by Lyndsie Manusos
Please enjoy this first chapter from our newly released novella From These Dark Abodes, available in print and ebook here.
I.
Lethe spent the first part of each evening in the storeroom.
She heard the gramophone drone on, its scratching song of night. It was the same crooning melody over and over. The sound made home in her head, an infinite itch of music. It seemed to have originated at these revelries (though Lethe knew this could not be true), where the gramophone groaned like an old man falling into his last sleep, as if the record might sputter and slow, until it wound down and there was blessed silence and oblivion.
But there was never silence at the revelries.
With the music, there was also the clacking and the clattering. Of snapping and smacking. Of crackle, grind, and rub.
Lethe knew these sounds well, witnessed their origins, and preferred very much to remain in the storeroom. Hiding. There were cans of soup stacked in neat rows and jars of every type of sugar imaginable. An array of honeys, nectars, fruit preserves, and jams. They were carefully labeled in beautiful script and the paper yellowing at the corners. Lethe didn’t know who wrote them, but she imagined the soul was gentle, kind. Surely nothing like those who celebrated down the hall. Lethe also couldn’t recall when any of the jars were last opened—and had no hunger for them—though she eyed the blackberry preserves each night, thinking one day. One day.
Petunia threw open the storeroom door.
Her sweet-and-sour fragrance overwhelmed Lethe so much, her eyes watered. She was caught. She was found. Petunia wore a white lace dress with an off-white apron over it. Her dark hair was wrapped in a bun piled high on her head. There were clips of fake pearls in her hair, and the pearlescent paint was peeling, revealing dull brass bulbs. Her lipstick—mauve—was smudged at the corners of her mouth. Charcoal streaked the corners of her eyes. She was weary, a soul bleeding at the edges.
To Lethe, though, she was infinitely lovely. Where Lethe was shadow, Petunia was light. Even unkempt as Petunia was, she was radiant. Her innocence was not naïve but purer, a wanting for hope. Lethe wanted to crawl to Petunia, but she forced herself to stay where she was.
“You can’t hide in here forever,” Petunia said.
Lethe lifted her chin. “I can.”
“They will catch you.”
Lethe picked at the grit under her fingernails. She wore a heavy black dress, all velvet. If she rubbed the fabric one way, the black might seem grayer, and rubbed the other, it would be so dark, she feared she might drown in it. The dress was high-collared, a bulbous ivory brooch securing the fabric. A crack through the middle of the ivory looked like a coronal suture marking a skull. The whole ensemble fit Lethe well. She hated it.
“They barely leave the parlor,” Lethe said. “They dance and dance and mingle, mingle, mingle…”
Petunia crossed her arms. “Stop mumbling.”
Lethe shrugged. She often mumbled “into depths” as Petunia so eloquently put it.
“They want more brandy,” Petunia said. “I have served them three times tonight already. It’s your turn.”
Lethe lifted her chin again, but she couldn’t hide her tremble.
Petunia softened, rubbed the forearm of her sleeve over her face. Black streaks of eye makeup lined her sleeves from the repetitive action, and when she lifted her arm, there were yellow stains of sweat at her armpits.
“Please,” Petunia said. “I need rest.”
Petunia began each night as a tender spring flower, smelling like life. Attracted by the sweetness, everyone flocked to her as she served glasses of champagne, brandy, and mixed cocktails, but as the nights wore on, the sweetness always soured. Every night there came a breaking point, the point where Petunia could take no more and would seek Lethe. She would throw open the storeroom door and beg for rest.
How could Lethe refuse?
“Fine,” Lethe said, brushing off her skirts. She wiped her own face with her forearm, where makeup would appear each morning, as Petunia’s did, and where it would wear down to pitiful streaks and blotches by the midnight hours. “Fine.”
“Thank you,” Petunia said meekly.
Lethe hated that sound from her.
“You aren’t a mouse,” Lethe snapped. “Do not act like one.”
It was Lethe who was the skittering thing, trapped and hiding in the corners and shadows. She wanted to fold into nothing. Nothingness.
Petunia straightened, sniffed at that age-old attack. The nose ring lifted on her left nostril. Whenever Petunia wilted, Lethe raged, and she responded in kind. This was another shot across the bow, one that Lethe always hoped kindled a spark that got Petunia through the rest of the night.
“I left the brandy on the tray in the piano room. Be quick about it, otherwise they’ll leave the parlor,” Petunia said.
It was never good when they left the parlor during a revelry. Things tended to get away from them. The mess multiplied. The uneasiness spread. The nightmare became too real.
Lethe dipped her chin in acknowledgement, tucking stray auburn hairs into the braid that wrapped her head like a crown. Each day it felt heavier, and she had to find more intricate and chaotic ways to keep it out of her face.
“All right,” Lethe said, shouldering past Petunia in the storeroom doorway. She inhaled her scent as she did—sweat, perfume, and something else—a mix of baby powder and lavender. “I’ll be on my way.”
Petunia touched Lethe on her wrist, feeling the pulse that bit at the skin beat by beat. She pressed, closed her eyes, and sighed. Lethe stilled, knew the look, the assurance that there was an essence underneath her skin that pressed back. Blood. Pumping strong against the push.
“Two hours till sunrise,” Petunia said.
“Two hours,” Lethe confirmed.
Petunia took Lethe’s place in the storeroom, crouching and cradling her knees against her. Her lace skirt sprawled around her like a broken spiderweb. She leaned against the shelves of honey and closed her eyes.
“Rest now,” Lethe said, glancing over her shoulder before closing the door.
Petunia was already asleep.
Lethe’s skirts brushed against her legs as she left the storeroom, which caused an infernal and never-ending itch. She walked through the enormous, ornate kitchen built from twisted wood and carved stone. She glared at the skeletal grins carved into the corners of the counters, open mouths cackling. The knobs on the cabinets—a stitched crack on a curve of bone—matched Lethe’s brooch.
She swiped cobwebs from her face. Spiders watched her from webs cast around the unused stove. A rat skittered across the stone floor, and Lethe paused to let it go by. A huge, rib-withered thing. It stopped, sitting up on its hind legs, and gazed at her with red eyes. All the damned rats in this place, Lethe thought, exhaling in a shudder. If it wasn’t the clacking and clattering from the parlor, it was the scratching and skittering of feet that seemed to come from everywhere. Within the walls. Underneath the floor.
The rat’s head twitched and then it loped toward a hole in one of the floor cabinets.
From the kitchen, Lethe entered a large hallway. Her bare feet padded along the thick, blood-red carpet. She avoided the dark stains where the fibers were sticky or hard from drinks and other fluids. It was a long hallway with few doors to other rooms. The lower half of the walls were paneled with red alderwood grown into a ripe cherry color with age. The upper half of the walls were flowery wallpaper peeling at the corners. There were long rips and scratch marks in some places, and Lethe grimaced at them. All stains and rips multiplied as she neared the parlor.
Lethe’s foot caught on a bundle left on the hallway floor. She tripped, cursing, then backed to the wall when she realized what the pile was.
A skin.
Steam rose from it in the cool dankness of the house. Clothing hung on it; Lethe could make out a collared shirt, a well-cut blazer. It was attached to skin that was pale, ringed with blue and purple veins. White-blonde hair hung limp along the wrinkled scalp. This belonged to someone who did not like the light.
Slavochka, Lethe thought. If anyone was careless enough with their skin, it would be Slavochka. The Bear. The Warrior. She’d have to carry it to the parlor. To the revelry. Where it ought to lie among the others.
Lethe swallowed down bile, tugged on the cuffs of her sleeves. She wished she could bring the black velvet over her fingers, like gloves, so she could avoid the feel of the cooling skin, or the throbbing bloody sinews still encapsulated within.
Lethe knelt, tried to stare at the walls, the ceiling, as she scooped the skin into her arms. It felt like a hot, wet coat, the steam of it tingling her nostrils.
Music echoed in such a big house, and it grew louder as Lethe neared the parlor. She’d go through the piano room first, which was next to the parlor; only Petunia and Lethe ventured there. It’s where they kept the brandy, bottles and bottles of it, along with champagne and the wine they lifted from the storeroom on the other end of the kitchen. Easier to serve that way, rather than hurry back and forth.
Lethe turned the ivory knob on the door to the piano room and shouldered her way in, clutching the skin to her chest. As soon as she was fully in the room, she dropped the skin on the floor and stepped away. Took deep breaths.
“Keep going,” she told herself. “Keep going.”
Crates and bottles were stacked next to the piano, a black grand with its lid closed. Dust gathered on its surface like everywhere else in the house. Lethe and Petunia were forbidden to play it for reasons unknown. Only the gramophone in the parlor was allowed to emit music. Lethe made a mental note to wind it again when she served drinks. If the gramophone wound down and stopped, they would leave the parlor. If they left the parlor, the night would run away from Petunia and Lethe, and come sunrise the cleanup and recovery would be worse. So much worse. They had learned that on their first night.
Lethe bent down and lifted her skirts to get at her legs. She scratched at the itch with her nails, long and unclipped, and moaned with relief. She wished her dress was the flighty lace of Petunia’s instead of the damn mourning gown of black velvet. The fabric was thick, hot, and sweat poured from her stomach down to her legs in such a way that it always itched. Every follicle, every pore, seemed to beg for mercy.
The fucking itch.
Lethe eyed Slavochka’s skin and carved at her own, tucking her fingers underneath the stockings that went to her calves, trying to get at the toes she felt she hadn’t seen in ages. It became a frantic cleansing of sorts, to reach all the places that tingled and pricked. Then a bell rang from the parlor, followed by a loud echo of clacking and cracks.
Lethe cursed again. Her legs stung, raw, and what had felt better for a moment was already itching again. The best way to manage was to get to work. She grabbed a sterling silver tray etched with St. Edah’s in swirling cursive at the top. She poured brandy into numerous tumblers scattered about the floor. It didn’t matter if they were clean or not.
Her hands shook.
“Couple more hours,” she told herself. She glanced at the grandfather clock in the corner of the piano room. It was the only clock that worked in the house, the only one she and Petunia could find, and they wound it each night.
When there were enough filled glasses, she placed them on a tray on top of the piano. She took up Slavochka’s skin again, tucking it under her arm, and balanced the tray on her hip. Pinning the skin to her side, Lethe reached for the knob to open the door from the piano room to the parlor. The same stitched ivory bulb stared at her, seeming to wink at her brooch.
She turned the knob.
“Coming,” she announced, and took a deep breath.
There was much clacking and clapping as she entered. A hail of noise like dice being cast together, or acorns falling on a roof. Distal bones clicked together in excitement, metacarpals banging, the linking of ulna and radius with that of another. Iliums bumping.
Lethe had spent hours in the first few days memorizing the bones that made up a human skeleton. She’d found a book in St. Edah’s moldy and overgrown library. A ceiling-high window was smashed near the shelves, and a willow tree’s vines hung limp, knotting through the wooden ladders. Long fine ropes of leaves twisted around volumes that Lethe and Petunia dared page through during moments of quiet and refuge. It was there Lethe had found a page labeling all the parts of a skeleton, wildly unassuming illustrations on paper.
Here in the parlor—skeletons danced.
Half a dozen skeletons, twirling together, gyrating against each other. In the corners of the room, draped across a chaise or folded next to the buffet table, lay the dresses and suits and skins they’d unzipped themselves from.
The skeletons could not speak. No, their vocals were tied to their skins, but that didn’t hinder the ferocity for reverie. Lethe couldn’t understand why—their tongues were tied to their skins—but they showed a great deal of glee pouring tumblers and champagne glasses into each other’s grins, till the amber and gold liquids sloshed from their jaws, down their vertebrae, raining on each rib, and dripping onto hip bones and feet. The floor was sticky and slick with liquid.
Lethe stepped tenderly, trying to breathe through her mouth. The air smelled like fermented syrup from all the alcohol on the floor, and the skins, too, had a smell when they weren’t worn, like burnt hair. Lethe had a faint memory in the back of her mind, an itch, where she recalled the smell after a storm, lightning thick and loud as a landslide. The smell of the electricity in the air was reminiscent of the skins. Of the parlor. Of the dancing.
She tried not to show her disgust as she draped Slavochka’s skin next to the others.
The skeletons clapped as she presented the tray, and then they were upon her.
Clamoring, clipping, clinking together to reach for a glass of brandy. Or at least, that was part of their appetite. The other part was crowding and reacting to Lethe beholding them.
Lethe shut her eyes and let it happen, feeling bones rub against her skirts, her arms. The chomping of molars, jaws unhinged, next to her ears. Lethe remembered the book of anatomy, listing off any bone she could think of.
That’s all they are, she told herself, recalling the words she read in the book…
Bones, their composition—Bones consist of gelatinous tissue, into which mineral matter has been deposited, until it possesses a stony hardness…
Cervical. Thoracic. Lumbar. Occipital. Temporal…
Something snapped in front of Lethe, and she opened her eyes. Erinyes stood there. Lethe knew it was her because of the way she decorated her skeleton—every crack or fracture had been filled with gold. Even her molars shone with the metal.
Erinyes was the first, the mistress of St. Edah’s House. How she had come to be mistress, Lethe didn’t know. If Erinyes had created the process Lethe found herself trapped in, Lethe did not know.
Once a seeker found the house, and then found Erinyes, she showed them a way. It didn’t matter if one changed their mind when they arrived, as Lethe had. Once in the house, you were part of it. Lethe had been trying to leave the moment she found herself within its walls, and she couldn’t remember what had brought her here. Those who wanted to leave became servants, unworthy of revelry.
Erinyes snapped her fingers again. Bone-on-bone, it sounded like a gunshot.
Lethe flinched but kept her eyes open.
Erinyes motioned to the tray, now empty, and pointed to the door to the piano room.
More.
Lethe nodded; she would get more. Already, beyond Erinyes, the other skeletons gorged on the brandy, pouring it over their bones and writhing against the sloshing. A few wedged glasses into their ribcages. Jaws bounced up and down as they laughed soundlessly.
What a gag, they must think. Lethe wanted to vomit.
Erinyes snapped her fingers again.
“Yes,” Lethe said aloud. “I will get more.”
If Erinyes had her skin on, she’d scold her. Huff a moan and drawl, “So dreamy, Lethe. You can’t be in the moment. That is why you are not worthy.”
“I don’t want to be worthy,” Lethe had always responded. “I want to go home.”
“And where is home?” Erinyes taunted, knowing Lethe did not know the answer. “Where is home, my darling Lethe?”
This time, Erinyes poked Lethe’s cheek. Lethe hated being touched bone-to-skin, and Erinyes knew this.
“I’m listening,” Lethe snapped.
Erinyes pointed to the gramophone. It needed to be cranked. The music was already starting to slow. Ada Jones chirped “By the Light of the Silvery Moon,” and each word came out a little more extended. It no longer sounded bright but desperate:
Your silvery beams will bring love’s dreams
We’ll be cuddlin’ soon
By the silvery moon
Lethe put the tray on the closest surface, a buffet table where two other skins and their respective clothes were folded. An amber silk halter-top dress and an immaculate pressed red velvet suit. The skins steamed from the coolness in the room. No need for heat when skeletons remained.
Lethe went to the gramophone, grasped the handle, cranked it until the music sped up to its normal tempo.
By the light, not the dark but the light
Of the silvery moon, not the sun but the moon
I want to spoon, not croon, but spoon…
More clapping. More snapping. Brandy spilled onto her shoulder as a skeleton leaned over, putting its face into the gramophone’s horn. The other skeletons cackled, their jaws bouncing, bouncing, bouncing…
Lethe staggered back from the gramophone and ran for the tray. She tucked the dripping metal under her arm. The scent of the room was heady with alcohol and steaming skins. Strands of hair fell from her braid; the back of her head felt wet, likely from splashed brandy.
She made for the exit, the ivory knob a beacon on the door.
When she clutched the knob, Lethe looked back over her shoulder. She couldn’t help it. Part of her wanted to confirm again and again that this new reality was, in fact, real. That the clacking did come from the skeletons flailing their limbs and not from a broken radiator. Part of her wanted to find nothing. A dusty, empty room.
But no, the room was full. The skins steamed where they lay. The skeletons waved at her, swaying to the music.
Lethe found Erinyes watching her. The mistress now relaxed on a couch of green velvet, another skeleton beside her, leaning over her until their ribs came together like the teeth of a key in a lock. Erinyes’s skull, though, was turned toward Lethe, while the other skeleton nibbled on Erinyes’s clavicle.
They did not have eyes. Those were tied to their skins as well. But the sockets were there, where eyes should be. Somehow, they could see, and the gaze was no less piercing.
Erinyes watched her, and Lethe could not shake the itch.
Lethe wrenched open the door and threw herself back into the piano room.
When she had finally closed the door behind her, Lethe threw the empty tray across the floor. It bounced on the hardwood before sliding against the back wall.
Lethe allowed herself one guttural scream. She wiped her hands on her skirt, desperate to get rid of the wetness of her fear-sweat mixed with alcohol. Limbs clacked behind the door, in the parlor. Bone on bone. The skipping of hardness upon hardness.
Crackle. Cackle. Clickity-clack.
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