“No! St-stay back!” She snapped, holding out an arm.
Her heart lurched as he tried to come closer once more. “Jane, please, allow me a moment to—”
The words spat in her ears like the snarls of the beast, and instead of a mouth he spoke with a fanged maw, kind eyes became pinpricks of hellfire, and his hands curved into talons set on gutting her.
She screamed.
“No! Keep away—!” Jane fell from the bed, crashing to the floor in a tangle of ruined limbs and soiled sheets. Pain wracked itself all across her body and the sickly feverous delirium made her flesh clammy as she wobbled atop gangling limbs. She shoved past Terence and through the door, trying to ignore the screaming of her name as she ran away with a staggered gait. Her leg nearly gave out on the stairs, and she heard the demon’s giggle rattle beneath the floorboards from its sitting room lair.
She ran until she was outside, drenched with mist-laden rain. She needed to run. She needed to escape. The Drowning House sought to drown her in her own blood, and she refused to meet her fate in the teeth of a beast who deceived her with the face of a friend.
She did not know where she was running to or where her intended destination was beyond simply beingawayfrom the Drowning House. Mud was caking her skirt, her legs. She felt it seeping into the bandage that swaddled her wound, seeping in to infect whatever the beast’s spit hadn’t already poisoned. Voices echoed in the fog around her, and with every tree or risingtombstone she passed she instead saw the flayed demon. And it was laughing with eyes that glowed gold.
Suddenly the earth gave way from beneath her as a foot tangled with her nightgown’s trailing skirt. She slid through mud until she lost touch with the ground and was tumbling deep, deep, into what felt like an abyss. Something semi-solid, somewhat soft, and rank in smell, cushioned her fall, but not without knocking the wind out of her.
An eruption of ebony feathers and raucous caws swelled the air as ravens took to the skies.
Jane’s body spasmed as she tried to gulp for air. And even then she didn’t want to breathe. The sickly sweet scent of rotted, damp earth surrounded her. Crumbs of forest floor were sucked between her parted lips with every breath she took; grit cracked between teeth she ground against the rising pain.
The world buzzed around her, and she just wanted to sink further into the safety of the earth, wishing that perhaps this had all been a horrible dream and she’d wake up back in the safety of the hotel, in the bed beside her mother, who would be stained with and smell of her expensive watercolors. But the odor of something putrid reminded her that she was still in the marshes of Wolf’s Run, and the stench was growing so horrid, accompanied by the discordant buzzing of flies, that it prompted her to at last open her eyes.
And when she did, she screamed.
The belly of Mistletoe’s disemboweled corpse gaped at her, yawning and wide and spewing strings of grayed entrails. Spots of white writhed between the guts. Maggots, burrowing their way deeper into fleshy crevices reeking of old death. The mare’s mouth hung open, showing the dried blood crusting her blunt teeth. Maggots wriggled among the folds of the savage wound that toreher throat, in the hollowed eye sockets.
Jane jolted upright but found herself slipping on the dirt beneath her, only it wasn’tdirt. It was a pond of corpses. Some fresh, some old, some being only bones and teeth that stuck out from the pit of rot; antlers and hooves of deer, the jaws of foxes and dogs. With every movement, she sunk deeper into the bog of Hell.
The smell penetrated her very flesh, stuffing itself into her lungs so that she alternated between screaming and gagging, tasting death on her tongue. Her heartbeat quickened so fiercely it pained her, and it only grew worse as she felt the phantom sensation of maggots wriggling to make holes of decay in her already festering leg wound. A deer’s corpse stared at her, its eye milky and gray and slowly being eaten away by a maggot in its very center.
Darkness suddenly fell over her eyes as someone grabbed her from behind.
“Don’t look! Jane, close your eyes—I beg you—close your eyes—” Terence’s breath was hot and ragged against her cheek as he hauled her free from the death-pit, keeping a hand affixed over her eyes. “Please, I’m sorry, Jane—oh God, forgive me—”
As he dragged her back toward the house, even when he scooped her into his arms to carry her, Jane struggled the whole way. She screamed and writhed. She tried to bite him, scratch him, but he did not release her. Her dread ignited into heart-pounding fear when they were back in the house. All she could think of was the cellar stained with blood, and that he was dragging her back to that hellish pit, to chain her to the walls with those discarded manacles and throw her directly into the beast’s gullet.
Whatever the beast—Terence—wouldn’t eat, then it would be thrown into the death-pit along with who knows how manyother victims, how many other innocent girls that’d been lured to this drowning domain.
She was growling and snarling, becoming her own beast, as she flailed and grunted out, “Let me go!” again and again and again. Even when he set her down in the plush embrace of his armchair, the heat of the sitting room’s fireplace stifling the air in her lungs, she continued to thrash.
When he at last stepped away, she pressed herself deep into the chair to keep as far away from him as possible. Even when he offered her a blanket from the sofa, she curled further away from his touch with a hiss, and if the pain in her leg wasn’t blazing she would’ve tried running again.
A swift sting of pride flared in her heart upon seeing a pained expression cross his features. He took a seat on the loveseat with the pathetic meekness of a dog tucking its tail between its legs. She would’ve allowed herself a smug smirk at the scene if her gut didn’t skewer with nausea as an image of the death-pit flashed through her mind.
The two sat in silence as their eyes locked, Jane the rabbit arming itself with new teeth and Terence the wounded beast. Regardless of how real the beast was, and how possible it was that it and Terence were the same—if such evenwaspossible—Jane’s trust, security, and affection toward him faltered. And she was afraid.
He nodded to her leg. “Your wound will need to be cleaned again.”
Jane followed his gaze to the soiled bandage, grime and blood staining in an elongated arch fashioned in the shape of the beast’s maw. The rest of her nightdress was stained the brownish-gray color of the death-pit, and she couldn’t help but once more imagine maggots finding their way into her dress, herhair, underneath her fingernails, between her teeth, in the back of her throat, between her breasts, into the depths of her festering wound. It was a notion that worsened her nausea and it must’ve been apparent because a hand braced against her chest, gently pushing her into the chair.
Terence must’ve left her at some point because he was suddenly kneeling before her with his arms full of fresh gauze, rags, and a decanter of water.
When he cupped her ankle in his hand, she started to jerk free of his grip but found the pain too unbearable to do so, and allowed her foot to settle into his palm. He unraveled the bandages, and Jane blanched at finally seeing the damage the beast wrought. It was jagged from the flaps of flesh that were mended back together by small, black stitches. Skin had turned red and purple by monstrous teeth as the wound wrapped around her calf. Dirt speckled the oozing wound, and Jane thought there was a maggot or two wriggling between the sutures.
Terence’s hand trembled as his fingers hovered over the wound, the air hovering just above her skin. His touch was even gentler as he began to dab at the blood with a soaked cloth. He barked a sound Jane thought to be a sob.
“All of this… all of this is my fault…” he mumbled, wincing as tears glistened in his eyes. “This was never supposed to happen.”
With little control over her mouth, Jane snarled, teeth bared with a harsh laugh, “Oh, really? I thought nighttime attacks of a wild beast were all a part of this house’s charm.”
