Chapter Thirteen
CHAPTER
Thirteen
The pain in Jane’s leg awoke her before she felt the sting of daylight piercing through her eyelids.
As she slowly came to, so did the looming shadow of a figure sitting at her bedside.
She gasped as she rushed to prop herself up on shaking elbows, everything aching, but a hand came to her chest, gently easing her back down.
“Jane—stay…” Terence’s rumbling whisper embraced her, timidly, as if she were an animal to startle or a doll to break.
His face, partially obstructed by hair that had fallen loose, became more clear.
He wore a dark robe, open to show the rumpled shirt and trousers underneath, and there was no sleep in his eyes.
They had to them a pink dewiness that only came after one had a particularly wretched cry.
He was quick to retract his hand, fingers flexing, as he returned to sit in the chair that had been pulled up alongside the bed. “Rest, please.”
Jane continued to frantically blink the bleariness from her vision and the ache from her skull.
“Beast… a beast outside, the cellar—Terence,” she blanched when she recalled those mounds of flesh, the slurping sounds as the beast lapped at puddles of some bodily goop.
The stank of congealed blood still clogged her nostrils, the color of her stained dress was a residual crust against her flesh, the taste of blood in her mouth was an echo of last night’s horror. She gagged. “W-We need to leave!”
I need to leave—I cannot stand to be here another minute.
A grim shadow inked across his features as he leaned forward and lightly cupped her chin between his fingertips with the gentlest pressure.
“And go where?” He whispered. “The roads are still flooded, we have no horse, and I reckon that you should keep weight off your leg for the time being.”
Her heart was pounding, sending cold blood through her veins that muddied her mind.
We can go nowhere.
We’re trapped—damned.
Those words felt too damning, as though they were the keys that locked her tightly shut in a cell where the beast would be in the corner, waiting to devour her. The demon would be crouched in an opposite corner while gurgling in amusement.
Panic was wracking its claws through her before settling in her throat to strangle her as she stared out the window, hoping to seek some hope for escape but instead saw the beast’s snarling eyes, its snapping teeth, in the jaundiced aura of the still-clouded skies that wept more rain.
Jane swallowed down thick bile. No one would save them—save her. No one would tell her mother, her sisters, her father, what became of her until it would be too late…
There was the mumbling of someone speaking, but a touch on her cheek alerted her to Terence’s presence still at her bedside.
“Jane,” he murmured, gently. The gauze that wrapped around his hand chafed her chin as he drew away from her.
His mouth moved as though he were still talking, but Jane couldn’t hear him.
She was too busy studying his wrapped hand as ice-cold nausea surged in her throat.
For on the bandage was a mark, faint and pink as some wound beneath it started to bleed through.
A wound that bled in the arched shape of teeth in the cradle between his thumb and pointer finger.
She licked her lips, the phantom sensation of rotted meat weighing on her tongue.
Jane’s teeth marks.
The taste of the beast’s blood flooded her mouth, sour and like bile.
As she failed to retain a single thought that wasn’t fueled by the pure animalistic fear to flee, she met Terence’s eyes. A dreaded knowing made them go utterly dark.
With a sound caught between a choke and a hiss, Jane coiled back, clawing distance between herself and Terence, to get as far away from him as she could without falling onto the floor. Aches jolted up her leg with every movement.
Terence visibly withered, drawing into himself, as an expression of hurt flitted across his face. He leaned forward in his chair to stand with his arms extended at his side, palms up in a non-threatening display.
“Jane…” he started slowly, but it was no longer Terence that spoke to her. All she saw was the beast, dog-faced and blood-stained, standing in his place. She felt the scrape of its teeth against her bone; she saw the demon that wept gold, a monster that hungered for her blood.
But how?
How were man and beast one?
“No! St-stay back!” She snapped, holding out an arm.
Her heart lurched as he tried to come closer once more. “Jane, please, allow me a moment to—”
The words spat in her ears like the snarls of the beast, and instead of a mouth he spoke with a fanged maw, kind eyes became pinpricks of hellfire, and his hands curved into talons set on gutting her.
She screamed.
“No! Keep away—!” Jane fell from the bed, crashing to the floor in a tangle of ruined limbs and soiled sheets.
Pain wracked itself all across her body and the sickly feverous delirium made her flesh clammy as she wobbled atop gangling limbs.
She shoved past Terence and through the door, trying to ignore the screaming of her name as she ran away with a staggered gait.
Her leg nearly gave out on the stairs, and she heard the demon’s giggle rattle beneath the floorboards from its sitting room lair.
She ran until she was outside, drenched with mist-laden rain. She needed to run. She needed to escape. The Drowning House sought to drown her in her own blood, and she refused to meet her fate in the teeth of a beast who deceived her with the face of a friend.
She did not know where she was running to or where her intended destination was beyond simply being away from the Drowning House.
Mud was caking her skirt, her legs. She felt it seeping into the bandage that swaddled her wound, seeping in to infect whatever the beast’s spit hadn’t already poisoned.
Voices echoed in the fog around her, and with every tree or rising tombstone she passed she instead saw the flayed demon.
And it was laughing with eyes that glowed gold.
Suddenly the earth gave way from beneath her as a foot tangled with her nightgown’s trailing skirt.
She slid through mud until she lost touch with the ground and was tumbling deep, deep, into what felt like an abyss.
Something semi-solid, somewhat soft, and rank in smell, cushioned her fall, but not without knocking the wind out of her.
An eruption of ebony feathers and raucous caws swelled the air as ravens took to the skies.
Jane’s body spasmed as she tried to gulp for air.
And even then she didn’t want to breathe.
The sickly sweet scent of rotted, damp earth surrounded her.
Crumbs of forest floor were sucked between her parted lips with every breath she took; grit cracked between teeth she ground against the rising pain.
The world buzzed around her, and she just wanted to sink further into the safety of the earth, wishing that perhaps this had all been a horrible dream and she’d wake up back in the safety of the hotel, in the bed beside her mother, who would be stained with and smell of her expensive watercolors.
But the odor of something putrid reminded her that she was still in the marshes of Wolf’s Run, and the stench was growing so horrid, accompanied by the discordant buzzing of flies, that it prompted her to at last open her eyes.
And when she did, she screamed.
The belly of Mistletoe’s disemboweled corpse gaped at her, yawning and wide and spewing strings of grayed entrails.
Spots of white writhed between the guts.
Maggots, burrowing their way deeper into fleshy crevices reeking of old death.
The mare’s mouth hung open, showing the dried blood crusting her blunt teeth.
Maggots wriggled among the folds of the savage wound that tore her throat, in the hollowed eye sockets.
Jane jolted upright but found herself slipping on the dirt beneath her, only it wasn’t dirt.
It was a pond of corpses. Some fresh, some old, some being only bones and teeth that stuck out from the pit of rot; antlers and hooves of deer, the jaws of foxes and dogs.
With every movement, she sunk deeper into the bog of Hell.
The smell penetrated her very flesh, stuffing itself into her lungs so that she alternated between screaming and gagging, tasting death on her tongue.
Her heartbeat quickened so fiercely it pained her, and it only grew worse as she felt the phantom sensation of maggots wriggling to make holes of decay in her already festering leg wound.
A deer’s corpse stared at her, its eye milky and gray and slowly being eaten away by a maggot in its very center.
Darkness suddenly fell over her eyes as someone grabbed her from behind.
“Don’t look! Jane, close your eyes—I beg you—close your eyes—” Terence’s breath was hot and ragged against her cheek as he hauled her free from the death-pit, keeping a hand affixed over her eyes. “Please, I’m sorry, Jane—oh God, forgive me—”
As he dragged her back toward the house, even when he scooped her into his arms to carry her, Jane struggled the whole way.
She screamed and writhed. She tried to bite him, scratch him, but he did not release her.
Her dread ignited into heart-pounding fear when they were back in the house.
All she could think of was the cellar stained with blood, and that he was dragging her back to that hellish pit, to chain her to the walls with those discarded manacles and throw her directly into the beast’s gullet.
Whatever the beast—Terence—wouldn’t eat, then it would be thrown into the death-pit along with who knows how many other victims, how many other innocent girls that’d been lured to this drowning domain.