Chapter One – Blood Sisters
The wooden panelled room stretched on and on into the distance, into the darkness. Dust floated in the shafts of sunlight pouring through the grimy, floor length windows, but that light alone was not strong enough to pierce the veil of shadows obscuring the back wall.
Abigail narrowed her sapphire eyes, trying to see if the room ever ended. Shadows danced in the corners of the chamber, rearing and rising to the high ceiling, twirling and churning like monsters in the gloom. That, and the complete silence, frightened the young girl, but she held her chin high and took a step into the room. The heavy wooden door clicked shut behind her.
Standing in the centre of the endless room was a bulky object swathed in an old, white sheet. The sheet didn’t quite reach the ground and Shadows lurked beneath it. They recoiled as Abigail approached the object, leaving prints in the dust layering the creaky floorboards.
“Echo,” she said loudly.
“Echo, echo...” the walls repeated.
“This house sucks!”
“House sucks, sucks, sucks...”
When the sheeted object was at arm’s length, Abigail paused. Dust clung thickly to the sheet, weighing it down to the flat surface of the chin-level entity. Ninety percent of dust is made up of dead skin cells, so who’s skin am I inhaling? she thought, wrinkling her nose. As she entwined her little fingers with the grimy material, Abigail sneezed, her eyes squeezing tight shut.
“Achoo, achoo, choo...” the echo sneered menacingly.
Blue eyes wide, Abigail glanced around, her heart pounding behind her ears. The Shadows grew, hulking in the corners, skirting along the walls. A fierce wind blew from the far end of the room, lashing Abigail’s brown hair around her freckled face. Howling filled the room as the gust grew stronger, raising the hairs on the back of her pale neck. The little girl spun on her heels and bolted for the door like hell itself was chasing her, because, for all she knew, it was.
With one hand on the cool, brass door knob, Abigail paused. The wind had stopped. Slowly, she turned around. The room looked as still and peaceful as it had from first glance. The Shadows had receded; the only thing moving was the dust in the warm shafts of sunlight. Now that her eyes had adjusted, Abigail could see a fireplace at the far end. That’s where the wind had come from. The howling had been the wind whistling down the chimney.
Like a slithering snake, the white sheet slid off the hulking object and crumpled to the ground. Beneath it stood a glossy grand piano. Abigail took a step towards it, then another, and another. She broke into a jog until she reached the piano and ran her hands along its cool, polished surface.
“Abigail!” Kasia’s voice was muffled through the walls. “Abigail, where are you?”
“Secret,” the Shadows hissed.
“Coming, Mom!” Abigail ran from the room, closing the door tightly behind her.
“Abi.” Kasia stepped into the little study sporting a troubled frown. “You left your brother in the car… What’s this room?”
Conflicted by the direction from the shadows and the instinct not to lie, she shrugged her tiny shoulders.
Kasia turned the knob, and the door rattled – it was locked. “Huh,” she said to herself, then turned back to her daughter. “All I asked for was one day where you could look after you brother, just while we moved in, and you just run off. There’ll be plenty of time for exploring later…”
Abigail wasn’t listening; she was already in the lobby heading for the front door where her uncle stood examining its rusty old hinges, having abandoned the boxes he was bringing in on the porch. Joseph Daine; the name stood out in bold print on the identification tag hanging around his neck, the man having just gotten out of work to help his sister-in-law move in.
“These need replacing,” he told Kasia as she breezed past, stepping gracefully over the cardboard boxes. She simply nodded and grabbed a suitcase from the boot of the car.
Daine ran a huge hand through his tangle of auburn hair, as he did when something was worrying him. “I’ll do it tomorrow.”
Sitting in the backseat of the silver Ford Focus, his soft brown hair a mess, was Abigail’s youngest brother, Jakob. According to Daine, Jakob’s real name was ‘oops’, and so far that name seemed to suit the two-year-old perfectly. Jakob’s clothes were always decorated with food and everything he touched he ruined somehow. Things had gotten worse for everyone when he learned to walk, but he still couldn’t talk nor did he seem to understand what people said to him other than the basics.
Abigail slowly opened the car door, and Jakob grinned widely. “You know,” she said, unbuckling his seat belt and lifting his heavy body into her arms. “If you were born when Dad was still alive, you probably woulda turned out right.”
Jakob giggled.
“Alex,” Abi called, seeing her other little brother’s halo of blonde hair bobbing around the other side of the car. “Help Mom and Uncle Joseph out. There’s some light boxes on the back seats.”
“Uncle Joseph said to call him Daine because he doesn’t like his name and being called Uncle makes him feel like an old man.” Unlike Jakob, Alex learned to talk at an early age and his speech was almost perfect though he was only four, almost five.
“He is an old man,” Abi muttered, but it wasn’t all that true.
“That’s what I told him…” Alex said, dragging his suitcase behind him as he tripped to the house.
A groan and a loud crash from behind caused Abi to jump and spin around. The front door lay flat on the porch, the red shards of its stained glass window scattered across the stone steps, like droplets of blood. Daine stood to the side in shock; it seemed he’d only just managed to jump out of the way before the door broke.
“I hate this place,” Abigail muttered, journeying around the side of the house.
In the backyard dead trees clawed at the grey sky; the rotten forest extended away and up the mountain, until it disappeared into the clouds. The house itself resembled an old manor home; Abigail was reminded of haunted houses in cartoons, with high stone walls containing countless secrets, and windows gleaming like dark, vacant eyes. Moss carpeted the cracked flagstone beneath her feet, the whole garden was damp and sent chills down her spine.
“Psst, Abigail.”
Abi almost dropped her brother with fright. Standing by an archway entwined with dead ivy, was Daine’s only daughter – Abi’s older cousin. Her frilly black dress and white knee-high socks made her flowing scarlet hair stand out even more so.
“Allyson,” Abi set Jake down and took his hand. Together they approached the tall, thin girl. “I didn’t even realise you were here.”
“Come with me,” Allyson flash her a sinister, gapped grin and danced through the archway. “Leave Jake here.”
“Where are we going?”
“Into the forest,” Ally said over her shoulder. “There’s a place I want to show you.”
Her cousin, her only friend, held out her hand expectantly. Abi dropped Jakob’s tiny hand, and replaced it with Allyson’s. Ally gripped her hand back tightly, eyes gleaming as she led her through the forest.
“I don’t think we should go too far from the house,” Abi said, watching her breath rise in plumes as they delved deeper into the woods.
“Stop being such a worry wart,” Allyson gripped. “We’re going somewhere private, so we can become blood sisters.”
“Blood sisters?” Abi repeated in confusion. “But we’re already cousins.”
“That’s not good enough. Do you ever see your mum or my mum or Auntie Zeda talk to any of their cousins? No. They only talked to each other. Because they’re sisters. If we become sisters, we can be together forever.”
Abigail nodded seriously, it seemed reasonable to the six-year-old.
“We’re here.”
They’d reached a creek whose crystal clear water trickled over the grey rocks, down the mountain side to the river through the valley. The property was the furthest one up the mountainside, more far away from civilisation to any other house. That was why Kasia had chosen it; its vast boundaries would provide adequate space for the children to run around in once their shape-shifting gene kicked in. Until then, Abi would hate it.
Ally pulled out a knife. Abi recognised it instantly – it belonged to their mothers and their aunty, from when they were teenagers and lived on the streets – it had been their only protection other than their claws and their teeth. For so long it had sat in Ally’s mum’s dining room, collecting dust - and always, always haunting Abi. But now it glinted in the dim light, shining brightly, looking new and alive, full of anger, pain, misery. Its essence throbbed as Ally drew it closer. Abi flinched away from the pull of despair, but the feeling still tugged at her, like being next to a tiny black hole.
“Don’t be a baby,” Ally snapped impatiently.
How could Abi tell her that everything that happens to an object leaves a trace on the entity, a trace that only Abi can read? How could she explain the horror associated with that knife, that Abi now felt?
Allyson grabbed Abi’s wrist, and now the knife was close than ever. A scream echoed through Abigail’s mind, a scream of horrors past. It was her Auntie Zeda’s scream, and she was screaming Kasia’s name, screaming it like it was the end-
And that was the end.
The feelings were too strong, too close. Too terrible for the little girl to relive.
Abigail blacked out.
The next thing she was aware of, was stumbling back through the archway towards the house, applying pressure to a thin cut across her palm. Ally’s hand bore a similar wound, but she let the blood flow, watching it as it dripped to the leaf-strewn ground.
Alex and Jakob sat on the front porch, rolling a ball back and forth to each other. Jake was thrilled by it, but Alex looked incredibly bored. He jumped to his feet at the sight of his sister.
“Mum’s mad at you,” he informed her. “Hello, Allyson.”
“Hey, brat.”
Alex frowned. “You two are in trouble,” he sat back down with Jakob, and their game began again.
The blood sisters trailed inside, Abi looking thoroughly miserable, Ally with an air of indifference. Kasia and Daine were waiting for them in the extensive lobby. It was a large, square room with marble flooring, faded with age. To each side were archways, the right leading into a stone kitchen and a fancy dining room, the left leading to the study. Straight ahead a wide carpeted stair case flattened into a landing then split into two, one flight going left, the other right. The faded wooden banisters looked like bones to Abi.
The blood sisters met their parents’ gazes, and sighed.
“Oh boy,” Ally muttered. “Here we go.”
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