Page 16 of Holly & Hemlock
At the stairwell, Mrs. Whitby lingers, watching me as if she expects me to turn and run back. When I don’t, her face relaxes.
“You’ll find things easier if you let sleeping dogs lie,” she says, softer now.
I want to ask her what happened in that room, whose portrait hangs in shame, why my aunt sealed the wing so fervently. But the words won’t come, and I sense that even if I asked, the answer would be another riddle, another warning.
When I reach the main hall, I shiver. Not from fear, not from the cold. But from the certainty that the house is paying close attention, and that some promises are easier to make than to keep.
That night,the storm returns with purpose. The wind presses its mouth against the glass, howling for entry. In the Blue Room, the darkness is nearly total—only the bedside lamp resists, throwing a small, nervous pool of light onto the navy damask walls. I undress and wrap myself in the quilt, its weight a poor defense against the premonition that has crept in with the cold.
I try reading. I try music. I try watching the second hand of my watch tick away the time, but none of it tames the anxiety gnawing at the base of my skull. Sleep arrives late, a concession rather than a gift. I drift in and out, the border between waking and dreaming fraying with each return.
In the half-world of sleep, the house is even larger, impossible. The corridors multiply, folding back on themselves, the wallpaper patterns shifting and regrouping whenever I turn my head. I hear footsteps behind the walls, laughter in the pipes, a piano chord struck and allowed to decay into nothing.
And always, the voices.
At first, they are indistinct—a murmuring at the edge of perception, like eavesdropping on a conversation in another room. Then a word emerges, then another. My name, repeated in a dozen different registers: whispered by a child, muttered by a woman, hissed by a man with a voice full of gravel. I follow the sound down the corridor, past the painting, past the black door. The closer I get, the more insistent the voices become. Some plead, some warn, all of them hungry for attention.
“Nora. Nora. Nora.”
My hand reaches for the knob. I feel the cold again, deeper this time, a spike driven straight through my palm. Pain radiates through my body, a poison seeping into every pore and traveling through every vein.
The whispers crescendo into a single, wordless shriek that fills the house from attic to cellar.
I jerk awake, heart racing, breath caught like a fishbone in my throat.
For a moment, I’m not sure what’s real. The storm still rages outside, and the Blue Room is freezing cold. I sit up, shivering, and that’s when I notice the window is open. Not just unlocked, but open wide, the curtains flapping inward like wings. Snow has drifted in, painting the floor with a scrim of white.
I know—I know—I closed it before bed. I remember the catch, stiff and corroded, the effort it took to force it shut. And yet here it is, gaping at the night, indifferent to the cold.
I cross the room, my bare feet thudding on the parquet, and pull the window closed. The lock resists, but finally slides into place. The storm’s howl is now muted, reduced to a low, exhausted moan.
I stand there, forehead pressed to the glass, and listen. Somewhere in the distance, a branch cracks, then falls silent. The rest of the house is still. No voices, no footsteps, just the slow tick of my own pulse, gradually returning to normal.
I turn back to the bed, but I don’t lie down. Instead, I wrap the quilt around my shoulders and sit at the edge, watching the window for any sign of movement. The room is cold, and I wonder when the radiator will kick on.
The promise I made to Mrs. Whitby replays in my head. The memory of her grip—so strong, so certain—lingers on my skin. But the dream’s logic is harder to shake. The sound of my own name, repeated in a chorus of longing and dread, loops through my mind, insistent and inescapable.
The house is silent, but the silence is a lie. Something is awake, behind the walls, behind the door, behind my own thin bones.
I stay like that for a long time, waiting for morning or for sleep, whichever comes first.
It is a long time before I dare close my eyes.
5
Confrontation
The sun rises at some ungodly hour, but the clouds see fit to keep it a rumor rather than a promise.
I am up long before then, shaking off the tail of nightmares I’ll never forget. The restlessness curdles into irritability. I dress in yesterday’s jeans, my favorite threadbare gray T-shirt, complete with permanent paint flecks on the hem, and a soft navy cardigan, then drift down to the kitchen for coffee.
The house is preternaturally silent, as if it knows what happened in the night and has decided to conspire in my insomnia.
After a brief, savage struggle with the percolator, I settle in the library. My second home, or at least the only room where I feel more curiosity than dread. The fire is banked low from last night, but a poke with the iron and another log coaxes it back to life.
I wrap a blanket around my legs and haul a stack of books from the locked case behind the desk. Not for the first time, I notice how many of these volumes are about death, poison,or the slow, botanical violence of the natural world. The Vale family, it seems, did not believe in happy endings.
I select a treatise on toxicology, eighteenth-century, hand-bound in cracked calfskin. The ink inside is a brown so dark it verges on black, and the margin notes—improbably neat, in a script characteristic of the time period—snakes through every page, annotating, correcting, sometimes arguing with the text.
