Part 36: The Foyer, Reprise

Previously in the Vines Inquiry— Harlow, guided by a (vision? hallucination? was she actually there??) of her mother, escaped the subterranean pool. Shooing the guilt of possibly dooming the matriarch, Harlow ran up the stairs towards the ground floor, dragging a broken foot behind her.

Her heart raced as she limped up the stairs, coughing up lungs that were still clogged with chlorine steam.

Harlow made it to the top of the staircase, away from the pool, away from the cats, away from her mother…and found the manor wasn’t letting her go that easy. A hallway with three branching paths taunted her, dared her. She put her ear up against a door, listening for a purr or scratch, but no sound made it through. Not even the thrum of the ocean like when she would listen to a shell on the down-island shore.

The whole place felt like a trick—like getting all gussied up for prom only to get stood up. Of course, no one in their right mind would stand up Harlow Voorhees, but Carlisle had been proven less sane than most these past few days. 

She had three choices, and so had none. Harlow picked one of the doors and pushed it open slowly, so that the mountain lion could…get her…at its leisure…

“What am I doing?” she said. “I am Harlow Voorhees!” 

She shouted it. A proclamation of, what? She didn’t know, but she and the house were going to find out together.

She was Harlow. She was scared. She was strong.

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Even amidst the centuries-old walls, the portraits of a local dynasty, it felt relevant. It felt solid. Her foundations were down-island but they were there, dammit. If the Vineses wanted to play their little end of the world game, then fine. She’d play too.

“You think I’m trapped in here with you?!” Harlow shouted, her voice echoing down the hall as she did her best Rorschach impression. “You’re in here with me!” 

She was lying to herself. An imagining. Self-proselytization. What was imagination, but with certainty?

Faith. 

“Are you listening?! I am the Final Girl. Laurie Strode, who? Sidney Prescott, when? Karla Wilson made some points, but I’m hitting threes from half court!” The house answered only in steady silence. Harlow continued, quieter, to herself. “Okay, I like that energy, babe, but they are still rabid mountain lions. They can’t understand English…probably.” Listen, Vines cats; you couldn’t be too careful.  

Shouldering the devastation that no one had witnessed her quoting Watchmen, Harlow stiff upper-lipped it and moved on to the next door. She kicked it open with her good foot.

Let’s play the game. Let’s get out of this house alive.

Her other foot felt increasingly mushy, each step like a spoon hitting the bottom of the jelly jar; squish, crack. Squish, crack. Every stride Harlow took threatened to be the one that would down her, but she had to keep moving. Her pursuers certainly were. 

The parts of the house she tripped through looked like they’d been abandoned for years. Spider webs and wrinkled rugs choked the already claustrophobic halls. Then, she’d turn a corner, bust through two more doors, and be back in a corridor that smelled of fresh paint. She hadn’t gone up or down any stairs since making it out of the pool, but when she passed a window, Harlow could see she was at least on the third floor. 

How many does the house have?

She tried to picture it from the outside, standing by the front door that morning, the whole manor salivating. No, the house wasn’t hungry. Something had to be alive to know hunger. This was a gaping skull; a dilapidated jawbone attached by a few dried strings of jerky to a head with empty sockets. 

Won’t be for long though, will it? That’s the whole point. 

Moving through the halls of Vines Manor was like traipsing through neighborhoods. She was in the midst of it: a violent resurrection dressed as refurbishment. It was crazy to think that was their reality; that the Vineses still had all this but felt like they were on their knees. 

Harlow knew she just had to keep moving. She was going to make it. Just keep moving. No such thing as a wrong turn. She paused, looking at the wallpaper, the artwork; anything to indicate what part of the house she might be in. Close to Frank’s room, maybe, or near a staircase down? Even if just to the kitchen or Richard’s office.

The good news was that at least her heart had slowed down. A combination of no more stairs—for better or worse—and that the panic in her system had been burnt out by repetition, but she still couldn’t take a full breath. Her fight or flight may have given up the ghost, like it too had gotten used to the smell of crusty boxers and body spray in Tucker Reagan’s dorm room, but her lungs still hitched.

She leaned against the delicate wallpaper, noticeably thin against her cheek.

Just be here. Just need to catch my breath. Harlow shivered in her wet dress as she mouthed the words. A bit of spit gathered at the corner of her mouth and immediately seeped into the wallpaper. The moisture spread into the paper as fast as the quick, tired shame roiled through her. he guilt of being helped when she was sick. The self-revulsion that bubbles up along with the vomit as the nicest girl in the bar bathroom held her hair.

But even so, gratitude took over. Stronger than body spray, and moldy toilets and chemically-treated steam. She just had to remind herself, every time. After it was done, when her sweat was cooling against the tile— Someday, she can pay it forward. Because someday, someone else will need it.

If I get a someday.

Harlow took a deep breath in and choked on dust. It swam right up into her nose, clouded her eyes. Behind her, the hallway door creaked open.  

“Come. On!” she wheezed. And started to run again. 

Frank fell through the wall, embedding the dust from centuries-old wood into the equally-ancestral carpet in the manor’s foyer. 

“No, no, no, no, no!” He brushed madly at the Persian. The dust worked itself deeper into the artisan fibers and he resigned to the mess. “That’s going to make it harder for my parents not to hate me now. Especially after I ruin their whole cult.”

Grime stuck to his bloody hand, long-since gone numb. He could still move three of his fingers, but the joints were swelling. Frank looked back at the hole he’d created in the foyer wall and wondered where he could get a painting big enough to cover it. Surely there was one in the house, but with the starving carnivores roaming around, he’d want to source as close to the front door as possible.

The chimes yanked his attention; a fish hook through his earlobe. Her Call sounded louder and louder, even through the tiny gap in the doors that led to the parlor. 

“How’s it going?”

Frank jumped back; hands raised in more of an ‘I’m at the top of a rollercoaster!’ than ‘Inquiry Self-Defense Pose #7.’

It was Blevin, looking sweaty and a bit pale. Frank could see blood running down the librarian’s arm. It matched his own; bright red droplets that highlighted the lines in his dry, winter skin. 

“AH!!” Frank screamed. “AH! And AH!! to you. There are angry mountain cats roaming the halls! Do not sneak up on people.”

Blevin clicked his tongue and shook his head. “Oh, come on, Frank. They’re not so bad. You just gotta help them work off all that excess kitty-energy.” 

A cougar stalked its way through the swinging door on the back wall that led deeper into the manor. Jaw hung low and salivating, it stepped one paw in front of the other in painfully slow, hunting steps. 

“See,” said Blevin, throwing a thumb over one shoulder. He winced. Two steps farther and the beast collapsed, utterly exhausted. Blevin flipped the cat over and started to massage its stomach. “Who’s a good kitty? Who’s a ferocious little kitty?” 

The cat’s eyes glazed over as its chest stopped moving.

“Blevin!” said Frank.

“What? Do they not like their stomachs rubbed? I grew up with dogs.” 

“How did you make it to this day alive? Like, with everything that happened just now, but also in general?”

Blevin thought, his eyes going somewhere far off and then shrugged. “Mostly I just kept moving forward. For both. My coaches always stressed cardio cause I’m kind of a bigger—.”

“Blevin.”

“Right. Not now. I got it.”

“No.” Frank pointed over Blevin’s shoulder to the swinging door that the cougar had come through. The beasts had found them.

“Oh. Maybe this one will get tired too?”

“Jesus,” said Frank. “I know going to the manor was my idea, but there is no way I could have seen this coming. I just want to be a good, kind, maybe sort of old-fashioned person.”

Blevin turned back to him, pouting. Deep purple bags had gathered under his eyes. 

“Frank, you are! Just in a ‘fear thy darkened woods, praise the olde gods’ kind of way.”

He punched him lightly on the shoulder and the cat jumped forward, claws ready. Frank looked to his right, across the foyer, to the parlor.

Her Call. It was still coming. He just needed to make sure that only one of them died in its range. 

“You hear it? The Call?” said Frank. 

The cat leapt and they both edged away from it, circling the round marble table in the center of the foyer. A drop of blood from Blevin’s sleeve mixed with the pink stain from Frank’s ancestor. The cat swiped a paw at the accoutrement on top, decimating Rosalind’s Christmas village and one of the ornaments Dick had made her in elementary school.

Frank winced. “I really need to die. Now, before my mother kills me for ruining her tablescape.” 

Blevin tugged him to the right, narrowly escaping another grasping paw. The beast jumped on top of the table, but slipped! It struggled for balance on a satin runner, losing some starving confidence.

“The doors!” said Frank, scurrying across the foyer. 

Blevin flipped the table on top of the surprised animal. Frank didn’t have the heart to look back and see what other priceless tchotchkes had fallen in the scuffle. He yanked and the thin door shook in its mooring, but wouldn’t budge. 

“You managed to lock these ones, huh?” Frank yelled at Harlow, wherever she was. Soon, though; soon she’d be safe. If only he could just—

Blevin rammed himself into the pair of doors, cracking the wood and shedding more blood on the floor. Sweat darkened his shirt collar and waistband. Frank could smell something coming off the man with each breath. He shook his own hand, the guilt at a lesser injury added to the self-appointed crosses already slung on his back. How much shame could atone for a pound of flesh? 

Blevin tried again, a meat golem constructed by a chef-owner of one of those restaurants with purposefully too-big food that’s also free for some reason but only if you eat the whole thing fast? The practice reeked of insecurity in Frank’s opinion—“Like my food and clean your plate otherwise pay me lots of money!”—but he could have just been projecting.

Wow, we are both losing too much blood.

Blevin bashed his shoulder into the door again. “Ow,” he said. “Do you hear that?”

Frank rolled his eyes, unsure whether to laugh or cry. “Yes, Blevin. That’s why we’re trying to get to the doors open. It’s Her Call.” 

In the middle of the room, that cougar kicked the table off, revealing an even deeper frothy anger. 

“Oh?” said Frank, pointing at the snarling animal. 

“No. Not that.”

The cat tensed its front legs, crouching into a kill stance. Its tongue lolled out one side of its mouth. Saliva infused with a need beyond mere hunger dropped in thick, white globs onto the carpet. With a final, guttural roar, the beast leaned back, contracting ever muscle and sinewy bit visible within its starved frame. 

Frank felt the air pop just before the wood chips flew into his face. They blinded him as much as the twin spotlights that had burst in through the front of the manor. He flinched, a tense ball of fear with tiny posture.

Above him, Blevin whooped in excitement with both hands raised to the ceiling. “YES!!!”

And, then, near-silence. The quiet hum of a car engine and tinny purr of the radio. 

“That!” shouted Blevin, jumping up and down with one finger pointed at the wreckage.