Chapter 5 - The Receding Valley
My father’s head appeared at the turn of the stairs. He was no longer standing. He was attached to my mother’s back, his chest fused to her spine by thick, fibrous ropes of white fungus that looked like root systems. His eyes were wide and milky with cataracts, but he was still breathing, his chest rising and falling in an unnatural, syncopated rhythm with hers.
"Rachel," he wheezed, his mouth filling with white froth. "Don't... don't touch the bone. The water... the water remembers everything."
My mother’s body lunged forward with a terrifying speed. She didn't use the stairs; she leaped from the third step, landing on all fours on the cavern floor with a heavy, wet impact that cracked the stone beneath her hands. Her head snapped toward me, her baleen-lined mouth opening to emit a high, piercing shriek that shattered every porcelain doll on the vanity.
The girl in the wicker chair didn't flinch. She let out her own cry—a deep, booming roar that didn't belong in the chest of a child. It sounded like the grinding of tectonic plates, the sound of a mountain splitting in half.
The vibration hit me like a physical blow, knocking me sideways against the iron vanity. My hand closed around the bone key before I even realized what I was doing.
The skin of the key was warm. It felt like holding someone’s wrist while they had a fever.
"Open it!" the girl screamed, her brown eyes completely disappearing behind her horizontal lids as they clamped shut. "The drain is behind the mirror! Open the lung!"
My mother’s body was scrambling toward me, her webbed hands tearing chunks of limestone out of the floor with every stride. My father’s head, dangling from her shoulder like a useless tumor, kept whispering my name over and over, his voice fading into a wet gurgle.
I didn't look at them. I swung the iron vanity mirror outward.
Behind the heavy glass, embedded in the raw rock wall of the cavern, was a circular bronze plate about the size of a ship's porthole. At its center was a small, triangular keyhole that matched the shape of the bone key in my hand.
The air coming from the keyhole didn't smell like Strawberry Shortcake anymore. It smelled like dead fish, black mud, and the immense, crushing weight of an underground ocean that had been trapped beneath the valley since the glaciers melted.
I shoved the bone key into the slot.
It turned easily, with a soft, organic click that felt like a joint slipping back into place.
For a second, nothing happened. The screaming stopped. My mother’s body froze three feet from me, her webbed hand outstretched, the translucent ridges of her teeth inches from my throat. My father’s eyes went dark, his last breath leaving his body in a long, rattling hiss.
Then, the floor beneath us dropped four inches.
A sound began deep within the earth—not a roar, but a long, slow sigh. It sounded like the valley was finally letting go of a breath it had been holding for a hundred years.
The white fungus on the walls began to turn black, rotting away into a greasy sludge in a matter of seconds. The stone pillars supporting the arches began to flake, their outer layers peeling away like wet cardboard.
"Thank you, Mommy," the girl said.
I looked back at her. She was no longer standing. The white tendrils connecting her to the floor had grown thick as tree trunks, wrapping around her legs and pulling her down into the cracking stone. Her skin was turning grey, her red hair falling out in clumps to reveal the smooth, hairless scalp of the things from the wall.
She wasn't my daughter. She had never been my daughter. She was just the shape the house had given her to keep me from running away until the cycle was complete.
"Goodbye, Lily," I said.
May you like
The bronze plate blew inward with the force of a cannon shot.
A column of black, brackish water hit me square in the chest, throwing me backward through the pantry opening and onto the yellow linoleum of the kitchen.
