by Amy Lukavics
Vanessa and I move through the dark hallway, the sounds of Nancy and Clara talking closer with each step. I think of when Clara said there was something special about me. I don’t think I want to know what that means, but at least she isn’t aggressively pursuing Vanessa and me. As we round the corner to the entryway that goes into the parlor, I can hear Nancy speaking from the room beyond as we step through the shadows.
“...after all this time.”
“Yes, well,” the voice of Clara says as Vanessa and I peek around the corner of the hall into the entry room. “I had all the time in the world to figure out how I’d shed enough blood to come back for you,” Clara continues. “And like you said—after all this time, here we are!”
As terrified as I am to see Clara in the flesh, I’m too curious not to look.
Nancy Shaw and the four other club wives are gathered on the tile around the base of the grand staircase, looking ridiculous in their elaborate holiday outfits—one woman even wears a tinsel-silver dress with real ornaments on it. About halfway up the steps stands a woman in a black floor-length gown of old Victorian design. Pearls hang in long loops over the front, and a small black hat sits on her head. I recognize her immediately as the woman in the photo from the library.
That’s who I’ve been talking to all this time, the thing that’s lurked inside the walls of the house for over a hundred years. There were never any spirits or ghosts, after all. I think of all the things she said to me as Margaret, stay, you were never there for me, we were best friends until we weren’t anymore. Over the years, Clara didn’t just listen to us. She got to know us, too. And she knew all the right things to say to each person to get what she wanted.
“And then?” Nancy says, sounding angry. “You preyed on the newest sister to the coven, and for what? To turn her against us?”
“How does it feel to be betrayed?” Clara nearly spits, losing her composure. “After you tried to end me, you used the sacred grounds but were too afraid to live on it yourselves anymore. You had to set up a steady resident that was at your mercy, is that it? So that just in case I came back, you’d be out of danger?”
“Penelope was a dedicated servant to the Mother,” Nancy says, shaking her head stubbornly. “You were no such thing.”
“Penelope has her own role to play,” Clara states, straightening her back and keeping her voice level. “And the Mother who brings the sanctity to these grounds isn’t pleased with you.”
“You’re wrong,” Nancy says, reaching into her holiday dress that’s dazzled with red and green sequins and retrieving a small, curved blade—I’m sure it’s the knife she used on Gregory, the matching knives that all the women have. “The gift of eternal life has continued to be given with every ritual we do. We are supported.”
“Of course you are.” Clara takes a step down, then another. “So why do you think the Mother took pity on me, allowed me to be reborn from the ground up, a squirming infant worm inside a magnificent stone cocoon of darkness? Who do you think processed the power of those deaths, made them matter in the first place, molded them into what would become my wings?
“I’ll give you a hint,” she continues. “It’s me. You’ve got your Mother right here.”
“These are sacred grounds built to serve the Mother you speak lies of!” one of the women behind Nancy cuts in, pulling out her own blade. The others do the same. “How dare you?”
“This place doesn’t belong to you,” Clara hisses, bending over a tiny bit at the waist as she cocks her head to the side. “Clara’s intuition for the Mother was always the strongest. That’s why she was the one to lead you originally. But none of you wanted the truth. Nobody wanted to face that the price for eternal life is death. And when Clara did things right, started sacrificing the students she’d collected in her home here...you all murdered her. You betrayed her. You wanted all the benefits of my power without having to actually earn them.”
The price for eternal life is death.
“But...you are Clara!” Nancy says, confused. “Why are you speaking as if you’re not?”
“Because I’m the one who found Clara,” the woman in the black dress says, her breath beginning to heave. “My precious servant, like a daughter to me, stabbed all over the place and then stuffed into the walls and left to rot. But she was barely alive, and in her last breaths, she whispered to me, called out for me, begged for me to help her.”
Nancy’s eyes have grown wide in fear.
“So I became her,” the thing in Clara Owens’s body continues. “Let her body evolve and grow into what it is now with the help of my power. Promised her that she would have her revenge, no matter how long it took. Kept you all alive long enough for me to get it for her.”
A great rise of sound comes from below the floor-length skirts of Clara’s dress, the same echoing skitter that reminds me of the song of cicadas in the summer, the same sound she made one of the first times I heard her inside the walls.
“Which reminds me,” Clara says, her smile growing wider and wider. “It’s time to pay up for all the years I’ve lent to you.”
The woman who spoke up behind Nancy lets out a frustrated scream and runs toward the woman in the long, black dress. I recognize her now as Kent Dickens’s wife.
“Mary-Anne, no!” Nancy cries, keeping her own blade raised.
Before Mary-Anne can slash her little, curved blade across Clara’s throat, she is impaled through the center of her face by the black clawed appendage that has risen from beneath the skirts of Clara’s dress. It bends in many places, a slithering multi-jointed leg that is riddled with sharp, black quills. A few more of the appendages sprout out from beneath, lifting Clara a few inches off the ground, the pointed toes of her laced boots hovering in midair. Two other appendages uncurl from her back and rise up on either side of her head, the claws at the ends gnarled and shining.
“Oh my God,” Vanessa moans from beside me, staggering in place. “Oh my fucking God.”
We both fall back a little, although we’re far enough away to go unnoticed in the commotion. My instincts urge me to take Vanessa and run out the front door only twenty feet away, leave our parents’ bodies behind, leave the estate behind, forever. I stand to do so when I see movement at the top of the grand staircase.
It’s Penelope.
MY AUNT WAVES frantically for me to come up to her, her fingers outstretched, pleading, desperate.
“How do you love your Mother now?” Clara cries in glee as she flings Mary-Anne’s body twenty feet across the room, where it collides with the edge of the bar and goes spinning into the wall, blood spreading over the tiles in a spiral design. “Stretching my wings is just as lovely as I imagined it’d be.”
The other women let out startled screams and nearly trip over their high heels as they backtrack toward the door that leads to the dining room, leaving a clear path between where I’m standing and the grand staircase.
“It’s your aunt,” Vanessa says, noticing Penelope now, too, who is still waving wildly. “What is she doing?”
“Calling for me.” I look back up at her, the woman I should hate, the woman who worships the thing that killed Margaret and so many others, my own mother included. I think of her passion when she spoke to me about the Mother in the attic, so very sure everything would be okay. She’s been misled. She just needs to be snapped out of it by somebody. “I’m gonna go.”
“Are you sure we should go up the stairs?” she whispers, her eyes staying on Penelope. “That doesn’t seem like the safest idea.”
“Clara has no interest in killing me,” I say again, remembering when she told me I was special. “And I never said anything about we. You should go out the front door, steal one of the cars in the driveway, drive to town and call 911 as soon as there’s service.”
“You can’t stay,” Vanessa begs. “You’ll die if you sta
y, I just know it.”
“I won’t be able to live much of a life if I run now,” I say, the truth evident to me. “I failed Margaret, and I thought I had the chance to redeem that, but it was a lie. I have to go with Penelope, she’ll protect me, she raised me and...my father loved her.”
My words catch in my throat, and my eyes fill with unexpected tears as I think about my father trying to hold everything together with whatever information he did or did not have. I can’t help but wonder if Miranda at least knocked him out before sawing him to pieces.
Vanessa hesitates for a moment, her lip trembling as Clara glides toward the women another few feet. The hum of the insectile buzz radiates through the parlor, along with the sharp clicks of clawed appendages on marble tile. “I...don’t want to leave you,” she says finally. “We’re in this together now. Just as long as you’re sure she won’t hurt us.”
“I don’t think she will.” I look up at my aunt, still urging me to join her, pointing up even though she’s on the third floor. “If the Mother has broken out, there’s no more need for more deaths. Plus, she’ll never leave this place unless I convince her to.”
“Fine,” Vanessa mumbles, scratching at the skin on her arms, her eyes still red from crying over her mother. “I don’t know how to drive, anyway.”
“Me, either,” I say, the corner of my mouth turning up ever the slightest. “But don’t say I didn’t give you the chance to back out if something goes wrong.”
We crouch behind an especially tall houseplant while we wait for the room to clear. Nancy is bellowing out instructions as her group is pushed back, but it’s doing little use. Clara’s top appendage flings across the middle of another club wife’s torso, disemboweling her. After a few seconds of shocked gasps, the woman falls into the pile of entrails at her feet.
“Stop this immediately!” Nancy cries. “Clara, I will punish this darkness out of you myself if I have to!”
“Now,” I whisper, when the three survivors duck into the dining room and Clara follows, still making that terrible skittering sound. “Run.”
Vanessa and I dash across the tile to the staircase, scrambling up the steps in a beeline for the third floor. “Lucy,” my aunt cries out in relief when I’ve reached her, and she pulls me into a hug. “We need to go, quick. If the passageway has been opened, we are free to use it.”
“Passageway?” I ask, but she’s already rushing for the back hall, where the entrance to the attic is. “Where are we going? We need to get out of here!”
“There’s a hidden way out that you can reach from the attic,” she calls back to us. “Nothing can touch us down there.”
Down there? But the attic is upstairs.
“Let’s just hurry,” Vanessa urges me, starting to follow her. “I’ll go anywhere that takes me away from that...thing.”
I hesitate for a moment before making sure that we’re not being followed, then dash down the back hallway. In the attic the floor is covered in shards of wood from where the wall was busted out. We wade through the wood pieces to look into the massive hole that was made beside Penelope’s bed.
There is a small space, maybe three to four feet wide, in between where the wood of the wall is and where the stone of the exterior wall sits solid and covered in spiderwebs. I stick my head in to see inside. In the back corner of the space, there is a ledge that opens into pitch darkness.
“Follow me,” Penelope says, making her way to the ledge. “There’s not much time.”
“Not much time until what?” I ask, but she doesn’t answer. “We can’t go in without a light of some kind.”
“There’s a flashlight in one of the boxes by the window,” Penelope says impatiently. “Hurry up if you’re going to get it.”
Vanessa goes with me to find it. Once we’ve confirmed the batteries work, we crawl into the space behind the wall.
“What’s that sack sitting against the stone?” Vanessa asks, squinting through the shadows as I point the light near our feet. “By where that ledge is.”
I point the light at it, the bag resting a few feet in front of Penelope. “This is mine,” my aunt says, pleasantly surprised. “I thought I lost it below. The Mother must have saved it for me.”
“Below?” I ask, my heart catching in my chest as Penelope swings herself over the side of the ledge. It takes me a few seconds to realize that there must be a ladder there. To the below.
“Just follow me,” Penelope says and disappears as she starts to climb down. “And leave the bag—I don’t need it anymore.”
Once she’s completely out of sight, I use my fingers sparingly to pick open the top of the burlap sack resting in the back corner against the stone, tilting the light inside so I can peek in. There’s nothing inside except for an old knife that I recognize, with a blade covered in dried flakes of blood, and an old photograph, curled at the edges and yellowing in spots over the surface.
It’s the same photograph used in that newspaper article we saw in the archives, the group shot with Clara standing in front of her home for troubled youth. I look over the photograph again, understanding how I didn’t see Nancy Shaw in it the first time. She looks so different without her painted lips and styled hair. But there she is, sure enough, standing proudly among the other women as a part of Clara’s staff—the country club wives.
I slide the knife down the pocket of my dress, deciding not to tell my aunt I have it. Just in case.
“I hear someone coming up the stairs to the third floor,” Vanessa says in a panic. “We have to get out of here, Lucy. We’re going to be killed by that monster...”
“Hurry up!” Penelope’s voice echoes from down below. “We’re not there yet, but we’re close.”
I follow Vanessa as she balances herself on the ladder, then begins the climb down. We climb for what feels like forever, the only sounds surrounding us the soft scratching of rat’s claws on stone and the steady dripping of water.
All this time, the Mother has lived in the walls of the house, using Clara’s body, skittering around and listening and killing with only her words. And Penelope, when she disappeared...where exactly was she? In the walls, too? But I saw her walk into the forest when she disappeared.
Once at the bottom of the ladder, Vanessa flashes the light around us, then up where we just came from to see if anyone is following us. The passageway is clear, for now.
“Where are we?” she says. “I don’t think we’re in the walls anymore. I think we’re beneath the house.”
I take the flashlight, and Vanessa links her arm around mine. We’re standing in a small stone room that has five different exits placed evenly apart around the perimeter. When I shine the light down them, it is revealed that each exit leads to a vastly long hallway with walls that are made of stone.
“They’re tunnels,” I say aloud as I realize it, and Vanessa squeezes my arm with hers. “The estate is built over some sort of underground tunnel system.”
“Exactly,” Penelope nearly whispers. “Do you know how deep some of these go, girls? It’s completely magnificent. If the Earth had veins, these would be it.”
Beyond the beam of the flashlight, the stone passageways reach into what seems like eternal blackness. It smells musty and dank, and it’s freezing cold. I sincerely regret kicking my shoes off in the house earlier. If I’m in here too long, I might lose my toes or feet or worse.
“That one will lead you outside through the empty tomb in the cemetery,” Penelope says, pointing to the tunnel on the far right. “But that’s not where we’re going tonight. Tonight it’s tunnel number three.”
“If that one leads out, we should go through it,” I argue. “Penelope, I know you love this Mother, but—”
“I hope you’re not going to talk badly about Her,” she says, her tone low. “If you even knew what She’s been through— She’s a hi
gher being, but it’s not as though Clara is completely dead, either! There is a part of her that’s still alive in her new form, all those memories and thoughts and feelings. The Mother feels everything Clara feels, the pain, the anger...”
“But Margaret died because of her,” I try, talking as calmly as I can through my chattering teeth.
“I told you not to talk about Margaret,” my aunt cries out, her voice bouncing off the stone walls. “The Mother must be allowed to take whatever measures necessary and all I have to do is have faith in Her decisions. No questions asked.”
Penelope starts scratching her head sporadically, walking in more exaggerated movements. I think about how filthy Penelope was when she finally returned home, how out of it she was. Howard said that she hadn’t slept for days. She wasn’t doing a ritual in the tomb, I think. She was wandering these tunnels.
But why? Why would the Mother let her live down here?
The knife rests heavily in my dress. I hope I haven’t made a huge mistake. Vanessa stays close to me, about ten paces behind Penelope. I shine the light back to the front of the tunnel, wanting to run back and choose the one that I know for certain leads out.
“I can’t go any farther,” I say and stop walking. “I’m going to go out the cemetery and leave this place.”
Vanessa lets out a sigh of relief from beside me.
“Don’t be ungrateful now, Lucy,” Penelope says and stops as well, to turn around. “This is your destiny.”
“You said you were leading us out.”
“Did I not do that?” my aunt answers, reaching into her pockets. “Don’t you want to get away from your life now, Lucy? With everything you’ve been struggling with, everything that’s wrong with you?”
She pulls out the black leather wallet from Margaret’s room. The one with the scalpel inside. The one that someone took out of my hands when I was sleeping last night. It was Penelope.
“That’s not mine,” I say right away, despite the stupidity of the statement. I wrap my arms tighter around myself, take a step back, hate myself for not just leaving when I had the chance. Too late now. I’m always too late.
