Chapter 7 - The Bloodied Blade
The harsh beam of the flashlight caught the glint of steel in Arthur’s hand, illuminating the dark crimson stain smeared across the blade of the kitchen knife. Clara gasped, stepping back instinctively as David shoved Martha roughly toward the cellar wall. The older woman stumbled, her maroon cardigan tearing slightly at the shoulder as she collided with the concrete, gasping for air with a look of pure malice in her eyes.
"David, what did you do?" Clara cried out, her voice trembling as she looked from the bloody knife to her husband’s sweat-slicked face. His dark grey Henley shirt was ripped at the collar, and a deep scratch ran diagonally across his cheek.
"She tried to stab me," David panted, his chest heaving as he kept a firm, bruising grip on his mother’s arm. He looked over at his father, his eyes wide with adrenaline and shock. "Dad had to stop her. He used the knife to cut the key free from her neck."
Arthur stepped down the last concrete step, his breathing shallow and wheezing. In his trembling, liver-spotted hand, he held a single, rusted brass key attached to a faded blue ribbon. He didn't look like a frail, confused old man anymore; he looked like a soldier who had survived a grueling war only to find the battlefield had followed him home.
"Here," Arthur rasped, holding the key out toward his son. "Before she finds another way to stop us. Open the door, David. End this nightmare."
Martha let out a shrill, hysterical laugh, struggling violently against David’s grip. Her grey hair was wild and disheveled around her flushed face, her yellow collared shirt stained with spilled broth and sweat. "You think opening that door makes you a hero?" she shrieked, spitting onto the concrete floor. "You have no idea what she was! You were seven years old when I locked her away! She was a monster, and she would have killed us all in our sleep!"
"Shut up, Mom! Just shut your mouth!" David roared, his voice shaking the dust from the low wooden rafters overhead. He snatched the key from his father’s hand, stepping past his mother with a look of absolute disgust.
Clara stood frozen beside the barricaded door, holding the flashlight steady as David inserted the heavy brass key into the rusted padlock. The key resisted at first, the tumblers stiff from decades of disuse and dampness. David gritted his teeth, putting his entire weight behind the turn.
Clack.
The sound of the internal mechanism releasing echoed like a gunshot through the cellar. David pulled the heavy iron padlock off the hasp and let it drop to the concrete floor with a heavy thud. He hooked his fingers around the thick steel staple, pulled the heavy wooden bar free from its brackets, and slowly pulled the cellar door outward.
A wave of pitch-black darkness rolled out of the tiny room, carrying with it an odor so foul and suffocating that Clara had to slap her hand over her nose and mouth to keep from vomiting. It smelled of twenty years of human confinement, unwashed skin, damp earth, and absolute despair.
David clicked on the flashlight's highest setting, shining the brilliant white beam directly into the pitch-black interior of the subterranean cell.
At first, the light revealed only bare concrete walls, a stained mattress lying directly on the floor, and empty plastic water jugs stacked neatly in the corner. But then, the beam caught a movement in the far, darkest recess of the room.
A figure curled into a tight, shivering ball slowly uncurled. A pair of hollow, sunken eyes blinked painfully against the sudden brightness of the light, staring directly out at them from beneath a thick, tangled mass of prematurely grey hair.
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"Hello, little brother," a raspy, broken voice whispered from the gloom. "You're much taller than the last time I saw you."
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