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Said pervert continues talking to me when my back is turned.

“Would you like to know how you came to be?” Helene asks.

“I learned the birds and bees when I was younger.”

If I keep staring ahead then I don’t have to acknowledge what she’s doing, so I go through the contents of the fridge.

The organization is familiar because it’s the same way my mom would do it.

Nostalgia is as strange as grief. I mourned my parents when I was in prison.

Not because they’d died, but our relationship had, so when they left this mortal plane I didn’t feel anything.

But now, looking into a fridge that’s arranged the same way my mother always did, there’s a foreign warmth in my chest. Almost like I miss her.

Anything sweet goes on the top row, the middle has prepared meals, the bottom shelf has raw meat.

But this meat isn’t labeled, and the color is strange.

There’s a jar in the door that’s not a fucking condiment either.

The deep red liquid is gelatinous, coating the sides of the glass in blobs where it’s clotted.

The disgusting sounds of slurping stop as Helene sighs, her chair scraping against the tile. Her stick tapping is next, and it gets closer to me without the human dog crawling beside her as she comes to my side. Her dress is back to the correct position in my periphery, so I meet her eyes.

“Isadora was a difficult child. She rejected our ways, and she was secretive,” Helene says. “I would like the opportunity to correct that so that you can see where you belong. It’s the same opportunity I gave Asher.”

I nod, stepping back so there’s space between us.

She walks ahead and I look at the person tied to the table by their hair.

They remain kneeling with their hands on their thighs and chin bowed as we leave the kitchen.

I look back, expecting them to untether themselves, but they stay there as though they’re unable to unhook their hair.

It’s right in front of them without anything restraining their arms, but they don’t move, as though the shackles are invisible.

Helene guides me around the large staircase to the other side of the house.

We stop in front of a pair of wooden doors held together with a padlock like the others.

She smooths her hand down the side of her dress, into a pocket hidden amongst the pleats, and takes out a skeletal brass key.

The top of it has scrolls around the edge, only where there should be a hole for a keyring, it’s filled with the same wispy metal details.

The padlock clunks as it unlocks, and she unthreads it from the metal rings to slide the doors open.

The room is set up similarly to the one that housed the piano, only the domed atrium at the furthest end of the room doesn’t have a piano sitting on it.

There’s a strange bench that has the same ornate ends as the one that Delilah’s father laid her on.

The long posts at the top of it have the same serpent design and the posts at the bottom are taller, making up the goat’s horns.

But the middle is different. It has an upside down Y-shaped flat cushioned bed rather than the rectangular one the other had.

I get closer to it without any thought and tilt my head to inspect the angle of the bed.

Where the other was angled downwards so their disgusting blood covered us, this has an incline in the opposite direction.

It’s more noticeable too and the flat rectangular area near the serpent posts is lower than each branch of the Y leading to the horns.

“Every generation has been created right here,” Helene says, stepping up onto the raised area to trace the horn with the tips of her fingers. She looks from the weird bench to me, adding, “Until you.”

It’s a fucking breeding bench. A multi-generational breeding bench, because what’s better to facilitate new life than the cum stains of your dead ancestors?

I look around the rest of the horrific room, the walls lined with every animal that has existed, stuffed and put on display.

But every piece of taxidermy has a deformity of some sort.

A rat with two tails that are twined together, a six-legged deer, a monkey with three eyes—all three open and staring like their eyes are following me when I tilt my head—and a wet specimen jar filled with something pink.

The orb-style jar is huge, a little smaller than a bowling ball, and held on an ornate brass ring that has vines crawling up the sides like it’s cradling it.

Helene opens her fucking mouth again as I walk away from her to the mantel.

“Are you aware of the tale of two faces?”

I pause, my hand outstretched to the wet specimen jar. “You’re the one who told Asher, aren’t you?”

Pride flashes across her face and she stands with her hands primly layered over each other on the horn of the bench post. “Yes. He was a very curious child who respected his lineage.”

Fucking weird bitch.

Taking the orb filled with liquid, a gummy pink thing, and a weird animal, I bring it closer to my face, inspecting it.

Her heels click against the tile, but she doesn’t have that stick that grates my nerves.

She stops beside me, her voice low like she’s a normal grandmother telling me family anecdotes rather than a twisted cunt.

“It was believed that the first-born daughter held a curse, a power so potent that it altered events while she was in the womb. That,” she takes the orb from me, “is part of her.”

It doesn’t look like an organ, and my eyes widen when she warmly smiles at it. “Hello, my shadow.”

She turns it then holds it out to me so I can see the face of a small baby. Its arms are the width of two of my fingers. It lays against the curved edge of the orb with its cheek resting on its shoulder.

A baby. A baby in a fucking jar.

“There is always a stronger part of us that wins. I display my weakness as proof that it can be overcome. But you, sweet boy, weren’t the one to overcome yours. Your wife took matters into her own hands and ruined what I created.”

I move the fuck away from her and wish my mother was here.

My mom was normal. She had moments of showing warmth and she would always check my homework.

My dad was normal too, almost boringly so.

He wouldn’t have been involved with something like this.

He didn’t even like Halloween because of the scary movies and people wearing masks, for fuck’s sake.

For the first time in my life, there’s an urge to cry out to my parents.

I didn’t do it when Asher was a dick, not when I was charged and later sentenced for a crime I didn’t fucking commit, not when the comfort of my own body was stripped from me.

But now, as I watch Helene’s boney fingers fondle the orb, that urge is overbearing.