Hi folks! Sorry for the delay on this one. Came down with a wicked migraine yesterday. Here’s the latest:
New to the story? Read Chapter 1 here!
Content warning: images of child death.
Chapter 14
It jumps back in shock, reflex sending its hands to its daggers. It thought it knew the manor’s secrets, from the servant’s stairs and hidden closet by the classroom, to the deep basement chambers and the secret passage to the coach house. It peers behind the door and sees is a steep, narrow, spiral staircase descending below the manor.
It needs food and rest, but takes more clohalc instead. From the deep basement, it gets its shoulder bag and the sparker. In the kitchen, it grabs an lamp, a jug of oil big enough for three refills and the two remaining candles.
In the living room it fills the lantern, lights it, and opens the hidden door. It steps onto the stair and pulls the wall shut behind it. The click of the latch, loud in the little space, freezes it. Its hand hits the release with a desperate, convulsive slap. The latch clicks and the door swing wide. It catches it and stands, gasping.
It is not afraid of darkness, small spaces or being underground. But the moment it stepped on the stairs it felt that something terribly, utterly wrong waits for it below. If it had a choice, it wouldn’t go. But its chest still burns, and the other Houses are waiting, so once more it pulls the door shut and starts down the steps.
The steps are wide at the outer edge, narrow in the centre, and spiral into the ground. It walks with its shoulder brushing the outer wall, and lamp held out before it. Even so, it can see no further than a quarter turn ahead. Unlike the deep basement, these stairs are damp, and the air that fills its lungs with each quick breath is moist. It is panting, it realizes, and forces its breathing slower, tries to put aside the creeping dread that twists it stomach in knots.
When that doesn’t work, it focuses on the burning in its chest, letting the pain keep the fear at bay.
The stair ends in a narrow, high-walled hallway whose painted plaster had long ago succumbed to the moisture in the air. Piles of it lie wet and broken on the floor. A few bits of colour still cling to the wall; a piece of green, another of blue, and near the ceiling, a single spot of yellow.
The silence here is deeper and thicker than any it has experienced. It hears no sound of water dripping, no animals running in the walls, no footsteps or voices or faint wails of the shades that haunt the world above. Its fear rises again, and it draws a dagger. The weight of the weapon, the warm leather on the grip and the cold steel of the guard are comforting. With slow, quiet steps it advances down the hallway into the atrium of an ancient house, and realizes where it is.
The City of Seven Walls is old. The children’s history lessons taught it that, since the God brought people into existence thousands of years before, they have lived where the City of Seven Walls now sits. The records count five different nations that rose and fell in this, victims of weather and war, storms and famines. And stories and legends speak of older civilizations, built over and buried by those that came after.
Now, it stands in a house from one of those cities, intact despite the layers of later civilizations pressing down on it. It looks up at the rough stone above it. If the rocks shift and fall, their weight will crush it to paste. Surprisingly, that thought calms i. The real possibility of dying is much easier to accept than the nameless dread of something that it can’t see.
The atrium’s tall walls have met the same fate as its hallway. The plaster and paint that decorated them has fallen away, leaving plain grey stone. A statue of a woman stands in the center of the marble floor. It goes closer. The statue’s face is gone, smashed by a hammer from the looks of it. It has one hand clasped to its chest holding what might be plants, though they have been broken as well. One raised arm, its hand missing, reaches for the ceiling.
Seven doors lead from the atrium, six blocked by fallen stone. The seventh has an arched doorway, made in a style different from the rest of the house. With nowhere else to go, and walks through the arch and finds a tunnel sloping deeper into the earth. It counts steps to keep its mind busy, and has hit five hundred thirty-eight when the passage opens into a round, dome-ceilinged room.
The walls and dome are built from large blocks of red- and grey-flecked stone that reflect the lamp’s light. It runs its hand over the closest and feels the polished smoothness of the rock. High above, a dozen wide slits, now blocked with stone, once let in sunlight. It lowers the light and its eyes and, for the first time, sees the small bones on the floor.
It moves forward, its free hand tight on the dagger grip. The smeared remains of a seven-sided shape drawn in yellow chalk stands out bright against the dark red stone floor. A few bones remain in the shape, but most are scattered, as if something tore apart the bodies they were once in and flung the bits around the room.
Children. It turns in a circle and counts seven small, broken skulls. Four lie shattered against the walls, the other three crushed, as if stomped in the middle of the floor. Seven children died in this room.
Something moves.
Read Chapter 15 Here!
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