“Sounds brilliant,” Rebecca mutters.
Poe only has a second to wonder why Rebecca doesn’t seem to like Emily before Poe’s father is seated on a sofa next to Samson. They look cute together, in a mismatched kind of way—Samson in carefully pressed pants and a sport coat, and Poe’s dad in jeans and a fraying University of Kansas T-shirt.
David takes a drink and says to Samson, “I wish the others were here.”
“You mean our parents,” Becket says from his chair, nodding down to Delphine. Neither the Hesses nor the Danseys were able to come to Kansas for the funeral.
“They should be the ones to tell you,” Poe’s father says uncomfortably.
“They’ve had their chance,” Samson disagrees. “Just like we did, David. Our kids are adults now, and they’re there. They should know.”
Poe’s father sighs. “Yes.”
“Dad,” Poe says, “just tell us. We already—” She stops at Rebecca’s expression of panic. Right. Their dads don’t need to know everything. Definitely not the naked parts. “We’ve already guessed a lot of it. We know that you were all, um, polyamorous.”
“Really?” Delphine asks, sitting up straighter. “I didn’t know that!”
Rebecca, meanwhile, looks like she wishes her chair would eat her alive. Poe can commiserate.
“But we don’t have to talk about that part,” Poe says quickly. “I just want to know the rest of what happened and why you were there.”
Her father takes a drink, definitely for courage, and then after a moment, he starts.
“It began innocently, believe it or not,” he says. “That year—the year we all stayed there—Adelina and I were in the country for a conference in Bristol. Poe, you were staying with my parents, and we decided to take a few days before the event and explore a little, see some of the places your mother had been as a student. We went to Kernstow Farm, and we hiked around the tors, and then we went to Thorncombe. They were celebrating May Day.”
“Beltane,” Delphine says.
David nods, and if he’s surprised his daughter’s friend knows about Beltane, he doesn’t show it. “Ralph was there too, presiding over the celebrations. Your mother—she was never shy—when she recognized him, she went up and re-introduced herself. After she mentioned her family came from the valley originally, that she was a Kernstow, he was so friendly. So charming. He invited us to come to Thornchapel, where he’d be hosting a small May Day celebration of his own.”
“So you just went with a stranger to a strange house in order to go to a mysterious celebration?” Poe asks. It sounds like something she would do, not her fussy, bookish dad.
“Your mother had been there before,” David points out. “And I am a professor of religious studies. It seemed like a privilege to be invited, and anyway, your mother and I always tried to say yes to new experiences. Just a few years before, some Polish friends of ours invited us to their village’s Dozhynki festival, and your mother helped make the wreath—”
Samson puts his hand on David’s knee with the affection of someone familiar with his tangents. David clears his throat. “Ah, sorry. Story for another time.”
“So you went to Thornchapel on Beltane,” Poe says. “And were you there, Mr. Quartey?”
Samson shakes his head. “Not yet.”
“Ingram and Helena were though,” David says, looking at Becket.
“And my parents?” Delphine asks.
David nods.
Poe doesn’t want to know. Except she kind of does.
Except she definitely doesn’t.
Except—
Delphine puts everyone out of their misery. “Did you all have sex that night?” she asks, tilting her head.
Poe’s father blushes a little above his stubble. He pushes his glasses up his nose. “Well . . . ”
“Dad! You’d only just met them that day! What the hell?”
“Poe, don’t slut-shame your father,” chides Delphine.
“I’m not slut-shaming—”
“You are a little,” Becket says.
“I think,” Samson cuts in calmly, “your father was explaining how Ralph came to invite your parents to stay for the summer.”
“Right,” David says, shooting Samson a grateful look. “So your mother and I had a lovely time that night—”
“Ew,” Poe says.
“—but we did have to leave the next day for our conference. When we got home afterward, Ralph called, and invited us to stay the summer. He was already hosting the Danseys and the Hesses, and we’d be welcome to bring you since all the kids would be there. We’d get to stay in a beautiful house, free of charge, give Poe a summer abroad, and have complete access to the Thornchapel library—which obviously was a dream come true. There’re books there that you can’t find anywhere else—local religion for me, local history for your mother—and we’d be able to use the grounds too. There was the maze, the garden, the thorn chapel . . . ”
“And all the sex you wanted to have,” Delphine pipes up. “Don’t forget that.”
Poe makes a face.
“Well, uh, yes,” says David. “That was part of it.”
“Wait, Daddy, how did we end up staying there?” Rebecca interrupts to ask Samson. “If you weren’t there on Beltane?”
“He’d commissioned me to draft up a proposal for the grounds, to see what it would look like if they were properly opened up to visitors. During that first visit, I met David, and . . . ” Samson falters a little, meeting David’s gaze and then looking away. “I think Ralph knew. He was perceptive like that, very gifted at reading people’s thoughts. He invited us to stay the summer as well—I could work in peace, with a break from all the noise and hustle of London—and Rebecca, you could be with your peers, with children it would have been good for you to associate with. How could I say no?”
“But really you wanted to stay to see Poe’s father,” Rebecca says. The words are blunt, but her tone is not.
The look Samson gives her is honest. Vulnerable. He laces his fingers through David’s, and David squeezes them tight. “Yes,” Samson says.
Rebecca glances away, but she doesn’t seem unhappy, only pensive.
“I have a question,” Auden says politely from the floor. “If that’s all right.”
“Of course,” says Poe’s dad.
“I know that both of you were there for largely emotional reasons, and that a fair amount of your time was spent recreationally,” Auden says.
“That’s tactfully put,” mutters Poe.
“But I know that you were also working on something together,” Auden goes on. “In the library. Almost all summer long, all of you were locked in there, and we weren’t allowed in. And I spent enough time trying to eavesdrop at the keyhole to know that you were actually talking and reading in there, not just . . .”
“Recreating?” offers Delphine.
“Right.”
David goes to take a drink and realizes his glass is empty.
“I’ll get it,” Samson says, reaching for the drinks globe next to the sofa. He pulls the whisky bottle free and makes to tip to David’s glass, but David snatches the bottle by the neck and drinks from it instead.
“Your dad is kind of a wreck,” Saint says into Poe’s ear. “Papers everywhere, drinking from the bottle. In love with your friend’s dad.”
“He’s a widowed professor with tenure,” Poe whispers back. “What do you expect?”
Fortified by the liquor, David hands the bottle back to a vaguely alarmed Samson. “Okay. Okay. Do you want to tell them, Sam?”
“Sam,” Rebecca repeats under her breath. “Sam.”
Samson touches his knee. “You start. I’ll help.”
David covers the hand on his knee and then takes a deep breath. “Okay. So. When we were finally settled there, it was early July. I learned that Ralph—along with the Danseys and the Hesses—had been trying to revive some of the older practices of Thornchapel, like we did on Beltane, but all year round. Your
mother and I became fascinated by this, we became just as obsessed as Ralph, just as eager as he was to learn every secret the thorn chapel had. When he said—when he asked us to help him try something—it was impossible to say no.”
“You have to understand what Ralph was like,” Samson says. “What it was like to be there with him, at Thornchapel. It was like being in a dream.”
“Like fairyland,” David says. “And Ralph was the fairy king. Offering you everything you ever wanted. Sex and magic and mysteries.”
“What was it that he wanted you to try?” Becket asks.
“He’d heard a story,” Samson says. “An old one, from someone in the village, that there was a door to—well, it sounds ridiculous to say it now—but that there was a door to Faerie somewhere on the Thornchapel grounds. Anyone else would have dismissed it as nonsensical folklore, but not Ralph. He felt powerfully that the story was rooted in some truth.”
“There was a song the people in Thorncombe sometimes sang,” Poe’s father says. “Here and there/king and door. Cup and spear/corn and war. Ralph felt like there had to be a connection.”
Poe is staring down at her hand—the same hand that held Estamond’s in her dream. She knows that song. She knows that song because Estamond knew it. Because the Kernstows knew it. And lived by it.
“And then he found the journals by Reverend Dartham.”
At Dartham’s name, all their heads snap up.
“Dartham? Really?” Becket asks, leaning forward.
“Yes, really.” Poe’s dad studies them for a moment. “How do you know about him?”
“I’ve cataloged his book in the library at Thornchapel,” Poe says smoothly, before anyone else can elaborate more. “And I showed everyone after I was done. It was very interesting.”
“I’m sure it was,” David says, eyes narrowed.
“Ralph stumbled upon Dartham’s journals at a historical society when he was searching for local fairy tales,” Samson says, picking up the thread of the story. “He thought he could use the fairy tales to triangulate the precise nature of the door. Instead he found something better—Dartham’s interviews with the people living in the valley.”
“When the door appeared, according to those interviews,” David says, “the Guests were supposed to go to the altar in the woods. Ralph felt certain that meant the door was near the altar itself. You’ve been to the thorn chapel by now, I’m sure, and I’m sure you’ve noticed the problem: there is no door there.”
Auden meets Poe’s eyes from across the room. She shakes her head very slightly.
“Ralph wasn’t deterred. He thought he could manifest the door,” Samson says. “That it would appear if he engaged with the thorn chapel in the right way. He thought if he could find an earlier version of the rituals, if he could discover how it was done centuries ago . . . ”
“And he had your mother,” David adds. His voice goes a little heavier then. A little angrier. “He believed a Kernstow was necessary, that it needed to be a Guest and Kernstow in the chapel together in order to make whatever ritual he found work fully.”
“We spent weeks combing that library, looking for a way to make the door appear,” Samson says. He looks down at his hands and shakes his head. “It sounds like madness now. Foolishness. Doors that don’t exist, spending every night . . . together. But at the time—” He falls silent, as if he can’t quite find the words to explain it.
“At the time,” David says after a minute, “it felt like the only thing that was real. As if only Thornchapel was real life, and everything else was a dream. Your mother—she felt that way most of all.”
Poe meets his eyes and then she has to look away. It was easy to dismiss her father’s fears for her when she’d heard them over the phone, but being right here, face to face, listening to him talk about her mother—she understands now. She understands why he’s scared.
Because he knows she is just as in love with Thornchapel as her mother was.
“And so what happened?” Saint asks. He’s leaning back against the couch, his booted feet planted firmly on the floor and an arm around Poe. “Did you find anything in the library?”
“We did,” David answers. “The Record of Thornechapel Customs. We decided we’d follow its instructions for Lammas as closely as we could.”
None of the six look at each other when David mentions the Record, which Poe is grateful for.
“And did it work?” Saint presses. “Did you see the door?”
Neither Samson nor David answers for a moment. And then David wordlessly reaches for the bottle, which Samson hands him.
“If everything until that point had been a dream,” Samson says quietly, “then that was when we woke up.”
Silence—except for the sound of snoring dogs—fills the room.
“The door was and is the single most terrifying thing I’ve ever seen,” David says after a while. “It wasn’t there when we began, and then it just—was. Right there in the half-crumbled stone wall. Surrounded by roses so dark they looked black.”
Poe thinks of her dream. She knows exactly what those roses look like.
“But the most frightening thing about the door wasn’t only that it was there,” Samson says. “But that it was open.”
“Open,” Becket says. His voice is strange.
“Open,” David confirms. “Dangerous.”
“It was wrong,” Samson says softly. “Whatever that door is, it’s not meant to be open. Perhaps it’s not meant to be at all.”
“What happened next?” Delphine asks, rapt. “Did you try to close it?”
“Your father tried, Delphine,” David replies. “He reached an arm through the doorway to pull it closed, but—”
“He collapsed,” Samson finishes for David. “Unconscious, and he was asleep for nearly a full day after.”
“We fought after he tried,” Poe’s father recalls, his voice going even heavier still. “We all fought. Bitterly.”
“We couldn’t agree on what to do.”
“To brick it up.”
“To try to find an expert—”
“—a scientist—”
“—the government—”
“—anyone who knew more—”
“I wanted to leave it the way it was,” Samson says. “I wanted to walk away. If God has put that door there, then it is not for men to meddle with.”
“And I wanted it studied by people with plastic suits and ticking meters and lanyards with government IDs on them.”
“And Mom?” Poe asks. “What did Mom want?”
David sighs. “She wanted what Ralph wanted. To try to close the door on Samhain.”
A palpable chill settles over the room. They’re all very, very aware of when Adelina died.
Auden, of all people, is the one to ask. “And how did my father think he could close the door?”
Poe remembers her dream weeks ago, her dream of Estamond going to the altar on her own.
If you don’t do it at Lammastide, then it will be done at Samhain.
“Sacrifice,” Poe says. “The door is shut with a sacrifice.”
One of them—Becket maybe—lets out an unhappy exhale.
Auden sets his jaw and looks down at the dog whose head he’s stroking. Agitation and shame are sketched all over his face, in the tense lines of his shoulders and arms.
“Ralph didn’t tell us that at the time,” David says after a long minute. “And honestly, I don’t think it had even occurred to him by then. To really do it, I mean.”
“He only said that he thought doing the Samhain ceremony as described in the Record would close it, and your mother agreed with him, Proserpina,” Samson says. “And the Hesses. Freddie wanted nothing more to do with it, however, after what happened to him, and Daisy agreed.”
“By that point, things had already started to go wrong between us anyway,” Poe’s father says. “There were too many of us, maybe, or not enough. Some of us—like Samson and Clare—had no experience with polyamory,
and maybe the rest of us had had too much.”
“It was Ralph, mostly,” Samson says, rubbing a soothing hand on David’s back. “He wanted Adelina. It was all that mattered to him. He was willing to do anything, hurt anybody, so long as he could possess her.”
Across the room, Auden meets Poe’s eyes again. There’s a haunted look to them that Poe doesn’t like.
Samson continues, addressing them all now, “Because of Ralph, we were ready to fall apart at the slightest push—which the door gave us.”
“We couldn’t agree, we couldn’t stop fighting. Your mother didn’t want to leave, but I convinced her we had to. Look at what happened to Freddie! What if you kids found your way out to the door and were hurt by it? What if Ralph never saw reason? What was the point in staying when it was so dangerous for all of us? We left two days after Lammas.”
“As did I,” Samson says. “The Hesses and Danseys weren’t far behind.”
David looks out the window to the front yard. There’re cars parked outside, joggers on the road, moms with strollers on the sidewalk.
“The farther away we were from Thornchapel, the sillier it all started to seem,” he says slowly. “Who cared about a door in the woods? Why did it matter? Let it stay open. It wasn’t hurting anything. I should have known then.”
He looks over to Poe, his blue eyes full of pain. “I should have known she would go back—” He breaks off. Samson slides an arm around his shoulders and pulls him close.
“You couldn’t have stopped her, David,” Samson murmurs. “She was determined.”
“I still wonder . . . did she know?” David asks. He’s asking everyone and no one—his daughter and the son of his wife’s killer. “Did she know what he was going to do? Did he tell her? Or did he simply beg her to come back to help him close it?”
Auden clears his throat. “I don’t—I don’t know if the police mentioned to you. But when they were searching through my father’s things, they looked through his phone records. They found a call from a phone number here in Kansas, registered to the University. It was her old faculty number, not her current one, and it wasn’t her cell phone, which is why you wouldn’t have found it when you were investigating her phone records the year she disappeared.”
Harvest of Sighs (Thornchapel Book 3) Page 28