Page 90 of The Executioners Three
It was so stereotypically Old Lady it was almost painful.
A shadowy stairwell waited beyond, so Freddie made her way over. The steps creaked beneath her duck boots, and halfway up, the furnace clicked on—loud enough to send Freddie jumping. Loud enough that she had to stand there mid-step with her hand clutching the banister for a solid ten seconds before her heart finally slowed.
“Nerves of steel, Gellar,” she whispered as she resumed her ascent. “Nerves of steel.”
She reached the second floor, and there, at the end of the hall as promised, was a door. As Freddie snuck toward it, she passed two open doors. One revealed a tiny bathroom, the faded wallpaper as outdated as the fridge downstairs. The second showed a bedroom with a bunk bed draped in Fraggle Rock sheets.
Freddie approved.
At last, she reached the attic door, and after a brief pause tolisten very hardover the furnace’s blast (and after hearing nothing), she turned theknob and pressed inside. A narrow stairwell met her eyes, lit only by a dim light through a circular window.
At the top of the stairs, Freddie found more issues ofNational Geographicthan she had ever known existed. As she twisted around to cross the attic—dusty, spider-y, and with exposed nails inallthe most dangerous places—she examined the magazines. They went back decades, and the worn creasing in the spines suggested they’d all been read cover to cover. Several times.
Next came old toys. Heaps andheapsof them—and ahead in the weak light, Freddie could see the dollhouse Mrs. Ferris had told her about. It was as tall as Freddie’s waist, with as many steeples and gables and what-have-yous as Allard Fortin’s estate.
Freddie’s boots thumped over the attic. Floorboards groaned. She reached the dollhouse and peeked behind. Her lungs tightened. A small door waited. The kind that led into crawl spaces and murder dungeons. It wasn’t well hidden, though, and now that Freddie was looking, she realized no cobwebs clustered here. Nor did dust. In fact, a streak of clean wood suggested the dollhouse had been moved.
Recently.
Freddie inhaled deeply, senses sharpening and logic waking up. Mrs. Ferris had been in the hospital for two days. This couldfeasiblyhave been her doing. But cobwebs formed fast. Freddie knew that from her days of cleaning at City-on-the-Berme, yet there wasn’t a single web between here and the doorway.
Maybe Mrs. Ferris had told someone else about this secret area?
Ducking down, Freddie gently turned the knob. It squeaked. The door pulled wide, revealing a tiny room tucked beneath the roof’s support beams. A string dangled down, and when Freddie yanked it, a lone bulb flashed on.
She winced. So bright. So obvious. She hastily shut the door behind her.
Unlike the rest of the attic, everything here was meticulously organized in boxes.Tools,read the closest.Documents,read the next. And a third, unlabeled, sat in the farthest corner.
It was the massive corkboard leaning against the sloped beams that captured Freddie’s gaze. She scooted in close. On one half was a topographical map of the county park. Someone had drawn in all the trails with a redmarker. They’d marked the Village Historique too, and the parking lot and the archives, and…
The gravestones.
Or that was what Freddie assumed the three red Xs labeledburial sitemeant. She set down her flashlight and snapped a picture of the Xs. Then she moved to the second half of the corkboard.
Her eyes widened as she beamed her flashlight over it. “Holy smokes.” This was even better than the map. The page was shorter and the edges had been folded inward, but there was no mistaking what she was looking at: three family trees, tracing all the way back to 1679. It began with a Portier, a Steward, and a Charretière—the same titles inscribed on the three gravestones.
And the same roles referenced inThe Curse of Allard Fortin: a footman, a steward, and a carriage driver.
Freddie quickly snapped a photo, then kept on snapping all the way through to the present day, unfolding the enormous page as she went. Tens of names unfurled before her. Generation upon generation of descendants of the three men whomusthave worked for Allard Fortin.
Ropey, Hacky, and Stabby. A footman, a steward, and a carriage driver. They’d each had children here, and those children had continued to live here for generations.
It was when Freddie reached the 1950s, though, that the family tree changed. The names were still there, but now they’d been scratched out. And not just casual strikethroughs, but scrubbed away so hard that the black pen had torn the paper.
It was as if someone hadn’t simply tried to erase these people from the family trees but had tried to erase them from life entirely.
Freddie gulped and snapped one more picture before turning her attention to the boxes. With her flashlight back in hand, she opened the one labeledTools—only to instantly rear back. She had no idea what she’d expected to find inside, but it definitely hadn’t been what glittered up at her.
Handcuffs. A rope. Duct tape. And zip ties.
Okay, sure. Those were tools, alright. Formurder.And not supernatural murder either, but, like,legitmurder by a very human hand.
Stomach roiling, Freddie took a picture of the contents. Then plunkedthe lid back on and shoved the box aside. Her skin crawled. She didn’t think Mrs. Ferris was a killer, so what were these things doing in her attic?
With shaky hands, she next opened the box labeledDocuments. It was almost entirely empty save for three handwritten copies of “The Executioners Three.” The topmost page was clean white printer paper with 1999 scribbled in the corner. Beside the poem’s second and third refrains were the dates October 13 and October 15.
Freddie’s breath hissed out. Those were the dates of the hanging and the decapitation—and they matched up with the verses for the Hangsman and the Headsman. Meanwhile, next to the lineThe Oathmaster is waitingwere the wordsHe’s back.
