When Death Dies

The scream from the cellar echoed through the empty spaces between the walls. It sounded like an animal had been trapped and was desperate to escape. Eloise froze in place when she heard it.

The Andersons had been gone for several days. Eloise didn’t know where they were or when they would be coming back. Carl was out for a walk. She wasn’t sure where he had gone, nor did she care. Carl enjoyed his privacy, and sometimes, Eloise thought it was nice to be away from him.

“Did you hear that?” one of the maids asked the butler out in the hall when Eloise went looking for the source of the scream. Of course, he heard it, Eloise thought. It echoed through the entire house.

Eloise knew no one would have made a sound like that if they were alive. It couldn’t have been Thaddeus, either, as he was on the third floor. He’d also never made a sound like that. A scream like that from the cellar could have only come from one place.

The Dark Ones typically kept to themselves. There were occasions when one would slip out and creep through the house causing mayhem, but it was often at the behest of the girl in the pond, and she had kept to herself recently. When Mr. Anderson was gone, the Dark Ones usually stayed quiet. He was the source of their anger, and without him, they stayed out of sight.

There were times when Eloise would go down to the cellar herself and spend time in the darkness with them. As twisted by anger and hate as they had become, they were still people at their core. Sometimes, they even held conversations and were something close to the people they once were. It was always dangerous to try to spend time with them, but it gave Eloise something different to do and someone different to talk to, so she felt it was worth the risk.

She waited in silence, listening for any follow-up from below. No other noises rose through the house, and she began to wonder if perhaps the Dark Ones were just playing a trick. Of course, anyone in the house would want to investigate an unexplained scream, wouldn’t they? Even Vivienne would be curious if she did not know the source. Random screams were not everyday events.

With nothing more forthcoming, Eloise found herself perplexed. If it had been a trick, surely, they would have made more sound to draw someone in. But if it was not a trick, what could make one of the Dark Ones scream as though they were in pain? It dawned on her then that the conundrum offered only one solution. She would have to go down and check. Maybe that was the point.

The staff and Carl and the others tended to avoid going into the root cellar unless they had to. Eloise was the only one who voluntarily spent time there, though she did so carefully, and usually with a plan to get in and out, just in case. She had spent so much time down there, however, that she felt confident it would be easy to check if something out of the ordinary was happening.

“You’re not going down there, are you?” Thaddeus asked when she arrived at the butler’s pantry.

“Maybe,” she replied. “Why are you in here?”

“I heard a scream. I came to see if someone was hurt.”

“Someone?” she asked.

The boy shrugged.

“I don’t know. I thought maybe one of the staff was here and got hurt. Who else would be screaming?”

“A Dark One,” Eloise suggested. “I bet they’re up to something.”

“Then why would you go look?”

Thaddeus was not the adventuring sort. Of all the ghosts in the house, he seemed the most content to do the least. Even Carl had more of a fire in him than Thaddeus, which Eloise thought was a shame. As a boy, Thaddeus was supposed to have a sense of adventure. A lust for life, as it were. Or at least a desire to break the rules sometimes. He showed very little of that.

“Stay if you want. I’m going to see what happened,” Eloise said.

“But Carl isn’t here. What if something is wrong?”

“Exactly. Carl isn’t here. What if something is wrong? We’re the only ones who can fix it. Think how cross he’ll be if he comes home and finds out you wouldn’t help me.”

“He won’t be cross,” Thaddeus replied. “He would tell both of us to stay away.”

“No one tells me what to do, Thaddeus,” Eloise pointed out.