The Last House on Needless Street

“A soft white glow gathered on his chest over the place where his heart must be. The glow became a cord, reaching out through the air.”

The bond between Olivia and Ted is symbolized by a golden cord that connects them. Olivia can see it, but Ted cannot. The appearance the cord takes on reflects their mood and the way Olivia feels about their relationship at any given moment. As the part of Ted’s personality directly responsible for his emotional health, the cord represents how well Ted is taking care of himself in that moment.

“Breaking me, then mending me, over and over—that was my mother.”

This passage is a very early indication of the horrific abuse that Ted endured as a child at his mother’s hands. Mrs. Bannerman forces Ted to give up the wooden cat keychain on the pretense of preparing him for dealing with loss later in life. However, it is another form of the psychological abuse that she inflicts on him, breaking his will to accept his position and keeping him emotionally dependent on her.

“The last thing Lulu said to Dee was, I found a pretty pebble. Some days all Dee can think about is that pebble.”

The story Dee tells herself about the day at the lake becomes the framework for her life after Lulu’s disappearance. The story absolves Dee of responsibility for Lulu’s death while maintaining the guilt she feels, symbolized by the pretty pebble—a phrase Lulu never actually used, but which becomes almost a mantra for Dee as she searches for Lulu’s kidnapper. The pretty pebble represents Lulu’s innocence, lost forever, and the promise of social connection that could have saved her.

“I took down the mirrors some years ago because they upset Lauren. But I don’t need a mirror to know how I look. Her words stung me.”

As a consequence of his mental condition, Ted feels alienated by his own body. Unable to account for the passage of time, he is also unaware of his physical growth. These symptoms—including memory loss and weight gain—are later revealed to be a side effect of the medication the bug man prescribes him. He both literally and figuratively can’t see himself for who he truly is.

“‘I love you more than anyone else in the world,’ I tell her. And I mean it. Lauren is special. I never showed any of the others the clearing.”

This is an example of a red herring, a deliberate misdirection designed to make the reader think something else is going on. Ted’s mention of “the others,” in the context of the reader’s knowledge that something is buried in the clearing where he takes Lauren, seems to imply that he has kidnapped other children and buried them there. Lauren is the only one of Ted’s personalities he is allowed to see the clearing. She has borne for Ted the unbearable weight of physical torture, and so he does feel a special responsibility to take care of her and explain to her the context of her torture.

“The whole place smells of death; not of rot or blood but dry bone and dust; like an old grave, long forgotten. Everything is decaying. Even the latch on one of the back windows is rusted through. Flakes of dark red litter the sill. The tired detective Karen’s voice is in Dee’s head. A chaotic home environment. Unmarried. Socially marginal.”

Dee’s description of Ted’s house is the first objective analysis the reader gets of its conditions. Dee’s observations directly contradict some of Olivia’s narrative in the previous chapter: The rug, for example, appears to be blue, not orange like Olivia claims. This discrepancy marks one of the many differences between the real world and Ted’s “weekend place.” The air of death and decay creates a tomb-like environment indicative of the fact that Ted has not truly been living in all of his adult years.

“‘I’ll let you in,’ Dee whispers. She pulls the bookcase aside. It shifts with a groaning shriek. She sees what crouches outside the window, gazing in. The hammer falls to the floor. She kneels and comes face to face with it, the child, with its silver-white flash dappled in the moonlight, its mouth a black cherry, eyes gleaming like lamps, filled with the light of death, scalp stripped and wounded, where the birds have plucked the hair from her skull.”

Though this appears to be a supernatural element, it is, in reality, an example of how Dee is an unreliable narrator as well. The guilt she feels over her sister’s death causes her to imagine supernatural elements where there are none. The ghost of the dead girl that Dee sees at the window turns out to be the stray tabby cat that lives in the neighborhood.

“It has been years since Lauren tried anything like this. I feel like an idiot, because I thought we were friends. I shouldn’t have let things get so slack.”

Lauren attempts to kill Ted (and herself) by cooking up meat that went rancid when Olivia left the refrigerator door open. This passage indicates that Lauren has attempted to do this before, emphasizing her dissatisfaction with her captivity in the house. It also gives insight into Ted’s precautions, locking away or getting rid of anything that could be dangerous in the house.

“‘We must investigate trauma,’ the voice says. ‘Get to its roots. Revisit it, in order to purge it.’

I yawn. This ted is on TV sometimes and he is very boring. I don’t like his eyes, Round, like little blue peepholes. I always feel I can smell him when he’s on, which makes my tail tingle. He reeks of dust and sour milk. But how could that be? You can’t smell teds on the TV!”

The psychologist that Olivia sees on the daytime television show is the bug man--but at this point in the narrative, it is unclear how she is experiencing what Ted sees during his therapy sessions. As one of Ted’s personalities, Olivia can sometimes experience life through Ted’s eyes, though to her, it appears on television. This is another clear and early indication that all is not what it seems in the novel.

“I’m Ted’s kitten, but I have my other nature. I can let that side take control, for a while. Maybe we all have a wild and secret self somewhere. Mine is called Night-time.”

The first real indication of dissociative identity disorder in the novel is presented as Olivia’s alter-ego, Night-time, who seems to embody the feral side of being a cat, hunting for food when Ted forgets to feed Olivia. Olivia is conscious of this other presence in her mind, and she can consciously allow him to take over whenever she needs him. The fact that Night-time is a part of Olivia and not a separate identity in Ted indicates that the will to live is intimately tied to emotional support. One cannot exist without the other.

“I jump up onto the mantle and knock the horrible fat monster doll to the floor. She falls with a crack, spilling her babies in the air as she goes. They shot her into splinters on the floor. It is a massacre. I tried to knock the picture of the parents down, too. I know it won’t work, but I can’t help myself.”

The presence or the absence of the Russian nesting doll indicates whether any given part of the narrative inside the house takes place in the real world, or in the weekend place. Olivia breaks the Russian nesting doll, which Ted already broke in real life when he was younger. The reappearance of the doll and the constant presence of the picture frame, even though Ted later pawns it, indicates that Olivia’s world is not real.

“I brush dirt gently from the rounded surface of the first God. The soil I lift it from his black and rich. The gods feed the earth. I put my ear close and listen. The God whispers in a secret voice like rain. ‘I hold you in my heart,’ I whisper.”

This is the first glimpse readers get into the nature of Ted’s “gods.” The compulsion he has to hide them and keep them safe makes it seem like they are a serial killer’s souvenirs, relics of past kills. It is the importance and weight of memory that makes them into gods.

“You are probably promising yourself that you will never do such a thing again. You are thinking that you gave in just this once…and maybe that will prove true. But I do not think so. Yours is an old sickness, which has been in our family for a long time. My father—your grandfather—had it. I hoped that it had died with him. Maybe I thought that I could atone for it. A new world, a new life.”

After the incident with the mouse, Mrs. Bannerman convinces Ted that he has latent urges to harm and kill things. She claimed that this runs in their family, though she is projecting her own urges on to Ted. Because of his love for his mother, Ted maintains this view of himself for the rest of his life, unable to live a normal life, because he views himself (and the bug man later confirms) as a monster.

“I felt the ankou follow me across the ocean, across the land, to this far coast. Once he has seen you he will not let you go. We know these things in Locronan. This so-called new world has forgotten them. On the day he comes to me with open arms, wearing my face, I will be ready.”

The Ankou is a Breton spirit/god of death, believed in by the people of Mrs. Bannerman’s home village. Its ability to take on anyone’s face links it with Olivia’s Lord: Olivia, too, knows that the Lord will come to her wearing her face when it is her time to die. The Ankou is neither good nor evil; it is simply the arrival of time.

“‘It’s the other way around, Olivia,’ she says. ‘You’re inside me.’”

The revelation that Olivia is a mental construct is one of the three major twists in the novel. It explains why Olivia can read and communicate, even though she is a cat, along with some of the physical feats she accomplishes, like knocking the Bible off of the table or opening the refrigerator. However, the fact that Ted can see and communicate with Olivia means that Lauren’s story does not quite add up.

“‘The girl in your TV show would probably have been subject to systematic abuse, physical or emotional,’ he says. ‘So her mind fragmented. It formed a new personality to deal with the trauma. It’s rather beautiful. An intelligent child’s elegant solution to suffering.’”

The bug man’s interest in Ted’s case is suspicious; it is clear he infers more about Ted and Lauren’s situation than he lets on. At this point in the novel, it appears as though Lauren created Olivia as a way to cope with Ted’s abuse. However, this does not prove to be the case.

“‘You think you’re beautiful,’ Lauren says in the same, dreamy voice. ‘He took down the mirrors—you can’t see what you really are—so I’ll tell you. you were small, twisted, wizened. You are half the size you should be. Each of your ribs stands out like a knife blade. You don’t have many teeth left. Your hair grows in stringy patches on your bald head. As the burn scars on your face and hands healed, over and over, the scar tissue grew so thick that it twisted your face. It pulled your nose aside, and it grew over your eyes so one of them is almost sealed shut by scars. You think you are stalking around the house on 4 elegant feet. That’s not what’s happening. You were crawling on your hands and knees, dragging your useless broken feet behind you, like an ugly fish. No wonder you don’t want to live in this body. You helped him make it and then afterward you climbed into his lap and purred. You are pathetic.’”

Lauren’s description of her and Olivia’s body is a harsh reminder of the abuse that she has experienced over the years. However, many of these physical injuries and appearances, except for her feet, actually apply to Ted’s body. Lauren’s appearance reflects the “treatments” and punishments that Ted suffered from his mother.

“When I met you, I knew I’d found something special—my case study.”

Just when Ted feels comfortable opening up to the bug man on a personal level, the disgraced psychologist reveals his true intentions for Ted: He is just using him to try to grab a bit of fame off of Ted’s story. He has surmised that Ted has dissociative identity disorder, and he is willing to overlook the fact that Ted is potentially a serial killer in order to make money off the situation. This shows that the bug man is unscrupulous and predatory, taking advantage of a man in a vulnerable psychological position.

“It’s not your body, Lauren. I am crying now. It’s his. We live in Ted.”

The revelation that comes—too late—to Olivia, that she and Lauren inhabit Ted’s body, is the second major twist of the novel. It explains many of the apparent plot holes and discrepancies and Ted’s and Olivia’s narratives throughout the novel. Everything Lauren tells Olivia about the abuse that she suffers is true; however, Ted is suffering at the same time, and it is not Ted, but rather Mrs. Bannerman who inflicts it upon them.

“I am powerful and sleek, my great flanks heave. Where are you? I say. Where am I?

Nowhere, he says, and here.

Are you still Night-time?

No.

I’m not Olivia anymore, I say, certain.”

Olivia and Night-time undergo integration—one of the methods of therapy for DID that the bug man explained to Ted—in order to save Ted, their body. However, because of this, neither Olivia nor Night-time truly exists anymore. Ted later mourns Olivia’s absence.

“‘It will eat at you until there’s nothing left,’ she said finally. ‘Believe me, it would be better to let it out.’”

The revelation that the story Dee tells herself in Chapter 4 is a lie she made up to cope with the guilt for her part in Lulu’s death is the final major twist in the novel. Detective Karen seems to see through Dee’s lies, though she is evidently unable to prove it. Her prediction that the guilt will eat Dee alive comes true, ultimately culminating in Dee’s death, alone, in the middle of the woods, and of her attempted murder of Ted, an innocent man, due to her obsessive need to free herself from guilt.

“I understand something about life that Ted never has: it is too painful period no one can take so much unhappiness. I tried to explain it to him. It’s bad, teddy. Mommy is nuts, you know that. She’s lost it. She’ll go too far and in this one day. Better to choose our own way out.”

Lauren is created by Ted’s subconscious mind to help protect him from the physical pain that he suffered at the hands of his mother. However, over time, Ted is able to completely dissociate during episodes of abuse; instead of sharing the pain with Lauren, all of the pain is transferred into Lauren’s consciousness. This causes Lauren to resent not only Mrs. Bannerman, but Ted and Olivia as well, for having the comfort of the inside place while Lauren suffered alone.

“I kept TRYING to tell Big Ted. I took him back to the yellow house with the green trim again and again but he still didn’t get it. I think he always knew somewhere deep down that it was Mommy. But he hoped so hard it wasn’t. Now he can’t avoid the truth anymore. Bam, POW, like being hit with a punch.”

Little Teddy is finally able to get through to Ted: He witnesses their mother hiding Lulu’s body in the basement of the chihuahua lady’s house. All of the times Ted finds himself staring across the street at the house are due to Little Teddy trying to communicate with him. Thanks to his childhood self’s testimony, the police are finally able to find Lulu’s body, bringing an end to the decade-long ordeal.