Page 90 of Harvest of Sighs (Thornchapel 3)
“Your father tried, Delphine,” David replies. “He reached an arm through the doorway to pull it closed, but—”
“He collapsed,” Samson finishes for David. “Unconscious, and he was asleep for nearly a full day after.”
“We fought after he tried,” Poe’s father recalls, his voice going even heavier still. “We all fought. Bitterly.”
“We couldn’t agree on what to do.”
“To brick it up.”
“To try to find an expert—”
“—a scientist—”
“—the government—”
“—anyone who knew more—”
“I wanted to leave it the way it was,” Samson says. “I wanted to walk away. If God has put that door there, then it is not for men to meddle with.”
“And I wanted it studied by people with plastic suits and ticking meters and lanyards with government IDs on them.”
“And Mom?” Poe asks. “What did Mom want?”
David sighs. “She wanted what Ralph wanted. To try to close the door on Samhain.”
A palpable chill settles over the room. They’re all very, very aware of when Adelina died.
Auden, of all people, is the one to ask. “And how did my father think he could close the door?”
Poe remembers her dream weeks ago, her dream of Estamond going to the altar on her own.
If you don’t do it at Lammastide, then it will be done at Samhain.
“Sacrifice,” Poe says. “The door is shut with a sacrifice.”
One of them—Becket maybe—lets out an unhappy exhale.
Auden sets his jaw and looks down at the dog whose head he’s stroking. Agitation and shame are sketched all over his face, in the tense lines of his shoulders and arms.
“Ralph didn’t tell us that at the time,” David says after a long minute. “And honestly, I don’t think it had even occurred to him by then. To really do it, I mean.”
“He only said that he thought doing the Samhain ceremony as described in the Record would close it, and your mother agreed with him, Proserpina,” Samson says. “And the Hesses. Freddie wanted nothing more to do with it, however, after what happened to him, and Daisy agreed.”
“By that point, things had already started to go wrong between us anyway,” Poe’s father says. “There were too many of us, maybe, or not enough. Some of us—like Samson and Clare—had no experience with polyamory,
and maybe the rest of us had had too much.”
“It was Ralph, mostly,” Samson says, rubbing a soothing hand on David’s back. “He wanted Adelina. It was all that mattered to him. He was willing to do anything, hurt anybody, so long as he could possess her.”
Across the room, Auden meets Poe’s eyes again. There’s a haunted look to them that Poe doesn’t like.
Samson continues, addressing them all now, “Because of Ralph, we were ready to fall apart at the slightest push—which the door gave us.”
“We couldn’t agree, we couldn’t stop fighting. Your mother didn’t want to leave, but I convinced her we had to. Look at what happened to Freddie! What if you kids found your way out to the door and were hurt by it? What if Ralph never saw reason? What was the point in staying when it was so dangerous for all of us? We left two days after Lammas.”
“As did I,” Samson says. “The Hesses and Danseys weren’t far behind.”
David looks out the window to the front yard. There’re cars parked outside, joggers on the road, moms with strollers on the sidewalk.
