2. #2
“Elias fucked with the schedule. He could have brought you here at any time. Hell, he could have asked you to marry him a week after meeting, and you probably would have said yes. But he didn’t.” Ash slanted his eyes, glancing at her over his shoulder. “Maybe he cared about you after all.”
She wanted to slap him. She didn’t, her hand curling in on itself at her side instead.
Unfair, that she should be this angry with Ash when he was the one trying to save her. Deeply unfair that she should resent him for Elias’s death.
In that way, she guessed she was just as much at fault for it as Ash was. She’d made Elias care enough to delay, enough to doubt. Perverse, how that was consoling.
“What did you do with all that time, then?” Claire asked when they finally got to the last landing, the metal door back into the house looming up ahead.
“You left Harrow, left Elias to take care of everything, but clearly you just came back. Why? What were you doing?” She shook her head. “What was the damn point?”
Ash didn’t answer. “Come on. Causeway should be up. I left a car in the front drive, but they could’ve moved it. If they did, we’ll need to take a side door outside.”
He went to the door, opened it slowly. It didn’t creak, too well maintained for such a thing. Beyond, the hall was nearly as dark as the back stairwell, though Claire could see a faint flickering light close to its end.
Cold skin on hers. Ash, reaching backward, grabbing her hand. “For what it’s worth,” he murmured, “I would’ve married you, were it not for the whole sacrifice-to-a-tentacle-monster thing.”
His idea of caring was fucked. And it made sense, seeing his family, but it still made her furious.
Fury felt good. “Is that supposed to be comforting?” She wanted to wrench her hand away, but in her current predicament, it seemed like a bad idea.
“I don’t know you, Ash, and what I do know isn’t exactly indicative of excellent character. ”
“Fair enough.” He huffed a laugh. “But I know you.”
“No, you really don’t.” Her hand twitched in his. “All I am to you is a way to feel less guilty. Don’t pretend it’s something more.”
No answer, again. Wordlessly, Ash tugged her into the dark hallway.
The door closed behind them. Next to it, a candle set into a recess in the wall, carved stone in the same wavering pattern as the columns outside. The recess made a shallow pool, the candle in the middle, water reflecting the flame.
An apse, like in a church. The wax of the candle had those same green flecks as the candle below her picture, back in the shrine.
Ash led her down the hall, the dark closing in as they moved away from the apse. There was no other light, but he moved with confidence. Claire fumbled behind him, one hand on the wall to give herself an anchor.
“Stay here.” The halls appeared empty, but Ash spoke low, his voice more an impression on the air than actual sound.
“We’re about two floors from the surface.
I’m going to check for the car. If you hear anything, head for the back staircase again.
” He slipped into the shadows, his footsteps like an erratic heartbeat moving away from her.
The darkness here had mass, it had teeth. She could feel it crowding in from all sides. Claire tried to think of what it’d looked like as Wellington and the others led her down the staircase the day she arrived, the single file line of them winding into the gloom.
They’d mentioned apses at the ends of the hallways then, the ones branching from either side of the stairs that led to the main house below. She must be close to the same staircase now, waiting in one of those halls.
Ash had told her to stay put, but a desire to orient herself overtook the desire to follow his orders to the letter. Claire took a small step forward, mindful of the possibility of stairs, and put out her hand.
It settled on stone, cool against her skin. Claire worked her fingers over it, following the ridges and grooves, trying to figure out what she was touching.
One of those weird statues she’d seen lining the staircase, she was almost sure of it. The creepy-ass mermaids.
Knowing where she was made her a bit less terrified.
Claire leaned against the toothy mermaid statue, smothering a delicate snort in the palm of her hand.
It was weird to think of herself as terrified when she was just waiting around in the dark, looking for all the world like someone completely calm.
But she remembered a lit class she’d taken in college, an elective focusing on gothic literature, and how they’d spent an entire lecture discussing the difference between horror and terror.
Terror, apparently, was the dread, the awful anticipation of seeing something that would scare you.
Horror was how you reacted when you actually saw the thing.
Claire hoped that in this particular situation, she never made the crossover into horror.
She could make out the vague shape of her surroundings—the angular rise of stairs, the landing where she stood, the hallway continuing on the other side. The dim candle flickering at the hallway’s end. Another apse.
It looked farther away than it should, and it wavered, like something seen from underwater.
Claire had taken a step toward it before she really knew what she was doing, walking slowly across the landing.
She put her hand on the mermaid statue at the opening of the other hallway, tested the points of its teeth with her finger as she passed.
Oh my God, don’t be an idiot. She’d seen enough horror movies to know that she shouldn’t move any farther. Ash would be back in a minute, surely, ready to haul her up to the ground floor, where he could get her the fuck out of here—
She took another step toward the light.
Claire’s limbs didn’t feel like her own. No longer full of muscle and sinew and bone, but of something looser, stretched long and reaching. A compulsion to move, as if her body remembered a promise that her mind didn’t, a task set before it.
Still, the feeling within her remained terror, not horror, not yet. Not if she didn’t look down to what should be calves muscled by all those long walks when she and Elias first moved in together, what she was sure would now look longer and more gelatinous, more graceful.
Not horror, not yet.
Her strange, gliding gait took her down the hall, all the way to the apse. The feeling changed as abruptly as it had come; her own legs again, if they’d ever been anything different.
The sense of a task left undone remained, though. Something predestined.
A lone candle flickered in the stone basin set into the wall, green-flecked pale wax. The fire danced, casting jagged shadows. Orange light was reflected in the basin, in the shallow water.
She dipped in her finger, brought it to her nose. Salt water. Moving slowly, as if in a dream, Claire stuck her finger in her mouth.
“Fuck.”
Ash, whipping out of the darkness, roughly grabbing her hand and pulling it away. “Fuck, Claire, you shouldn’t have done that, we have to go.”
Movement in the shadows. Ballet-smooth, almost serpentine. Not people, at least they didn’t move that way, but something.
“The car is still out front.” Ash hauled her back to the stairs, took them two at a time. He didn’t whisper anymore, as if it was pointless. More stirring in the hallways, something waking up. “The causeway is up. If I can get you off the island—”
Something rushed out of a hallway.
A person—Claire thought it was a person?
—dressed in the black and white of the house staff, corpse-gray eyes wide and pale skin glowing in the dimness.
But where arms should be, there were… arms, still, but wrong.
Too long, not segmented with wrist and elbow, just noodle-like appendages that reached for her…
Claire screamed, and Ash cursed, tugging so hard on her arm she felt it might come free of the socket. The staff member’s strange limbs made it uncoordinated, and it flapped after her, reaching with those tentacle arms, flopping up the stairs behind them with surprising speed.
The thing tumbled over itself, as if moving through water rather than air. A squelching sound, a reedy cry, the voice of something that shouldn’t be able to speak.
Claire got one good look at its face, before its limbs flipped and hid it from view. Normal, except for the mouth. Where a mouth should be, there was a maw, circular and full of teeth.
“What the fuck?” Claire stuttered, stumbling up after Ash. “What the fuck?”
“The barn was compromised!” Ash’s voice was a yell to her whisper, all pretense of secrecy gone. “They moved the skins into the house!”
More staff members appeared from the hallways, all loose, all wrong, all tentacled.
Some were more human than others, those reedy cries made lower and louder, snatching out at Claire with fingers that were too long.
Others barely looked human at all, marine things miraculously breathing air, skin gone blue green and fingers gone sucker.
The staff churned after them as Claire and Ash reached the top of the stairs, crashed out the double doors, into the chill night of the northern coast. A black BMW sat on the curb, and if Claire hadn’t been so preoccupied with the impossibility of what was chasing them, she would have spent some time considering that.
“Go!” Ash nearly threw her at the passenger side. “Go go go!”
Harrow Point boiled over. A sea of not-people burst from the doors after them, their humanity in various states of breaking down.
Claire’s brain felt like a siren, like a flat line on a monitor.
A few of them no longer wore their staff uniforms, not human at all, just writhing masses of tentacles and teeth.
They reminded her of the octopus-thing in Elias’s aquarium.