To His Hell and Back-Chapter 202: Missing Mother

Arabella didn’t find the chapel terrifying in the past. As this was far in the hill, most people would usually avoid the path but for Arabella and Ariel who had to visit the forest to take the herbs would have no choice but to pass the path.

She would always find herself looking at the chapel, staring at it but she never felt horrified by it or felt that this place was something she had to avoid. But now upon finding out that her mother had been sealed inside a coffin and then buried under this temple, her heart felt awry as they stepped closer to the building.

"Just go alone- you don’t have to bring us!" Charles, the cowardly man was the first to yell.

Cassius let out a faint scoff, "You have killed someone but is too scared to see her body? How funny you are."

Charles clicked his tongue but turned quiet when he met Cassius’s red eyes. He quietly disagreed, muttering, "It’s not that I don’t want to see her body. I have visited this chapel before! But this place... has some ghosts in it."

"It’s just a ghost," Arabella snapped at her father, "It won’t kill you by draining your blood. It’s not scarier than being sold by your father either so suck it up."

Cassius turned at her and chuckled before whispering, "Are you trying to say that I’m scarier than a ghost?"

She turned at him with a sigh, "I think ghosts are scared of you instead."

"If that is true, then perhaps the ghosts in this place would also run away after seeing me. So let’s put it to a test should we?"

Once they stepped in, dusts flew over the air, making Arabella to cough. She brushed her hands in front of her face, stepping deeper into the dark chapel with the oil lamp that she had brought earlier on.

Trying to find a way to lit the place for more visibility, Arabella found the candles on the walls and lit them up, finally getting a clearer look of the building once all the candles on the left side of her wall lit up.

Arabella held the lamp steady as the flames flickered against the high vaulted walls, lighting up the painting of holy murals in shades of amber and blood. Angels stared down from the ceilings with cracked halos and dark eyes, their paint flaking, their once holy air instead looked more horrifying than anything.

Humans used to worships three gods: god of love, death, and sun. But after the vampire’s attack they have let go their beliefs, thus the reason why there hadn’t been a new priestess after the old one had died.

Arabella herself wasn’t so much of a believer to the temples as she often heard the stories of priestess and priest requesting money to their believer for a paper that they say would "abolish" their sins and allow them to be blessed by the three gods.

She doesn’t believe that money could ever abolish anyone’s sins and knew that whatever those priests and priestess were doing was simply out of greed.

She then turned behind her, finding Charles who had stayed far behind, muttering prayers under his breath that no god would answer. Her grandmother, Mrs. Rath was silent now, her jaw clenched, eyes twitching at every echo. She clearly fear this temple as much as Charles, perhaps because the two of them knew what they had done to turn this once holy place of prayers into a deadly crime scene.

Arabella ignored them and continued her action, walking between the benches placed in the temple that had creaked from old age.

The candles hissed softly as she lit each one beside the bench and one by one, the gloom peeled back.

Cassius stood beside the altar, looking unimpressed. "Well," he drawled, voice echoing through the cavernous space, "your ancestors certainly had a taste for the dramatic."

Arabella didn’t answer as her eyes had caught something.

There, behind the altar, barely visible, was the wooden floorboard that seemed to have caved in, causing for a wide hole to appear underneath the ground. It didn’t seem to be made for renovation, instead it appeared as if the circle was made after someone had burst it into a wide hole.

Then underneath was a dusty ground with a circle inscribed in symbols she didn’t recognize, but that made her skin crawl with instinctive dread. Iron rings, aged and rusted, were bolted into each corner.

She stepped forward slowly, her expression paling as she understood what this place was.

"This must be it," she murmured. "Where they buried her."

"What a disgusting taste indeed," Cassius muttered as he came closer and bent down, staring at those symbols and noticing what it was.

Those symbols, they weren’t any symbols. It looked like symbols because no one could understand it but once in the past this must have been letters used by those ancient people.

He could tell this as he had seen it all over Arabella’s body, perhaps it was also the same ancient language that her mother had used and wrote over her body.

Was this letters to seal someone? Or was it to unleash something?

Either way, the letters seemed important thus he memorized those curves in his head.

Arabella felt her breath hitch. Her hand hovered just above the broken floorboard now, drawn to it by something she couldn’t explain.

"She was here," she whispered. "All this time. And I never knew."

Behind her, Charles called out nervously, "Don’t go inside! You don’t know what you’ll unleash!"

Arabella didn’t even flinch. She stood tall, straighter than ever before.

"You said that she left. That her body is not here anymore. What would I unleash if I step in?" She demanded answer from her father who seem to fear her mother, as if knowing something that they don’t, something that made them into a coward.

"She did left but," drawled Charles.

"A pointless fear," Cassius chided, "You fear she would know you came back here and that she has been waiting somewhere to attack you once she could feel you’re near here again."

Charles went quiet, confirming his guess.

Cassius rolled his eyes, "Cowards what could I say?" then he easily turned to Arabella, "I can go down, it’d be better if just one of us go down to check."

"But.." Arabella felt hesitant, thinking that she should be the one getting inside as this was her mother. She didn’t want to involve Cassius into something dangerous, specially something none of them ever knew about.

"Silly, I’m curious," Cassius said as he went closer to the hole before jumping inside. He stepped on the ground three time, trying to check for something before he moved forward and looked down on the hole, finding a brown wooden coffin with more ancient letters written on it.

"It looks like they placed your mother in the coffin and nailed it shut," Cassius said quietly, his eyes scanning the sealed box. "Then they buried her, etched symbols across the lid, and wrapped the site in chains before remodeling the floor to conceal it."

He paused, hesitating for once.

What he didn’t say, what he couldn’t quite bring himself to voice, was what he saw on the inside edges of the coffin. Deep, desperate gouges. Claw marks. As if, after they sealed her in, she had still been alive... and had fought with everything she had to get out.

"Hm," Cassius then suddenly went quiet and Arabella who noticed this leaned closer into the hole on the wooden floors.

"What? What is it?"

Cassius looked up with a complicated expression, "She didn’t got out by herself."

"What?"

"Arabella! Stop! Don’t go near her!" Charles yelled on the top of his lungs. But Arabella was already lowering herself down, ignoring the way Charles called out behind her again.

Her feet dangled as she tried to slowly lower her body from the floor but she didn’t expect that the ground beneath the floor was much higher than she thought. As she was deliberating to just fall on her bottom in a way that wouldn’t hurt her too much, Cassius had reached out his hand, looking unsurprised by her action, "Jump here," he said with his outstretched hands. freewebnøvel.coɱ

Closing her eyes, she let go of the floor and jumped down, her waist immediately grabbed by something stronger than iron as Cassius caught her mid air, placing her down to the ground beside the coffin with such ease.

She turned at him, feeling slightly sorry and embarrassed, "Thank you."

He only responded with a faint smile before turning back to the coffin. "If she had escaped on her own, the wood would be splintered from the inside, shattered with force. But there’s no sign of that. Look closely, those nails on the lid... they have been pried out, not pushed. Someone opened this from the outside."

Arabella looked at the coffin’s lid to confirm what Cassius had concluded. She frowned as she muttered, "Then was she still alive?"

"Perhaps so," Cassius turned behind him and pointed his hand to the ground, "Those footsteps, one comes from a man and another comes from a woman. The woman is without shoes, perhaps barefooted, if it is your mother’s footsteps then we could confirm she’s still alive."

Arabella breathed out in relief, not knowing that all this time she had been holding back her sigh so tightly on her throat.

"What to do now?" She asked him, "We found where she was buried but she isn’t here anymore, how could we ever find her now? Seeing that Morpheus said my mother was dead, he doesn’t seem to know that someone had released her from this coffin, does he?"

"Most probably but birdie," Cassius who had gone quiet earlier was now looking at the ceiling of the temple, his neck craned as his chin tilted up. "Seems like we have got a company here?"

She followed his line of sight, finding the people who seemed to have suddenly appeared at the ceiling of the temple, their hands behind them as they crawled like a spider.