Elliana Morris's Arc

Chapter 1 of 5

Elliana Morris had owned the house for six days when the cold started eating her food. She stood at the bottom of the cellar stairs in her father's old wool coat, holding a candle to a jar of pickled beets. Frost webbed the glass. The jar had been fine yesterday. Half her savings sat on these shelves in cans and jars, the buffer that was supposed to carry her through winter while she fixed the roof upstairs. A draft moved past her ankle. She followed it three steps and lost it. The cellar was long and low, stone walls sweating in patches, and the cold came from somewhere she couldn't see. She had been hunting the leak for two nights. Every crack she sealed with rag and wax pushed the chill somewhere else, like squeezing a balloon. She set the candle on the supply shelf and watched the flame. It leaned left, toward the back wall. She walked the wall with her palm out. Behind a stack of crates, the stone went cold enough to sting. She dragged the crates aside. Cans rolled and clattered on the floor. The wall behind the crates wasn't a wall. Cobwebs hung in a curtain across an arched opening, thick as gauze. Someone had bricked it up once and someone else had knocked the bricks back out. The rubble sat in a neat pile to the side, as if whoever cleared it had meant to come back. Elliana pulled the webs down with the broom. A stone archway stood behind them, older than the house by the look of the masonry. The dark inside it wasn't flat. A faint glow sat somewhere deep in the passage, low and steady, the color of a banked coal. The draft poured out of the opening in a slow, cold river. She stepped back. Her breath came out white. The air from the archway smelled like wet stone and, under that, something warmer she couldn't name. Not smoke. Not rot. Something alive. The realtor had said Moonveil House was built in 1889 by a widow who left no children. He had not mentioned a tunnel. Elliana crouched and held her hand near the threshold. The draft was steady. Constant. Whatever was on the other end was open to the air, and it was warm enough that the difference had been ruining her food for a week. She couldn't seal it. Sealing it meant living above a hole she didn't understand. She looked at the ruined jars, then at the glow. “All right” she said as she went back upstairs to grab a lantern.