The Bathroom

He scrubs the grout at three in the morning and he doesn't remember installing it.

Dean has been a plumber for twenty-two years. He parks two streets from every job and has never known why. He checks his phone every seven minutes, even where there's no signal. He came to number 14 for a routine survey, found a bathroom that smelled like the inside of a mouth, and crouched to inspect grout that rang under his tool like it had teeth in it. It does.

What the house offers Dean isn't fear. It's a tap he can open, and behind it a hundred and forty years of other people's lives to drink, and the thing Dean has never told anyone is that he has no bottom. He drinks. The mark on his chest branches like pipework. For the first time in his life, he feels accounted for.

Room three of The Feeding House, and the one that gets closest to the bone. Not gore. Worse. The calm.