Blood ran deep in the mud, filling in another print right beside the body, a print in the shape of a beast’s paw.
Back in the house, Mrs. Foster and Ms. Hudson had taken to ignoring Jane to instead speak to each other in hushed, frantic whispers in the kitchen.
Under the guise of making tea, Jane tried to eavesdrop but as she waited for the kettle to boil, both women replaced their chittering with sharp sideways glances she couldn’t read. Ms. Hudson’s glare was indecipherable as she took Mrs. Foster by the arm and, together, rushed from the room to resume their whispering elsewhere.
Jane tried to ignore a bitter twinge within her. Why wouldn’t they include her in such conversation, especially if it may have concerned whatever beast may have been roaming the grounds?
Still waiting on the kettle and requiring some semblance of movement in her numbed, tingling limbs, she retrieved her drawings from upstairs and ran a finger along Old Man Hayes’ books in the sitting room until she pulled out the first title shethought would be of most use (and entertainment) to her—On Wards Against Spooks, Demons, Witches, & Warlocksby some unnamed author, and seemed to be more in the style of an old, flimsy, amateur penny dreadful than something of proper literature. She brought both to the conservatory, a room she’d only glimpsed out of the tail of her eye during previous wanderings of the house, as she decided she could use a change in scenery for the day’s activities, having grown tired of the sight of stale, sad blue wallpaper.
Jane returned with her tea, which she wasn’t even thirsty for, and plopped herself into one of several plump armchairs that occupied the room. The golden upholstery squealed beneath her slight weight and layers of ornately-patterned rugs pillowed her steps. The room was cozy, lit by several Tiffany lamps that cast a kaleidoscope of red and green shades across the bookshelves lining each of the four walls. A residual scent of cigar smoke, having long since seeped into the wood for eternity, hung faintly in the air like a ghost. Rain pinged against the domed skylight in a gentle symphony, creating a fragile serenity that felt in poor taste.
Jane wished she had said something about the beast she saw, that she suspected it of being Mistletoe’s murderer. She winced, pressing her eyes shut as the image of the horse’s maimed throat, the blood-soaked paw print beside it, burrowed its teeth into her brain. It wasn’t until she went to take a sip from her tea and the ping of rattling porcelain started to ricochet off the skylight that she noticed her hands were shaking; her appetite was missing, her thirst nonexistent. The chamomile was a sludge on her tongue and she struggled to swallow as it clawed its way down into her belly like molten sandpaper.
She sighed and sat back in the chair so that she could watch the rain dribble across the skylight. She suddenly hated the rain.The more it rained, the longer she would be stuck at the Drowning House, deep in the bowels of the Wolf’s Run marshes. No horse to ride or to pull a carriage meant she’d have to resort to walking to Wolf’s Run to hail a cab back to Cambridge—that was if she wasn’t so worried about ruining her wardrobe, on top of drowning in an ocean of mud.
Jane began to wonder how her mother was faring in her absence. She wondered if anyone had told Mrs. Sterling about the rains flooding the marshes, and that there was a logical reason for her daughter to be gone, not because of a murder or being gobbled up by some marshland creature—
Jane smacked her palms against her thighs. She couldn’t allow herself to stew in these thoughts for too long, for, in time, they’d score unpleasant lines along her mouth and sag below her eyes.
Turning to the book and pile of papers, she took her drawings and spread them across her lap, offering her a view of each one. After another sip of tea to moisten her cracked lips, she flicked through the thin book. She didn’t pause to read any passages, instead seeking out symbols and illustrations that could hint at anything useful. Most pages had illustrations, some pentagrams and crescent moons—protection sigils if the title was anything to go off of—though none resembled her drawings.
Without her glasses, her eyes had grown sore with all their flickering between the book and her drawings, and she tossed the book onto her lap with an exasperated sigh. As she rubbed her temple with a thumb and forefinger, she found that she was pinned beneath the stare of a great, unblinking eye peering up at her from the page the book splayed open to. At the eye’s center, in place of a pupil, was a spiraling, circular rune, not too unlike in Jane’s drawings.
In the margins of the page were nonsensical scribblings, wavering lines of ink scratched into the paper with a slanted, etching script. The penmanship of Old Man Hayes?
Jane canted her head to the side and held the book up to her face so she could attempt to read without her glasses. Only managing to decipher every other word between her farsightedness and Old Man Hayes’ poor handwriting, the annotations described the eye to be used as a general ward against evil, an “evil eye,” a malevolent stare of envy and misfortune to frighten away spirits—the eye of a protective God. But what spirits was Old Man Hayes so afraid of that warranted, seemingly, several protective sigils carved into floorboards?
Jane’s finger tapped the drawing of the eye. If this symbol was to ward off evil, then she was certain the others beneath the bed were as well. It was now only a matter of deciphering what Old Man Hayes felt he’d need protection against. She paused her tapping. Had he been seeking protection against the beast, something similar to the one clawing at her door, murdering horses, and skulking in the dark of night?
What if legends of the black shuck were true—
Jane scoffed and rolled her eyes. “No. It’s nothing more than Spiritualism and spooks shenanigans—”
Lightning flashed, blinding the room, a heartbeat before it was pursued by a clap of thunder that shook the house and rattled the skylight panes.
Jane jumped with a yell. Her knee knocked against the table holding her tea, and she hissed as the thing shattered on the floor in an explosion of porcelain chips and hot liquid.
“Oh, that’s just lovely…” she muttered, closing the book and setting it on the arm of the chair. Grumbling, she got down on her knees, created a little pocket with the excess fabric of her skirt, andstarted to gather the pieces of the chipped cup. As the tea soaked into the rug with a brownish stain and a heat that bled beneath her knees, she tried to ignore how much it reminded her of spilled blood, and the white chips she gathered like little teeth.
She reached for a particularly large, particularly jagged, piece that fell beneath one of the chairs when her finger caught on a frayed seam in the rug, causing its edge to flip back just enough to expose the floorboards underneath. Floorboards that, Jane noticed, possessed a funny crookedness, as if mislain whether on accident or with great haste to hide something. Atop the most crooked of the boards was the black smudge of singed wood.
She set her gathered pieces of broken cup on the table, then, with great effort heaved and pushed the armchair aside enough so that she could have a better view of the crooked floorboard. A sigil was rotted into the wood, another one of Old Man Hayes’ evil eyes, surrounded by carvings of crosses. Terence’s stories of his grandfather’s inclination to dabble in the occult flooded back to her and rushed a thrill through her veins. Perhaps she had just stumbled across yet another one of the old man’s occult secrets. She bit her bottom lip to tame her morbid giddy. With little hesitation, she jammed a prodding finger into a notch in the board and wriggled it loose.
She couldn’t resist wheezing out a triumphant cackle when she pulled the square of floor up to reveal a hidden compartment—and the little book that was hidden inside. It’d felt like uncovering a treasure, one that she wasn’t meant to find. She wished Mr. Thompson was here so she could share the excitement of her find as she picked the book up and turned it about in her hands. It was small, perhaps a journal or a pocket bible, bound in flimsy leather and tied closed with a piece of twine. Imprinted on its cover were more crosses.
She glanced at the conservatory door, listening for any approaching footsteps or conversation, and once she was sure she was alone, she undid the string and leafed through the pages, brittle and yellow at the edges beneath her fingers. Damp had gotten to the book, with a corner of its cover stained black with mold. The crust of old rot ruined the ink on most pages to the point they were hardly legible. Jane wrinkled her nose with disgust and wiped a hand against her skirt. Not so much a treasure but rather a piece of garbage that stank of age and left a grimy powder on her fingertips. She would’ve put the book back where she found it to then forget about it if it weren’t for the crosses on the cover and a page soaked with violent sketches.
Abruptly, she stopped her sheafing and hurriedly flipped back to the page with the illustrations. At last, she found it and slammed a finger down to claim its place on the page.
The sketches were garish, yet Jane couldn’t help but find a familiarity in them. The crude, scribbled angles hinted at them being drawn in some feverish vigor rather than artistic amusement. In a way, it reminded Jane of the drawings of malformed dinosaur skulls she’d claw into her mother’s sketchbooks as a child. But these weren’t the drawings of a child with daydreams. No, this was something else.
In the page’s center, most prominent, was something resembling some canine skull, or at least Jane thought it to be so. A very ugly one, with a snout both too long and too broad, and eyes set too loose in otherwise hollowed sockets. Circling it in the same chicken scratch was a single word, written again and again, until it created an unholy halo around the skull:CLAUNEK.
Jane’s nose wrinkled again. What was a “Claunek”? Was it a spell? An incantation, a hex? A name, a species? And what did it have to do with a poorly drawn dog’s skull? Was that thename Old Man Hayes prescribed to the beast as though it were some pet? Jane could picture Old Man Hayes, bent and broken and crooked with age as he hunched over the book, carving that word onto paper just as he carved evil eyes on the guest room floor. Once more, she had to ask herself why and for what, and against whom.
Beneath the skull was another sketch that, upon first glance, almost resembled a blot of ink. But distinctly rough lines hinted at a vague shape of what could have been a dog—in the sense that it had a body, four limbs, bristling hair, and a yawning jaw full of teeth like a wild mongrel. There were two empty, unmarked voids that the drawing’s body seemed to orbit. The eyes of a beast.
The eyes of a Claunek?
