by Darcy Coates
The weather outside varied. Some days, sleet would pound at the house and leave a frosty coating over the chilled stones. Other days, snow fell. Twice, there were more thunderstorms and even a small smattering of hail, though it didn’t grow as large as the day they’d been trapped in the cottage. She preferred the days with sleet. It tamped down the snow, reducing the drifts and making it look almost possible to walk over the field again.
There was only one clear day that week. Sunlight glittered off the endless blankets of white. Clare had the impression that the sun felt a bit like she did—dazed and disoriented. It warmed the air’s temperature enough to start melting the snow, but more dark clouds rolled in that afternoon to undo the effort.
On the sunny day, she broached the idea of trying to reach the car again. Dorran crossed to the window and stared across the field of white for several minutes. Clare, sitting by the fire, knitted her hands together while she waited.
After an agonising pause, he said, “I don’t think we can risk it again yet. You’re not well enough to travel that distance. Not safely.”
She bristled. “I’m doing better.”
“You are.” He turned back from the window and smiled. “I’m happy. But those snowdrifts are going to be challenging, even for me. And if we’re caught out by another storm…”
She understood. The weather had been unpredictable, bordering on insane. One minute, the air outside the house could be still and silent. The next, freezing, screaming gusts swept through, catching up flurries of snow and assaulting the already-damaged manor.
“I could try to go alone.” Dorran scratched the back of his neck. “But even that’s risky. If something happened to me out there, you would be trapped here alone.”
She stood, crossed the space, and rested a hand on his arm as she tried not to laugh. “If something happened to you… I’d be lonely? That’s what you worry about? Not the fact that you’d be—you know, dead?”
She could feel his chuckles reverberating out of his chest. “All right, that wouldn’t be good either.”
“You worry about me too much.”
“I’m more selfish than you give me credit for.” He patted her hand. “I think being alone could be worse than death in some situations.”
She closed her eyes. “Yeah.”
“But I feel that as long as we stay together, as long as we stay a team, we will be all right.”
Clare smiled. “I’d better get stronger, then. And the sun had better spend some more time melting the snow. Because I don’t think I could stand ignoring that radio for much longer.”
“I know.”
Chapter Twenty
When Clare woke the next morning, Dorran was still asleep beside her. He’d stretched out, one leg hanging off the edge of the bed and his forearm over his eyes to keep out the sunlight.
She moved gently to avoid disturbing him as she slipped out of bed and approached the window. The sun was out again. That seemed like a good sign. She shivered as she leaned close to the glass and tried to guess how deep the snow was. Another layer had been applied the night before. The sun might have been working to cut through the cold, but it had a long way to go.
Clare stepped into the bathroom and splashed icy water over her face, trying to shake off the last cobwebs of sleep. A door farther down the hallway creaked open. She kept her eyes fixed on the basin as she brushed her teeth.
Dorran thought that ignoring the phantoms would make them go away. Clare had hoped it would get easier the more she shut her eyes and ears to them, but the paranoia seemed to be growing worse.
Her hands shook as she ran the toothbrush under the stream of water. She still couldn’t control her reactions. Fear was always present, lurking just under the surface, waiting for the smallest disturbance to rise up and wreak havoc. A creaky door. A whistle of wind. A floorboard flexing. They were simple, harmless noises, but they made her pulse race and her throat dry.
It was better when Dorran was around. She could look at him, and he would smile back. That was enough to often stop the hairs from rising and her breath from quickening. He thought they were safe. And that meant they were. Doesn’t it?
She left the bathroom and stopped at the edge of the bed to watch Dorran’s chest rise and fall. She’d woken early that morning.
Something that might have been a cricket or a closing door latch echoed from the floor below. Clare closed her eyes and squeezed her hands together as her breath hitched. She could wake Dorran. He would blink lazily then stretch, like he always did in the mornings, and she would feel safe again.
But that wasn’t solving the problem. Ignoring it wasn’t making anything better. Keeping the lights on, staying close to the man she trusted, and backing away from anything threatening weren’t fixing her.
Will confronting it change anything? She had asked herself that question repeatedly over the last few days. Bethany had never been part of the face-your-fears camp, but Clare knew it worked for some people. They would meet the phobia head-on, embrace it, and learn to live with it. And then it would stop being frightening.
But what she had was more than a phobia. She still didn’t know what it was. She didn’t want to believe it might be insanity. But there were very few other explanations that made sense.
If there is something wrong with me… something that’s been knocked loose in my brain… will confronting it make it better or worse?
Clare carefully, silently plucked her coat off the chair beside the bed and slipped her feet into the oversized boots. They couldn’t keep on the way they were—wasting electricity and wasting Dorran’s time. The radio, Clare’s only other hope to escape the phantoms, was just as far out of reach as it had ever been. So it was time to try the other option.
She turned the door handle gently. It had been kept oiled and didn’t make a noise. She gave Dorran one final look before she stepped out of the room and shut the door behind her.
The air bit her exposed skin. Her knees were already shaking as she tugged the jacket over her back and zipped it up. It had a thick, fluffy collar, and Clare tucked her chin in so that her neck would stay warm.
She waited for a moment, arms folded, as she listened to the house. The wind was calm that morning. The sense of hollowness about the space seemed to reverberate tiny noises back at her. They were maddening.
Simply being alone in the corridor made the back of her neck prickle. But it wasn’t enough. She needed to face it, to see it, to stare it down and win. Whatever it was. That meant travelling into its territory.
An image popped into her mind: the wine cellar. Clare reflexively stepped back then forced herself to hold still and not shiver as the fear enveloped her. She didn’t want to go to the cellar, which meant she had to.
The frantic voice of caution begged her to tell Dorran where she was going. But she couldn’t do that. He wouldn’t want her to go anywhere alone. He wouldn’t want her stepping into the dark.
It’s just a cellar. She reached the staircase and ran her hand along the bannister as she descended. One large, dark room at the foot of the house. There is nothing sinister about it, nothing dangerous. You’ll walk into it and spend a minute or two in the darkness, surrounded by old bottles that probably cost more than your car. Once you’ve acclimatised and realised there’s nothing to be afraid of, you can come out again. Run back to your room, slip back into bed, and you’ll be a step closer to conquering this.
She tried to cling to that thought as she passed through the foyer. There was nothing dangerous about a cellar. It wasn’t like going outside, where one bad footing could leave her stranded and freezing. The phantoms—whatever they were—existed only in her mind. She would be safe. She might not feel it, but she would be.
She entered the stone chamber. The familiar garden door stood ahead. The lights hadn’t turned on yet that morning, but they would automatically power on soon. She glanced to her right, at the small, innocuous, and familiar door to the furnace room.
To he
r left, the cellar’s archway seemed larger than she remembered it. The opening was huge, its insides a swirl of moving black and infinite possibilities, none of them friendly. The stones were old, almost old enough to start cracking, but somehow, they managed to look eternal. She knew the steps would be much the same way. Solid. Unyielding. Unforgiving.
The table at the back of the room held candles and matches for when Dorran ventured into the basement. Clare found one that was half-melted and lit it. The flame started small but quickly grew as it softened the wax and fed itself more fuel. She picked up the old bronze holder and turned towards the cellar.
It’s just a wine room. The temperature dropped noticeably as she approached the entrance. A place for fancy people to store expensive drinks. Nothing more exciting than that. Don’t give it any power.
Her candle flickered as she passed over the threshold. Clare stared at the light, her heart hammering and her palms sweaty, but the flame righted itself within a second.
She almost backed out. The thought of her bed upstairs was painfully tempting. She could lie there, warm and comfortable, swaddled in soft sheets, as she watched Dorran dream. She didn’t need to push herself that day. She didn’t need to face her demons as long as Dorran cared enough to stay at her side.
But that was the problem. He was giving by nature. He would do what it took to make her feel safe. And she couldn’t keep asking him for that, absorbing his time and energy, wasting resources, and slowing him down at every turn. He didn’t need an obligation. He needed a partner.
She stepped down. The chill had been bad at the top of the stairs, but it grew worse with every step. Clare began to imagine shuffling footsteps ringing out of the eternal blackness. When she stopped walking, the shuffling noise stopped too.
Echoes. That’s all. Echoes in the fancy people’s wine room. Don’t give it power.
She kept descending. Her heart kept hammering. She didn’t remember the stairs going down so far. The hallway was wide—wider than the flight of stairs into the basement—and made of slabs of solid grey stone. Her candlelight caught on uneven scraps of rock, and the shadows it created ran in circles around her.
Something rang out in the blackness ahead. Clare froze, and she clenched her teeth to keep quiet. She thought the sound was caused by something being dropped.
It’s an old house. Things fall sometimes. Maybe there was a chip of rock on the wall, and the reverberations from your footsteps knocked it free.
She’d come too far to turn back. Clare forced her legs to work, to carry her lower. After three more steps, the staircase levelled out on the stone floor.
Shelves surrounded her. Dorran had said his family had squandered most of their wealth, and she could see some of the symptoms in that cellar. The shelves were less than a tenth filled. Empty brackets ran for rows sometimes before the pattern was interrupted by a bottle. She supposed good wine was expensive, and having good wine delivered into the middle of nowhere must be even more so.
Clare waited, forcing her back to be straight as she faced the room. It was large. The shelves continued on farther than her light could manage, disappearing into the inky gloom. The stones under her shoes were well-worn from countless feet pacing over them in search of the bottle that had been requested. Clare focussed on those details, on the elements of the room that were mundane and normal, grounded in reality. She tried to use them to push out the panic in her mind and silence the soft scrabbling noise she imagined coming from the room’s unseen corner.
Stay for two minutes. That’s all. Then you can get out of here. She swallowed. The cold stung her throat and made her nose water. She blinked her eyes rapidly as she stared towards the nearest wall.
There was something dark there. It looked like a stain of some kind, like a liquid that had sprayed over the stones and soaked into the porous material. Blood, her mind whispered, and Clare clenched her teeth. It obviously wasn’t blood. She was in a wine cellar. Bottles would inevitably, eventually be broken.
Maybe I am delusional. My flames of paranoia are being fanned by an unwelcoming mansion. How long has it been since I’ve spoken to someone other than Dorran? It has to be weeks.
The scrabbling noise wasn’t going away. In fact, she thought it might be coming closer. She steeled herself, knowing that running would only make the fear worse in the long term. She was nearly at the two minutes she’d assigned herself. She would spend the last few seconds approaching the other side of the room—the unseen side—and once she’d conquered her imagination, she could leave.
She walked forward, each step slow and measured. The delusions were realistic. She could pinpoint the exact space the sound seemed to be coming from—ahead and a little to the right, near the ground, close to the space she’d imagined seeing the figure days before. Fingernails on stone.
Each step revealed more of the space. The soft golden glow of her candlelight poured out like a liquid, running over the stone floor and stone wall to give her a little dome of light. Then the candle guttered as moving air disturbed it. In those brief seconds when the flame trembled and fought to hang on, Clare thought she saw two round, yellowed eyes staring out of the darkness.
Chapter Twenty-One
Clare stopped moving. The candle stabilised. Her throat was dry, and her hands shook, but she knew what she had to do.
It’s not real. There’s nothing there. Step forward. Prove it to yourself.
Her shoe scraped across the stone as she lifted it. As the candle moved forward, its light cut into the blackness. There was a shape there. The huddled, filthy figure was almost invisible on the absolute outer edge of her light.
It’s not real. It’s not real.
She lifted her other foot. The limb felt heavier than stone. It barely moved forward, but when it did, the light that splashed across the shape became a fraction brighter.
Vertebrae had cut through the skin on its back. The bones were jutting out and poking up like a spiny ridge. The skin surrounding the protrusion was a dark red, almost black.
It’s not real. It’s not real!
She couldn’t breathe. She wanted Dorran. He would erase the fear and make her feel safe. He would make her believe nothing in the cellar could hurt her.
Dorran. She clung to the thought of him. Dorran is why you’re doing this. Dorran needs you to be better.
Her foot scraped forwards again. The creature moved. Its gaunt face turned towards her. It was a woman… but only just barely. Strands of long grey hair hung about its face. Its jaw was too long and projected out. Deformed. Bony fingers tipped the arms that didn’t fit properly at its sides. It took Clare a second to understand what she was seeing. The arms were far too long. They had an extra joint each, making them jut out at bizarre angles.
It’s not real.
The creature had been scrabbling at the stone wall, in the same place Clare had seen the first woman. Its round, lidless eyes stared at her as it rose out of its crouch. A narrow, pale tongue darted out to taste its bottom lip. Then one of the three-jointed arms reached towards her.
It’s not real.
Her legs shook. Her body shook. Her hands jittered so badly that the candlelight shimmered.
Elongated teeth filled the gaping maw. The arm kept reaching, stretching closer and closer, aimed at Clare’s outstretched hand that held the candle.
A memory rushed through her. It was vague and gone in an instant, but the emotions associated with it were sharp enough to make her breath catch. Claws digging into her. Claws just like the overgrown nails protruding from the woman’s fingers.
Clare turned and ran. The creature made a noise, something between a hiss and a rasping, gurgling inhale. Then its nails began scraping over the floor as it gave chase.
All rationality had fled. Clare only cared about one thing—reaching the top of the stairs. Her shoulder hit one of the shelves. It shook her, and she stumbled. The enormous wooden structure creaked and swayed. As Clare swivelled, she saw the creature two paces behin
d her, jaw stretched wide and spines glistening in the light. Then the candle went out.
Clare yelled. She lurched forward, towards where she knew the stairs had to be. She hit another shelf. Bottles clinked and rattled. Clare used shaking hands to feel along the structure’s edge, guiding her forward. Her lungs were starved for air. Her throat was too tight. Then she hit the first step of the staircase and tumbled forward.
Sharp rock hit her jaw, jarring her and making her taste blood. She barely felt the pain, though. She clambered up. The clawing, scratching noises were almost on her. She could hear more of them. They came from every corner of the cellar, clicking over stones, scrabbling around the shelves as they converged on her. With every heartbeat, she expected to feel the sharp pain digging into her ankle. She ran, pure adrenaline driving her up, closer and closer to the archway of light in the distance.
She burst through the archway and made it four more steps into the room before she collapsed onto the stone floor. Sobs wrenched out of her, each one aching as it forced its way past the lump in her throat. She pulled her legs up under herself and wrapped her arms around her knees. She couldn’t run anymore. But the creatures didn’t seem to be chasing her.
Light came out of the garden’s open door. It wasn’t enough to fully illuminate the space, but it wasn’t darkness either. Clare lay there, curled into a tight ball. Her head throbbed. Her limbs all felt like they were made of stone. And the inside of her chest ached from where her thumping heart had bruised it.
