Page 15 of Holly & Hemlock
When I reach the main hall, I have to pause, hand braced against the wainscot, before I trust myself to move on. The rest of the house is as before, echoing, too warm, and suffocating despite its vastness.
I head for the kitchen, seeking the comfort of tea, or failing that, the illusion of normalcy. The house gives nothing away, not even a groan.
But as I pour my tea, I realize that the chill hasn’t left my fingers. It feels as if something in the wood of that door—something in the black grain and the brass handle—has seeped into me and is curling around my bones, waiting for the right moment to be felt again.
My logical, academic mind tells me I’m being ridiculous. But everything else around me feels like it’s in on the bit.
Evening returns in increments, the blue hour leaking into the stairwell, the radiators cycling on with a faint, asthmatic sigh, the muffled thump of someone moving overhead. The house feels marginally less predatory with the lights on, but only just. After a solitary dinner (mild cheese, fresh sourdough bread, and a soup that smells so strongly of cloves, I briefly consider the possibility of poison), I find myself drifting back toward the East Wing, compulsion masquerading as idle curiosity.
I don’t even want to return.I need to.
The corridor is quieter than earlier, the silence less like absence and more like a held breath. The prints I left in the dust earlier are already half-erased, the edges softened by the imperceptible, constant movement of air. I walk slowly this time, cataloguing everything with a conservator’s eye.
Near the end of the corridor, just outside the black door, hangs a painting. The portrait is hung in reverse: the image turned to face the wall, the canvas bare to the passage. The frame, curiously, is not only free of dust but also polished to a faint gleam. I can see my reflection, distorted and faint, in the curved edge of the molding.
This is not how portraits are meant to be displayed, even in a wannabe mausoleum like Hemlock. Something about the arrangement makes my pulse drum a little harder, my stomach lurch with anxiety like a misplaced footfall on a stair.
I stand in front of it for a moment, debating whether to lift the frame and peek at the hidden face. The impulse is almost overwhelming. After all, what’s the harm? I reach up, curling my fingers over the top of the frame?—
“Don’t.”
The voice, behind me is so quiet I nearly doubt I heard it. I turn, and Mrs. Whitby is there, standing in the threshold to the corridor, hands folded over her apron. She must have moved without a sound. For the first time since I arrived, I am startled enough to step back, hand still hovering near the portrait.
“Is there a problem?” I ask, trying for a lightness I don’t feel.
Mrs. Whitby studies the painting, her expression unreadable. “That one is not for viewing. Best to leave it as it is.”
I glance at the door to the sealed room, then back at the portrait. “Was it always hung this way?”
A slight pause. “No. It was turned some years ago. For good reason.”
I wait, but she doesn’t elaborate. Instead, she moves closer, her steps whisper-quiet on the warped wood. There’s something in her face I haven’t seen before—not fear, exactly, but a kind of sorrow, deep and old as the house itself.
She stops within arm’s reach and fixes me with a gaze that could sand varnish off a coffin. “Some memories have teeth, Miss Vale. They bite and leave scars.”
The words land with more force than I expect, and I find myself lowering my hand, half-ashamed.
Mrs. Whitby glances at the door, then at me. “Your aunt insisted this wing be kept closed. There are rooms in Hemlock best left undisturbed.”
“But it’s just a door,” I say. “What could possibly?—”
She interrupts, gentle but final. “Not all doors are meant to be opened. Not all portraits to be seen.”
I laugh, brittle. “Is this where you tell me about the family curse? Or the ghosts that haunt the halls?” My voice rises higher than I want, my laugh sounding close to hysterical.
She almost smiles, but it’s a pained thing, quickly extinguished. “I have lived here longer than you realize. I know what the house can do, and what it can undo. Promise me you’ll leave it be.”
There’s a force in her voice—a gravity that makes the request feel less like a suggestion and more like an invocation. I nod, not because I want to, but because I can’t imagine refusing.
Mrs. Whitby nods in return, a ceremonial sealing of pact. She places a hand on my wrist, her fingers surprisingly strong.
“Promise, Miss Vale,” she repeats.
“I promise,” I say, and mean it, for now, at least.
She lets go, and the warmth seeps back into my skin.
Together, we walk away from the door, from the painting, from whatever lives behind those layers of dust and paint. As we retreat, I catch the faintest echo of a sound—like a sigh, or maybe just the wind trapped in the bones of the house.
