The room was lit in somber tones and she had to glance around, taking in details to make sure she was awake and it was actually morning.
Eric wasn’t in bed and the bathroom door was open. As she moved across the room she slowed, needing to reassure herself she wasn’t trapped in the nightmare she’d had two nights before. No, she could hear kids laughing down the street and someone was revving a weed-whipper obnoxiously. She was awake.
A near-scalding shower brought her fully conscious, and by the time she’d brushed her teeth and dressed in a comfortable set of sweats, the day before had taken on a hazy quality that didn’t prompt the same dread she’d fallen asleep to. The woman she saw in the mirror was herself.
Heartened, she went downstairs, smelling strong coffee. Eric must’ve risen early and made it, then ventured out for his Sunday morning run, because his shoes were absent from the entry. On certain weekends he would jog five, sometimes eight miles, not returning for hours.
Clare poured herself a cup of coffee and stood at the dining room window. The Millers’ dog, a yellow lab, jumped at the end of his chain in response to several kids playing tag down the street. One of the children did an impromptu cartwheel, bringing a half smile to Clare’s face. The sky was clouded but bright—a freshly laundered sheet stretched tight from horizon to horizon.
She decided to grab the new paperback she’d started a few nights ago and sit in one of the chairs on the porch, drink her coffee, and wait for Eric to get back. The fresh air would do her good.
She set her mug down and started toward the living room. Immediately her eyes flitted to the counter where the coin lay. Button. It was always just a button. But even as she continued around the island she felt herself stiffen and falter.
The wooden coin sat beside a coaster, its cross upraised and undeniable.
Clare squeezed her eyes shut. Opened them.
A button. Four little holes in its center.
She swallowed a surge of panic and continued to the stairway. A trick of the light along with what she’d feared she would see. That was it. That was all. She snagged her book off the nightstand and went back down the stairs.
She cut down the hallway behind the living room, fully focused on grabbing her coffee and heading outside, but something made her slow and stop short of the kitchen doorway. For several beats she couldn’t understand what it was. Something off, but unnamable. Clare looked back at the hallway to the stairs at its end. Nothing out of place. The small table they kept in the hall was in its customary place, a few knickknacks arranged on its top. A modest mirror hung above it. And the hall closet. Completely normal.
Except it wasn’t.
Clare stared at the closet. The open closet. It had been closed when she’d passed it initially. She was sure of it.
She huffed a laugh. Stupid. It had been open before, she just hadn’t noticed it. But as she stepped toward the closet the assurance teetered and fell apart. She specifically recalled walking past the closed door the first time. Now the opening gaped wide, the door folded almost flat against the wall.
“Eric?” she said. Her voice sounded strange, as if she’d spoken in a much smaller space than the hallway. The house lay quiet around her. The kids had fallen silent outside.
She took a step. Another, and stopped before the open door.
It was a typical hallway closet. Three feet deep, six feet wide. A few shelves to one side holding extra blankets, their winter clothes in plastic bins, and two sets of cross-country skis. But she couldn’t see any of that.
The closet was a rectangle of darkness.
Her stomach lurched. It was like someone had hung a black blanket over the inside of the doorway. She leaned first one way, then the other, trying to see through the gloom and make out something familiar. Anything. But there was only darkness.
It wasn’t real. Couldn’t be. She was seeing things again. Clare blinked, keeping her eyes closed for several seconds before opening them. The darkness remained unchanged. And now there was something else. A sound that hadn’t been there before. She cocked her head, thinking it was a car coasting by the house, but after a second she realized it was coming from inside the small space before her.
Whispering.
A low voice muttering words so quietly she couldn’t make them out.
This wasn’t happening. It was in her head. All in her head.
Clare took a step back but she bumped against the hallway’s wall. The darkness in the closet swirled like dust motes disturbed by someone’s passage. The whispering grew louder. She could almost hear the words. Could almost—
—make out what he’s saying, but not quite. Clare stands at the top of the basement stairs in the light of the late afternoon sun. Mother Charity and Shanna are readying for evening worship at the hall and she was charged with making dinner for her father. It’s ready, a plate steaming on the table, and she’s called to him twice but he hasn’t answered. She’s not sure he can hear her in the basement where he goes to have his visions.
She takes a step down onto the first tread and stops. The last time she’d been in the basement was years ago, almost too long to remember. It had been dark and dank and smelled like decaying earth, the air thicker and more oppressive than it had any right to be. Even now she always hurries past the closed and locked door on her way through the small house.
“Father,” she says, her voice weak. She takes another step down. Another.
There is a feeble glow of light and the smell of kerosene. She forces herself down, finally deep enough below the house she can see the entirety of the basement.
The kerosene lamp sits on a small altar at the far end of the room. A solitary cross illuminated a dull yellow hangs above it, its shadow jittering and distorted. Her father kneels before a rectangle of deeper darkness carved into the earthen floor. His hands are clasped before him, head lowered in supplication. He mutters under his breath.
A shape snags her attention beside what must be a hole cut into the floor. It’s a handmade conglomeration of boards nailed together to form what looks like a small door. It takes her half a beat to realize it normally covers the opening her father is kneeling in front of. Some kind of hatch he made for the hole.
She begins to call out for him again but stops herself short. His voice has risen slightly and she catches bits and pieces of what he’s saying.
“—into the abyss of sin and return gleaming of polished righteousness. Sacrifice is love and love cannot be denied. Your will unto us shall be done. Passage paid in toil and blood.”
The words send a ripple of goosebumps across her skin and the back of her throat tightens. She doesn’t think she could speak if she tried. And there is something else, which sends a sickening weight plummeting downward through her middle, as if there is a hole inside her to match the one in the floor.
Her father’s voice isn’t the only one she can hear.
Another, more guttural uttering is beneath his, speaking the same words a second before her father repeats them.
Shock and pure fright has staked her to where she stands until now. But as she hears the voice coming from the hole say her name, she scampers up the stairs, rushing blindly toward the faint light above, toward sanctuary. The last glimpse she sees is of her father’s head coming up and turning in her direction.
Clare looked up from the clenched fists she held in her lap. She was sitting on the floor of the hallway across from the closet. The memory of the basement burned away like an old spool of film held too long over a projector bulb. The wood of the hallway was cool beneath her. Solid. She could taste the coffee she’d sipped earlier along with acid on the back of her tongue. The closet door was still open and darkness remained solid inside it.