My Husband Dies Every Midnight

What Nathan Hid

The thing on the landing did not charge at them. It simply stood in the landing’s dim light, as tall as Nathan, but thinner shouldered. Its face was shadowed, which was what frightened Elena most, since it did not seem angry at all. It looked patient.

Nathan placed himself in front of her before the figure could move. He made a barrier with his body, as if his very bones would keep it away.

"Down," he said.

The thing on the landing gave him a sidelong glance before responding, and when it spoke, its voice was fractured and rough, as if it had learned to speak from cracking stone.

"The first door is open."

Maris stiffened.

Lila crossed her camera over her chest. "Nope. No way. Absolutely not."

Ingrid's voice floated down the stairwell, all cold smooth edges. "It's worse than I thought."

Elena turned to Nathan. "What is it?"

He didn't answer, and that was worse than any scream.

The figure on the landing shifted and the room fell silent. Elena could see the face more clearly, could see that it wasn't a generic face, not even a human face if you believed in things like genera, but a particular face, one she knew very well. It had the same nose, the same mouth, the same vaguely sculpted jaw—

No, she thought. Oh no no no.

Nathan's shoulders tensed. The thing on the landing opened its mouth in something like a smile, revealing the same mouth that had greeted her at their wedding, but there was some imperceptible difference in the way the muscles shifted, and the skin hung too loosely over the bones, as if the thing had been stretched and was still recovering its elasticity.

Lila gave a choking noise. "Tell me I'm hallucinating."

"You're not," said Maris.

Elena's heart hammered. She turned to Nathan and then to the thing and then to Nathan again. "What is it?"

He closed his eyes for a moment, and then opened them, and they were not the same eyes that had looked at her when he'd proposed to her, but different and sadder. He didn't seem surprised, but pained.

"I was going to tell you," he said.

The thing on the landing gave a tiny laugh, and the sound made the chamber feel claustrophobic.

"It's not that bad," said Ingrid, coming up the stairs, her hand resting on the wall as if she needed the support. Her composed mask was slipping, becoming something more porous and frightened. "There isn't much time. If he hasn't told you, he will tell you."

Nathan turned to her, eyes blazing. “You said you’d wait.”

"I said I would wait if the hollow stayed asleep."

Maris positioned herself between them. "Enough. Tell us what it is."

Elena turned from one to the other, feeling as if she were on the outside of something intimate and terrible. "Tell me what?"

Nathan's throat bobbed once before he responded. "When I came back the first time, I wasn't alone."

There was a hush. Even Lila stopped moving.

Elena's heart thundered. "What do you mean, you weren't alone?"

He looked down at the floorboards. "There was something in me."

"No," she whispered.

"I didn't know," he added. "Not at first. After the second death, I started having these flashes of places and faces that weren't mine. I thought it was the stress, or the grief, or maybe my subconscious trying to process the whole thing."

Elena's hands were shaking. "Nathan."

He looked up at her, and something inside her withered at the guilt etched across his face. "There was a voice too, telling me to find the door. Only at night."

The thing on the landing nodded approvingly. It was almost charming if you didn't consider the context, the fact that it was speaking in Nathan's voice.

Maris closed her eyes as if in despair. Ingrid swore under her breath.

Elena turned back to Nathan, her pulse hammering in her skull. "Why didn't you tell me?"

"Because I was afraid you'd look at me like this."

"Like what?"

"Like I was already gone."

The words landed between them, and for a moment, neither of them could think of anything to say. It wasn't anger that kept Elena from speaking, but a deep, rolling grief that made her feel as if she had been watching Nathan die every night, and that the thing living inside of him had known it too.

The thing on the landing stepped down one stair.

"Stay back," Elena said sharply.

It smiled wider. "He opened the first door," it said, in Nathan's voice. "He will open the next."

Nathan looked as if he might argue, but Elena's anger surged right past the sorrow and grief to something much hotter. "Shut up."

Ingrid stepped down two stairs, her eyes locked on the thing. "It's not an independent entity. It's a splinter, a part of the hollow that invaded him when the deaths started."

Elena turned to her. "You knew?"

"I suspected."

"You knew and you let us continue?"

Ingrid's expression hardened. "I let you live."

That was such a brutally honest thing to say, Elena would have laughed if it hadn't made her so furious.

Maris moved closer to Elena, lowering her voice. "Listen to me. The hollow takes more than the dead. It marks the living who observe the deaths as well. Your husband's continued passing has made him something of a conduit for the thing inside him. It's been growing stronger every night."

Nathan's face had gone completely pale. "How much of me is it?"

Maris didn't answer immediately.

Elena turned away from him before she could see the look on her own face. Nathan's death and rebirth had been a kind of slow poisoning, and there had been other things in the shadows all along, things feeding on him and on her and on Ingrid and Maris. It explained the strange detachment she often felt, as if she were seeing it all through a glass that wasn't quite clear.

She felt physically ill.

The thing on the landing opened its hands, the bones in its fingers elongating in the dim light.

"He opened the first door," it said, its voice rougher now. "He will open the next."

Nathan stepped forward, his expression dark. "I didn't know," he said.

"You knew enough," the thing replied.

Then it laughed and lunged at Elena. She wasn't aware she'd moved until she felt the press of Nathan's shoulder against her back, shoving her out of the way. The thing hit the far wall where she had been standing and dust rained down the chamber in a cascade. Lila screamed, and Maris grabbed Elena's arm and pulled her back.

Ingrid shouted something else, but Elena couldn't hear what it was.

Nathan drove the creature back down the stairwell with a shoulder to its chest, sending it tumbling backward, down the stairs, and then it was up again with uncanny speed.

The thing on the landing was changing, its face softening in places, hardening in others. The shape of Nathan's jaw was barely recognizable, his nose was longer, his mouth wider, as if his bones were made of wet clay and someone had been reshaping them with invisible hands. The next thing was a sort of reverse mirror image, and then something else entirely.

Elena found herself lunging at the thing, her fingers finding the glass vial she'd dropped on the stone floor. She broke the wax seal with her thumbnail and then she was shouting.

"Maris! What does this do?"

Her mother looked at the vial in her hands and then at Elena's wrist, where the clock charm hung. "Don't open it—"

It was too late. The contents of the vial—a pale, swirling vapor—had already begun to escape in single serpentine ribbons, and the chamber seemed to hold its breath as it escaped in a single pale, wavering ribbon, and then the vapor coiled upward and began to snake along the ceiling. The thing on the landing froze, as did Ingrid, as did Nathan.

The vapor found Elena's wrist, and the clock charm, and then it split into two ribbons, one of which coiled around Nathan's torso like some kind of silver vine. The other ribbon hovered near the creature on the landing for a moment, then snaked up and around its body as well.

The room changed. Changed in a way that wasn't quite physical, but was deeply felt, as if the walls themselves were pressing in. Elena saw images—Nathan at a basement window, peering back over his shoulder at a man she didn't recognize, and a hidden room under an old foundation, and a child's drawing of a door with no handle, and Nathan standing in front of Saint Agnes for the first time, and then the last thing she saw was the sound of the voice in the dark, speaking to no one.

I found it first.

Elena turned toward the voice, only to realize with sudden, sickening clarity that it was coming from Nathan's mouth. His gaze locked onto hers, his mouth open in a stunned O.

"Elena, I didn't want you to see that."

"See what?" She turned to Ingrid, who looked as if she'd heard the words for the first time.

"It isn't just memory the charm holds," said Ingrid's voice, suddenly raw and frayed. "It transfers it."

There was a hush. A stunned silence. Elena turned slowly to face her husband.

"Nathan."

He looked as if he'd aged ten years in the space of a heartbeat.

Maris looked appalled. Lila looked as if she'd lost her best friend.

Elena took one step toward him. "What did you do?"

His voice cracked. "Years ago, before I met you, I was employed by an excavation firm to help with an old site outside the city. We found a sealed chamber inside the foundation, and inside that chamber, I touched something I wasn't supposed to. After that, I started having these flashes of memories, things that weren't mine. I took it to my superiors, and later they decided not to pursue it."

"The reports were falsified?"

"Ingrid found them," said Nathan. "Or rather her people did. They warned me that if I didn't keep quiet, they'd bury the project and everyone involved with it." He swallowed. "I thought I was doing the right thing by keeping it from you."

The thing on the landing smiled with Nathan's mouth.

And suddenly Elena understood the most horrifying part of it all.

It wasn't just his memories that had been transferred to the charm, but the secret he'd kept.

The chamber shuddered, sending down a cascade of dust, and from deep within the hollow, Elena heard voices answering the call. They sounded like laughter, but it was more like the ground itself was laughing, rolling deep beneath the foundations of the city. Maris looked up at the doorway, and then at Ingrid.

"That's it, isn't it?" Maris said quietly. "We have to choose."

"Choose what?" Elena whispered.

Maris held up the notebook.

The page had turned again, and now there were new words on the page, black and viscous, oozing like smoke from the edges of the paper. Elena read the words and went very still.

The next door opens with a married name.

The thing on the landing smiled wider, showing Nathan's teeth. And below them, something in the hollow began to laugh.