Arabella lay in bed with the gaslights off, the windows cracked open to the sound of wind slipping through the garden's dying leaves. She hadn't drunk tonight. That felt important. She wanted to feel this, whatever this was without the warm filter of absinthe.
Somewhere, a pipe groaned.
Another answered, deeper, like breath through a throat too long buried.
Eventually, she drifted off to sleep. She had a dream.
In the dream, the house was the same but wrong.
No color. No warmth. Just endless gray corridors, the floorboards were damp and soft beneath her bare feet. She wandered, lanternless, through rooms that bled shadow. The wallpaper peeled in strips like flayed skin.
Then she heard it.
A voice beneath her.
Calling her name.
It doesn't sound like a scream or a whisper, but something in between.
Arabella, the voice called again.
She dropped to her knees, pressed her ear to the floor.
It was Elia's voice calling her
He was laughing. No singing a lullaby in the wrong key. The kind he used to hum after too much brandy, when he thought himself poetic and gentle.
"Ara-bel… Ara-belle… in her pretty little shell…"
She scrambled to her feet, backing away from the boards. The floor pulsed beneath her like something breathing.
She turned to flee and behind her, Jonah stood.
He was soaking wet.
Mud clung to his legs. His eyes glowed faintly like twin coals beneath water.
He raised a hand, slowly.
"Don't let him out," he said.
Then the floor split open beneath her.
Arabella woke with a gasp, sweat-soaked and tangled in her sheets.
The gaslight beside her flickered low.
The window was open again.
She sat up, heart hammering, her throat dry and itchy.
Then she saw Jonah standing barefoot and silent in the doorway.
His shirt loose around his frame and his arms were resting at his sides.
He didn't move. But his eyes met hers.
Then slowly, his head tilted just slightly to the left as if he were listening to something she couldn't hear.