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The closet had been sealed for a reason. The old woman had learned the truth. She wrote the lessons on the walls, scratched the truth until her fingers bled, and she was cursed. Three months.
Hutch knew the truth. He saw it in Steven's eyes. He saw it in the world around him, the world he feared but not enough to keep him from intervention. His dying breaths gave her the book, and he was cursed. Three months.
Nine months she withered away. She knew the truth. She painted over it at first, laid down pretty carpets and table sets from the magazines. She never truly knew, yet her curse was the worst of all. Three months, three months, three months.
She played along with their game. The baby is dead – long live the witches, all of them witches. And on that night, she found them.
Drunk on tannis root and power, their screams were drowned in blood.
A good girl doesn't scream. A proper housewife doesn't get angry.
If those were the rules, perhaps Rosemary was no woman. Perhaps she was the devil that was said to have sired this child. Did she not, after all, carry it, through hysteria and conspiracy and fluttering gaze?
Did she not see the child, irises so black, so wide, so faint they fell in with the void that should've been pure and white, fingers and toes adorned with claws, and say naught? She was this child's mother, after all. No, he was not Adrian, son of the devil, but Andy, son of Rosemary, son of the new devil.
Her touch soothed his cries, cries from his twelfth set of lungs, and he was no longer the son of the devil you know. The knife had not once left her hand until the floorboards were saturated, the apartments below them finding leaks in the ceilings dripping red. They would not take her child.
Witches they may be, but hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.