Page 89 of Harvest of Sighs (Thornchapel 3)
Poe is staring down at her hand—the same hand that held Estamond’s in her dream. She knows that song. She knows that song because Estamond knew it. Because the Kernstows knew it. And lived by it.
“And then he found the journals by Reverend Dartham.”
At Dartham’s name, all their heads snap up.
“Dartham? Really?” Becket asks, leaning forward.
“Yes, really.” Poe’s dad studies them for a moment. “How do you know about him?”
“I’ve cataloged his book in the library at Thornchapel,” Poe says smoothly, before anyone else can elaborate more. “And I showed everyone after I was done. It was very interesting.”
“I’m sure it was,” David says, eyes narrowed.
“Ralph stumbled upon Dartham’s journals at a historical society when he was searching for local fairy tales,” Samson says, picking up the thread of the story. “He thought he could use the fairy tales to triangulate the precise nature of the door. Instead he found something better—Dartham’s interviews with the people living in the valley.”
“When the door appeared, according to those interviews,” David says, “the Guests were supposed to go to the altar in the woods. Ralph felt certain that meant the door was near the altar itself. You’ve been to the thorn chapel by now, I’m sure, and I’m sure you’ve noticed the problem: there is no door there.”
Auden meets Poe’s eyes from across the room. She shakes her head very slightly.
“Ralph wasn’t deterred. He thought he could manifest the door,” Samson says. “That it would appear if he engaged with the thorn chapel in the right way. He thought if he could find an earlier version of the rituals, if he could discover how it was done centuries ago . . . ”
“And he had your mother,” David adds. His voice goes a little heavier then. A little angrier. “He believed a Kernstow was necessary, that it needed to be a Guest and Kernstow in the chapel together in order to make whatever ritual he found work fully.”
“We spent weeks combing that library, looking for a way to make the door appear,” Samson says. He looks down at his hands and shakes his head. “It sounds like madness now. Foolishness. Doors that don’t exist, spending every night . . . together. But at the time—” He falls silent, as if he can’t quite find the words to explain it.
“At the time,” David says after a minute, “it felt like the only thing that was real. As if only Thornchapel was real life, and everything else was a dream. Your mother—she felt that way most of all.”
Poe meets his eyes and then she has to look away. It was easy to dismiss her father’s fears for her when she’d heard them over the phone, but being right here, face to face, listening to him talk about her mother—she understands now. She understands why he’s scared.
Because he knows she is just as in love with Thornchapel as her mother was.
“And so what happened?” Saint asks. He’s leaning back against the couch, his booted feet planted firmly on the floor and an arm around Poe. “Did you find anything in the library?”
“We did,” David answers. “The Record of Thornechapel Customs. We decided we’d follow its instructions for Lammas as closely as we could.”
None of the six look at each other when David mentions the Record, which Poe is grateful for.
“And did it work?” Saint presses. “Did you see the door?”
Neither Samson nor David answers for a moment. And then David wordlessly reaches for the bottle, which Samson hands him.
“If everything until that point had been a dream,” Samson says quietly, “then that was when we woke up.”
Silence—except for the sound of snoring dogs—fills the room.
“The door was and is the single most terrifying thing I’ve ever seen,” David says after a while. “It wasn’t there when we began, and then it just—was. Right there in the half-crumbled stone wall. Surrounded by roses so dark they looked black.”
Poe thinks of her dream. She knows exactly what those roses look like.
“But the most frightening thing about the door wasn’t only that it was there,” Samson says. “But that it was open.”
“Open,” Becket says. His voice is strange.
“Open,” David confirms. “Dangerous.”
“It was wrong,” Samson says softly. “Whatever that door is, it’s not meant to be open. Perhaps it’s not meant to be at all.”
“What happened next?” Delphine asks, rapt. “Did you try to close it?”
