The Tenth Bead

Hi there,
Will keep this very brief, as I want the focus to be on the story.
But before you read on, please note, this story contains: Violence, abuse and femicide.

The Tenth Bead

When Camille Yeager clutched her rosary and prayed for her husband’s death, she had hoped her faith would absolve her of any and all wrongdoing.

Vernon Yeager was a cruel man, to anybody or anything that wronged him and Camille had taken enough of his abuse. She had come to feel that way quickly, even after a whirlwind romance, when on their wedding night he had put a fist through the wall next to her head.

She hadn’t meant to defy him then, but she had not yet known the rules. He would make those rules abundantly clear over the next seven years of their marriage.

Now as she placed her prayer beads next to the sink and washed his thick blood from her hands, she knew those rules could and would never contain her.

She had used the very same claw hammer that he himself had built their cottage with.

“With my own bare hands!” He would yell repeatedly, when he used those very same hands to hurt her.

The irony of that same well-used hammer was not lost on her. But this was not all of her design. Someone else had planted that seed in her head. At nights first, the voice would tell her, but eventually she found where the voice was coming from.

In her walls. In those walls she found solace, and shared pain and the motivation of that seed in her mind.

Everly, the woman from the walls, had planted the seed. She had been Vernon’s secret lover long before Camille—reported missing twelve years ago, her body never found. But this version of Everly was present and accounted for. She crawled from the wall cavity at night, skin blackened and slick with fractured, smoking cracks. Her burned flesh caught the moonlight as she slunk on all fours across the barren room, her ashen smell arriving before she did, to sit before Camille.

Some nights Everly even watched Camille sleep. On this particular night she had come with thoughts she wanted—needed to share.

Everly had told Camille that there were others that dwell in the walls and if Camille could just finish what most of them wished they had started, then they would all be free. They could all be free together.

When Camille had entered the main sparsely decorated room, a single table and chair, just for Vernon to sit, not her, firelight kept the space in its smudged gloomy hold. Vernon was writing with his large, feathered pen, his back to the door. It was almost too perfect. Camille had stepped behind him, the floorboards moaning under her slight weight.

Without turning Vernon simply said, “I know you are there, wife. Why must you interrupt me so? Let me be in peace, to finish this letter woman!” His voice now raised, as it so often was.

He did not ever finish the letter, but it was signed in his blood and brain matter.

Camille had seen the others that Everly had mentioned as she entered the room, their eyes watching her, unblinking from the dark corners of the room; that dark place they had all dwelt in, like the very secrets they were.

She had raised her thin wiry arm for all of them to see.

“With my own bare hands!” She brought that hammer down again and again—and again just for good measure, for those in the walls were laughing with her—and watched as Vernon fell forward, his dark thoughts spilling out of the open fissure in his skull and across the floor. Those thoughts were then hungrily devoured by those that came before her. Those that lived in the walls came out, and in that feasting they began to be remade in his broken image.

But one task remained.

Camille scrubbed at her flesh until it burned, her wrists tied with the prayer beads that also cut into her skin. It was if she too needed to feel one last bout of pain, one last tear at her skin. She watched the last blood trail whirl around the drain, followed by a chunk of skull that sat resting in the plug. She picked it out and held it up to the dim light. She turned it over, plain white on both sides, how all this hate could be contained within it, only now was she beginning to understand. She dropped it with a delicate clink back down the drain, stirred by the sounds of scratching on the wooden floors.

She turned and saw Everly again down on all fours, her face like that of a once-starved-dog-now fed. Even her burnt and blistered tongue hung lolling from her mouth. Surrounding her were the others, in various states of death or what now looked like various forms of undeath. What was once broken, now slowly being remade.

“We are now free, as are you,” said Everly, her voice like that of bubbling porridge, no doubt due to the burns her vocal cords received when Vernon doused her and set her alight that day in the basement all those years ago. Behind her the others had gathered, once broken and battered, now somewhat remade. They all looked at Camille, whose hands twisted unknowingly in the rosary beads. Everly eyed them, then her eyes moved back up to Camille,

“You think those beads and your prayers saved you? That man put the Lord’s good word in your heart with lies and falsities, then broke it and shattered your world. I don’t think you owe nothing to him—or them.”

The others around Everly nodded and hummed in agreement.

“You gained your own freedom, girl.” Everly stated.

Camille swallowed and said nothing in reply. She simply reached back into the sink, plucked the small piece of bloodied skull out and wound it onto the thread that held the rest of her prayer beads. It pressed cool against the skin of her wrist. Camille eyed it like that of a hunter’s prize.

Everly smiled back, a knowing white smile against stygian burned flesh.

Camille finished emptying the kerosene bucket and pulled the book of matches from her pant pocket. The others watched in anticipation as she flicked the match against her boot. She felt the hard blistered crust of Everly’s hand on her shoulder, but she felt love for the first time in an age.

They all watched together, hand in hand, as flames consumed their shared pasts, and together they were remade in blood, fire and ash.

Camille was sure she heard his awful, tortured screams on the wind as the house and everything in it was razed to the ground.

Until next time.

Thank you for reading
Dan