Door of Bruises (Thornchapel Book 4)

by Sierra Simone

  “All the more reason to bring in the men in plastic suits,” I say, with some defiance, with some bravado, as if the door can hear me.

  If it does, it doesn’t care. My words fall flat and pointless to the earth, and nothing changes. There is still only the mist on my side of the door, and a clear night on the other. Still only Sir James whining at my back and the roses gathering raindrops at my feet.

  Primal unease continues to pluck at the nape of my neck. Telling myself this is only a quirk of physics, a strange crease of energy and particles, is one thing. But standing here, looking at a weathered stone threshold that light won’t cross is another.

  On a hunch, I look down at my feet for a pebble or stone and settle on a small rock the size of my palm. I toss it at the door, knowing, logically, that the rock should land on the soft grass on the other side. The rock should pass right through the doorframe and arc downward to the ground, just as it would if I threw it on my side of the door. Just as it would anywhere else.

  But it doesn’t do that.

  It stops right over the threshold, right between the jambs, as if it’s struck something solid, and then it drops to the ground.

  On my side of the door.

  I pick it up again and throw it, overhand this time, with enough force to carry it right into the trees, but again to no avail. It still stops at the threshold and falls to the ground.

  I throw it again. And again. Not because I think I’ll have a different outcome, but because I’m trying to discern why I’m having the outcome I am. Because there’s no noise when the rock stops, there’s no bounce, nothing that would indicate exactly what the invisible barrier is made of. The rock itself seems unchanged by its contact with the door, which almost makes me tempted to reach out and touch it myself, but I remember what happened to Freddie Dansey when he tried to shut the door, and I’d rather not put that to test when I’m in the dark, alone. Touching the space inside the door seems like a . . . a daytime activity.

  I don’t try the rock again. Now I merely stand and consider the problem in front of me.

  My father said the door was dangerous, and Samson Quartey does not say such things lightly. If he believes the door is dangerous, then I’d be foolish to dismiss that as a data point. I’d also be foolish to dismiss my observation—which is that the door seems fairly inert. Aside from the roses crawling everywhere—admittedly weird and unsettling—and aside from the near-constant prickle of danger that comes from standing near it, the door doesn’t seem to be able to do much. It repels rocks thrown at it . . . and that’s about it.

  Auden’s instinct to ignore it may not be a bad one after all. If it can’t hurt us, then what’s the harm in letting it stay out here? And given enough time, I could probably convince Auden we should give experts or the government or someone permission to examine it—

  Sir James gives a soft bark behind me, followed by a whine. It’s the same bark-whine combo he uses on Auden when Auden won’t let him run after rabbits or jump into uncovered Bronze Age graves. Like he sees something he would like to chase and then spend the rest of the night chewing on.

  I don’t have to turn back around to discover what it is, however, because it’s right in front of me, through the door and on the other side. A small bird has hopped into view, flitting up into the door-world’s trees and then moving from branch to branch in flashes of pearl and gray.

  A wren, I think, with its plumply curved breast and its flouncy little tail, although it’s not quite the right color for a wren. It’s too silvery, too pale—nearly pink in some places.

  In fact, it looks rather like the bird from Delphine’s necklace. Rather a lot.

  Down to its bright, black eyes.

  I step as close to the door as I can without going over the threshold, holding my breath. I must be wrong, I’m certain I’m wrong, because there’s simply no way this bird looks like it does, but there it is anyway, hopping onto another branch and tilting its head back and forth. It lets out a little chirrup, watching me, hopping a little, and then watching me again.

  I can hear it. Interesting. So sound can move through the door too. At least in my direction.

  Satisfied now that I’m not moving toward it, the bird moves to a branch lower down and gives another trill, eying me again. Its upright tail waggles every time it sings or moves, and whenever it stops to glare or sing at me, it stamps its little feet on the branch, adorably defiant.

  Even though I’m looking into a world that’s decidedly not this one, even though I’m looking at a bird eerily like the one made of jewels I gave Delphine, my uneasiness abates a little. The bird is cute. And something about it reminds me of Delphine, with its tiny glares and little tantrums.

  “It’s okay,” I murmur to it. It tilts its head again, like it can hear me. I wonder if it can, if it’s like the light from my torch, where it comes through, but only very faintly. “I won’t hurt you.”

  It stares at me a second and then hops to the next branch down, glaring at me again, as if daring me to stop it. It reminds me so much of Delphine again that I almost laugh.

  Which then makes me want to cry.

  The bird finally stops on a branch midway to the ground and hops towards the trunk, which I see now is twined with a flowering vine of some kind. I don’t recognize it, or its flowers even, because some are small and possibly purple and others are pale with dark centers, but in the faint moonlight, it’s hard to tell the colors exactly. But what can be discerned is that the vine has thorns as long as nails, like teeth biting right into the air, and the bird is hopping closer and closer to them.

  “Careful,” I whisper to it. “Careful.”

  It turns and trills at me, as if to tell me to mind my own business, and then it lifts off the branch and flies right into a snarl of thorns.

  “Wait—” I breathe, but it’s too late. The little wren is now caught in the thorns, one wing pierced and snared, the other wing flapping frantically. Its chirps are now desperate, high-pitched, and its feet push and strain at the branch below it, as if it’s trying to take flight, and it can’t, it can’t.

  All around it, flowers shiver and tremble from its struggle, and drops of dark blood start running down its pearly wing.

  “Oh God,” I say, “Oh God, oh God.”

  I want to help it; I need to help it. But I can’t, I can’t get to the other side, and I’m forced to watch as it twists and struggles against the thorns.

  And then the crows come.

  One by one, they start flapping into view, cawing at each other, cawing up at the trapped and bleeding wren. It freezes for a long moment, like it hopes the crows won’t notice it, but when the first crow lands just outside the thorns, the wren struggles harder than ever. Blood stains its wing and drops on the flowers below, and the crows seem to jeer at this. More flap up to the wren’s branch, a few find perches just above or just below, and soon the wren is surrounded not only by thorns but corvids too.

  “Go away,” I say. “Shoo! Shoo!”

  The crows glance back at me, looking amused, and then they throw a few dismissive caws my way. The crow closest to the wren takes a step closer, leans in, and tears a chunk of flesh right from the wren’s breast.

  The wren screams. I scream.

  The crows jeer and flap some more, and then the lead crow tears off another bite, and another, until its friends fly up and start tearing too. I get a single glimpse of the wren’s desperate eye, glinting in the moonlight, before the crows completely obscure my view, flapping and ripping in their frenzy.

  It only lasts a minute. Maybe less.

  And as quickly as they started, they stop. They hop back from the wren, they clean their feathers. Until finally—tidied up and sated on wren flesh—they fly off.

  The wren is unrecognizable now. Nothing but flesh and feathers, the wing that was caught in the thorns now torn to shreds.

  Blood drips onto the flowers below it. Dark, so dark in the moonlight.

  And in something almost li
ke slow motion, the corpse of the wren tips forward and pitches onto the grass, landing with a light but final-sounding thud. I only realize I’m moaning no no no once I stop. Once I suck in a breath and hear my own silence.

  Stop it, I tell myself, a little wildly. Stop it now.

  Everything gets eaten, everything dies. That is nature, that is the way nature has always worked.

  Everything dies. Even sweet, tantrum-y little birds that remind me of Delphine.

  And the bird wasn’t Delphine, that is what I need to remember. It was just a bird, and the crows were just crows, and the world beyond the door can’t touch me here anyway.

  It’s nothing personal or contingent or specific to me. It’s the world going about its sometimes-deadly, sometimes-mysterious business.

  It’s not magic. It’s not an omen.

  I’ve almost convinced myself of this when a wind picks up on the other side of the door. I can hear it murmuring through the trees, blowing over the grass in the lea, plucking at the leaves and the flowers on the strange, thorny vine that snared the bird.

  Two of those flowers tear free and tumble across the clearing until they roll almost all the way to the threshold of the door. Mere feet away from me. I can see the blood on their petals, I can see where they were tattered and torn from the bird’s thrashing panic.

  And then the flowers blow right through to door to rest at my feet.

  For a moment, I don’t move at all, I don’t think. I can’t think. Something from over there has now come over here, and I didn’t know that could happen—in fact, I’d empathetically convinced myself that it couldn’t happen.

  Fear prickles at my skin as I fully apprehend what’s just occurred, as I bend down and pick up the flowers. And then I see what the flowers are, and the fear is more than prickles now, it’s knives and broken glass all over my body.

  A roselle—a hibiscus varietal native to West Africa—and a violet.

  A violet.

  I stagger back, I stumble. My hand is wet with the bird’s now-cooled blood, and I’m carrying two flowers that should not be in season, that should not grow on vines, and I can’t ignore, I can’t pretend any longer, that these flowers are not somehow meant for me. That the tableau with the dying bird was not somehow meant for me.

  That all of this was not somehow meant for me.

  I push back through the thorns, past the roses, half jogging now, half scrambling, one fist clenched around the bloody petals and the other around my torch. Sir James prances and spins when I reach him, giving me a bark of canine relief, and together we bolt out of the chapel like we’re being chased. Like the door has opened wide and let out something even more terrible than flowers and blood.

  All this time, this entire year, we’ve been worried about the danger of going in, about what would happen if we touched the door or came near it.

  But we’ve been wrong. So wrong.

  We should have been afraid of what could come out.

  Chapter Twelve

  Within Thy Wounds Hide Me

  St. Sebastian

  The dinner with Freddie went like this:

  Saint got there on time, he wore his jacket to the table but unbuttoned it when he sat, he buttered his bread on the plate and didn’t clank his silverware around. They made polite conversation until the food came, conversation that made Saint feel a little poor and unworldly—but in a way that felt familiar and also in a way that was clearly unintentional on Freddie’s part.

  And then Freddie started speaking of Jennifer Martinez.

  It was painful and wonderful to hear new stories of her. To hear about a time when she’d been young and carefree, a young journalist who’d chased her curiosity all over the world and then fell in love with a hidden little corner of it. Every word Freddie spoke—every past tense verb, every fond, sad syllable—reminded Saint that his mother was dead, that it had been almost two years since he’d seen her eyes twinkle at him over a mug of tea or had heard her infectious giggle. But also it reminded Saint that she had lived. That she had mattered, that she had left a Jennifer-shaped hole in the world when she left.

  He didn’t know if he could bear any more.

  He also wanted Freddie to talk about her forever.

  After dinner—and two bottles of wine shared between the two of them (in vino veritas, Freddie had rumbled cheerfully)—he and Freddie walked to the door of the restaurant, and Freddie asked him if he’d like to take a walk along the Thames. Saint almost said no—he had a late train back to Bristol and also it had only just stopped drizzling in that damp, hushed way that suggested it would start up again at any moment—but there was something about the way Freddie asked, something about his face as he did. Hesitant and bashful, almost nervous.

  Saint found he couldn’t say no.

  So they walked to the river, moving in silence until they reached the stretch of paved walkway above the bank, and then Freddie finally said, “I didn’t ask you here solely to tell you about your mother.”

  Saint knew what was coming next.

  Freddie was about to ask about the chapel and the door. He was going to do what David Markham and Samson Quartey had done, and warn Saint away from it, warn him of its many dangers. And Saint wasn’t sure what he would say in response—I’m not living there anymore, perhaps, or we haven’t gone near it since Lammas—but as he braced himself to speak, Freddie said, in a very quick rush, something that Saint could never have expected.

  “There’s a chance Ralph isn’t your father.”

  For a single second, the words weren’t words but noise. Noise like the cabs and buses on the road above them, noise like the river sloshing against its walls. They meant nothing because how could they mean anything, because they were sounds and nothing else.

  And then they became words, and Saint stopped walking.

  “Pardon?”

  Freddie stopped too, shoving his hands into the pockets of his trousers. Aside from the fine lines around his mouth and eyes, he could have been a man in his thirties, not his early fifties, and Saint could see what his mother would have liked about him, all those years ago. He was handsome, easy, warm. Even right now, with his posture tensed in what seemed to be discomfort, he radiated an earnest and boozy cordiality that was hard to resist.

  “I mean,” Freddie answered, “that it was never certain whether Ralph was the one who fathered you.”

  “How—” Saint stopped himself. How was not the right question, although he also didn’t know what the right question should be in its place.

  Freddie seemed to understand his problem. “You know about the feasts,” he said quietly. “You know what they were.”

  “Yes.”

  Freddie moved over to the railing overlooking the river and leaned against it. After a moment, Saint joined him, looking not at the river but at the man next to him. The flaxen hair and the honey-gold eyes, so much lighter and warmer than Saint’s own.

  “Did you know that the Guests used to have many, many children?” Freddie asked, eyes on the water below. “Ralph found that out, when he was trying to revive the old ways. That any child born in the village to an unmarried mother was paid for and cared for by the lord of the manor.”

  “Because he was the father?”

  Freddie shook his head. “Not always. Sometimes he might have been the father—given what happened in the chapel, I’d be surprised if that wasn’t often the case—but his protection extended to all children conceived in the village during a feast, any child at all that was born to an unmarried mother. Ralph was very taken with that idea, I think. It appealed to how he thought of Thornchapel and his family: benevolent guardians of the valley and such. And so that first year, we all agreed that was how it would be. The lord of the manor would claim responsibility for any children made if birth control methods failed.” Freddie snorted then. An inelegant noise for such an elegant man, but on Freddie it worked, because everything worked on Freddie. “As if it would be that easy, what Ralph wanted, that simple. As i
f children are bottles of wine to be swapped around or handed out like gifts.”

  “Freddie,” Saint asked, feeling like a giant fist was clenched around his throat, “what are you saying?”

  “I’m saying,” Freddie said carefully, “that Ralph promised to take responsibility for any child conceived in the chapel, but even though your mother was his May Queen, the feasts were not only—”

  Even in the faint light of the streetlights, even with the wine already glowing in his cheeks, Saint could see that Freddie was blushing.

  “The feasts weren’t hemmed in by those kinds of boundaries,” Freddie continued haltingly. “That any one person belonged to any other. In the chapel, all of us belonged to one another, you see.”

  “You’re saying you slept with my mother too,” Saint said, although it was more of a statement than a question.

  “Yes. Every feast. And on Samhain, in particular, we were very much . . . together. You were born on Midsummer’s Day, correct?”

  “Yes, but I was born five—”

  “Five weeks early,” Freddie said first. “I know.”

  Freddie looked at Saint then, his honey eyes full of regret. “A Samhain conception date is very likely. And Ralph and I were the only ones who were with her that night—you see the problem now, don’t you? Jennifer withdrew after that first year, and I didn’t know she’d had a child until years and years later—and by the time Ralph told me about you, you were already in the States. I was told that Jennifer wanted you to think you were her late husband’s child, that you’d been raised believing it, and that Ralph was already helping financially. It bothered me, not knowing the truth, not knowing you, but I didn’t feel I had a right to intrude on Jennifer’s wishes. I didn’t think I had any right to say anything at all until we spoke at the gala and you mentioned being Ralph’s son.” He took a long breath. “I thought if you’d learned the truth about that much, then I could tell you the truth about the rest.”