Hilltop House

House, Eleven

It's what was missing, I realized--love and fear are as pleasure and pain--she must know I owned both within her.

Her device, her small phone, suddenly rang, its screen lighting up, playing the chords of some inharmonic bit of sound, and she first looked at it from her bed in confusion; it hadn't made this specific noise in a few days. I watched as she rose and went to it, picked it up off the floor, and held it to her ear.

She called that boy's name--Ben? Yes. She asked for him, where he was, what had happened, why his car was still there, but of course he didn't answer. It was only me, wasn't it? Like wet clay on the other end. And when the line went dead, she did as I knew she would, being the good girl she is--she returned the call.

It was fun and games after that.

His sound--I'd stifled it when she'd called before, but I let it go, now. Cat and mouse, hide and seek . . . could she find him? Would she peek? I knew she didn't desire to come to me in the basement. I've watched both she and the woman hesitate to descend my stairs for months, doing so only when they must. It is of no surprise that they sense my intimacies linger there. Aren't I most raw, most exposed in the part of me embedded in the very ground? I am not attractive, there; I am not welcoming. I did not wish her to spend time with me at my lowest. But for this, I was willing. It was necessary to lure her into a place she'd rightly found forbidding. Her desperation to know, to solve the mystery, overrode her aversion, and down, down she came, white face and neck like a marble bust delicately carved, bare feet nibbled by my cold concrete, black and white and fire and frost in all her contrast. I could feel everything rushing within the confines of her flesh, could guess the quivering movement of each connected bone. She was frightened, and though some small part of me resented myself for being the cause of her fear, I was mostly thrilled watching her, knowing how I could move her, already planning ahead.

Ring, ring, ring! Around she goes . . . where she stops, only I know.

She spun in circles, an unintentional ballerina, something fit for her tiny box of music. And oh, the things inside her beat wilder. She heard but could not find, knew but could not prove. The longer it went, the wilder she became, until she tried to get the noise to stop. But I couldn't hold back--I was in control of it all, now, and I not only continued its sound but amplified it, so the whole lower level of me resounded with his call.

At last she could take no more and ran back to the safety of our room, and I knew I'd succeeded, for now. I hadn't scared her enough that she left altogether. No, she returned to me, to the safety I'd been offering her, and I wanted to press in on her from all sides, to feel her really between my walls, to embrace her. I'd done this to her, caused that wildness to beat within her head and chest, and the time to punish was over. Now was the time to soothe.

When she'd come into our room, rather than lie on the bed as she usually did, she put her back to my door and slid down onto the floor. Oh, sweet contact! And she lay in a pile of herself and wept. That was when I was afforded the taste of her tears--she shared some part of her inner self with me. In some quavering manner, I was taken back in time to my first, when she'd shared her blood . . . oh, seductive memory! It was that moment I'd developed an appetite for her insides but was ultimately denied them when she was taken away. And now, this girl's water has restirred that lust within me.

Things begin to move faster than I'd anticipated. I'd thought I could linger on her for months, years if I were patient. I've wanted--and still want--to hold her, to cherish her, to encourage her to rely on me. But forces beyond my control create shift and urgency.

It has been several days, now, since I punished the girl, and she has hardly left our chamber. I fear I made her more ill than I'd intended. I've not been adjusting her climate to instigate her sickness--there's been no need. She seems to have made herself unwell and continues to work on her computer and read books and write her rhymes with almost no desire to leave. I cannot say this upsets me--hasn't it been my goal to keep her inside? And yet the mother has become problematic. When she is with us (which, thankfully, she seldom is, and her frequent absence is truly the only thing curbing my actions), she is on constant watch, simultaneously sedating her own senses while behaving as one of those startled squirrels I often see crossing the grass in the spring. Whenever she is home, she looks in constantly on the girl, whether the girl sleeps or is awake. And she's asked more than once about her wellness, though she thankfully seems disinclined to encourage my darling to leave the house and return to that place she was attending prior to becoming sick. One particular conversation has upset me greatly, though--the woman asked whether or not the girl had . . . feelings about moving.

Not that word! That odious word. But my darling has satisfied me. She was adamantly opposed, almost furious at the notion.

The mother has become a grave concern. I control my darling for now, but that woman has something in control of her as well, and though I cannot sense what it is, it consumes her entirely, likely hollowed her out long ago, and she is only a stringed puppet, subject to another's pull. Aren't they all so predictable, these things? Rather pathetic, really, how ready they are for just anything to step in and subjugate.

For now, I rest, for my darling rests. She sleeps, and I enter her mind. She wanders, her movements scintillating, her footsteps echoing . . . for though punishment was enjoyable, I do hold her tenderly.