Page 14 of Hellbound

More static. She tuned through the noise, but only found silence. A gaping emptiness where Marian swore something important once was.

Hell’s doing. It had to be. Focus.

At the end of the hall stood six recessed alcoves, their metal doors all ajar.

“Please, help me.”

“Mom?” Marian rasped, voice brimming with disbelief.

She’d never heard Deborah Eaves speak here. Marian didn’t believe such a pious woman would join her in Hell. But her rational mind tripped over that logic. No, Marian was wrong. That voice. So desperate. Terrified. Her mother never sounded like that all her life.

Marian approached the open cold chambers. All of them empty, though the shelves bore signs of organic decay, as though the walls themselves were skin and flesh, slowly rotting away.

“Marian. It hurts.”

She spun around at the sound of her own name, clear as a bell.

Deborah Eaves stood behind her wearing a salmon pink sweater and khakis. The last thing she ever wore, her face caked with blood.

She took a tentative step forward. The second she moved, the scene flickered before her, revealing Hell’s dead hall once more, its pulsing walls and dismal light. Instead of Deborah Eaves, there was a gray statue reaching for her, featureless and crude like a cast from Pompeii. A human vestige of a great cataclysm.

A second later, her mother and the morgue returned.

Slowly, Marian reached for her mother’s face. Deborah Eaves looked at her with such despair. Such love in those eyes.

“My sweet baby girl. I know you can help me.”

How Marian longed to hear those words. But she knew better.

Deborah Eaves hated her daughter.

Focus.

Marian framed her mother’s face between her hands. Deborah twined her fingers with hers. Marian glanced at her mother’s fingers. Two jutted out at odd angles, broken so badly, bone protruded through skin. Just like that night.

The sight tore at a distant memory, bringing with it a soul-deep yearning for a place that didn’t exist.

The face beneath her fingers turned cold and rigid. Marian squeezed. Tiny fractures appeared in her mother’s skin and widened. Hell bled through the mortuary backdrop. But the skull between her hands remained solid. Real.

Deborah Eaves stared at her, eyes ablaze.

“Oh, my wicked daughter. My wretched child.”

Reason abandoned Marian, and the next thing she knew, she was all but clawing at her mother’s face, frantic to … to what?

To find the truth.

Skin peeled away. Bone cracked between her fingers, giving way to gray stone. The morgue and memory of her mother collapsed, and suddenly Marian was back in the middle of the dark hall, the walls rippling violently around her. Between her hands, she held the head of that gray statue. It crumbled away to reveal a deep, black pit where an eye should have been. Not flesh. Not bone, but a charred black carapace that became ash under her touch. Another socket emerged as the plaster-like surface fell away, exposing brutal ridges that no human skull possessed.

Before she could dig any deeper, the rest of the statue shattered, slipping through her fingers in streams of dust.

When Marian looked up gasping, there were dozens more of the same gray statues, all reaching for her.

It didn’t make any sense.

She dropped to her knees and scrabbled through the debris, gray dust slipping through her fingers. She swept it toward her, gathering it in her arms only for it to spill down her front. She had to put it back together. To free her mother. She is gone. But her voice was so clear. You are alone. Marian could fix this, fix everything. There is no redemption here.

The sound of stones quivering on the floor brought her racing thoughts to a grinding halt. Horror washed over her.