Chapter 9 - The Debt of Flesh
The dangling legs swinging from the kitchen air vent stopped moving.
Slowly, with a sickening CRACK-CRACK-CRACK of breaking bone and tearing cartilage, the body attached to the legs forced itself down through the six-inch metal opening.
It didn't drop like a human body. It poured out of the vent like liquid rot—a mass of soil, tangled black hair, waterlogged clothes, and fragile white bones snapping together as they hit the dirt floor of the basement with a wet, heavy thud.
The creature stood up.
It was seven feet tall, its body an impossible, elongated construct woven from Lily’s small blue burial dress, river mud, and the skeletal remains of forest animals. At the top of its unnaturally long, thin neck sat Lily’s face—half-preserved, half-decayed, one hazel eye bright and clear, the other a hollow, dark socket filled with crawling earthworms.
It turned its head toward the oil furnace.
"Daddy..." it purred, the voice coming not from its mouth, but echoing simultaneously from every corner of the stone cellar walls. "I brought the river with me."
Water began to pour out of the monster's hollow eye socket and open mouth. It wasn't a trickle; it was a torrent of black, freezing marsh water, gushing out onto the basement floor, rapidly filling the cellar like a rising tide.
"Run!" Ryan screamed, pushing Sarah and Toby toward the wooden cellar stairs they had come down earlier.
They scrambled through the rising water, which was already up to their ankles, freezing cold and thick with black silt.
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They reached the wooden stairs and sprinted up the steps, Ryan hitting the heavy wooden door at the top with his shoulder.
The iron slide bolt snapped under his weight, and they burst back into the dark kitchen.
