Not the door.
The moon cut its rectangle across the floor and illuminated exactly nothing useful.
I turned in the other direction. Found the bedpost. Found the foot of the bed. Oriented myself and moved toward the far wall and found… a window. Two of them, west-facing, open at the bottom, the curtains barely moving. The cicadas were loud through them, a solid wall of sound. Below, the grounds stretched dark and silver, the oaks massive against the sky.
No door.
I stood in the moonlight in someone else's house wearing nothing and thought:find something to put on first.
Judah’s shirt was on the floor. I found it by stepping on it, which seemed about right. Pulled it on. It came to mid-thigh. Itstill carried his cologne, that specific mix of cedar and vanilla. I decided not to think of it too much, and moved on.
I found a door — thought it led to the bathroom, but when I opened it, it led me outside, to a hallway that sunk in long shadows and the humid night air of Louisiana.
I suddenly remembered every horror movie about every haunted house…ever.I thought about getting back into bed but my bladder felt like it was going to burst any moment now.
Stop being a wimp, Mercy, I told myself. It’s just an old house.
I took a deep breath and soldiered on.
The hallway was long. Longer than it had seemed when I'd walked up it earlier, following Judah, not paying attention to the architecture because I'd been paying attention to other things. The floorboards were old — each step a small negotiation, my weight and the wood reaching an agreement about how much noise to make.
I found a guest bathroom two doors down — formal, cold tile and a soap dish shaped like a shell.
On the way back out I turned left instead of right.
I didn't realize it immediately. The hallway looked the same in both directions — same width, same occasional table, same dark-framed things on the walls that might have been portraits or landscapes or nothing. I walked until I reached a landing I didn't recognize and understood I'd gone the wrong way.
I stopped.
I didn’t like how quiet it was. And those odd little house sounds? It was like it was groaning, then whispering to the night, then groaning again. Deep inside I knew what the sounds were: wood cooling. Air moving through rooms. The faint tick of something mechanical somewhere below.
I leaned over the railing and lookedbelow.The stairs that led to the first floor were narrower — not the main staircase.Steeper. The servants' stairs maybe, tucked against the back of the house. They went down into dark.
I should have gone back. Retraced the hallway, found the right door, gotten back into the fine cotton sheets and Judah's warm orbit and not thought about any of this until morning.
Instead, I fashioned myself into a horror movie heroine. One that, judging by the way things were going, died at the first half of the film.
I stood at the top of the stairs and looked down.
It must’ve been the rum.Surely.Because I could find no other explanation as to why I went down.
The ground floor was cooler than the rooms above. Stone tiles underfoot instead of wood, the temperature dropping with each step until I was standing in a back corridor that smelled like the house's bones — old mortar and earth.
The cicadas were muffled down here, too. Somewhat distant. They wanted no part of this.
The corridor was short, leading toward the back of the house — the kitchen was somewhere to the left, I thought, or the utility room. The moon didn't reach down here. I was navigating by the faint secondary light that seeped through from somewhere — a window above a door, something.
I came up to a door. Set into the wall at the end of the corridor, lower than the others, with a different quality of frame around it — as much as I could tell — or hallucinate— in the dark. It was older, the wood heavier, not matching the rest. An odd iron handle sat too high and looked very odd; something that you had to push rather than pull.
I blinked a couple times, thinking what the hell was I doing.
I stood in front of it.
The rational explanation was storage. Of course it was storage. Old houses had cellars — structurally, necessarily, as partof the architecture. Root vegetables. Wine. The miscellaneous accumulation of generations.
Skeletons.
Bodies.
