Door of Bruises (Thornchapel Book 4)

by Sierra Simone

  It is a testament to what we’ve been through and how we’ve all come to see each other that no one objects to Auden being the final voice, the deciding vote.

  Which is good, because if I was asked to vote, I’m not sure what I would say. Rebecca and Delphine do come first, but yet—there is something about the door . . . something I am certain I’m missing . . .

  Everything is possible.

  Convivificat.

  “The flock comes first,” Becket finally concedes. “Although you are wrong about one thing, Auden. I am no longer a shepherd.”

  A stunned silence fills the room.

  “I’ll move my things out of the rectory this week,” he says.

  Delphine is the first to digest this. “Oh, Becky,” she cries, flying to the sofa and giving him a massive hug. “Have they fired you? What bores they are in the Church, I’ve always said this!”

  Becket returns her hug, smiling at the rest of the room over her shoulder. “No, I wasn’t fired. I quit.”

  “You quit?” I ask. Guilt is moving through my blood, dark and grainy. I did this.

  Auden gives my hand another squeeze, sensing the shift in my mood, and Becket pulls away from Delphine so he can look me in the eye. “It was my choice, Proserpina,” he says gently. “My own. I didn’t feel forced or pushed into it.”

  “But I . . . ” I trail off. “You love being a priest, Becket. I saw you there, week after week, thriving and happy . . . ”

  “I’ll still be a priest,” Becket says. “Did you know that? I was forever marked as one at my ordination, my very soul was transfigured. Ontologically, I will always be a person of God. It is only in practical matters—saying Mass, hearing confessions, working as a pastor—that I will no longer be of service. My clerical state is revoked, although my soul is unchanged.”

  “What does that even mean?” asks Saint. “How can you be a priest without being a priest?”

  “I honestly don’t know. Which doesn’t change the fact that such a thing is possible,” replies Becket. “Clearly, since I am here before you now as both a priest and not a priest.”

  Auden pulls me over to Becket, and Becket stands to greet us. And then Auden pulls him into a hard, long hug.

  “You have been dear to me as my confessor,” Auden says softly. “As my Father Hess of St. Petroc’s. But you will be even dearer to me as my Becket of Thornchapel.”

  I see the wet in Becket’s eyes as he nods, and then I hug him too, and then Delphine is there, and then Saint has emerged from his corner, and then even Rebecca, who hates churches and hugs equally. And we are all hugging him, and we are all in our own whirlpools of shame or anger or fear or longing or all of those things mixed together, but we are together in this moment, we are together in this. When one of us hurts, we all hurt. And when one of us needs, we all need.

  We are all of us bound together by thorns. We are all of us a family like the world has never seen.

  Eventually, the moment ends. Eventually Delphine calls for drinks and Saint mumbles something about needing to go but he never does go and Rebecca tries to get us all back on task. Eventually, we circle back to the business of the door, and I decide to help Rebecca by indexing all the things we’ve tried on a blackboard Auden and Becket have carried down from the attic.

  “We’ve done iron, salt, holy water, rowan, rowan berries, ash, red yarn, talismans, prayers, inside-out clothes, and blood on the threshold. Auden said he did fires and dancing on his own. We’ve also of course tried just pulling it closed.” I tap the blackboard with my chalk. “There are two things we haven’t tried yet that we know might make a difference.”

  “A sacred day,” Becket suggests.

  “Exactly,” I say, writing on the blackboard. “The door seems to respond to holy days. So perhaps these things would have a greater effect on equinox or Samhain than say, a random Thursday.”

  “A rite,” Delphine adds. “That’s the second thing you’re going to say, isn’t it? That we could do a full rite.”

  “Yes,” I say, adding rite under holy days on the board. “Auden saw the door after Beltane, although it didn’t stay. But there’s the possibility that rituals may affect it.”

  “But we didn’t do a ritual on Lammas,” Delphine muses, her forehead wrinkling. “Nobody went into the chapel at all. So maybe I’m wrong.”

  Auden clears his throat, and when I look up, both he and Saint look uncomfortable.

  “That’s not . . . entirely true,” Auden says. “St. Sebastian and I were out there that day. And we . . . well, it wasn’t a rite, necessarily, but . . . ”

  “We acted out a sacrifice,” Saint admits. “The two of us.”

  “Let me guess,” Rebecca says, eyebrow arched, “instead of killing your king, you, what? Gave him a blowjob?”

  “Give me some credit,” Saint says. “I got to home base.”

  Auden makes a choked noise—either a laugh or a groan, I can’t tell.

  “At any rate,” he continues, “we should take all that into consideration.”

  “Yes,” Becket adds. “Perhaps for the purposes of the door, what you two did was ritualistic enough in nature and execution to influence it.”

  I asterisk the word rite and scrawl *king-killing kink underneath it. “Okay. So that’s what we’ve got left. Holy days and holy rites.”

  “There’s one more thing,” Becket says.

  We turn to look at our not-a-priest.

  “Sacrifice,” Becket says.

  “No.”

  That was from Auden.

  Becket holds up his hands. “I’m not personally advocating for it, but it must be mentioned. Poe told us what Dr. Davidson said, and we all heard Poe and Rebecca’s father talk about their summer here. We know what Ralph and Estamond believed.”

  “John Barleycorn is a memory,” I say, echoing the words of my dream.

  Auden gives me a sharp look.

  “Exactly,” Becket says. “Remember Paris Dartham? Here—” He digs for his phone and scrolls through his camera roll until he finds what he needs. He reads the image he took of Reverend Dartham’s journal aloud.

  “They—that’s the people in the valley—can all explicate in meticulous detail how the Thorn King was killed in the woods and whereby his blood fed the land. And then some local history, and then—if the door should appear, then the Guests have done their duty by the land and gone to the altar in the woods.”

  Becket finishes and then sets his phone on the library table. “It may be off the table, but it should still be in our minds. People have believed for centuries that a death can close the door. And we know for a fact that Estamond’s death did close it.”

  “And my mother’s,” I say, a little tremblingly, although it hurts less and less to talk about it these days. “At least, I assume it was her death that closed the door that time.”

  “A sacrifice doesn’t have to be a person,” Rebecca points out. “It could be an animal.”

  “I don’t like that,” Auden says.

  “Or grain, like Cain offered,” Rebecca suggests.

  “Which worked out so well for Cain,” mutters Saint.

  I write sacrifice on the board. “We can try blood again on a holy day,” I say as I write, and then I step back and think. “But I wonder if it has to be bigger. Blood isn’t truly a sacrifice, is it? Not when it’s only a few drops. Not when we have bandages and antiseptic to make sure a wound can’t hurt us.”

  “No sacrifices,” Auden grits out. His eyes flash hazel around the room. “Not animals. Not people. No. Sacrifices. Whatsoever.”

  “Of course not,” Delphine says soothingly.

  “Obviously,” Saint says.

  “Not even a goat?” asks Rebecca, but I think she’s joking. Mostly.

  But when I meet Becket’s eyes across the room, I know he’s thinking something similar to me. That it’s easy to dismiss centuries and millennia of sacrifice as misguided superstition . . . but what if there’s some truth hidden there? What i
f we’re not the first people to try to find another way, any other way, and can’t?

  I don’t erase sacrifice from the board, but before Auden can object, his phone rings.

  “It’s Tally,” he sighs. “One moment.”

  As he walks away to his friend, I turn back to the others. “We need to learn more,” I say. “I think—I keep thinking there’s something we’re missing here.”

  “A clue?” Delphine asks, a little excitedly. “I like the sound of that. It makes it all rather like a mystery, doesn’t it?”

  “Yes,” I agree. “A mystery I’ll need help solving.”

  “And what is this mystery exactly?” Rebecca asks. “What kind of clue do we need?”

  “My dad told us that Ralph was searching local folklore and fairy tales for information about the door,” I say. “And we know he was searching for those things here in the library too. I think there’s a possibility that we might find more explicit texts about the door here, in the books around us. But I’ll need help.”

  “I don’t know how much help I can be,” Rebecca says, a little doubtfully. “I know nothing about fairies.”

  “There’s not that much to know,” Saint pipes up. “They don’t age like we do, they don’t like iron or salt, and you can’t eat fairy food, or else you have to stay in fairyland forever.”

  “The fairies aren’t the point,” I cut in. “The fairy tales are, because they might have some abstracted mentions of the door. That’s what we’re after. No one needs to have their PhD in fairy lore after this.”

  “Fine,” Rebecca says. “But I’m not a librarian. You’ll have to tell me what you want me to do.”

  I think a moment, spinning slowly to take in the rows and rows of shelves. Even though I’ve been here nine months, I’ve still barely scratched the surface of this collection. I’ve catalogued only ten percent of it, and I’ve scanned even less. There’re entire sections I haven’t even looked at, much less searched.

  “We’ll need to do an organized hunt. Divide the library into sections, assign those sections to each of us. Becket and Saint, seeing as how you’re currently unemployed—sorry—you’ll take bigger sections, as will I. Auden, Delphine, and Rebecca still have their own work to do, and so they’ll take smaller ones. We’ll pull books one by one and assess them for potential. Maybe we can find an answer that’s better than dead birds or human sacrifice.”

  “There’s that optimism I love so much,” Auden says cheerfully as he walks back to us. “We can do better than human sacrifice! Say it with me now!”

  “You’re in a better mood,” I observe as he kisses my cheek and then pinches my bottom.

  “Tally’s just told me that the lab has started on his samples, which means we are getting close to the excavation being formally over.”

  “Good,” Rebecca says. “And while you were on the phone, Poe has devised some homework for all of us.”

  “If it means we can stop all this mad sacrifice talk, I’ll happily do any manner of library drudgery.”

  “Wonderful,” I say. “We’ll start tonight then.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  St. Sebastian

  A week or so later, I’m standing in the middle of the lane when a sporty little Ford comes up behind me and rolls to a stop.

  A handsome blond head pokes out the window. “This isn’t how hitchhiking works, St. Sebastian.”

  “Har har,” I rejoin, looking back down to my phone, where I’d been dialing the Livestock Society. Becket parks his car and hops out to join me.

  “Hi, yes,” I say for the Society’s voicemail. “There’s a dead sheep on the road between the village and Thornchapel. Doesn’t look like it’s been dead very long. Hasn’t been hit by a car or anything, seems to be alone.” I rattle off a few other details that I notice—no sign of injury, a smear of green paint on its back, and then I hang up as Becket squats down to look at the sheep.

  “Do you reckon we should move it?” I ask. “It’s in the middle of the road.”

  “I wouldn’t,” Becket says, eyes still on the dead animal. “In case it died of some communicable illness.”

  “Are you sure? I don’t think your car can get through to the house otherwise.”

  I’m being polite. The lane here, while somehow legally a road, is practically only as wide as Becket is tall. In Texas, this would be a footpath. There’s hardly enough room for a motorcycle to pass by the side of the sheep, much less a hatchback.

  Becket sighs and stands. “Right you are. Can I park at yours? I’ll walk the rest of the way.”

  “Of course. And I’ll wait, if you’d like.”

  And so about ten minutes later, we are walking to Thornchapel together, a brisk wind kicking up and rustling the leaves above us as we go. I’m not cold, despite being only in a T-shirt, but Becket has a chunky cardigan pulled over his shirt and keeps fussing with the shawled neck of it, trying to raise it higher around his throat. Even though equinox is still a few days away, Dartmoor autumn is already announcing itself.

  “Were you clearing out the house?” Becket asks as we walk.

  I nod. I’ve been splitting my time between helping Poe in the library and getting my mother’s house ready to sell, which is less emotionally exhausting than it was the last time I tried to clear out her things, but also more time-consuming than I anticipated, due to her habit of saving anything and everything she thought might be useful, like gas station receipts and half-used skeins of yarn and plastic tubs that once held spreadable butter and were now used to hold everything from earrings to batteries to—yes—gas station receipts. But I don’t have a choice about combing through it all, because I have to sell the place. I need the money, seeing as I won’t have a job when I’m in school.

  If I’m in school.

  Becket seems to know which way my thoughts are bending. “Term starts soon,” he observes. “Have you decided whether you’re going to go?”

  I shove my hands into my pockets. “No.”

  “May I ask what’s influencing your decision?”

  No, you may not, I want to say, but I make myself remember that collar or no collar, Becket is my priest and also my friend.

  I make myself remember that I don’t want to be the person who hides from friends anymore.

  “I want to be here at Thornchapel,” I admit.

  “Bristol is hardly on the moon. You’d be able to come back as frequently as you like.”

  “I know,” I say, “I know. It’s just . . . ”

  I can’t put it into words, I really can’t, because when I try to, it sounds so stupid I can’t stand it. It sounds pathetic.

  But I’ve underestimated Becket. He brushes his shoulder against mine as we walk, and tells me, “I quit the only work that’s ever given me meaning because of this place, St. Sebastian. Nothing you say will sound melodramatic to me. Nothing will sound like it’s not a good enough reason.”

  His shoulder feels nice against mine. I suddenly think of the nights I used to spend in St. Petroc’s, kneeling in not-prayer with him sitting a few rows behind me in silent companionship.

  I decide to try to explain. For him. And for me.

  “I’ve spent four years like this,” I say. “Being here, being the town’s librarian, being a good son. But also being a person of half-starts, of broken attempts, of unfinished ideas. It eventually became part of me, the attempting, it became who I am, and I know—I know that who I am, or who I let myself be, was more about Auden in the end than about me. I was making myself into his opposite. He was in London and I was here. He went to uni and I didn’t. He had a big fancy job and I shelved picture books. He was building cool shit all over the world and I was giving up on the guitar after three weeks. It was like . . . I don’t know. If I couldn’t be with him, couldn’t be near him, then I had to be as different from him as possible. I had to put so much distance between our lives that even if he did walk into the library one day looking for me, even if he did suddenly decide he didn’t hate me an
ymore, a future between us would still be impossible.”

  “And then,” Becket notes, “it would be your choice. The distance between you two. It would no longer be this animus out of your control, but a wall that you erected—not him, not the past. You.”

  Becket is uncomfortably perceptive. But then again, that’s what had made him such a good pastor before. “Yeah,” I say. “That.”

  “And if you leave for school, what happens then? That distance erodes? Your control fades?”

  I sulk a little at being read so easily . “I guess.”

  “And what happens after that?” Becket presses. “If you no longer have the illusion of control? If you’re no longer pushing him away before he can push you away?”

  I know the answer to this. I know what will happen.

  I think of his words in his bedroom, of his line in the sand.

  You have to decide.

  If you come back to me, it will be because you’re ready to accept whatever may come, without fear and without shame.

  “I’ll have to choose for real,” I say softly. “All these years, I’ve been in a kind of stasis. A cocoon that was mostly lonely and mostly boring and also mostly safe. But if I tear that cocoon open . . . there’s no more safety. I will have to choose my life and then accept the consequences that come after.” I’ll have to either choose him . . . or not. For good.

  “It’s terrifying,” Becket agrees.

  It’s beyond terrifying. It’s existential. “I still love him,” I blurt out. “It seems so simple to walk away from it all, to keep Poe close but leave everything else behind. But then I see his eyes in the sunlight . . . or he smiles at me with that lopsided smile . . . or he says something in that ridiculous accent, and it’s like I’m sixteen again, staring at him from across a church and wishing I was his.”

  Becket makes a humming noise as we turn onto the drive and are greeted by crenelations and windows peeking through the trees. “As someone who has chosen the uncertain path,” he says, “I can honestly say that my only regret is not choosing it sooner. I can’t define your morality for you, St. Sebastian, and I would never try, but consider what will be lost and what will be gained. Is the illusion of safety worth the starving of possibility? Is there a world where you can allow yourself a choice more nuanced than stay or go?”