I instinctively reached for my anger, finding it—as always—a hair’s breadth away. Because that was the key to survival in this world. Always have your finger on the trigger. Always be ready to go absolutely apeshit at a moment’s notice. Never be caught unguarded again.
I reared my axe and swung.
Everything went blurry, as it always does. My battle cry rang in my ears. My limbs burned with the quick, heavy chop-chop-chop. Fear and rage ran my arms like pistons, pounding the metal blade into the meat of the thing attacking me. I only stopped when my swing found nothing, and I unbalanced with the force and weight of the axe.
I let myself tumble to the floor, panting hard, my side now screaming in pain. But I kept the axe close, clutched in my sticky, wet fingers. I searched the floor for movement.
A sickly coppery smell cut over the scent of trees and pollen blowing in from the open door.
Moonlight pooled on the living room floor, casting Rowan’s battered face in cool blue light. Puddles of black liquid spread around his head.
CHAPTER 44
Rowan’s chest was patterned with slices and gouges. Half of his face peeled away, opening up his skull and spilling gore onto the sheepskin rug.
I’ll never get that out of the wool, I thought stupidly.
He sputtered and shook, a marionette whose strings were snagged and caught, as a dark froth foamed up from his bisected mouth. My eyes widened. This time there was no brief flash of gore, no face disappearing into the darkened doorway. The bloody horror was lying in front of me, inescapable, unrelenting.
You’ll never learn, will you?
My body trembled. I thought I could hear sirens. The front door lay open behind me.
Hurting and hurting, round and round.
Maybe it really was Rowan. Did I want to wait and find out? They’ll lock me up for good this time. If I ran now, I could escape to town. Why did it have to be Rowan? The one person who was nice to me. I tried to push what I’d done away.
Your very own circle of hell, spinning like a hamster wheel.
I stumbled toward the front door, hurrying in the direction of the night air, thinking of places I could hide.
Then I stopped. I leant against the door jamb, looking out onto the driveway. My car sat there with its broken windshield. A cool breeze, fresh and inviting, pulled around my sweat-sodden clothes, and I found myself aching to be outside, to be anywhere but this house of horrors.
Callie-Ann’s words came to me on the breeze, suddenly cold and hard.
“Stay in the house. Find the breach.”
I inhaled a deep breath of that sweet, night air, let it cool the sweat on my arms and brow, then I turned around and went back into the house, back past the twitching body on the living room floor, back to the door under the stairs, and headed down into the basement. Down inside the hill.
CHAPTER 45
More stairs. More darkness. At least I wasn’t falling down these ones. No, I was choosing this descent. God, I hoped I wasn’t going mad. Would I even know?
At the base of the stairs, my feet found the concrete floor and I waited in the black. It was dark all around. I stepped away from the staircase.
Without any light, the room felt as if it were spinning, no discernible up, no down. Just floating in space. It was like what I’d always imagined death to be like. An unending darkness, a void, and me alone in it for all eternity with no escape.
Normally, I would run from this. I would drink or flick aimlessly through TV shows or scroll on my phone, anything to get away from the awful nothingness I was sure awaited me at the end of it all. But this time I stayed in it, though every nerve told me to run back up the stairs, that no monster skulking in the living room could be worse than this one thought, this one inevitability, that just by standing here in it I was making it true, wishing it to me, letting it find me.
I waited.
And then I realised there was something here. There was fear.
I held onto the fear as a something.
I felt the rise and fall of my chest, the beat of my heart, the shifting of my clothes—just like I had in the forestry on the hill.
My eyes adjusted. And I saw the basement. And I saw the door.
