Cellar
The room was dark. The lamp had been turned off at some point. I didn't remember when. The curtains were still open on the west-facing windows and the moon was coming through them at an angle that lit a long pale rectangle across the floor and nothing else.
Judah was beside me. Warm, solid, breathing slow and even.
I lay still for a moment, just thinking about everything and nothing.
The rum had burned off to a low hum behind my eyes that threatened to transform into a nasty headache come morning, and my body was sore in places I didn’t know could get sore.
But right now, more than anything, I. Needed. To. Pee.
I eased out from under his arm — he'd had it across my waist — and sat up on the edge of the bed.
I felt the cool floor under my feet.
It was so very dark. I thought about turning on the light but I didn’t want to wake him.
There was an adjoining room — bathroom. Judah had gone into it, or I had imagined him going into it, I didn’t know anymore. But I was pretty certain there was a door here somewhere that led to a bathroom.
I turned toward where I thought I'd seen it and moved carefully, hand outstretched, touching the damask wallpaper and then the edge of a picture frame and then — wall. More wall. A corner.
Not the door.
The moon cut its rectangle across the floor and illuminated exactly nothing useful.
I turned in the other direction. Found the bedpost. Found the foot of the bed.
Oriented myself and moved toward the far wall and found…
a window. Two of them, west-facing, open at the bottom, the curtains barely moving.
The cicadas were loud through them, a solid wall of sound.
Below, the grounds stretched dark and silver, the oaks massive against the sky.
No door.
I stood in the moonlight in someone else's house wearing nothing and thought: find something to put on first.
Judah’s shirt was on the floor. I found it by stepping on it, which seemed about right. Pulled it on. It came to mid-thigh. It still carried his cologne, that specific mix of cedar and vanilla. I decided not to think of it too much, and moved on.
I found a door — thought it led to the bathroom, but when I opened it, it led me outside, to a hallway that sunk in long shadows and the humid night air of Louisiana.
I suddenly remembered every horror movie about every haunted house… ever. I thought about getting back into bed but my bladder felt like it was going to burst any moment now.
Stop being a wimp, Mercy, I told myself. It’s just an old house.
I took a deep breath and soldiered on.
The hallway was long. Longer than it had seemed when I'd walked up it earlier, following Judah, not paying attention to the architecture because I'd been paying attention to other things.
The floorboards were old — each step a small negotiation, my weight and the wood reaching an agreement about how much noise to make.
I found a guest bathroom two doors down — formal, cold tile and a soap dish shaped like a shell.
On the way back out I turned left instead of right.
I didn't realize it immediately. The hallway looked the same in both directions — same width, same occasional table, same dark-framed things on the walls that might have been portraits or landscapes or nothing.
I walked until I reached a landing I didn't recognize and understood I'd gone the wrong way.
I stopped.
I didn’t like how quiet it was. And those odd little house sounds? It was like it was groaning, then whispering to the night, then groaning again. Deep inside I knew what the sounds were: wood cooling. Air moving through rooms. The faint tick of something mechanical somewhere below.
I leaned over the railing and looked below. The stairs that led to the first floor were narrower — not the main staircase. Steeper. The servants' stairs maybe, tucked against the back of the house. They went down into dark.
I should have gone back. Retraced the hallway, found the right door, gotten back into the fine cotton sheets and Judah's warm orbit and not thought about any of this until morning.
Instead, I fashioned myself into a horror movie heroine. One that, judging by the way things were going, died at the first half of the film.
I stood at the top of the stairs and looked down.
It must’ve been the rum. Surely. Because I could find no other explanation as to why I went down.
The ground floor was cooler than the rooms above. Stone tiles underfoot instead of wood, the temperature dropping with each step until I was standing in a back corridor that smelled like the house's bones — old mortar and earth.
The cicadas were muffled down here, too. Somewhat distant. They wanted no part of this.
The corridor was short, leading toward the back of the house — the kitchen was somewhere to the left, I thought, or the utility room. The moon didn't reach down here. I was navigating by the faint secondary light that seeped through from somewhere — a window above a door, something.
I came up to a door. Set into the wall at the end of the corridor, lower than the others, with a different quality of frame around it — as much as I could tell — or hallucinate— in the dark.
It was older, the wood heavier, not matching the rest. An odd iron handle sat too high and looked very odd; something that you had to push rather than pull.
I blinked a couple times, thinking what the hell was I doing.
I stood in front of it.
The rational explanation was storage. Of course it was storage. Old houses had cellars — structurally, necessarily, as part of the architecture. Root vegetables. Wine. The miscellaneous accumulation of generations.
Skeletons.
Bodies.
Mercy, stop.
I put my hand on the iron handle.
It pressed down.
Unlocked.
I blamed Judah for this. For not locking every door in his house.
It swung inward. Cool air came up from below, and with it the smell of earth and stone and something that didn't belong in a root cellar. My mind thought of pennies. That faint metallic tang that was descriptive of a certain red fluid.
I glanced underfoot.
Idiot.
Moron.
What the hell are you doing?
Stone steps went down. I saw the faint outline of a pull-string bulb at the bottom.
Dark beyond it. I should have turned back.
Every instinct screamed it. But there was something about that odd smell — ritualistic, almost — that didn't fit with the rest of this grand old house.
It whispered of secrets kept below the floorboards, of things hidden from polite society.
Dumbass.
I took the first step.
The second.
You reckless, foolish girl…
The third, and stopped.
The dark below was total. I stood on the third step and thought about what happened to women in stories who went into cellars.
I thought about Celeste Taylor's flyer.
I thought about the boat at the dock.
I thought about Gerald Hall and his notepad. And my pen that he never gave back.
I thought about the cherry in my palm and the way Judah had looked at it pinned to my dress.
My foot found the third step going back up. Then the second. Then I was in the corridor with the door still open behind me, the cold air still coming through it.
I pulled it shut.
Turned around.
Judah was there.
He didn't look like a preacher. In the near pitch-black dark of the corridor, he looked like a statue carved from something old and unforgiving. He was shirtless — the suffering Christ on his skin looked distorted in the shadows, the ink dark as bruises.
“I was looking for the bathroom,” I said. My voice sounded thin, like a wire about to snap.
He didn't move. He watched me with that terrifying, Sunday-morning stillness. It was the look of a man who knew exactly where every mouse in his house was hiding, but not quite sure how this mouse had slipped him by.
I knew that look. My father had worn the same expression whenever I’d “disappointed” God, which, according to him, had been fairly regularly.
“I went the wrong way,” I said quietly, careful not to disturb the night. Or maybe too afraid to let him her me.
The silence stretched, vibrating with the sound of… nothing really. That was the bizarre thing. It was so quiet it felt like sound.
He didn't look at the door behind me. He looked at my throat. He looked at the way my pulse was jumping under the skin.
And he moved, closing the distance until the heat from his chest hit my face. He was so close I could see the fine grain of his skin, the absolute lack of hesitation in his eyes.
He reached out. I flinched — just a hair — but he didn't strike. He tucked a stray lock of hair behind my ear, his fingers grazing my temple. His touch was light, almost holy, but his eyes were cold as a ledger.
“Come back to bed, Mercy,” he said.
It wasn't a request.
Upstairs, the room felt smaller. The damask walls seemed to be leaning in, watching, like all good peeping-toms.
Judah didn't say a word. He didn't ask what I saw. He didn't threaten me. He simply lay down and opened his arm, waiting.
I got in. I didn't have a choice. Being near him felt like standing at the edge of a cliff, but being away from him felt like falling. I slid into his heat, my skin prickling where it touched his.
He didn't move his arm. He just… let the weight of it settle across my waist — a loose, certain tether. His hand found my hair, his fingers rhythmic and steady, stroking from my crown to my neck.
One. Two. Three.
A strange thought came to me. It was the way you’d soothe a horse before the slaughter. Gentle. Patient.
I lay there with my eyes wide open in the dark, listening to the house groan. I knew he wasn't sleeping. I could feel the alertness radiating off him — listening to my every breath, measuring them against his own.
Eventually, the exhaustion won. My eyes got heavy. The last thing I felt was his thumb tracing the line of my jaw, slow and possessive, marking the territory he already owned.