Page 13 of Echo
The longer I stood in front of the door, testing key after key on each and every lock the worse it got.
“What the fuck is wrong with you, Madison?”
I fumbled for at least five more minutes before the last lock snicked, and the door opened inwards with a loud creak, that made me think the wood was screaming. As if it hadn’t beenopened in countless years, and I’d stressed the stiff muscles of the door.
My stomach knotted up, and the urge to puke hit me sideways. Like the door was the only thing keeping this bad feeling at bay, and now that it was open the vibes hit me right in the gut.
The smell hit me hard. This was what I’d been sort of expecting of the house as a whole. Stale air and dust filled my nose. The house was lived in and comfortable, but this room was cold and abandoned.
Goosebumps crawled over my skin spreading the tremble from my hands to my entire being. A big part of me wanted to shut the door and run.
“Nut up, Maddie. It’s just a room.”
Then why were my feet lead blocks that wouldn’t move forward? Why did I have a sudden urge to burn sage like my grandmother did? Anytime the monsters under my bed scared me as a girl, she’d come in and burn her sage to ward off any evil spirits trying to steal me from her.
Being in my family’s house was fucking with me. I shook my head to fling the terror seeping into my bones away.
With a deep calming breath, I reached in for the light switch, but this time my fingers sank into spider webs. The sensation of little legs crawling on my hand made a girly eep rip out of me that I’d never confess to, and I yanked my hand back to shake the arachnid’s home I destroyed off my hand.
“Fuck,” I whispered under my breath and reached in again, until I found a tall cylindrical tower of wax, that I knew was a Rinah homemade candle, sitting on a shelf. I pulled it out into the light to confirm what I already knew.
I studied the twelve inch tall, hand sized candle as I blew the dust off the thing. It had been used numerous times, having a deep melted center that had seen better days. I risked smelling it and wasn’t surprised to find it infused with sage. The designcarved into the side was what really got my attention.There was an extra detail that was never on my grandma’s candles.
A celtic shield knot.
The same knot that my grandmother would sew over and over again as her mental state declined. She started putting it on everything. Especially clothing.
I still had an apron she’d made me, with that patterning the bottom.
“I’ll protect you, Maddie,” She’d scream at the tops of her lungs before the nurses would sedate her.
I pulled a lighter from my pocket and lit the damn thing, stepping into the room. The dim light of the candle didn’t do much to illuminate the room, and I was still mostly blind. The scent and the illusion of light comforted me enough to take the worst of the edge off.
Despite it being May, I wished for a jacket to help endure the icy breath that the room exhaled onto me. It rolled down my body, like a caressing knife threatening to rip my throat out.
Each step echoed loudly in the eerily silent room. No buzz from electricity. No hum from the woods. It was enough to make me think the room was big and empty.
That’s when it hit me that the flashlight was still in my back pocket. I turned it on and found myself inches from an altar. On top of a knitted shield knot was a metallic dome that looked to be made of nothing more than lead and wielded with yet another shield knot.
“Oh Pearl, what the fuck did you get into?” Shit like this was probably why the townsfolk thought my ancestors made a pact with Lucifer.
There was a table of candles behind the altar, but I didn’t consider lighting any of those any more than I considered lifting the giant dome. Grandma Ruby’s voice was in my mind.“Nomatter what you believe in, baby girl, it’s best to not fuck with things you don’t understand.”
Her logic was that all religion and superstition was founded in some truth. People didn’t wake up one day and start tossing salt over their shoulder for no reason. We’ve just forgotten the reason. And if you don’t fully understand a rule, you had no business trying to break it.
Since I didn’t know the rules, it was best I touch nothing.
Someone was desperately trying to protect themselves from something. They were scared enough to put three locks on the door after putting protection around it. This room was meant to stay locked, and that was exactly how it would remain.
I turned to leave, and giant burlap sacks lining the left wall caught my attention. Salt. And even a few bags of those black rocks that Pearl made the paths around the farm with.
On the wall above it was a family tree, but it was too small to be accurate. Only to realize, there were no men on the tree and random names were circled.
My name was on the bottom, and I was one of the ones circled. The line above me skipped my mother, but had Ruby, Pearl, and Jade. Pearl’s name was circled with a year listed under, but the thru date wasn’t completed.
But it wasn’t her birthdate. There was a picture upstairs that predated it by thirteen years.
Grandma’s name was circled and crossed out. The name circled above them was my great-grandmother, and I found the end date for her and Pearl’s start date was only three days off. Same with the generation before it.
