Your bridegroom is six feet under in the frozen timber, Clara, and crying won't buy your fare back to Missouri.
The world around us dissolved into a maelstrom of sound and fury. The cabin shrieked, a tortured groan of wood and stone. The tremors intensified, throwing Elijah off balance. His revolver clattered to the floor.
“No!” he roared, his face a mask of disbelief and pure, unadulterated terror. “That’s a lie! It’s mine!” He lunged for me, for the contract, but he was too slow.
A blinding burst of icy blue light erupted from the parlor floorboards. It ripped through the polished pine, tearing great splinters into the air. The floor shattered, exploding upward as if struck by a lightning bolt from below.
A spectral, translucent figure burst through the ruptured floorboards. It was Silas Delaney. His form was a swirling vortex of blue light and freezing air, his face contorted in a silent scream of vengeance.
He did not speak. He did not need to.
Silas’s spectral form surged towards the center of the parlor, directly over the cellar hatch. With horrific, supernatural force, he tore away the heavy stone well lid, sending chunks of masonry flying.
The lid crashed into the far wall, exposing the open, black abyss of the well shaft.
And there, entwined in thick, dark roots that snaked up from the depths, was Silas’s preserved corpse. His eyes were wide and milky, staring upwards, his mouth agape in a silent, eternal scream. The black silt clung to his skin like a second hide.
Elijah screamed, a sound ripped from the deepest pit of his being. He stumbled backward, away from the terrifying apparition, away from the horrifying truth of his crime.
But the house was collapsing. The entire foundation split wide open with a deafening crack. The stone fireplace, a massive structure of granite and brick, groaned and tore free from the wall.
It crashed down, directly onto Elijah. A sickening crunch of stone and bone echoed through the chaotic parlor. He was pinned, crushed beneath the tons of masonry, his screams abruptly cut short as he was dragged into the widening fissure.
At that exact moment, the ground beneath Thomas’s chair in the cellar gave way. I heard his terrified cry as the earth swallowed him whole.
“Thomas!” I screamed, lunging forward, my arm outstretched.
I caught his hand. My fingers locked around his, felt the thin, fragile bones. His eyes, wide with terror, met mine for one agonizing second.
The entity’s pull from the abyss was immense, a powerful, supernatural suction. I braced myself, digging my heels into the crumbling floor, muscles screaming, trying to hold him.
“Clara!” Thomas choked out, his voice weak.
But the force was too great. The downward pull was absolute. With a sickening, wet crack, Thomas’s wrist snapped in my grip.
His fingers, suddenly boneless, slipped from mine.
I watched, frozen in horror, as his small body plunged into the widening, tar-black abyss, disappearing into the subterranean void. The earth groaned one final, terrible time.
Then, with an awful, final shudder, the fissures in the parlor floor began to seal shut. The raw earth, the broken timbers, the remaining stone—it all collapsed inward, closing over the abyss.
Over Elijah. Over Silas. And over Thomas. Forever.
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