Page 128 of Harvest of Sighs (Thornchapel 3)
“Happy birthday, dickhead,” I say, sitting down next to him. Sir James spins in circles and then does the same, huffing like it’s some kind of unbearable dog burden to have to nap at a moment’s notice. “I thought you told us not to come to the thorn chapel today.”
Auden selects a pencil from his bag and then bends over his pad, his hair falling over his forehead. “Are you accusing me of hypocrisy on my own birthday, St. Sebastian?”
“You deserve it.”
His eyes don’t stray from his work, but a small smile tugs at his mouth. “Maybe.”
“Why are you out here?”
“Because I knew you’d come out here,” he says mildly, reaching for another pencil. “And because I was up early. I had trouble sleeping.”
Because Poe stayed with me last night. I wonder if he misses her as much as I do when she’s sleeping with him. It’s nonsensical to miss her when she’s only a wall away, but there it is.
We should have been a three. Not two variable sets of two.
I look down at what he’s sketching. It’s the thorn chapel, of course, but only the far end. The altar, the crumbling, rose-decked wall behind it, the dark clouds pressing against the trees behind all of that. And set in the wall, surrounded by roses that Auden’s currently coloring a red so deep it’s nearly black—
“That’s the door.”
Auden nods. I look up at the wall, which in real life is a bank of stone and untidy blackthorn studded with bright blue berries. And then I look down at the sketch. There, the penciled door rises above it all. Its top arch is pointed, its planks fitted with dark metal. It looks like a door that would belong in a medieval chapel.
“Is that what you think it looks like?” I ask.
“It’s what I know it looks like.”
“But shouldn’t it look older?” I gesture at the altar. “Dr. Davidson’s book said that the altar predates the chapel, predates even the standing stones.”
Auden follows my gaze over to the altar. “You think the door and the altar are the same age?”
“Or the door came first. And the altar was built in front of it.”
I get another smile. “I thought you didn’t believe in the door, St. Sebastian.”
I shrug, looking away from him and into the storm-shadowed forest. It’s so hard to be close to him sometimes. So hard to see his smile and not think of what it felt like to have his foot on my chest, his drawings on my skin, his footsteps chasing after mine as we ran through the trees.
“It’s the kind of morning where I don’t care what I normally believe.”
I’m not worried about whether he understands what I mean or not—I know he will. And he does.
“Yes,” he says. “It is that kind of morning.”
And then he lifts his hand over his sketch and starts working again.
“They didn’t have doors in the Neolithic,” I say after a long minute. I stretch out my legs and lean against the wall too, tangling my hand in the grass next to me. “It would have looked different then.”
“I would suppose so,” Auden says, a bit distractedly. He’s filling in more details around the altar, using a few different shades of gray to capture the look of the weathered stone. “Maybe it would have been a breach in the air itself. A gateway without the gate.”
“But to where?”
“I don’t know. Poe says in her dreams of Estamond, even Estamond herself doesn’t know. Although Estamond did believe that local stories of being abducted into fairyland came from the door.”
“There’re stories like that all over the world, though. Do you think that means there’re doors all over the world?”
Auden contemplates this. “It certainly seems possible.”
“So maybe this door isn’t special.”
I don’t know why I say that. I of all people think that Thornchapel is the best and most interesting place in the world, for no other reason than I love it. Just by being associated with Thornchapel, the door is important to me.
