Marian was only aware of time passing. She held her breath as she descended the stairs, trying to keep herself from shaking. She became aware of all the underneath-sounds you never hear during the day because you’re too busy to notice them; the faint, irregular drip of water as condensation fell from the pipes, her own breathing, the creak of a house still settling. She wet her lips, then squeezed the wooden railing for reassurance. No good; she was still petrified.
The stairs groaned and rasped with her every step; it would not have surprised her had the damn things simply splintered in half and sent her falling straight down, Alice in the Rabbit’s Hole. Then came a sound from somewhere behind him. A soft sound. But close. “Doing fine,” said Jack.
The doorbell rang upstairs. Alan grabbed Marian’s shoulder, halting her, then turned to Jack and said, “You’d better stay up there and take care of the beggars. Make sure you tell all of them about tonight.”
Wordlessly, Jack did as he was told.
Every muscle in Marian’s body seemed to knot up all at once; her skin broke out in gooseflesh and her breath suddenly caught in her throat. She briefly flashed on an incident from her childhood when Dad had bagged a deer while hunting and split it open from its neck down to its hind legs, then hung it upside-down in the basement to drain. She hadn't know it was there when she went down to get something for Mom, and it was dark and she didn't want to go because the light switch wasn’t working and that meant she had to go down the stairs and then walk all the way over on the other wall, which meant going across the basement in order to turn it on, which always seemed like a twenty-mile hike through the darkest woods to her, but she managed to get to the bottom of the stairs and took a deep breath and start hiking through the forest, then slipped in a puddle of something and fell on her stomach. She yelled because she was having trouble getting up, so Mom came down and walked over and turned on the light and there
was so much blood everywhere because the deer was hanging right over her, its eyes wide, staring at her as a steady flow of blood and pieces of guts spattered down on her face and arms and she just knew that if Mom didn't pull her away the light would go out again and she’d die there with the deer in the dark forest....
That same feeling returned to her as she came off the last step and found herself in the basement.
In the center of the floor, illuminated by the single bulb which hung from the center of the ceiling, was a pond of blood; there was no mistaking its color of its sharp, coppery scent. Though it had not turned the shade of rust as that in the bathroom, it was old enough to have begun coagulating.
Just a deer, she forced herself to think. It’s just the blood from Dad’s deer.
Her eyes followed the path of the arterial spray on the wall to the left of the blood, as well as the one directly behind it. She saw clumped bits of viscera and small chunks of shattered bone.
“Look at it,” said Alan, pushing her toward the pond. “See how it glimmers? Isn’t it beautiful?”
Deer blood, remember. Has to be deer blood.
Even though she knew that wasn’t the case, Marian called on her training as an actress to make herself believe it; as long as she could do that, she might get out of her in one living piece. “This is where you killed Joseph?” “Yes,” whispered Alan, staring into his reflection as he knelt by the edge of the pond. “Joseph Comstock?” Marian asked once again. “Yes.” “Then where’s his body, Alan?” “It’s here.” “Joseph Comstock’s body is here?” “Yes. Our great-great-great-great-grandfather.” A layer of ice formed in the pit of Marian’s stomach. “What?”
Alan looked at her. “Joseph Comstock was our ancestor, only he used to call himself Josiah. Came over here in the early 1800s and helped settled Cedar Hill. During the cholera epidemic he came down with a fever that drove him mad, picked up a scythe, and murdered his entire family. They hanged him for that, but when they went to cut down his body, it wasn’t there. He couldn’t be allowed to die, you see, because if he had, the bloodline which eventually led to you and me being born...it wouldn’t have survived. We never would have been. So he’s been hanging around, you see, in the cemetery, and can only move around during the month of October because it’s the month for ghosts, you see?” He stared back into the pond.
Marian shook her head, but only slightly. I did not fuck the ghost of my great-great-great-great-grandfather. I. Did. Not.
“The bloodline has to be kept strong,” Alan continued, “so it was up to us—you and me—to accept him.”
Marian looked around for something heavy—but not too heavy. Something just weighty enough with which to knock him unconscious; then she could sneak back up the stairs and get out through the back door. She saw a pile of old pipes in one corner and started edging her way toward them. “So beautiful,” Alan repeated. “Come look.” Marian passed close enough to her brother to look over Alan’s shoulders and see his reflection in the blood—
—only his was not alone; on either side of him were the faces of Mom and Dad, with Grandma and Grampa behind them, as well as countless others whose faces she did not recognize but knew they were Quinlan ancestors, be it from the shape of the jaw or the set of the eyes or the fullness of the lips, they were the rest of the family bloodline, going all the way back to—
—Josiah Comstock, whom she had known as Joseph, who stood at the very back in the puddle of faces, slightly higher than the rest, the original patriarch smiling down at his lineage. Marian, dizzy, reached out and placed one hand on her brother’s shoulder to steady her balance. “I knew you’d come around, Sis,” Alan said. “Do you want to see the body?” Marian said nothing. Alan straightened himself, still kneeling, and removed his baseball cap.
The back of his head was clump of raw, seeping meat speckled with strands of bloodied hair, bone slivers, and brain matter, covered with maggots. Both the skull and the brain had been split in half and pried apart, leaving a jagged, black horizontal gap where blood trickled down and out, drawing a straight line of crimson down his neck that disappeared into the collar of his shirt.
Before she could pull away, Alan’s right hand snapped up and gripped her wrist, pulling her hand closer to the ruins of his skull.
“You have to touch them now, Sis, you have to know what I know—”
She kicked out at his back but it did not good; his grip was iron, and before Marian could pull in enough breath to shout or scream or laugh, Alan was shoving her fingertips deep into the bloodied chasm, and it was wet and crumbly and thick and cold, sucking her fingers in deeper as the pupa swarmed over her skin.
“Feel them now?”
“...ohgod,” she chocked, on the brink of vomiting.
“Give in to it, Sis, it’s the only way.”
The basement spun, the blood mixing with the light and the stench. Marian went down on one knee, her chest pounding, and felt a small part of her mind start to shut down—
—and then heard herself speak:
“...my goddamn prom dress...Mom spent months working on it in secret because she wanted to surprise me with it, she lost sleep staying up nights after we’d gone to sleep, and when she finally gave it to me I threw...oh, fuck!...I threw a fit because it was the wrong color, it didn’t match my shoes, and she felt so stupid because she’d never thought to ask me what color my shoes were, but I wasn’t about to wear any other shoes, so Dad had to dig into the savings to give me the money for a prom dress...”
Alan continued: “...and Mom felt like she’d failed you again.”
Marian felt one tear slip from her eye and slide down her cheek. “I never apologized for that. All these years, and I never apologized.”
“Know what she did with the dress?”