by April White
I had to wait for the water to boil anyway, so I wandered back over to Mrs. Taylor. “How can I help you?” The chickens were all plucked and prepared but there was only one other cook in the kitchen and she was making pies at the far end.
Mrs. Taylor eyed me. “Don’t you have classes?”
“Not yet. Today’s my first day.”
“Hmmmph.” It was a great noise and probably meant about a dozen things. I tried to hide a smile. “There’s potatoes in the root cellar that need peeling. Grab a basket and pick out forty or fifty medium-sized ones.” I was almost sorry I asked, but the idea of a root cellar instantly appealed to the underground junkie in me.
I picked up the big wicker basket Mrs. Taylor indicated and hesitated. “Annie! Show Saira the cellar, would you?”
I smiled at the cook making pies. “You can just tell me where to go.”
Annie wiped her hands on her apron and shook her head. “You’ll never find it on your own.” Annie’s voice had the same Welsh gravel as Sanda’s did.
“Do you know Sanda, in my… in Millicent Elian’s house?”
Annie raised an eyebrow and she looked at me for maybe the first time. “Olivia’s Sanda?” I nodded. “I’ve known Sanda’s people since Olivia’s mum and me were bairns together in Gosefordsich. They’re all born there, but come here to Epping Wood to serve when they’re grown.” The Welsh accent sounded soothing as it rolled off Annie’s tongue. “And how do ye know Sanda?”
“She works for my mother’s family.”
Annie stopped in her tracks and looked at me through narrowed eyes. “You’re an Elian then?” I nodded, suddenly nervous that being an Elian would be considered a bad thing to this tiny woman. “And an American?” The raised eyebrow was back.
I winced. “Yeah.”
Annie laughed. “It’s not as bad as all that. Being an American Elian gives ye a fighting chance.” We stepped outside the kitchen door and Annie lifted a heavy iron ring from the ground. A wooden door came up with it and a black hole yawned open below. Annie propped an iron bar under the door like the stick that holds the hood of a car up and then reached down to pluck a flashlight from just inside the hole. She turned it on and handed the light to me.
“The potato bins are at the back. Mind the steps and don’t leave the torch behind. And if ye wouldn’t mind, shut the trap when ye finish?” I said I would and Annie gave me a quick smile before slipping back inside the warm kitchen. The sun had gone behind the clouds and it was starting to get cold. I was glad to be wearing my hoodie and boots as I started down the creaky wooden steps into the cold root cellar.
The flashlight was one of the big old kind that shines wide but not bright. It illuminated a huge space under the kitchen and I fell instantly in love with the mood of it. It was dark and gloomy, but the flashlight wasn’t powerful enough to make shadows so I was right in my element.
Brick columns supported the arched ceiling and wooden shelves lined the wall closest to me. The other walls were cloaked in total darkness, but I assumed they probably held food storage shelves and bins too. The floor was made of flagstones and the temperature was at least twenty degrees colder there than outside.
I explored the cellar methodically, circling the walls to find my way to the back where the potatoes were kept. Every kind of food imaginable was stored down there, probably enough to feed a hundred people for at least a week. I loved the idea of having provisions. My mother and I never really had more than a week’s worth of food at a time, and because we moved so often, things got abandoned every couple of years. But this place was like having a supermarket under the school. Incredibly cool.
I found the potato bins and counted out forty-five medium-sized ones into the wicker basket. The big flashlight was too hard to hold with potatoes in my hands so I set it on its end like my little Maglite candles. The ceiling above me was beautifully domed, but oddly cut off by the potato bin wall. Almost as if the room continued beyond and the wall was built later.
My curiosity was starting to ping and I left the basket on the floor to explore the room a little more thoroughly. The wall was built of brick, just like the rest of the room, and a food storage rack covered most of it.
My nose was literally inches away from the wall when I spotted a small metal latch behind the storage rack. It seemed too flimsy to carry the weight of the heavy unit. I reached behind the shelves and unfastened the latch. It came free easily.
Something glinted on the floor and I knelt down to study it. Buried in the flagstone was a thin metal track that ran under the shelf unit and all the way across. I shone the light up and saw a groove set into the bricks about eight feet up, the same height as the top of the shelves.
I tugged on the shelves and they creaked slightly but were clearly designed to slide sideways. The mechanism seemed old but it was still functional and I slid the shelves about three feet to the right. The wall behind was a wooden panel with another small latch, which I unfastened with quick fingers.
I slipped through the opening and then shone my flashlight around the hidden space. It felt like another storage room, but instead of food it was full of odds and ends of furniture, art, and books. My light passed over armchairs, old desks, two bookcases full of dusty books, a sofa and rolls of what looked like tapestries or rugs. Two eyes glinted at me from the wall, and I fought back a gasp when I saw it was just a taxidermy owl, with wings spread out as if it were taking off in flight. The place was cold and dark, but it wasn’t creepy in that way old places sometimes were. It felt like the kind of place I wanted to explore for treasure or lost objects.
I started with the bookcases, but quickly realized they were full of old textbooks. The really important books were probably all upstairs in the library and in Miss Simpson’s office. There was a gap between the cases, just wide enough for a person to pass through. So I did.
Behind the bookcases was more furniture and rugs, but they were arranged like a bedroom and study. A desk dominated one wall, a sofa the other, and a huge four-poster bed hung with heavy drapes filled the back of the room. A rug covered the flagstones and there were more bookcases lining the walls. These actually looked arranged on purpose, with books and small objects filling the shelves. It was quite a beautifully furnished room despite the darkness and chill.
I crossed the old Persian carpet to check out the books on the shelves. They weren’t textbooks, they were older than that and included novels, history books, scientific references and volumes about world politics. I was curious to see if the bed still had sheets on it so I pulled the heavy drape back. I instantly dropped the curtain as I leapt backward in shock and horror.
There was a body on the bed.
Resting Place
I wanted to run screaming from the room.
“Keep it together, Elian,” I whispered to myself fiercely. I took a deep breath. No smell. So if it was dead it had been that way for a long time. The flashlight traveled slowly up the body. It was dressed in black pants and a black cloak.
Cloak? I quickly shifted the light to the man’s face.
Archer. What the hell?
I shook him. Hard. “Archer!” I whispered as loud as I dared. Nothing. I shook him again, panic rising in my throat. His head flopped alarmingly with my shaking, so I stopped and put my head to his chest. I could hear a heartbeat, but I couldn’t tell if it was his or my own thundering in my ears. So I tried to find a pulse at his neck. Nothing. His skin was cool to the touch and it was as almost if he was dead.
Dead? Or undead?
“Archer!”
The panicky thump of my heart was in my throat as I studied his face in the dim glow of my flashlight. His skin was perfect, but pale and waxy like a mannequin. He looked exactly like I remembered, but like the Madame Toussaud’s version of himself.
Adam had asked me if I’d gone to meet the ‘Sucker’ in the woods. Could Archer be the one everyone was so freaked out about? Was this the daytime resting place of a Vampire?
I poked
his cheek. His skin bounced back into place like live skin does, although I didn’t have a lot of experience poking dead people for the comparison. I lifted his arm and dropped it to the bed. The muscles were limp, as if he was unconscious, but not stiff like a corpse would be. I wracked my brain thinking of other tests I could do to determine Archer’s status, but knowing absolutely nothing about Vampires put me at a distinct disadvantage. I looked around the bed. There was an old fashioned gas lantern on the bedside table, with a zippo lighter and a magazine next to it. I picked up the magazine; the British version of Fortune. A page was marked and I flipped it open.
It was an article about the Rothchild Family, ‘not to be confused with the French Rothschilds, the great wine and banking Families’ according to the writer. These Rothchilds were English and had made their fortune in buying and selling money. The current head of the family was Markham Rothchild, a brilliant and ruthless businessman who, because he’d only had daughters, was grooming his son-in-law, Laurence Walters, to follow him in the business. I flipped to the front for the publication date. It was this month’s issue.
I took a deep breath. I’d seen Archer last night in the woods, very much alive. He was hiding out in a secret cellar room reading a current issue magazine, and despite looking like a corpse, he didn’t smell or feel like one.
And the more I pieced together about my own family, the more it seemed that random people can’t time-travel through spirals. So the idea of Archer traveling here from 1888 seemed pretty unlikely.
I looked at him and decided to consider the impossible. Archer was a Vampire. Ho boy, was he ever going to have some explaining to do when he woke up.
It was a little weird to study him so closely when he was unconscious, but I figured he deserved it for being an even bigger freakshow than me. His hair was a little longer than most men wore it, which probably made it easier for him to fit into all the different decades of the past two centuries.
The 1930s and 40s might have been tough for him to blend in, but he’d have been fine since the beatnik era of the fifties. I’d read a couple of Jack Kerouac’s books once when I was trying to figure out my own style. The black turtlenecks and skinny pants were okay, but the fringe culture writing wasn’t really my thing. Archer would have looked good in that style though. The guy probably looked good in anything.
The conversation from the woods came rushing back to me. This guy who I barely knew – a Vampire – had somehow managed to fall in love with me even though we only spent one night walking around Victorian London together. Well, running too, but mostly just walking and talking.
Had he been a Vampire when we met? When did he become one? What had he been doing since then? If I was totally honest with myself, the logistics of him being a Vampire weren’t as intimidating to me as his intensity had been. The things Archer had said to me in the woods weren’t something I could just dismiss as a guy trying to put the moves on. He was way too serious for that, and the way he looked at me was like he was burning the words into my skin. It felt like too much too soon.
But now, looking down at his dead-to-the-world body lying so peacefully in a secret room under the school, I felt protective of him. Scary creature or not, he was totally helpless in this state. A piece of dark hair had fallen over one eye and I brushed it to the side before I could stop myself.
I glanced around the secret room again. Had Archer set this place up as a daytime resting place or did he just find someone else’s hiding spot and use it as his own? I had so many questions, but if I didn’t get back upstairs with the potatoes, someone was going to come looking for me.
I looked at Archer’s face, so peaceful and perfect, and I had a crazy impulse. I leaned over and gave him the smallest kiss on the cheek. My heartbeat jumped in my chest and I pulled back before he could move or grab me or something, but he stayed perfectly still. I told myself my jumpy heart was from nerves but I’ve never been very good at lying to myself.
“See you later, Sucker,” I whispered, and as I turned the flashlight back toward the room I thought I caught the hint of a smile at the corner of his mouth and chills prickled my skin.
When I got back to the kitchen Mrs. Taylor threw me a sideways glance. “Get lost down there?”
“Sorry. I’ve never seen a root cellar before. Is all that food from your garden?”
“Of course it is. Why buy what you can grow?”
“My mom felt the same way. She really missed having a garden when we lived in the city.”
Mrs. Taylor made a grumbling noise and I bit my lip to keep from laughing. “Cities. No point in them if you ask me. Just set the potatoes on that table and tend to your poultice. It’s bubbling away something fierce in there.”
I had totally forgotten about the cast iron pot in the fire. I used the long tongs to carefully lift the heavy pot off the rack in the fireplace and set it down on the stone hearth. Almost all the water had bubbled away and the mixture inside was like a soupy paste. Mrs. Taylor looked over my shoulder.
“There’s a wee pot with a lid in the spice rack. It used to hold ginger, but my grandmother put ginger in her compresses for muscle aches. I’ll bet your Mr. Shaw won’t have known that.”
I thanked her and scooped the Marsh Mallow poultice into the little pot. The ginger smell cut through the green plant smell and made it kind of spicy, so I mixed the poultice around the pot to absorb the leftover ginger powder.
I cleaned all the dishes I’d used and scrubbed out the cast iron pot with a rough sponge. When my workspace was clean I checked the big kitchen clock over the door. It was five o’clock. “Thanks for everything, Mrs. Taylor.”
“You’ve been a big help, Saira. You’re welcome in my kitchens anytime.”
Annie’s eyes caught mine and she winked. I grinned at her and left the big, warm room.
The room I shared with the Crow was empty, thankfully, and I set the little poultice pot on my bedside table and dropped onto the bed. I felt like a wind-up toy that had just wound down and everything from my feet to my brain hurt.
I looked around the little room and realized I didn’t want to stay there at all. If I was going to be trapped in this place until my mom came back, I needed to find my own space. Someplace private and secure. I thought about the secret cellar room but dismissed that as too cold. Not to mention there was a V living in it. My Vampire. My secret. Even if he was okay with the idea of me moving in, I wasn’t sure I was. Besides, I’d run the risk of leading other people right to him if even one person saw me going in and out of the cellar.
No, my best bet was one of the empty wings. I groaned at my achy legs as I got up off the bed. It was time to go exploring and of course the ornate doors leading to the East and North wings were locked. I knew that without trying the handles, but still pushed on the heavy iron just in case. Then I looked around the central hall and realized there were windows at each of the intersections. I tried the one between the locked halls and was shocked when it opened.
From the fire escape it was an easy climb to the roof. Running down the length of the North wing was like scampering across a playground for me, and at the end of it, just where I hoped it would be, was another fire escape ladder leading down to first floor. I tried a second floor window and slipped inside the dark hall. It was gloomy in there, but enough light still shone from the window that I could see. I tried the doorknobs of the rooms closest to me – all locked. No surprise there, but the keyholes were the old-fashioned kind, and it looked like the keys were on the insides of the doors.
That discovery made me smile. Now to just find the perfect piece of art… Halfway down the hall I found a print behind glass, which meant it had a backing I could use. I quickly pulled the print off the wall and dismantled both wire and backing for my key drop trick – this time to get into a locked room instead of out of one.
I chose the room closest to the fire escape. It didn’t take long to work the key out of the lock and slide it under the door. I re-assembled the print and
hung it back on the wall. A missing print would turn a routine patrol into a search and I didn’t need anyone poking around my empty wing.
The lock was a little stiff, but the key finally turned and opened the bedroom door. The room was small, but neat, with a single mattress, a desk and a dresser. There were heavy drapes on the window but no bedding or rugs. The room had been closed up a long time and I crossed it to open the window, then sat on the bed and sank into a decent mattress. I needed bedding, but Ava said she had hidden my suitcase in a linen closet and I hoped I could find everything there. My room. I grinned to myself, satisfied with my discovery. I quietly locked my bedroom door and pocketed the key, then went in search of the bathroom and a way out.
The bathroom was halfway down the hall and still functional, even if the first water out of the pipes was rusty. I hoped there wasn’t anyone living below who would wonder about running water, and I resolved to explore the first floor North Wing for my bearings.
Finding a way in and out that didn’t involve scaling walls and running across rooftops was actually surprisingly easy. The key to my bedroom also worked on the main door to the hall. It made sense that students should be able to get in and out with just one key.
I had left my poultice on the nightstand of my old room and walked in to find Raven sniffing it with a disgusted look on her face. “Eeeww. That smells rank.”
I took the pot out of her hands and clapped the lid on it. “Then don’t open it.”
She scowled at me. “Where have you been?”
“Class.”
“With whom?”
“Why did you go through my stuff last night?”
She practically recoiled. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I have the picture of my open suitcase from your phone. And I can only assume that someone who rifles through their roommate’s things can’t be trusted. So I’m leaving this room.” I leaned in closer for emphasis. “If you tell anyone I’m gone I’ll make sure Miss Simpson gets a copy of that photo.”