Vespera
The air in the upper reaches of the Valerius estate is a curated lie. I breathe it in and feel the sting of its perfection—the scent of cold lilies, expensive floor wax, and a forced, ozonic crispness that suggests a world of pure sunlight and aristocratic grace. Up there, in the halls of vaulted ceilings and velvet drapes, the atmosphere tells you that the Valerius dynasty is built on nothing but legacy and light. But as I descend the service stairs, that lie begins to fray. It unravels floor by floor, the sweetness of the manor being consumed by a thick, oppressive dampness that clings to my skin like a second, unwanted layer of clothing.
Every step I take downward is an act of transition. I am a slow-motion fall from the world of the living into a realm of the discarded. The stairs themselves seem to degrade as I go; the polished white marble of the grand foyer had long ago given way to functional granite, and now, at the threshold of Sub-Level 4, it has devolved into raw, weeping concrete. The walls are slick with a persistent condensation that looks like sweat—or perhaps tears—oozing from the very foundations of the mountain that houses this mansion.
I adjust the heavy, nylon strap of my industrial equipment bag. The canvas is thick and abrasive, digging into the skin of my shoulder through the thin, charcoal-grey fabric of my maid's tunic. To the aristocratic guests who frequent the levels above, I am a non-entity. I am a whisper in the hallway, a shadow that smooths the sheets and vanishes before the sun reaches its zenith. I was hired through an agency that didn't ask for my resume, only for my signature on a nondisclosure agreement that felt more like a death warrant. They specialize in "discreet maintenance"—a sanitized euphemism for the kind of labor that requires a shattered soul and a total lack of curiosity.
I reach the bottom of the fourth flight. The lighting here is sparse and sickly. Long, flickering fluorescent tubes are encased in rusted iron cages, buzzing with a high-pitched, insectile whine that I can feel in the very marrow of my bones. The light they cast is a jaundiced yellow, creating long, jittering shadows that seem to dance just at the edge of my vision. Sub-Level 4 doesn't exist on any official blueprint of the Valerius mansion. It is a cartographic ghost, a hollowed-out secret tucked beneath the feet of the powerful, and I am its newest inhabitant.
"You're three minutes late," a voice rasps, emerging from the gloom like a jagged blade.
I stiffen, my pulse leaping into my throat. A woman steps into the pool of sickly light. This is Martha, the lead "cleaner." She looks as though she was forged in a furnace and then left to cool in a cellar. Her skin is the color of old parchment, translucent and mapped with a web of blue veins, and her eyes are sunken so deeply into her skull they look like twin entry wounds. She wears the same grey tunic I do, but hers is permanently stained with the grey and rust-colored residue of years of chemical warfare against the dark.
"The service elevator was keyed off for the guards," I reply, my voice sounding small and brittle in the vast, echoing hallway.
Martha gives a sharp, mirthless grunt that sounds like dry leaves skittering over pavement. "The guards. They think they're the wolves of this house. They aren't. They're just the dogs at the gate. The real wolves... they don't use elevators. Now, move. The Don is away at the High Table summit, which means we have exactly six hours to erase the evidence of his last 'session.' He was a particularly messy man this week."
I follow her into a sterile, windowless locker room. The transition into my working gear is a ritual of erasure, a systematic stripping away of whatever identity I have left. I pull on the heavy, rubberized apron; the material is thick, smelling of acrid lye and the stale ghost of bleach. Next come the elbow-length gloves, made of a reinforced polymer. I lace up my heavy, steel-toed boots, feeling the weight of the equipment anchor me to the concrete floor.
Finally, I reach for the respirator. It's a full-face mask with dual canisters. As I pull the rubber seal over my head, the world narrows. The sounds of the basement—the buzzing lights, Martha's ragged breathing—are replaced by the hollow, rhythmic echo of my own respiration. In. Out. In. Out. I feel like an astronaut preparing for a walk in a vacuum, or a diver descending into a sunless, pressurized sea. Through the curved plastic visor, the room takes on a distorted, fish-eye perspective, making the walls feel as though they are leaning inward, hungry to crush me.
"Listen to me, and listen well," Martha says, her voice muffled and metallic through her own mask. She hands me a five-gallon carboy of industrial-grade lye. The liquid inside sloshes with a heavy, ominous viscosity. "We do not speak in the room. We do not look at the ceiling. Most importantly, we do not ask what the stains were before they became stains. Your job is not to think. Your job is to scrub until the concrete is white. If you find something... solid... you put it in the incinerator bin. You don't look at it. You don't name it. Do you understand?"
I nod, my breath fogging the edges of my visor. I have no choice. I came to this house because I was running from a past that was just as dark as this basement, and the Valerius family pays in a currency I couldn't refuse: anonymity. For a girl who wants to be a ghost, this is the perfect haunt.
Martha pushes open a heavy, reinforced steel door at the end of the hall. It moves with a terrifying, silent precision. No hinges creak; it swings as though it were eager to let us in.
I step inside, and my heart nearly stops.
This is the "Killing Room."
It is a cavernous chamber, perhaps sixty feet across, entirely devoid of the estate's usual grandeur. The floor is not flat; it is meticulously sloped toward a central, oversized drain—a gaping maw of steel mesh that looks like the throat of some subterranean beast. There is no furniture, only a series of heavy-duty iron rings bolted into the ceiling and walls at varying heights. High-pressure hoses hang from the rafters like sleeping serpents, their nozzles glinting in the dim light.
But it is the color of the room that tells the true story. The concrete should be a neutral, industrial grey. Instead, it is a deep, permanent, bruised rust-brown. The stains are not mere spills; they are a topographical map of agony. Some are fan-shaped, suggesting a sudden, violent spray. Others are long, dragging smears that trace the final, desperate movements of someone trying to reach the door.
"Start in the far corner," Martha commands, her gloved hand pointing toward a section of the wall where the darkness is particularly thick, almost black. "Use the wire brush first. Then the lye. Then the high-pressure steam. Don't stop until I tell you."
I walk toward the corner, my boots clicking with a hollow, lonely sound on the sloped floor. The silence in the room is absolute, broken only by the rasp of my own breathing. I kneel, the rubber of my apron squeaking against my thighs. As I uncap the carboy, the sharp, stinging scent of the chemicals manages to penetrate even the filters of my mask. It is a clean scent, a violent scent, a scent that promises to destroy everything it touches.
I dip the heavy wire brush into the bucket and begin to scrub.