Page 5 of Holly & Hemlock
“Is it haunted?”
She weighs the question, then says, “No more than the rest of the house.”
A draft creeps up from under the door. My scalp tightens. “I’ll take your word for it.”
She leads me back to the main stairs, then, without ceremony, leaves me alone. I hesitate, then wander back to the Blue Room, past the glares of dead relatives and the patient ticking of a clock I don’t remember seeing before.
I flop on the bed, read the letter again. It’s boilerplate.
Maeve Vale leaves all her property, real and personal, to her only living relative, Nora Vale, provided she assumes residence at Hemlock House within thirty days of death.
The rest is legalese, an address, and one handwritten addition: “The house requires you.” I run my finger under it and wonder if it’s the lawyer’s joke, or something my aunt wanted to say from the beyond.
Outside, the wind whines. I close my eyes and imagine the faces in the hallway, each one watching, waiting. I could call the office. I could call my step-mother. But my phone is dead and I find I don’t want to hear anyone else’s voice right now.
Then, from somewhere below, a masculine yell and the slam of a door. It echoes up through the bones of the house, hard enough to rattle the radiator. I sit up, heart doing a little polka in my chest. I wait for footsteps, a verbal response, a door creaking open. There’s nothing.
The silence that follows is complete.
Welcome home, Nora,I think to myself.
2
The Godson
That evening, at seven o’clock precisely, I find the library with a conviction born of determination, caffeine, and a little bit of spite. The door is open, and a spill of yellow lamplight leaks across the threadbare runner. For a moment I hesitate, then step inside, resisting the urge to genuflect before the altar of old books.
The room is at once cavernous and close—a paradox constructed by the architects of generational excess. The ceiling floats somewhere in the upper stratosphere, yet the lamps and the shelves crowd the floor, imposing a vertical claustrophobia. Every available surface is armored with leather-bound volumes, some visibly decaying, others haughty in their gilt and preservation. I walk the perimeter, skimming titles, my fingers cataloguing the fine gradations of mildew and foxing on the spines.
I find no evidence of a librarian, living or dead, but sense the presence of some invisible warden anyway. The collection could rival the ones I’d seen in some university libraries and my Art Historian heart is both elated and overwhelmed at the fact that this is all mine now.
It’s then that the clock on the marble mantel chimes: a single, well-bred note. I glance over my shoulder and see a man in the doorway.
He is tall—unsettlingly so, in the way of men who expect the world to part for them—and framed in silhouette by the hallway’s watery light. His hair, too long to be military, too short to be seedy, shades somewhere between copper and light brown. His jaw is sharp, his expression sharper. He wears a dark suit, open at the collar, and in the crook of one finger a cigarette, unlit. His eyes, in the lamplight, register as a bright and improbable green. Like a serpent.
For a moment, we simply inventory each other.
“You’re early,” he says, with the exact cadence of someone used to being late.
“Habit,” I say. “Museum hours.”
He smirks. “I’d have guessed mortuary. Or perhaps the tax office.” His accent is local, but sanded down, shaped by years of boarding schools or exile.
I don’t answer right away. I don’t know who this man is, or why he’s in the house. But I don’t know anything about the house or its inhabitants.Are there inhabitants?And it feels strange to be concerned about the people here when there’s nothing tethering me to this place except a letter, a dead woman who had previously pretended I didn’t exist.
The stranger steps deeper into the room, eyes flicking from my face to my hands and back again, as if I might be hiding a weapon, as if there’s anything more dangerous here than the accumulated weight of all these eyes—painted, carved, or living. He notices my hands on the books and gives a low, sardonic sound. “Be careful with the Rousseau. It’s a first-edition. The binding will crumble if you so much as frown at it.”
I look down. I am, in fact, holding a Rousseau—DiscourseOn the Origin of Inequality. Maybe not the rarest, but a cut above the tourist bookshop variety. And I find the subject matter wildly ironic in its current setting.
“I restore things for a living,” I tell him. “But thanks for the warning.”
“Something tells me you’ll have your work cut out for you.”
He looks young—late twenties, my age or even less, but already possessed of the kind of boredom that usually requires years to cultivate. I try to stand up straighter. The library seems to shrink in response.
“Larkin Hughes. Godson to the late tyrant.”
Interesting.
