Bodies In The Walls
Reader’s Discretion is Advised: Mentions of suicide and self-harm
Written by Nohbodee
Cecelia
Rivertown Warehouse District
The house was quiet. Too quiet. Especially, being on a busy block like it was. It bothered her. Like it was a warning. What bothered her more was that she couldn’t stop thinking about the basement. The images from the police report flashed in her brain and it made her sick to her stomach.
She felt like a coward. Why did she choose to come back? She wanted it, yes. And it seemed like a good idea when she was in Boston, but now that she was here, she wasn’t so sure. This was the only childhood home she had ever known. Then, why was she so afraid to even sleep inside its walls? She didn’t want it to be true. Any of it. She wanted to remember her parents as they had been. Quiet, even a little brooding, but they loved her.
Mr. Perry used to read her stories about Kings and Queens, gypsies, even Knights that fought beasts in dark, cursed woods. And Mrs. Perry used to make her anything her little heart desired. She wanted to cry for them, even then, but she’d cried enough.
She cried when she discovered they’d died, and then she cried when she saw what they’d done. She feared she’d become like them. Evil. Murderous. Fiendish. Cruel. Her parent’s case had happened so long ago, but it still felt like a cold one. No peace for the victim’s families.
That had been hard, too. Getting the letters and phone calls from people she never knew. She was six when the Perry’s had mutilated their family members. How could she have been responsible? But they felt she was. She felt like she was, she supposed, too.
They wanted her money, which she gave them. Millions, in truth. She did try to amend what her parents had done, but she realized that nothing would put the wrong things right. Not when it involves someone’s loved ones.
She tried to kill herself with a shotgun, after reading the articles on the internet. Only…she ended up waking up the next morning with a hell of a hangover and the whole afternoon cleaning up brain matter. She slit her wrists, but woke in the bathtub, all pruny. She hung herself but found getting back down later was annoying. So, she gave up. God is punishing me for their sins, she told herself after the last attempt. That suffering thought had made her feel a little better.
Cecelia stood up from her dining table and went to the fridge. She pulled out cranberry juice and found the vodka at the bottom of her freezer. She made herself a drink and went to the window.
The only thing to distract her from her self-hatred was her cat and the mechanic across the street. She peeked through the window at him. He was tall, dark, and grumpy. Cecelia blushed at the images she conjured of him.
His dark eyes looked into the night sky, like they always did around this time. He was a man of habit, she discovered. Every night, around ten, after he closed his shop and his employees had left, he’d swig his beer and stare out, thoughtfully.
She wanted to know what he was thinking. What did mechanics worry about?
Cecelia sighed and closed the blinds.
Three hours and entire bottle of vodka later, Cecelia decided to go down into the basement. She assumed that there wouldn’t be much down there, as it was the place they found the bodies.
The stairs creaked ominously loud as she counted each step. Her breathing was loud in her ears. She couldn’t even hear her heart beating in her chest. For just a moment, she wondered if she even had one.
The eleven steps it took to get to the basement felt more like thirty flights. She imagined herself in a cowardly lion costume, when she struggled to stop her knees from shaking.
She didn’t know what she was going to find or how it was going to change her? Indefinitely, probably, she thought, sarcastically. When she had finally got down to the bottom step, she turned on the second set of lights. She was wrong about the basement being empty, but the leather chest in the corner did seem less scary in a newly refurbished basement.
She inspected the basement. It looked like all the other rooms. Light beige carpets and eggshell walls. It was actually kind of nice, and then she remembered what happened down here.
Cecelia approached the chest cautiously. When it didn’t shake and vibrate with demonic voices, she knelt down in front of it. She attempted to open it, but found it was locked.
Cecelia pulled out the ring of keys her lawyer gave her and tried each one. She didn’t truly think it would be that easy, but the sixth key fit and popped open the lock.
She froze. She didn’t truly want to see what was inside, but she knew it was her duty. In order to bury her parents, she would have to dig up their past, light it aflame and watch it burn.
She lifted the lid and looked inside.
She hated the way it smelled down here. A moldy smell, mixed with…flesh. She quivered. There were spirits down here, too. She could feel them. She could hear them whispering very loudly. Telling her things, she didn’t want to hear.
She hadn’t thought about what she was doing as she made her way back up the stairs. She entered into the garage and reached for a hammer she didn’t know she owned.
Back down in the basement, Cecelia stood before the far side of the wall, staring blankly. She rose the hammer and began to smash in holes, tipping back the rest of the fine vodka.
The voices told her to do it. The voices told her that her secrets lied in the walls. She had to find them in order to…in order to…to win the war. That part of the vision was unclear. Only images of darkness and violence.
The answers were in the walls. She slammed the hammer over and over again into different parts of the wall. There wasn’t really a method. Just erratic and drunk demolishing. She ripped at the plaster, not stopping even when she found what she was looking for.
She had to tear away the whole wall before she started pulling out the skeletons. There were twenty in total. Full skeletons. Random objects and pieces of paper. She sat down looking at the piles and couldn’t seem to comprehend all that was happening or why.
She wanted to throw up, but her body wasn’t acting of its own accord. She just simply stood and stared at it all. Then like she was under a spell; she reached down, took a necklace from one of the skeleton’s hands, and put it on.
After a while, the shock guided Cecelia upstairs and to the kitchen. She pulled a Sheriff’s business card out of her back pocket and dialed the number.
It didn’t take long. After two rings, Sheriff Andrew Peters answered. “Detroit Police Station, Sheriff-” “It’s Cecelia,” her voice trembled. “Cecelia? Is everything ok?”
“Remember…remember when you said if I found out anything else?” she wanted to just scream out at him, but she was struggling to put the words together.
“Go ahead, Cecelia,” Sheriff Peters encouraged.
“Come to the manor,” was all Cecelia could manage, before she hung up the phone.
