I find a few more blankets, and a platter of colorless carrots, and a toilet and sink tucked away in a small alcove. I find a metal door etched with spiraling vines and human eyes.
“There’s a little sliding thing at the bottom,” Isabella says. “Dad puts the food through there.”
I shove the door, and the metal does not bend or scream. I lower my eyes, and I’m still wearing the vermillion cardigan, chartreuse floral dress, thin black belt. I’m awake. I’m definitely awake.
My heart squirms and twirls. My heart is a whirlpool of flesh swirling around a murky vortex.
I continue my loop around the chamber, and Isabella stays with me for a while, holding my hand in silence. In time, she returns to her collection of stone animals. I should go and comfort her. I should tell her that everything will be all right.
I end up on the toilet, waiting for tears, searching my cardigan pockets for anything useful. All I discover is a note written in gold letters, in elegant uncials. The parchment paper reads: In death, all misdeeds are forgiven. It reads: Please don’t bang on the door. Please don’t plug up the toilet.
I crumple up the paper.
The tears I’m feeling never come, so I make my way back to Isabella.
I take a deep breath. Another.
“My name’s Danna,” I say. “I was wondering if you could tell me some more about beavers.”
Isabella tells me everything she knows about beavers and lemmings and porcupines. And I tell her a story about a capybara who achieves her dream of becoming a prima ballerina of the Bolshoi Ballet.
After the story, we return to Albert’s side. Isabella gives him a little water from a wooden bowl.
Rubbing my aching legs, I say, “You said your father brings you food through the door. Have you told him that Albert’s sick?”
“Yeah,” the girl says.
“What does he say?”
She places the bowl next to Arnold’s head. “It doesn’t matter to him. Dad says we’re already dead.”
“Has your father ever—”
I never finish the sentence, because a cacophonous clank invades the room. And the metal door begins to open. I picture Mr. Evers stepping through, dressed in blue jeans and a beige smock, speckled with blood.
I stand. Isabella stands.
Instead of Mr. Evers, his wife appears in the doorway and says, “Bell!”
When she rushes to her daughter, the door starts to close, so I hurry forward and shove it with both hands. The metal still won’t scream or change color, but I don’t care anymore. I hold the door wide open.
“We need to leave,” I say.
Molly holds her daughter close. “Are you real? Are you real?”
“Yeah,” the girl says.
“We need to go now,” I say. “Mrs. Evers—Molly! Isabella.”
Isabella takes her mother by the hand and leads her out of the chamber. I let the door close behind us, revealing a three-pronged spindle wheel on the opposite side. We travel a cement tunnel painted with towering flames and blistered flesh.
“What about Albert?” Isabella says.
“We’ll send help for him soon,” I say.
We reach the end of the flames and begin climbing a lofty flight of stairs.
“I’m so, so sorry,” Mrs. Evers says. “We should have left years ago, but I didn’t know he was a monster until tonight. He locked me in the dark room, and I finally heard you, Bell. I heard you inside me. But was that you?”
“Mom?” Isabella says, her voice shaky.
“You said he could take off his face,” Molly says. “You said he might devour me if I didn’t run away. So I . . . I escaped and I followed him. I wanted to see the truth for myself. And I saw him carry you down here, Ms. Valdez.”
“Is he still nearby?” I ask.
“No, no,” the woman says, waving the thought away. “I waited until he went back to bed, and then I made my way through the tunnel. But how is it that you’re alive, Bell? You told me you were dead. You showed me where you collapsed.”
“I’m fine, Mom.”
At the top of the stairs, we pass through an opening in the floor into Mr. Evers’s unlit studio. My heart climbs into my throat when I notice a woman sitting on the velvet armchair, in front of the muslin backdrop. She stares blankly in our direction, her hands raised high in the air, her fingers curled.
Isabella must notice what I’m looking at, because she whispers, “That’s only his dummy.”
The woman’s face seems to contort, but that’s only a trick of the moonlight. A trick of my mind.
“We should call the police,” I say.
Mrs. Evers whispers, “He took my phone when he locked me away. I assume he took yours as well. We don’t own a landline.”
The floor creaks somewhere nearby, and our bodies freeze like the mannequin in the armchair. We wait. Mr. Evers doesn’t appear.
We creep together through the hallways, passing angels and spirals and wide open eyes. And I finally see Stockton House for what it is. Mr. Evers uses the symbols above to rationalize his dungeon below, and it’s all bullshit. There’s nothing here but bullshit.
Once we pass through the black wood doors, I take a deep breath. Another.
We move forward. On either side of us, colossal faces sculpted in the hedges scream their silent screams. Moonlight alone lights our path.
We’ve almost reached the maze when Isabella says, “Mom, what are you doing?”
Mrs. Evers is facing the house again, her hands at her cheeks. “Oh god. We have to go back.”
“What’s wrong?” I say.
“Don’t you see?” She points to the battered facade where headless figures claw at the darkness. “Your soul is still in there with him, Bell. Right there in the window. Don’t you see?”
“Isabella’s right here,” I say. “She’s safe. We need to keep moving.”
“Come on, Mom,” Isabella says.
Mrs. Evers squeezes the fingers of her left hand with her right hand.
I catch a glimpse of movement in the corner of my eye, and I turn in time to see the front door of Stockton House swing open. Mr. Evers appears, dressed in a shimmering silk robe. He’s holding a medical syringe in one hand and a kitchen knife in the other.
“Wait right there,” he says. “Do not move.”
“Hide,” I say to Isabella, but she doesn’t move.
I look around for something, anything. A rock? A trowel? Raul’s Lesche knife? I see nothing.
Mr. Evers approaches us swiftly, and I take Isabella by the hand, ready to run.
“Stay away from us, Hubert,” Mrs. Evers says. “Let us go.”
“You don’t understand,” the man says, stopping a few yards from us. Tears well up in his eyes. “You know my heart, Molly. You know I find no greater joy than giving you everything you desire. However, I can’t give you our daughter, because she is beyond our reach. The creatures who stand beside you are not the people you knew. As soon as they crossed the threshold into the unearthly realm, their physical forms transmogrified into little more than solidified ectoplasm. They’re abominations, Molly. And their being here in the realm of men is an affront to every rule that binds our reality together.” He gestures wildly with the knife, cutting the skin beside his right eye. “For now, I’m utilizing every ounce of my willpower to minimize the damage they’re causing. But if they escape my sphere of influence, there’s no telling what will become of our world. The very fabric of time and space might unravel.” He points the knife in my direction. “You must let me have them, Molly. They are nothing to you. They are walking corpses, held together by memories and dreams.”
“Put down the knife, Hubert,” Mrs. Evers says. “I need to speak with you privately for a moment.”
She walks forward, and Mr. Evers keeps his weapons at his side.
As soon as she’s close enough, Molly kicks the man hard between the legs. Then, when he crumples, she kicks him hard in the face.
“Ahh,” he s
ays. “Ahh. Ahh.”
Without thinking, I race forward and grab the fallen knife. I take a step closer to the man. I raise the blade slightly.
And I can feel Isabella watching me. I can feel Bruno.
“Ahh,” the monster says, writhing on the grass. “Ahh.”
I turn away from the man, and we hurry into the maze.
“Follow me,” Isabella says.
Hand in hand in hand, we pass the boy with the crater in his skull, and the man with the bleeding sores, and the woman with the collapsing face. Before long, we hear a car. More specifically, we hear a small utility vehicle with cushioned seats and integrated cup holders.
“You’re here, miss,” Robin says to the girl, as she hops out of the vehicle. She’s wearing a pink wool coat and a feathered hat.
“Yeah,” Isabella says.
Robin and I sit cross-legged in the bed of the UTV so that the mother and daughter can sit up front with Raul. A mellow breeze cools my face. The air smells like lavender. We work our way through the labyrinth, leaving the Atrocities behind us.
In time, I can feel the darkness of sleep closing in. Robin chatters beside me about 3-D projectors. Mrs. Evers sings a lullaby about dancing fish. Isabella giggles.
As I close my eyes, the voices surround me, and fill me, and I feel alive.
Acknowledgments
Many thanks to Lee Harris, Sam Araya, Christine Foltzer, and everyone on the Tor.com Publishing team who helped make this book possible. Thank you to my family, for being lovely, supportive people who are quite unlike all the chthonic family figures in my stories. Thanks to Lisa for expanding and galvanizing my love of gothic fiction. And I am forever grateful to my local libraries, for supplying copious worlds to explore, and for providing the perfect space to sit and think and create weird little worlds of my own.
About the Author
Photograph by Jacob Shipp
JEREMY C. SHIPP is the Bram Stoker Award–nominated author of Cursed, Vacation, and Sheep and Wolves. His shorter tales have appeared or are forthcoming in more than seventy publications, including Cemetery Dance, ChiZine, and Shroud Quarterly. Jeremy lives in Southern California in a moderately haunted Victorian farmhouse. His Twitter handle is @JeremyCShipp.
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ALSO BY JEREMY C. SHIPP
Vacation
Cursed
The Sun Never Rises in the Big City
COLLECTIONS
In the Fishbowl We Bleed
Monstrosities
Attic Clowns
Fungus of the Heart
Sheep and Wolves
NONFICTION
Always Remember to Tip Your Ninja
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Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Begin Reading
Acknowledgments
About the Author
ALSO BY JEREMY C. SHIPP
Copyright Page
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novella are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
THE ATROCITIES
Copyright © 2018 by Jeremy C. Shipp
All rights reserved.
Cover image by Sam Araya
Cover design by Christine Foltzer
Edited by Lee Harris
A Tor.com Book
Published by Tom Doherty Associates
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New York, NY 10010
www.tor.com
Tor® is a registered trademark of Macmillan Publishing Group, LLC.
ISBN 978-1-250-16438-4 (ebook)
ISBN 978-1-250-16439-1 (trade paperback)
First Edition: April 2018
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The Atrocities Page 7
