Her breaths shallow, she feathered her thumb over his lips before kissing them again the moment she imagined the beast’s teeth hiding behind them, painted red with her blood.
“I will protect you,” she whispered in a ragged breath as she pulled away. She licked her lips, savoring the taste of his sadness. “I will protect us. But first, I… I need to show you something.”
CHAPTER
Eighteen
Jane abandoned Terence in the sitting room, but only for a moment, when she trotted to the conservatory, kicked aside the rug, and removed the loose floorboard to retrieve the moldy little book inside.
When she returned with the book held out before her, Terence remained at the harpsichord, head bent low as he gingerly rubbed fingers over his lips, pink and swollen like a virgin after her first kiss. His brow furrowed as he regarded the book.
“What’s this?” he asked as he took it. He leafed through it, and Jane’s head throbbed as she tried to focus on what was written inside. An ache of sleeplessness.
“I was hoping you would tell me.” With a huff, she stormed over to the windows and closed the curtains, dousing the room in asoft darkness to nurse her headache. Rain and the echo of thunder continued to drone outside. She took the lamp from the desk, lit it, and brought it over to the harpsichord.
“At first, I found these carvings under the guest room bed. I thought I could pass the time deciphering their meanings from your grandfather’s books when I happened acrossthisone in the conservatory,” she explained as she leaned against the instrument. “I found the most peculiar drawings within it, it almost reminded me of a manual a hunter may keep. It’s the only book I’ve seen that could even hint at the beast’s machinations. I’d like to know if anything in this book holds any meaning to you so that maybe I could better understand the beast—”and even you,“perhaps learn of some of its weaknesses—”
“It’s written by my grandfather,” Terence whispered, then tapped on a name scrawled inside the front cover.
George Frances Hayes
Sept 1823 — Oct 1895
Terence thumbed through the pages again, and over and over again Jane saw the drawings of the beast and Old Man Hayes’ protective wards, blotches of darkness drawn so fiercely they tore through several pages with a single scribble.
At the beginning of the book, there was only one drawing, then there were two several pages later, then three, then four, then three once more. Each drawing correlated with the number of beasts occupying the Hayes family, marking each birth and loss in his own morbid way, Jane supposed.
Terence turned back to the book’s beginning, to the very first sketch of the beast, and read the text around it. The handwriting was poor and hastily written.
Today, I stand at the threshold of Heaven. But before I can step across, I must confess to a great sin I have committed: I—George Hayes—have sold my son’s soul, and the fate of my lineage, to the Devil, and I am ashamed.
The money was gone. Invested in failed coal mines to the south—damn them. Gambled away out of mad desperation to win back what had been lost. I did not know what else to do, with a young wife and an even younger son to tend to.
It was while Beatrice and I were on holiday to witness the Great Exhibition in London when we came across a rather mystifying group that labeled themselves as “Spiritualists”—so-called vessels that communicated with the spirits that lay beyond the veil.
The Exhibition was meant to only be like a fair, so that we may gawk and awe at manmade wonders amidst our misery. Young and old, rich and poor were united then. I didn’t know with who I belonged until we came across a wooden stall on the lawn of Hyde Park. It was draped in burgundy tarps embroidered with symbols of the arcane: elaborate crescent moons, butterflies, eyes, hexafoils, pentagrams. Those operating the stall, selling books and words, wore similar shades of black and burgundy and purple.
The Spiritualists’ leader had been a woman of whom I cannot remember the name (had it been ‘Florence’? ‘Laura’? Perhaps she had been utterly nameless to begin with!) nor can I recall the shapes of her body, though I can recall how she flourished her close connections with Georgiana Houghton like a metal of wartime honor. It was her who, after we sat for tea and told her of our plight, wearily advised us to seek the guidance of spirits of wealth to recover what had been lost. However, she insisted that the work of a Spiritualist was to comfort, both those of the dead and the living, not to ask favors.
Beatrice only thought of them as cons, caught up in the craze of ghostlyparlor tricks and seances. She pleaded with me to craft our happiness from what we had. But what happiness could have been forged whilst the impending threat of workhouses loomed across our shoulders?
What more would I have to lose upon pleading to spirits?
I did not know who I prayed to or who I had intended to summon, but I had taken the Spiritualists’ book of occult incantations, a page dedicated to subjects of wealth and fortune, and I took to the front room to scribble those arcane symbols and circles, lit candles where instructed, and offered a bowl of chicken’s blood in the pentagram’s center (though, I must have it be known that the incantation requested blood of a stallion—a luxury too expensive for my pocketbook; I’m certain that if I instead killed a horse the being that haunts this family would be more benign.); then, I began to hum the spell written for me.
At first, it seemed that no one heard me. I felt defeated, fearing that we would remain destitute and unfortunate.
That was until I saw it standing in the middle of the room, in the center of the symbols I’d written in chalk upon the floor, with its feet dipped in the bowl of blood, having risen from the blood, crafted by the blood.
The figure was masculine, finely-sculpted and decorated with piercings of pure gold. Its deformed visage was hidden beneath a fine burgundy veil. Sores and fleshless burns wept blood and gold across its body. From beneath its veil glowed yellow eyes.
Claunekwas its name. It said it could provide the wealth I so desperately sought, in a voice that bubbled like honey, and it asked me for a price. And so I named it, enough money to rebuild our home anew and away from the marshes and to have enough money in our pockets so that they were always heavy. And the moment we shook hands, with the palm of my right hand flayed open to complete our deal, a horrific howl tore through the dead of night. The sound of my son, dear little Georgie, being torn apart in order to reshape in the image of Claunek, the newfound god of our wealth. It made him into abeast.
Through its veil, the demon smiled with teeth of gold. Just as it had given wealth, it took a fraction of ours as a price. The male blood in our family had thusbeen cursed—starting with Georgie, then his eldest son Matthew, then Elias, and finally Terence; their sister Esme, my sole granddaughter, had been spared of the curse, but not the dangers of her brothers’ violence. The poor lamb was only eleven.
(Why the boys? I supposed the demon sensed the innate instinct for violence born in the blood of boys and men.)
By day the boys were just that: boys, that may run and play and enjoy the wealth of their family without a care in the world, but by night they are but servants of Clauneck, wearing its skin and forced to crawl on their bellies to commit whatever evils it may not be able to whilst trapped in Hell; it watches over us now from the sitting room mantle, through the eyes of the totem it molded in its image, a reminder of the domain it has crafted for itself here, reeking of brimstone and the dead.
