Chapter Forty #2
A gust of wind rattles the windowpanes, then the rain starts, pelting the panes with fat drops that sound eerily like skeletal fingernails tapping the glass. Something outside trying to get in.
Heart banging against my rib cage, I sprint back through the great room and follow the winding hallway that leads deeper into the house. The walls seem to press close as I run. My footsteps echo off the ceiling then die abruptly as if the house is swallowing the sound.
The corridor becomes a twisting labyrinth leading me farther and farther away from where I began.
A mocking laugh rings in the distance. Though I’ve walked these halls a hundred times, I soon grow disoriented.
It seems as if the house is shifting, doors opening into bricked walls where once there were familiar rooms, the floor rising and falling as if the house’s lungs are breathing.
“Bea! Bea, where are you?”
I stop abruptly, struggling to hear the faint answering cry.
It comes from somewhere far below my feet. I look down at the floorboards.
The cellar.
As soon as the thought crystallizes in my mind, it’s as if the house knows and makes accommodations for me. The shadowed corridor brightens slightly. The pressing walls seem to fall back.
I move ahead, my ears straining for the cries that are growing steadily louder. I burst through a door that drops off abruptly to a steep staircase, almost launching myself into space from momentum.
I grab the wooden rail in time to save myself from breaking my neck in a fall and scramble down, down, down into darkness.
I don’t need light now. I know where I’m going.
At the bottom of the staircase, the floor is dirt.
The heavy wooden cellar doors are set flush into the floor a few feet beyond.
The faint draft seeping from them is warmer than the surrounding air and scented with the distinctive, smoky, resinlike essence of myrrh, an herb commonly used in various ritual practices.
Like sacrifices.
My nerves raw and screaming, I grip the heavy, round iron knobs of the cellar doors and throw them open.
A blast of hot air hits me. My hair billows away from my face. Then something hard kicks me between my shoulder blades, and I tumble forward into pitch blackness.
I hit a hard surface. The breath is knocked from my lungs at the same time my forehead cracks against unyielding stone. Stunned, I groan as stars explode beneath my eyelids. Pain floods every cell, paralyzing me.
I’m rolled onto my back. My wrists and ankles are gripped by unseen hands. I’m lifted and carried for a while, my throbbing head hanging down, my hair dragging along the floor. Then I’m deposited onto a cold, hard surface.
I hear the clank of metal as heavy chains are fastened around my arms and legs.
When my vision finally clears, I look up to see a tall figure standing over me. Dressed in a long black robe with a cowl covering the head, the figure is haloed in light, red and flickering.
The light comes from the bonfire on the stone floor of the middle of the cave I’m in.
The cavern is massive, with ceilings so high, they’re lost in shadow. Multiple passageways lead off from the main space, their openings pitch black. I’m in the center of some kind of underground maze of tunnels, a complex I sense stretches far beyond the borders of Blackthorn Manor.
And far, far below.
A naked man is chained to a large rectangular stone across from me. The stone is crudely shaped, rising directly from the cave floor, rough-hewn but with edges worn soft from long use.
Its sides are streaked with ominous, rust-colored stains.
The man’s stomach is painted with red marks, strange symbols drawn directly onto his pale flesh. He appears drugged, his eyes closed and his head lolling from side to side. Helpless moans work from his throat.
He’s lost his thin-rimmed glasses.
It’s Ezra.
The stone he’s lying on is an altar.
Littered around the altar are fragments of bone, strewn carelessly about as if kicked away.
All around the cave, in fact, remnants of bone are strewn.
The floor is crowded with them for as far as I can see, a grotesque white carpet that stretches to the mouths of the tunnels.
Some bones are charred, others broken, and some are perfectly intact.
There must be hundreds of skeletons in here. Thousands.
The tiny baby’s skulls are the most horrifying. Their hollow eye sockets stare at me accusingly.
If I had to guess, I’d say all those little baby skulls were male.
Mingled with the bones are translucent, tubelike shapes of various sizes. Their surfaces are scored in an intricate mosaic of diamond patterns. The one nearest the altar is at least a hundred feet long, indicating the enormous size of the creature who shed it.
The snake who shed it, rather.
All the delicate papery shapes are molted snakeskins.
The figure in the black robe moves closer, withdrawing a knife from within bell-shaped sleeves. The edge of the curved blade glints wickedly in the flickering firelight. I can tell by the shape of the hand that the person beneath the cloak is female.
She pushes the cowl off her head, revealing the mass of fiery red curls tucked beneath.
Davina smiles affectionately at me.
“Welcome to the party, darling. We’re just about to get started.”