Chapter 4 - The Erased Face
I stood in the doorway of the hidden room, the hair on the back of my arms standing straight up. The air pouring out of the alcove felt heavy, charged with a grief so old and dense it felt tangible.
"Dominic?" I asked softly, breaking the suffocating silence.
Slowly, deliberately, Dominic turned the portrait over.
The beam of the flashlight illuminated the photograph inside. It was a young woman—perhaps in her early twenties, with dark, expressive eyes and hair pinned back in the fashion of the late nineteen-seventies—smiling warmly while holding a little girl of about four years old.
Except the little girl’s face had been aggressively, violently scratched out with the tip of a knife, gouged down to the bare backing paper until nothing was left but a jagged, white void.
Dominic’s jaw clenched so hard a muscle twitched violently in his cheek.
"Elena," he whispered, the name tearing from his throat like something dragged across broken glass.
"Who?" I asked, taking a hesitant step into the dust-choked space.
"My aunt," Dominic said, his voice terrifyingly quiet. He looked up at me, his dark eyes burning with a sudden, devastating fury. "My father’s sister. She lived in this house until forty years ago. Then, one day, she and her daughter simply... vanished. The family told everyone they moved to Italy. They purged every photograph, every record, every trace of them from the main estate."
He swept the flashlight beam around the tiny, daisy-papered cell.
"They didn't move to Italy," Dominic said, his voice dropping to a harsh whisper. "They locked her away. Or worse."
Leo stepped into the alcove behind us, shining his light on the base of the small iron bed. Etched into the peeling plaster wall beside the pillow, scratched by fingernails or a sharp stone, were dozens of tiny tally marks, grouped in fives, stretching across the wall in a desperate, endless count of days.
"Why?" I breathed, my hand flying to my mouth. "Why would a family erase a child?"
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Dominic didn't reply. He carefully set the mutilated portrait back down on the nightstand, his fingers lingering on the edge of the wood. Then, as he pulled his hand back, his cuff caught the corner of the small wooden table, tipping it slightly.
With a hollow thump, a loose floorboard beneath the table shifted upward, revealing a second, deeper compartment hidden beneath the alcove floor.
