Chapter Nine #2
“Oh, that’s just lovely…” she muttered, closing the book and setting it on the arm of the chair.
Grumbling, she got down on her knees, created a little pocket with the excess fabric of her skirt, and started to gather the pieces of the chipped cup.
As the tea soaked into the rug with a brownish stain and a heat that bled beneath her knees, she tried to ignore how much it reminded her of spilled blood, and the white chips she gathered like little teeth.
She reached for a particularly large, particularly jagged, piece that fell beneath one of the chairs when her finger caught on a frayed seam in the rug, causing its edge to flip back just enough to expose the floorboards underneath.
Floorboards that, Jane noticed, possessed a funny crookedness, as if mislain whether on accident or with great haste to hide something.
Atop the most crooked of the boards was the black smudge of singed wood.
She set her gathered pieces of broken cup on the table, then, with great effort heaved and pushed the armchair aside enough so that she could have a better view of the crooked floorboard.
A sigil was rotted into the wood, another one of Old Man Hayes’ evil eyes, surrounded by carvings of crosses.
Terence’s stories of his grandfather’s inclination to dabble in the occult flooded back to her and rushed a thrill through her veins.
Perhaps she had just stumbled across yet another one of the old man’s occult secrets.
She bit her bottom lip to tame her morbid giddy.
With little hesitation, she jammed a prodding finger into a notch in the board and wriggled it loose.
She couldn’t resist wheezing out a triumphant cackle when she pulled the square of floor up to reveal a hidden compartment—and the little book that was hidden inside.
It’d felt like uncovering a treasure, one that she wasn’t meant to find.
She wished Mr. Thompson was here so she could share the excitement of her find as she picked the book up and turned it about in her hands.
It was small, perhaps a journal or a pocket bible, bound in flimsy leather and tied closed with a piece of twine.
Imprinted on its cover were more crosses.
She glanced at the conservatory door, listening for any approaching footsteps or conversation, and once she was sure she was alone, she undid the string and leafed through the pages, brittle and yellow at the edges beneath her fingers.
Damp had gotten to the book, with a corner of its cover stained black with mold.
The crust of old rot ruined the ink on most pages to the point they were hardly legible.
Jane wrinkled her nose with disgust and wiped a hand against her skirt.
Not so much a treasure but rather a piece of garbage that stank of age and left a grimy powder on her fingertips.
She would’ve put the book back where she found it to then forget about it if it weren’t for the crosses on the cover and a page soaked with violent sketches.
Abruptly, she stopped her sheafing and hurriedly flipped back to the page with the illustrations. At last, she found it and slammed a finger down to claim its place on the page.
The sketches were garish, yet Jane couldn’t help but find a familiarity in them.
The crude, scribbled angles hinted at them being drawn in some feverish vigor rather than artistic amusement.
In a way, it reminded Jane of the drawings of malformed dinosaur skulls she’d claw into her mother’s sketchbooks as a child.
But these weren’t the drawings of a child with daydreams. No, this was something else.
In the page’s center, most prominent, was something resembling some canine skull, or at least Jane thought it to be so.
A very ugly one, with a snout both too long and too broad, and eyes set too loose in otherwise hollowed sockets.
Circling it in the same chicken scratch was a single word, written again and again, until it created an unholy halo around the skull: CLAUNEK.
Jane’s nose wrinkled again. What was a “Claunek”?
Was it a spell? An incantation, a hex? A name, a species?
And what did it have to do with a poorly drawn dog’s skull?
Was that the name Old Man Hayes prescribed to the beast as though it were some pet?
Jane could picture Old Man Hayes, bent and broken and crooked with age as he hunched over the book, carving that word onto paper just as he carved evil eyes on the guest room floor.
Once more, she had to ask herself why and for what, and against whom.
Beneath the skull was another sketch that, upon first glance, almost resembled a blot of ink.
But distinctly rough lines hinted at a vague shape of what could have been a dog—in the sense that it had a body, four limbs, bristling hair, and a yawning jaw full of teeth like a wild mongrel.
There were two empty, unmarked voids that the drawing’s body seemed to orbit. The eyes of a beast.
The eyes of a Claunek?
Jane lingered on the drawing, her fingertip lightly circling it until it turned black with the phantom remnants of ink. She imagined the thing’s claws clotted with splinters and its mouth stained in blood as it snapped at the pulse in her throat—
Music flittered into the room and Jane jumped.
She looked over her shoulder, half-expecting to see someone lurking in the doorway.
But there was nobody, only the distant echo of thunder and the melancholy trill of a harpsichord.
It began as something like a ghostly song, whispering and dull, but enough to keep her attention away from the moldy book in her hands.
Had someone put a cylinder on the phonograph, to drown out the weighted sorrow in this house?
The music was too clear, too organic, to be a cylinder.
Gingerly, she put the book back under the floor and replaced the loosened floorboard. She could return to the book of beasts and Clauneks later. She flipped the rug back over the spot and went to investigate the music, scrubbing her hands clean on her skirt as she went.
As she suspected, the music was someone playing the harpsichord in the sitting room, but she was surprised to see Terence seated at the instrument, his fingers caressing the reverse-colored keys with a grace she never thought him capable of having.
There was no music before him, and his eyes were shut as he gently swayed to his own orchestrated rhythm.
There was a tranquility in the scene, and Jane leaned against the doorway and just took a moment to listen to him, silent.
Her eyes traced the blunt aquiline lines of his profile, the way weariness grayed his features, the shadows deepening the lines around his mouth and eyes so that he appeared both troubled and content all at once.
He’d the countenance of a musician, perhaps even a tortured poet.
Whatever he was, Jane preferred it over the fear she saw earlier.
He wore melancholy better than he did fear.
As his hymn slowed to what must have been its ending, Jane seized that moment to clap a muted applause.
Terence jumped in his seat and swiveled to stare at her. He must’ve been so entrenched in his music that he failed to notice he accumulated an audience of one.
“Oh, Jane,” he stammered a bit, brushing his palms against his trousers as he scooted back on the bench in preparation to stand. “Forgive me if I interrupted something, I just—”
“Why apologize for something so lovely?” Jane strode across the room until she leaned against the harpsichord with her chin cradled upon the heel of her palm. “I never took you to be a man of music. Seems like you’ve been full of surprises, hm?”
Thankfully, Terence remained in his seat but his shoulders were rigid, nervous. “My mother was a very musical type. She ensured all of us boys learned an instrument, my father too.”
“Is that so?”
With a timid jerk of his head, he gnawed on his lip. “I was the only one with passion for the skill.” And he said no more.
Jane sensed he didn’t wish to speak further on the subject, so she didn’t press on it despite the insistent eagerness to do so.
She let it be. Instead, she said, “Do you perform? You’ve the skill of a man who could draw numbers to music halls across the world, I’m sure.
This could take you across all the known continents if you wished.
It’s a talent that should be shared.” Not kept caged in this sad house.
Terence lightly traced his fingers over the keys before folding them together in his lap, shaking.
His shoulders drooped beneath the weight of a sigh—and perhaps even more.
“Please know that if I could, I would. I would love to share music with others. The truth is that I… I…” His eyes were cast toward the floor as he seemed to search for said truth before wetting his lips and looking to his lap, brow furrowed.
“I’ve never traveled beyond Britain before. And I wish I were able to.”
Jane leaned closer. “And why aren’t you able to?” She asked, perhaps a little too eagerly as she bit her bottom lip with a grin.
She received no response beyond him mumbling something she thought to be, “You wouldn’t understand,” which she wanted to huff about, but she knew it was not her business to know, even if she liked to think she was entitled to such knowledge.
Sighing, she let the topic fall dead to the floor.
She then sat beside him on the bench and stifled the urge to smirk at how he tensed beside her.
“Teach me,” she demanded, cool and blunt.
He cleared his throat. “I beg your pardon?”
“I’d like for you to show me how to play,” She said, looking at him expectantly. “I’m a horrid student but I’ve nothing else to do as of right now.” Except learning a little more about your strange house and stranger family… “I wouldn’t want to die of boredom, now!”