Page 6 of Caution to the Wind

Inside, it was dimly lit, the scent musky and damp like it was dug straight out of the earth.

I shivered, holding myself like my arms were a shield and a cloak of invisibility.

“It’s just an illusion,” I murmured to myself because it made me feel better to hear it said aloud.

The first room was an asylum, a woman shackled to a table rocking back and forth like she was possessed. When I tried to cross the room, she flew at me, a flurry of dark tangled hair and eyes that were pure white. I screamed as her fingers brushed my arm, curling into talons as she tried to grab me.

I ran.

Through the next corridor where a man with a chainsaw burst from some unseen corner and chased me up a rickety staircase, through a retro-style children’s room where hands shot out from under the bed to grasp at me, a low wailing cry sounding from its depths, into another room built like a science lab where it seemed a doctor was cutting open a man lying writhing and crying on a metal tabletop.

I screamed and I ran, a continuous cycle of both that made me nearly mindless with fear. It was enough for my twelve-year-old brain to almost short-circuit and forget why I’d subjected myself to these horrors at all.

Finally, I made it to the attic, a vast space littered with gross and terrifying displays like a collection of heads floating in jars and old surgeon’s equipment rusty with dried blood. I moved through the shelves trying to modulate the sound of my heaving breath and failing. It was too loud, every breath, every step, and I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was being hunted even though I tried to soothe myself with the knowledge that all of this wasfake.

Only, the sound of Kate’s voice, raised in an indecipherable shout, was absolutelyreal.

Fear speared me through the heart, the force of it making me stagger forward into a shelf. I dislodged a jar of something that smashed and splashed against the old wooden floorboards.

“Please!”

Kate’s voice again, thin and high with stress and, I thought, excruciating pain.

“Kate!” I called as I started to run again, winding my way through the bookcases until I reached the other side of the attic space.

A narrow staircase descended into pitch darkness.

I stared down it, knowing that Kate was in there, in that blackness, and she needed me. My foot hovered over the first tread. I still remembered how the shadows seemed to swallow it whole.

And then from behind me, a whisper of sound that was really only a displacement of air. But I knew with utter certainty someone was behind me.

I started to swing around to face them, an image snapped from the corner of my left eye as I made it halfway around. Someone, not too tall, wearing a wide brimmed cowboy hat with only a burning ember like a cigarette butt in the dark mask of their shadowed face.

And then, nothing.

Because two hands curled around my shoulders, squeezing so hard I whimpered.

“Should have listened to Madame Cheung,” a voice––male?––hissed.

Right before those two hands shoved me forward over the edge of the staircase into the voracious dark.

My shoulder hit the stairs first, jarring me so brutally my entire body was thrown into the wall, one of my fingers, raised to brace myself, broke with a sharpcrackat the impact. Gravity took me down again, rolling end over end down the steep stairs, hitting every bone like a child banging on a xylophone until I finally landed with asplatat the bottom. My entire body vibrated with pain, even my teeth, the edge of my front right eye tooth broken off, the sharp tip actually hooked through my lower lip, a caught fish bleeding and flapping for release. There was a severe pain in my right arm, and when I tried to fix my blurry vision on it, I noticed almost numbly that a shard of white bone had split my pale skin.

And the blood, the scent of it, all around me.

People said blood didn’t have a scent, but they were wrong.

It smelled like old pennies picked out of the bottom of a fountain, like rust and metal, like something struggling to return to the earth.

And that scent, it closed in on me, stuffing my nostrils, sliding over my tongue down my throat to suffocate me.

It was worse than the pain because I knew, no way, all that blood was coming from me.

Using my good arm, the one with the broken finger, I pushed myself into an upright seated position, closed my eyes against the dizziness, and then forced myself to take in my surroundings.

And immediately, I wished I had not.

Because I’d found Kate.