Cordelia couldn’t answer that, wasn’t sure she wanted to.
Looking away, she shone her light against the far wall where a high table stood, stacked with bowls and various containers and an assortment of peculiar, handheld tools. She recognized the large earthenware mortar and pestle, the copper and brass cauldron dulled by years of dust. But others, she did not.
“What is that?” Eustace asked, pointing to a ring with several chains ending in hooks hanging on the wall above.
“Or that?” she said again, pointing to a silvery saw with a thin blade, open in the middle.
“Or that?” she questioned further, gesturing to something that looked like a long clamp that opened in reverse.
“Eustace!” Cordelia scolded her, her sister’s mounting anxiety fueling her own. And then her flashlight fell on the farthest corner. “What isthat?” she asked quietly.
“Oh sure. Now you want to play,” Eustace grumbled, crossing her arms, until she saw what the flashlight was revealing.
A cast-iron stove—squat as a toad and blacker than tar—stood in the corner on four stout legs, its heavy door marked by giant hinges and bolted closed. A fat pipe ran from it up the wall to vent the room. Beside it, a cobwebbed pile of firewood and tinder lay forgotten.
“Looks like some kind of heater,” Eustace said.
“An oven,” Cordelia corrected, taking a deep breath. She knew appliances, new or old. She’d seen some doozies in her day, but nothing quite like this. “It’s an oven.”
“Witches indeed,” her sister whispered low, and Cordelia could see by the way Eustace bunched the fabric of her shirt in her fists that she was scared.
“But what kind?” Cordelia asked. They both gaped at the oven as if in a scene from “Hansel and Gretel.” Her burgeoning headache threatened to pulse back to life as she took in the room, her mind filled with candy-house horrors.
Cordelia moved the light away from the corner to the wall opposite them. Her eyes took a minute to refocus. Painted black as the stove, it was marked with an elaborate mapping system in chalky white. She stepped closer to it, studying the writing.Omen, Corvus, Laurel…
They were names.
Moving back, she searched until she found it.Magdalena—their mother.
“I think this is some kind of family tree,” she said to Eustace,who was now flipping through a leather-bound volume she’d pulled from the shelf.
And then she took another step back, shining her light a little lower, and the skin along her arms and neck began to crawl.
Eustace,it read.
Cordelia.
She gasped and stumbled back, accidentally bumping into her sister, who was cupping something in the palm of one of her hands.
“Great,” Eustace griped. “Now I dropped half of them.”
“Half of what?” Cordelia asked, sinking low so she could help her recover whatever she’d fumbled.
“They’re some kind of stones,” Eustace was saying. “But I couldn’t really see because you had the light. I think they have those same symbols we saw on our aunt and the floor carved into them.”
Cordelia held up her phone so they could make out what Eustace was holding.
“Shit,” her sister stuttered.
“Those aren’t stones, Eustace,” Cordelia told her. “They’re teeth.”
“From the raccoon jaw?” she asked, horrified.
Cordelia shook her head. These were no animal teeth. These were human.
Suddenly frantic to be rid of them, Eustace began trying to funnel them into the pouch she’d dumped them from, spilling half a dozen or more back onto the floor.
Cordelia spotted one glowing softly against the dark stone and picked it up. Hadn’t she seen one like it upstairs? The second her fingers closed around it she felt a cord of ecstasy pulse through her. With it, the knot in her head unraveled. The symbols were a match to those on the floor, those on their aunt’s corpse. She wanted to know what they meant, why they triggered somethingpowerful in her. Reluctantly, she dropped the stone back in the pouch her sister was holding.
