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***

One of the women in the Victorian lives on the third and top floor. She has flaming red hair. She is the queen.

In the basement, which is dark and grimy, the blonde woman waits. She is the one, now. I have to creep in through the bulkhead, at night, after passing through the garden cemetery that is adorned with weeping willows and enclosed, on three sides, by a brick wall armored with wrought iron spikes.

I creep because the queen is angry with me, and there are 27 women in the house, all at her command. 


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Seven is a smoker. She perches on a rock near the house, most nights. When I scale the wall from the street, gingerly traversing the spikes, I see her watching the black house with its yellow lights, silver smoke wafting to fill her aura. 

I navigate the leaning and broken tombstones in tall grass. “Hello, Seven.”

“She isn't going to fuck you,” she says, ever the killjoy.

“Nobody likes you,” I say. I go to the bulkhead. The chain is off the doors. Some nights it is looped through the handles; some nights it is padlocked, and I have to give Seven something for the key. I take this as an auspice, stand the doors open, and descend the slick steps.

It is dark. The city glow runs out at the bottom of the stairs. But the blonde can't move, chained to the center post by the wrists, at least not too far. I go and lay beside her on the floor, which is icked over with something that smells like wet pennies. She giggles and cuddles next to me, her breath and hair on my face.

I wait, as long as I can. When I touch her stomach, she slides away. The chain rattles. In the silence after its echo has faded, we hold our breath.

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Shelly brought me to the house the first time. We made our acquaintance on the night of the new moon, by the river, which slid by like oil at the foot of the riprap. An orange street light cast her in shadow; when she turned into the light I saw that her freckled face was everything.

We walked to the park and sat watching the occasional traffic gleam. She told me about the house. She wanted to leave. 

“The queen is a monster,” she said, and she told me about the blonde in the basement. “She's chained up down there because she likes sex; she'll fuck anyone. And the queen is a prude.”

Hearing the story, with the moon-bereft sky above and the face I already loved fragmented by branch shadows, I thought, she's crazy. I said: “Why don't you leave?”

“I have nowhere to go.”

“Stay with me.”

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By the full moon, I had met the others. We spent every night together until then, just walking and talking for hours and hours in the dark. Shelly told me more: of the queen's belittling epithets, her tirades and put-downs, the withholding of food. And of horrible punishments, like cigarette burning, cutting, and flagellation. I didn't believe her; I thought she had to be crazy. But I still wanted her.

Finally she agreed to stay with me. We went at midnight to gather her things, past the front garden's lone oak and up the stone steps to the veranda, where dead leaves skittered in the wind. The black front door stuck when Shelly turned the knob, so I took my palm and stiff-armed it. She asked me to wait in the darkened foyer, while she entered the well-lit but cloistered front room, where red settees framed a grand piano in a nook formed by a curved staircase.  

Five of the women gathered around the piano as a freckled redhead played. The music eddied, rising and falling and not going anywhere, while light from a glass chandelier shimmered on the polished hardwood floor. Through the white ceiling, I could feel a presence, which leaned in as though listening.

The music stopped when Shelly entered, and the others all stared at her. That presence watched too. The redhead, whose red hair is curly and short, pushed the bench back with a screech.  

“You're not going to leave,” she said.

Shelly halted midway across the room, her shoulders hunched, her head ducked. From the floor above, I heard a skittering, like the dead leaves on the veranda; then the rest of the women were walking one by one down the staircase, each with a hand trailing the banister. 

The women at the piano circled Shelly. They reached in to lay hands on her. Perhaps, if I would have let it be, if I would have let it happen, it would not have been so horrible. But I ventured one step into the light. “Stop it,” I said. “Let her go.” 

The women on the staircase all looked at me, but they kept on walking. The chandelier started to tremble, setting the light to twist on the floor, and the presence above waxed so strong and clear in anger that I knew it had to be the queen. 

When the first woman made it to the landing, she began to move past the circle, toward me, followed by the others. Inside the circle, Shelly brightened, until her aura glowed white-hot. She rose, lifting the hands laid on her, until those who touched her stood reaching up with empty palms. As she rose she rotated, her blue eyes wide and vacant. She rose and did not stop when she hit the ceiling: her clothes fell away and chunks of her simply disappeared: face and neck, torso from rosy-nippled breasts to navel, hips and thighs, her legs and tiny, tiny feet. 

Then the women in the circle turned to face me. The others were steps away. I ran. As I yanked the door open to meet the cold air, I realized that all their faces were identical.

All the women in the house have the same face as Shelly.

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Now, as the silence stretches, the blonde returns and cuddles with me again. Her breath across my ear  raises gooseflesh on my neck and chest; the tingle recalls that first night by the river with Shelly. I place my hand on her stomach, and again she slides away. This time I follow and pull her to me; I try to kiss her face.

Her scream is like a strobe in the dark. It is no use holding my breath. Three floors above, the queen crackles like sheet lightning over a rush of dead leaves.

Outside, Seven laughs, and the bulkhead doors slam shut,  and the chain clatters through the handles. Small feet tread up stairs. There is nothing in my arms. A door opens. I hear the whisper of many voices; then a snap as the shackles close around my wrists.

I am chained in darkness. 
 
***

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<center><sup>Cover, headline banner, and rule designed in Canva Pro by @cliffagreen. 
(He also wrote the text.)</sup></center>