Chapter Fourteen #2
The more she looked around the higher points of the cellar, she saw places where crosses hung from the ceiling on frayed twine and thin chains. The army of crosses in the Wolf’s Run marshes must’ve marched their way down here to hang their brethren.
To keep something out, or rather, and Jane found this to be the most probable, to keep something in.
Bound to the cellar, the house, the land in which the Drowning House sat crookedly upon.
But she doubted simple iconography harmed the beast. She was never a woman of faith, nor was anyone in her family.
The only touch with religion any of them had was baptisms, communion, and weddings, but those were only out of obligation rather than faith.
She held no fear nor reverence nor sanctuary in the symbol of the cross nor Old Man Hayes’ wards.
If she doubted the symbol, so would a beast and whatever companions it may have.
But while a cross may not do it harm, she thought back to when the beast attacked her, and the smell of its burning flesh as she stabbed it with her hairpin—her silver hairpin.
“Silver…” she hummed, in tune with the thrill of Mary’s zeal thrumming in her chest, her blood.
Silver, a holy metal—holy in its divine purity, to those who hold faith or superstition.
Perhaps holy enough to harm something dark, evil—a beast from the marshes, or a demon from her nightmares—and that it was time for her to forgo sensibilities to seek the arcane for protection.
She couldn’t hold faith in religion, but she could possibly summon faith in purity.
As she lowered the lamp, there was a new glistening piece of meat in the pile of flesh beside her. It compelled her to look down—to a face that stared back at her.
She choked on a scream.
Among the bits of congealed meat, there was what looked like a shoddy theater mask.
It had the rubbery outlines of a brow, nose, cheeks, an upper lip.
Blood and threads of sinew coated it in an unsettling visceral pink, with gore bulging forth from hollow eyes, an absent mouth.
Jane staggered back with a hand to her lips as she choked on a gag. No. Not a mask. A face.
Terence’s discarded face.
She staggered back and rushed up the stairs as fast as she could, trying her best to not slip on the slick steps; she only slowed down as her leg groaned in protest. She was caught by Mrs. Foster. The woman steadied her before locking the door.
As Jane braced herself against the wall and caught her breath, she noticed that Ms. Hudson and Ruben had come to gather in the kitchen, and they watched her with a tired resignation in their eyes.
She had an odd sense that she went through some rite of passage typical for staff of the Drowning House: venture into the darkened basement to gaze upon the ruined remains of the master cast aside when he turned into a beast, so that they may know his true nature.
“Well?” Ms. Hudson crossed her arms and raised a brow. “Enjoy playing in the blood?”
Jane glared at her. Beating the cook with her parasol was suddenly a very tempting thought. “Wouldn’t be needing to play in blood if you would have just told me that—” she pointed to the cellar door, “—was what you were so afraid of on the first night!”
The cook bristled with a scowl on her mouth. “Wouldn’t be so afraid if Mr. Hayes hadn’t let his grief make him so lonesome that he’d call on us to make the house all special and warm just for your visit—”
“Georgianna!” Mrs. Foster’s chatelaine jingled with her bark.
“You know it’s true! And, besides, if he,” Ms. Hudson now pointed to Ruben, who continued to wring his cap between white-knuckled hands, “would bite the bullet and take hold of a shotgun again, maybe then the poor thing would be put out of its mystery just like the last one!”
“Georgianna, that is enough!” The very cupboards rattled with the whiplike snap of Mrs. Foster’s tone, even beneath the sharp silence that followed.
Jane had gone numb and swayed on her feet.
What did Ms. Hudson mean? Had Jane truly been their executioner?
Was it her fault that they were all summoned here—and subsequently trapped along with her—all in an effort to impress her and present to her a proper home, hiding the blood, flesh, bones, and horror that crafted its foundations and pulsated within its very walls?
And was that why they’d neglected to inform her of the beast, in the hope that it’d eat her instead and leave the staff be for the time being?
Her roiling amalgamation of guilt and ire was nearly smothered by a morbid curiosity she mustered as she looked to Ruben.
He was like a fresh colt, with his gangly limbs and knobby knees that shook as he shifted his weight from foot to foot.
He avoided the gaze of everyone looking at him, chewing on his lip.
“What does she mean by ‘the last one’?” Jane asked him with a snarl creaking between her words. She felt Ms. Hudson’s scowl burn into her back.
His pale eyes darted between her, Mrs. Foster, and his cap. His throat bobbed as he worked down a swallow. “It was Matthew. Th-the one whom I…”
Ruben took another look around, and it was Mrs. Foster who spoke. “Matthew was ‘the last one.’ Ruben had been the one to…”
“Kill him.” Ms. Hudson said with the bluntness of death.
Jane blanched. The recent murder of Matthew Hayes—it was committed by the young man standing before her, shivering like a pup in the rain? The bruises along his jaw suddenly resembled battle scars. Scars from a beast.
She couldn’t help but laugh, a dry, husky sound.
“You? You murdered him? You… Why?” As soon as it left her mouth she knew the question was stupid. If he’d been attacked by a beast just as she was, he’d have every reason to murder the monster, regardless of whether it was Matthew or a beast.
Guilt turned Ruben’s stare murky, his lips a stiff line. “Because he asked me to.”
Suicide, then. Not murder.
“The body is buried in the yard,” he continued, and Jane perked up.
A beast’s body? That excitement returned to her chest, and she tried to focus on that feeling rather than the guilt that threatened to fester there.
“You hold that thought, and stay here,” Jane hoisted her skirts and was prepared to move. “I would like to see this grave.”
Before any of them could protest, she hobbled out of the kitchen and to the conservatory, every other step accented by the enthusiastic tap of her parasol against accursed floorboards.
The hairpin. She needed to find the hairpin and the last place she remembered seeing it was when she was lost in the delirium of blood loss in the conservatory.
As she entered the room, Terence jerked awake from where he slept in one of the plush armchairs. Blood stained the very fringes of its golden upholstery. He rapidly blinked the sleep from his eyes at her sudden arrival.
Jane didn’t need to search for the pin for too long, as she found it on the sideboard.
She strode over and took it, holding it up to twist it beneath the natural gray light filtering in through the skylight.
Brownish blood still crusted the blade, and the ruby glow of the Tiffany lamps made those stains bleed.
“Jane?” Terence’s bleary voice took her attention away from the hairpin. He slurred, “What is the matter?”
She arched a brow at him (though not for too long, as she still thought of the fleshy remains of his visage in the cellar). She turned to him and held out her hand.
“Paw,” she said. A demand, one meant for a dog.
Without a word, he gave her his hand, placing it in the middle of her own, and she gripped it to stay its tremor as she used the pin to prick the heel of his palm.
“Jane?!” Terence yelped, more out of surprise than pain, but she didn’t let him take his hand back. She watched as the bead of blood bloomed, without the steam of the beast’s wound, nor the gold of the demon’s.
She scowled as she licked her thumb and swiped it across the little wound, cleaning it.
“Roll your sleeve up for me, won’t you?” She gestured to the arm of the hand she bit.
Terence furrowed his brow as he covered the arm, clearly skeptical. “For what reason, Jane?”
“I think I’m onto something,” she said and held up the hairpin.
“This is made from silver. When I stabbed the beast—er, rather you, I suppose—it was as though I burned it—” Then I had a nightmare, and I saw…
something, and it seemed adverse to silver as well, “—I need to see if silver can protect me.”
Terence searched her face, mouth tight. He nodded slowly. “Silver is the most pure of substances in many cultures,” he mused aloud, almost to himself, as he began to roll up his shirt sleeve. “I suppose it’d be a protection for you…” He winced as he hissed, “Why hadn’t I thought of that sooner?”
Jane didn’t answer him and took him by the wrist. At first, she flinched as she came into contact with scar tissue at his wrist. The skin there was smooth, just like the scar she’d peeped across his throat, as if rubbed raw again and again, the skin burned away to never properly heal.
As her thumb circled in the center of his wrist, Jane thought back to the shackles in the cellar.
How long had he resorted himself to being chained and hidden, bearing such scars in an effort to protect others from himself?
Her heart softened slightly. It all seemed so noble—maybe even good.
Terence’s breath hitched beneath her ghostly touch; without a second thought, as she held it up, she kissed the pulse in his wrist. A wordless apology—a silent recognition of his sacrifice.
She then looked further up his arm to the pockmarks of where she stabbed the beast. She leaned in close enough to feel the heat of his blood against her cheeks as she peered closer at the wounds, with their cauterized edges knotted like melted wax.
She pricked the skin of his forearm just as she did with his hand, and swiped the blood away.
The new wound wasn’t at all like a burn mark like those scarring him now.
It didn’t sizzle, and she didn’t smell burning meat.
Human flesh is unaffected…
Beneath her, she was acutely aware of the heat from his body flush against hers and the rise of his chest as another breath hitched. A blush crept up her neck to settle in her ears, and her silent vow to fear him further wavered.
Her eyes fell to his lips, shivering as they were parted with a low breath. She wondered if he enjoyed the sensation of her blood painting his mouth.
“Jane…” Terence started. His fingers curled until he caged her hand in a loose fist.
Jane’s heart pummeled at her ribs.
Liar, beast, specimen. That was all he had become to her within the span of a single morning.
But he was a good specimen to her—
No.
Her heart couldn’t be at war with her sensibilities like this. Not now, not when she was a prisoner in a beast’s domain.
She suddenly felt a need to sink her teeth into him again, unsure of how else to channel the frothing emotions. But she stepped away before the urge germinated into temptation.
Without another word, she rushed from the room.
She had a beast’s grave to desecrate. Such a task required no distractions.