My Husband Dies Every Midnight

The Voice from Below

Daniel stiffened as the voice sounded.

It wasn’t just the fear that made him freeze. Elena could see it in the way his shoulders tensed and his face drained of color, as if the voice below had reached up through the floorboards and wrapped its fingers around his throat.

It was a second voice, deeper than the first and rougher, with a strange kind of amusement in it.

“Daniel.”

Maris whispered his name as if it were a prayer.

Nathan squeezed her hand. “What is that?”

Daniel did not answer. He stared at the widening slit in the floor, his expression a mask of something Elena couldn’t place. Pale tendrils of dust curled up from the gap, and the chamber seemed to shrink around them, the air thick with the sense of something waiting beneath the stone.

It spoke again, and this time, its voice was unmistakable.

“Did you bring the girl?”

Elena’s blood ran cold.

The thing wearing her face smiled, as if hearing an old friend’s voice. It pressed itself against the broken doorway, one pale hand curling around the edges as if it would crawl through if it weren’t already nearly impossibly long. The skin on its cheek split open another inch, revealing black tendrils of something that pulsed like a second heart beneath the first.

Maris made a small, pained noise. “No.”

Daniel finally moved. He took a slow step forward and met the thing’s gaze for the first time, his expression hard. “No one brought her.”

The thing below laughed.

It sounded as if the chamber itself were laughing, rolling over in deep, rolling tones from the gap in the floor. It sent a shiver down Elena’s spine, through her ribs, down her teeth, until it settled in the bracelet on her wrist. The clock charm flared to life, and she gasped, covering her wrist with her palm.

“What is down there?” she demanded.

Daniel’s eyes met hers, and for a moment, she thought he might not answer. They were strange eyes, full of something she couldn’t name, and when he looked at her like that, she felt as if he could see inside her bones.

“The first Holloway,” he said at last.

There was a long pause.

Lila blinked. “That is not a sentence I wanted to hear today.”

Daniel said nothing to her. He was looking at the floor again, at the darkened gap in the stone. “Or what remains of it.”

Elena stared at the space between the floorboards, willing herself to see what he did. It had begun to reshape itself, the space widening into a stairway of sorts, one step at a time, as if the earth itself were remembering how to carve a passage. Cold air rolled up from the depths, smelling of wet wood and something old and metallic.

Maris’s hands shook at her sides. “It should not be awake.”

“It is awake because the name was spoken,” Daniel said.

Thomas exhaled sharply. “Then we should not have come here.”

The thing in the doorway laughed again. “Too late.”

Its voice was different now, stretched and twisted, something like Elena’s own voice wrapped around something else, something ancient and cruel. It was a mockery of her, and she felt her skin prickle at the sound of it.

Nathan stepped in front of Elena before she could do anything to stop him. “You don’t get to speak through her.”

The thing in the doorway tilted its head. “Through her? No, Nathan. I speak through all of you.”

Nathan’s jaw tightened. “Shut up.”

It tilted its head again. “You still don’t understand what you opened.”

Elena’s heart pounded in her ears, and she felt her pulse in her throat. She turned to Nathan, then to her father, then to Maris, and something in her snapped. They all knew things. All of them had known things long before she had, and somehow, that knowledge had cost them. It had cost her.

“Tell me,” she said, her voice shaking with something like fury. “Tell me everything.”

Daniel inhaled slowly. “The Holloways were not chosen to protect the city because of some divine right. We were chosen because we were willing to forget.”

“Willing to do what?” she pressed.

“To forget,” he repeated.

The word sounded strange coming from his mouth, and she frowned. “What do you mean, forget?”

“The thing below feeds on memory,” he said. “Not in the way you might think. Not in the way a person remembers a face or a song. It feeds on the structure of identity. It eats at the things that make a person a person. The first keepers learned that if they gave it names, it would bind itself to those names rather than the entire city. So they created a line, a family, to protect themselves. A sacrifice, in a way.”

Elena’s stomach twisted. “You mean the Holloways were used as bait.”

Daniel’s expression didn’t change. “Yes.”

Maris looked away, tears glinting in her eyes, and Nathan muttered a curse.

“And I’m one of them,” Elena said softly.

Daniel nodded.

The room seemed to shake around them, the floorboards groaning. A crack split the far wall, and a slow, thick trail of black liquid oozed down the stone, leaving glistening rivulets in its wake. The air had grown colder.

Lila backed away toward the far wall. “Can we maybe not have this family therapy session in the murder basement?”

No one laughed.

Elena turned back to the broken floor, her heart hammering in her chest. The steps had grown impossibly long, stretching down into darkness that seemed to swallow the lantern light whole. She had the strange sensation that something was watching her from the other side, and she knew with a sudden, horrible certainty that if she looked too closely, it would see her.

“What does it want from me?” she asked.

There was a long pause before Daniel spoke. “It wants you to remember the door you opened as a child.”

Elena stared at him. “I never opened a door.”

Maris made a pained sound.

Nathan turned to her sharply. “What did he mean, Maris?”

Elena turned to her mother, her stomach sinking. She could see the guilt in her eyes, the truth behind the carefully constructed lies. It was there in the way her face twisted, raw and exposed.

“When you were six,” Maris said softly, “you went missing for one night.”

Elena stared at her. “What?”

Maris’s voice wavered. “You were gone by the time I woke up. I found you asleep in the church basement the next morning, curled up next to a wall that wasn’t there before. You said you followed someone there. I thought it was a dream. I thought. I hoped it was a dream.”

The room seemed to lurch around Elena. She turned to Nathan. “You never told me that.”

Maris looked at him bitterly. “I never told anyone.”

Daniel stepped forward. “Because what you found that night was the first door. And when it touched you, you touched it back.”

Elena’s throat tightened. “No.”

The thing in the doorway laughed, delighted. “Yes.”

It pressed a hand to the side of the doorway, and the wall blackened where it touched. The stone around the opening glistened with something that looked like sweat, something that Elena knew wasn’t natural.

The voice from below spoke again.

“Bring her down.”

Elena took a step back, Nathan’s hand on her shoulder keeping her from moving far. “I’m not going anywhere.”

The deep voice from below chuckled, amused. “You already did once.”

The room stilled.

Daniel closed his eyes.

Maris whispered, “No.”

Elena turned to them, trying to make sense of it all, but there was nothing to make sense of. She thought of the years that had passed, the lunches she’d eaten, the way time had stretched before her. She thought of her mother’s absence, the way it had always hurt, always lingered. But not the night in the church basement. Not the door. Not the strange, cold wall that hadn’t been there before.

Nathan’s voice was quiet when he spoke again. “Elena?”

She shook her head, her heart pounding. “I don’t remember.”

The thing in the doorway smiled.

“The bargain,” it said. “That was the bargain.”

The floorboards split open.

Something pushed itself up and out of the darkness. It was impossibly long, its fingers curling toward the ceiling, pale and elongated, and then its shoulders followed, then the rest of its body, until it stood at the edge of the doorway. It was humanoid, but its skin was stretched too tightly over its bones, and the shape of it was wrong, as if it had been carved from something other than flesh and sinew.

Daniel’s face was pale. He knew what it was. Elena could see it in the way his breath caught, in the way his mouth tightened into a grim line.

“What is that?” Nathan demanded.

Daniel’s voice was quiet, almost swallowed by the weight of the moment. “The one who took your memory.”

As it climbed out of the doorway, Elena finally saw its face. It was familiar, impossibly familiar, and it sent a jolt of something sharp and terrible through her chest. It wasn’t the thing in the doorway, the creature with the hollow eyes and the stretched, inhuman features. This one was younger, smaller, its mouth open in a silent scream. It had no shoes, and its knees were scraped, its hair matted down with something dark and sticky. It looked up at her from the floor, eyes wide and empty, and whispered one word in a voice too old for its body.

“Mother.”

Then the lights went out.