With nausea threatening to overturn her guts, she turned away from the gore to instead look at the walls around her.
In almost every stone were symbols, etched in a script Jane found to be familiar. Crosses, unblinking eyes, six-petaled flowers, horseshoes. In varying sizes and lengths and neatness, like the carvings beneath the guest room bed, Old Man Hayes’ journal. Jane’s fingertips tingled as she traced one of the crosses. She wondered if similar carvings could be found in every floorboard, windowpane, and brick within the house’s very foundations.
Just how scarred is this house? How much of this ruination was from a madman’s fear or a beast’s wrath?
The more she looked around the higher points of the cellar, she saw places where crosses hung from the ceiling on frayed twine and thin chains. The army of crosses in the Wolf’s Run marshes must’ve marched their way down here to hang their brethren.
To keep something out, or rather, and Jane found this to be the most probable, to keep somethingin. Bound to the cellar, the house, the land in which the Drowning House sat crookedly upon. But she doubted simple iconography harmed the beast. She was never a woman of faith, nor was anyone in her family. The only touch with religion any of them had was baptisms, communion, and weddings, but those were only out of obligation rather than faith. She held no fear nor reverence nor sanctuary in the symbol of the cross nor Old Man Hayes’ wards. If she doubted the symbol, so would a beast and whatever companions it may have.
But while a cross may not do it harm, she thought back to when the beast attacked her, and the smell of its burning flesh as she stabbed it with her hairpin—her silver hairpin.
“Silver…” she hummed, in tune with the thrill of Mary’s zeal thrumming in her chest, her blood. Silver, a holy metal—holy in its divine purity, to those who hold faith or superstition. Perhaps holy enough to harm something dark, evil—a beast from the marshes, or a demon from her nightmares—and that it was time for her to forgo sensibilities to seek the arcane for protection. She couldn’t hold faith in religion, but she could possibly summon faith in purity.
As she lowered the lamp, there was a new glistening piece of meat in the pile of flesh beside her. It compelled her to look down—to a face that stared back at her.
She choked on a scream.
Among the bits of congealed meat, there was what looked like a shoddy theater mask. It had the rubbery outlines of a brow,nose, cheeks, an upper lip. Blood and threads of sinew coated it in an unsettling visceral pink, with gore bulging forth from hollow eyes, an absent mouth. Jane staggered back with a hand to her lips as she choked on a gag. No. Not a mask. Aface.
Terence’s discarded face.
She staggered back and rushed up the stairs as fast as she could, trying her best to not slip on the slick steps; she only slowed down as her leg groaned in protest. She was caught by Mrs. Foster. The woman steadied her before locking the door.
As Jane braced herself against the wall and caught her breath, she noticed that Ms. Hudson and Ruben had come to gather in the kitchen, and they watched her with a tired resignation in their eyes. She had an odd sense that she went through some rite of passage typical for staff of the Drowning House: venture into the darkened basement to gaze upon the ruined remains of the master cast aside when he turned into a beast, so that they may know his true nature.
“Well?” Ms. Hudson crossed her arms and raised a brow. “Enjoy playing in the blood?”
Jane glared at her. Beating the cook with her parasol was suddenly a very tempting thought. “Wouldn’t be needing to play in blood if you would have just told methat—” she pointed to the cellar door, “—was what you were so afraid of on the first night!”
The cook bristled with a scowl on her mouth. “Wouldn’t be so afraid if Mr. Hayes hadn’t let his grief make him so lonesome that he’d call on us to make the house all special and warm just for your visit—”
“Georgianna!” Mrs. Foster’s chatelaine jingled with her bark.
“You know it’s true! And, besides, if he,” Ms. Hudson now pointed to Ruben, who continued to wring his cap betweenwhite-knuckled hands, “would bite the bullet and take hold of a shotgun again, maybe then the poor thing would be put out of its mystery just like the last one!”
“Georgianna, that isenough!” The very cupboards rattled with the whiplike snap of Mrs. Foster’s tone, even beneath the sharp silence that followed.
Jane had gone numb and swayed on her feet. What did Ms. Hudson mean? Had Jane truly been their executioner? Was it her fault that they were all summoned here—and subsequently trapped along with her—all in an effort to impress her and present to her a proper home, hiding the blood, flesh, bones, and horror that crafted its foundations and pulsated within its very walls? And was that why they’d neglected to inform her of the beast, in the hope that it’d eat her instead and leave the staff be for the time being?
Her roiling amalgamation of guilt and ire was nearly smothered by a morbid curiosity she mustered as she looked to Ruben. He was like a fresh colt, with his gangly limbs and knobby knees that shook as he shifted his weight from foot to foot. He avoided the gaze of everyone looking at him, chewing on his lip.
“What does she mean by ‘the last one’?” Jane asked him with a snarl creaking between her words. She felt Ms. Hudson’s scowl burn into her back.
His pale eyes darted between her, Mrs. Foster, and his cap. His throat bobbed as he worked down a swallow. “It was Matthew. Th-the one whom I…”
Ruben took another look around, and it was Mrs. Foster who spoke. “Matthew was ‘the last one.’ Ruben had been the one to…”
“Kill him.” Ms. Hudson said with the bluntness of death.
Jane blanched. The recent murder of Matthew Hayes—itwas committed by the young man standing before her, shivering like a pup in the rain? The bruises along his jaw suddenly resembled battle scars. Scars from a beast.
She couldn’t help but laugh, a dry, husky sound.
“You?Youmurdered him? You… Why?” As soon as it left her mouth she knew the question was stupid. If he’d been attacked by a beast just as she was, he’d have every reason to murder the monster, regardless of whether it was Matthew or a beast.
Guilt turned Ruben’s stare murky, his lips a stiff line. “Because he asked me to.”
Suicide, then. Not murder.
