Chapter Fourteen
CHAPTER
Fourteen
As a child, more than anything else, Jane wished to be Mary Anning.
She wished she lived amongst those Dorset cliffsides, wandering the shores of the English Channel where she’d acquire fossils to sell; pieces of past animals, the imprints of their flesh, the remains of their scat, until she’d find her own new beast, just as Anning uncovered her Ichthyosaur—an utter accident.
Despite the purgatory of living in a day where such a desire from a woman was frowned upon while also not wholly discouraged, Jane sought to be a woman like Mary Anning. Jane wanted to discover monsters, and she wanted to be remembered for it.
So, Jane had become Mary. She referred to herself as such and often introduced herself as Mary, even to family who very well knew that she was born Janet Elizabeth Sterling; they would just smile and play along as such were the whims of imaginative little girls.
Mary was the girl who walked with her father in the woods and Great Lakes shores, collecting bones and discarded antlers and shells, and who was taught about the trilobites and mastodons that had once roamed in prehistoric Wisconsin.
Mary wanted to be like her father and write books on her fossil findings.
Mary wanted to be the one who presented lectures at the Smithsonian as she announced her own fossil discovery—a whole new prehistoric beast that would be as equally awesome and beloved as the newly discovered Triceratops.
However, after a while, once she observed how others would sooner flock to the musically-inclined endeavors of her sisters and mother—with their shared auburn-haired, red-lipped beauty that’d make the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood flush—than spare a moment to offer polite grimaces at her procurements of palm-fulls of Brachiopods or owl pellets with half of a mouse skull peeking out from digested fur, she concluded that Mary must leave. Envy was but a smoldering ember, then.
Putting away her father’s textbooks to instead read Scribner’s Magazine and The Delineator, Mary the Girl needed to be subdued and replaced by Jane the Lady if she were to vie for the attention her sisters received.
Mary had lay dormant since then, stifled and suffocated beneath layers upon layers of silk and lace and brand-new petticoats and decorated hats.
Jane never anticipated needing to revive that child within her to better understand a live monster that seemed intent on hunting her, and, somehow, resided within Terence like some parasite.
Just as she had done with the beast’s pawprints, she attempted to rationalize it as though she were identifying a new fossil: to begin, she needed to excavate a subject from the earth; then scrape and clean away any unnecessary sediment to make the specimen more visible (quite important to have a gentle hand, to not scratch the precious find); next would be trying to compare it to other known specimens, though this was where Jane struggled as she didn’t happen to know other beast-men or cursed folk that could provide aide or comparison.
Where a fossil was found, the kind of rocks it was found in, would help in identification, according to her father, as sediments worked like a calendar, telling what era the animal died and further narrowing down its identity.
Terence’s beast wasn’t dead, and all that was here was fresh mud and reeds. The harder she tried to view Terence and the beast as specimens, the more her mind strained. It was pointless.
In the end, Jane’s head only hurt. No longer could she imagine or ponder.
She needed to dig, literally. She decided that to properly begin her understanding of the creature, she would need to begin by digging into earth—in this case, that damned cellar.
It wasn’t an ideal place to search, but it was at least a place to start.
As Terence finished cleaning the sutures on her leg, then her dress, she reached within herself, far and deep, to grasp the hand of Mary and pull her forward, inviting her help.
She tried to not frighten Mary away from the prospect that this task would not so much be an archeological dig but rather like taking part in some morbid fairy story, similar to the ones Emmy would read to her girls when tucking them in on chilly winter nights.
Far too grim for little girls to read before sleeping, Jane thought, but she’d prefer them reading about fictional wolves gobbling up fictional girls.
“Fetch me my parasol, would you?” Jane said to Terence once he finished wrapping her leg.
She did nothing to hide the emphasis she put on the word ‘fetch.’ She smirked at his visible flinch as he finished binding her leg.
He kept his head low and his mouth shut as he rose, trudged to the foyer, and returned with her parasol in hand.
He offered a hand to help her stand. She took it with a hum. “Such a good boy.”
Without another word, Terence dismissed himself and disappeared into the hallway.
Like a dog to his house, Jane thought with a sniff. So much for him helping her. Then again, she wasn’t too eager to be in his presence at the moment.
Using her parasol as a cane, she seethed as she rose from her seat. She cast a glance at the mantle and the demonic idol atop it, and she swore she heard the thing giggle. She offered it her middle finger before hobbling from its sitting room dominion.
In the kitchen, she looked to the damned cellar door and her heart thudded coldly in her chest. The door was closed, but it now sat crookedly in its frame.
A padlock hung from its handle, and Jane wondered if one had always been there since she first set foot in the house but she just failed to notice.
“It usually works keeping them down there.”
Jane yelped at the approach of a voice, jolting her attention away from the padlock. Mrs. Foster stood beside her, hands clasped before her, her mouth set in a grim line. Several pale hairs hung loose out of her bonnet. She wore a gray, exhausted pallor.
“How many have been kept down there?” Jane asked.
“At one time? Four,” Mrs. Foster said too simply.
Three brothers, one father.
Four beasts in that basement, fur soaked with blood and teeth that gnashed with fury—four pairs of eyes that blazed with the fires of Hell.
“I think I would like to go back down there,” Jane said, and it wasn’t until she saw Mrs. Foster flinch in her periphery that she realized what she said. A hand flew to her mouth in a too-late attempt to capture the words.
“I-I… Miss Sterling, may I ask why?”
I need to dig.
“I want to learn about the beast,” she said instead. She winced. “I need to at the very least try.”
Mrs. Foster’s nose wrinkled in a similar grimace as her eyes searched Jane’s face. “Miss Sterling… I don’t know—”
“May I at least try?” she repeated. Unless you’re willing to face your guilt in neglecting to tell me about what this thing was earlier and confess to me all you know.
She held Mrs. Foster’s gaze for a moment as the woman worked her bottom lip between her teeth.
Jane held her chin up higher for a moment, and at last, the woman sighed, and she reached for her chatelaine.
She didn’t even need to rifle through the keys, her fingers instantly knowing which to retrieve as she opened the padlock.
She opened the door for Jane, who reeled back a step as she was slapped by the rank stench of rotten meat and mildew.
Jane gaped down into the abyss, the stairs leading down into darkness that the daylight of the kitchen dared not to touch.
She stared intently, too terrified of seeing the glimmer of the beast’s eyes amongst the glittering stones, and yet was too afraid to look away and risk the beast launching from the shadows to rip out her throat.
A warmth in her hand alerted her to the oil lamp Mrs. Foster lit and held toward her. She otherwise did nothing more to offer Jane assistance in her journey down below.
Neither of them said anything as Jane took the lamp and stepped back into Hell.
Other than the slither of fabric and the asymmetrical padding of her steps, all she could hear was the dripping of water on stone.
The light from the kitchen was partially obscured by Mrs. Foster’s silhouette in the doorway, but the lamp cast everything in a sallow-colored glow.
The familiar bloody prints, the scratches in the stones—Jane paused to gag into her sleeve as the smell grew overwhelming.
But she persevered until she reached the bottom-most step, being sure to sidestep the shattered remains of her lamp from the night before.
Beneath her bare feet was the crust of old blood and the muddy slickness of newer gore. A stray clammy glob of gelatinous flesh against her toes sent a dry heave flipping through her body; stomach still empty, she spat aside a shot of acrid, bile-tainted spit.
Once her gagging subsided, Jane continued deeper into the cellar.
She made her way to the freshest pile of meat, half-eaten by the beast before she’d interrupted its meal the night before.
Beside it were unused manacles, all open in anticipation to be latched on to whoever prepared them only to have run out of time to secure their locks.
With nausea threatening to overturn her guts, she turned away from the gore to instead look at the walls around her.
In almost every stone were symbols, etched in a script Jane found to be familiar.
Crosses, unblinking eyes, six-petaled flowers, horseshoes.
In varying sizes and lengths and neatness, like the carvings beneath the guest room bed, Old Man Hayes’ journal.
Jane’s fingertips tingled as she traced one of the crosses.
She wondered if similar carvings could be found in every floorboard, windowpane, and brick within the house’s very foundations.
Just how scarred is this house? How much of this ruination was from a madman’s fear or a beast’s wrath?