29
Nothing could’ve prepared her for the sight in the last bedroom. Or the smell, either.
The room itself was larger than the others, and this one actually had stuff in it. Wall to wall, it was filled with bookcases and tables. All of them were filled with trinkets and knick-knacks, too. Ancient tomes with fading, moldy spines. Sculptures of glass and marble and wood, along with unknown items of brass and bronze.
Three candles were lit from a single sconce near a large, four-poster bed. At first the bed seemed empty. Yellow and stained, a series of crumpled up blankets lay discarded in the center.
Melody took another step forward, then covered her mouth with both hands and gasped.
The blankets weren’t blankets.
They were a person.
The thing in the center of the bed — and by now it certainly was a thing — looked only vaguely humanoid in appearance. It was emaciated and dessicated. Curled up in a vaguely fetal position, its wrists and ankles were bent at horrible, terrible angles that could speak only of pain and agony.
Then the thing moved, and Melody lost it.
She turned to one side and retched, right onto the floor. Her stomach was empty. It was more a dry heave than anything else. But the smell…
The whole chamber smelled of urine and feces and… and of something else. Something foul and wretched that just didn’t belong.
There’s a sickness here.
It was awful, but it was truth. And Melody knew it was true… somehow without even knowing, without even reading the thing on the bed.
A terrible, damnable sickness…
She covered her mouth instinctively. It did nothing for the smell. Whatever it was had seeped into every corner of the room.
What the—
The thing moved again. Shifted uncomfortably on the surface of the sour linens. And then Melody saw it on the night table, right next to the bed; a small, intricate stand. Carved from something, ivory perhaps. A four-legged stand that would hold an object that would have be rounded. An object somewhere around eight or ten inches tall…
Her eyes scanned the room frantically. Searching. Looking…
It has it.
The idea frightened her more than anything else since she’d arrived. More than the thing in the hallway. More than her nightmare…
It’s holding it. Clutching it…
She forced herself to look at the thing on the bed. The thing she somehow knew was a person. A woman.
The thing that once been Lady Neveux.
It took her another full minute to approach the bed. Even afterward, her body steadfastly refused to move.
“A—Are you okay?”
The question was rhetorical. Of course the thing in the bed wasn’t okay. Still, she had to ask it. She had to know if the Lady of the House was unconscious or alert. Comatose or delirious or—
It shifted again. This time in her direction.
Melody covered her mouth with her hand again. It was all she could do. A profound sadness came over her, the idea that this poor thing… this woman could be left here like this. Abandoned by the rest of the house. Confined to her room like some sort of animal, the whole time she was here.
She noticed a crystal decanter next to the bed, half-filled with water. Melody reached for it. Her hands still trembling, she extended her arm outward in a gesture… an offering…
“Lady Neveux,” she said.
The thing shifted again, even more this time. It almost half sat up.
“Please, take some water. You have to be thirsty.”
Melody tried to ignore the smell. Or the fact that the water she was holding already had some kind of film or scum formed over the top of the meniscus. She sloshed it around a bit. Extended her arm even more.
“Are you able to—”
An eye blinked open. She caught its face.
OH MY GOD…
Lady Neveux’s skin was stretched over her cheekbones so tightly it had actually cracked. Sores covered her face, open pustules that ran red beneath a cheesy, white substance. It was gruesome. The apogee of unimaginable pain.
The creature on the bed opened its mouth and screamed in what could only be horrific agony. Melody gasped, but still held the decanter. Her entire arm was shaking. She grit her teeth… just as the creature pushed itself up on one arm and reached out for her.
The old woman’s hand was a shriveled claw. The skin had pulled back long ago from her yellowed fingernails, creating even more cracks and wounds that were terrible to behold. She was almost touching the decanter now. Melody leaned forward, bringing it to just within her reach…
Tears streamed down Melody’s face. She was crying openly. Lady Neveux’s corpse-like fingers closed around the vessel, her lips spreading — no, cracking open — in anticipation of bringing the water to her mouth.
Suddenly the door burst open. It had swung closed behind her, but now it banged so violently into the opposite wall Melody heard the wood actually splinter. Startled, she allowed the decanter of water to slip from her hand. It slipped through Lady Neveux’s mummified grasp too, then dropped to the floor and shattered into a thousand crystalline pieces.
Melody whirled in a mixture of terror and disappointment. Then she screamed.
Eric stood in the doorway, his chest heaving with the exertion of having just run up two flights of stairs.
Head to toe, he was covered in blood.