by Darcy Coates
Dorran stood at a little side table behind Clare. He’d laid out three sheets of paper and drew the house’s layout, one floor on each sheet. It was a labour-intensive process. He was completely silent as he worked, and Clare gave him space.
The flames caught on one of the larger logs. The muffled hissing and popping were the only noises inside their room. The radio, which Clare had kept at her side constantly, sat on the mantel. She knew it would be smarter to turn it off and conserve the batteries since Beth wouldn’t be re-opening communications until the following morning, but she couldn’t bring herself to shut the machine off. The euphoria from speaking with her sister was still fresh, and if Beth tried to make contact again, she didn’t want to miss it. Even if it meant burning through their limited supply of batteries.
Her car had spare batteries, along with cases of food, water, and petrol. They were all things she and Dorran needed. But the car was an hour’s walk from Winterbourne, in Banksy Forest, which was home to an unknown number of hollows—and the last time Clare and Dorran had ventured there, the creatures had almost killed them.
“Clare.” Dorran had the sheets spread out across the floor ahead of himself and beckoned for her. She knelt at his side and admired the sharp, intricate lines he’d drawn.
“Here we are,” he said, indicating their room on the third floor. “The kitchen is here. The foyer is here. These are the stairs.”
He’d drawn the hallways cleanly, but instead of butting the rooms up against each other, he’d left space between them. The hidden passageways could be anywhere; he intended to add them into the map when he found them.
Dorran took out a red pen and drew three short, thick lines. “Here are the passageway entrances I know about. There is also a doorway into the attic that will have to be dealt with.”
“There’s going to be another one here,” Clare said, pointing to the hallway a little farther on from their room. “That’s where I first saw one of the creatures.”
Dorran marked the paper. “All right. What will be the best way to handle it? Start at the top and work our way down, or go from the ground up?”
“Ground up, I think.” Clare chewed on the corner of her lip. “They came in through the holes in the roof. If it’s possible to chase them out—and I think it might be; that one we saw in the hallway earlier was nervous enough to run rather than confront us—then going up will herd them outside without making us more vulnerable by opening the main door.”
“I agree. It will also make it safer to reach the gardens, which still need water daily.” Dorran clipped the top back onto the pen. His jaw worked as he examined the maps. “I don’t know if it’s possible to eradicate the creatures from the house entirely. As long as there are holes in the roof—and that will not be a small project to fix—then they can get back in. But as long as we can seal all of the doorways, we can keep them contained. They will have the hidden passageways, but we will have the rest of the house.”
The idea of sharing her home with the monsters, no matter how contained they were, left her stomach squirming. But Dorran was right; there was no way to get rid of them completely.
She realised he was watching her and forced a smile. “Do you have nails?”
“Yes. In the basement. As well as boards. The house was constantly in need of repair during my mother’s rein; we will not be short of supplies.”
“Let’s get this done, then.”
He smiled at her, and the fondness in his expression was almost enough to melt the queasy sensation.
They collected the equipment they would need. Thick jackets to ward off the cold. Gloves and scarves for protection against bites. Dorran strapped a sheathed knife under his coat then fussed over Clare, making sure she had small blades tucked into pockets within easy reach. Then they both retrieved a main weapon: the poker for Clare and a hatchet for Dorran.
Clare carried the maps and a lamp as she followed Dorran. She sucked in a breath as they left the warmth of their bedroom and pulled her scarf up to cover her mouth and nose.
Getting from their room to the basement was a short hike. Clare watched the sun through the windows they passed. Small flakes of snow were snatched at and hurled around by the wind. Gradually, natural light was filtered out as they descended deeper into Winterbourne.
The staff’s areas were shabby and old compared to the rest of the house. Dust, which hadn’t been tolerated in any of the family’s many rooms, had gathered across a lot of the tools. Dorran picked out a can full of nails from the shelves behind their indoor garden and passed them to Clare. “Would you carry these?”
“Sure.” She took the hammer as well, then Dorran bent to reach a stack of wood piled underneath the shelves.
“I can help—” Clare reached towards Dorran as he hauled out eight of the planks.
“I have this.” His voice was a fraction tighter than usual, but he didn’t hesitate as he hefted the planks to carry them across his shoulder.
Clare pressed her lips together. Dorran never complained, but she worried for him. Neither of them were in peak shape. They had run out of meat, and the tinned soup—their only source of food left—wasn’t meeting their caloric needs. Both of them were trying to recover from injuries while simultaneously dealing with the cold, the stress, and the exertion that Winterbourne demanded. Sometimes, she had the sense that they were being held together by will alone. She didn’t know what would happen when their resilience finally failed.
Dorran, breathing heavily, stopped in the cathedral-like room that bridged the basement, the wine cellar, the garden, and the hallway back to the main parts of the house. He adjusted the boards on his shoulder and glanced at Clare. “Wine cellar?”
“Yep.” She knew why he was asking. Of all the rooms in the house, she hated the cellar the most. The cold stone space seemed to leak hostility, and her skin prickled whenever she neared it. But it needed to be dealt with first—it held an entryway to a hidden chamber the hollows had been living in.
Dorran hesitated, his dark eyes questioning. She made herself smile. He gave a brief smile in return then stepped towards the cellar stairs.
Clare shivered as she passed through the massive stone archway. The change in atmosphere was palpable. The hairs rose along her arms, and no matter how thick the jacket was, it never seemed enough to keep out the damp, frozen air. She held the lamp ahead of herself and kept close enough to Dorran to light his feet. As the steps led down, the grey stone created endless echoes that bounced across the walls. The candle’s light felt muted. It shone off Dorran’s back, shimmering in his dark hair and across the wooden planks, but never reaching far enough to see ahead of him.
The steps levelled out into a stone floor. Shelves rose around Clare, the bottles glinting in a way that reminded her of eyes in the dark. She kept her breathing shallow, her ears straining to pick up any unnatural noises as Dorran wove between the shelves. In the distance, she caught the sound of dripping, and behind her, something that might have been a sigh or an echo. Dorran was moving too fast. Clare started to lose him amongst the shelves. She broke into a jog and staggered as her shoe clipped an uneven stone. She caught her balance against one of the shelves. Its bottles clinked as they rocked in their holders.
Dorran had stopped. Even though he faced her, he looked half like a stranger. His deep-set eyes were full of shadows. The candlelight painted unnatural angles over his face as its flame guttered. They stared at each other, unmoving, and Clare’s heart felt like it was about to burst.
“Clare? Are you all right?” His voice was distorted by the wine cellar’s echoes.
Clare didn’t trust herself to speak, but she gave two quick nods. Dorran adjusted his hold on the boards and held out a hand, and Clare moved to his side. He wrapped his arm around her shoulders. They walked side by side, and for a moment, Clare could hear only their breaths.
They reached the back wall. Clare recognised the place she’d seen a hollow one scrabbling at the ground. She nodded towards i
t. “The door must be somewhere here.”
Dorran bent and let the wood fall against the end of the closest shelf. “Keep the light steady.”
She held it high while Dorran explored the wall. His gloved fingers dug into the gaps between the stones, feeling for any sort of opening.
A soft noise intruded. A shudder ran through Clare, and the candle flickered. The scratching noises were back. Fingernails on stone… digging, digging, digging.
“Dorran.” She kept her voice to a whisper. “Do you hear that? The scratching noises?”
He stopped his search. They both held their breaths. The scratching ran around them, distorted but persistent. Clare strained to hear where it was coming from. The cellar was disorienting, and the noise was so faint, it was almost possible to lose it under the sound of her pulse.
Dorran watched her, his expression unreadable. “Do you still hear it?”
“Yes. Don’t you?”
He frowned, staring into the blackness, and after a moment, he shook his head. “I do not.”
Clare swallowed around the lump in her throat. “I’m not imagining it.”
“No. You’re not.” He stripped off his gloves as he stood. A finger brushed loose hair back behind her ear. His eyes were sad but intense. “I promised you I would not doubt you again. And I don’t. You are better at hearing them than me. Please, stand guard. Tell me if they come closer.”
She nodded. Dorran’s fingers lingered a moment, grazing her jaw, then fell away. He turned back to the wall and ran his hands across the surface.
He believes me. She couldn’t hear the scratching noise any longer. Part of her already wanted to believe she’d imagined it. The cellar was making her paranoid, and it would be easy to extrapolate a simple echo into something malevolent. But the other part of her held steady. She’d doubted her senses once before, and it had nearly killed Dorran. She wouldn’t make that mistake again.
Dorran pressed his shoulder against part of the wall. It shifted back. Hinges, old and rusty, groaned as they turned, and the door drifted inwards.
“There.” His smile glinted in the thin light. “We found it. Are you ready?”
She didn’t feel ready. Dorran waited in the opening, his dark eyes trying to read hers. She knew he would let her return upstairs, into the safety and warmth of their room, if she asked. He would probably even be grateful for it. But that would mean he would have to enter the passageway alone. Clare’s fingers ached from how hard she gripped the lamp, but she lifted her chin and stepped through the doorway.
Chapter Five
The wooden hallway was wide enough that Clare and Dorran could stand side by side. The pathways would have been built by the house’s original owner, a woman who had constructed Winterbourne deep in the forest to hide away from the world, following her husband’s death. Clare guessed she had designed the passages to be her refuge—a way to move about the house without staff or relatives knowing.
Dorran stopped inside the door and glanced down the passageway’s length. It stretched away in both directions, the smooth walls vanishing within feet. The lantern wasn’t as bright as Clare would have liked; already, she couldn’t see much of the wine cellar. Just the glint of two bottles that looked horribly like eyes.
“We will have to nail this one closed from the inside.” Dorran ran his hands across the wood door. On the other side was stone, designed to blend into the cellar’s walls. Clare nodded. They had no way to drill into the stone without specialised tools. She tried not to let her panic rise as they stepped inside the passageway and pulled the door closed behind them.
With their exit sealed, the hallway’s sickly musky scent intensified. It smelt like rancid meat and rats. The hollows were responsible: a mixture of wet, decaying clothes, greasy hair, and injuries left open and allowed to fester. Clare tried not to imagine how many of them had paced the hallways for their smell to permeate it.
Dorran lifted one of the wood pieces, braced it across the door, and held out a hand. Clare passed him a nail and the hammer. For a moment, her ears were filled with the hard thuds of metal impacting wood. Dorran drove the nails in at opposing angles, ensuring they could not be pulled out easily. Once the first board was secured, he picked up a second but paused before positioning it.
“I have been thinking. About your car and about Beth.”
“Yeah?” She offered him the nails.
“If we are to reach your sister, we will have to learn more about the hollows. About how to handle them, how to fight them, how to escape them.”
“Right.”
He drove in the first nail then lined up the second. “And the supplies in your car would be a boon. As it is, we will run out of food in four days.”
Clare squeezed her eyes closed. She hadn’t expected it to be so soon. “Is that all we have?”
“Yes. Initially, I had planned to ration it. But you were not well. Your body needed fuel to heal.”
And Clare had refused to let Dorran ration his own food. When she’d found out that was what he was doing, she refused to eat unless he ate at the same time. She didn’t regret that. Not even when faced with their dwindling supplies.
“The garden is growing well,” Dorran continued. “A few of the plants, especially the leafy ones, could be harvested within five or six days. But it will not be enough to survive on, and we are still a few weeks away from sustainable food. I considered sprouting some of the seeds. But the amount we would need to eat to even last a week would wipe out our store, and that, of course, would put an end to our garden.”
“You’re thinking about going to the car.”
“Yes. If we can find a way to reach it and to bring the food home, we will not have to go hungry.”
“And it’s like a practice run for getting to Beth.”
“Exactly.”
The passageway didn’t feel as cold or dark as it had a moment ago. Clare bit her lip, a cautious sense of hope starting to form. If they could reach the car, then surely, they could make it outside the forest. And if they could get outside…
Dorran kept his head down as he finished nailing the second piece of wood. He hadn’t voiced the idea just to make idle conversation, she realised. He’d felt her stress and brought up the plan to give her something less grim to think about. Not for the first time, Clare felt a pang of gratitude that they were together.
She pulled the hand-drawn maps out of her pocket as Dorran put down his hammer. They unfolded the pages against the stone wall, and Clare held her lantern close. Dorran marked off the entrance they’d sealed, then he drew two red lines through the empty space to indicate which direction the passages went.
“Left or right?” Dorran asked.
“Right.” Clare could see lilting stairs leading upwards. More than anything, she wanted to put some distance between them and the wine cellar.
Unlike the main parts of the house, the wooden passageways weren’t flat. They constantly led upwards and downwards with sets of two, three, or four shallow steps at a time. It disoriented Clare. For a house as proud and rigid as Winterbourne, the uneven stairs felt like a dirty secret hidden away where no one could see.
She hated having her back exposed. Every time she tilted her head, she glimpsed leaping shadows in her peripheral vision. She thought she heard the scratching again, except this time, it faded in and out of hearing, never close or loud enough for her to be certain it was there. Still, it teased her senses and terrified her subconscious.
The familiar question kept playing through her mind. How many are there? How many?
She imagined them creeping up behind her. Scuttling. Moving so quietly that their noises were buried under her footsteps and gasping breaths. She could almost feel them behind her, close enough to snatch at the hem of her dress, close enough for their bony fingers to tangle in her hair and yank her back into the yawning darkness. When the tension grew too immense for her to bear, she turned. The pathway was empty.
She hated the tunnels. She hate
d the house. But Winterbourne was the only thing keeping her and Dorran alive. She squared her shoulders and lifted the lamp higher to light their path.
Behind her, the soft scrabble of grasping fingernails seemed to seep out of the house, coming from every corner and every crevice, unstoppable and repugnant, like a stain bleeding through the walls.
Chapter Six
They sat in their nest of blankets in front of the fire, shoulder-to-shoulder as they watched the flames. A pot of soup sat in the coals, warming. Clare felt as though she could finally breathe again.
Even after two trips into the furnace room for more wood and eight sealed doors, they hadn’t finished working through the ground floor. Her nerves were raw. She imagined she could still hear the scratching sounds in the back of her mind.
Dorran reached forward to stir the pot as wisps of steam began to rise. As he settled back at Clare’s side, he kissed the top of her head. “Today was a challenge. You did well.”
“You did most of it,” she countered. Still, she relaxed against him, enjoying how solid and safe he felt.
He murmured happily, his fingers running over her arms, his eyes closed. For that moment, everything felt right again. Clare could forget about the monsters crawling through their house. She could forget about the world outside the forest. She could even forget the scratching noises. She had Dorran. And in that moment, she realised she’d found the answer to a question she’d asked herself earlier. Could I spend the rest of my life in Winterbourne? She smiled. Yes. I could. As long as Dorran is with me, I could live anywhere.
The moment ended, though. The soup bubbled, and Dorran reached forward to take it from the heat before it spilt over. He divided it into two bowls and placed one in Clare’s hands.
“Let’s eat,” he said, his fingertips trailing over her shoulder as though he were as reluctant to let her go as she was. “And you must be ready for some rest. It’s been a long day.”