The Boy with Words for Skin

Chapter 22: A Visitor

November got cold real quick. Thick gray clouds rolled in and covered the entire sky for days, spitting cold rain on and off. There was thick frost in the mornings, but instead of making everything look pretty it made the world look sharp and mean.

With my hoodie gone, I had to find a replacement. The only other hoodie in the house that fit was Kit's. It was baby blue and had a flower pattern all over it. So, that was out of the question. Instead, I wore long sleeves and a beanie that was too big for me. That way I could pull the hat down over most of the back of my neck.

After Halloween, we started hearing the thing from the basement moving around at night. "We" meaning everyone. That first week, it came up from the basement three times. How any of us hadn't heard it before made no sense. Just like Boy had said, it sounded huge. It sounded like it walked on two legs, each footstep a heavy thud.

It would come up the basement stairs and stomp around the main floor. Then it'd come up to the second floor, circle around the toy room, and go back down into the basement. Sometimes, it stopped outside one of our bedroom doors for a few seconds. I tried not to, but I wondered if it was sniffing, trying to figure out what was on the other side of each door.

Every morning after it came upstairs, we gave each other grim looks. We made it through another night. We tried to act normal during the day. We talked and played games and did chores, but the later it got, the more nervous everyone got. By dinner, we barely spoke to each other. After, we went straight to our rooms. The thing wouldn't come for hours—if it did come that night—but it didn't matter. We just felt safer in our rooms.

Boy refused to sleep anywhere but in the upstairs bathtub once we started hearing the footsteps regularly. He asked me to sleep in there with him, and I did. We brought Rope in the tub with us, too. It was kind of cramped, but we didn't want to leave him in the bedroom by himself with that thing walking around.

Two weeks after Halloween, I was pretty much back to normal other than a few scabs. You could barely see the scars left from Kit's stitches. She used tan thread.

Light avoided me. He was embarrassed about running away when Tang showed up. I told him it was fine, that there was nothing he could've done, but he still hadn't looked me in the eye.

Keys also avoided me. He disappeared a lot those days. He used to go to his parents' house a lot—he said they worked a lot and were almost never there—but with the colder weather I figured he spent most of his time in the upstairs storage room, his secret reading spot.

One day, I decided I couldn't wait anymore to talk to him again about locking the basement door. With that thing coming upstairs so often, we needed to at least try something.

I watched him go upstairs after lunch that day. I hung around the parlor for about half an hour, then I went upstairs. I checked his room and the bathroom. When I saw that he wasn't in either of those places it left only one other place he could be.

I opened the storage room door and called inside. "Keys?"

Boxes were stacked all around the walls, and there was a huge pile of boxes in the center of the room. I circled around the room but didn't find him. Surprised, I circled around again. Nothing. I called his name over and over again. I even looked inside and behind some of the boxes—nothing. He wasn't in there. So, where could he be?

I slipped out of the storage room and shut the door behind me. My eyes fell on the door to the locked door at the top of the stairs.

I went over to the door and tried to look in through the keyhole. I couldn't see anything. It was totally black. That room felt like a pit. It felt like stepping through the door would send you falling into a dark nothing.