Page 64 of The Last Heir to Blackwood Library

But still they came. A frantic nurse in a hospital, her white uniform painted in blood and vomit, too busy to spare a moment for a distraught young woman. Ivy at her mother’s bedside, watching helplessly as the fever ravaged first her mind, then her body, until her beautiful mother was nothing but a rasping corpse.

Clambering to the chair, Ivy grabbed the book and began ripping out fistfuls of pages. If there were no words, no memories on the pages, then they couldn’t haunt her. But no sooner had she torn out a page than it materialized again, ink appearing as if written by an unseen hand. Blood oozed from her fingers as they razed against the paper, her heart racing to unnatural speeds, slamming against her rib cage. Air. She couldn’t get enough air—

“Ivy!IVY!”

The voice calling her name came from far away, an echo in a distant cave, but still she tore at the pages. Someone grabbed her wrists, and she flailed against them, certain it was the monk, his bony hands skittering across her flesh, in search of her heart. But when her vision cleared and her heart slowed, it was not a robe drenched in blood that her face was pressed into, but an ordinary shirt, covering an ordinary man.

“Ralph?”

At his name, he relaxed his grip on her. “You’re safe, you’re safe.”

“Where were you? The monk, he was here, and you were gone.” Her pitch rose as her sense of relief was replaced with betrayal. “You said you would be here, that I could trust you and you left.”

“You were dreaming. You were thrashing about in your sleep.” He ran his hand through her hair, leaving her scalp tingling in its wake. “I didn’t leave. I would never leave.”

Her breath slowed, and she glanced about the cell. No torn pages, no lingering stench of death. It was just as it had been when she’d laid her head on Ralph’s shoulder and fallen asleep. “It was so real,” she murmured. “He told me about the manuscript, about the pact that gave him his power.” As she recounted the dream, more of the horrors came back to her, like pulling a thread that unraveled an entire blanket. “And the nun!” She told Ralph how the nun had been the original author of the manuscript, all the precious knowledge she had gathered in the hopes of preserving it for future generations. The monk was everything dark and evil, had perverted the nun’s words, twisting them for his own vile purposes. Whatever mystical knowledge she had committed to the pages had been powerful perhaps, but not harmful. The manuscript as it was today was a corruption of the original. And now the monk held the library and the manuscript in thrall, living off the knowledge that it gave him.

Ralph listened, his fingers idly twining through Ivy’s hair as she spoke. “So, what now?”

It took a long while for Ivy to answer. They had been dreams, yet the messages they had contained had been real.

“I think we can stop it,” she said, finally.

“Stop what?”

“Everything. The monk, Arthur, the Sphinxes. And we don’t even need the manuscript. We don’t even need to leave this room.”

32

The stones were cold, unyielding. If they had secrets beneath them, then they were loath to give them up.

Ralph watched as Ivy got on her hands and knees and ran her fingers over the edges of the slate floor. “What are you looking for?”

“I’m not sure, but I’ll know when I see it.” Rocking back on her heels, she let her gaze roam over the small room until it landed on the lectern. The floor was uneven beneath it, one of the large paving stones just barely protruding. She tested the stone with her fingers, but it wouldn’t budge.

“Here.” Ralph crouched beside her, his arm brushing hers as he pushed aside the lectern and crooked his fingers under the lip of the stone. “Bloody thing is heavy,” he muttered. He had her move to the other end. It was cumbersome, her arms screaming in protest, but together they were able to find just enough purchase, and the stone scraped away, inch by inch. When it was free, Ralph hoisted it the rest of the way and pushed it to the side.

Realistically she’d known that what she was looking for wouldn’t be right there, but Ivy still felt a pang of disappointment as all that greeted them was a floor made of hard-packed dirt. A bug skittered away as the lamplight fell upon it, and Ivy took a fortifying breath. “We’re going to have to dig.”

They fell to work. Fingernails full of dirt and arms on fire, Ivy was just about to admit defeat, when the glint of glass shone up at her. Hurriedly brushing away the rest of the dirt, they stared down into the dark recess. The smell of death and rot rushed up to meet them, filling the cell.

“Shit.” Ralph scrabbled backward, but Ivy just stared at the foggy glass coffin and the visage that grinned back up at her.

The monk looked like the skeletal reliquaries of the Roman Catholics, reclining with his mouth ajar, coins resting in his sunken eye sockets. Emerald and ruby rings hung loose on his bony fingers, and his crimson hood was as vibrant and soft as the last time he donned it. Someone, perhaps the first Lord Hayworth or one of the other monks, had taken some extraordinary measures to preserve him, send him off into the hereafter in extravagance. Yet there was something not right about the skeleton. The bones that should have been dry and white instead glistened, and the sagging skin was wet with sticky brown blood. A faint humming rose from the grave, low but persistent.

Ralph murmured something too low for Ivy to hear, and her stomach turned over on itself. Fighting the urge to replace the stone and pretend as if they had never found it, she leaned down, sliding her fingers under the lip of the coffin lid.

“Ivy,” Ralph warned, but his voice was faraway.

The humming grew louder. It was the sound of a thousand voices speaking, words pouring over each other so quickly that she could barely catch one before another drowned it out. Stories, memories, dreams. A frantic chorus of forgotten lives. Here was the epicenter of the storm which brewed in Blackwood, the words winding around the skeleton, each story preventing any further degeneration of flesh. It was not blood which pumped through his desiccated heart, but stolen memories. The monk would never stop feeding, never stop searching for the words and stories that would sustain his suspended state of rest.

All of the death, the stolen lives and dreams, the grief. All of it because of one man, and his selfish, twisted beliefs. Ivy yanked off the glass lid, rusted hinges giving way with a groan and then she was face-to-face with death incarnate. Without so much as a second thought, her hand closed around the femur, wet and repulsive to the touch. With a yank, she pried it off. Next came the head, smashed to the floor, the golden jaw flying off. The arms, the ribs, one by one the bones came off, sinew and flesh protesting, but no match for Ivy’s frenzied state. The humming built until it was a storm of words and screams, swirling about with no page to land on.

When the bones lay shattered on the floor along with all the gold and jewels, she finally allowed herself the chance to breathe. The humming voices had gone quiet, but there was still a prickling tension in the air. Then light, slowly building, like the sun breaking free of clouds on a stormy day. The cell filled with it, warming her skin and bringing her to a place and time that was at once beyond the scope of her memory, yet intensely familiar. The tolling of a single bell echoed through the chamber, the spicy scent of incense wrapping around her. The world went still, and Ivy could feel not just the absence of evil, but a loving presence hovering just out of sight, like a mother watching her child from the doorway of another room.

The sound of Ralph calling her name gradually came back to her, his hands around her waist, pulling her back from the edge of the grave.

“It’s over, Ivy. It’s over.”

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