Only one woman survived…a seventh woman, Leslie Rain Everett. She ran away, saving the baby in her womb, but by the time she had reached town, she was moments from death and only her child survived, delivered prematurely and nurtured by a country doctor named Isaac Howard, who told the girl’s tale for many years until his own death.
Samael Reuchlin disappeared. Many, in the spirit of wishful thinking, wrote him off as dead.
The manor sat empty for several years, but since Samael had claimed the women as his brides, the courts decreed that the offspring of those women were rightful heirs to the property. In a fine twist of irony, the child of his would-be victim, a lovely girl named on her mother’s deathbed Fiona Layne Everett, grew up to inherit the manor and the property, married well, and eventually became great-grandmother of Nora Ann Everett-Davenport, Bruce’s mother, who now lay dead and desiccated by some horrific means in her bedroom upstairs.
Bruce breathed the dust of the book’s spines. Some of these books contained the histories of pagan traditions, a library amassed by his father in an attempt to understand the forces he claimed were still at work in this godforsaken manor. Other books contained tales of American Indians and pirates and cowboys and soldiers, stories that composed a tapestry of the few joyful memories of time spent here, in this spot, with Dad.
An empty picture frame lay on the small table under the reading lamp. There were recent fingerprints in the dust on the face of the glass. He looked down at the chair where he’d sat on his father’s lap at a very young age and heard those tales of heroism and adventure and yes, later, this, the most horrific tale of them all, before he finally urged his teenage son to get away from here. This place feeds on men, son. Go out into the world; get away. Find a life of your own.
He still remembered that day. The look in his father’s eyes when he uttered the words. Bruce still failed to understand what they truly meant. If the implications of the forces at work here were true, certainly a male was required to close the circle of life. That said, why hadn’t his father left? Truth be told, Bruce knew the answer to that, too—Dad had been enchanted by Mother. He remembered her, among other things, as a dark and lovely creature for whom witchery did not seem outside the realm of possibility. Mother had indeed been a woman of strange and eldritch ways. In the wake of her death, Bruce couldn’t help but wonder with a pang of grief what kind of woman she might have been if not under the influence of Elderwood Manor, if only he’d grown up anywhere but here.
I did it, Dad. I got away for a while, anyway. I hope you’re proud.
But he didn’t feel any pride, only an omnipresent sense of foreboding now that he had returned. A menacing sense of doom pressed around him in the shadows of this room, the distinct sense of unseen watchers in all its hidden spaces.
His phone rang.
Bruce nearly jumped out of his skin. The candle he held wobbled in its holder and fell to the floor. He quickly stamped out the flame, then scrambled for his backpack. It rang a second and third time before he could get to it. He realized that he was more in a hurry to silence the phone—to keep the house, or whatever awful things dwelled here, from hearing it—than he was to hear the voice on the other end of the line.
The phone glowed when he flipped it open. He sat down on the hearth, catching his breath, watching the firelight play over the features of Cody’s face. The boy’s eyes were wide open, staring at him.
“Hello?”
“Mr. Davenport, this is…afraid the police…make it out with the ice on the…hope you can wait…morning there will…” A strange electronic static was followed by silence and then the line went dead.
Bruce looked at the phone. The glow of its face died slowly and went dark, the power drained completely even though it had been fully charged not two hours ago.
He laid it down softly on the hearth and dug in the pack for the charger, not willing to consider that the device had done anything other than lost its charge. A fluke, defective battery. But a voice in the back of his head told him otherwise.
“Dey’o not coming, are dey, Daddy,” Cody said quietly.
“No, not tonight. Tomorrow, things will warm up. And first thing in the morning, you and I are going to go out there and put gas in the car, so if they don’t come soon enough, we’ll drive out of here ourselves.”
Cody’s eyes brimmed with tears. “I miss Momma.”
The words stung Bruce to his soul, and he couldn’t help feeling it was somehow his fault. He shouldn’t have come, no matter what Mother said to him on the phone.
If it was actually Mother who’d called.
Bruce hugged Cody, tucked the blankets in tighter around him.
“I know. I miss her, too.”
Cody reached out for him, his tiny hand gripping Bruce’s.
“Look,” he said, stroking Cody’s hair. “We’ll stay here tonight. We’ll snuggle up really close and hold each other tight, and nothing’s going to get us. I’ll keep the fire going, and everything will be okay.”
Cody sniffled and nodded, curling deeper into the blankets.
Bruce stoked the fire and piled more wood from the broken chair onto the coals. Then he slipped onto the couch next to Cody, pulled his son into his arms and held him tight.
He watched the fire burn for a long time. He saw things in the flames. Wraiths with wicked eyes and wide, howling mouths.
He lay there like that for what felt like hours. Bruce measured the passing moments by each breath Cody took, the steady beating of the boy’s heart, which he felt in his own chest. If only he had stayed away, they could have spent this time together somewhere, anywhere, else. But it was too late for that now. His mother or the manor—perhaps an entwined form of both—called him back and he had come. Now that they were here, he knew he’d been lured and the firm realization of that settled into his bones like terminal illness.
The den seemed too big around them. The way they lay together on the divan, Bruce had his back to the largest part of the room and that made him nervous. He thought of the dead spaces behind him, the deep shadows, the dead women.
He heard a groan.
The sound of someone very old, or in great pain. Almost human.
Almost.
It was followed by a lowing moan, barely audible.
His instincts were at war. Part of him insisted he jump up and see what had made the sound. Another part of him said to stay very still.
Don’t move. They won’t know we’re here.
In the hallway, on the other side of the door, something scraped across the wooden floor.
Did I lock it again? Is that door locked?
Trying not to disturb Cody from his sleep, Bruce slowly sat up.
After staring so long at the fire, his eyes had trouble adjusting to the gloom, so the rest of the room appeared pitch-black. Bruce kept staring into the void, willing his eyes to adapt. He saw nothing in the dark…and then forms began to take shape. Things hunched over. Things tall and standing stock-still.
Furniture. Just furniture.
The door stood closed. He couldn’t see if it was locked from here, but he didn’t want to leave Cody’s side.
Breathe. Just take a breath.
He ran shaking hands over his face. He blinked again into the shadows of the den.
It was nothing.
Maybe. But before he lay back down, he turned the divan—ever so gently so as not to awaken Cody, who was still dead asleep—so they could still feel the heat of the fire and Bruce could watch the rest of the room.
* * *
The fire had died. Sometime in the silent watches of night, with Cody clutched in his arms, Bruce had finally fallen asleep. He immediately slipped into dreams of robed wraiths with faces of fire chasing them through a frozen forest. They were running toward the distant sound of Heidi’s voice, somewhere deep in the dream-woods. As he ran, he began to feel himself become slowly entangled, things tugging at him from the ground, winding around him in the dream ether, coiling about
his body like dry snakes, restraining him completely. Soon he could no longer move. Looking to his feet, he saw the things that entangled him were umbilical cords, and the ground here was drenched in blood, squirming with fetuses crying, dying. Cody ran on ahead of him, toward his mother, and dream-Bruce tried to yell out for him but his voice wouldn’t come.
Bruce sputtered a sound of grief that woke him. He tried to roll over, but couldn’t move, paralyzed by the dream…or something else? He held Cody, snuggled in front of him, but the boy felt cold, very cold.
He opened his eyes, which burned with weariness. It was still dark in the den, and an icy chill pressed its cold hands around them. The embers of the dying fire glowed orange.
Something was holding him down.
He couldn’t move. Things were really wrapped around him, rough ropes of some kind, binding his arms to his sides, restraining him on the divan.
He gave a furious yell, both fear and anger fueling his struggle to escape. He tried to turn, tried to sit up, forced his arms out but kept Cody in front of him—poor, cold Cody—employing sheer determination and brute force to rip free of the ropy bindings. It took some doing. The vinelike tentacles were thick in places, but many of them were no more than a half inch in diameter. The smaller strands snapped, giving him enough room to break these thick hairy things that had grown around him. As the cords broke, they released the cloying scent of a rotting forest floor, damp leaves and earth. He pulled and pushed and kicked the rest of the way out of the tangled mess. As the final strands broke and slid off onto the floor, he realized what they were.
Roots. They had grown around him as he slept.
He struggled to sit up as the loose root-cables unraveled on the floor.
Bruce clutched Cody to him, but he realized now that, while what he held was the same size and shape of his son, it was actually…something else.
He looked down at what he held in his arms.
It was roughly the same shape of a human boy, but faceless, wood grains over a bulbous “head.” The entire piece of dark wood was about the same size as his boy, but it was just dead weight, wrapped in a blanket.
He dropped the wooden decoy, which fell heavily to the ground and made a loud thud that shook the floor. In the aftermath of his escape, there was the skittering sound of the roots retreating from the room. They slid like wiry tentacles back out the door of the den into the darkness of the manor.
Bruce felt as if his entire body were suddenly in a vice. His guts clenched, his skin crawled and tightened over his scalp and limbs. A tidal wave of fear washed over him as his eyes sought to penetrate the dark beyond the open door.
“Cody! Cody!”
He listened. There were noises out there—that awful scraping sound. But something else, too. Heavy steps, slow but persistent, as if something was walking with staggering steps away from the den, treading deeper into the house.
Then he heard crying and knew immediately it was Cody.
“Daddy!” His son’s lament grew steadily more distant, moving farther away from him.
Something had snatched Cody while they slept. Something had his boy, his only son, and was carrying him off with each heavy step into the black heart of Elderwood Manor.
Bruce frantically searched for the flashlight. A split second of panicked fury had him looking around for a solid weapon. He grabbed a heavy iron poker from the fireplace and took it with him. Clicking on the flashlight, he ran out into the hallway, stumbling over the roots dragging across the floor, gnarled and grotesque in their movements, squirming away from his feet like diseased earthworms.
“Cody! Daddy’s coming!”
Bruce raced through the foyer of the house. All the lights were out, and darkness pressed against the windows. The only illumination was the flashlight’s beam. He aimed it across the foyer, at the recessed doorway that led to the east wing.
The door stood open. The corridor that led back into the depths of that long, empty space was black at the end. He remembered what they had glimpsed down there yesterday, the weird images of cords or gray tentacles that had taken over the end of the hallway. It stretched forty yards to its end.
Bruce went to the doorway, and though part of him wanted to recoil and squirm away, he went straight through into the stygian dark. He shined the flashlight down to the end of the hall. Then he froze.
The thing making the heavy footsteps paused at the far reaches of his beam. It stood shrouded in darkness but for the dim circle of light.
It was a tall humanoid figure wearing a dark blue gown the same as his mother’s corpse. But this, whatever it was, was not dead.
It looked in some ways like an old woman, but its features and angles were all wrong. Its flesh was brown, wooden. When its legs bent, he could hear creaking like old planks under stress. Its feet were clubbed gnarls of wood, its frame thin, the gown hanging off its appendages like a tattered rag. Its back was twisted, its shoulders narrow, one of them poking sharply out of the fabric.
As Bruce’s light touched the tree-woman, she turned slowly toward him.
It was Mother. No, it looked like Mother. A misshapen, asymmetrical representation of her human form.
The thing turned its head on a gnarled, crooked neck. As it did so, that creaking sound of stressed wood once again filled the corridor. Bark cracked and fell away from the neck as it turned. The face was too sharp, the nose a twisted hook, the eyes perhaps the most gruesome of all—blank, pearlescent orbs that reflected the beam, focusing their milky gaze upon him. It opened its jaws but no sound came out. The face was a nightmare in wood—the head a bald snarl of knots, with that long, gaping mouth, hooked nose and awful white eyes.
In the moments that Bruce absorbed the vision of horror before him, all had gone silent but for the pounding of his heart. Now, the sound of Cody crying brought him back to himself, snapped him to action. The tree-woman, whatever manner of creature it was, clutched his boy in its knotted limbs.
The thing turned abruptly on those heavy, stiltlike feet.
It disappeared into a room at the end of the corridor, the one on the left.
Bruce ran, yelling his son’s name.
As he advanced through the corridor, the walls and trim of the structure became more irregular. It seemed as if trees had grown into the walls, their branches bulging like veins beneath the crispy wallpaper. By the time he reached the end of the hall and the door through which the thing had disappeared with his son, the corridor no longer resembled anything made by the hand of man. The walls were completely covered by ivy growths, thick cords and knurled wood. It had become a passageway of branches and roots, creaking, groaning, and alive.
He turned left into the dark room, following the tree-woman. His light scanned the darkness, his eyes taking in the bizarre surroundings, his mind struggling to link this scene unsuccessfully with some form of reality that would make it less disorienting and surreal.
This room was a cathedral of trees. Branches thick and thin, forked and angled, had twisted around each other and wound tightly together to make a solid domelike room. He paused to listen. He could not hear Cody now, only his own pulse as it surged in his ears, blood rushing. He tried not to breathe so hard, wary not only of missing the slightest hint of his son’s whereabouts, but also of betraying his position to whatever lurked here. His flashlight emitted a wan glow. The darkness seemed preternaturally thick, and his imagination populated the unseen areas with nightmarish figures.
Something scraped across the floor, close to him. There was squirming beneath his feet as if he stood upon a carpet of snakes. Quickly he adjusted the beam.
The floor was a tangle of roots, pulsing and moving slowly back and forth.
He caught his breath.
A shape hunched nearby.
Something was in the room with him.
In a cleared-out circle, where all that remained of the original house showed through as the old wood floor, was a figure wrapped in what looked like furry ropes.
&nb
sp; It didn’t move. There was no sound of breath, no sense that it was a living creature.
Something was tacked to the “head” of the thing where a face might have been. A rectangular piece of paper, half-charred. When he recognized what it was, he felt the blood drain from his face. His legs went numb and he thought he might collapse.
He had to remind himself to breathe. He steadied himself and reached forward to grab the piece of paper.
It was a photograph that he’d mailed to Dad two years ago, a picture of him and Heidi and Cody at Christmas, in a professional family portrait. The side of the photo where Heidi had been was burned away, and somehow, despite all of this absolute insanity into which he’d been immersed, the fact that she had been burned out of the picture was a kick in the guts so hard it made him want to puke. He wanted to see her face, but she was gone, here in the picture and forever.
Bruce let the photograph fall from his hand, sent it fluttering to the floor. He tried for just a moment to summon the face of his dead wife. It came through, blurry and faded by time and tough emotions. A surge of stinging pain rose in his throat and his eyes blurred with tears. Feeling bleak and ruined, he looked again at this strange rope form before him.
He leveled the fireplace poker at it, and thrust the sharp end into its neck.
The ropy shape rustled like hay and collapsed, disintegrating into a pile of fragments and acrid dust.
Examining the remains of the thing, he realized something was written on the floor in the cleared area that surrounded it. Someone had used charcoal to draw an outline of the rough circle and filled it in with all manner of strange, runic symbols. Among these scrawled characters were two triangles and a smaller circle. Inside each of those shapes were purple, smeary letters that looked very much like they’d been written in blood by an ancient hand. In the triangles had been written his name and Cody’s name. In the circle, Heidi’s name had been written. Over her name was a blackened, hand-drawn X.
Elderwood Manor Page 4
