Hell?
Jane’s mind was scrambling to imagine this place’s sickening purpose as she was assaulted by the sight of blood—so, so much blood—clumped in congealed puddles, streaked across the floor, painting the walls with hand-shaped prints. With a sickly, metallic sweetness, old blood was already seeping into her tongue, between her teeth, down her throat.
Despite her empty stomach, bile surged into her mouth and she gagged before swallowing it back down. It was the stench of spoiled blood and the thought that this hall of gore and horror had been lying beneath her feet without her knowing. And that Terence kept it a secret from her.
What had been kept down here? Who was bound with the bloody chains?
Some blood was still damp beneath her lamplight—someone had just bled.
She didn’t have much time to puzzle through her terror any further as a slurp leaked out from the darkness. Something else was down here with her, and she didn’t know what terrified her more: someoneor something.
A beast? Old Man Hayes? Who? What?
Jane’s head spun. She should have supposed that even the most kind-hearted of Englishmen would entomb a family member so that their embarrassment may remain in the dark. But what madness led to so much blood?
“Wh-Who’s there?” She called out and a blunt blood-stained echo returned to her.
She held the lamp up again in an attempt to further illuminate the cellar, trying to peer past the mounds of flesh and manacles to focus on the hunched shadow in the furthest corner. Another wet crunch of bone or some other body part breaking resounded against the bloody stones.
She swallowed, licking her lips (and gathered her courage), and tried again, “Hello?”
The figure fell silent and went still, compelling Jane to cry, “Come now, who is that? I-I can see you!”
The figure shifted, a hulking dark mass that turned until two glowing orbs stared at Jane from the darkness. It sat before something glistening and damp—fresh gore, discarded flesh, and viscera.
Jane froze, her very heart going painfully still between her breasts, as the thing abandoned its mess of shredded clothes and blood and skin to stalk toward her. On all fours and hunched over like a wild animal. Gnashing teeth glittered with strings of freshly torn flesh. Pale claws scraped against stone. This was not Old Man Hayes, nor was it even remotely human. This was a nightmare.
Jane didn’t know whether to weep, run, die, or fall to her knees before it.
Thebeast.
The beast’s shape was something Jane could only describe as primal and prehistoric, uncanny in its mimicry of something mammalian with bowed, bear-like legs, square snout, and the yellow saber-shaped teeth its black lips peeled back to reveal. Down its back, piercing through sinewy gray flesh that stretched taut across a jutting skeleton, bristled a sparse covering of black and silver hair. Blood stained its jowls, the malformed protrusion of its muzzle, and bubbled at the corners of its mouth as it snarled again—and lunged forward, just as Jane screamed.
As she jumped back, the lamp slipped from her hands and plunged the room into darkness beneath the symphony of shattering glass and snuffed flames. There was the sound of fabric tearing as one of the beast’s reaching claws snagged on the very edge of her skirt, nearly tripping her. Jane wrenched herself free byturning on her heel and clambering up the stairs on all fours in a blind scramble.
She didn’t dare look behind her, instead focusing on the pinprick of light ahead, illuminated only by unending flashes of lightning, and making sure that every one of her limbs stepped one in front of the other.
Behind her was a gurgling roar and the scrape of claws against stone in pursuit of her. Hot breath moistened her ankles just as she threw herself onto the kitchen floor. Half standing, half on her knees, she slammed the door shut. The force of something ramming against the other side was enough to knock her back to the ground.
Mind locked purely on survival, cunning abandoned Jane as she scrambled to her feet and ran toward the first door she saw, leaving the threshold to Hell unlocked and unobstructed.
She pushed through the door as she heard the splintering of wood coming undone from its hinges and was met by a blustering downpour. Blinded by rain, and deafened by thunder, Jane continued to run despite the storm; from somewhere too close behind the beast howled.
She didn’t get very far before her foot caught on stone and was catapulted forward until she splashed down in mud. Pain ricocheted from her ankle and seething a breath between her teeth only resulted in her inhaling a mouthful of slimy earth. Looming above her were two stone angels, one with outstretched wings while the other drooped over its grave. The cemetery. She turned to glare at the headstone that tripped her but was instead met with a bloodshot gaze and a flash of teeth as the beast tore into her leg.
Jane screamed as the saber-teeth sank deep into her calf and yanked her back through a slurry of mud and blood. Even as a delirium of pain washed over her, she grappled to hold onto theheadstone nearest to her with a free hand, but her fingers slipped as the beast rattled her with a great shake of its head. Her blood foamed from its mouth and its growl pealed through her, just beneath the surface of her skin.
The world momentarily fell into a haze of oblivion as teeth grated across bone. Any semblance of time and place was lost beneath the blazing pain, even when the beast released her leg with a final shake of its jaws and pinned her beneath its broad body. She couldn’t feel hardly anything below her knee. Would a limb even be attached there anymore if she dared to look?
Hot breath reeking of blood—Jane’s blood—drowned her, even in her daze, as a claw pressed against her shoulder and pushed her deeper into the mud. Air rushed from her lungs and she couldn’t breathe. The other claw caressed her face. Not to smother, but rather in an uncanny gesture that cupped her chin and canted her head to the side—offering it a perfect view of her throat. No longer was she its prey, but rather its plaything, she decided with a dread laced with red-hot pain.
The beast continued to idly toy with her face, lolling it limply from side to side as though she were nothing more than a ragdoll.
Rude to play with your food, Jane would have muttered if she weren’t drowning beneath rainfall, mud, her own blood, and the beast’s assertive presence.
All she could manage to think of was to beg for death, and to have such a death not be as horrid as being rendered a sloppish mound of blood and skin and clothing left to spoil in the cellar.
No.
