A Mothers Work Is Never Done

CW: Contains themes of grief, death, and supernatural horror

The wave of grief Alison was expecting failed to wash over her. Aunt Valerie was still on the phone giving her the details. Her mother's death was supposedly peaceful and surrounded by the staff at the hospice.

Alison should have been crying, screaming, rending her garments. Instead she was looking at the ceiling, thinking about the thing in the attic. Mom's burden was now hers. Valerie was Alison's fraternal aunt and ignorant of the secret.

Slamming the phone down while Valerie was mid-sentence, Alison hoped that the funeral arrangements would take care of themselves. Danielle having only just left for school meant she wouldn't have to break the news of her grandmother's passing just yet.

Not that it mattered, all Alison could think about was how long before it showed up. When she lived with her mother it would always strike in the dead of night, but she had no idea if it would be the same for her.

Alison flashed back to the feel of scratchy sheets pulled up to her chin, listening through the paper-thin walls as her mother screamed at it for forgiveness. Even Mick Mars's thundering guitar riffs couldn't drown the noise out.

Without thinking she headed into the kitchen and poured herself a glass of vodka neat. It left the usual freezer burn sensation upon her tongue but did nothing for her nerves. A second later Alison was vomiting her expensive mistake down the sink.

Scrubbing her lips, Alison leaned back against the kitchen counter and listened to the stillness. The old farmhouse was isolated at the end of a long dirt track, the surrounding fields, once vital, were now a patchwork of crabgrass and ferns.

Alison told people it was the rent that had sold her on the place, that she had no plans to raise Danielle in a trailer. And it was, she had made the promise to her husband shortly before his passing.

In her heart of hearts however, she had been preparing herself for today. A dozen dark jokes about inheritances sprung into her mind, each more bleak than the last.

Over the dining table sat a large family portrait. A reminder of the people she had lost, and how empty her daughter's life was becoming. Alison would weep for her mother, let the pain in and come to terms with the loss some other day.

A metallic screech tore through the house, like the building was in pain. The skylight's hinges, rusted solid after years of neglect and fused shut by an errant bolt of lightening, had been torn open.

Taking the stairs two at a time, Alison was far from being afraid. She had a lifetime's worth of anger coursing through her veins.

Her mother had fought her battles in private, so Alison had no idea what the thing looked like. It was only the cancer diagnosis that made her mother share what she knew about the thing with her.

On the landing Alison found the hatch open and the ladders down, as if inviting her up. Along with faint weeping she could smell stale air and a sugary violet scent. The steps creaking beneath her, Alison stopped partway into the attic and fumbled for the light switch hidden amongst the beams and insulation.

Pressing the switch, an intense white light flooded the room, before quickly fading to black. Once her eyes had recovered all Alison could make out was the dying filament from the naked bulb.

"Fuck," she grunted, pulling herself into the attic with the aid of a roof support.

Apart from a couple of wooden planks laid down by the previous tenants, the attic was desolate, Alison had made sure to keep it that way since moving. Even the dust and cobwebs hadn't been disturbed in years. A small draft was creeping in through the skylight, the earlier noise overexaggerating just how open it was.

The crying and the scent came from the far side of the room. A princess style dress hung from the last support, swaying gently in the breeze. At first it looked empty only for its wearer to raise their head. Their long black hair was bunched around their neck by a noose that had been wrapped around the beam.

"I've no idea who you are, or what you want, so please just forgive me and be done with this...this...whatever this is...we've more than paid for..." Despite having rehearsed the speech a thousand times, the words failed her. Alison couldn't take her eyes off the space between the hem of the dress and the floor, where its feet should have been.

"Why?" the voice of a child with a deep southern twang, came from everywhere and nowhere all at the same time.

"That's just it, I've no fucking clue why! I don't, my mother didn't, her mother didn't and I'm pretty sure her mother didn't!" The words exploding out, propelled by a lifetime of frustration.

"Lies!" The voice hissed.

"No! I'm not lying, if anyone knew who you where or what they had to do to gain your forgiveness, don't you think they would have done it by now!" the intricately hand stitched diamond pattern on the dress began reforming into faces. Some familiar, others almost strangers save for a few features.

"Mother..." Alison couldn't not look away. In her final months an aggressive dementia overtook Melissa's cancer ridden body, and even then she had not looked as lost or scared as the embroidered portrait did.

Clumsily crossing the exposed beams, Alison tried grabbing the dress only to find nothing but cold air. Her fingers burnt and ached, as if from intense frostbite. Blowing on one hand like it had been scalded, Alison gripped a wooden beam with the other.

"Mum," the voice of a ten year old Alison coming from her adult throat.

She was close enough to see none of the embroidered faces belonged to men. It was a macabre family joke, the first time a Larson woman falls pregnant it would be a girl. Danielle's generation often claimed to be gender fluid, but Alison didn't think it would care all that much about pronouns.

The front door to the house crashed open, and Alison heard the thud of a heavy rucksack being discarded. Followed by the words "I'm back, did you miss me? Mum where are you?"

Scrambling back towards the hatch, more sure footed than before, Alison needed to reach the landing before Danielle appeared asking questions. The wooden beams painfully dug into the arches of her feet.

"I'll be down in a minute, I have a present for you." Slipping off the bottom of the ladder, Alison pushed it back into place and quietly closed the hatch.

"How" she shouted, before calming herself and lowering her tone "was your day?"

Alison could barely hear Danielle over the sobbing noise escaping from the attic. It was faint but persistent, like the onset of a toothache. Only there was no hope of an extraction or drugs to dull the pain.

The television in the living room was playing an endless parade of YouTube shorts. The constant stream of content hypnotizing Danielle as she packed her mouth with Pringles. Alison silently watched her daughter from the doorway.

"That's just creepy, you do know that right?" Danielle never took her eyes from the screen.

"I'm your mother I'm allowed to be creepy, could you pause that for a moment?"

Reluctantly Danielle aimed the remote control and the two guys from Content Machine stopped mid joke. Alison recognized the look upon her daughter's face, like all teenagers she was frantically trying to remember what lies she had told that day.

"I..." She should have told Danielle about her grandmother, instead Alison opened the drawer beneath the coffee table and took out a brown package.

"...I have a present for you."

Danielle took the package and brushed her mother's skin, "What have you been up to? Your fingers are freezing?"

Not waiting for an answer, her daughter tore open the package. The sobbing was still audible over the ripping of card and the squealing of plastic tape. Freeing the garishly coloured box, Danielle gave her mother a puzzled expression.

"Noise cancelling headphones?"

"Yeah, I thought you might need them, you know in case you...."

"Does this have anything to do with that crying noise?"

Feigning ignorance, Alison watched Danielle shake her head as if to clear the sound from her ears.

"Anything else?" Her daughter asked, finger poised over the remote.

"No...Nothing, just wanted you to know that I love you."

"Thanks?" Pressing the button Danielle discarded the headphones.

That night, her daughter safely in bed, Alison returned to the attic. Her visit was the first of many failed attempts at atonement. She sat on the edge of the hatch with her legs dangling into the dark hall below. Watching for any sign of Danielle waking up.

Scrolling the list of questions she kept on her phone, Alison hoped one of them would affect a response from it. She tried asking each multiple times, varying her tone and cadence, avoiding modern words or slang. But nothing worked and eventually, exhausted, she gave up before passing out and risking falling through the ceiling.

Silently closing the hatch, Alison made her way along the hall before collapsing, fully dressed, into bed. She had three hours before she needed to get up and chase Danielle out the door to school.

The whispered weeping from the attic became a consistent, pained wail. When covering her head with a pillow failed to block it out, Alison moved down to the living room and tried to sleep on the couch. Wondering if she should have bought herself a pair of headphones.

As the week progressed sleep became almost impossible, only sheer exhaustion granting Alison the odd hour every now and again. What little life she had left, Alison spent online, deep in research. Only to discover that trying to parse fact from fiction in a space notoriously full of shit, was difficult as sleeping.

"Mum? Mum? MUM?" Danielle, ready for school, stood at the bottom of the stairs. Alison almost didn't hear her over the incessant cry from the attic.

"You're staying at Lia's tonight right?"

"Yeah, you made sure of that."

Alison, who normally took such things in her stride, snapped "For once could you just do as I ask without the smart arsed remarks? Is it really that difficult to spend time with your best friend? It's not like I'm asking you to go sleep on the street!"

Seeing the fear on Danielle's face, Alison managed to stem the flow of her tirade. She massaged her eyes and let out the breath she didn't know she had been holding in.

"I'm sorry, it's not you I've just not been sleeping and I've got a lot...It's not you." Pulling her daughter in close, she hugged her, inhaling the scent of her long blonde hair.

"Mum?"

"It's fine honestly, just get to school and let me know when you are at Lia's, the last thing I want is to be up all night worrying about you!" Opening the front door, Alison guided Danielle out into the morning light.

From a crack in the curtains, she watched Danielle head up the drive. The girl more interested in her phone than the road ahead. Alison had a terrible premonition of a truck colliding with her daughter. The girl eventually turned the corner and passed from sight.

Scurrying around the living room, Alison collected her purse and her keys before raiding the small pile of cash she kept for emergencies.

Moments later Alison was in the car heading towards a motel that charged by the hour. Hoping for a couple of hours of uninterrupted sleep, before the thing found her again. Watching the house get smaller in the rear view mirror, the distance between her and her burden growing.

The thing stood, instead of floating, in the middle of the road. The end of the hangman's rope drifting into the air as if it were attached to some unseen balloon. Alison spun the wheel and the car plunged down into the drainage ditch, hidden beneath a skeletal hedge that ran along the side of the road. Her head collided with the dashboard, turning the world black and, mercifully, silent.

Alison dreamt of an abnormal growth on the front of her head. Frantically clawing at it she struck the massive purple bruise instead and fireworks exploded behind her eyes. Dry blood coated her mouth and her body was a single dull ache. Emerging from the car, she crawled back to the road, leaving the door open and the engine running as she staggered back to the house.

There was a sticky red trail running down the side of her face. Her eardrum was burst and Alison thanked God for small mercies. While she was unconscious the sun had set and darkness had swallowed the house.

Leaving the lights off, Alison climbed the stairs. On the top floor the hatch was wide open and the ladder down. Climbing up, she slipped and skinned her shins on the badly treated wood. On her second attempt she made it up into what had once been the attic.

She had noticed small differences each time she had gone up there but put them down to lack of sleep. What she saw now Alison could no longer rationalize away, even after the car crash.

She stood in a large barn, straw covered the floor, along with candles. Strange glyphs and sigils marked the walls. High up in the rafters, wind blew the dress around, its shadow dancing on every surface. Its rope had been replaced by a heavy steel chain.

The intense screaming drove Alison to her knees. Covering her ears she could feel blood seeping out between her fingers. Tears flowed as she crawled around desperate for a reprieve from the constant wail. A wave of nausea rose up and exploded out onto a small patch of straw.

Alison felt a soft hand rest on her shoulder. Looking up, she saw a blurry shadow with a familiar scent. A terrible mixture of fear, failure and hope roiled inside. She let Danielle pull her hands away from her ears before slipping on the cordless headphones. It was like listening to "Home sweet home" underwater but it blocked screams.

The next few moments where a blur, Danielle was moving across the room, her head down, as if pushing against some unseen force. She had something in her hand, but Alison couldn't make out what. Rising without thinking, she moved in front of her daughter, acting as a shield.

Danielle was pushing her towards the nearest post, Alison could see the sigils glowing white hot. Grabbing hold of the beam to steady herself, she watched as Danielle drove whatever she was holding into the wood.

The screaming stopped instantly and the candles began to fade one by one like collapsing stars. The room slowly reverting back into an attic. All that was left was the smell of her own vomit.

Crouching down in front of her, Danielle mouthed 'It's over'. Her daughter's words broke the dam holding back Alison's tension and she collapsed into the girl's arms.

She left herself be guided down and into her bed. The last words Alison heard before sleep finally claimed her was "We're a family, this was our burden, it was never just yours," Danielle kissed the top of her hair and promised an explanation in the morning.