They circled down into the blackness below with only the pinprick of light from the flashlights to guide them. In the stillness, with only their labored breath to break the silence, the temperature dropped as they slowly descended, and their exposed skin pebbled in the cool air. Finally, after what seemed like an eternity, they reached the bottom and found themselves facing another heavy wood paneled door with brass hinges.
Ava watched as Kelley reached out and grasped the small round handle and twisted. There was a small audible click and the door swung open easily on well-oiled hinges, which seemed somehow more ominous than the creaking hinges in the corridor high above them.
The first thing Ava noticed was the ground beneath her feet. It didn’t have the soft give and warm creak of aged wood, nor did it have the rough metallic clang of the spiral staircase. This time they found themselves standing on cold hard tile.
The room didn’t seem to fit the rest of the house, Ava thought to herself. It was cold and sterile. The walls, as she turned a slow circle, were plain white utilitarian tile, edged in a deep green colored tile which bordered the strange room, at the top, middle and floor level, breaking up the stark whiteness.
Her beam of light fell on a long rectangular table sitting in the center of the room. It was mounted on a circular base and footplate. She slowly edged closer and reached out with trembling fingers to touch it. It was smooth and ice cold to the touch, and made, it seemed, of porcelain.
It wasn’t entirely even, she realized. It sloped ever so slightly down to a deep rectangular sink with a metal hand pump mounted on the side. Unable to help herself she lifted the handle, which was heavy and stiff, but after a few grinding, experimental pumps it spewed out a stream of dark urine-like, rusty water.
Beside the porcelain table was a small metal tray on wheels and sitting atop it was a large urn like bottle. The label was worn, and she was unable to read the confusing writing, but it contained some kind of fluid. Placed neatly beside it was a long length of rubber hose, wound up like looping entrails.
She looked up to see where Kelley was and found him standing beside a heavy desk upon which was a gas lamp, a pot of quills and several stacks of dry parchment-like papers. Next to the desk were huge apothecary shelves revealing rows and rows of glass jars and bottles in varying sizes and containing all sorts of things, from dry leaves and powders to liquids and several gooey looking items they couldn’t even identify.
Kelley’s beam of light highlighted a long row of books as he shuffled along slowly reading the titles. ‘The Anatomie Generale,’ By Marie Francois Bichat in three volumes. There were another eight heavy volumes by someone called Sommerring. ‘Anatomy of Bones and ligaments, Anatomy of the muscles and vascular system, Microscopic anatomy of the nervous system, including the brain, the spinal cord and the ganglia…’ There even appeared to be an original copy of Grey’s Anatomy dated 1858.
‘What the hell is this place?’ Ava breathed heavily.
Kelley turned slowly, his light falling on the pale table in the center of the room.
‘I hate to say it,’ he swallowed thickly, ‘but I’m pretty sure that this is some sort of mortuary.’
‘A mortuary?’ she replied in confusion. ‘What would a mortuary be doing down here? The house itself is out in the middle of nowhere, and right now we’re pretty deep underground, in fact we’re probably inside the cliff itself.’
‘I don’t know,’ he shook his head. ‘I have no clue why there would be a room like this hidden beneath the house. I’ve never even heard a sniff of a rumor about anything like this.’
‘Kelley look,’ her light fell on another doorway, ‘that’s not the door we came in.’
Kelley turned and looked behind them. Sure enough, and easily confused in the darkness, there was a second door.
‘Ava,’ Kelley muttered, ‘I’m not so sure. I mean, hidden corridors and empty rooms are one thing but this… this is a whole hell of a lot of creepy. I’ve got a weird feeling in my gut. I’m not sure we’re gonna like what we find behind that door.’
‘We have to see,’ her stomach turned over and over in nervous somersaults. She didn’t want to open that door any more than Kelley did, but something told her she had to. If she didn’t it would keep playing on her mind. She had to know the truth, whatever it was.
This time it was Ava who reached for the door. Like the door to the mortuary it turned with a small click and swung open easily with a strange hiss of air, as if the room were somehow taking its first breath in over a century.
Unable to help herself she stepped into the room and the temperature plummeted even further. Her breath was expelled from her blue tinged lips as a fine lacy mist and she shuddered, her fingers and toes suddenly numb.
She stepped further into the room and felt her feet sink into a lush carpet. The walls were decorated with silk wallpaper with filigree motifs and delicate floral patterns. Mounted on the wall was a brass plate. No, a grate she mentally corrected herself, with a small lever below it which would allow the plate to slide horizontally back and forth to open what she could only assume this far underground was an air vent of some sort.
The vent was in the closed position and deep in the heart of the cliff surrounded by rock. The naturally cool temperature had almost perfectly preserved the room, like a time capsule.
She turned to the right and found a huge four poster bed, with a canopy and heavy drapes. The sheets and blankets were still neatly made up as if it were merely awaiting its owner’s return.
There was a strange buzzing in her ears as she stared at the bed. She tilted her head, unconsciously straining to listen. It was weird, it almost sounded like whispering, only it was too low to make out the words. She turned slowly, her flashlight trailing along the wall to the opposite side of the room. Her heart and stomach jolted violently as her mouth fell open in a silent scream, unable to force any sound from her frozen vocal cords.
She could hear the whoosh of her adrenalin fueled blood gushing through her veins and pounding in her ears as she stared, unable to process what her eyes were seeing. Built into custom alcoves in the walls were ornate glass coffins, seven of them in all and they weren’t empty…
Seven women lay, as if asleep, naked, on pillows of pale silk and lace, surrounded by dried flowers, with blood red petals, the edges curling and blackened with the stench of death.
The women were, for the most part, almost perfectly preserved. Three of them, each with dark hair and full breasts lay languidly, a cruel parody of a slumbering lover, their skin dried and slightly withered.
The next two, one a redhead and one a blonde, were laid out, still naked but in a more demure fashion, with barely any hair at the juncture between their thin desiccated thighs and breasts that were small and underdeveloped. It betrayed how young they had been at the moment of death, barely on the cusp of womanhood.
The sixth one seemed somewhere in the middle, age wise. A young lady in the burst of youth, but unlike her companions in death, she had not fared so well. There was a great jagged crack in the glass wall of her coffin. Her skin had crumbled away leaving parts of her torso collapsing inwards. Her face had begun to decay, revealing patches of bleached white skull and grinning teeth beneath her paper-like flesh and her eyes were nothing more than sunken hollows.
Ava shuddered. It was like she’d walked into a horror show, only these weren’t wax models and she couldn’t just head for the nearest emergency exit. She was trapped deep below ground in a room of death and her muscles were tensed so tightly it physically hurt.
Her eyes slowly fell on the last corpse. Part of the wall above the casket had cracked away, not enough to breach the wall of the room but the plaster had come away and crashed down in a sheet, smashing the glass of the coffin and breaking the seal. Like her companion, her skin had disintegrated leaving only patches of her humanity left, bones protruding from dried leather-like flesh and scattered with dried petals and stick like stems.
Somewhere in the di
m recesses of her mind Ava seemed to recall someone had told her the cliff had been struck by lightning. She couldn’t have said how or why she knew, but the moment the thought occurred to her she understood beyond a shadow of a doubt that, that was what had happened. The moment the lightning had struck the cliff the plaster had cracked away and crashed through the coffin, revealing the rough stone wall behind.
Ava was afraid. She could feel the fear, dry and tasteless in her mouth, making it hard to swallow, but there was something else. Her mind seemed kind of distant, like she was standing outside her body looking at the grisly scene.
The whispering in her ear began again and without stopping to wonder why, she stepped forward, reaching for the girl in the broken coffin. Her vision narrowed, blurring at the edges like a tunnel. She just had to touch her papery skin, just once, she had to know…
‘AVA!’ Kelley’s voice cracked like a whip, his tone so sharp and unfamiliar it snapped her out of the strange trance as he rushed toward her.
Grabbing her arm, he yanked her back.
‘Don’t touch her!’ he told her urgently, yanking off the lavender colored bandana holding her hair back, and pressing it over her nose and mouth. ‘She’s been embalmed with arsenic. When the glass was broken it released the fumes from her body and they’ve been building up inside this sealed room… the whole room is toxic.’
With his t-shirt pulled up over his mouth and nose he dragged her from the room. She dropped her flashlight as she stumbled along behind him, holding the bandana to her mouth. Her head was swimming and she was dizzy. She held onto his hand, the only warm safe thing in the darkness, and trusted him to lead her out.
Holding onto Ava’s hand tightly with one hand and leading the way with his flashlight with the other, he dragged her through the mortuary and back up the winding staircase, along the corridor, lifting her over the broken desk as he approached the light spilling down from the wide-open hole in the ceiling.
There were two ropes dangling down ready for them, as several concerned faces peered through the gap.
‘Killian!’ Kelley called urgently as he secured the rope around her waist, ‘pull her up.’
He watched as she was hoisted up through the hole before scrambling up the second rope, agile as a monkey. He climbed over the jagged edge, losing some skin on his palms and shins to the splintered wood. As soon as he was free, he lifted Ava into his arms.
‘Kelley, what is it?’ Killian asked in concern.
‘Get everyone out of the house,’ Kelley told him as he carried Ava from the room toward the main entrance, with Killian barking orders to his men to clear the site.
Kelley stumbled out into the daylight, the sudden brightness stabbing his eyes like pins after the darkness of the hidden rooms. He stumbled down the steps, collapsing to his knees with Ava still in his arms.
‘Ava?’ he pulled the bandana from her mouth, ‘are you okay?’
‘Feel sick,’ she croaked as she turned and dry heaved.
‘Get her some water,’ Kelley barked to Bo, the foreman who was standing hovering anxiously nearby and who took off for Ava’s supply of refreshments without having to be asked twice.
‘What the hell Kelley?’ Killian dropped to his knees next to them, ‘what happened down there?’
‘You need to call Dad,’ his serious green eyes locked on his brother. ‘We’ve got a room full of dead bodies down there and they’re all poisonous.’
11
The Lynch House, Midnight Island.
Dec 1873.
He should’ve been sleeping but the screaming had woken him. He’d called for Sarah, but she hadn’t answered. The room was freezing. The fire had long since gone out in the grate, nothing but cold ash and cinders. It would not be lit again until morning.
The scream came again, this time followed by a crash and the sound of breaking glass. He climbed from his bed and dropped down on the floor, avoiding the half-filled chamber pot and sliding beneath the heavy wooden frame in nothing but his nightshirt, the freezing floor chilling his small body as he placed his hands over his ears to block the desperate cries.
His father would punish him if he left his room. He could still feel the barely healed strokes of the switch across his backside and the backs of his thighs. The cries came again, filled with pain and fear. His heart clenched, and his eyes filled with tears even as his bottom lip began to quiver.
It sounded like Sarah, screams which had turned to violent sobs, the word no, chanted over and over. He pressed his hands so tightly against his ears his fingers turned white and his ears began to burn from the pressure. The first tears dripped onto the wooden floor and his heart pounded in fear, his father hated it when he cried. Only babies and women cried, his father said.
He wondered if his father had taken the switch to Sarah, wondered what she had done wrong. He liked Sarah; he didn’t want her to leave like the others had. Nancy, Olive, Alice, the maids, his nurses, they’d all promised him they would stay, that they wouldn’t leave him, but they had. They’d all broken their promises to him, and it was all his father’s fault. He’d made them leave; he was sure of it.
The screams quieted and he released his ears, laid there for a moment on his belly, breathing hard, his palms pressed against the floor, leaving tiny little star shaped handprints in the dust. He should just go back to bed and close his eyes, pretend he hadn’t heard anything like he had before, only this time it was different.
It was Sarah and she’d been his favorite. She’d sung to him and told him tales of the old country as she’d called it, in her lilting Irish brogue. He liked to listen to her voice, to the funny way she talked. If his father had taken the switch to her, she’d be hurting.
His own pain still fresh in his mind he slowly slid out from under the bed and headed for the dresser. Pulling open the bottom drawer he retrieved a little tin pot of salve she’d hidden in there to soothe his hurts whenever his father punished him. He tucked it into the pocket of his nightshirt and shoved the heavy drawer closed.
He crept across his bedroom to the door and opened it slowly, before slipping out into the hallway. He navigated the darkened corridor easily. He tried Sarah’s room first; it adjoined his own in case he woke in the night when he was younger. The room had seen many occupants but for now it was Sarah’s. He checked but found her bed empty.
Confused, he slipped back into the hallway. He should’ve gone back to his room, but he saw a sliver of light spilling from the doorway of his father’s room and he was drawn toward it. Silent as a mouse, he crept forward on bare feet, pressing his eye to the slight crack in the doorway.
His mouth went dry and his chest pounded in fear, like the wings of a fragile bird dashing itself in panic against the bars of its cage. His eyes widened at the scene before him, his mind too young to comprehend what he was seeing.
Sarah was pinned to his father’s bed by his large commanding frame, her skirts shoved roughly up and bunched around her small waist. His father’s clothing was loosened, his pants shoved indecently down his hips revealing his naked buttocks as he rammed himself violently between her pale limp thighs, grunting loudly.
He couldn’t look away, his innocent eyes wide with confusion and wet with tears. His father continued to slam himself against the girl who seemed so small and fragile beneath his powerful body. His breathing was ragged and labored with animal like grunts heaving from his throat. His movements increased in speed as he pounded into her and finally with one last violent jab and a vicious growl, he collapsed on top of her, panting heavily.
The boy glanced at her face, his sweet Sarah. She no longer screamed or cried; she made no sound at all. His father’s huge meaty fist was still wrapped around her slender throat like a snake constricting its prey. Her head lolled limply to the side, as if she were watching him, as if she could see through the tiny sliver of the crack in the doorway and somehow knew he was there.
But she couldn’t; the whites of her eyes appeared red as she stared li
felessly at nothing. His heart jolted when his father moved. He should have run then, back to his room, back to his bed, back to the childhood innocence that would never be innocent again, but he didn’t.
Instead he watched as his father climbed off her and moved aside. Sarah didn’t move, she laid there across the bed, her legs grotesquely splayed out, revealing the most secret part of a woman he was too young to know. But he could see it now, a patch of fair hair between her legs to match the long locks braided over her shoulder. Blood was smeared between her thighs staining the bedclothes.
His father, with no care for the girl, walked over to the dresser and calmly lifted the china jug, pouring a generous amount of water into the wash basin. Reaching for a square of muslin he dipped it in the water, squeezing it out before washing the sweat from his face and neck, exposed by the open collar of his shirt.
The boy’s eyes widened as his father turned slightly revealing his penis. It jutted out, swollen and painful looking. It was hard and angry, nothing like his own, but it didn’t seem to bother him as he took the cloth and washed himself. Tucking himself into his smalls he pulled his pants back up and fastened them. He tossed the dirty muslin onto the girl carelessly before wrapping her body in the soiled sheets until she was no longer visible. Then he picked up her slight frame and tossed her easily over one shoulder.
The boy scrambled silently out of the way as the door swung wide open. He pressed himself as far back into the shadows as he could, pressing his trembling hand to his mouth to stop himself from whimpering in fear.
His father stood there for a moment, the white shrouded girl draped over his shoulder like a sack of coal. One of her hands hung from the sheet, swinging limply as something dropped from her fingers with a tiny, almost inaudible clatter, and his father turned in the direction of the sound.
For a second of pure terror he thought he had seen him but after several long moments his father turned back and passed by him, so close in the darkness he could smell the sweat and cologne clinging to his skin, underlaid with another primal scent he couldn’t place. He listened silently as his father’s footfalls echoing against the wooden floor became fainter.
The Clockwork House Page 18