Previously in the Vines Inquiry— As the gang waited for Her Call to come through the radio, Frank and co. understood why a Carlisle Parks Dept. truck had been parked in the Big House’s drive all day— Cougars. Starving and mad, the wild cats came into the parlor through the unlocked door and immediately made their intention known. It left the gang with only one choice: Run.
Sprinting down into the manor’s maze-like cellars, the trio quickly got separated with no choice but to keep fleeing. Soon, the darkness was their only companion.
Blevin was good at sports the way a conveyor belt is good at moving things from Point A to Point B. He didn’t want the intricacies explained to him, didn’t need to understand the more complex maneuvers. He was goal-focused, hard-working and thrived in a repetitive environment.
So, in a sense, he was lucky to already be lost by the time Harlow was forced to improvise their route.
After falling down the cellar stairs behind them, Blevin ambled up and started running as fast as he could, figuring Harlow and Frank must have taken the same path. After five minutes, he was beginning to think that maybe he’d made a wrong turn.
“Or that they ditched you,” he said aloud. A redundant detail, of course. Blevin was an…external man.
He jogged on at a steady pace, turning right if possible at corners, and double-timing it up and down the subterranean stairs as he reached them. A trickle of blood (iron-dense breadcrumbs, if he could be so playful) followed behind. His stomach ached during all of it; part from still needing to pee, and the rest from not being able stop and look at all the Inquiry history that was on full display.
Portraits of the entire Vines line. Reliefs from ancient tombs. He’d jogged through the same archive twice, trying to read as many titles as he could without slowing down. A collection of “Vines, Winfrey. Journals” spanned four decades and three shelves while the sum total research of someone named Paul Sunderson had been unceremoniously shoved into the corner. Blevin was giddy with all of it. He could almost smell that new pencil scent that accompanied each fall.
“Keep going. This will all still be here in a few days.”
He wished Frank or Harlow were there. He knew the latter wasn’t his biggest fan, but she had a rightful claim to this room if the photos in Rochester’s book were unaltered. Sure, the more Blevin learned about the Inquiry, the clearer it became that not exactly every little piece of it was perfect; but name a construct that was besides the pilot episode of “The Nanny.”
No matter how flawed, he still felt like he shouldn’t be there alone. Didn’t have the right to be there.
“No, no. Bad thoughts. Not useful thoughts. One more lap around this room, and then we pee. Where am I supposed to go? The foyer!”
He ignored the exit out of the archive and turned to do another tour of the Memoirs section.
Meanwhile, the divot-eyed cougar, perched high on a shelf, crouched; waiting for just the right time.
Harlow called back to Frank, but it felt like yelling into outer space. An evacuated auditorium. There was a lacking, the opposite of the pop she felt when someone walked into the bar after it had been abandoned for hours. She wanted to slow down, but couldn’t risk it. Her hands scraped along the walls in the lightless tunnels beneath the manor. All the while, her mother’s appeal during their phone call at McCroy’s echoed in Harlow’s head.
Oh, baby. LoLo. Please don’t go up there.
Her hot breath seethed through grit teeth as she ran along, each step threatening to take her over a low railing in the dark. I’m gonna live, dammit, she thought.
C’mon now, girl. Focus. Her mother again, but herself as well. They said it in tandem. A Fugue of Determination. Soon, her father joined, his voice the deepest and softest of the bunch.
From far away, distorted by a staticky phone line, she could hear her sister Stella too.
Honestly, Harlow. Focus.
Harlow laughed to herself at her sister’s insistence on living life like an unimpressed AI assistant. She held her breath for a second, needing the perfect quiet. Nothing was right behind her. Nothing was right behind her. Echoes and snarls that shot out of the dark, close one second and distant the next. She knew it was stupid, she’d yelled at heroines on-screen how stupid they were for doing exactly what she was, but she needed to.
Stopping in the darkness, Harlow found a wall and fought to catch her breath.
What was the air like? Could she smell anything familiar? Dust? Mildew? Remnants of a meal? Frank had mentioned a pool… She sniffed, deep enough that it hurt. She was rushing her body, her lungs. The feet of her tights were wet and cold, a mixture of ground water and blood she didn’t care to know the ratio of. She wanted to tear a slit in her green velvet holiday dress—it trapped her legs—but was afraid that if she had to run, to burst through a door without looking, she might end up outside and freeze in the blizzard.
The manor, Harlow knew, was not on her side.
Something would come. Something had to come. She was not meant to die like this; hunted, underground. She’d fought too hard for that. Clawed her way too far back after being so carelessly thrown over the edge. Harlow closed her eyes, little difference it made. She felt her wrist, her pulse. And listened to her family.
Focus, they said. You can do this… She felt something soft on her fingers; a scrunchie. A statement piece, purposefully too much. It matched her dress. The photo would perform well.
You can do this…she heard again. Harlow doubled the elastic band and pulled her hair back, securing the braids away from her face. No one puts their hair up to get murdered.
“You can do this,” she said. A scent on the air. The gentlest waft. Chlorine. “Because you have before.”
She kept running, hobbling along when she had to but never stopping. Her ears popped and the air temperature shifted four times. She avoided the swinging doors as much as she could and kept turning, looking for anything familiar.
Finally, up ahead: the smallest change. Not light, but something like it. An absence of the perfect dark that had stretched her pupils beyond their widest. She ran for it. Every basic instinct told her to. But her mind, the one that knew tropes, the one that had seen dozens of hapless ‘survivors’ get plucked off the mortal coil for letting their guard down too soon—that mind told her to stay in the dark. That she was too smart for a simple trap like a nightlight.
Her sister cartwheeled into her head again. I just think it’s a bit much that cats can see in the dark. Like, who are they trying to impress?
“Crap.”
Harlow ran for it. Towards it. Into whatever comfort knowledge offered over ignorant maybe-safety.
It hit her like a shot of vodka on no food, simmering into her irises as she kept moving. Couldn’t stop moving. The light was brighter than she realized; a shock to her eyes that had acclimated to the manor’s inescapable shadow.
Harlow blinked, catching glimpses of the room she was entering as her eyes tried to adjust. She spread her arms out in front to catch a wall, a railing, anything. Something hard and cold, solid all the way through, hit her just below the belly button. She tumbled over the railing, and she was in the air.
Spinning. Grasping. She saw flowers—bruised roses and funeral bouquets—rushing up to meet her.
At first, Frank thought that maybe if he just stayed in the same place, he’d find his way out. A strategy he’d unsuccessfully employed in many areas of his life. But it had worked that one time when his family left him at a mall on a road trip. Alas, it soon became clear that the various basements and sub-basements of the manor didn’t have kindly security guards who reunited lost children with their parents. At least none he knew of…
Frank looked over one shoulder, suddenly feeling a presence in this part of the basement, but it turned out to be just another memory come calling. A bathroom visit.
He’d wanted to use a stall, but after thirteen years of “this shit” (muttered under his breath), Richard was out of patience. It was one of the rare instances where Frank and his father had been left alone together.
“How are things going?” said Richard, staring at the wall while he did his business on the other side of the urinal partition.
“Fine,” said Frank.
Armed with so few parenting tools from his own upbringing, Richard usually left Rosalind to pick at the boys’ growing pains, often producing festering scabs rather than fading scars.
“Good,” said Richard, nodding to himself. Proud.
It was one strategy. A necessity, maybe; the sort of delusion Richard rooted himself in. Frank guessed you had to be at least a little deluded, or deeply self-involved, to imagine that you could parent at all.
A father to only plants so far, he imagined it must be like getting hit across the face with a shovel. Feeling all the pain and torment, writhing on the floor, holding your broken teeth in a bloody mouth. Until, one day, you’re finally able to get up and see the horizon.
And all you see is more shovels coming.
Sweeping in wide arcs, directed at the people you’ve brought into this world. And no matter how you try and warn them, or help them dodge, those shovels are gonna hit. Frank bet it was just then, at the moment of impact, that a person might realize someone had tried to save them. That they’d been warned about the shovel all their life, only for it to shatter their face in due time. Over and over and over again.
It was insanity; parenthood. But he still wanted it, hoped it for himself—someday. Because Frank would do better. He’d figure it out soon enough to save his kids where no one had before. It was that sort of madness, or bravado, that he recognized as wholly Richard’s. A confidence and ease he’d learned that day, when Richard was asking ‘how things were going.’ It was that day that Frank realized how much better it was to lie.
Back in the basements, the fervor in his blood boiled off into vapor. Whereas before he’d flown through the dark halls with justice on his mind, Frank now realized it would never come. If he lived long enough to see his parents again, he knew what would happen.
“Cougars?” they’d say. “I don’t recall. What do you mean about lungs? Francis, are you feeling alright? You had a lot to drink. Plus, remember when you were rude to your father in that store when you were fifteen? Yes. Yes, of course you do. But what? No. I never said that. Well, I didn’t. Are we just going to complain about the past every time we talk? You can be so nasty.
“You can be such a bitch, Francis.”
Frank would have a better chance of explaining it to the rocky walls. His hand glided gently against the rough wooden surface as he tried to—
Wooden.
He stopped and pressed his ear against the wall. Frank knocked, got a hard thud and then moved a few steps down. Again, hard. A few more steps. Knock-knock. Dull.
Open. Hollow.
“It’s hollow.” Frank pressed against it and the wood flexed. “It’s thin.”
He lined up his fist as best he could in the dark, using his left hand as a guide. He knew it was going to hurt. He knew it was going to take way longer than he hoped, but he could do this.
A snarl from somewhere in the dark. Far, but getting closer. Okay, he had to do it. But he could. Frank took a quick inhale and punched into the darkness; old foes imagined as targets. His knuckles caught fire, prickling, hot pain like champagne fireworks that smoldered into a thud.
He punched again.
On the third strike, Frank could feel the wetness against his fingers. A fourth hit did less than the first three combined. He was holding back. A fifth, more pain. But progress.
Something in the wood was cracking along with his skin. The faintest noise. Not even enough to quicken his heart. It came in and out, a signal trying to catch the receiver.
“Her Call.”
I can do this. I can make it.