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The girl with dark hair wore an eyepatch with an eye drawn on covering her right while the white-haired girl had a silverish eye like the one we hid.
Their arms were stitched and so were their necks, as if someone had taken them apart and then put them together again. They looked more like pretty, monstrous dolls than anything human. I’d never seen expressions so empty.
“That doesn’t look anything like us,” Bellatrix refuted, her hand tightening around mine.
“Yeah. How old is this portrait?” I asked, forcing sarcasm into my tone.
Alex shrugged. “As old as this house, probably.”
“I can see it,” Amber agreed with him.
I rolled my eyes and forced myself to walk away from the portrait, taking Bellatrix with me.
“These boxes are full history. This stuff is so intriguing,” Jacob lilted. He began rifling through a box, pulling out books and objects that were far beyond our time. Adjusting his lens, he began taking pictures.
A floorboard creaked from above us.
Tyson looked up at the ceiling with his dark brows furrowed. “Fuck was that?”
“Can we…?” I began to ask if we could leave, trailing off when a light zoomed past a window in the adjoining room. Reflexively, I tightened my grip on Bellatrix’s hand.
“I saw that,” she murmured.
“Saw what?” Amber turned away from the box she was digging through.
“There was a light,” Sasha confirmed, her voice shaky.
Alex walked towards us. “A light? Could it be the people from the Honda? They have to be here somewhere, right?”
“Stay here.”
I crept through the arched doorway and into the next portion of the manor. It was small and long, a mudroom of sorts maybe. Beautifully arched windows lined the entire back wall, but majority were covered by thick, heavy fabrics
Empty planters were all over the place. Some of the porcelain rims were cracked and stained with what looked like old blood.
Rolling my lower lip between my teeth, I squinted and looked out one of the windows that were uncovered. Bellatrix was right behind me, her hands on my shoulders.
As if whoever was wielding the light had been waiting on us, it swung around and settled on a large stone fountain in the middle of the yard with various symbols and script carved into it. A large pillar extended from its center, covered in even more markings.
The light moved over the backyard scene slowly.
My stomach dropped as what I was seeing registered. I tried to open my mouth to scream, to yell for our friends to get out of the house, but I couldn’t move.
In front of the fountain were two bodies barely recognizable as human. I could only assume these were the people that had been in the Honda because what remained of their corpses had yet to rot. It looked like something had ran them through a paper shredder. Chunks of flesh and bone littered the ground.
A naked girl had been bound to the pillar itself, her hands behind her back. A crow was perched atop her head of tattered blue hair. One eye dangling from its beak. The other was nowhere to be seen, torn from her face the same way something had ripped open her chest.
A small voice told me to run while another, sinister yet soothing asked me to stay, to go into the backyard.
The bird opened its wings, head tilting as it regarded me and my sister before taking flight, coming straight for the window.
“It’s time to fucking go!” Tyson yelled, grabbing hold of me Bellatrix. I hadn’t seen him come or heard him come up behind us.
Snapped out of whatever trance we’d been in, we ran.
CHAPTER
No one asked why or what had caused us to run out of that room as if it were on fire. They followed us out of the manor with the same sense of urgency. The lights went out as we spilled down the stoop.
It was darker than it’d been before, the perched high in the sky as if hours had gone by instead of minutes. The luminescent light illuminated the skulls previously attached to the tree now scattered throughout the grass.
“What the fuck?” Alex yelled, the first hint of fear creeping into his tone.
We kept running, moving down the driveway at a rapid speed. As soon as we passed through the pillars at the end of the driveway, every hair on the back of my neck stood up.
We ran back into the woods, racing down the path we’d come here on. Approximately five minutes later we stopped so Sasha could catch her breath. Jacob placed his hands on his knees, the light from his mini flashlight bobbing as he coughed and heaved.
“We can’t stop here,” I rasped.
“What did you see?” Collin fretted.
“You don’t wanna know. It was some fucked up shit,” Tyson answered.
A breeze blew, the first I’d felt all night. Overhead a crow soared through the tops of the trees before disappearing. Seconds later, a bell rang. Our spines rigid, anxiety worming its way through each of us, we searched the trees.
