Chapter 26 #2
The lower levels had a hunger to them. Night-Father would not pursue the children down here, but some of Eldest’s siblings had chosen to let themselves be captured rather than seek sanctuary below.
Mother’s attentions were such that even the certainty of torture might be preferable to a chance of being captured by her.
Eldest had felt her loathsome touch only once, and still the skin on her arm wanted to shrivel at the memory of those fingers against her flesh.
Night-Father worked with pain, but Mother touched the mind, her unclean fingers staining thoughts and emotions, leaving deeper and longer-lasting wounds.
Mother made you feel that this was your fault, and that what was happening…
that it was almost love. At least it seemed more that way the longer she had you.
The pair of them appeared to have divided the mansion between them, and Mother had no obvious role in what happened in the main house.
Even so, Eldest had always felt that the power lay down there in the darkness, and that Father, in both his skins, day and night, was Mother’s agent, up here in the world where she fit so poorly.
Quite how they had hatched their plan together, and what that plan was, Eldest didn’t know.
But she was sure that there was a plan, and she wanted no part of it.
Recovering the memory of her family, or at least the outline of that memory, the fact that the monster in the cellar and the one who haunted the mansion were not her blood—that had been a moment of unutterable relief.
It had been a diamond filched with blind fingers from the murk and grime of her past. Something hard and clear and pure.
Something to hold on to. A purpose in and of itself.
The cellars had three entrances but fortunately Mother wasn’t given to lurking near them, preferring the deepest places until something drew her attention and set her prowling.
Even so, Eldest trembled so badly going down the first flight of steps that had she still been carrying chains they would have rattled.
A lightless corridor brought her to the wine cellar.
She had explored this place by touch on her previous visit.
Beneath the brick arches of the largest of these vaults lay scores of barrels.
Fewer than half of them were intact and all of them were empty, at least of wine.
Amid the scattered stays and shed hoops of corroding metal were barrels large enough for three children to hide within and barrels too small for even Tune to squeeze herself into.
If she went any farther into the underground complex, Eldest would enter a region where Mother might come at her from any one of multiple directions.
But here at the far end of the wine cellar she could be ambushed only if Mother knew she was coming and had concealed herself along the way.
Since nobody ever came down into the basement during the day, Eldest felt relatively safe.
Or rather she felt totally unsafe and terrified, but her intelligence told her she was as safe as anyone could be in such a place.
She found an empty barrel with its base still in one piece and inverted it, shocked by her own weakness. Next, she began the slow process of arranging the remaining barrels across the cellar floor, creating an obstacle field complete with two walls of barrels, all of it seen only in her mind.
Every misstep, every scrape, rang terrifyingly loudly in her ears, seeming to echo back and forth beneath the curved ceiling.
Totally blind, she kicked a barrel hoop and sent it skittering.
She worked on, cursing silently, heart hammering, sure that Mother would arrive at any moment.
It seemed impossible that the noise Eldest had made wouldn’t have woken her.
By the time Eldest found her way back to the inverted barrel, placed closest to the archway she’d entered by, her limbs were trembling with exhaustion as much as with the fear of what was to come.
Eldest took three deep breaths, then hunted for a loose stave and struck the base of the barrel with it.
She hit her makeshift drum again, the boom both startlingly loud in that silence and yet not so loud as she had imagined.
“Show yourself…” Her voice came out small, a croaking apology. She coughed and filled her lungs. “Show yourself, monster!”
Mother’s weapon of choice wasn’t pain but fear itself. Father used pain to instil fear, but Mother jumped that stage entirely. There was something so awful in the dry strength of her embrace and the wrongness of her whispered affection. Eldest’s hands shook. Her legs felt weak.
Boom! “Show yourself!” Boom!
That Mother would genuinely show herself was another part of the horror. Somehow, although the cellars held not even a whisper of light, when Mother came she could be seen, her outlines drawn in pale white strokes that illuminated nothing.
Being able to see Mother’s approach helped the children escape her if they ever ended up in this awful place, but she knew how to hide, and although she moved like a broken thing, she moved fast. When she had caught Eldest it had been in a chamber on the second level of the basements, a cold box of a room strewn with old bones.
Eldest had knocked against something and sent it tumbling from a decaying shelf.
She’d made a blind grab for the object as it rolled noisily across the stone floor, and somehow, she’d got a hand to it.
Mother had risen from a far corner, shedding her sackcloth covering in the same moment that Eldest’s exploring fingers had revealed the object to be a skull.
Mother had lifted from the ground as if drawn on invisible wires, her arms and legs bone-thin, each joint swollen, her hair a wild tangle aglow with its own lightless light.
The clicks her body made with each of its unnatural motions set Eldest’s teeth on edge and made her think the creature had escaped from some awful dungeon where they’d twisted every limb, drawing each joint from its socket.
Eldest had run but Mother caught her in a trice, bringing her face up close, her eyes, wide, staring, and hardly human. “I have spiders under my skin.”
Boom! “You’re not my mother!” Boom! Eldest’s voice shook with memories of the horror she’d endured nestled in Mother’s arms. The loathsome whispering. The terrible true lies that had unwrapped her mind to the woman’s touch.
And there she was, suddenly, sliding into the archway opposite. “Daughter.”
Eldest shook off the paralysis she knew would come beneath the creature’s incurious predatory stare.
Even so, Mother had covered a third of the distance before Eldest could turn her back on the pale horror and start to run.
The barrels Eldest had arranged hardly seemed to slow her.
She flowed over them with broken grace, not so much as rattling a loose stay.
Darkness, thick as blankets, wrapped itself around Eldest. She wanted to sprint, but starvation and fear mired her in the moment.
It felt as if she was wading back towards the door, all the while with Mother’s scream clenched around her heart.
The steps were a mountain for Eldest to labour up beneath the weight of all her terror.
Dry fingers clutched at the back of her neck at every step, fading to phantoms until the next heartbeat manufactured another anticipation of the inevitable.
Shrieking her panic, Eldest crashed through the gap where she’d left the basement door ajar, skinning her shoulder.
She grabbed the hook and for a chain-rattling moment it seemed she’d miscalculated, giving herself an inch too little’s reach.
But with a gasp and a grunt, she had hook through handle and was running again, following the chain.
Mother gained the door before Eldest got to the kitchen.
The chain sprang and bounced as Eldest ran beside it.
Another jerk, and then with a roar, Mother applied her true strength.
At the other end of the chain the bars across the chimney tore free.
One of them caught Eldest a glancing blow above her hip.
Deep in her fear she staggered forward, ignoring the pain.
Had she been well-fed she would never have squeezed through the gap the bars had left. She was six feet up by the time Mother reached the fireplace.
“Child…” The word slithered from the monster’s lips. “Come back to your mother, child. I’ve more treats to feed you.”
Eldest climbed, showering ancient soot behind her.
“Child!” Mother tore another bar loose.
Damp stone and weakness betrayed Eldest, her toes slid, fingers lost their grip, she fell, screaming.
Her heart stopped. She stopped.
Eldest hung, wedged in the widening chimney, every muscle straining, feet pressed furiously against the brickwork on one side, shoulders against the other.
Not far below her, Mother hissed and spluttered, showered by the debris dislodged by Eldest’s fall.
High above them both, impossibly far away, a circle of daylight burned.
“Come to your mother.” Another bar tore free. An arm reached through, clawing at the air just beneath Eldest’s heels.
Straining every muscle, Eldest shifted herself by degrees, patting for holds in the brickwork, trying to move from horizontal to vertical without being snared.
“Sweetling, there’s no need to be shy…” Mother snatched at a dangling ankle, but her reach into the chimney breast was tentative, as if the old fires still burned there with furious heat.
The light! The light might save her. Eldest found the smallest of ledges, wedged her toes, shifted herself, and began to climb.
“Come down, sweet child,” the creature crooned. “Don’t go. We love you so.”
A yard, another yard, Eldest kept climbing for the light.
“Come down, bitch! I’ll skin you. Keep you in the oven till you’re ready to eat! Burn you with—”
A brick, dislodged by Eldest’s questing toes, cut off the tirade.