Jane in the Attic peek

"The cruelest prisons are the ones built deep inside the mind."

Content Warning: Graphic violence, blood, child abuse, psychological trauma, disturbing imagery, and themes of mental illness and death.

PROLOGUE: THE MORNING AFTER

Red. Not the word, but the thing itself, raw and everywhere. On small hands that won't stop shaking. On white fabric that was once something else, something soft and harmless. It might have been a nightgown, maybe. The girl can't remember putting it on or why it's wet, heavy, and clinging to skin that feels far too cold.

The hands don't look as though they belong to anyone. They're too small, too red, almost unreal. The fingers curl and uncurl in her lap, tracing shapes that mean nothing. The girl watches them the way you might watch insects skittering across a windowsill.

There's a smell of copper, salt, and something darker underneath that makes her throat tighten. The girl breathes through her mouth in shallow, trembling breaths that bloom pale in the cold air. November. It must be November because frost feathers the windows. The bare trees outside look like bones stretching toward a gray, lifeless sky.

The house is quiet. Not the good kind of quiet or the peaceful kind. This is the hollow, breathless quiet that comes after something loud has stopped. After screaming. After... The girl's mind skitters away from the thought as a hand snatched back from the fire.

She sits on the floor. Black and white tiles, she thinks, though some of them are red now too. The pattern stretches in every direction, a dizzying illusion that makes the floor seem to tilt and sway beneath her. She fixes her gaze on one tile, a white one near her left foot, still white, still clean, still untouched by the red flooding everything else.

Somewhere in the house, a clock has stopped. She can hear the silence where the ticking should be, a hollow hush pressing against her ears. Tick. Tock. Tick. Tock. No, not anymore. Only this terrible, absolute absence of sound.

The girl tries to remember how she got here. She tries to trace the path backward from this moment to the one before. There are only fragments, though. Like pieces of shattered glass scattered across the floor, each one catches a different glint and reflects something different, and none of them fit together into anything that makes sense.

A door. Red wallpaper. Darkness, hunger, and cold. Endless days of cold. She remembered a voice whispering, "Perhaps another night will teach you." There had been hands that hurt her, cruel and unrelenting. A fist. Blood in her mouth, her own blood, warm and metallic on her tongue. Something inside her cried, "No more. Never again. Make it stop." And then...

The girl's breath catches. Her hands shake harder now, her red fingers trembling against the crimson-stained fabric. At last, she looks up and sees what she has been sitting in the middle of.

A body lies near the stairs, face down, with one arm outstretched as if reaching for something just beyond its grasp. Red pools beneath it, spreading slowly across the tiles and slipping along the grout lines like a map of something unspeakable. The girl stares at it and waits for something to stir in her, but nothing comes.

She looks away. Her gaze catches on the grandfather clock in the corner, its pendulum frozen in silence. She turns to the windows, where frost patterns lace the glass like delicate scars. Then she looks at her hands again, those strange red hands that will not stop shaking.

What happened? The question stirs in her mind but finds no answer, or maybe it finds too many. Maybe the answers lie scattered throughout the house like splinters of glass, each one sharp enough to cut and none of them safe to touch.

She knows, somewhere deep in the hidden chamber where knowing lives, that there are more bodies. She can feel them the way you can feel unseen eyes watching you in the dark. Upstairs, in the drawing room, and in the linen closet. Each is a shattered fragment of something once whole, now broken beyond repair.

I did this. The thought arrives with the certainty of something ancient and undeniable, as if it had always been true. Not a question or a guess, just a fact, cold and absolute as November frost on bare glass. I did this, and I feel nothing.

That should frighten her. The absence of feeling should be more terrifying than its presence. However, there is only emptiness where the fear should be, only a vast, echoing void that stretches down into darkness like a bottomless well.

Time slips into minutes or hours; the girl can't tell. The gray light from the windows shifts slowly and slightly, hinting that morning is drifting toward afternoon. She sits on the floor in the red silence, waiting for something to happen, for someone to come, or for the world to make sense again.

The sharp clatter of hoofbeats on gravel outside shatters the silence. The girl's head lifts, and her body tenses like a drawn wire. Voices rise outside, urgent and frightened. The crunch of boots on frost-covered ground rings through the stillness. The front door opens, and a man stands in the doorway. He's tall, wrapped in a dark coat. His dark eyes sweep across the scene with a cool, searching attention that misses nothing. He doesn't scream or run. He simply looks, studies, and observes the girl. She stares back at him, this stranger whose gaze rests on her as if she is something curious, something worth studying, not a monster or a victim, just something.

"Extraordinary," he murmurs, the word falling softly and strangely into the shattered silence.

The word means nothing to her, but then again, nothing does. The girl opens her mouth to speak, to explain, to ask for help, but her throat has clenched shut, and her tongue lies thick and useless. No sound escapes, only a small, shattered noise, the kind a wounded animal might make.

The man moves closer, carefully and deliberately. His boots whisper against the red-slicked tiles. He kneels a few feet away, close enough now that she can see his face clearly. His cheekbones are sharply carved, his dark eyes reflecting nothing, and his mouth looks as though it might smile, but never does.

"Can you hear me?" he asks, his voice soft, almost gentle, like a hush in the dark.

The girl gives a slight, single nod.

"Good." He reaches into the leather bag at his side and pulls out a notebook. He begins writing with quick, efficient movements, his pen skimming across the page in neat, precise script. "Severe dissociative state. Complete affective shutdown. Remarkable capacity for violence in one so young."

The words wash over her like cold water. She understands each one on its own, but she is unable to weave them together into a coherent whole.

The man looks up from his notebook and studies her face with the same piercing attention. "You're broken," he says, not with cruelty or unkindness but with the flat certainty of a man stating a fact. "Shattered into pieces, but I can help you. Would you like that?"

Yes. No. I don't know. I don't know anything anymore. The girl says nothing. She only keeps staring at him, her eyes stretched too wide, too empty, and somehow brimming with nothing at all.

The man rises and turns to address someone in the doorway, another man, older and pale with fear. "This child requires immediate psychiatric intervention. I'll take her to my facility."

"But, sir, the bodies. Surely there must be..."

"The child is clearly insane." The man's voice slices through the room like a blade. "She belongs in an asylum, not a prison. I have documentation of the family's concerns. This tragedy, though horrific, was not a sudden surprise."

More voices rise and clash around her, but the girl stops listening. The words blur together, dissolving into a hollow, meaningless hum.

The man turns back to her and extends his hand, his voice low and steady. "Come. Let's get you somewhere safe."

Safe. The word is a hollow lie. The girl knows this, just as surely as she knows there are bodies in the house and that she did something terrible, yet she feels nothing at all.

She rises anyway. Her legs tremble, and the nightgown clings to her skin, heavy and wet with red. She looks down at herself and sees a stranger. A small girl drenched in red, a monster wearing a child's face.

The man places a hand on her shoulder, gentle and steady, a quiet touch meant to guide. "Come along."

She follows him past the body by the stairs and past the stopped clock, its silence thick in the air. She moves past another figure in the doorway, a woman with glassy eyes and a slack mouth, making a sound like broken breathing that never seems to end.

Outside, the November morning lies gray and cold. The world looks exactly as it did yesterday, flat and indifferent. It seems as if nothing has changed, as if the house behind them is not filled with bodies, blood, and silence.

A black carriage and a pair of black horses wait in the drive. The curtains drawn across the windows are black as well, swallowing what little light the morning offers. It looks like the end of something, a final hush made visible.

The man guides her inside. The interior smells of leather and something sweet and chemical. The seats are dark velvet, and straps hang fastened to the walls like silent restraints.

He settles across from her, and his dark eyes never leave her face. "You're going to sleep now. When you wake up, everything will be different."

He draws a white cloth from his bag. It smells sweet, chemical, and deeply wrong. He gently presses it to her face, covering her nose and mouth like a quiet, inescapable veil.

"Breathe," he murmurs, the word soft and velvety-dark.

The girl tries to fight, to pull away, but her body will not obey. The emptiness inside her has spread like a slow, dark tide, consuming everything and leaving her hollow, frail, and weak. She breathes in, and the cloying sweetness floods her lungs as the world begins to tilt, blur, and fade at the edges. The last thing she sees is the man's face, fixed on her with that same cold, fascinated expression.

The last thing she hears is his voice, soft and certain, slipping over her like silk. "Remarkable. Truly remarkable."

Then darkness comes. It drags her down into a place with no light, no sound, and no sensation, only her own voice, though not truly her own, whispering through the void, "What have you done?" The question echoes, circles, and repeats.

There is no answer, only darkness, silence, and the terrible certainty that the girl who stepped into that abyss is not the same girl who will emerge from it.

The carriage lurches into motion, its wheels crunching over the gravel. It bears her away from the house, away from the bodies, and away from everything she has ever known.

Behind them, someone starts screaming, a ragged, rising sound that goes on and on. It is a sound that feels as though it will never stop.

In the carriage, in the darkness, in the chemical-sweet oblivion, the girl sleeps and dreams in shades of red.