Voices in the Snow

by Darcy Coates

  She stopped at the base of the ladder and looked up. Through the square opening in the ceiling, she could see a light flicker over wooden beams high above. Her angle was too low to see into the room, so she cast one final wary glance about herself then began to climb.

  The rungs, rarely used, creaked. Clare paused partway up the ladder with the top of her head peeking through the hole. The attic was immense. Temporary walls had been constructed at odd intervals. Some sections looked like they might have been modest bedrooms, though the furniture was nowhere near as grand as the rest of the house. Cheap metal bed frames held old mattresses and simple sheets, and wardrobes that looked like castoffs stood beside them. In other areas, the attic seemed to have been turned into storage. Crates, building material, old furniture, and dozens of thick cardboard boxes were scattered about. She couldn’t see Dorran from her angle, but the light—a soft gold rather than the harsh white of outside—came from behind one of the walls twenty feet away.

  She climbed off the stairs and followed the edge of the attic, close enough to touch the slanting roof. Insulating material had been placed in the ceiling to conserve heat, but she could tell where the wind had torn away tiles. The padding was sagging and discoloured and had even split in some places, spilling piles of snow into the attic. The house’s highest level was too cold for the frost to melt, and the wind nipped through the holes to ruffle Clare’s hair and make her bundle her scarf around the lower half of her face.

  She moved silently as she crossed the area. She couldn’t risk making noise in case she and Dorran weren’t alone in the attic. Instead, she kept her feet light and skirted around furniture and stacks of storage, giving any shadowed areas a wide berth. She approached the closest wall and peered around it.

  Dorran was on the other side, facing away from her. She felt a swell of pride while watching him. He’d brought a lantern, which he held high. His movements were steady and assured. An overcoat’s collar had been lifted so that it curled around his chin to protect him.

  He was scoping around a set of dilapidated wardrobes. One at a time, he bumped the doors open, stepping back in the same motion. He waited just long enough to check that the insides were empty before moving on to the next set.

  He’s gorgeous. Clare took a step closer, and a board creaked under her foot. Dorran swung at the noise, eyes blazing and teeth bared as he lifted a crowbar.

  “Sorry! It’s just me. Sorry.” Clare raised one hand and risked an apologetic smile.

  Dorran’s expression morphed into a mix of horror, frustration, and incredulity. He crossed to her in two long paces and grasped her arm. “You can’t be here.”

  Clare took advantage of his coat’s high collar and tugged on it to pull Dorran closer until their eyes were at the same level. “Remember how you promised to let me win our arguments?”

  His shoulders slumped, and even though his eyes stayed tight and worried, a smile creased the corners of his mouth. “Incorrigible.”

  “I am. You can take me back to my room, but I promise I’ll find a way to get out again and again and again. It’s going to be safer to keep me with you than to let me wander the house alone.” She narrowed her eyes, daring him to argue with her. “I don’t even know what half of this place looks like. I could get lost out there and starve in some long-forgotten third parlour.”

  “It is not that big.” He chuckled then sighed, resting his forehead against hers. “Very well. I am not too proud to admit I’ve lost this battle. But please, you must be careful.”

  “I will be.”

  “Stay behind me when we move into a new area. Don’t try to explore alone. And if anything becomes too dangerous, you must promise me you will run. There is no shame in retreating if it means surviving to fight another day. Yes?”

  “Yes.”

  He kissed her tenderly, the touch heartfelt and lingering. “If you care about me at all, put your own safety first.”

  “It won’t come to that.” Clare rose onto her toes to meet his lips in return and felt him shiver. “We’ll be okay.”

  Dorran’s fingers brushed across her cheek as he smiled down at her. The wind screamed as a harsh gust funnelled snow into the attic. Reluctantly, he let Clare go and adjusted his grip on his crowbar. They turned to face the length of the attic. “Let us continue.”

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  From her new vantage point, Clare had a taste of how vast the attic really was. It had to run across the entire house, though its temporary walls helped break up the space. She suspected there were several other ladders leading into it.

  Like the staff’s areas downstairs, comparatively little care had gone into maintaining the attic. Some of the walls had wallpaper, though age had worn away the glue and left strips of it hanging loose. Other walls had been given a thin coating of paint or left as bare wood. None of the furniture, not even the doors, matched.

  “Sometimes staff were made to sleep here if there was a shortage of space below.” Dorran led her along the attic, his eyes bright as they searched around old furniture and inside cupboards. He spoke in a whisper, but Clare kept close enough to hear him clearly. “Which was far from reasonable. The attic can become cold, even in the warmer months, and there are always unused guest rooms below. But my mother would rather die than allow one of her servants to sleep in a guest bedroom.”

  He used his crowbar to nudge open a cabinet. Inside was empty. They kept moving.

  “They put up with it?” Clare asked, keeping her own voice to a murmur.

  Dorran lifted his shoulders then let them drop. “She didn’t tolerate insubordination. They either bowed to her will or were removed from the house the same day. And many of them, especially the ones who had been here the longest, adored her.”

  They reached another wall, which stretched halfway across the attic’s width. Dorran opened one of the doors, one arm held back to keep Clare behind him. He stayed still a moment as the lantern’s light danced over incalculable piles of cast-out goods, then he gave her a brief nod before stepping through.

  The new section was messier with jumbles of furniture on ragged wood floors and old carpets rolled up in the corner. A broken tea set balanced inside a display cabinet. Dorran crouched to check under the furniture then led her onwards.

  A gust of freezing air snatched Clare’s breath away. They turned towards it, and Dorran exhaled heavily, letting the lamp drop. “Ah. I think we may have just found how the creatures got into the house.”

  They faced one of the larger holes in the roof. Dark, broken tiles littered the floor. The insulation had been torn, and snow was piled below the hole. It was easily large enough for a person to crawl through. Dirty scuff marks spread out from the opening, spiralling in different directions until they became too faint to follow.

  Dorran muttered under his breath as he shook his head. “How did they scale the walls? Regardless, there is no purpose in searching the remainder of the house if they can easily come back in again. We will need to seal the hole. And not just this one, but any others that are large enough to allow the creatures through.”

  Clare looked behind them. The roof was dotted with damage. She could see at least three other breaches that would be large enough for a person to fit through. One of them had its own set of dirty footprints leading away from it. Her heart sank. “I thought the wind and hail were breaking the roof. And I guess they were… but only because it had been weakened. I think the creatures made the holes themselves. I heard something that sounded like scratching on the roof my first night here.”

  It was a horrible mental image—the distorted humans crawling over Winterbourne like insects, surrounded by the blizzard, frost growing in their hair and over their skin as they clawed at the tiles.

  Dorran’s lips pulled back in a snarl. “If that is true, then closing the holes will not work. They can simply make more.”

  “Can we seal off the attic? Barricade the trapdoors?”

  “Yes. That may be the best option. Ev
entually, we will have to eradicate them from the attic as well, but I think this is the only choice we have at present. Please, would you hold this?”

  He passed his lamp to Clare then led her out of the makeshift room and towards a stack of building equipment.

  Massive planks, old tins of half-used paint, and workmen’s tool chests stood propped against the wall. Dorran opened one of the chests and retrieved a pot of nails and a hammer, then he began gathering boards. “From the house’s last expansion,” he explained.

  Looking closer, Clare saw that all of the equipment appeared to be ancient. The wood was old and cracking in some areas, and the tool chests were all rusty. Dorran picked through the wood until he found pieces that seemed solid, then they crossed the room to one of the trapdoors.

  For the next twenty minutes, the attic was full of deafening bangs as Dorran nailed shut three of the four trapdoors. They moved carefully. Every time Dorran put his head down to work, Clare stood as sentry, the lamp held high above them as she scanned the space. They didn’t try to search for the monsters, and they weren’t disturbed. Either the hollow ones had all moved to the lower levels, or the hammering was loud enough to keep them hidden.

  As Dorran finished securing the third trapdoor, Clare asked, “Are there any other exits from the attic?”

  He brushed sweaty hair out of his face as he stood. Plumes of mist rose with his every breath. “Just the one we came in by. We can carry some planks down with us and nail that shut from the outside. Then we will need to search the remainder of the—”

  A low, quiet creak echoed from the back of the attic. They glanced at each other.

  Clare spoke in a whisper. “Should we…”

  Dorran looked conflicted. “We can leave and avoid confrontation entirely. But there is no guarantee the creature will not try to follow us or stop us from nailing the trapdoor shut. No. I had better deal with it now.” He picked up the crowbar, and Clare saw that he was clenching it tightly enough for his knuckles to turn white. “It will need to be done eventually anyway.”

  Her stomach turned cold. Dorran moved towards the back of the attic, and Clare hurried to keep up with him. The lantern’s glow danced over the walls as it swung.

  “Careful,” Dorran whispered. “Stay well behind me.”

  Up ahead was the attic’s back wall, shielded by a folding screen. Clare could barely make out hints of motion in the gaps between the slats. Dorran circled around, moving silently as he tried not to draw attention.

  Clare tightened her grip on the fire poker. This encounter felt different. Before, in the forest, they had been attacked. She had acted in self-defence. Now she was going to strike first. It left her feeling uneasy and dirty. She didn’t want to kill something defenceless, something that might just have been trying to hide.

  You can’t think of them that way. The monsters were beyond reason and beyond saving. They had lost too much of their humanity. She’d seen their eyes in the forest. They were wild, driven by pure animalistic impulses. They barely felt pain. And they certainly hadn’t felt remorse when they’d bitten into her.

  Even so… hunting them seemed wrong.

  She thought Dorran’s mind might be running along similar tracks. She could see the tension in his face and across his shoulders. His eyebrows were drawn together, but the expression didn’t hold any ferocity. It was full of dread.

  Something scuffled across the wooden floor, just out of sight. Dorran took three sharp steps to round the barrier and raised his weapon. Clare followed, the lamp thrust in front of herself, poker aimed outwards like a spear.

  The woman on the other side snarled. Her teeth jutted out of her jaw, protruding at odd angles, each one nearly three inches long. A bald head and the remains of a dress’s collar shone in Clare’s lamp. Her back curved into an S shape, bending in then out again in a way that made her spindly legs and overturned pelvis seem like they didn’t belong together.

  Dorran’s crowbar was raised, but he didn’t move. The woman coiled, her muscles bunching as she prepared to spring, but then the distorted head rolled to the side. She hissed and scuttled back. The shadows coiled around her as she vanished into the wall.

  Dorran’s crowbar dropped. He inhaled quickly, his breathing ragged, as his expression turned bitter. “I couldn’t do it.”

  Clare rolled her shoulders, feeling the cold sweat sticking the dress to her back. “I couldn’t either.”

  “She used to be human.” He turned his head aside. “She… she wore a dress. Did you see? She still had its collar around her neck. She was a woman not long ago.”

  Human. Inhuman. Where do we draw the line? How much mercy can we show without bartering our own lives? Clare didn’t have an answer for that… or for Dorran’s next question.

  “What did she do to earn that fate while we survived?”

  They stared at each other for a moment, both lost, both conflicted. Then Dorran turned back towards the opening the woman had stepped through. Clare squinted at it. It looked like a door, except it was set into the back of the attic. Logically, the opening should look into the snowy, early-morning sky. Instead, its insides were pitch-black.

  Clare took a step forward. Dorran held out a hand to keep her back, but she still craned her neck to see over his arm. “Where did she go?”

  He shook his head. “I do not know. This should be the back wall. It makes no sense to have a door here, unless it’s a storage closet.”

  He approached and reached his crowbar towards the wooden door. He nudged it closed, and Clare saw that it only looked like a door on one side. The other was covered by the same blue wallpaper that ran over the wall. The edge was jagged where it had been ripped, but once it was closed, it blended perfectly into the rest of the wall.

  A secret door.

  Dorran hooked the crowbar into its edge and pulled it open again. Clare leaned closer, lamp extended, to see inside. Behind the door was a passageway. It was wider and taller than she would have expected from the door’s size. Thick wooden steps led down. Clare stepped into the opening and stretched her lamp out as far as she could, but she still didn’t see the stairway’s end.

  “Can you guess where it might go?” she asked Dorran.

  He looked grim. “I have no idea. We should be standing above the east wing. But there is no way to reach the attic from that section of the house. And certainly not through a stairwell like this.”

  “It probably explains how the creatures got into the rest of the house, though. The retractable attic ladders would be too complicated and noisy for them.”

  He muttered something furious. “I don’t like this. If we go down there, I will no longer know the floor plan or how to escape if something goes wrong. We could be trapped.”

  “We’ll have to follow it, though, won’t we?” Clare ran her fingers over the ragged wallpaper edge. The idea made her feel sick, but she couldn’t see any way around it. “If you don’t know where the passageway comes out, it’s probably another disguised door somewhere else in the house.”

  Dorran was silent for a moment. His dark eyes darted across the stairs, then he rested his hand on Clare’s shoulder. “I would like you to return to your room.”

  “We’ve already had this argument.”

  “This is different. I don’t know how easily I can defend you in this passageway.”

  “That’s okay.” She flexed her grip on the fire poker. “It will be safer with two of us. Besides, if we don’t know where the passageway lets out, no part of the house is safe. It might even open into our room. I saw one of the creatures in there, after all.”

  “I sometimes wish you were less deft at logic,” he said. “Very well. Stay behind me and be careful.”

  They took up the same positions—Dorran leading, Clare holding the lamp and following closely enough to light their way. The boards creaked as they stepped on them, but the noise seemed insulated, as though the walls were too thick to let it carry far. Their breathing echoed. It didn’t take lon
g for the attic to feel like a distant world. Twenty steps in, the passageway turned at a right angle. It cut out the last traces of the natural light that had leaked through the attic’s roof. Clare started breathing through her mouth. A heavy musky scent seeped out of the passageway. It smelled like rotting flesh and oily hair. The farther she went, the stronger it became, until she almost gagged on it.

  “I was hoping we might be in a disused staff passageway from an old edition of the house.” Dorran sounded hoarse. “But look at this.”

  Clare moved closer to where he indicated on the wall. The lamplight revealed the support beams. They ran up the walls and over the ceiling like an archway. The wood was solid and carved into an elegant design. She frowned. “There isn’t anything like this in the other staff regions.”

  “Exactly. And it has been dusted within the last month.” Dorran nodded for them to continue.

  Now that Clare was thinking along those lines, it seemed equally strange that the hallway was so wide. She bent to see the floor and confirmed what she’d suspected—they were walking on dark wood. It was dusty and scuffed compared to the main parts of the house but no less decadent.

  What is this place?

  She had a suspicion, but she didn’t want to say it out loud. Dorran was stressed enough, and if she was reading the tension in his neck and the angle of his eyebrows correctly, he’d already had the same thought.

  The stairs levelled out into a straight hallway, and they came to a halt. The passage continued ahead, but a narrower branch led to the left. Dorran looked over his shoulder to get Clare’s approval for their direction, and she nodded. They continued straight ahead.

  In the distance, Clare thought she could see a trace of light on the right wall. It was fine—razor-thin and near the floor—and barely a meter long.