The Yaak House, Part Six

(Originally published on my main blog, Andi and I Write, on October 12, 2020

"Gerald, I'm sorry," Thaz'ra didn't get much more out before Jasper's own voice ran hers over.

"Rin called it Ger-" Gerald put a hand over Jasper's mouth with a sigh, lowering the light.

"Okay, stop. One at a time," he sighed, "Did the middle of her sentence interrupt the beginning of yours?" Jasper blinked a few times, sighing behind the other man's hand. 

"Sorry," Jasper murmured.

"Look around..." Thaz'ra said in a small, almost broken voice, "I'm sorry... please for the love of what's good... just look..." she murmured, leaning into Jasper. Gerald sighed and kissed the top of her head before he looked around, a smile softening his face for a moment as Jasper leaned over to press a kiss to his shoulder.

Decrepit pews lay scattered before them, broken like china as though a bull had charged through them and out the door. Gerald followed the trail of carnage with his light to an open set of heavy cellar doors, the wood they were comprised of long rotten and sagging like the wings of some defeated forest angel. Jasper shuddered at the sight, and Gerald gave him the light.

"Nope," Gerald said simply as he turned to reach for the door of the cabin, “Not going down there,” Jasper pointed the light into the yawning darkness within the cellar doors, surprised to see pale stone steps training ever further downward into the  cursed in a mix of German and English that drew Jasper's attention, "Wait, there was just a door here!" Jasper turned the light toward the place... and sure enough, the log beams ran unbroken, no doors to be found as he looked around.

"Thaz'ra," Jasper's voice was calm, though his hands shook as he looked at Thaz’ra with uncertainty and questions he didn’t have the nerve to voice.

Gerald looked around the cabin after taking the light back, hoping to find another exit, only for his gaze to fixate on the far wall. Soon Jasper’s shocked gaze joined him. Thaz’ra had since huddled against Jasper, the taller of the two, shaking and silent.

On the far wall, ensconced by a crowd of candles encrusted with dead moss on the floor was the antlered skull of what looked to be an Irish Elk, pristine and fresh against all laws of time and logic. The antlers spread nearly from wall to wall of the cabin. A glow like that of the beast’s eyes outside shone in the void spaces of the skull, though this glow seemed more akin to sleepy phosphenes, the waver of light one would see in their vision when rubbing tired eyes. Gerald shuddered, pushing his logical mind aside for the moment as he swung the light around to Thaz’ra. She wouldn’t look at him, the dark crimson stripe over her face smeared as she ran her hair through with a shaking hand.

“Your eye,” Gerald frowned, just now noticing the scratch. He tucked the light under his arm and cradled her face in gentle hands. It felt, for a moment, like the familiar gesture it was before Thaz’ra shied away from the touch.

“I have two for a reason Gerald,” Thaz’ra murmured, voice small and demure. He lifted her chin and frowned. She looked away, “there’s only one real way out of here…” she murmured, turning from the blond before he could stop her and heading for the cellar doors.

“We chose a madwoman,” Jasper said after a moment to Gerald, seeing Thaz’ra pause to pick up an ancient brass candle holder, pulling a lighter from her pocket and lighting one of the candles after placing it in the holder. She turned to them and Jasper, after a long silence, sighed before making his way toward her.

“Jaz-” Gerald warned, but Thaz’ra lifted her eyes to him. The left was beginning to swell shut and painful looking, the other looked mournful.

“I’ll get you two out of here safe,” Thaz’ra murmured, “That’s a promise.”

“And yourself?” Gerald asked. Jasper turned and gave him a frown, but Thaz’ra said nothing, turning to descend the stairs into the yawning darkness. Jasper hesitated a moment before turning to follow her.

Gerald looked around the cabin once more with his own light before sighing shakily and following the two with rushed steps. His boots made a heavy sound over the stone steps into the darkness… they seemed to trail onward down into the earth at a slow incline, and he clicked his light off for the time being as he caught up with Jasper, taking his hand as they followed the wavering glow of the candle and Thaz’ra before them.

The stairs continued for some time into the earth and Gerald would have expected it to be cold, but it was balmy and warm, a touch muggy even, when the two reached a set of ornate doors. Two orbs of green danced atop them, and Jasper took the light from Gerald and clicked it on fearfully. The architect in Jasper then paused and admired these doors; the patinas over the twining metalwork of the frame, hinges, and handles left him reminded of ivy and roses. The catholic in Gerald, however, was unsettled by the heathen imagery in the center of the doors.

In relief over the exposed wood of the doors was the image of a bare woman with a spindly set of antlers swooping back along her head cradling a two-headed fawn; one of the fawn’s heads was tucked down, asleep against the neck of the other, which appeared to suckle from breast of the bare woman holding it. She appeared mournful in the embrace of a stag-headed woman and a man with deer’s skull, a snake’s tongue flickered forth from his open mouth. The scene was encircled by what looked to Gerald like antlers and ribcages, a skull of some kind atop the scene with eyes of some green stone that had danced by the wavering candlelight, but now shone still and unnatural.

Jasper had moved on from his admiration of the metalwork on the edges to the scene in the center, and he shivered.

“I don’t feel like these doors are meant to be opened,” Gerald murmured.

“Not easily… by mortals at least,” Thaz’ra sighed, pulling something from her pocket; a fragment of the jawbone she had shot off at the tent the first time, before Gerald had fallen asleep. Jasper frowned, and Gerald squeezed his hand, “but they can be.”

“Thaz…” Jasper asked in a worried voice, looking the rest of the door over as Gerald watched Thaz’ra set her piece of jawbone in the crook of bare woman’s arms. There was a hiss, a gust of humid wind escaping as Thaz’ra pushed the doors open.

Gerald took the light from Jasper now and followed Thaz’ra in. Jasper squeezed his hand tighter and Gerald turned to him, “Jaz… You came this far, Thaz’ra said she’d get you out of this.”

“I… this place just…” Jasper shook his head a bit. Thaz’ra had paused, and Gerald sighed, pulling Jasper along gently, reeling in the dark haired man from arm’s length until he had his hands cupped over the other’s face, “It feels wrong,” Jasper’s voice cracked over the words, and Thaz’ra sighed, circling back to the duo as Gerald pulled Jasper’s head down to place a tender kiss to his forehead.

“You believe in Thaz’ra, yeah?” Gerald asked.

“I always have…” Jasper murmured.

“Then don’t let this fear stop you. She said she’d get us out safe,” Gerald murmured. Thaz’ra stood behind him, the candlelight giving her an ethereal glow and catching the premature greys she sported like flashes of starlight before their eyes.

Jasper sighed and stepped free of Gerald’s embrace, though not before pausing to cup his face in his hands and kiss him properly for a long moment. Thaz’ra gave a smile, though there was a melancholy to it that haunted Jasper as he parted from a now blushing and breathless Gerald.

“Lead the way Thaz, sorry,” Jasper murmured, “I just… feel less afraid after kissing him… you know?”

“Fear is a healthy response,” Thaz’ra murmured, turning again to walk onward into the yawning darkness that revealed a narrow hall and a second set of doors not far ahead. Behind them, the first set swung shut with a heavy boom that rattled in their lungs.

Gerald jumped, his breath hitching as his body seemed to lock up for a moment before he gave a shaking sigh, Jasper squeezing his hand before they continued down, following Thaz’ra down for what could have been hours or seconds to a second set of doors that seemed to taunt them from the end of what their lights could see for a while.

More metalwork adorned these doors as well as more roses, ivy, antlers, and ribcages; though each of these doors had its own set of images this time, some of the figures the same ones as the last. To the right was an image of the stag headed woman in distress beneath the body of a man who looked to be human, save the boar’s tusks that pushed from his lips, and the piggish ears that were laid back as a the antlered woman drove a spear into the assailant.

Jasper shuddered at the image, the stag woman’s expression was vivid enough even that had he not survived the horrors such as what was depicted, he’d have understood.  Gerald turned the light to the carving on the left. His hands shook; the antlered woman was offering the butchered remains of the boar man. He had been cut in two, his heart in her hands as she held it up to a two-headed stag, though unlike the fawn at her feet, the antlered heads appeared to split from the side rather than the neck.

“Thaz…” Jasper rasped. She looked away, pushing these doors open and bringing them to a cavernous chamber. Before them was a shallow-looking pool, a path of stepstones through it.  The light of her candle cast dancing ripples of light across this chamber, and Jasper frowned as he saw yet another set of doors, “How many doors are there?”

“This is the last set,” she said softly. Her whisper echoed over the walls and across the water like a ghost. Jasper and Gerald made their way along the step stones silently. Gerald glanced into the water and saw white shapes beneath the water, he paused for perhaps a moment too long and shone his light down into the water; he saw ribcage, it looked small. He saw all manner of small bones beneath the surface, and he realized the water was probably deeper than he thought. He found he didn’t want to ask how they had come to rest there. He stopped looking into the water and hurried carefully across the stones, taking Thaz’ra’s free hand as Jasper took the light now and his other hand.

Thaz’ra set the candle down and pulled a cervid jawbone from her coat, the same that had fallen in the ashes of their fire. Gerald frowned a bit, then looked up to the shaking exhale he heard leave Jasper’s lips.

“Thaz’ra… babe,” Jasper said softly, “How do you know this is the last set of doors? What is this place?”

“I’m not sure…” she admitted. Gerald saw her turn the jawbone over in her hand as she confessed this, “Time doesn’t pass the same here, that… that’s all I know…” Gerald felt his arms bristle with gooseflesh as he took in the relief carvings on this door; in the center of another ivy and antler circle were the figures from the first door, though these carvings were done in greater detail. The stag-headed woman had been slashed across the chest; the wound inlaid with a paler wood than the rest. She lay on the ground, clutching at her breast with one hand while the other reached for the deer skulled man. He had a hand outstretched to her, one behind him grasping a hand of the antlered woman with the two-headed fawn running at her feet now towards the wounded party. The antlered woman held something before her against a large bear. This area of the carving was recessed, unclear, but the bear seemed to be recoiling from the sight of it. Jasper tilted his head and stepped closer in a daring move, the group moving with him. He looked to the jawbone in Thaz’ra’s hands.

“What are you hiding from us?” Gerald asked warily. She winced, and Jasper frowned at him.

“Gerald,” he scolded with a tired sigh.

“She’s been here before, and a lie by omission is still a lie,” Gerald said, his voice wavering as he spoke, watching Thaz’ra place the jawbone in the recessed space after pulling the teeth free with a jerk. These she put in her pocket before pressing the toothless jawbone into the recess.

The doors groaned and swung inward, and the group advanced on into a smaller space; wood paneling glared from the walls, garish and out of place after so many earthen and stone walls.

Behind them, the doors swung shut and Gerald turned to them, trying to open them back up. Thaz’ra didn’t stop him. This side of the door was blank; but before them, more alarmingly, was a room that looked like the interior of the cabin from which they had descended initially, but larger and with no pews.

What hushed the questions in Jasper and Gerald’s throats was the wall.  

There, on the far wall, ensconced by a crowd of candles on the mossy floor, was the antlered skull of what looked to be an Irish Elk, dark and ancient along the laws of time and logic unlike its pristine mimic upstairs. Beneath this mount was a stone altar, built tilted toward them; it looked to have been hewn from the earth itself, runes running along a groove at the low edge that cut down to the mossy floor.

Then the skull dipped down, as if in greeting, before an ancient-sounding voice filled the chamber after a rushing sound, as if unseen lungs had drawn a breath.

“Thazenelra,” it was a tired greeting, but one of welcome as Thaz’ra stepped forward, Gerald pulling Jasper behind him and pulling his gun as Thaz’ra knelt to one knee and bowed her head before the skull. The name that escaped her lips in greeting was fluid, hushed one that sounded more like wind hissing through pine boughs.

“Dvasia.”