The Cellar

“How could they tell?”

“He didn’t have claws, sweetie.”

A few in the group tittered. The chubby boy arched an eyebrow at Donna and turned away. The man from the cafe still looked at her. She met his eyes. They held her, penetrated her, set warm fluid spreading in her loins. He didn’t look away for a long time. Shaken, Donna tried to recover her composure. She finally returned her attention to the tour.

“…through a window out in the kitchen. If you’ll just step around the screen here.”

As they moved to the front of a three-paneled papier-mache screen that partitioned off a corner of the room, someone screamed. Several members of the group gasped with shock. Others mumbled. Some groaned with repugnance. Donna followed her daughter around the screen, glimpsed an outstretched bloody hand on the floor, and stumbled as Sandy bolted back.

Maggie chuckled at the group’s reaction.

Donna led Sandy around the end of the screen. Lying on the floor, one leg propped high on the dusty cushion of a couch, was the form of a woman. Her shiny eyes gazed upward. Her bloody face was twisted in a grimace of terror and agony. Tatters of her stained linen gown draped her body, covering little except her breasts and pubic area.

“The beast tore down the screen,” said Maggie, “and leaped over the back of the couch, taking Ethel Hughes by surprise while she was reading The Saturday Evening Post. This is the very magazine she was reading at the time.” Maggie stretched her cane across the body and poked the magazine. “Everything is just as it was on that awful night.” She smiled pleasantly. “Except for the body, of course. This replica was created in wax by Mssr. Claude Dubois, at my request, way back in 1936. Every detail is guaranteed authentic, down to the tiniest bite mark on her poor neck. We used morgue photos.

“Of course, this is the gown that Ethel actually wore that night. These dark places are made by her blood.”

“Was there sexual assault?” the white-haired man asked in a strained voice.

Maggie’s pleasant eyes hardened, flicking toward his face. “No,” she said.

“That’s not what I heard.”

“I can’t be responsible for what you heard, sir. I only know what I know, and I know more about the beast of this house than any other person, living or dead. The beast of this house has never carnally abused its victims.”

“Then I apologize,” he said in a cold voice.

“When the beast was done with Ethel, it rampaged through the parlor. It knocked this alabaster bust of Caesar off the mantle, breaking the nose.” The nose rested on the fireplace mantle beside the bust. “It dashed half a dozen figurines into the fireplace. It upset chairs. This fine rosewood pedestal table was thrown through the bay window. The racket, of course, awakened the rest of the household. Lilly’s room was right up there.” Maggie pointed toward the high ceiling with her cane. “The beast must’ve heard her stirring. It went for the stairs.”

Silently, she led the group out of the parlor and up a broad stairway to the second floor hall. They turned to the left. Maggie stepped through a side doorway and into a bedroom.

“We’re now above the parlor. Here’s where Lilly Thorn was sleeping the night of the beast attack.” A wax figure, dressed in a lacy pink gown, was sitting upright, staring fearfully over the brass scrollwork at the foot of the bed. “When the commotion woke Lilly up, she dragged the dressing table from there”—she pointed her cane at the heavy rosewood table and mirror beside the window—“to there, barricading the door. Then she made her escape through the window. She jumped to the roof of the bay window below, then to the ground.

“It’s always been a wonder to me that she didn’t try to save her children.”

They followed Maggie out of the bedroom.

“When the beast found that he couldn’t get into her room, he came down the hall this way.”

They passed the top of the stairs. Ahead, four Brentwood chairs blocked the center of the corridor. Clothesline was strung from one chair to the next, closing off the center space. The members of the group squeezed between one of the lines and the wall.

“This is where we’ll put our new display. The figures are already on order, but we don’t expect to have them much before spring.”

“That’s a shame,” the man with the two children told his wife in a sarcastic voice.

Maggie entered a door to the right. “The beast found this door open,” she said.

The windows of the room faced the wooded hillside behind the house. The room’s two brass beds looked much like the one in Lilly’s room, but the covers were heaped in disarray. A rocking horse with faded paint stood in one corner, next to the wash stand.

“Earl was ten,” Maggie said. “His brother, Sam, was eight.”

Their wax bodies, torn and chewed, lay sprawled face down between the two beds. Both wore the remains of striped nightshirts that concealed little except their buttocks.

“Let’s go,” said the man with the two children. “This is the most crude, tasteless excuse for a voyeuristic thrill I’ve ever come across.”

His wife smiled apologetically at Maggie.

“Twelve bucks for this!” the man spat. “Good God!” His wife and children followed him out of the room.

A trim woman in a white blouse and shorts took her teenage son by the elbow. “We’re going, too.”

“Mother!”

“No argument. We’ve both seen too much already.”

“Aw geez!”

She tugged him out the door.

When they were gone, Maggie laughed quietly. “They left before we got to the best part,” she said.

Nervous laughter whispered through the remaining members of the group. 2.

“We lived sixteen nights in this house before the beast struck.” She led them through the corridor, past the blocking chairs and past the stairway. “My husband, Joseph, he had a distaste for the rooms where the murders happened. That’s partly why we left ’em well enough alone, and settled ourselves elsewhere. Cynthia and Diana weren’t so squeamish. They stayed in the boys’ room we just left.”

She took the group through a doorway on the right, across from Lilly’s bedroom. Donna hunted the floor for wax bodies, but found none, though a four-paneled papier-mache screen blocked one corner and window.

“Joseph and I were sleeping here. The night was the seventh of May 1931. That’s more than forty years back, but it’s burned in my mind. There’d been a good deal of rain that day. It slowed down after dark. We had those windows open. I could hear the drizzle outside. The girls were fast asleep at the end of the hall, and the baby, Theodore, was snug in the nursery.

“I fell asleep, feeling all peaceful and safe. But long about midnight, I was awakened by a loud crash of glass. The sound came from downstairs. Joseph, who also heard it, got up real quiet and tiptoed over here to the chest. He always kept his pistol here.” Opening a top drawer, she pulled out a Colt .45 service automatic. “This pistol. It made a frightful loud sound when he worked its top.” Clamping her cane under one arm, she gripped the black hood of the automatic and quickly slid it back and forward with a scraping clamor of metal parts. Her thumb gently lowered the hammer. She returned the gun to its drawer.

“Joseph took the pistol with him and left the room. When I heard his footsteps on the stairs, I stole out of bed, myself. Quiet as I could, I started down the hall. I had to get to my children, you see.”

The group followed her into the corridor.

“I was right here, at the top of the stairway, when I heard gunshots from downstairs. I heard a scream from Joseph such as I’d never heard before. There were sounds of a scuffle, then scampering feet. I stood right here, scared frozen, listening to footsteps climb the stairs. I wanted to run off, and take my children to safety, but fear held me tight so I couldn’t move.

“Out of the darkness below me came the beast. I couldn’t see how it looked, except it walked upright like a man. It made kind of a laugh, and then it leaped on me and dragged me down to the floor. It ripped me with its claws and teeth. I tried to fight it off, but of course I was no match for the thing. I was preparing myself to meet the Lord when little Theodore started crying in his nursery at the end of the hall. The beast climbed off me and ran to the nursery.