He blinked at her name in dark blood, the cross scrawled over it black. Like cancer.
Bruce felt himself emerge from a daze. Anger waged war against the oppressive weight of horror overcoming him as he understood the impact of what he was seeing. It snapped him back into action. He swallowed bile that had worked its way into his throat.
“Cody!” He yelled in the room, as desperate to get his son to respond as he was furiously eager to defy the house and the evil it embodied. “Cody!”
Then he heard it. Just the slightest note, but as a parent he’d learned to detect the sound of his son through walls and from under the spell of a dead sleep. It was Cody. He heard him, but he was being carried away.
I know they came in here, but where did they go?
His flashlight came to rest on a formation in the strange walls. He studied it for a moment, and his first reaction that such a thing couldn’t exist here was quickly rejected in the new terms of his current reality.
At this moment more than any other in his life, including the moments he’d spent here with his son and the years he’d grown up here, he felt that he now stood on the threshold of truth —a twisted, fantastic truth, yes, but a truth he had known in his heart all along. Beyond this weird portal he would learn the true nature of Elderwood Manor. Given what he had suspected for so long—that the house, the land and the earth, had taken on the blood of those poor women murdered here long ago, the blood of their unborn children, their spirits of vengeance, twisted and stirred perhaps by the lingering remnants of whatever black magic had once been cast upon these unhallowed grounds—he understood the true nature of evil. The evil that had now claimed his son for its own delights.
He stepped forward for a closer look.
Between two thick trunks grown tightly together in the cathedral of trees was a massive wood scar about three feet wide by six feet tall. Around the edges of the scar, bare wood had grown and bulged like grayish lips on each side of a vertical slit of raw wood. The raw wood in the center was moving…throbbing. A membrane there shone like the greasy skin of an eel in the center of the scar. As he watched, part of it opened. The sound of his son’s voice eked out, reaching to him like a lifeline.
Bruce approached the opening. He pushed against it with the poker, then tried it with one hand. It had a rubbery feel, and gave with pressure. Bruce forced his body through, shoulder-first. He slipped through the greasy membrane of the slit and stumbled into the tunnel beyond.
The smell struck him first. Musky and dank, the odor of rot and wet decay. His light reflected on the wet walls of the tunnel, which oozed and dripped a muddy black substance. The walls were shot through with white branches of root systems that looked for all the world like capillaries in some kind of cancerous tissue.
Cody’s cries were close now.
“Daddy!”
“I’m coming, Cody. I’m coming!”
Bruce forged ahead. The tunnel descended and suddenly became steep. He slipped and cried out, sliding downward. As his rear hit the wet ground, he instinctively reached out to catch himself. The poker went flying, clanging off the walls to some unknown location, lost. The flashlight went clattering from his hand, rolling down ahead of him.
He slid into unknown darkness. It was only a few feet but it might as well have been hundreds for the way his stomach dropped.
As soon as he reached the end of the short drop-off, he scrambled for the light. It was four feet away, its beam shining through some milky twist of vapor. He crawled and snatched it up.
He’d fallen into an underground chamber of sorts, but Bruce had never seen anything like this before. The walls of the chamber were translucent, and what lurked beyond in these foul subterranean depths squirmed against the membranous walls, churning. He thought he heard a rumbling not unlike thunder, and then a painful groan.
Six women stood in a circle around the room. White gossamer gowns hung from them in tatters. They were emaciated, hands like claws, elongated skull faces with dried skin, and those terrible pearlescent eyes. In the center of the circle, the tree-thing that looked like Mother but certainly was not Mother had lain Cody atop a pinkish rise upon the soft ground.
The tree-woman stretched its wicked arms with too many elbows toward the top of the chamber, signaling, calling for something.
A thick tentacle, tapered at the end with thin, writhing feelers, pushed through a tight, wet hole in the chamber’s ceiling and lowered toward the boy.
A taproot, Bruce realized.
And it was going to burrow into his son.
“No!” Bruce charged into the circle. He shoved the tree-woman to the side, but she was unexpectedly sturdy. It made a cracking sound as it turned and swiftly brought one arm down, ripped into his neck and the soft meat of his shoulder with its sharp, branched talons. Falling back, he had the sinking feeling that was it. After all his efforts and everything they’d been through, the end had come for him and Cody.
No, this isn’t it. Fight!
Bruce reached up and probed the wound, with a quick prayer that it wasn’t as deep as it felt. It wasn’t. He had dodged out of the way just in time to prevent the wound from being fatal, but blood welled up quickly. It flowed, sticky and warm, down his neck.
He turned his back to the tree-woman. This time he protected the back of his head and neck as he barreled backward into her, shoving her away from his son. She was still sturdy, but this time, she gave slightly, and he was able to gain some ground against her, get some room to edge in and grab Cody.
The thing recognized it had lost ground and stood to lose its prize. It shrieked and lashed out, viciously ripping grooves of flesh from his back.
Crying out in anguish, Bruce knelt and grabbed Cody, gathering his sobbing son into his arms. The pain of the tree-woman’s inflicted wounds stabbed deep, but sheer adrenaline gave him the strength and energy to struggle and back away to a place just outside of the awful woman-thing’s reach.
Deprived of its succulent feast, the taproot became agitated, twirling and thrashing the dank air. With a shudder, the earthy appendage seemed to sense where its quarry had gone. The tip of the root curled toward Bruce and, quick as a striking snake, whipped around his neck.
He yelled and tried to pull himself free, still holding on to Cody for dear life. The taproot coiled about him.
Until now, the manifestations of pale figures that encircled the room had remained still and silent observers. The white figures of the women now moved. Gaunt and horrid, they leaned forward in anticipation, eyes shining.
“Feeeeeed,” they said in whispered unison. “Feeeeeeeeeed….”
The taproot was like a python. As the throbbing thing coiled more tightly around him, sliding around his frame and pinning Cody to his chest, Bruce felt something happening over the surface of the thick root’s skin. Tiny, hairlike feelers emerged from the main appendage, probing for the opening of his wounds, inserting themselves. He screamed at the needle-biting pain as they tapped into his bleeding lacerations. At the taste of his blood, the root pulsed, milking him, squeezing him so tight he only hoped Cody could still breathe. His left arm was around the boy, and he pushed out with all his strength to keep his son from being crushed.
Bruce rocked and threw his weight to the right, yanking against the massive appendage. The entire room seemed to waver, the translucent tissue of its weird walls undulating with the violence of his struggle. The taproot did not loosen, but it had begun to excrete a kind of mucus, making it possible to slip just slightly out of its grasp. While his left arm still held Cody pinned to his chest, he jerked again and managed to slip his right arm free. He dropped the flashlight from his hand, tingling from lack of blood flow.
Using his newly freed hand, he savagely clawed at the root. His fingers were unable to get purchase in the strange flesh, which was now coated in the oily slime. The feelers were still inside of him, living needles sucking the blood from him. An onrushing light-headed feeling made him aware he would lose conscious
ness soon and they’d both be dead if he couldn’t escape.
A soft voice spoke in his head. Dad?
He was thinking wild, irrational thoughts in a rapid string, but it occurred to him in that split second that perhaps what he was hearing was the consolidated voice of the other men of Elderwood Manor who’d come before…the men who’d fallen in love with, or been enchanted by, the women who’d ruled this manor with their strange and wicked power, the power that flowed from the earth, dear mother Earth, mother of vengeance, the blood of the women, the blood of their children, the blood of the earth, dear mother Earth…
Just let go, the voice told him. Let it drink you in. You’ll be with Cody forever. You’ll be with each other. Join her, join us…we’ll be together forever.
Bruce’s eyes watered. Pain stabbed deep in his throat. He blinked. Cody was screaming with his mouth wide open, eyes squeezed closed and flowing with tears.
The knife.
The folding knife he’d used to cut the siphoning hose in the shed. He’d slipped it into his pocket.
Bruce scrabbled for his pocket. The root was wrapped about him above and below his waist, so he was able to reach into his pants pocket with the tips of his fingers. He dug for the knife, clutched it, pulled it out, and almost dropped it. He felt it pinched between two fingers, balanced…
No!
The tree-woman had been standing nearby, branch-arms raised as if in supplication to the taproot, but now she stirred as if awakening from her stony trance. Her milky eyes flicked down and saw what was happening, sensing his intent.
She came at him with her jerking motions, jaws opening. He could see into that gaping maw. A squirming layer of mud and worms fell out to reveal rows of splinters like thousands of teeth. She advanced on him, a twisted nightmare on stilts.
He lifted both legs, using the taproot for leverage, and kicked her in the wooden torso with both legs, the impact a hollow crack like stepping on a rotted log. He forced her back into the circle of hissing wraiths.
Regaining his grip on the knife, he used his thumb to click it open. Wasting no time—black stars of creeping unconsciousness dancing in his eyes, barely able to see or breathe—he jabbed and sliced at the meat of the taproot above him, cutting through it chunk by chunk.
The circle of apparitions opened their mouths too wide, emulating the tree-woman, their long, skin-skull faces emitting ethereal shrieks that reverberated through the stifling air around him.
The next moments were blurred. He felt the things inside him pulsing, pinching with each stroke of violence to the root. The tree-woman clawed at his attacking arm, trying to capture it and restrain his assault. The nature of her long, gnarled claw-fingers made it impossible for her to move quickly, but she was able to dig more gouges in the flesh of his forearm. His right arm was screaming with pain, not only from the tree-woman’s attacks but also from the way he had to contort to keep cutting, stabbing, and holding Cody. He felt himself losing the ability to struggle, the strength draining from him—
Then they were free.
He had managed to cut the writhing root in half.
Bruce and Cody dropped suddenly to the soft floor of the chamber. The appendage that had constricted around them went slack and loosened its grip.
Bruce hurriedly slipped the thick tangle of root from around his throat, shrugging it from around his shoulders, throwing it off him. As it came loose, so too did the little tendrils that had embedded themselves in his wounds. Shocking pain ripped through him as they released, as he pulled them from the bloodied openings, but that was good—pain was good because it helped keep him alive, shocked him back to wakefulness and ignited his panic.
They had to get out of here.
Cody was crying and clutching him, gasping for air. The boy hitched with sobs and he needed to calm down, but Bruce knew it wouldn’t happen until they escaped this rotten cavern. The flashlight was back there on the ground, but no way was he going back for it now.
The white wraith-women extended their arms outward. Their gaunt forms levitated from the floor and drifted toward them, emitting a soft white-blue radiance as they came for Bruce and his only son.
Bruce scrambled up the slick slope of the tunnel. He dug his hands into the greasy floor, gaining purchase on white veins that ran through the wet passage, pulling them both up to where the tunnel became level again. Suddenly engulfed by blackness, he could not see, but there was only one way in so there was only one way out, and he kept going until they ran into the rubbery walls of the opening that would lead them back out to the cathedral of trees.
The wraiths were still behind them. Silent, grasping for them, luminous and drifting closer.
The wraith-women were all they could see.
Cody was panicking, breaking down, on the verge of hyperventilating.
Bruce ran headfirst into a wall. Thankfully, it was moist and fleshly like the rest of this subterranean lair, so it gave when he struck, bouncing him back instead of knocking him out. They’d reached the end of the tunnel.
Bruce groped and then pushed against the membrane of the opening, dragging his son through.
They gasped as the cold air of the manor shocked their lungs compared to the foul, musky warmth of the subterranean tunnel they’d just left behind. They fell through the vertical slit and tumbled onto the ground of that insane room, the cathedral of trees. The tangle of roots on the ground made it hard to gain their footing in darkness.
“Come on, buddy,” Bruce breathed, one ankle almost twisting beneath him. “Almost there. Come on.”
Cody already seemed better. The change in air had done him good. Now he was moving fast, almost pulling his dad behind him, stumbling along but not yet quite falling, gripping Bruce’s hand like the last lifeline to the world he’d known before.
They managed to find the door that would lead them out of the cathedral of trees—Bruce remembered its location in relation to the wood scar portal, so he was able to lead them back into the corridor that was the east wing of the manor…or whatever it had now become.
Gasping, running through the hall toward the foyer of the house, they could see the gray morning light penetrating the windows on either side of the doors. The sight of daylight, even slate gray and filtered through icy mist like it was, gave them energy. Hope.
Bruce lifted Cody and sprinted with his son in his arms toward the foyer and that gloomy but ever-so-beautiful illumination.
Bruce’s wounds burned and ached. His arm and back were slick with blood. He felt a shock of pain through his shoulder and right arm and had to stop, letting Cody back down to the ground before he dropped the boy.
They reached the end of the corridor to the east wing, stood in the foyer, on that side of the threshold. Bruce clutched Cody’s hand and dared to take a quick glance behind them, down into the darkness from which they’d fled.
The wraith-women shimmered at the end of the corridor. Thick roots coiled over the floor beneath their feet. Their images turned to smoke, dissolving into spectral tendrils that curled and dissipated in the black air.
The door of the corridor slammed closed.
* * *
They went back into the den. It felt hostile, as if unseen things were glowering at them from every dusty corner. Bruce was tempted to stay just long enough to charge his phone, but an inner voice told him it was pointless. The house seemed to have lost power completely. Perhaps the ice storm had downed the lines.
Bruce did a quick check of Cody.
“Are you okay?”
Cody shook his head and threw his arms around his daddy. The boy shuddered and sobbed, crying with full force.
“Okay…okay.”
Cody wouldn’t let go of him. It took some time for the child to calm down. Bruce looked him over, mending the boy’s cuts and scratches, using their bottled water to clean them.
Bruce could not reach the wounds on his own back and they throbbed with heat. He poured the water down his back in an attempt to wash them of
f. Next, he washed the grooves that had been slashed into his forearm, and flushed the achingly deep laceration in his shoulder, so close to his neck. Finally, he wished for a clean shirt but had to settle for the one he’d worn for now. He talked to Cody while he was doing these things. He had no real recollection of what he was saying, mere platitudes really, but it seemed to help Cody feel better. At least, he got to the point where he was able to talk without quavering on the verge of tears. It took a while, but he got there. He was a strong kid. His good boy.
He carried his son with him to one of the windows of the den, pulled back one of the curtains and they both looked outside.
“It’s light out, Daddy.”
Bruce started to laugh, but it had an unbalanced tremor to it, so he didn’t give it much voice.
“Yep, it sure is. Thank God.”
“But looks co’d out dere.”
“Yes, that too.”
All of the trees looked as if they’d been completely dipped and frozen solid, every branch encased in glassy icicles. The ground was a sheet of shimmering white.
Just like their eyes.
The gas can was still in the room, sitting just inside the door. He regarded it for a moment. Gave things some thought.
He could go outside, try to gas up the car, and leave right now. If the roads were solid sheets of ice, they wouldn’t make it far. Then they’d be stuck in a ditch, in the cold, no better off than they were now.
Except we wouldn’t be here.
But that wasn’t enough.
They had to wait. They’d be safe here for just a little longer. If the sun came out, then it would melt the ice. It had to.
It absolutely had to.
* * *
They waited a while. Bruce made another fire. They ate PBJs and drank very cold bottles of water. Cody was listlessly turning over one of his toys in his hands, staring down at it. Bruce looked at his son, wondered what was going through his head. They’d been through so much, and now…now that ashen daylight was coming in through the windows, it should have seemed unreal, like a dream. Instead, the aftermath of terror and emotional trauma hung on to them, dragging down their spirits, refusing to let them go. His wounds ached. The fear wouldn’t leave him, and every perceived sound, each peripheral movement, was regarded with suspicion.
Elderwood Manor Page 5
