Chains hung on the wall, covered in dust and cobwebs. Chains that, if you judged the color of the metal near the manacles, looked well-used.
My stomach dropped when I saw the chains. “What the fuck?” I whispered, a jolt of terror running through me—but then I remembered this place was abandoned, and then I remembered no one here was out to get me, to lock me up there.
Could be a ghost around here, though. You never knew.
“I’m surprised this place wasn’t on more websites,” Joe remarked, inching towards the chains. He refrained from touching them, even though I knew he really wanted to.
We were slow to walk back through the basement, passing a group of paintings that I took a quick, precursory glance at. Covered in dust, but the topmost one I saw the portrait of a man. Smooth brown hair, a nose upturned and haughty, sideburns for days. Whoever this guy was, I bet he was important to this place.
It was a little weird to talk about Grimmstead like it was a living being, but walking through its halls, feeling its rank, musty air attempt to choke you with every breath, it was hard not to. This place felt alive, like its walls were seconds from talking.
Crazy, I knew, but still.
“Time to check out the upstairs,” Joe mused, shooting me a smile as we emerged in the hall after climbing up the basement steps. A silly grin grew on his face, and he stopped walking to place a soft kiss on my cheek.
If I wasn’t so excited about being here, I might think about tearing his clothes off.
Well, there was still time. Maybe we could do that later.
Joe was ahead of me, and my intent was to follow him up the stairs, but as I passed that locked room, I stopped. A chill swept over the nape of my neck, and almost like someone was whispering directly into my ear, I felt the need to turn to my right and look at the door, check that it was still locked, for whatever reason.
And it wasn’t.
The door that Joe had tried earlier hung ajar, six inches or so.
A strange sound came from within, and I felt my heart skip a beat. Joe was already at the base of the stairs, about to head up, but I called out for him as I inched closer, my flashlight illuminating a part of the room, “Uh, Joe? Come here.”
That sound…it was an instinctual sound, something everyone could recognize, even those who hadn’t had one themselves yet. A tiny wailing, a set of lungs too small to do much of anything but breathe, cry, or blabber.
Joe was by my side in an instant, blinking in shock as he stared at the open door. He glanced at me, asking, “Did you do that?”
“No,” I said, meeting his inquisitive stare. “When we walked by, it was just open.”
“Weird. I don’t hear anyone else in the house,” he whispered. For a moment, both of us got quiet, and then that sound rose again. His head turned sharply toward the semi-open door. “What was that?”
I already knew what it was, but it couldn’t be. It just…it couldn’t be what I thought it was.
I said nothing, stepping forward, setting my free hand on the door to push it open wider as the hand with my flashlight started to shake a bit. This was all getting too weird for me. I didn’t think—the most I thought we’d encounter was some paranormal activity, not this. This was…well, this was something you’d see in the movies, not in real life.
Joe was right behind me. Both our lights illuminated the room, where there were no windows, nothing at all but darkness and dust. And, because we were in a spooky as hell place, a red velvet chair, sitting right in the center of the room.
But that wasn’t all of it.
Joe and I inched toward the chair, seeing something bundled up in a grey fabric. “Is that…” Joe trailed off when he shone his light on the moving bundle, seeing the top of a head.
“A baby?” I said what he could not, feeling some kind of strange. It was almost like something took over me, and I went to set my light down near the moving, whimpering bundle, kneeling beside it. The baby was still pudgy, hardly any hair on the top of its head—and a quick check found that it wore no clothes under the bundle of fabric…and that it was a girl.
I slowly picked her up, cradling her to my chest as I glanced at Joe. It wasn’t like we could leave her here. She was so young, almost as if she was fresh out of the womb. A baby like this couldn’t last long abandoned and on her own.
“Her parents have to be nearby,” I said.
Joe nodded, and he stopped recording.
We then spent the next thirty minutes calling out, walking through the place, trying to find any other living soul—the people, or at least the mother, who had left this poor girl to die. In the end, we found no one else. It seemed we were as alone in Grimmstead as we’d initially thought, minus the baby in my arms.
“We should call the cops or something,” Joe spoke, frowning. We stood in the front vestibule of the giant place, and he unlocked his phone screen to do just that.
I looked down at the baby in my arms, at the beautiful, innocent face staring up at me. Something in my gut told me to stop him, like someone whispered in my ear not to let him do it. “Wait,” I said, turning to face him. His fingers stopped above the call button. He’d already dialed the 9-1-1. “What if we don’t?” I couldn’t explain why I felt the need to keep her, but I did.
“What if we…Hannah, we can’t just keep a baby. Even if her parents left her, she still has family out there. It isn’t finders-keepers,” Joe said, sighing when he realized I was dead serious. “We just got married. We can’t have a kid yet—”
The girl in my arms hiccupped, and I gave him a look. The look I knew Joe could not argue with, the look I knew would swing him to my side. It was a good power to have over him, and I only used it occasionally.
In the end, he gave in to me, which meant we had to cut our tour of Grimmstead short. As we grabbed our things and headed out the front door, as we walked down the long concrete path to the broken gate, I couldn’t help but feel as if we were being watched, eyes on the backs of our heads.
It got to the point where I had to stop and turn around, to gaze around me just to make sure Joe and I hadn’t missed this girl’s parents. For a moment, I thought I’d lost my mind. I thought…well, I thought I saw faces inside Grimmstead, in the windows. Sad ones. Five of them, too.
But then when I did a double-take, I saw absolutely nothing.
Huh. Maybe this place was messing with my mind.
Joe and I decided to name her Felice Grimm Beck. Grimm as her middle name, a reference to where we found the newest love of our life. As for Felice? I couldn’t say where the name came from, really. It just…it felt right, somehow. Like fate had already decided what her name should be.
I never believed in fate too much, but after that day, I couldn’t help but wonder if someone upstairs had planned it all.
Felice Grimm Beck. We’d do our best to give her a good life, to love her as if she truly was born from my own womb. We would give her all that we could, and we did, for years and years.
When she turned eighteen, she received an unmarked letter in the mail, an invitation to attend Grimmstead Academy.
It was almost funny, because I could’ve sworn Joe and I went to a place similar to that. Her middle name was Grimm, after all. After so many years, I couldn’t remember why we’d given her that middle name, but it felt like fate.
And fate…fate was something you couldn’t fight.
Thank you for reading Grimmstead! I know it wasn’t your typical academy story—or your typical reverse harem, for that matter—but I still hope you enjoyed the ride…and I hope you’re not too upset with me over the ending. Some readers like open-ended endings, others don’t.
Honestly, the original ending was going to be worse, but then this one came to me, and it just seemed to fit so well. Grimmstead is cyclical, and Felice is trapped in its cycle now. I might have plans to write Felice Grimm Beck return to Grimmstead, but frankly, these books have underperformed, even though they were SO fun to write.
Reader
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Well, maybe not them…
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Grimmstead Academy: Defiant Rebellion Page 19
