My Husband Dies Every Midnight

The Voice Beneath

The knock came again, three measured raps beneath the stone floor. Elena’s muscles had gone rigid with the effort in the answer, so great was the tension coiled in her shoulders, as though her whole body had somehow known to prepare itself even before she had.

A man’s voice spoke beneath them, rough and weathered but real enough. “Maris,” it said, and then again, more gently, almost sorrowfully, “tell our daughter the truth before the hollow does.”

The room went completely quiet.

Nathan turned sharply to Elena, then to Maris, as if demanding answers, but no one had them. Lila’s camera had fallen an inch or two as it swung from her hand. Ingrid’s face was a mask of such frozen surprise that it could have been carved from stone.

Elena couldn’t move.

The voice had not been in her imagination, not really. She hadn’t imagined the sound of it, rough and worn, or the weight of the truth in it. It was as if the dead man had been waiting in the dark and listening to everything that had passed before he spoke, so that he knew who he was speaking to in the first place.

Maris had turned white, her lips parted in something like a scream, though no sound seemed to come.

Then Nathan was crouching at the edge of the opening and forcing his fingers between the seam in the stone. “No,” Maris said, her voice raw, and reached for his arm. “Nathan, please, don’t - ”

It was too late.

He pulled back, and the stone groaned and shifted beneath them, revealing a set of stairs that ran down and into utter darkness beyond. A cold gust of air curled up past Elena’s feet, stinking of damp and rot. “It’s open,” Lila said. “There was a passage down here.”

It was not, however, very welcome.

“Maris,” the voice said again, from deeper within the opening, “what have you done?”

It wasn’t so much a demand as a wail, and for a heartbeat, no one knew quite what to do with it. Elena turned to her mother, her pulse hammering in her throat. “Who is that?” she asked finally. “What is that?”

Maris’s face was wet with tears, though her gaze seemed to be somewhere far away. “Someone I failed to bury,” she whispered. “Someone I think I failed to find.”

Nathan turned to her, his mouth tight. “Who is he?”

Maris closed her eyes. “Your father.”

Elena felt as if she’d stopped breathing. For a heartbeat, the room spun, but then she righted herself. Her father. Not dead, not gone, not even a ghost. A real live man, buried in the very basement of the church with a voice that had just come up through the stone and whispered to her in something like truth. “No,” she said. “No.” Her mother looked at her, her face pale and wet with grief.

“Elena - ” she began, as if there might be an explanation, something reasonable that might explain away this impossible discovery.

“No.” This time it was a growl, and it stopped everyone. “You told me he died when I was six.”

Maris blinked slowly. “I told you what I thought you could live with.”

A strange statement, perhaps not untrue, but one that made Elena’s stomach twist with something close to hate. “Why lie about him?” Nathan asked Maris. “Why keep his death from us?”

Maris exhaled a short, humorless breath. “Because if I told you he was alive, they would have found him. If I told anyone what he knew, they would have found all of us.”

Ingrid stepped forward. “You should not open that stair.”

Nathan shot her a look, his mouth tight. “You don’t get to give orders now,” he said.

“I get to tell you that if he’s still in there, the seal has been compromised far more than I anticipated,” Ingrid countered, her gaze locked on the opening. “It wasn’t just your ancestor’s tomb your people were guarding. It was whatever was underneath.”

Lila glanced at Maris and then back at the stairs. “Can someone please explain to me why the people who keep secrets are always the ones who warn us about danger?”

No one had an answer to that.

The air smelled of damp stone, dust, and something else. Something old. Something human. All of Elena’s life, she had lived in the shadow of a ghost who wasn’t supposed to be there, and so bitterly ironic that the truth had been buried literally beneath the cathedral. “Nathan,” she said, “do you want to go down and see him?”

No. She wanted to be the kind of woman who could walk away from it all, who could pretend it never happened, that no one had kept anything from her. But the voice of her dead father had reached her through the stone. The pages of the journal had whispered his name. All the lies had curled up and died when she heard the hollow’s voice and the sound of the passage being unsealed. “Yes,” she said. “I do.”

Maris looked devastated. “Elena, I - ”

“I need to hear it from him.”

That was all. The man’s name was something she had lived with for years, but she didn’t think of him in those terms. Not really. Not until now. Nathan gave her a long look before answering. He took the lantern from the pedestal and climbed down the first step. Maris followed him, her steps unsteady, and then Elena went after him, with Lila close behind and Ingrid bringing up the rear, her face unreadable.

The passage was tighter and lower than she had expected, the walls practically brushing their shoulders on either side. Even here it was cooler than the chamber above. Elena put a hand to one of the stone walls to brace herself and felt strange grooves carved into the surface. Scratches and markings. Time wore them down almost beyond recognition, but she knew what she had seen. Her father had been living here for a long time, and if he had been making markings on the stone walls when he was free, who knew what he had carved for himself when he wasn’t?

The passage opened up into another chamber, this one roughly the size of a chapel vestry.

It was, in fact, a cell. A man sat tied to a small iron bed at the far end of the room. Various objects littered the space in neat but unwelcoming piles. Dust covered almost everything, but enough of it was visible to see the general inventory: medical supplies, candles, broken glass, paper, odd instruments, bundles of dried herbs. Toward the side near the only other door stood a small table. On it was a chair pulled up to a low shelf on which were bottles of dust and candle stubs, stacked neatly, as if for display. That door was secured with a thick bar across the handle, but several chains hung from either side, and a few had already snapped from their fittings on the floor. More iron bands ran from the hinges up along the doorframe, and several of those also showed signs of being broken in various places. The man who sat on the edge of his cot, staring at them, wore a long gray coat that hung to his knees, the cuffs frayed and worn. His face, too, bore the creases of someone who didn’t know how to sleep well, but those lines softened when he looked at Elena. More specifically, when he looked at her eyes.

She practically stopped breathing.

They were familiar. Exactly her own, in fact, save that his skin was a darker shade of brown. “Elena,” he said, as if he hadn’t believed it for a moment. “You look just like your mother, but your eyes are mine.” Maris made some sort of shocked sound behind Elena and stepped forward as if compelled to do so. “Thomas,” was all she said. That was his name, apparently. Her father’s. Thomas. He didn’t take his eyes off Elena, which meant that he didn’t see Maris at all. He just looked at his daughter. He said nothing more. He didn’t smile or frown or explain anything at all. He just looked, and she saw the unbearable grief in his face and felt her own heart twist in sympathy before it hardened into something else, something angry. “You’re alive,” Elena said. His mouth twitched, a ghost of a smile. “For now.” Nathan’s brows furrowed. “What does that mean?” “It means that whatever it is beneath this city hasn’t decided what to do with me yet,” Thomas replied. Ingrid paled. “You know him.” That got Elena’s attention. She turned sharply to Ingrid. “You know him?” There was something strange in Ingrid’s expression, something like regret. “I know of him.” Thomas chuckled, a dry, rasping noise. “She means she helped keep me locked in here.” “Because you were trying to break the seal.” “I was trying to save my daughter.” “Elena was never the only life at stake,” Ingrid said sharply. The room seemed to tighten around them. “She’s not the only one who suffers when they take what belongs to us.” “Stop it,” Maris said, though her voice was strained. She stepped between them, shaking her head. “Both of you. Stop.”

Nathan turned to Maris. “You kept him here all this time?” “He was hidden from you,” she said quietly. “For years I watched the bells ring from the tower above him. Every day I listened to the stairs and pretended to hear footsteps when there never were any.”

That was a terrible thing to say, to do, but it was not what made Elena feel as if she might choke on her own breath. “Why didn’t you come for me?” she asked. The words came out before she could stop them. Thomas’s face changed, just slightly, but it was enough. “I tried,” he said softly. “More than once. Both times they stopped me before I could reach you.” “Who?” “The people who own the history your mother taught you to fear.” Lila laughed. “Lovely. Fantastic. I feel so loved.” No one answered her. Thomas came forward slowly, but the chain on his ankle was long, and he could only get so far before it stopped him. He stopped right in front of Elena and looked into her eyes. It seemed to take him a long time to speak. “They chained me to this floor,” he said finally, “but not for them.” He looked down at the iron band fastened around his left ankle with rusted nails. It had been there a long time, judging by the grayness of the skin around it. “They put it there, but it wasn’t their order.” Maris looked as if she might cry. “I didn’t know where they took you.” “You knew enough,” Thomas said evenly. “You knew where it was, and that meant you should have known what they were doing here.” Elena’s throat constricted. “You said tell our daughter the truth.”

She meant it as a rebuke.

Thomas went utterly still, so still that for a moment Elena thought he might stop breathing. Then he turned to her again and said, in a very quiet voice, “The truth is that the hollow does not want your husband.”

Elena’s blood ran cold.

Thomas met her eyes. “It wants you.”