Chapter 18 Sera
Sera
The ceiling bleeds yet again.
More footprints, thicker this time. Angrier.
They don’t just walk across the plaster above my bed; they smear, like whoever made them stumbled.
This time, the trail starts near the window, crosses the center of the ceiling, descends diagonally down the wall beside my bedroom door, and tracks into the hall.
Leading me somewhere?
I lie still, watching the early gray light filter through the grime on my window and catch the rusty-brown tracks. They look like old sins, like the stains he left inside me.
I breathe in the dust and stillness of the old house. It holds its breath with me, waiting.
Don’t.
The word isn’t spoken. It’s a pressure drop in the room, a sudden chill against the nape of my neck that makes the fine hairs there stand rigid. My shadow daddy. His disapproval is a physical thing, cold and damp as a cellar stone pressed against my skin. It curls around my ankles like mist.
“Morning to you too,” I murmur.
I pull on my legs slightly, and he reluctantly releases them.
The floorboards groan like old bones beneath my bare feet. I ignore the chill clinging to my legs and pad towards the hallway. The footprints are clearer here. Smudged, yes, but purposeful. They lead straight down the staircase to the first floor.
I follow and then stop where the footprints do—in front of the battered basement door. The one I’ve avoided since I moved in. The one nailed shut with planks warped by time and dampness.
I kneel and trace a finger along one smeared footprint.
The texture is rough, gritty, like dried clay mixed with…
something else. Iron. I bring my finger close to my nose.
The scent is faint, buried under decades of dust and mildew, but it’s there.
Old pennies. Old blood. Whoever walks my house at night leaves messages written in red ink.
Come down to the basement, the message reads. Come play with me in the dark.
Shadow Daddy’s presence intensifies, filling the hallway and darkening it. The air thickens, tasting of wet earth and the sharp tang of woodsmoke that always clings to him.
Careful. Sera. The unspoken words vibrate in the silence.
I lean my forehead against the cold, rough wood of the basement door. The planks feel like prison bars. Beyond them, the silence isn’t empty. It’s a held breath. A waiting mouth.
“Who’s down there?” I whisper, my breath ghosting white in the suddenly frigid air. “I need to know.”
I turn the knob. It’s stiff, unused for years, and groans in protest. The nails holding the planks screech as I pull, putting my weight against the stubborn wood. One plank cracks near the top hinge, sagging inward.
A puff of air escapes the gap—damp, sweet-rot thick, smelling of mushrooms and decay and something profoundly wrong. It coils into my lungs, tasting like spoiled fruit left in a crypt.
Sera. Shadow Daddy’s voice is a scrape against my mind now, urgent, tinged with something like panic. Careful.
Shadows writhe at the edges of my vision, tendrils of darkness reaching for my arms, trying to coil and pull me away from the door. They feel like cold silk against my skin, insistent as they slide up the legs of my shorts to rub and tease my pussy.
He can touch me all he wants, but he can’t hold me back. He can’t distract me, not when I’m determined.
“Curiosity didn’t kill the cat,” I mutter, shoving harder. Another plank gives way with a dry snap. “Annoyance did. Leave me alone for a bit, Daddy. I’ll fuck you in a minute.”
I wrench the door open just wide enough to slip through. The darkness beyond is absolute, thick as velvet. The smell intensifies, wrapping around me, cloying and rotten. It clings to the back of my throat.
I sprint back upstairs for my phone, thumb the flashlight on, and head to the basement again.
The beam slices through the blackness, illuminating steep, narrow wooden stairs descending into oblivion.
Dust motes swirl in the harsh light. The footprints are here, too, stark against the worn, unpainted wood of the steps.
They lead down, down, down.
I place my boot on the first tread, and it groans like a dying thing. The second step answers with a higher-pitched whine. The air grows colder with each descent, damp seeping through my thin sleep shirt.
The silence isn’t silence anymore. It’s a low hum, the sound of vast emptiness, punctuated by the frantic thudding of my own heart against my ribs.
Shadow Daddy’s cold presence presses against my front, a wall of icy dread trying to shove me back up the stairs. It feels like wading through freezing tar.
“Back off,” I hiss, gripping the splintered handrail. “I’m going.”
CAREFUL, he shouts, his full volume resonating inside my skull.
His voice sounds strained, frayed at the edges.
The beam of my flashlight trembles slightly with my next step down. The footprints seem to glow faintly in the phone’s glare, leading me deeper into the belly of the house. Into the place where things get buried.
Halfway down, the iron-and-clay smell is stronger. Underneath it, that sweet, sickly decay grows thicker, blooming in the damp air like a poisonous flower. My stomach clenches. I force myself onward.
The basement is larger than I expected, cavernous and low-ceilinged, the brick walls weeping dark stains.
Cobwebs hang like decrepit lace from exposed rafters.
Old furniture shrouded in dusty sheets hulks in the corners.
The floor is packed earth, uneven and damp.
The footprints fade here, swallowed by the dirt.
But my light catches something else. Shadows? Movement?
No. Color.
In the far corner, farthest from the stairs, half hidden behind a rusted iron boiler that looms like a dormant monster…I make out something pale, something that’s a sickly, waxy yellow in the stark beam.
Hands, I realize, clasped in prayer.
The smell hits me then, and it’s not just rot anymore.
It’s like the reek of spoiled meat left in a warm place, mingled with the cloying sweetness of perfume gone bad.
It coats my tongue, thick and nauseating.
Bile burns the back of my throat. I swallow hard, the sound unnaturally loud in the suffocating quiet.
My shadow daddy’s cold presence surges. It’s no longer just a pressure; it’s an embrace from my back to my front.
Shadows boil up from the floor itself, thick and oily, wrapping around my legs, my waist, my chest, trying to pin my arms, to physically haul me backwards.
They feel colder than ice, dense and resistant.
His distress is a live wire now, sparking against my nerves.
The shadows tighten, pulling me back a step. My bare feet scuff the dirt, but I plant them, leaning into the resistance.
The shadows writhe, protesting, but I push forward, one heavy step at a time, dragging Daddy’s clinging darkness with me. The smell is a living thing now, crawling into my nostrils, my pores. My eyes water, blurring the harsh beam of the flashlight.
Beyond the hands, a shadowy shape resolves into a woman.
She’s kneeling, her legs neatly tucked beneath her, against the damp brick wall on a pile of mildewed burlap sacks.
She’s wearing a simple cotton dress, once pale blue, now stained nearly black with earth and blood.
Her hair may have been blonde at one time, but now it hangs lank and matted, half covering her face.
But it’s the hands that hold my gaze, clasped around what looks like a dead, burnt rose. Her hands are small, delicate. And the fingernails…
Each one is painted a violent, screaming red.
Candy-apple red, the kind at cheap drugstores or gas stations.
It’s thickly applied, globbed in the cuticles, stark and obscene against the waxy, dead flesh.
The polish is chipped slightly on the thumb and index finger of her right hand, like she tried to scratch at something.
Or someone.
I force the beam upward, tracing the line of her arm, over the stained fabric of her dress, to her neck.
Faint, dark bruises ring her throat, like a grotesque necklace.
Fainter ones circle her thin wrists. No gaping wounds.
No overt violence splashed across the scene.
Just the bruises, the pose, and the obscene red paint on her nails.
She hasn’t been here long. Weeks, maybe, but not months. The decay is advanced, the skin slipping, the bloating distorting her features, but the damp, cool air of the basement must’ve slowed her decomposition.
And there above her head is a red handprint, too big to be hers.
Red Hands. It has to be.
The name blared out from the radio one day on my way to work and announced that another victim had been found. And I’d found yet another victim.
The realization isn’t a shock. It’s an ice pick driven straight into the base of my skull. I’ve been so focused on him. Every shadow has his shape. Every threat is filtered through the lens of the revenge I need to carve from his bones.
Red Hands was background noise. A local bogeyman. A problem for Detective Eddie Crowe and his beautiful, haunted eyes.
Wrong. Dead wrong.
Red Hands isn’t background noise. He’s the main event playing right in my fucking basement.
He’s not just circling Wichita; he’s been inside my walls before they were truly mine, which means he knows the layout of this house.
He brought his art project here. He violated it. He made it part of his stage.
And the ghost? The one who made the footprints? Was it Red Hands’s victim? Did she want me to find her in order to help her find peace?
I stare at the dead girl and at her garish nails. At the faint, almost serene expression frozen on her decomposing face.
The cold, hard knot of fury in my gut, usually reserved solely for him, shifts.
Expands. There’s a new target painted in screaming red nail polish.
The threat isn’t just his untouchable power anymore.
It’s this. The intimate violation of my home before it was my home, but also to avenge this stranger in my basement. She didn’t deserve this. No one does.
I take a step closer, ignoring Daddy’s shadowy restraints, ignoring the stench threatening to overwhelm me. I fix my light on her face, on her dirty hair, on her bruises. She looks young. Too young. She must have been so terrified.
I crouch down, my knees pressing into the cold, damp earth with her. Daddy’s shadows writhe around me, a cloak of cold dread. I reach out to brush a strand of hair away from where it sticks to her cheek. My fingers hover inches from her waxy skin while she stares into nothing.
“Guess I’m calling the cops.” My voice comes out flat, low, echoing slightly in the damp basement.
The words hang in the rotten air. Calling the cops. Inviting the law. Inviting him.
The untouchable Sheriff Vincent Harrow. The architect of my ruin.
If Vincent comes, he wins by walking through my front door, by seeing me vulnerable, by having the power to decide what happens next. He’ll control the narrative. He’ll spin this.
He’ll ask questions.
But not calling the police? Leaving her here? Letting the rot seep deeper into the foundations of this already haunted house?
No.
Daddy’s shadows tighten convulsively around me, colder than the grave.
I push to my feet, and the shadows resist then fall away like cold water. My phone screen glows brightly in the oppressive gloom, and I hover my thumb over the keypad. Nine…one…
Every digit feels like a hammer blow on the coffin lid of my safety. But safety was never the goal. Power was. Control. Revenge.
Let him see me standing over a corpse in my own basement, cool as marble. Let him see how I don’t flinch. Not anymore. Not even for this. Even though he doesn’t know the real me, he’ll find the girl underneath isn’t scared.
She’s feral.
She’s waiting.
I press the final one. The ring tone echoes in the damp, rotten silence, a tiny, electronic death knell. The game just changed. The gameboard just got bloodier.
But this time, I’ll be the queen instead of the pawn.