House of Cabal Volume One: Eden (21 page)

“Make sure you attend. There have been
complaints. You're on thin ice.” Becky slipped away and let the
door shut in Isabel's face.

Old dingbat
, Isabel thought, trying to
minimize her anger. Becky wasn't going anywhere. She was as much as
fixture of the school as the gargoyles on the front of the
building.

The children continued to draw in grim
concentration.

“Ten more minutes.”

After college, Isabel had volunteered in
Venezuela, and the kids there had always been playful and eager to
learn—poor and dirty, but quick with smiles and laughter. She
missed them, or more precisely missed being the naïve idealist that
viewed every one of them as a growing seed of hope. It felt like a
lifetime ago.

She did her job at Lumen Christi—put in long
hours, did as she was told—but no longer risked emotional
investment. That didn't mean she didn't take pride in her work; it
just meant being practical. Like with the rest of her life, she got
what she needed and tried to require as little as she could in
return. Now everything ran smoothly.

An unnatural skittering flittered back and
forth in the classroom and gave her a frightening chill. She looked
for its source, but the sound stopped. Was it the pipes again? It
seemed unlikely. The lights had flickered too, but none of the
children seemed to have noticed. Was it her vision that had
flickered?
Did I just have a stroke or something?
she
wondered.
No, why would I think that? Everything's fine.
Whatever it was, things felt normal again.

Over the summer, an electrician had installed
brighter lighting. Despite this (and the rainbow alphabet, and
silly posters, and day-glow bulletin board), the room still held
its gloomy atmosphere.

Of course she'd heard the stories about the
basement, but ghosts didn’t exist; why would Satan’s minions
trouble themselves with moving around furniture and making strange
noises just to scare the custodians? Faulty wiring and unreliable
power sources made lights flicker, not the spirits of the dead.

Alexander Stonecipher’s hand shot up.

“Yes. Alex.”

Still sitting at his desk, the boy held out
his drawing. Its subject matter faced the floor and the lower
chambers. Isabel walked forward, her hands clutched at her chest.
It was a child’s picture, that’s all, yet dread made her hesitate.
She knelt and took the picture: A big crayon sun.

“Very good,” she said tightly, still not
relieved. “I’m sure your mother will love this.”

“Why do children die?”

Some of the other children looked up from
their drawings.

Alex’s father had died of pneumonia only six
months before—his mother had sent Alex to school with a handwritten
letter that looked like it was from the 1800s—and so it was no
wonder death occupied his mind. “Well, Alex, all things die
eventually. It’s part of God’s plan. Don’t worry. You’re going to
live for a very long time. Here.” She tried to give the picture
back, but he shook his head.

“It’s for you. Because you lost your
baby.”

She looked back at the drawing. It wasn't a
sun, as she first assumed; it was a yellow snake eating its own
tail.

“It’s an ouroboros,” he said with pride.

She grabbed his arm. “How did you…” Loss hit
her in the gut, a physical pain that made her eyes water, and she
could no longer make out the snake, only the circle that it made.
God! It had been six years since Taylor died, and yet it was still
a sucker punch to remember. An empty crib. A silent apartment.

“It’s not your fault,” Alex said. “They all
lose their babies to the House of Skulls.”

4

That night in Stonecipher House, Molly
pretended to sleep under an old quilt hand-stitched by her mother
from rent dresses.

An oak crucifix carved by a Muslim slave
during the Middle Ages hung on the wall, and the
realistically-rendered Christ, in striking sorrow and agony,
watched over Molly in her bed. Lashes crisscrossed his emaciated
abdomen and obvious ribcage, and carved blood rivulets streamed
from his thorn crown. Below the corpus, a skull and crossbones
referred to the original name of Calvary: the Place of the
Skull.

Molly bided her time under the cover, her
slight body trembling with anticipation. Jacobi House waited. Its
form loomed behind her eyelids and grew there like a carnivorous
plant that wanted to swallow her up. She wiped her sweaty palms on
her nightgown and turned her head against the pillow.

Molly wasn't the only Stonecipher awake and
disturbed by the house next door. At the end of the hall, Alex ran
water into a glass in the bathroom sink.

A naked light bulb, screwed in beside a
medicine cabinet, gave off harsh light and heat. The boy repeatedly
glanced at the intense filament and then watched the spot in his
vision fade. How long before the light permanently scarred his
retina? Maybe then the darkness would stay away.

He poured the water down the sink and
refilled his glass. If he went back to bed he'd just have another
nightmare: a black terror-void, fangs and hissing. His dry tongue
stuck to the roof of his mouth. The dream of rope burns still stung
his wrists.

Cold water from the tap on his wrists muted
the phantom pain, a little.

He remembered the drawing he had made for his
teacher, how his hand seemed to move on its own. How long had he
not been himself? And if he wasn't himself, who was he?

Father's razor was missing from the medicine
cabinet, likely thrown out by Mother. He closed the cabinet and
looked again in the mirror. He expected to see someone else, but a
little boy still looked back.

“Escape,” he saw himself say.

A stone carved with the word “Lamb” rested on
a shelf next to a pile of hand towels. The stone and the crucifix
were the only decorative things in the house.

“Let her…”

If he hooked his thumb in the “L,” he could
hold the stone in one hand without the risk of dropping it. He knew
if it slipped, it could crush his toes.

“Don't…” In his mind a woman in a dirty slip
ran barefoot down Ferry Street. Old lips sewn up tight with fishing
line made the boy flinch.

The weeks following their father’s death,
Alex often dreamed of running away; he imagined stuffing his
backpack with peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and running north
as far as Washington, maybe even farther.

With Father gone, the ceiling of religion
came down until the only thing to do was to crawl. Then Alex
started first grade, and life became bearable again. His teacher
was a beacon in a darkening world. He now suffered through the
nights knowing relief came in the mornings. He thought his sister,
who never left the house, who never talked with anyone outside the
family, must long for escape every minute.

He thought wrong. His sister never dreamed of
escape, because she never even knew it existed.

Molly, deciding everyone finally slept,
folded back the quilt, and slipped out of bed without a sound. Her
heavy nightgown hung to the floor. It was too dark to see anything
besides the square of her window, but she knew her room; there was
nothing to trip on, and with purpose, she tiptoed forward.

She felt her desk and climbed on top.

Out the window, the gabled roof of Jacobi
House pressed against clouds lit by downtown Portland.

The window slid up easily this time, and air
rushed in too warm for a night this late in September, like an
exhaled breath. It swirled the room and creaked her door open.

Light intruded from the hall. She looked back
at her open door. There Alex stood in his starched PJs, his right
arm dangling straight from the weight of the stone in his hand.

“Are you running?”

She shook her head. “I lost her. To the
house.”

Alex didn't understand whom she had lost. She
didn’t have friends, and their mother slept soundly downstairs. He
didn't know about Dolly.

His sister didn’t explain; instead, she
awkwardly backed off the desk and out the window into the night. He
did nothing to stop her.

“
Don't let her escape
,” he heard his
mind say. But Molly wasn't trying to escape; she was going to the
house.

The house would have her.

5

In the blustering wind outside the window,
Molly clung to the top rung of the emergency fire escape ladder
that led from the second story window to the yard.

If she fell, surely she'd break all her
bones.

God will protect me.

As she descended, she stared at each
ladder-rung instead of the yard below. At about halfway down, an
anguished scream from Jacobi House startled her. With her arm
hooked around a ladder-rung, she listened. The scream could be from
a woman, but Molly knew that men, when truly terrified, could sound
like women too.

The scream cut off.

“Molly!” It was Alex, leaning out the window
with the “Lamb” stone in his hand. Shadow hid his expression, but
moonlight shone on the stone, which hung directly above Molly's
face. Seeing it dangle there, she flinched and tensed up.

“I’ll pray for you,” he said.

She hurried down the rest of the way to the
yard. Her bare foot touched grass, and she leaped away from the
side of the house. Once at a safe distance, she looked back up.

Her room was dark. Her brother was gone from
the window.

Jacobi’s surrounding wall towered taller than
it had ever towered before, and she traced her hand along its rough
stones and stepped through fallen leaves. As a game, she and her
brother often dared each other to touch the wall, but tonight that
transgression was nothing because far worse was still to come; she
was going to slip through the gate and search the grounds of Jacobi
House.

Be brave
, she told herself.
Be
brave
!

Sticks and rocks stabbed at her soles, and
when the pain felt too sharp, she quickly hopped to the other
foot.

At the east edge of her family’s property ran
Ferry Street. No one drove this street at night (a drop to Sellwood
Park and the Willamette River created a series of dead ends that
stymied any through traffic), but street lamps lit the way with a
pale, sickly light that gave her confidence.

She continued around the corner of the wall
and up the sidewalk. Ahead, past Jacobi House’s outer wall and gate
at the street's end, a metal railing and a warning sign stopped
cars from plummeting into the park hundreds of feet below. Jacobi
House was the last house before the drop-off, and from the
sidewalk, and also from the riverbank below. The surrounding wall
made the Jacobi estate look like a windowless warehouse. She
touched each lamp post as if playing a game of tag until she
reached a gravel driveway and a massive iron gate that blocked the
way into the grounds. A two-hundred-year-old black cherry tree
stood next to the gate like a sentry standing guard.

A hundred years ago, the tree wept blood at
the witching hour, but its tears had long since dried up. Even a
tree can only weep for so long.

Molly peered through the bars. The street
lamp behind her cast light a few yards into a courtyard, Past that,
the dark form of Jacobi House, a cross between a two-story hotel
and a Gothic Revival church, loomed in the moonlight. Her mother
had forbidden her from entering this place, but her mother forbade
her everything.

The iron bars left grease on Molly’s fingers
as if she'd been eating her mother’s fried chicken. The girl
slipped her arm and shoulder through without any trouble, and then
with a little more force her head popped to the other side. She
kept pushing forward, and the farther the bars slid across her
chest, the more they felt like a tightening snare.

Two dark figures advanced in the shadows of
the courtyard. The first figure had a bloody hacksaw used
exclusively to cut off the heads of children, and the second figure
had a pair of sheering scissors the length of Molly’s forearm. They
hid their weapons behind their backs as they crept forward. Molly
didn’t see the weapons, just the dark forms advancing. Though not
threatening in size, the forms moved with stealth, like shadows
come alive.

The little girl cried out and tried to pull
back, but her efforts wedged her tighter between the bars.

She whimpered, mewling like a caught
animal.

6

“Little girl!” the first figure said in a
hoarse voice that seemed to cross an impossible distance to reach
Molly’s ears.

Still panicked, Molly pulled and squirmed.
She tried to get her head back through, but her ears caught on the
bars. Despite the pain, she kept pulling and squirming and finally
slipped free just as the two figures reached the edge of the
light.

“Don't go!”

The streetlamp illuminated the first figure’s
bloodstained clothes, but the light failed to reveal a face. The
second figure hung back in the darkness, almost invisible.

Molly wanted to rub the hurt from her ears,
but was too afraid to move. “Are, are you a ghost?” she stammered.
Did the things have substance or would they just pass right through
the chained and padlocked gate?

“Ghosts are make-believe, sweetie.” A
blood-caked hand reached into the light and pointed. “Right over
there, hanging on that tree...”

On the backside of the gnarled cherry tree
hung a key on an iron spike.

“All you have to do is get that key, and you
can free us.”

They're trapped!
Molly realized.
They can't get me!

Body odor wafted from the other side of the
gate, and there was something even fouler underneath. The girl put
her hand to her nose to ward off the stench. She didn’t think
ghosts would smell.

“No-no-no, be a good girl. Molly, you're a
good girl, aren't you?”