The Women in the Walls (18 page)

On the center platter rests a head, one that I immediately recognize as my father.

MY MIND GOES
back to when I heard the power saw in the garage earlier, and how I became confused at the raw turkeys in the refrigerator. The turkeys never made it to the oven. They weren't the cause of the roasting meat smell that's been thickening the air of the house for hours, after all.

My father's hair is still combed to the side. His mouth is open and filled with a bread stuffing of some sort, which overflows onto the platter that the head rests sideways on. His eyes are sewn closed.

My knees give out and I fall onto my hands, the marble tile cold and gritty beneath them. My breath is heaving; I'm struggling not to pass out. “No,” I try to yell, but it comes out like a strangled cry instead.

“Everybody eat up while it's hot,” Miranda's voice calls from somewhere hidden from view around the corner, closer to where the entrance to the kitchen is. “Your host wouldn't want anybody to go home hungry.”

Cries of disgust and terror erupt from the club members. Miranda killed my father. How, why,
why
? I think of her strung-out appearance, how Vanessa claimed she was acting different, and that she had feelings for my father. She couldn't have done it of her own free will, right? There had to have been something else that caused her to do it. That doesn't change that I'll never see my father again, never struggle to understand what he was thinking, never wonder if he really loved me.

He doesn't love anybody now.

“Oh my God,” Vanessa whimpers from beside me. She takes another step forward to the door. “What has she done?”

I hear the sound of a chair scraping across the tile, then Gregory Shaw's voice, shaky but booming. “Stay where you are,” he calls to Miranda from across the room. “If you take one more step—”

Vanessa leans down and helps me climb to my feet. We're holding on to each other, keeping each other up, when there comes the earsplitting pop of gunshots, three right in a row followed almost simultaneously by the hard thunk of a body hitting the floor.

“Mom!” Vanessa screams, pulling away from me to tear into the room. I try to grab her shirt, but just like that time in the attic with Margaret, I miss by an inch.

“Don't go in there!” I urge in a loud whisper, but she's already through the doorway. I can't go after her. Not with my dad and Miranda and Gregory Shaw. Penelope has to be around here somewhere. Maybe she's in the attic—that's where she told me to go after the party was over. Miranda was clearly lying when she said my father and aunt had run away together.

Kicking my shoes off so they won't make any noise on the tile, I run to the stairs and start climbing them. I pass the second floor without hesitation, making my way as quickly as possible to the third. Once I reach the top, I turn to make sure nobody's come looking for me yet. The enormous room that looms below is empty. The silence from inside the dining room causes my skin to break out into goose bumps.

I run down the hallway without turning on the lights, then scramble up the miniature staircase below the attic. The single bulb is lit, filling the room with a dim yellow glow, but Penelope's bed is empty.

What could have happened to her? Did Miranda kill her, too, or did she run back to the woods? I nearly throw myself to the floor next to the wall, the same one that Margaret was leaning against before she jumped out the window.

“What am I supposed to do?” I cry out loud, the image of my father's head on a platter still burned in my brain. I should just get out, leave without a word to anybody. If I hurry, maybe I can sneak out through the front door and steal a car from outside.

“Nothing,” Margaret's voice comes from behind me, causing me to scream. “You lost the chance to escape what will come now.”

A scatter of clicks moves around the surface of the wall from the other side.

“Please,” I beg, hitting my hand against the wood. “Penelope promised she'd tell me how to free you! But I don't know where she is, and the police are going to be here soon, and...”

“There won't be any police.” Her voice is softening, deepening somehow. I have to lean my ear against the wall to hear her clearly. “And there's no reason for you to try to help free me anymore. My demands have been met by someone else.”

“What demands?” I don't like how she sounds, so cold, so different, so unlike my cousin. “Margaret? What happened to your voice?”

“Oh, sweet child,” comes the reply. “Over the years, I have become a thing of many voices.”

I pull my ear away from the wall quickly, the blood in my face like ice. “Where is my cousin?” I demand, slowly getting to my feet. “Where are Margaret and my mother?”

“They're dead,” the voice says simply. “But I know you just as well as they did, if not better. I've been here for a long, long time.”

All those times that I thought I was talking to them, how much I missed my cousin, how much I wanted to help her, how I felt when I first heard my mother's voice. It wasn't even them.

“What is happening?” I cry, my hands coming to rest on the sides of my face.

“A growth spurt,” the voice says. “Felix's death has completed the spell, and Miranda's, well...Miranda's just added an extra bit of flair, shall we say.”

A wave of nausea rolls over me as I realize what the voice is saying: that every death that took place in the house made it stronger somehow. But what is it? More important, what has it grown into?

“I have to say,” it continues. “At first you were to just be more fuel for me, more energy, but you never gave in to the madness I instilled, like the others did. There's something...special about you.”

So Margaret was manipulated into losing her mind by the voice, which made itself sound like Penelope for her. Then it sounded like Margaret for me. I wonder what Walter heard in the walls, what Miranda heard in order to cut my father to pieces and roast him in the oven.

I take a step backward toward the latched attic door. “What spell?”

“The spell to set me free, of course.” There comes a lively series of light taps that dance all over the surface of the wall. “The process of getting revenge on those who put me here. The process of
metamorphosis
, sweetling. My transformation is complete.”

With that, there comes a cracking boom so loud that I cry out without meaning to and stumble back, almost falling. Something hits the wall from the other side, hard, then again but even harder.

Boom.

Dust rises from the surface of the wall as it rattles.

Boom.

A small crack awakens down the center of the wood, about two feet high. My breath catches in my throat.

BOOM.
The crack deepens and grows vastly in size as splinters of wood are spit forward.

I make a hurried dash to the secured attic door and heave it open, only going down the first few steps before jumping the rest of the way to the third floor. As I hit the ground, I hear an explosion of wood in the attic above me, along with the sound of pieces of the wall skidding across the floor. I stand up and sprint down the hallway to the grand staircase. The entry room is still empty, but I can hear the sound of people talking in hushed, angry tones in the dining room, where my father was served for dinner.

I go down the stairs so fast it feels like I'm gliding, but running across the tile floors with stocking feet proves to be more difficult than I'd wish. I burst into the dining room, not caring if the people inside mean to murder me.

“Where's Vanessa?” I shout at the club members who are still seated around the grisly scene on the table. “What are you all still doing here? We need to get out!”

This is when I realize that even though Gregory Shaw is sitting upright and still in his chair, his throat has been slit. Red soaks the front of his suit, and his eyes are wide-open. Beside him, Kent Dickens sits the same way.

I look slowly to Nancy Shaw, grand, glamorous Nancy Shaw with her brightly painted mouth and love for vodka martinis. She sits beside Kent, very much alive. In fact, all the wives are alive.

“Don't be too frightened, dear,” Nancy says, and takes a sip from the wineglass in front of her. She nods to her dead husband. “I killed him myself. He discovered far too much about the true value of this place, beyond the money, thanks to what happened to Felix. And, well...” She drains her glass, looks over at Gregory's body regretfully. “That simply wasn't any of his business.”

I'm frozen in place, too scared to move.

“But I would never dream of hurting
you
, of course,” she continues when she sees my face. “You're an Acosta.”

“There's something coming,” I say, my ears buzzing at what she just said. “From the attic, we have to go before it kills us.”

“Oh, I'm counting on her to come down.” There's a sudden edge to Nancy's voice. I look to count the other women who sit silently with their eyes on mine; there are four of them. “It's her fault that all of this happened, after all. When Penelope first disappeared, we became confused. When Margaret died, we became curious. And when Penelope returned, well...” Nancy takes another sip of her wine. “When she returned, we became suspicious. Enough to send Howard in to keep an eye on things, anyway.”

So Howard the nurse was a spy for the club—more specifically, for the club wives.

“Who is she?” My hands are trembling so badly I'm afraid I might lose the ability to use them. “How do you know her?”

“Her name is Clara, dear,” Nancy says. “And we're the ones who killed her.”

No. “How could you know Clara Owens?” I say in a near whisper. “She died in 1903.”

A massively uneasy quiet settles over the room; the calm before the storm.

“I see you've been doing your homework,” Nancy says, her fuchsia mouth pulling into a frown. “I sure wish you hadn't done that. It's not that it matters to
me
, but you've been digging into some pretty big stuff. The kind of stuff you wouldn't want to entangle yourself with if you have hopes of ever looking the other way.” She sighs. “I'm sure the Mother is well aware of your presence by now.”

The Mother. It wasn't just Penelope serving her.
How were these women alive in 1903?

I brace myself for them to get up and come at me, slit my throat just like they did their apparently disposable husbands, but it would seem that the women have no intention of hurting me. In fact, some of them look into my face with a sort of pained pity, a nostalgia, as if they care about me.

“What about my aunt Penelope?” Penelope was friends with these ladies; all the stress surrounding the club had always seemed to come from the husbands. “Where is she if my father's dead?”

“If she's alive, and something tells me she is,” Nancy says, “I'll find her. She was strong, that one. An heir of the sacred grounds, eager to join us. Still, that was before Clara got to her behind our backs, poisoned her mind with whatever lies I can't imagine.” She lets out an exaggerated huff, lifts a hand to check her hair. “We could have just
sworn
that bitch was dead!”

The other women nod in agreement. I struggle to keep up: the club wives were secretly a part of some sort of coven that Penelope was joining, a coven that makes you immortal somehow? In the worst way, Margaret would have thought this was hilarious—the women we used to make fun of for their face-lifts and antiaging tactics literally
do not age
. How is that possible?

“Nancy?” a voice calls from the entry room behind me, from somewhere up the stairs. I recognize it immediately as the one from the attic. It's much clearer now that it's not being muffled by the wall, energized and lightened and singsong. The sound of it causes the skin on my back to break into a sweat. “Is that you I hear down there, my love?”

“IT'S BEST YOU
run along now, dear,” Nancy says, her voice lost of all frilly charm. “Find your friend in the kitchen and get out. There's more mess ahead and I'm afraid you've seen enough.”

The realization is like a punch to the stomach: this is what Penelope had been talking about last night—the reckoning for the
club
. She meant the wives. Why couldn't she have told me that? Did she think I'd try to get involved? Another realization, even worse: she must have known that someone would have to die in order for Clara's transformation to be complete, whatever that means.

We'll show him
, she said.

Gregory. She'd said that Gregory had caught her
serving the Mother
, and that the Mother couldn't be exposed. He must have had no idea that his own wife was a follower, too. None of the husbands knew the truth.

The other women sitting around the table rise, anger slowly painting their faces as they step around the table to go into the entryway.

I hurry away in the opposite direction, to the kitchen, where I find Vanessa sitting against the wall with the body of Miranda draped over her lap, bullet wounds over her face and throat and chest. I think of how she sounded when she announced the serving of my father's corpse. I wonder what Clara said to her to push her over the edge into insanity; how many nights she had to keep her awake to string her out enough to go through with it. I wonder whose voice she used when she did it.

“He shot her,” Vanessa whispers when she sees me. Her face is streaked with tears, and her eyelids are droopy as if she's drunk. “Then his wife said something about how Clara was back, ‘somehow.' The women were upset about it, but the men didn't understand. When they tried asking about it, their wives slit their throats. They all had the same knife.”

I remember the blade that I found in the attic when I was ten, with its distinctive curve and handle.
Forget coven
, I think in horror.
It's a fucking cult.

“I'm so sorry, Vanessa,” I say and drop to my knees beside her. “But we have to go now.”

“Clara,” she answers, still staring into space. “Isn't that the name of the lady we found at the library?”

“Yes,” I say and gently pull her out from underneath Miranda's body. The dead woman's eyes are partly open, and her mouth is a mess of blood and meat. “I don't know how or why, but she's been haunting the house. Waiting until there were enough deaths to give her the power to...bust out.”

I break into a sweat again. What's Clara doing now? What is she planning? How invincible is she?
Trust me
, Penelope's words echo in my head.
Come find me.

“That doesn't make sense.” Vanessa shakes her head as she looks down at all the blood on her outfit. “None of this does.”

A sound rolls in from the parlor: laughter, fast and high-pitched. Clara Owens.

“We can't go through the garage,” I say in a mangled whisper, remembering that it was where my father was dismantled. “We'll have to sneak around to the front door.”

Vanessa and I move through the dark hallway, the sounds of Nancy and Clara talking closer with each step. I think of when Clara said there was something
special
about me. I don't think I want to know what that means, but at least she isn't aggressively pursuing Vanessa and me. As we round the corner to the entryway that goes into the parlor, I can hear Nancy speaking from the room beyond as we step through the shadows.

“...after all this time.”

“Yes, well,” the voice of Clara says as Vanessa and I peek around the corner of the hall into the entry room. “I had all the time in the world to figure out how I'd shed enough blood to come back for you,” Clara continues. “And like you said—after all this time, here we are!”

As terrified as I am to see Clara in the flesh, I'm too curious not to look.

Nancy Shaw and the four other club wives are gathered on the tile around the base of the grand staircase, looking ridiculous in their elaborate holiday outfits—one woman even wears a tinsel-silver dress with real ornaments on it. About halfway up the steps stands a woman in a black floor-length gown of old Victorian design. Pearls hang in long loops over the front, and a small black hat sits on her head. I recognize her immediately as the woman in the photo from the library.

That's who I've been talking to all this time, the thing that's lurked inside the walls of the house for over a hundred years. There were never any spirits or ghosts, after all. I think of all the things she said to me as Margaret,
stay, you were never there for me, we were best friends until we weren't anymore
. Over the years, Clara didn't just listen to us. She got to know us, too. And she knew all the right things to say to each person to get what she wanted.

“And then?” Nancy says, sounding angry. “You preyed on the newest sister to the coven, and for what? To turn her against us?”

“How does it feel to be betrayed?” Clara nearly spits, losing her composure. “After you tried to end me, you used the sacred grounds but were too afraid to live on it yourselves anymore. You had to set up a steady resident that was at your mercy, is that it? So that just in case I came back, you'd be out of danger?”

“Penelope was a dedicated servant to the Mother,” Nancy says, shaking her head stubbornly. “You were no such thing.”

“Penelope has her own role to play,” Clara states, straightening her back and keeping her voice level. “And the Mother who brings the sanctity to these grounds isn't pleased with you.”

“You're wrong,” Nancy says, reaching into her holiday dress that's dazzled with red and green sequins and retrieving a small, curved blade—I'm sure it's the knife she used on Gregory, the matching knives that all the women have. “The gift of eternal life has continued to be given with every ritual we do. We are supported.”

“Of course you are.” Clara takes a step down, then another. “So why do you think the Mother took pity on me, allowed me to be reborn from the ground up, a squirming infant worm inside a magnificent stone cocoon of darkness? Who do you think
processed
the power of those deaths, made them matter in the first place, molded them into what would become my wings?

“I'll give you a hint,” she continues. “It's me. You've got your Mother right here.”

“These are sacred grounds built to serve the Mother you speak lies of!” one of the women behind Nancy cuts in, pulling out her own blade. The others do the same. “How dare you?”

“This place doesn't belong to you,” Clara hisses, bending over a tiny bit at the waist as she cocks her head to the side. “Clara's intuition for the Mother was always the strongest. That's why she was the one to lead you originally. But none of you wanted the truth. Nobody wanted to face that the price for eternal life is death. And when Clara did things right, started sacrificing the students she'd collected in her home here...you all murdered her. You betrayed her. You wanted all the benefits of my power without having to actually earn them.”

The price for eternal life is death.

“But...you are Clara!” Nancy says, confused. “Why are you speaking as if you're not?”

“Because I'm the one who found Clara,” the woman in the black dress says, her breath beginning to heave. “My precious servant, like a daughter to me, stabbed all over the place and then stuffed into the walls and left to rot. But she was barely alive, and in her last breaths, she whispered to me, called out for me, begged for me to help her.”

Nancy's eyes have grown wide in fear.

“So I
became
her,” the thing in Clara Owens's body continues. “Let her body evolve and grow into what it is now with the help of my power. Promised her that she would have her revenge, no matter how long it took. Kept you all alive long enough for me to get it for her.”

A great rise of sound comes from below the floor-length skirts of Clara's dress, the same echoing skitter that reminds me of the song of cicadas in the summer, the same sound she made one of the first times I heard her inside the walls.

“Which reminds me,” Clara says, her smile growing wider and wider. “It's time to pay up for all the years I've lent to you.”

The woman who spoke up behind Nancy lets out a frustrated scream and runs toward the woman in the long, black dress. I recognize her now as Kent Dickens's wife.

“Mary-Anne, no!” Nancy cries, keeping her own blade raised.

Before Mary-Anne can slash her little, curved blade across Clara's throat, she is impaled through the center of her face by the black clawed appendage that has risen from beneath the skirts of Clara's dress. It bends in many places, a slithering multi-jointed leg that is riddled with sharp, black quills. A few more of the appendages sprout out from beneath, lifting Clara a few inches off the ground, the pointed toes of her laced boots hovering in midair. Two other appendages uncurl from her back and rise up on either side of her head, the claws at the ends gnarled and shining.

“Oh my God,” Vanessa moans from beside me, staggering in place. “Oh my fucking God.”

We both fall back a little, although we're far enough away to go unnoticed in the commotion. My instincts urge me to take Vanessa and run out the front door only twenty feet away, leave our parents' bodies behind, leave the estate behind, forever. I stand to do so when I see movement at the top of the grand staircase.

It's Penelope.