He drew a long breath in through his nose in a faltering attempt at composure. “Because I ambeggingyou to do so, Jane. I… J-just—listen to me,please, andgo.”
A dread not too unlike what fermented after his ominous warning following her first night at the Drowning House returned to spiderweb its way through Jane’s gut, and her appetite—for both soup and company—dissipated. His breathing had become increasingly ragged, the hollows of his face deepened, his shoulders slouched as though he were a scolded dog when she glared at him,lips turned downward in a frown.
She didn’t know what to feel in this moment as they held each other’s gazes, the sweat on his brow leaking down his face like tears, but an emotion she could name washurt. But she couldn’t let such hurt show.
She curled her lip in a sneer before she carelessly dropped one of the bowls onto the counter. The bowl, to her chagrin, didn’t shatter, but a mess of spilled cream and potatoes was made.
“Tomorrow, I expect answers for all—” with her free hand she gestured to, well, all of him, the house. Her fingers were bent to form claws. “Because I am tired of whatever games and mysteries are being played here. Goodnight, Mr. Hayes.”
So she avoided his gaze as she took her bowl and went to her room.
Out of spite, she didn’t bother to have her door locked.
CHAPTER
Ten
Jane startled as a blood-curdling scream tore through the house.
A deathly silence followed, practically shaking the floorboards.
She froze beneath her sheets as another howl echoed against the pipes, rattling foundations so that it seemed as though it were the Drowning House that was crying in agony.
She waited for another sound, holding her breath, but heard nothing other than the rain, wind, and lightning that hissed against the windows.
Had it been the mystery animal? Did it break in and attack one of the staff? Or, and her gut curdled away whatever anger had remained there for him, did it get Terence? The sounds were too alive, too powered by torment, to be a mere settling of the houseor even thunder. Whether it was Terence, the staff, or an animal, the sound was horrible, soaked in blood, and Jane needed to know how much blood. She knew she should’ve been more afraid, but that same, insistent nagging that’d wriggled into her brain when she’d discovered the carvings beneath the bed had returned with fervor.
Slowly, she cast her sheets aside and snatched the hairpin-knife, having never returned to its metallic sheath, from the nightstand. Beside it was her untouched bowl of cold soup. She didn’t bother eating it, her appetite shot dead by the betrayal of Terence’s outburst. Never would she admit it out loud but the callousness of his tone hurt. More than she anticipated. She never thought he, of all people, would raise his tone with her. It was what made her heart crack and her throat tighten as she’d pressed her back against her shut door, cries muffled into the heel of her palm.
She tried to read and she tried to sleep, but she instead bundled herself under the covers and stared at the rain smattering against the window, watching the flashes of lightning dance within the droplets, until the scream broke her out of her trance.
Her head still ached and her eyes remained blotched from her crying as she clutched the little knife, took hold of the oil lamp, held her breath, opened the door, and stepped into the hallway.
The silence that lay over the house was almost more grim than the screams that woke her. She was betrayed by every footfall as wood creaked beneath her toes. With every other step, she was compelled to look over her shoulder to ensure that Mrs. Foster hadn’t burst into the hallway like a bat out of hell to drag her back into her room rather than assist her in investigating the screams. The thought hurried Jane’s pace until she crept down the stairs and found herself in the kitchen, the gas lamp in her hand alighting everything beneath a yellowing, pestilence-colored hue. Thoughshe wasn’t near the sitting room, she couldn’t shake the feeling of the idol’s leer pulsing through her bones and settling at the base of her skull.
Holding her breath, Jane strained to listen for any sound that wasn’t the din of the storm or her pulse hammering in her ears.
A groan assaulted the quiet, droning from behind a door Jane thought to be some sort of pantry, which now, beneath the light of her lamp, sat crookedly ajar. Damp air with the sweet, metallic odor of old, rotted meat wafted from the door, clearly not the scent of a pantry, but perhaps of an old cellar.
A sliver of blackness stared at her with the danger of a cat’s eye, challenging her as another low groan rumbled from somewhere deep within.
Swallowing down the trepidation that started to scratch in her throat, Jane hoisted her oversized skirts higher in the same fist clutching her blade, eased open the door with her foot, and made her way into the darkness.
Stone stairs wound steeply downward, slick with a damp both natural and unnatural, and the walls glistened yellow beneath her lamp. The strong odor of discarded meat and rot was pungent in the air and assaulted every one of Jane’s senses. Too much did this feel like being swallowed whole into the throat of a tomb, a crypt that hollowed out the earth beneath the Drowning House. Jane half expected to step down into a pit of bones that’d crumble and crunch beneath her weight as she reached the bottom-most step. Her toes met only with cold, wet stone.
She wrinkled her nose as the stench had become overpowering and her whole body shuddered with a gag. If she had eaten her soup from dinner, surely she would have certainly spewed sick all across the floor. A floor that Jane noticed to be marred by severe marks.
She crouched low and put a hand down to the scarred stones until her fingers snugly fit within four fissures running parallel to each other. Just as they did with the depressions beneath the entrance hall’s wallpaper. And the splinters along the guest room door. She retracted her hand as though the stone burned her fingertips. These had to have been left behind by an animal, one very large, very powerful, very angry, as it clawed at the cellar floor, every inch of it it seemed.
It suddenly became difficult to breathe as Jane’s heart lodged in her throat. Could this have been where Old Man Hayes’ boogeyman-beast—his Claunek—was kept? Was this the resting place of the animal that was clawing doors, haunting the grounds, and murdering horses? If this were some animal or pet or boogeyman, what manner of creature was it that it’d driven a man to scribble madness into a notebook and carvings into his home?
“Wh-whatareyou…” she managed to whisper, and the darkness answered back.
Jane stopped breathing entirely as something shifted within the dark. There was the sound of something wet plopping against the stone floor.
In a shaking grip, she held the lamp higher, trying to see more of the cellar, before reeling backward until her back collided with the wall. A scream was trapped on the back of her tongue, too afraid to escape. She was surrounded by piles of rot. Rotted flesh, decayed meat—discarded and gathered in mounds in the cellar’s dark corners, left to spoil. There were the rusted bits of many chains, many broken manacles, some scattering the floor, some partially lodged in the heaps of flesh, some hanging from loose bolts in the walls. It didn’t matter. It all reeked.
A dungeon? A torture chamber?
