Something in the Blood
Copyright© 2026 by Sparhawk99
Chapter 8: The Locked Room
The drive back from Harwick took twenty-two minutes. Nobody said much. The highway was flat and gray, and the fields on either side had gone the color of old straw. November had done what November does in the middle of the country—stripped away everything decorative and left only the structure underneath.
Eli watched the road and thought about his uncle Terry, who he’d met maybe four times in his life—a heavyset man with a reddish beard who laughed at his own jokes and had once helped Eli fix a bicycle chain at a family cookout, kneeling in the driveway, grease on his hands, completely ordinary. He thought about his mother at a family gathering—he couldn’t have been older than thirteen—laughing at something his aunt Carol said, their heads close together, their ease with each other the ease of people who share a long and specific history. He thought about how normal all of it had looked, and felt, and been, and how completely that word normal had just come apart in a diner with a blue awning twenty-two miles east of where he grew up.
“You still want to do this,” Samir said. Not a question exactly, just a way of giving Eli permission to change his mind.
“Yeah,” Eli said.
The town came up around them the way it always had—the familiar sequence of the overpass and the grain elevator and the gas station with the broken E on its sign that had been broken as long as Eli could remember, and then the subdivision, and then his street. Hickory Mill Road, which had no hickories and no mill, just forty-year-old ranches and split-levels on half-acre lots, the occasional basketball hoop, the occasional decorative gourd left over from Halloween still sitting on someone’s porch.
His parents’ house looked exactly like it always had. Beige siding. Black shutters. The maple in the front yard doing what maples do in November, standing there bare and patient, not complaining.
Eli looked at it through the windshield and thought: I grew up in there. And then: Something was in there the whole time.
They parked two houses down, which felt both cautious and slightly ridiculous. Then they walked to the front door and Eli put his key in the lock and turned it. The door opened, just like that, because nobody had thought to change the locks—or maybe someone had thought about it and decided it would look like an admission of something.
The house smelled like his parents. That was the first thing and the worst thing — not a bad smell, not at all, just the particular combination of his mother’s dryer sheets and his father’s coffee and the vaguely sweet undertone of the candle his mother kept on the kitchen counter, the same scent she’d been buying for fifteen years. It smelled like home. It smelled exactly like home, which was the cruelest possible version of walking into it.
He stood in the entryway for a moment and breathed it in despite himself.
“You okay?” Samir said quietly behind him.
“Don’t ask me that for the next hour,” Eli said.
“Done.”
He moved through the living room without stopping. The family photos on the wall were the same ones that had always been there — the school portraits, the Easter one from when he was about seven with Claire and Becca in pastel dresses and him in a clip-on tie, the formal family picture from what he thought was maybe 2014, all of them in coordinating blues and grays, standing in front of some neutral outdoor backdrop a photographer had chosen. He looked normal in all of them. Happy, even. Looking at his family like they were the thing that oriented him in the world.
He went past them quickly.
The kitchen was clean. His mother had washed up before leaving — the dish rack empty and dry, the counter wiped. A yellow notepad sat by the phone with a grocery list in his mother’s handwriting. Milk, bread, chicken thighs. The ordinary things a family eats in a week. The normalness of it made something in Eli’s chest pull tight in a way that felt close to anger and closer still to grief.
He didn’t linger. He went to the basement door.
The basement of the Calder house was partially finished — carpet in the front section, an old couch, the defunct exercise bike his father had bought in 2011 and used four times, shelves of holiday decorations and paint cans and the kind of accumulated household equipment that accretes around a family over twenty years. It smelled like concrete and a little like mildew, the particular undersmell of any Midwestern basement. The fluorescent lights buzzed when he hit the switch, working just slightly harder than they wanted to, the way fluorescent basement lights always do.
The back section was unfinished. Concrete block walls, bare floor, the water heater and furnace, the breaker box. And in the back-right corner, the door.
It was steel—which Eli had always noticed without thinking much about it, unusual for an interior basement door—set in a poured concrete frame, painted gray, with a keyed deadbolt and below it a separate padlock looped through a hasp. Two locks. On a door in the basement that supposedly led to old mechanicals.
He’d asked about it once, when he was maybe twelve. His father had said: Asbestos insulation around some of the old pipes. You don’t want to be in there. Matter of fact, no emphasis, the way Jonah Calder said everything. Eli had believed him completely and never thought about it again until right now.
He stared at the two locks.
“I don’t suppose you have a key,” Samir said.
“No.” Eli crouched in front of the padlock and examined it. A standard combination lock, the cheap kind, heavy-duty but cheap. He’d had one exactly like it on his gym locker three years running.
He studied it for a second. Then, not letting himself think too hard about it, he tried his mother’s birthday. 0318. Nothing. His father’s. 1122. Nothing. His grandmother Irene’s, who had died when he was nine and who had been, according to Dawn, part of all of this her entire adult life.
0 – 4 – 2 – 7.
The shackle released.
Eli sat back on his heels.
He heard Samir exhale slowly behind him.
The deadbolt was the question, but when Eli stood and pulled on the door it swung open without resistance—the deadbolt wasn’t engaged, or hadn’t been locked properly the last time someone was in here. Either way, the door opened, and the air that spilled out was dry and carried a smell he didn’t recognize immediately and then did: wax. Old candles. The same smell as a church, specifically the Catholic church his friend Marcus had dragged him to once in eighth grade. Wax and stone and something reaching for timelessness.
He found the light switch on the interior wall. Clicked it.
The room was about fifteen feet by twelve. It had been finished—drywalled and painted, the floor tiled in plain white ceramic—at some point Eli couldn’t pinpoint, but it felt older than the rest of the house renovation. The paint had yellowed slightly, and the grout between the tiles had darkened with age. There were no windows.
Along the left wall sat a long low table—not a workbench, not a utility surface, but a table built or chosen for a specific purpose, covered in a length of dark cloth. On it: seven white pillar candles in varying states of use, the tallest about eighteen inches, the shortest burned nearly to a nub. Between them, a wide shallow bowl, ceramic, with a dark residue inside that might have been ash. A set of small glass bottles, the kind you’d find at a craft store, each containing something—dried flowers, he thought, or dried herbs, the contents brown and feathery with age. And at the center of the table, elevated slightly on a wooden base, a ceramic disk about ten inches across, painted white, with the symbol in the center in dark red.
The little loop. The three lines.
He stared at it a long time.
Along the right wall were shelves. Metal utility shelves, the kind you’d buy at any hardware store, but organized with a deliberate care that contrasted with every other shelf in the basement, every other shelf in the house—no random clutter, no layering, just neat rows of binders, folders, and what appeared to be ledgers. Each one labeled in the same hand, black marker on white tape.
He went to the shelves.
The binders held the genealogies. Not the versions in the county library, not the clean, partially falsified records he and Samir had studied under the fluorescent archive lights—these were the originals, handwritten and annotated, cross-referenced and coded, going back in some cases to what the dates suggested was the 1890s. The Calder line on one side, the Voss line on the other, and then a third binder, spine labeled simply Covenant Record, that showed the lines merging and intertwining across generations in a way the public records carefully disguised.
He pulled the Covenant Record and opened it in the middle. The handwriting changed across generations—four or five different hands, the oldest in a script that took him a moment to decipher, the most recent clearly Lydia’s, the same cramped, purposeful lettering he’d seen in the library margins.
Each page covered a year. A date at the top, then the year, followed by a list of names. The names were annotated in a column on the right—first time, meaning their first gathering. Welcomed into covenant. First belonging. And after each person’s name, the name of whoever had conducted their initiation. Their sponsor, he supposed, though that word implied a choice.
He turned to recent pages.
He found his mother’s name. 1989—she would have been eighteen.
Mara Voss. First belonging. Welcome given by R. Voss (uncle, paternal). Received fully into covenant.
His stomach dropped.
He kept turning pages, not because he wanted to but because he needed to understand the scale of it. And the scale kept revealing itself in the same neat handwriting, year after year—the same entries, the same ritual language, the same names cycling through in different configurations. Then in the entries from the late 1990s and early 2000s, a different kind of annotation began appearing: a column marked Gathering Notes. And the gathering notes were explicit.
Not clinical—the language was elevated, ceremonial, the same old phrasing Dawn had described Lydia using. The blood-bond. The covenant’s renewal. The joining of kin to kin. But explicit. They described who was with whom in terms that left nothing unclear. His aunt Carol and a man listed as her brother. His great-uncle Harlan, who Eli remembered as the man who brought butterscotch candies to every family gathering and smelled like motor oil, described in the gathering notes as a consistent and enthusiastic participant who took particular joy in the initiation of younger female relatives. The language was reverent. It treated all of it as sacred, as right, as the natural expression of a family that understood what family was really for.
He found his mother again in the gathering notes.
He didn’t read them carefully. He read just enough to understand that his mother had been a full participant — not coerced in the year-to-year sense, or at least not recorded that way, though he had no way to know what not recorded that way actually concealed — and then he moved away from those pages. There was a line somewhere between understanding and something he wouldn’t be able to carry, and he could feel himself approaching it.
The folders were something else.
He pulled the first one: a manila folder labeled Noncompliance Record. Behind it were five more like it, each spanning different date ranges. The most recent was labeled 2010–present. He opened it.
Inside was a list. Names, dates, brief notations. Refused attendance. Expressed objections. Advised removal. Some entries included outcomes: voluntarily withdrew, no contact maintained. A few read: relocated, no further concern. One name he didn’t recognize — Margaret Voss, a notation from 1997 — had only the single word resolved and no further explanation. The blankness of that word in that context settled cold and certain in his chest.
To read the complete story you need to be logged in:
Log In or
Register for a Free account
(Why register?)
* Allows you 3 stories to read in 24 hours.