost black, with strange lace at the bottom and a ribbon weaving its way up her chest, but she leaves bare her arms, for which I'm grateful--I believe she does so expressly for me. Against her white blankets, in the deep blue of the night, she is like something from the morbid nursery rhymes the woman long ago used to read to that infant, like a pool of blood on a mound of fresh snow.

Blood--it has always fascinated me, what runs within them.

I first learned of blood when the two of them--my long ago couple--moved in, and she cut her finger on a sharp hinge of a cabinet. In my silence, I saw perfectly formed red pearls drop onto the counter, saw her pull a towel from a drawer and wrap it around, stifling what was trying to flow against her desire to stop it. I'd been disappointed, then; I'd wanted to know more of it. Cut me, and I do not bleed. I have pipes within me, but they are not necessarily me. If they run dry, I do not die. But these creatures are fragile, strange dolls with wax exteriors so malleable the slightest thing can threaten their existence. This blood, it is the life of them; she herself, my first, she almost died when she let too much flow. But breath is also important, I have learned; the man taught me that when he cut off his own.

My darling will keep her blood and her breath, for now. Though I wish to explore what lies within her, how these things move and animate her, I must continuously remind myself not to grow overexcited. The mother is increasingly erratic--what trails her is surely something that will catch up at some point. She is dangerous, and I cannot give her cause to leave.

But I digress. I have been, as I said, speaking with her, in a way. Not in a way she can quite understand, but in a way more subtle. Once I discovered she was unafraid of my little messages, the music box, that ugly thing she'd thrown into her closet after that person she communicates with made her upset (how dare anyone upset her! only I should hold such privilege), I knew she was ready for more. Each night, after I've made sure all is still, that the mother is either gone or asleep, after my dear has herself fallen asleep, after at least an hour of complete silence and darkness, I speak to her. I begin slowly, softly, with a flicker of the small lights she's added to her room (no doubt with the intention of aiding our conversations). There are a few nightlights, one a small bulb she inserted into one of my outlets, another a strange geometrical stained glass shape. I pulse through these mediums sensually, strobing in and out inconsistently, as the mood strikes me, and I open the music box. She never fails to wake, sweetly, as if surfacing from a pleasant dream, and when she does, when she realizes I am trying to speak to her, I come on stronger (I cannot help it; I grow so agitated).

I love to watch her eyes open as she lies there, no longer startled as she was when I first introduced myself. She gazes up at my ceiling, caresses me with her looks, and when I tease her through the desk lamp, her floor lamp, even the overhead bulb if I'm feeling adventurous, she'll often press her hands, sometimes even her back or cheek against my wall--if I am especially lucky, she'll enfold herself into my corner, one of my most untouched and therefore most sensitive places--and the sheer contact of her skin against my plaster has more than once burst a bulb.

Her mother cannot understand why my darling has had to replace so many lights. Her secrecy is bemusing.

Oh, our conversations need none of the words she and her kind are so fond of exchanging. We exist on a different plane, when we speak to one another. How have I been so fortunate as to reach this place? But I cannot act as if it is only some quirk of fate that has brought me to this bliss; I myself have worked hard to draw her in, and I must continue to do so. I will not let her go--not now that I have her caught. I've seen enough spiders in their webs over the years, watched them lure their prey with all their deception, watched how they waited for the very precise moment--then struck. I am in that waiting . . . and I enjoy it as much, surely, as the spiders do. But my darling is not a fly or moth, of course. I do not look at her as something I should terrorize before I absorb her. No, I want her to find the moments leading to my final maneuver as pleasurable as I do, in fact prefer if she has little awareness of my ends which, at this stage, she would surely oppose.

Our nightly liaisons are an unexpected joy. Who would have thought I could entice her by revealing myself? She is a different sort of person than any of the others I've met. Whenever I've shown myself in even the slightest ways, I've experienced suspicion and fright from my observers. That has been true of every single one of them. So it was a big risk I took, you understand, in playing openly with my dear, but I am glad to have done it. Had it gone wrong, surely she would've told the woman, and they'd have become fearful, perhaps even run. But as it is--as she is--I read something in her, a sort of kindred spirit. She's one to embrace something . . . different. Something like me.

She believes I would not hurt her, that I am a friend to her. That I care for her. And she isn't quite wrong, although we may have different ideas of caring, of hurting.

Here, I should stop. I have no wish to divulge my notions, to cause concern where it is not warranted.

Rest assured I intend to keep her wrapped within my walls to ensure her protection. There are forces without that I refuse to allow in. That person with whom she communicates (or used to communicate) using her small electronic device--he is troublesome. He upset her, and I was able enough to decipher their messages to understand that he wished her to reveal parts of herself to him. She was, rightly, disgusted. I laugh when I think of that person on the other end of her communication--if only he knew how often I was able to see her, when she changes or washes herself . . . and yet the baring of her body does not mean the same thing to me as it would seem to mean to another of her kind. I've seen what these beings do to one another; it is utterly grotesque. When I see her smooth skin, herself revealed, I revel in her vulnerability, in her unadulterated state, as if I stand before some pure structure whose interior I aspire to explore. But that is all.

So it is good that she rejected the demands of that person; she should keep all of herself for me.

Anyone else who intends to harm--that boy from down the street, whatever demons follow the mother--will find a foe in me. So long as she is with me, she is safe. It is when she leaves that I worry. I must find a way to keep her here. She has begun to trust me; I have made her comfortable. But those things alone have not worked. She continues to leave me often in the daylight hours. Perhaps I need make some trouble if I am to convince her to keep within me. I do not wish to harm her, and yet . . . a small bit of harm might result, in the end, in some larger bit of good.

It is worth thinking of, at least.