Page 63 of The Last Heir to Blackwood Library

Tears welled up and overflowed, hot and cathartic. Ivy had not given way to tears and rage when her family had died, each death marked only by a solemn and internal grief. She had not mourned the academic life of which she had always dreamed but would never be possible. But she raged and cried now, against the injustice of it all. Her body would give way to exhaustion and soon whatever memories had sown and bloomed would be lost to the unforgiving reaping of the library once again.

The room grew colder, darker. Ralph was still nowhere to be seen. Any comfort the nun had brought was gone, replaced instead with a palpable disquiet. Small spaces had never bothered Ivy before, but now the four walls threatened to close in on her, crush her like one of the spiders that spun their webs in the shadowed corners.

No gentle light preceded the monk, no soft birdsong or scent of aromatic herbs. It took Ivy a moment to notice that the room had changed at all, since much was the same. The same dark walls, the same dismal lack of light, the same cold, hard paving-stone floor. Only the occupant was different.

He sat at the same desk as the nun had, the manuscript laid out before him. The window that had let in light and birdsong was now boarded and covered. The air smelled of stale incense tinged with something like burnt hair. Smoke stained the wall behind the lamp, as if many hours had been spent working beside a dwindling flame. Any moment he would turn around and this time there would be no human face, no recognizable emotion except for death. But he did not turn, did not show any acknowledgment of Ivy’s presence; this was a tableau, set for her benefit.

By his wrist sat a small piece of unrolled parchment, a familiar pattern of stars sketched on it; the cipher of the manuscript. He had cracked the code, centuries before Ivy. His quill scratched away, and though her fear would have rooted her to her seat, her curiosity was stronger, propelling her forward to glimpse his work over his shoulder. Where the nun had painted blissful pools of aquamarine, he colored over them in red, turning water into blood, flowers into twisted and thorny monstrosities. Young women with crimson slashes across their throats. Dissections performed in the darkest corners of the abbey. All in the name of not science nor God, but the perverted glory of one man.

What had started as a silent parade of images on the parchment was now an assault on Ivy’s senses: the metallic scent of blood mingled with burnt hair. Rotten meat and fetid water. Despair.

“What—what do you want from me?” Ivy forced the words from her dry throat. “You already have everything, why come here and terrorize me just to—”

The monk turned in his seat, leveled malicious eyes on her. To witness him was chilling, but to be the object of his hateful attention was downright terrifying. “I always visit my guests toward the end of their tenure, pay my respects to the great family that has sustained me these five hundred years. You are no exception, though unremarkable girl that you are. I thought that you would last longer, but I suppose there have been some unusual circumstances.”

Ivy didn’t say anything. Maybe if she didn’t move, didn’t speak, he would grow bored and leave her.

Unperturbed, the monk continued. “Your life has been short and rather unexceptional, but it is your dreams that interest me. Such dark horrors that haunt your sleep! They have made a brilliant addition to the library, and keep me endlessly entertained.”

He was not a man, and not yet a ghost. He was everything that was dark and twisted and wrong. Anger rose in Ivy’s body, words spilling out of her despite her sense of self-preservation.

“Haven’t you anything better to do? Why must you torment my family and the people of Blackwood? You take and take and take, and still it isn’t enough.” She must have been dreaming, because she would never be capable of having such a level conversation with the spirit of a monk who had lived and died centuries ago and was now stealing the very fibers of her being.

The monk moved about the small cell, his crimson robes trailing behind him as he ran his finger over the empty desk before turning his attention back to her. “The pursuit of knowledge is the pursuit of the divine. How can we profess to know God without understanding all that he knows? And how can we attain that knowledge in but the brief window of time we are given on this earth?”

“You didn’t answer my question,” she ground out.

“Didn’t I?”

Her eyes were grainy and tired, her mind dizzy and unmoored.Wake up, Ivy. Why can’t you wake up!“I wish you would just leave,” she said, her voice coming out small and childish.

“I’m sure you do,” he said with a smile that revealed sharp, uneven teeth. “But that is not how it works, not how the conditions are met.”

“What conditions?” she asked warily.

“It always starts with a desperate plea, doesn’t it? The first Lord Hayworth was granted Blackwood by King Henry for service in his army fighting against the Scots. He was a man haunted by his memories of the atrocities he had committed on the battlefield in the name of his king. Our needs dovetailed nicely, his memories and knowledge in exchange for a gentle decline, much more respectable than taking his own life. But he did not consider the long-term implications, or if he did, he simply did not care about the generations that were to come after him. For you see, the bargain was not just for him, but for all his family to come. I knew better than to bind myself to just one soul, a finite resource. Someday when the last of the Hayworth blood has run dry, when every book is complete, I will be reborn, infinite and immortal. You ask why I don’t just leave you be? Because we are both of us bound to a pact drawn in blood and executed in flesh. Could I finish you now, drain you completely and move on to the next in line? Of course. I could do any number of things with the power I possess. But instead, I take what I want, and give back scraps and slivers, just to keep you a little longer. Fresh memories are always so much sweeter, so much more vivid on the page. In short, you exist at my leisure, remember what I want you to remember.”

There was no rhyme or reason, no underlying logic. “What happens if I take my life into my own hands?” she asked. “What if I end it, and there are no more Radcliffes or Hayworths left?”

The monk turned a sharp gaze on her, a flicker of provocation deep within his dark eyes. “Why, your mortal body joins your decaying mind, of course,” he said. “I will find someone else, I always do.”

He was capable of being irritated, and irritation was a sign of a chink in his armor. She would follow the chink, prying until it opened and spilled out what she wanted to know. “And what became ofyourmortal body?” she asked.

The monk’s temper was shortening, a twitch pulling his lips downward. “I rest in glorious repose until one day my body can rise again, my mind alive and nourished with all the knowledge and dreams that the library has to offer. It would behoove you to put a stop to all these questions, lest you learn something you wish you hadn’t. I am not here to entertain the questions of a silly girl.”

She had gone too far, she knew she had, but she couldn’t stop. Maybe she would forget it all tomorrow, but for now, she had to know, had to have every tool at her disposal if she had any chance of survival. “Whyareyou here, then? To terrify me? To gloat of your contract and your cleverness? Because if everything you say is true, then it doesn’t matter. After all, I am just a silly girl.”

In the time it took her to blink an eye, he was beside her, a flash of darkness blacker than any night, the smell of hellfire on his breath. And then just as quickly, he was gone, a book in his place.

The cell grew quiet, Ivy’s heart beating furiously, her breath echoing in the dream space. A dark presence filled the air, growing by turns hot and cold, whispering against her skin. The book called to her, begging to be opened, to be released.

The Life and Dreams of Ivy Radcliffe, the Lady Hayworth. 1903—

She reached for the cover with shaking hands, but before she could even pick it up, the cover flipped open.

She jumped back as the pages of her life whipped past with supernatural speed, the nightmares spilling out, early ones first, the forgotten anxieties of a small child. Being left alone in a crowd with her mother nowhere in sight. Monsters lurking in the shadows under her bed. The coal man who always grinned at her with missing teeth and told her he had a special present for her if only she would follow him to his cart. Sounds of the neighbors upstairs fighting, a man’s raised voice and then a woman’s scream, a sickeningthudand the fraught silence that followed. The walls crawled with bedbugs, the floor undulating with the bodies of rats.

“Please stop,” she begged, dragging her nails down the door.

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