Excerpt from “Deeper Downs”
Mae completely gave up trying to stock the kitchen with plates and cutlery after they’d so often launched themselves at her. She’d learned quickly which ones hurt the most—forks, surprisingly, rather than knives—and which ones were hardest to sweep up after they smashed against the walls. Once she’d fully resorted to paper plates and plastic cutlery. Those, too, had sometimes launched themselves across the room at her, but it had seemed half-hearted because they fluttered rather than flung and never managed to give her so much as a paper cut.
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Sometimes there had been insects: flies, obviously, but also centipedes, bees, and, weirdly, ladybugs. On the second week after the hole was covered, a colony of tiny spiders had exploded out of the first-floor toilet. It would have been terrifying if anybody had been sitting on it at the time. As it was, the spiders had just blorped up, paddled around in a panic for a while, and then drowned en masse in the worst place anything can drown. It had been more sad than scary, and Mae had felt terrible for them because they’d been coerced and didn’t deserve that fate.
Those happenings were all annoying and occasionally scary, but they were nothing compared to the murder attempts. The First’s most often-used tactic was temporarily possessing one of either Guy or Mae and having them try to kill the other. By Mae’s count, she had made nine attempts on Guy. That was if you included the first time with her clogs which only caused bruises and were unlikely to have ever killed him. The third and fifth attempts—both with her car, once forward and once backward—had come the closest to succeeding and the seventh attempt would certainly have worked if Guy wasn’t so surprisingly responsible about keeping the fire extinguisher fully charged. True to his career and hobbies, most of Guy’s attempts on her had involved power tools. It might have been a little scary except that he was incompetently stealthy and loved the noises his tools made, so he always gave them a little burst of power before he came looking for her. So every time she heard a quick test buzz from a jigsaw or an experimental whine from a cordless drill somewhere down the hall, she knew to lock her door or go out the window until Guy wasn’t possessed anymore.
Other than trying to kill each other, Mae and Guy had gotten along surprisingly well stuck in the same house together. And after a couple of months, they had gotten fairly accustomed to the murder attempts, both giving and receiving. And they’d developed an instinct to know when one was coming on, and even built up a bit of resistance to them. Sometimes they could shut them down completely, suppressing them like a sneeze. And when the possessions finally stopped in early summer, both Guy and Mae missed them a little. It was one less bit of excitement to look forward to. And Mae’s last attempt had been so feeble—feather dusters are rarely lethal, she discovered—that it almost embarrassed her. For a while, she considered going for one more try without any supernatural influence at all just to salvage her dignity.
The other, non-murderous goings-on in the house also slowed down around the same time. No more noises. No more lights. No more creepy crawlies. All of it had ceased. There was an unmistakable sense that the First had given up. The rock had blocked him from emerging and Mae and Guy had demonstrated that they would not be intimidated, either into killing each other or into moving the rock off the hole again. So it appeared that the First had gone back down to wherever he had thundered up from, and either given up or died.