The Women in the Walls (19 page)

MY AUNT WAVES
frantically for me to come up to her, her fingers outstretched, pleading, desperate.

“How do you love your Mother now?” Clara cries in glee as she flings Mary-Anne's body twenty feet across the room, where it collides with the edge of the bar and goes spinning into the wall, blood spreading over the tiles in a spiral design. “Stretching my wings is just as lovely as I imagined it'd be.”

The other women let out startled screams and nearly trip over their high heels as they backtrack toward the door that leads to the dining room, leaving a clear path between where I'm standing and the grand staircase.

“It's your aunt,” Vanessa says, noticing Penelope now, too, who is still waving wildly. “What is she
doing
?”

“Calling for me.” I look back up at her, the woman I should hate, the woman who worships the thing that killed Margaret and so many others, my own mother included. I think of her passion when she spoke to me about the Mother in the attic, so very sure everything would be okay. She's been misled. She just needs to be snapped out of it by somebody. “I'm gonna go.”

“Are you sure we should go up the stairs?” she whispers, her eyes staying on Penelope. “That doesn't seem like the safest idea.”

“Clara has no interest in killing me,” I say again, remembering when she told me I was special. “And I never said anything about
we
. You should go out the front door, steal one of the cars in the driveway, drive to town and call 911 as soon as there's service.”

“You can't stay,” Vanessa begs. “You'll die if you stay, I just know it.”

“I won't be able to live much of a life if I run now,” I say, the truth evident to me. “I failed Margaret, and I thought I had the chance to redeem that, but it was a lie. I have to go with Penelope, she'll protect me, she
raised
me and...my father loved her.”

My words catch in my throat, and my eyes fill with unexpected tears as I think about my father trying to hold everything together with whatever information he did or did not have. I can't help but wonder if Miranda at least knocked him out before sawing him to pieces.

Vanessa hesitates for a moment, her lip trembling as Clara glides toward the women another few feet. The hum of the insectile buzz radiates through the parlor, along with the sharp clicks of clawed appendages on marble tile. “I...don't want to leave you,” she says finally. “We're in this together now. Just as long as you're sure she won't hurt us.”

“I don't think she will.” I look up at my aunt, still urging me to join her, pointing up even though she's on the third floor. “If the Mother has broken out, there's no more need for more deaths. Plus, she'll never leave this place unless I convince her to.”

“Fine,” Vanessa mumbles, scratching at the skin on her arms, her eyes still red from crying over her mother. “I don't know how to drive, anyway.”

“Me, either,” I say, the corner of my mouth turning up ever the slightest. “But don't say I didn't give you the chance to back out if something goes wrong.”

We crouch behind an especially tall houseplant while we wait for the room to clear. Nancy is bellowing out instructions as her group is pushed back, but it's doing little use. Clara's top appendage flings across the middle of another club wife's torso, disemboweling her. After a few seconds of shocked gasps, the woman falls into the pile of entrails at her feet.

“Stop this immediately!” Nancy cries. “Clara, I will punish this darkness out of you myself if I have to!”

“Now,” I whisper, when the three survivors duck into the dining room and Clara follows, still making that terrible skittering sound. “Run.”

Vanessa and I dash across the tile to the staircase, scrambling up the steps in a beeline for the third floor. “Lucy,” my aunt cries out in relief when I've reached her, and she pulls me into a hug. “We need to go, quick. If the passageway has been opened, we are free to use it.”

“Passageway?” I ask, but she's already rushing for the back hall, where the entrance to the attic is. “Where are we going? We need to get out of here!”

“There's a hidden way out that you can reach from the attic,” she calls back to us. “Nothing can touch us down there.”

Down there? But the attic is upstairs.

“Let's just hurry,” Vanessa urges me, starting to follow her. “I'll go anywhere that takes me away from that...
thing
.”

I hesitate for a moment before making sure that we're not being followed, then dash down the back hallway. In the attic the floor is covered in shards of wood from where the wall was busted out. We wade through the wood pieces to look into the massive hole that was made beside Penelope's bed.

There is a small space, maybe three to four feet wide, in between where the wood of the wall is and where the stone of the exterior wall sits solid and covered in spiderwebs. I stick my head in to see inside. In the back corner of the space, there is a ledge that opens into pitch darkness.

“Follow me,” Penelope says, making her way to the ledge. “There's not much time.”

“Not much time until what?” I ask, but she doesn't answer. “We can't go in without a light of some kind.”

“There's a flashlight in one of the boxes by the window,” Penelope says impatiently. “Hurry up if you're going to get it.”

Vanessa goes with me to find it. Once we've confirmed the batteries work, we crawl into the space behind the wall.

“What's that sack sitting against the stone?” Vanessa asks, squinting through the shadows as I point the light near our feet. “By where that ledge is.”

I point the light at it, the bag resting a few feet in front of Penelope. “This is mine,” my aunt says, pleasantly surprised. “I thought I lost it below. The Mother must have saved it for me.”

“Below?” I ask, my heart catching in my chest as Penelope swings herself over the side of the ledge. It takes me a few seconds to realize that there must be a ladder there.
To the below.

“Just follow me,” Penelope says and disappears as she starts to climb down. “And leave the bag—I don't need it anymore.”

Once she's completely out of sight, I use my fingers sparingly to pick open the top of the burlap sack resting in the back corner against the stone, tilting the light inside so I can peek in. There's nothing inside except for an old knife that I recognize, with a blade covered in dried flakes of blood, and an old photograph, curled at the edges and yellowing in spots over the surface.

It's the same photograph used in that newspaper article we saw in the archives, the group shot with Clara standing in front of her home for troubled youth. I look over the photograph again, understanding how I didn't see Nancy Shaw in it the first time. She looks so different without her painted lips and styled hair. But there she is, sure enough, standing proudly among the other women as a part of Clara's staff—the country club wives.

I slide the knife down the pocket of my dress, deciding not to tell my aunt I have it.
Just in case.

“I hear someone coming up the stairs to the third floor,” Vanessa says in a panic. “We have to get out of here, Lucy. We're going to be killed by that monster...”

“Hurry up!” Penelope's voice echoes from down below. “We're not there yet, but we're close.”

I follow Vanessa as she balances herself on the ladder, then begins the climb down. We climb for what feels like forever, the only sounds surrounding us the soft scratching of rat's claws on stone and the steady dripping of water.

All this time, the Mother has lived in the walls of the house, using Clara's body, skittering around and listening and killing with only her words. And Penelope, when she disappeared...where exactly was she? In the walls, too? But I saw her walk into the forest when she disappeared.

Once at the bottom of the ladder, Vanessa flashes the light around us, then up where we just came from to see if anyone is following us. The passageway is clear, for now.

“Where are we?” she says. “I don't think we're in the walls anymore. I think we're beneath the house.”

I take the flashlight, and Vanessa links her arm around mine. We're standing in a small stone room that has five different exits placed evenly apart around the perimeter. When I shine the light down them, it is revealed that each exit leads to a vastly long hallway with walls that are made of stone.

“They're tunnels,” I say aloud as I realize it, and Vanessa squeezes my arm with hers. “The estate is built over some sort of underground tunnel system.”

“Exactly,” Penelope nearly whispers. “Do you know how deep some of these go, girls? It's completely magnificent. If the Earth had veins, these would be it.”

Beyond the beam of the flashlight, the stone passageways reach into what seems like eternal blackness. It smells musty and dank, and it's freezing cold. I sincerely regret kicking my shoes off in the house earlier. If I'm in here too long, I might lose my toes or feet or worse.

“That one will lead you outside through the empty tomb in the cemetery,” Penelope says, pointing to the tunnel on the far right. “But that's not where we're going tonight. Tonight it's tunnel number three.”

“If that one leads out, we should go through it,” I argue. “Penelope, I know you love this Mother, but—”

“I hope you're not going to talk badly about Her,” she says, her tone low. “If you even knew what She's been through— She's a higher being, but it's not as though Clara is completely dead, either! There is a part of her that's still alive in her new form, all those memories and thoughts and feelings. The Mother feels everything Clara feels, the pain, the anger...”

“But Margaret died because of her,” I try, talking as calmly as I can through my chattering teeth.

“I told you not to talk about Margaret,” my aunt cries out, her voice bouncing off the stone walls. “The Mother must be allowed to take whatever measures necessary and all I have to do is have faith in Her decisions. No questions asked.”

Penelope starts scratching her head sporadically, walking in more exaggerated movements. I think about how filthy Penelope was when she finally returned home, how out of it she was. Howard said that she hadn't slept for days. She wasn't doing a ritual in the tomb, I think. She was wandering these tunnels.

But why? Why would the Mother let her live down here?

The knife rests heavily in my dress. I hope I haven't made a huge mistake. Vanessa stays close to me, about ten paces behind Penelope. I shine the light back to the front of the tunnel, wanting to run back and choose the one that I know for certain leads out.

“I can't go any farther,” I say and stop walking. “I'm going to go out the cemetery and leave this place.”

Vanessa lets out a sigh of relief from beside me.

“Don't be ungrateful now, Lucy,” Penelope says and stops as well, to turn around. “This is your destiny.”

“You said you were leading us out.”

“Did I not do that?” my aunt answers, reaching into her pockets. “Don't you want to get away from your life now, Lucy? With everything you've been struggling with, everything that's
wrong
with you?”

She pulls out the black leather wallet from Margaret's room. The one with the scalpel inside. The one that someone took out of my hands when I was sleeping last night. It was Penelope.

“That's not mine,” I say right away, despite the stupidity of the statement. I wrap my arms tighter around myself, take a step back, hate myself for not just leaving when I had the chance.
Too late now.
I'm always too late.

“Of course it's not yours,” my aunt says, her voice overly warm. “It's mine.”

THE WALLET DIDN'T
belong to Margaret. My cousin never coped the way I did, never counted hidden scars over and over again until the concept of numbers faded away. Even in the awful stone tunnel, the realization warms me, a tiny pardon after a long line of fuck-ups.

“But why was it in Margaret's closet?” I ask, wanting all the proof in the world that the scalpel wasn't Margaret's.

“I hid it in there, along with some other things,” Penelope says. “I don't use it in the same way you do, of course.” She makes a
tsk tsk tsk
sound with her tongue, like I'm being scolded for stealing a cookie before dinnertime. “I use it for much more practical things.”

She takes the scalpel out of the wallet now, flashes the blade at Vanessa and me. “And I could tell you all about those things, if you'd just come with me now.”

She's insane
, I realize, and the anger starts to bubble away uncontrollably inside. “You want to talk about faith?” I say, taking just one step forward, and Vanessa reaches out for my arm to stop me from going farther. “Do you realize how much faith I put in you, how many times I've had to give you the benefit of the doubt? In the end, it was for
nothing
!”

Penelope's eyes narrow just a bit. I step back and start making my way toward the other tunnel entrances, Vanessa close behind. “Lucy,” my aunt calls. “Come back here right now.”

“No,” comes my reply. As we make our way through the dark tunnel, I turn back every few seconds with the flashlight to make sure she isn't following us. When we finally step into the open stone room below the house, Nancy Shaw is standing there, shivering and alone.

“Thank God it's you,” she gushes at the sight of our faces. “I saw your light coming closer, and I thought maybe Clara had somehow gotten ahead of me...”

“Stay away from us,” Vanessa says right away. “We're leaving on our own. If you want to hash things out with Penelope, she's in the middle tunnel. Have a ball.” She pulls my sleeve toward the tunnel on the end and we inch away from the woman in the blood-splattered sequined dress.

“My sisters are all dead,” Nancy weeps, reaching out for us. “Please, please don't leave me, take me with you, we'll all escape together. I can pay you any amount of money that you desire. We've accumulated a massive amount over the decades.”

So that's where all the money came from. They already had it all saved up, ready to throw around for whatever reason they wanted. No wonder Gregory Shaw
settled
for Nancy over Penelope. The woman was filthy rich.

“No, thanks,” I say, removing the knife from the pocket of my dress and pointing it at Nancy. “Stay away from us so I don't have to use this, please.”

Vanessa suddenly stops dead, causing me to bump into her from behind. “Why did you stop?” I ask hurriedly, keeping my eye on Nancy.

“Because there's something standing in the doorway,” comes the horrified reply.

“Excuse me,” Clara's voice says from the darkness in front of the last tunnel. Vanessa shines the light on her—no monster appendages in sight. She looks like a regular woman wearing old-fashioned clothes. “I was just enjoying sitting in here, listening to sweet Nancy shiver in fear as she lives out the last few moments of her pitiful little life.”

“No,” Nancy cries, backing into the stone wall where the ladder is attached, leading to the house above. “Stay away from me. Haven't you done enough?”

“Enough?” Clara lets out a genuine laugh, long and rolling and filled with glee. “You want to cry uncle after seeing a few of your friends get their faces torn off? Nancy, Nancy, Nancy. Who do you think I am?”

Nancy Shaw puts her hands out in front of her—she must have lost her knife somewhere along the way.

“I bet you wish you had this, don't you?” Clara asks, producing the knife from her dress. The blade is identical to the one I'm holding myself. “Don't worry, sister dear.” She says the word with disgust. “I wouldn't dream of killing you any other way than how you killed me.”

And with that, Clara steps forward and plunges the knife into Nancy's neck. Almost as quickly, she removes it and sinks it in again, this time in the arm, then she moves to the chest, over and over and over again. “How does it feel?” Clara growls, the jovial expression gone, her eyes shining as she continues to stab Nancy.
“How does it feel, you miserable bitch?”

Nancy makes a few gurgling sounds, fear evident in her widened eyes. “Pleeth,” she manages, choking on her own blood. “No m-m-m...”

“No more?” Clara asks, cackling, but this time there is no joy in her laugh. “Oh, Nancy baby, we're only just getting started!”

And with that, Clara lets out a guttural scream as she quickens the pace of the stabs. She goes at Nancy's body again and again, harder each time, the insect-like clickings coming from beneath her skirt once again. Soon, Clara's screams are anything but human. She pounds away at the bloody mound of flesh and hair wrapped in green and red sequins, until the body starts to break apart.

I look to Vanessa and see that she's hiding her face. “We're going to die,” she whimpers, then starts reciting some prayer that I don't recognize; Catholic, maybe.

She doesn't see the shape of Clara's body change as the monster inside comes out, an ever-transforming form of pure terror and insanity; doesn't see Nancy's skull give in to the force of the appendages, collapsing in on itself like a hard candy with a creamy center.

When it's over, the appendages tuck themselves back in and Clara looks human again, except now her face is smeared with fresh blood.

“I'm sorry I lost my temper for a bit there, girls,” she says, taking a forceful deep breath and brushing a curl of dark hair off her forehead. “That one was a little personal for me.”

“Let us go,” Vanessa weeps, still covering her face. I can't look away from the pile that used to be Nancy, steaming in the cold, the bloody sequins glittering away.

“I almost forgot,” Clara says, turning back toward the pile. One quilled black appendage slithers out once again, to scoop up Nancy Shaw and shove what's left of her into a small opening between the stones that make up the wall. “
Now
we're even.”

“Revenge has been had at last!” comes Penelope's voice from behind us. Vanessa screams and jumps aside, and I step over to her, shining the light back to the third tunnel. My aunt sits crouched in the opening, her expression completely mad. “Now we can start our new lives.”

“New lives?” I ask hesitantly, waiting for Clara to move away from the opening of the tunnel that leads out so we can bolt through. I doubt the monster will let us out, but we have to try. “What are you talking about?”

“There's been a change in plans,” Clara says, looking down at Penelope with a sort of disgust on her face, like there's a stinking dog sitting on her brand-new carpet. “You can leave, servant.”

“But... What?” Penelope asks, devastation painting her previously gleeful face. “No, no, no, you said that if I showed my dedication, if I helped you get revenge...”

“What I
said
,” Clara interrupts, her upper lip curling into a snarl, “was that I would make you mine if you were able to do as you were told.”

“I have!” Penelope screams, stomping her foot like an upset child. “I've done everything you asked, haven't I?”

“No,” Clara says. “You couldn't handle yourself when you saw what else lies in these tunnels, the other lurkers with powers as wondrous as mine. You lost your mind. Look at you now, crouching there in the dark like some sort of rabid animal. You're weak.”

“I am not weak!” Penelope wails, collapsing at Clara's feet and grabbing on to her dress with both hands. “I even brought you my own niece, the one you said you couldn't crack yourself. I brought her here just for you!”

My stomach does a flop, threatening to empty its contents. Penelope dragged me down here as a trap.

“And look at her,” Clara says, looking at me with...pride? “Everyone I've ever encountered bent to my will and suggestion without a second thought, but not Lucy. She is strong. Stronger than you.”

Penelope looks at me with pure hatred, and I try to remember gardening with her when I was young, laughing over tomatoes and cucumbers while Margaret scowled in the background. I have wasted my entire life looking up to Penelope, wishing she was my mother, and looking down on Margaret for disrespecting her. But my cousin was right—Penelope is no mother at all.

“What are you talking about?” I say, and Clara steps away from the mouth of the exit tunnel to look into my face close-up.

“I mean, I choose you,” Clara answers, her eyes soft, her tone affectionate. “What is a Mother without a Daughter to teach everything she knows?”

“I'm your daughter!”
Penelope rages, crawling toward me with a strangled cry. I scream and step back, raise the blade at her to no avail, but Clara steps between us.

“You are not.” The Mother's warmth ceases as she looks down at my aunt. “You're so pathetic, you'd do anything I said. Anything.”

“I've done things for you!” Penelope tries again, standing up before Clara. “I dug up your old students from the cemetery, I pulled their teeth out, I
swallowed
them just to prove my dedication!” She moves forward, like she's going to try to hug the creature in the black dress, but Clara puts her hand up and says firmly, “Stop.”

Penelope stops.

“Open your mouth wide,” Clara says, and Penelope complies immediately, almost to the point where I wonder if she has any real control at all.

“Now spit them forward,” Clara continues, her smile widening wickedly like it did before she attacked the club wives. “Your dedication means nothing to me.”

Penelope leans forward and vomits, massively. At first I think it's just regular vomit, but almost immediately I hear the sound of teeth hitting the stone floor, like a bowl of beads that has been overturned. I watch my aunt retch as the teeth come out in thick waves, swimming in green bile, flooding over the stone floor, making scratching noises as they slide aside to make room for more.

When she's finished, my aunt gasps for breath, tears streaming from her eyes, her nose running.

“I think I'd like you to keep going,” Clara whispers, and Penelope's eyes widen. “Give me all you've got.”

At first, nothing. But then a gurgling sound comes from deep within Penelope's throat. Her eyes widen in disbelief, and then pain, and blood begins to dribble from her lips.

“What's happening?” I cry out, as something thick and pink pushes through Penelope's lips. She leans down, gagging and moaning, until the thing slithers out like a very long snake, piling on the stone floor in swirling coils over the teeth.

Her stomach.

But she's not done. More organs push themselves out of my aunt, spewing forth from her mouth before splattering onto the floor, and I can hardly hear the sound of my own thoughts over Vanessa's screams. I vaguely process that she's taken off through the exit tunnel, without the flashlight, without me. Clara does nothing to stop her.

Good
, I think, listening to the sound of her footsteps fade away into the darkness.
At least she got away.

When my aunt has finished throwing up her guts, she crumples to the floor, dead.

“She wasn't what I needed in a daughter,” Clara says, locking eyes with me, holding out her hand in the cold stone room of blood and death. “Her strength was superficial. But something tells me you're different. Something tells me you'll last forever and ever.”

“No,” I manage, realizing what it is that Clara is telling me. She lowers her hand back down when I don't take it.

“Yes.” The monster is grinning at me. “You'll do it or I'll make those scars you've carved into your body look like butterfly kisses.”

“Please...” I fall against the stone wall, my feet so cold I can't feel them anymore. “You can't make me do this.”

“But I need new worshippers now, Lucy,” Clara says. “All of mine have turned up dead, fancy that. And I know the perfect person to bring the newcomers in, dazzle them with this beautiful estate, tempt them with promises only I can keep...”

I scream out in agony, which only makes her smile widen. All of the things that drove me to hurt myself, all the pressures and expectations that made me miserable—I'm never going to escape them. I'm going to live them forever.
An Acosta must never lack control. She must keep her back straight, and her clothes ironed, and her expression placid. She must refuse to be seen unless her hair and makeup have been set. She wears her armor like scales on a snake: patterned, impervious, perfect. She understands that smiling is tactical, that words are for getting things that you want, that tears have no use except to expose disgusting, snotty shortcomings.