by Amy Cross
“No!” she screamed. “Dad, we can both -”
Before she could finish, Owen drove the broken piece of wood deep into the mechanism, causing an immediate, loud grinding sound.
“Dad!” Jenna shouted, reaching down toward him. “Get out!”
As the words left her mouth, she saw more spikes slicing through her father's body. She screamed, but the house's defenses burst into life as never before, and all she could do was watch as Owen's crumpled form was folded deeper and deeper into the depths beneath the house. She heard him cry out one final time, before he disappeared from view entirely and was swallowed by the darkness. A moment later, she heard a faint bumping sound from far below, and then another, as if her father's body was falling deeper into the mechanism.
The entire house was groaning now, with several of the wires and pulleys starting to break down. New pieces were already being moved into place, but the damage was too great and most of those new pieces were destroyed before they could be activated. Cesar Marchionne's carefully-constructed mechanical symphony was being torn to pieces faster than it was able to repair itself.
“Dad!” Jenna screamed, watching as the house's internal system began to shudder and break apart. The floor was shuddering now, and the walls were rattling, as if the entire structure might collapse at any moment.
And then suddenly it all stopped.
Still leaning down into the pit, still bleeding heavily from her wounds, Jenna realized she could hear nothing but silence all around. Even the ticking sound from behind the walls had stopped, although after a moment she realized there was a faint creaking sound coming from somewhere below. She could see the piece of broken wood still embedded in the house's mechanism, as the system struggled to repair itself.
“Dad?” she called out, as she started to sob. “Dad, please...”
She waited, but there was no sign of him.
“This can't be real,” she whispered, stunned by the sight of such a vast mechanical jungle beneath the house. “Please let this not be real...”
Pulling back, she sat alone on the floor of the laundry room, listening to the faint wheezing, clicking sounds that were starting to emerge from behind the walls. It was as if the house was still trying to deal with the damage, and she had no doubt that eventually its complex systems would be able to switch out the ruined sections and replace them. The genius of Cesar Marchionne wasn't ready to die yet, and she felt overawed by the thought that even from beyond the grave, he was refusing to accept the end of his monstrous creation.
A moment later, she heard a creaking sound from the hallway, followed by a gentle thud.
“When you hear the front door swing open,” she remembered her father saying just a moment earlier, “that means the house is disabled. You have to get out when that happens, Jenna. You have to run.”
“I can't leave you,” she sobbed, staring down into the hole and seeing the mechanism still trying to repair itself. She imagined her father down there somewhere, clinging to life, but slowly she began to realize that all hope was gone.
She paused for a moment, before getting to her feet. Trembling with fear, she staggered toward the doorway. She tested the first of the traps, but nothing happened, and finally she stepped out into the hall and saw the front door hanging wide open. Ahead, the sun had finally risen, casting bright morning light across the countryside. After the nightmares of the previous few hours, the way out suddenly seemed so simple and easy.
“Dad?” she called out, her voice little more than a hoarse whisper now. “Mum?”
She waited, but the only reply came from the damaged machinery behind the walls.
“This is a dream,” she continued, pinching her arm. “It has to be.”
When the pinch didn't work, she looked at her damaged right hand and then began to twist one of the broken fingers back. The pain was intense, but she desperately wanted to wake up, even as she felt damaged bones grinding against one another. Finally she could hold back no longer, and she had to let go of her finger.
All around her, the house's damaged mechanism could be heard trying to fix itself.
“It's still a dream,” Jenna whispered. “It has to be. Something like this can't really be happening.”
Taking a few steps forward, she felt as if she might collapse at any moment. Blood was soaking her clothes and running down her legs, but she knew she had to keep going. Deep down, in the back of her mind, she was still clinging to the hope that her parents might be alive. All she had to do, she told herself as tears streamed down her face, was get to a place with cellphone coverage and call for help. When the police arrived, they'd be able to take the house apart and rescue her parents. Her father could be alive somewhere in the depths of the place, and so could her mother. As she reached the front door, Jenna stopped for a moment and looked down.
Her legs were shaking so hard, her knees were rattling together.
Ahead, freedom waited. A chance to escape.
And then, slowly, she turned and saw the framed photo of Cesar Marchionne on the wall. Nothing about the photo had changed, but now his dark, stern gaze seemed almost to be gloating, as if somehow he was proud of the misery and carnage he'd caused.
“You did this,” Jenna stammered, feeling a rushing sense of fury in her chest. “You did all of this. You built this place, you designed it so it'd kill people and...” She paused. “And that's exactly what it does.”
For a moment, she thought back to the old man's voice on the wax cylinders. Even though Marchionne had been dead for more than a century, she wanted to find some way to make him pay, to prove that his legacy was coming to an end. She could burn the house down, she told herself, but not while there was still a chance to save her parents. Slowly, she turned and saw the lower half of her broken baseball bat still resting on the floor.
“You did this,” she whispered, limping over to the bat and picking it up with her left hand. Her right hand was barely functioning, thanks to the bloodied hole in her wrist, but she took hold of the broken fingers and forced them around the bat's handle as she turned and looked at the photo of Marchionne. The pain was intense, but this time she could ignore it all as she used her less-damaged left hand to grip the bat.
In the distance, the house's mechanism's could still be heard creaking, as if even now the traps were trying to repair themselves.
“You did all of this,” Jenna sneered, sniffing back tears as she limped toward the photo on the wall. “You think you can get away with it, just because you're dead? Did you really think you'd go down in history as some kind of genius?”
She paused. Although she knew she should get out of the house as quickly as possible, she wanted to wait one final moment and express her rage. She couldn't even contemplate leaving yet, not while the smug photo remained in place.
“Screw you,” she whispered, raising the broken bat.
She took a deep breath, trying to summon a little more strength.
“Screw you!” she screamed finally, smashing the bat against the photo.
When the glass failed to break, she hit it again, then again and again, each time with no better result. She figured the glass was reinforced, just like the windows, but this time she refused to let that hold her back. Striking the photo again and again, she let rip with every last ounce of pain, hatred, anger and grief, screaming as she hit the glass repeatedly, not even considering the possibility of stopping, not while Marchionne's smug face remained behind the -
Suddenly the entire framed photo clicked back a little, retracting partway into the wall.
As Jenna froze with the bat poised to strike, she realized she could hear a new ticking sound coming from the walls all around, as if the photo had suddenly triggered a fresh mechanism.
“No,” she whispered, before noticing that the front door had begun to swing shut.
Turning, she slammed against the door-frame and slipped outside, dropping the baseball bat in the process. Once she was on the front porch, she raced towar
d the steps.
At the last moment, a metal panel shot up through the porch's floorboards, tripping Jenna and sending her crashing down to the ground.
Before she could get up, a large blade slammed down from the porch's main arch, slicing straight through both her legs, just above the knees.
She let out a scream, as the blade shuddered for a few seconds and then began to rise again.
Too shocked to look back, Jenna grabbed the top of the porch steps and pulled herself forward, trailing blood and leaving her severed legs behind. More blood was flowing from her stumps, but sheer panic had gripped her soul and all she could manage was to haul herself down the steps and then across the patch of scrub-land at the front of the house.
“Help!” she screamed, her voice shattering the silence of the countryside. “Somebody help me!”
She dragged herself a few more meters across the ground, before suddenly feeling a vibrating sensation beneath her body.
Looking down, she realized the ground seemed to be moving and tipping backward. She turned just in time to see that the entire patch of land at the front of the house was tilting. Although she tried to hold on, she was powerless to save herself as she slithered down the sloping ground and into the darkness beneath the house. She screamed, but her cries were cut short as the patch of land raised itself again, leaving no sign of her presence other than a trail of smeared blood that ran down the steps and stopped abruptly.
On the porch, a section of the floorboards began to tilt, and Jenna's severed legs rolled down into the darkness. Her agonized screams could be heard again briefly, before the floorboards rose back up into their normal position and silence was restored.
Inside the house, far down in the laundry room's pit, Owen's ravaged, partially-crushed body was similarly moved aside by a set of long metal arms. After a moment, he fell deeper, landing on a hatch that then sprung open. As he was tipped down into the darkness beneath the house, Jenna could be heard crying out once more. Owen's corpse landed right next to his daughter, and just a few feet from Helen's body, with the bones of the house's earlier victims all around. After just a few seconds, however, the hatch closed, and once again Jenna's screams were cut off.
The house stood completely still for a few seconds.
And then, inevitably, the silence was broken by a rising chorus of clicks and ticks, as the house's repair mechanism got to work. Damaged sections were slotted out and back-up machinery took their place. Each and every trap, in each and every room of the house, was put back into position. For the next couple of hours, new pieces of equipment trundled between the walls, as weights and pulleys determined what was needed and where. The calculations of a madman, first written down more than a century earlier, were still working perfectly. Just as Cesar Marchionne had once grinned at the recognition of his own genius, now the house seemed to salute him by reordering itself.
Once the job was done, the house began to tick again, just as it had done before.
Down in the basement, beneath the main part of the building but far above the dark pit where Jenna was no doubt still screaming, a large switch shuddered on the wall. It was the same switch that Owen had flicked less than twenty-four hours earlier, to bring power to the house, and just as it had earlier set the mechanism running, now it switched everything off again, so that the house could wait for its next victims.
In the study, a fresh phonograph machine was already being pushed into place, replacing the old, damaged equipment that had been smashed.
In the bedrooms upstairs, metal panels slid across the floors, tipping the family's possessions into gaps that briefly opened in the walls.
In the bathroom, the back of the sink tipped down and Jenna's toiletry bag plummeted out of sight, disappearing into the depths.
In the hallway, the framed photo of Cesar Marchionne slowly began to grind forward, until it clicked into place and resumed its place overlooking the house, as if it had never been attacked in the first place.
A moment later, the ticking sound stopped and the house fell silent again. Waiting for its next victim.
Epilogue
Six months later
“Wow,” Tom said, making his way across the penthouse suite, “this is... This is stunning.”
“Oh my God!” Penny called out, hurrying to the window and looking out across London. “The view is incredible!” She turned to her husband. “Can we really afford this place?”
“Apparently,” he replied with a shrug.
“There must be something wrong with it,” she continued. “There's no way a place like this is in our price range. I mean, it's so much bigger and grander than anything else we've looked at, but it's less than half the price. Are you sure there wasn't a misprint in the ad? Maybe they put the decimal point in the wrong place.”
Making his way over to join her, Tom looked out at the view. “I think we just struck lucky, honey. Not every landlord is out to gouge tenants dry.” He leaned closer and lowered his voice to a whisper. “You know, I think the old guy quite likes the idea of renting the place out to a family. He's probably sick of dealing with a bunch of yuppies and bankers. Think about it for a moment. George and Tracy are gonna love living here, and there are some amazing schools in the area.”
“Just make sure there are no strings attached,” she told him, keeping her voice low as footsteps approached from the other room. “We don't want any nasty surprises.”
Turning, Tom smiled as he saw Mr. Daniels in the doorway.
“It's wonderful,” he told the old man. “To be honest, it's more than we ever dared imagine. We're just a little surprised by the low price.”
“The Marchionne Corporation's primary responsibility with this apartment,” Mr. Daniels replied, leaning on his cane as he made his way over to join them, “is not purely the pursuit of profit. There are various other factors that must be taken into account. We manage a wide portfolio of rental properties across the country, and our late benefactor left strict instructions regarding the way we conduct our business.”
“And it's been empty for a while, right?” Penny asked cautiously.
“The previous tenants moved out in 1975,” Mr. Daniels told her.
“Huh.” She paused, clearly a little concerned. “It just seems weird that a penthouse apartment in the center of London would sit empty for forty years. I mean, there are always stories about how people are desperate for apartments, and this seems like such a catch.”
“Our benefactor's instructions were most precise,” Mr. Daniels explained. “He specified certain periods during which the property should be left vacant. Our job is not to question his wishes, but to carry them out, even long after his death.”
“And the apartment below this one is empty, isn't it?” Tom asked. “What's up with that?”
“Just another of our benefactor's rules,” Mr. Daniels continued, with a faint smile. “You needn't worry about noise, though. This apartment has been completely sound-proofed in all possible directions. You won't be bothered by the sound of the city, and of course that goes both ways. You could hold a riot in here and no-one would be able to hear you.” He paused for a moment. “I understand that you have two children?”
Tom nodded. “George is six years old, and Tracy is four. I hope that isn't a problem...”
“Not at all,” Mr. Daniels replied, as his smile grew. “In fact, it's perfect. I must remind you, however, that there are certain rules about living in this apartment.”
“Everything looks to be bolted down,” Penny noted, looking at the table nearby. “What's that over there?” she added, pointing at another table in the corner. “It looks like one of those really old-fashioned record players.” She paused for a moment, before smiling. “I like it.”
“And the apartment comes furnished, right?” Tom asked, turning to Mr. Daniels. “All this stuff stays?”
“It does indeed,” the old man replied. “As I indicated earlier, however, there are certain rules that must be followed. I t
ake it that you have had a chance to look over the tenancy agreement?”
“Yeah,” Tom said, with a hint of caution in his voice, “and... I do have a couple of questions, actually.”
As her husband headed through to the next room with Mr. Daniels, to discuss those questions, Penny was left standing at the window. After a moment, however, she felt her phone buzzing, and when she pulled it from her pocket she saw that she had an incoming video call from home.
“Hey,” she said with a grin, as she saw her two children smiling and laughing on the screen. “What are you guys up to?”
“Grandma said we can call you,” George said, with chocolate smeared on the side his face. “She says we should ask whether you've found a new place for us to live yet!”
Next to him, Tracy giggled.
“I think we have found somewhere,” Penny told them, holding the phone up so they could see the large, modern front room. “What do you think, guys?”
“Are we going to live there?” Tracy asked, with a hint of awe in her voice. “Really, Mummy?”
“We are,” Penny replied, and there was awe in her voice too as she looked across the apartment. “It almost seems too good to be true, but...” She paused, unable to stifle a faint, excited smile. “Call me crazy, but I've got a really good feeling about this place.”
Over on the far side of the room, next to the front door, a small framed photo had long ago been screwed to the wall. The photo showed the face of an old, bearded man. At the bottom of the image, in neat handwriting, someone had carefully inscribed the name Cesar Edward Marchionne.
Also by Amy Cross
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