Everything stops.
The tapestries on the walls.
The strange dolls on the shelves.
The books.
The weapons.
The animal skulls—horned, all of them.
The piano—
“Play something pretty,” Father says. He lifts the lace covering from the keys.
“It’s such a little piano!”
“Just the right size for a girl to play.” This voice, unfamiliar. Who is speaking? The little girl can’t see him. Then someone steps out of the dark. A tall person in a black hood.
Roan snaps her head away.
“Play,” Father says again.
Her fingers on the yellow keys. The sound is strange. Not like a piano at all. More tinny and thin.
“Keep playing,” Father says, and then he leaves her alone.
It is a strange room and the little girl is so busy looking at the dolls that she stumbles on the keys. She expects Father to rebuke her as he so often does when she isn’t paying close attention, but he does not.
She stops playing and listens.
She can hear the men talking in another room. Good, she thinks. She wants to look at all the beautiful things, and anyway, she is getting cold. There is no carpet in this room, no curtains—no windows at all.
The only light is from the candle on the piano top and another candle by the door at the end.
Maybe she’ll just have a little wander around. No one could get angry at her for just looking. The dolls—she wants most of all to look at those strange dolls…
“…I’ve been here before,” Roan whispers, lifting her candle higher. This piano… She knows the sound of it, the feel of it. Those dolls lined up on a shelf near the back of the room… she knows them too.
She shudders.
And then, all at once, she can see them.
They seem to jump out at her, so obvious she cannot believe she did not notice before.
Sigils.
Everywhere.
There, tiny, on the edge of an oil painting. It almost glows. There, cut into the glass of an ancient mirror—barely perceptible to the human eye. Another, on the forehead of a doll whose eyes seem to scream. There, there, and there. Dozens of them. Hundreds.
She backs away, the tapestry of evil rising in her mind’s eye to reveal itself to her.
Roan’s growl escapes and rumbles through the shadowy room.
“Damn you, Maudley. What have you been tampering with?”
Their faces are grim in the fading light. An entire day of searching has yielded no result. Dr. Maudley has simply vanished. Rapley, Roan, Cage, and Andrew sit together in the kitchen. Jenny potters about handing them bowls of broth from a steaming pot on the stove. Roan would rather have Seamus sitting by her side, for she likes his calm company, but he is with Emma upstairs, and she will not ask for them.
“He might have fallen where I could not see,” Rapley says, his arms folded. He is wrapped in a thick fur blanket, his hair still dripping. “The storms have never been this bad, nor persisted this long. And now we have a rolling fog like a velvet curtain during the day. To attempt a descent in order to seek the constable would be a death sentence. It is nothing but mire and jagged rock with hidden crevices and steep stops.”
“So, what?” Cage says. “We stay here until spring? What of the stores of food? Will they last some four months?”
“There will be no supplies reaching us in conditions like this,” Rapley agrees, “but we’ve survived through storms before.”
“Has there been a series of storms like this before?” Cage asks, and Roan shudders when his eyes flicker to her and then away again so fast she can’t tell if she saw it at all.
Rapley hesitates. “No. Not like this.”
Cage folds his arms. “When was the last time we saw blue skies? Or the sun?”
“Not since I arrived,” Roan says. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen a blue sky here. So… three weeks.”
“Unnatural,” Cage murmurs.
“It is winter,” Rapley snaps. “The weather will break.”
“And if it doesn’t? We die?”
Rapley shoots him a furious look. “No, we do not simply lie down and die.”
“Like dogs on their bellies,” Roan adds, her distaste evident.
Rapley’s eyes meet hers and there is a spark of warmth there.
“We survive. I hunt—I do it well. I will have to go to the high ground where it is less barren and less dangerous. There is no game here, but there will be rats, mice, snakes. We will kill them and eat them if it comes to that.”
Jenny crosses herself. “We cannot partake of snakes, Master Rapley. They are the Devil’s creatures.”
“Trust me,” Roan says, stirring her broth, “when you get hungry enough, you’ll eat anything.”
“It won’t come to that,” Rapley says. “In the meantime, we need to check when the next delivery is coming. Jenny, do you know?”
“Mrs. Goode keeps all that information to herself. She does not even share the schedule with Andrew. But she’s not well, again. Said she was feeling tired yesterday and did not come down this morning.”
“Well or no, we need to know where every last store of food in this house is kept and when the deliveries are scheduled to arrive.”
Roan cannot suppress her grin. His voice is… pleasant. And to see him so animated, rather than still like the rocks out there on the mountain, reminds her of spring.
“She will have my hide for waking her,” Jenny says softly, her blue eyes so wide they almost tremble.
“Then we all go,” Rapley says. “She can’t very well get angry with everyone.”
He smiles. How transformative! His teeth, still canine in shape, no longer make him a wolf on the prowl, but a man. A man who had once, as a boy, perhaps, even laughed.
When it disappears, Roan is surprisingly crestfallen.
“Up, then,” Cage grumbles, turning to Jenny, who must lead the way.
What a comic company they seem, walking through the entrance hall, up two flights of stairs, and then trudging up the narrow attic stairs in single file, each wrapped and draped in blankets, furs, and soft coverings to wake the housekeeper from her sickbed. Banded together purely for fear of her wrath.
Jenny pauses at the door with a fearful look at Rapley, who nods with another smile.
Roan again finds it unexpected. How different he looks with it upon his face.
“Mrs. Goode? Are you decent?” Jenny knocks again. “It is Jenny. I am come with some… visitors.”
Nothing.
“Be damned with it and open the door,” Cage snaps. He is wedged between Rapley and Andrew.
Jenny glances uncertainly at Roan, who gives a small nod.
After sticking for a moment, the door gives way suddenly, and they tumble in one after the other. Cage and Andrew remain upon the stair.
Jenny’s scream rends the air before everything goes utterly still.
Chapter 18
COLD AS WAX
The corpse of Mrs. Goode lies like a waxwork on the bed. Roan’s candle does little to make her seem more lifelike. Death is always empty. The men have departed, leaving Jenny and Roan to wrap the body respectfully before they return.
“I cannot,” Jenny whispers, hanging behind Roan in the hallway.
“We have to wrap the body before it begins to smell.”
“God almighty—mistress, I can’t.”
“Wait here, then. I will call you if needed.”
In honesty, Roan wants to do this alone. She had not seen her father’s corpse, though she had begged to. She wants the chance now. Needs it.
She closes the door on Jenny’s startled face and advances to the bed, her candle turning the grim scene even more macabre. Mrs. Goode’s body is athwart the bed. Robbed of life, it is now but an object, no different from the bed or the chair or the bedside table.
The door creaks open and Jenny slips inside. She gasps in horror—it is
almost comical—and scurries into a corner, looking away, as far from the body as she can get without trespassing the wall. Jenny’s breathless prayers are a strange memorial to the moment. Like a song.
The garments appear as before, but Mrs. Goode’s skin looks like a sheet of paper that has been crumpled into a ball. Besides colorless, she is dry; no moisture here. No elasticity. She is near yellow with it. The contrast with the rain-soaked air in the room, blowing through the open window, which slams rhythmically against its frame, couldn’t be greater.
Roan leans closer, her candle hand steady, and examines Mrs. Goode’s face; it’s the impossible look of someone who’s fallen asleep while startled. Before Jenny came in, the room felt peculiarly empty.
Mrs. Goode is no longer here.
Roan reaches out a finger and pokes at Mrs. Goode’s face, feeling the strange texture of the devoid flesh.
“You old hag,” Roan whispers, leaning close to Mrs. Goode’s ear. “You look as dried up and bitter as you were in life. For all your venomous words, look at you now.” She sniggers. “Still. No one deserves to die alone in a cold room. For that, I am sorry. Perhaps we’ll meet in hell, you and I. Or… in heaven.”
She gets to her feet, reaching over the corpse to grab the sheet. Something catches her eye. The plain wooden cross that hangs over Mrs. Goode’s bed has fallen and landed upside down on the headrest. Roan reaches for it, but a gust of wind disturbs the room, rumbling as the window slams violently against the frame once more. Roan moves to close it, but struggles as the wind blows the window frame away from her hand. At last she grabs it and, looking down as she pulls it closed, notices something far below in the grass. A book, pages fluttering in the wind, possibly a Bible, soaked beyond use.
She closes the window, dread slinking down her spine, only to find that Jenny has fled the room, leaving Roan alone with the dead once more.
The mist hangs in the air; it is so dense that it is only from the sound of Emma breathing that Roan knows the girl is still standing a pace away. The cold bites bitterly and they all shiver into their warmest coats and cloaks. Roan doesn’t see Cage approaching; only his footsteps and panting pierce the gray. There is a faint thud as he unburdens himself of Mrs. Goode’s body, and Emma mutters, “Lord almighty,” and steps closer to Roan.
Roan listens as Cage lowers himself into the hole, which he’s spent the morning digging, and then drags the body into it, before climbing back out. He is a vague shadow.
He speaks briefly of the love of God, of Mrs. Goode’s Christian character—of which he knew little—and then bows his head and makes the sign of the cross.
“In nomine Patris,” his voice booms, “et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti.”
Minutes pass, featureless but for his verses and four moribund lanterns on the ground, marking her position, Emma’s, Cage’s, and Jenny’s. Andrew waits inside with Seamus, keeping the boy plied with warm ale. Rapley is nowhere to be found.
“Well, that’s that,” Cage says. “Jenny, please be so good as to make us some tea. We’ll take it in the Red Room.”
“Yes, master.” She recedes back toward the house.
Roan arches an eyebrow, but says nothing.
Emma hesitates for a moment, and says, “God invented whiskey to keep the Irish from ruling the world, and I’m content with that.”
She nods her head toward Mrs. Goode’s final resting place, and then turns back toward the house. Roan watches her shadow as it fades.
Cage remains motionless, bolted to the ground. Roan can sense that he is staring at her, as she is at him, a duel of sorts, but neither can see the other’s visage, let alone their eyes.
The duel is inconclusive, and both quit the scene with deliberate slowness, almost at the same time.
Chapter 19
HOWL
The storm rattles the windows and hammers at the walls, a symphony of chaos. Roan no longer sleeps at night. Since Mrs. Goode’s death, she has been unsettled. Rapley has not returned, and Dr. Maudley is still missing. She lights candle after candle, placing each in the window seat, hoping that the light will guide Rapley back, but as the days pass with no sign of him, everyone feels the strain. With nothing to do but wait, Roan wanders the house at night, wrapped in a blanket that cannot warm the cold thoughts in her mind.
Roan’s candle burns low, but the lightning, what little of it bursts through the small windows in the corridor, is enough to burn the stairs white.
She doesn’t see him right away. But the second shock of lightning illuminates his small frame on the cold floor below her.
“Seamus?”
Another slash of light and a roll of thunder. He is pale. Small.
She hurries down the stairs two at a time and falls to her knees beside him.
“Seamus!” She heaves him up, but he is a deadweight. “Come on!”
A faint heartbeat whispers through his icy skin. She shakes his body, slaps him hard, yelling into his face.
No response.
A horrible thought: Is he going to die, like Mrs. Goode? A small, boy-size grave beside the crone’s?
Getting to her feet, she jerks him up, but only manages to lift his torso. “Someone!” she yells. “Someone, help!”
The house is still and dark.
Lowering him again, Roan does the only thing she can think of; she runs across the entrance hall and out through the main doors into the storm.
Somehow, she knows where he will be.
“Rapley!” she yells through the ruckus, which buffets her from all sides. She’s blinded by debris and lanced by rain; her memory guiding her across the courtyard. The winds howl.
For a moment, she is lost, surrounded by slate and shale and bombarded by flying pieces of heather and detritus from all sides. They slice at her face and hands, tangling in her hair.
The sigils flare in her mind quicker than anything from the English language, and then are on her fingers. A mix of symbols for Parting and Revealing and Urgency. Her fingers dance and she mutters beneath her breath, the taste of ash rising up, and then the storm parts like a seam in the fabric of the sky, finding a figure on the mountain, stumbling through the pitiless storm.
Rapley looks up, sees directly, impossibly to the house, where Roan stands, hands curved like claws.
Roan staggers. An overwhelming weight presses against her. One she does not expect.
are
you
here?
I
you
feel…
“Rapley!” Roan screams his name, or she thinks she does, but perhaps she only thinks it.
His eyes meet hers through the tunnel she has made. He doesn’t hesitate, running toward the house, the storm around but no longer buffeting him.
“I found him here,” Roan says, after she’s closed the doors behind them. “He’s so cold, Rapley…”
Without a word, Rapley hauls the boy into his arms and heads for the Red Room, placing him down on the sanguine sofa on the far side near the piano.
“Blankets,” he instructs. “Quickly. As many as you can find.”
Roan runs from the room and into the kitchen, grabbing every blanket, table covering, and sheepskin rug she finds. When she returns, Rapley is shaking Seamus roughly.
“Nothing?” she asks, piling the blankets on top of him.
“No.”
She lifts the blankets off his legs and pulls off his socks, rubbing furiously at his small, shriveled feet but to no avail. She covers them again, tucking the sheepskin rug tightly around them.
Rapley stands, his eyes flitting to the windows in the room, jaw clenched. “I must go.”
Roan opens her mouth to reply, but at that moment, Seamus begins to shake, a convulsion overtaking his entire body.
“He’s seizing! Grab his face, make sure he doesn’t bite his tongue!”
Rapley does as commanded, but his eyes dart continually to the window and the door.
“Your mountain can wait!” Roan yells. “Hold h
im steady and don’t let go. I need you to watch us both.”
“What?”
“Just do it!”
Roan lies down on the floor and closes her eyes, letting her mind drift.
Up, she breathes. And out.
She is in the air, near the ceiling, watching Rapley as he restrains the seizing Seamus. They are moving slowly. So slowly.
Movement in the room startles her. Not slow movement, like the movement of the living—like Seamus and Rapley, but movement in speed with her own floating spirit.
Dark shapes are gathering around Seamus and Rapley, inching closer and closer.
Roan cries out, but there is no sound here. The figures do not even sense her.
Roan looks around the room, searching for some sign of Seamus, but it’s too crowded. She is about to fly farther when a cold, chilling sensation runs through her.
There. Down in the crowd… someone is slicing at her cord. The small silver cord, no thicker than a spider’s web. There. She can see it. And she can see the person slicing at it. He, for she’s certain it is a male, lifts his hand, a scalpel glinting in the strange other-light of this place, and comes down to strike again. It is like a slice to her heart, which blanches inside her.
She screams, waking herself up with a violent movement, hitting out with both arms and both legs and then clutching at her heart.
“Oh, God,” she says, “Rapley—”
But it is not Rapley who stares down at her.
It’s Cage.
“What…” Roan blinks hard, trying to catch her breath, her heart still stuttering inside her.
“Rapley asked me to watch over Seamus. And you, of course.” His eyes are appraising. “What on earth were you doing?”
“I… must have fallen asleep.”
“This boy is an innocent,” Cage says, glancing at Seamus, whose color is much improved. “A child, still.”
“Where did Rapley go?” Roan asks, getting gingerly to her feet.
“Innocents need protecting.”
“Did he go back out?”
Cage turns his cold eyes on her. “I know you’re up to something. You aren’t right. Aren’t… normal.”
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