“Jeezus, Isidor! I’m meant to be the girl here,” Melody laughed nervously.
I could sense that she felt anxious, but I suspected it wasn’t the dark or our current surroundings that made her feel like this, but the act of taking me back to her home for the first time and whatever it was that she wanted to show me.
Melody’s house sat in a small plot of land which was surrounded by a waist-high wooden fence. She swung open the gate which whined on its frozen hinges and led me across the front yard to the porch. Although it was dark, and the moonlight only shone intermittently through passing clouds, I could see that Melody’s home from the outside looked well-kept. It was only when Melody pushed open the front door and flipped on the hallway light that I immediately got the feeling something was odd about it.
“Holy moly!” I whispered through my teeth as I stepped inside and looked around in bewilderment. The short hallway was covered in an array of pictures, twelve in all. Like I’ve already said, I knew a little about the man named Jesus, and each of these pictures was of him. They weren’t beautiful pictures, they were ugly. They depicted him suffering in a way that I hadn’t contemplated before when I had heard stories about him. In each picture, he had been drawn in a skeletal and emaciated fashion. His eyes looked odd, and it was only as I stared at them, I realized they had been penned deliberately to look too big for his face. This gave him an almost alien-looking quality, which I found haunting. These were in stark contrast to paintings that I had seen of Jesus before, in books brought down to The Hollows by those who had adventured above ground. Those books had illustrations of him with a loving smile, locks of honey coloured hair, and angel-blue eyes.
“This way,” Melody whispered, her voice dragging me out of the weird trance the pictures had placed me in. Beneath the stairs there was a door which Melody opened. I peered over her shoulder and could see a set of wooden stairs leading down into darkness.
“I’ll show you what’s down here,” she whispered, making her way down into the pitch black. I silently followed. I held onto a rough feeling banister with my left hand and held my other directly out in front of me. The stairs cried out beneath us as we placed our weight on them. At the bottom, my hand struck Melody on the shoulder as she suddenly came to a halt in front of me. For a moment there was silence, stillness, nothing. Then I heard a ‘click’ as Melody pulled on the light switch which hung from the ceiling just above us. My new surroundings appeared dimly before me in the murky glow of the naked light bulb.
My throat made a shallow wheezing sound as I sucked in a mouthful of air in complete shock at what had just been revealed to me. The basement had been turned into a tiny chapel. The smell of melted candles and incense hung heavy in the air. There were two small pews in front of an altar which had been covered with a crimson cloth. There were rows of candles down the length of each wall, and at the end of the rows there was a large statue of Jesus. Positioned behind the altar was a huge cross which hung about four foot from the floor and protruded by about a foot from the wall.
“This place is creepy,” I whispered.
“It’s where my mum locks me away,” she said softly.
“What?” I couldn’t understand what she had just said to me.
“When I was a kid, if I was bad, she would bring me down here. I had to stay for hours, sometimes days, kneeling on that little box,” she said, pointing to a small crate at the foot of the cross.
“Get out of here!” I breathed.
Melody stared at me without replying. I looked into her eyes and that brilliant blue had faded. My stomach lurched with a sickening feeling and I knew that she was telling the truth.
“Why?” I tried to find the right words.
Melody settled into one of the small pews, and in a hushed and broken voice, she told me everything.
“Mum would drag me down here and make me strip to my underwear, and all the time she would be praying…almost chanting. She would rant over and over again. Her face would look as if in pain and I remember seeing spit form like foam around her mouth. She would keep me locked down here for days at a time.” Melody looked in the direction of the cross on the wall and I followed her gaze.
“Sometimes I would have to kneel on the crate for so long that my knees would bleed.”
“Why would she do that to you?” I asked, stunned at what she was telling me.
“Because she said I had an evil demon living within me. She would make me fast, too. My mum said she was starving the demon out of me.”
“How long would she make you go without food?” I gasped.
“Until I could take no more,” Melody explained. “My stomach would start to cramp and all I would be able to think about was food and water. My thirst was so bad sometimes, the pain was unbearable.”
“Where would your mum go while you were left starving down here in the dark?”
“She would sit right here and pray for my forgiveness. Sometimes, I could hear her sobbing hysterically.”
“When would she let you eat?”
“When I was near unconsciousness,” Melody said, looking up at the cross, her face haunted as she remembered the torture her mum had put her through. “I used to hallucinate due to the pain in my stomach and throat. I could hear water rushing past me, then drowning me. But it didn’t bring me any closer to God, like my mum hoped it would. It just made me believe there was no such thing. If there were a God, he wouldn’t have let me suffer like that.
I would finally rock forward on the crate, my knees red and raw, close to exhaustion. It was like I was falling into a well of blackness, but before I hit the bottom, my mum would catch me in her arms.”
I put my arm around Melody’s shoulder and hugged her as we sat on the pew and she stared up at that cross.
“Melody, I’ve never heard anything like that before. I don’t know what to say. You’ve got to report this, she can’t do this to you,” I whispered.
“Who would believe me? I’m not sure that even you do.”
“I believe you; it’s just that I can’t believe that any mum could do that to their kid.” But then I thought of what I had seen through Ray’s window and wasn’t quite so sure.
“Well, believe it or not, she does treat me like that and has always done so!” she insisted.
“Haven’t you got anyone else, family that you could go and live with?” I asked.
“No,” she said, shaking her head. “Anyway, she hasn’t locked me down here for a while.”
I studied Melody’s profile in the dim light of the makeshift chapel, and for a fourteen-year-old, she looked tired and haunted.
As if knowing what I was thinking, Melody stood up and said, “C’mon, the tour isn’t over yet!” Throwing the chapel into darkness once more, she led me up the stairs and to her mother’s bedroom.
Melody swung open the door, and her mum’s room was warmly lit with two red coloured light bulbs that sat in shaded lamps. Like the hall and so much of the house, the room was decorated with haunting pictures of Jesus at various stages of his crucifixion. The room was sparsely furnished with a single bed, a dark wooden wardrobe, and a reading chair. The most dominant feature in the room was the papier-mâché grotto Melody’s mother had constructed in the far corner of the room. If it hadn’t have been for its bizarre location, it would have been a truly impressive piece of work. It was very detailed, and from a distance, it did look like an actual stone structure. It had been painted, and a great deal of time and effort had been taken to paint plant life and flowers all around its base, and what appeared to be wild ivy growing up the length of one side. The front of the structure had been hollowed out and in this stood the most beautiful statue of a woman who I figured had to be Mary, Jesus’s mother. Unlike the many pictures of Jesus which were hanging around the house, this was truly breath-taking. In the statue’s hands she held a set of rosary beads just like the ones that Melody carried in the pocket on the front of her apron.
“What do you make of that?” Melody asked. She was whispering again.
“I’ve never seen anything like it in my life,” I murmured, moving forward to get a closer look. “What’s the point of it?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” Melody sighed. “I think it’s meant to resemble this holy place in France – Lourdes.”
“Wouldn’t it have been easier to buy a plane ticket and visit the place for real?” I half joked.
“If you were normal, yeah. But we’re not talking about your everyday pilgrim, are we?” Melody said.
“What would your mum do if she knew we had been in here?” I asked, continuing to study her abnormal handiwork.
“To her it would be like one of us taking a leak on God’s robes!”
I turned away from the grotto and was just about to say,
I think I should be going
, when we heard it: the unmistakable sound of someone’s footsteps coming up the stairs.
Chapter Fourteen
Isidor
We looked at each other. Even in the glow of the red lights in the room, I could see that the entire colour had drained from Melody’s face and she looked petrified.
“She’s back!” Melody whispered.
“What are we going to do?” I panicked. I could see Melody’s eyes frantically search the room for somewhere for both of us to hide. Outside, I could hear her mum’s footsteps and they were getting closer.
“In the wardrobe” she breathed in my ear.
“Are you kidding me?” I whispered back.
“Get inside,” she hissed, opening the wardrobe door. I could see real fear in her eyes and sense it in her voice.
Before I had the chance to say anything else, Melody pushed me in the back and into the wardrobe. The clothes on the hangers smelt musty and old as they brushed against my arms and face. Melody squeezed herself in next to me and closed the door. My heart was racing so fast I thought it was going to explode out of my chest. I stood as still as possible and I hoped that Melody’s mum wasn’t going to bed for the night. I knew that I wouldn’t be able to hide in here until morning.
It wasn’t completely dark in the wardrobe, and I noticed a chink of light seeping in through a gap in the door. As quietly as I could, I crouched and pressed my eye against the gap. I saw Melody’s mum enter the room and close the door behind her. I couldn’t see all of her, just brief glimpses, but enough to know that she dressed just the same as Melody.
How did I get myself into this?
I cursed.
Then her mum stopped in the middle of the room, and I saw her take off her bonnet and apron.
Oh my God, she is going to bed! I’m trapped!
I screamed inside.
She rummaged around for something in the grotto, and then dropped to her knees. Her head was cast forward so I couldn’t see her face. But in her hands she held a set of beads, just like the ones Melody had. I guessed that’s what her mum had taken from the statue in the grotto.
How did I get into this?
I thought again.
Then her mum started to speak as if she was having a conversation with someone else in the room, whom I couldn’t see.
“Forgive me,” she muttered, head resting against her hands which were clasped before her. “Please take the burden which is my daughter from me.”
Melody must have heard what her mother had said, as she moved uncomfortably beside me.
“I know that I sinned, that I was tempted by the devil,” her mother continued. “But he tricked me into falling in love with him. He used me to carry his demon.”
I closed my eyes because if I did, it meant that perhaps I wasn’t hiding in the wardrobe and having to listen to this woman speaking about my friend in such a way.
“Once he had placed his demon inside of me, he left,” her mum continued to mumble. “But I know he will return one day. That’s why you must help me rid my daughter of her demon.”
Holding my breath, and turning as quietly as I could, I looked at Melody. She cowered in the corner of the wardrobe. In the chink of light that cut through the gap in the door, I could see tears glistening in her eyes. I pulled her close to me, then resting my forehead against hers I gently placed my hands over her ears so she didn’t have to hear what her mum was saying about her.
Her mum continued to babble her wicked prayers on the other side of the wardrobe door. To block out the sound of her voice, in my head I pictured Melody and me down by the lake, our feet being covered by the cool water that lapped against the shore. With our foreheads touching, I hoped somehow Melody would see those pictures too. I closed my eyes and pictured her.
It was like I completely lost track of time. I could no longer hear Melody’s mum praying. Taking my hands from over Melody’s ears, I shuffled around on the spot and peered through the gap.
I watched as Melody’s mum placed the beads back in the statue’s hand, and then headed for the bedroom door. Here she took off her plain grey dress and let it flutter to the floor. With her back to me, I was horrified to see her back was criss-crossed with a network of old scars. They were silver-looking in the red glow of the lamps. She took a dressing gown from the back of the door, wrapped herself in it, and left the room.
No sooner had she gone, than Melody was pushing me from the wardrobe. She tiptoed across the room towards the door.
“C’mon!”
I could sense the panic in her voice.
“Is it safe for us to come out now?” I asked.
“She’ll be having a shower.
C’mon!
” Melody pulled at my arm and we snuck from her mother’s room. We crept along the landing and as we passed the bathroom, I could hear the sound of running water. I just wanted to get out of there and I began to descend the stairs two at a time. In my haste, I lost my footing and clattered into Melody who fell forward and tumbled down the last few stairs.