Things got quiet in the following days.

I stayed upstairs in our bedroom for over a week. The first times I went down the stairs, I was glad I was alone because I felt stupid and haunted by the sheer risk this posed to me. I couched down above the stairs and went down on my ass, one step at a time like a toddler. But I walked downstairs like nothing had happened.

I learned to build this mask over my face of a strong woman that wouldn’t do this. I knew that if I crumbled I couldn’t keep Eloim strong, and I don’t know how well Xander would fare if he was the only one not falling apart.

He didn’t talk about it, but I knew that the fact that his wife was here, haunting his son, was tormenting him. But like me, he had a mask of his own.

It’s only when I had to go down the stairs with Eloim, that I went down like a grown-up, acting as if it was nothing to convince the boy there was nothing to fear.

I guess what they say is right, no matter how strong you are, it’s nothing compared to the strength that comes from taking care of a child. My fears were sent to the back burner to elevate his, and I did something I, alone, wouldn’t have thought myself capable of. I was starting to believe that for this kid, I might be able to walk through freaking fire.

It was hard to do things with Eloim always around. It’s like he had the fear that the moment he would not see me for any significant amount of time, I would just disappear. So much so, that I wasn’t able to take a bath on my own without having him playing on the floor next to the tub.

After a few weeks of this as my injuries completely healed, he learn to let us have some distance between us, but it was a hard process, and given the circumstance it was hard for me to gage where I had to limit him and where I had to be conciliatory and indulge him.

Trauma makes everything so complicated.

I wanted to do the right thing, to help him heal, but I also know that to learn to stand on your own is an important lesson to learn. So I was always walking that thin rope between the protection and lessons that he needed, never knowing if I was doing the right or wrong thing.

Xander contacted the priest of the local parish. The information we got was that he was busy and would give us a house call whenever he could. We were pretty sure that the main issue was that we were not part of his congregation, which was why he was not rushing this.

We even consider joining to make sure he would come, at least long enough to deal with our situation, but it felt hypocritical to both of us. We knew, though, that if this kept escalating, hypocritical or not, we will do what we must, but at the same time, we had no idea if it would do anything to begin with.

When you fight an illness you can rely on medicine, when you build something, you can rely on engineers, when you face enemies, you can rely on the military, but whom can you rely on when you’re facing something most of the world won’t even acknowledge the existence of. How can You push away something that doesn’t even have a physical body? You can’t lock the doors one something that can walk through them. You can’t call the cops on something they can’t even see. And you can’t run away from something that is hooked to a person without abandoning him, and both of us knew we would not, could not, abandon Eloim.

All we could do was try.

Anything.

Luckily, not every day was Amityville Horror. We could have long stretch of time without any incident, and most of them were minor things we couldn’t even be absolutely sure were incidents to begin with.

We had managed to keep everything under wrap from the construction crew, so we had none of them running away. We even noticed that things were more quiet with them around, so we allowed them to work longer in alternating shifts, from six am to well pass nine pm. We only had to tell them we wanted everything done before the wedding, if possible, for them to see this as absolutely normal.

On the up side of things, it indeed accelerated everything. The exterior was mostly painted now and all that was left was the ridiculously massive amount of molding left to paint. On the inside, most of the first floor was done, my studio was well on its way, and as we hired painters for the inside too—mostly due to how little work I could do for a while there—it raised the cost, but accelerated things a lot, and I was mostly relegated to bossing everyone around.

Our budget was holding regardless, thanks to Xander’s impeccable planning that had included provisions for such unexpected surprises.

This house was feeling more and more like a home, and it was showing us how much of a stunning butterfly was slowly emerging from its ugly cocoon.

Soon, it would not look like the local haunted house.

Now we just had to make sure it wasn’t.

It was nice that we weren’t too far from Xander’s parents’ house too. They came to see us often and to help around.

If everything went according to plan, our wedding would be around spring as it would be a bit complicated to have an outdoor ceremony in winter.

I was starting to get excited despite myself. Contrary to Xander, I never was married before and it was a bit new to me. Sure, I’ve been to weddings, but it’s all different when you get this new vantage point.

Xander was pretty bummed by the fact that our intimacy had been pretty much cut short.

Having a kid in your bed tend to do this.

He did try a few things but nothing worked. Eloim could sleep like the dead, but the moment the bed was empty, it took a maximum of fifteen minutes for him to either look out for us, or start screaming.

We thought we could manage a few quickies, but everything we tried, failed, and had to stop halfway through, which can get even more frustrating than the lack thereof.

We were kissing in bed. Eloim was sleeping on the other side of the bed, snoring loudly. Xander sank his finger in between my thighs.

“You can’t,” I murmured.

“We can be quiet,” he said equally quietly.

“It’s wrong.”

“We don’t have to go all the way through.”

“You call this not going all the way through?” I asked breathlessly as his fingers sank deeper in me.

There was a massive ‘clanking’ sound that snapped us out of it.

Eloim jerked awake in a gasp, and I turned around to grab him in my arms before he started panicking.

Xander opened the light and investigated.

Miki, at the foot of the bed was growling.

“It’s just a box that felt from the commode,” said Xander. “Could be the cat.”

He came back to the bed and closed the light on the nightstand.

The moment the light went out, I saw it. A dark shape. I pressed Eloim’s face against my chest so that he wouldn’t see it, and shushed him quietly so that he wouldn’t feel the fear and anxiety building inside of me.

Miki was barking and growling as ferociously as a tiny French bulldog can at the thing, and Xander turned into a pure statue.

There was little light coming in tonight. Since we were now rising at dawn with the construction workers, we didn’t bother with the curtains as much, and the full moon was bright tonight, bright enough to show us the silhouette of a woman, looking at us. It was hard to see her features and they were deformed, but there was enough light to see some of the gore on her face and splashed on her body.

I kept my eyes on her, not moving and sheltering Eloim.

“Xander,” I ordered him to snatch him out of it. “Light.”

It worked. It took maybe five seconds, but he stretched to the lamp and flicked it on.

There was nothing there anymore.

Miki kept growling at that same spot for a while until the bedroom door that had been left cracked open to let the pets move in and out at will, slammed hard.

Miki sat proudly at the bottom of the bed, giving occasional warning barks but generally satisfied with his own performance.

Xander just kept looking at the vacated space where she had been.

I spend an hour after that reassuring Eloim and getting him to fall asleep again. Xander stayed silent the whole time. He had never seen her before, and I knew that deep down, there had been a part of him that had hoped that this was all a terrible misunderstanding, but he couldn’t escape the truth now and it was crushing him.

When Eloim was finally asleep I took him in my arms, laid us down, and pressed his head on my chest, and something burst opened in him. Something that I suspected had been locked shut for a long time, something he hadn’t let many people even know was there. He wrapped his arms around my waist and started crying, while I glided my fingers slowly through his curls wondering if I had the strength to hold this household together.