Page 65 of Darkest at Dusk
* * *
My son,
Your mother is dead.
You will return at once and remain for a time. There are matters here which require attention and I will not have the running of this house left to servants. I am not inclined to write more particulars by post.
Send word of your train and the carriage shall meet you at the junction.
Your ever affectionate Father,
A. Caradoc
* * *
Isabella read it twice to be certain she had not mistaken the economy of words for cruelty. But she read, beneath the clipped declarations, the words of a man who would not set grief to paper because ink made it true. Aunt. Uncle. One brother, then the next. And finally, mother. All dead. The tragedy of it tore at her.
She laid the letter with the others and sat very straight in the chair because if she bent even a little she might fold in half and not unfold again. She thought of Rhys standing in this room, grieving. She imagined him returning and returning until he had no returns left. She slid her hand into her pocket and worried the slip of ribbon between her thumb and forefinger.
The hush shifted, changing its pitch. The needles along her skin sharpened, then smoothed. Somewhere in the wall, metal dragged along stone, slow and purposeful. The same drawling scrape she had heard the first night, as if a poker were being pulled along a hearth one inch at a time, as if someone wished to make the world look up and listen.
All she had read blended with all she had learned in Marlow, stirred into a stew of confusion. Hargreaves’s name worked under her ribs like a sliver. Men with a wagon at dawn. Men Rhys had hired. He had wanted something from that office, something Hargreaves had left in his bottles and ledgers and cabinets. Not the man himself, but the man’s knowledge. Of what? Of whom? Her mouth tasted of metal.
She rose, certain of her destination. She could seek the kitchen, the comfort of tea and Mrs. Abernathy’s good sense. She could look for Matty’s solemn eyes and Peg’s quick smile. She could go to her room and wash her face and lie down until the tremors passed.
Instead, she took up the lamp.
This was madness, she knew. Mrs. Abernathy would call her foolhardy. But ignorance, for her, was a greater terror than any wraith. Better to risk the house’s malice than to let her mind gnaw itself hollow.
She told herself she would only look. She would stand at the foot of the north stair and breathe and listen. She would not touch any lock, any latch. She would not turn any knob. She would not go where she had been told not to go. She merely wished to know if the air was as wrong as Peg had said, if the draft came hot when the weather went cold. She wished to hear, perhaps, the chorus the workmen had heard, the howling down a cold flue, because hearing was better than imagining.
At the bottom of the stairs, she paused.
Treads pounded by centuries of feet had been worn into shallow boats. The lamps here were bracketed and cold; no one lit this place now. The dark above was heavy and thick. Isabella tested the first step with the toe of her boot, then set her weight and climbed.
The house smelled of old dust and chimney soot. And threaded through it, faint and cruel, of roses spoiled by stagnant water. Peg’s whispered rhyme brushed her memory. Iron to bind. Hearth to keep. The words deserted her now, leaving her bare.
At the landing she stopped and turned her face toward the corridor that led to the locked doors. A current drifted along the floor growing warm, then hot, swirling around her ankles, heating her face. Her shins prickled as if she stood too close to Cook’s range.
She put out her free hand to the wall to steady herself and touched sweat instead of plaster. A bead swelled and dripped down the wall like a tear. An instant later, steam filmed there, pearled, and vanished as though swallowed.
“Show yourself,” she said, and hated the tremor that turned the command to a plea.
The girl obliged.
She stood three strides off, nightgown straight from narrow shoulders, pink satin at throat and cuffs, hem singed black. Not a child any longer. She had the face of a young woman now, her cheekbones high, her chin round. Her hair hung in lank ropes that might once have been glossy. A halo of shadow surrounded her.
“Who are you?” Isabella whispered, though she knew now the shape of the name from the letters. Catrin. Cousin. Kin.
The wraith’s mouth softened, as if at a memory. Then her lips parted on a breath that was not air and stretched wider…wider…grotesque, inhuman.
Her lips peeled back with a wet, tearing sound, pulling away from her teeth and gums like the flesh of a rotting fruit peeling from its pit. Threads of flesh clung, then snapped. A fathomless dark seam split her face, widening, a yawning chasm, tearing a gaping strip along her forehead and down her chin with a pop of gristle that made Isabella’s stomach churn.
With a brittle snap her jaw unhinged, gaping like a serpent’s, as though she would swallow herself, swallow the shadows…swallow Isabella whole.
An oily, black substance oozed free and dripped over her unhinged jaw, the air heavy with a carrion-sweet stink.
With a gasp, Isabella stumbled back.
