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Had Wilder gotten everyone out?
It seemed impossible. They had barely even responded to my pleas to vacate, and I’d been screaming down the stairs. Yet as we moved out of the kitchen and into the dining room, it quickly became apparent we were the only ones left in the house.
“What the hell?” I leaned past a doorframe to look into the living room, which mere moments before had been filled with grinding bodies and passed-out drunks. We were alone.
As we walked from room to room, a strange sensation passed over me, the feeling of something lifting, as though a heavy burden had been taken off my shoulders.
The lights flickered back on.
I stopped in my tracks so quickly Santiago smacked against my back. “Hey.”
Then he let out a low whistle, seeing what I was seeing.
The garbage was gone. The living room was as pristine and pin-tidy as it had been when I’d first come the previous morning.
“I…” My mind was a blank. I wanted to say something to address how completely insane this was, but there were no words. All traces of the party had vanished.
“Yeah,” he replied.
“You saw the party, right?” I was already
making my way back to the kitchen where we’d only moments earlier been sidestepping beer bottles and puddles of spilled vodka.
It was spotless. The surfaces were polished to a high shine, and the only garbage can in the room was neatly tucked into a corner, looking as if it had never been used.
“Tell me you saw it.” I spun to face him, half-expecting him to have vanished like everything else.
He was still there.
“I saw it. I pulled you into a wall. I don’t do that sort of thing for kicks.”
“What’s going on here?” I started pacing around the room, then went back into the living room, hunting for any kind of sign there had been a party here. Nothing. No stereo system, no strobe lights, not a single Halloween decoration, balloon, or plastic cup.
I sat down on the floral-print couch and buried my face in my palms.
It had been real. The sights, the smells. That thing I’d seen upstairs. How could I have imagined that?
Was it possible the demon was that powerful now? Strong enough to make us all see things that weren’t here? To create a hundred people in our collective subconscious, only to make them vanish on a whim?
I had seen things tonight I would never be able to unsee. How could that have just been in my head?
And why?
To distract us.
To get scare us out of the house, because it wanted to hide something. I thought of the thing I’d seen upstairs that had made me long to run screaming for the hills, and it made sense. Gamigan wanted to get rid of us. It had just gone about it a really strange way.
“Come with me.” I got up again and ran up the stairs, two at a time, not sure what I was hoping to find when I got there.
Everything was still and calm. The bedroom doors were shut, including the one at the end of the hall where Gamigan had been.
And maybe still was?
I went to the first door, where I’d been so disturbed by what I’d seen I had to run away.
The room was vacant. Two tidily made beds sat empty, with no sign of a human sex monster having ever been there. There was no one on the ceiling.
I shut the door slowly, letting all my breath out in a puff.
