Chapter Ten
CHAPTER
Ten
Jane startled as a blood-curdling scream tore through the house.
A deathly silence followed, practically shaking the floorboards.
She froze beneath her sheets as another howl echoed against the pipes, rattling foundations so that it seemed as though it were the Drowning House that was crying in agony.
She waited for another sound, holding her breath, but heard nothing other than the rain, wind, and lightning that hissed against the windows.
Had it been the mystery animal? Did it break in and attack one of the staff?
Or, and her gut curdled away whatever anger had remained there for him, did it get Terence?
The sounds were too alive, too powered by torment, to be a mere settling of the house or even thunder.
Whether it was Terence, the staff, or an animal, the sound was horrible, soaked in blood, and Jane needed to know how much blood.
She knew she should’ve been more afraid, but that same, insistent nagging that’d wriggled into her brain when she’d discovered the carvings beneath the bed had returned with fervor.
Slowly, she cast her sheets aside and snatched the hairpin-knife, having never returned to its metallic sheath, from the nightstand.
Beside it was her untouched bowl of cold soup.
She didn’t bother eating it, her appetite shot dead by the betrayal of Terence’s outburst. Never would she admit it out loud but the callousness of his tone hurt.
More than she anticipated. She never thought he, of all people, would raise his tone with her.
It was what made her heart crack and her throat tighten as she’d pressed her back against her shut door, cries muffled into the heel of her palm.
She tried to read and she tried to sleep, but she instead bundled herself under the covers and stared at the rain smattering against the window, watching the flashes of lightning dance within the droplets, until the scream broke her out of her trance.
Her head still ached and her eyes remained blotched from her crying as she clutched the little knife, took hold of the oil lamp, held her breath, opened the door, and stepped into the hallway.
The silence that lay over the house was almost more grim than the screams that woke her.
She was betrayed by every footfall as wood creaked beneath her toes.
With every other step, she was compelled to look over her shoulder to ensure that Mrs. Foster hadn’t burst into the hallway like a bat out of hell to drag her back into her room rather than assist her in investigating the screams. The thought hurried Jane’s pace until she crept down the stairs and found herself in the kitchen, the gas lamp in her hand alighting everything beneath a yellowing, pestilence-colored hue.
Though she wasn’t near the sitting room, she couldn’t shake the feeling of the idol’s leer pulsing through her bones and settling at the base of her skull.
Holding her breath, Jane strained to listen for any sound that wasn’t the din of the storm or her pulse hammering in her ears.
A groan assaulted the quiet, droning from behind a door Jane thought to be some sort of pantry, which now, beneath the light of her lamp, sat crookedly ajar.
Damp air with the sweet, metallic odor of old, rotted meat wafted from the door, clearly not the scent of a pantry, but perhaps of an old cellar.
A sliver of blackness stared at her with the danger of a cat’s eye, challenging her as another low groan rumbled from somewhere deep within.
Swallowing down the trepidation that started to scratch in her throat, Jane hoisted her oversized skirts higher in the same fist clutching her blade, eased open the door with her foot, and made her way into the darkness.
Stone stairs wound steeply downward, slick with a damp both natural and unnatural, and the walls glistened yellow beneath her lamp.
The strong odor of discarded meat and rot was pungent in the air and assaulted every one of Jane’s senses.
Too much did this feel like being swallowed whole into the throat of a tomb, a crypt that hollowed out the earth beneath the Drowning House.
Jane half expected to step down into a pit of bones that’d crumble and crunch beneath her weight as she reached the bottom-most step. Her toes met only with cold, wet stone.
She wrinkled her nose as the stench had become overpowering and her whole body shuddered with a gag. If she had eaten her soup from dinner, surely she would have certainly spewed sick all across the floor. A floor that Jane noticed to be marred by severe marks.
She crouched low and put a hand down to the scarred stones until her fingers snugly fit within four fissures running parallel to each other.
Just as they did with the depressions beneath the entrance hall’s wallpaper.
And the splinters along the guest room door.
She retracted her hand as though the stone burned her fingertips.
These had to have been left behind by an animal, one very large, very powerful, very angry, as it clawed at the cellar floor, every inch of it it seemed.
It suddenly became difficult to breathe as Jane’s heart lodged in her throat.
Could this have been where Old Man Hayes’ boogeyman-beast—his Claunek—was kept?
Was this the resting place of the animal that was clawing doors, haunting the grounds, and murdering horses?
If this were some animal or pet or boogeyman, what manner of creature was it that it’d driven a man to scribble madness into a notebook and carvings into his home?
“Wh-what are you…” she managed to whisper, and the darkness answered back.
Jane stopped breathing entirely as something shifted within the dark. There was the sound of something wet plopping against the stone floor.
In a shaking grip, she held the lamp higher, trying to see more of the cellar, before reeling backward until her back collided with the wall.
A scream was trapped on the back of her tongue, too afraid to escape.
She was surrounded by piles of rot. Rotted flesh, decayed meat—discarded and gathered in mounds in the cellar’s dark corners, left to spoil.
There were the rusted bits of many chains, many broken manacles, some scattering the floor, some partially lodged in the heaps of flesh, some hanging from loose bolts in the walls. It didn’t matter. It all reeked.
A dungeon? A torture chamber?
Hell?
Jane’s mind was scrambling to imagine this place’s sickening purpose as she was assaulted by the sight of blood—so, so much blood—clumped in congealed puddles, streaked across the floor, painting the walls with hand-shaped prints.
With a sickly, metallic sweetness, old blood was already seeping into her tongue, between her teeth, down her throat.
Despite her empty stomach, bile surged into her mouth and she gagged before swallowing it back down. It was the stench of spoiled blood and the thought that this hall of gore and horror had been lying beneath her feet without her knowing. And that Terence kept it a secret from her.
What had been kept down here? Who was bound with the bloody chains?
Some blood was still damp beneath her lamplight—someone had just bled.
She didn’t have much time to puzzle through her terror any further as a slurp leaked out from the darkness. Something else was down here with her, and she didn’t know what terrified her more: someone or something.
A beast? Old Man Hayes? Who? What?
Jane’s head spun. She should have supposed that even the most kind-hearted of Englishmen would entomb a family member so that their embarrassment may remain in the dark. But what madness led to so much blood?
“Wh-Who’s there?” She called out and a blunt blood-stained echo returned to her.
She held the lamp up again in an attempt to further illuminate the cellar, trying to peer past the mounds of flesh and manacles to focus on the hunched shadow in the furthest corner. Another wet crunch of bone or some other body part breaking resounded against the bloody stones.
She swallowed, licking her lips (and gathered her courage), and tried again, “Hello?”
The figure fell silent and went still, compelling Jane to cry, “Come now, who is that? I-I can see you!”
The figure shifted, a hulking dark mass that turned until two glowing orbs stared at Jane from the darkness. It sat before something glistening and damp—fresh gore, discarded flesh, and viscera.
Jane froze, her very heart going painfully still between her breasts, as the thing abandoned its mess of shredded clothes and blood and skin to stalk toward her.
On all fours and hunched over like a wild animal.
Gnashing teeth glittered with strings of freshly torn flesh.
Pale claws scraped against stone. This was not Old Man Hayes, nor was it even remotely human. This was a nightmare.
Jane didn’t know whether to weep, run, die, or fall to her knees before it.
The beast.
The beast’s shape was something Jane could only describe as primal and prehistoric, uncanny in its mimicry of something mammalian with bowed, bear-like legs, square snout, and the yellow saber-shaped teeth its black lips peeled back to reveal.
Down its back, piercing through sinewy gray flesh that stretched taut across a jutting skeleton, bristled a sparse covering of black and silver hair.
Blood stained its jowls, the malformed protrusion of its muzzle, and bubbled at the corners of its mouth as it snarled again—and lunged forward, just as Jane screamed.
As she jumped back, the lamp slipped from her hands and plunged the room into darkness beneath the symphony of shattering glass and snuffed flames.
There was the sound of fabric tearing as one of the beast’s reaching claws snagged on the very edge of her skirt, nearly tripping her.
Jane wrenched herself free by turning on her heel and clambering up the stairs on all fours in a blind scramble.