House of Furies Page 8

  “Let me out of here. I want to leave. At once.” Panic rose hot and strangling in my throat. I backed toward the door, wrist throbbing to the erratic beat of my heart.

  “I’m afraid that’s not possible,” Mr. Morningside said with a sigh. He did not advance on me. “You cannot leave.”

  So this encounter was not meant to mete out punishment, but to be a death sentence. I had to get out. If there was one skill I had developed in all my years, it was self-preservation at all costs.

  I made my eyes wide and innocent, and pleaded with my hands in prayer position. “I’ll tell nobody of what you’re doing here. I just want to leave—”

  “You misunderstand. It is not possible.” To his credit, he looked genuinely upset. “You touched the book, Louisa.”

  That made me freeze in place. The book? What did that have to do with anything? How could a damned book stop me from leaving? Did it command coaches? Horses? The very road itself?

  “Just slow down and let me explain.”

  “No! You’re a murderer.”

  “A murderer of murderers; the farmer who kills the lamed animal; the laborer who throws the match on the refuse heap. What’s the difference?” he said matter-of-factly. “Still, I cannot argue with you there.”

  I took another big step toward the door and turned, preparing to bolt. “Nor do I wish to argue. I want only to leave this place and forget all about it.”

  This time I did not wait for his response. The door to his study was already open and I shoved through it, feeling his eyes upon me, knowing it was just a matter of seconds until he caught up and restrained me. But he moved not, and I was at the bottom of the stairs, on the brink of freeing myself, when he spoke once more.

  His voice boomed in my ears. “You should already be dead.”

  My hand clutched the railing of the stairs, and I twisted, listening, staring back at him, afraid but unwilling to let him see it. There was nothing to say. I should be dead? Were those shadow monsters meant to kill me?

  “That is why I know you belong here and why you cannot leave. The Residents—those shadows—they are there to watch over the house, but they are also meant to protect the book. You should never have gotten near it, and you certainly should not have touched it, but having done so, that single touch should have struck you dead.”

  “N-nonsense,” I stammered. This was more madness. More bizarre lying. “It’s just a silly book. How could a book do that?”

  “That silly book can persuade a murderous widow to come to it from hundreds and hundreds of miles away.” He at last advanced toward me, moving slowly around the desk, his golden eyes no longer friendly but focused and fiery, trained on me not with malice but with total concentration. There was no escaping such a gaze, no matter how dearly I wanted to flee. “That silly book calls to all corners of this world and tempts killers and criminals of all kinds, persuading them to ignore little things like distance and inconvenience, and they come. They come to it because they cannot help themselves. All that power, and you think it would be difficult for the book to take a simple human life?”

  “Let me go,” I whispered. Now I was frozen in earnest, sinew and bone rigid, my hand tented over the railing but unmoving. Some force held me prisoner, suppressing even a tremble. But there had to be a way out, some trick to releasing me if I was indeed caught in some invisible spider’s web. “Please, just let me go.”

  “It’s the middle of the night,” Mr. Morningside pointed out. “It isn’t safe.”

  I could control my limbs enough to flinch as he cleared the desk, passed the chair . . .

  “It isn’t safe here, either,” I whispered.

  “Now, that’s not true. You’re safe here.” At that I made a sound like a sob and a laugh. The absurdity of such a statement, when he had just confessed to arranging murder, to using strange occult things to bind people to a house of death . . . “You are safe,” he reassured me. “You weren’t lured here, Louisa; Mrs. Haylam brought you. You aren’t evil, but you are one of us.”

  Inside I was shaking my head, shaking every part of me trying to break this infernal spell as he approached. “No,” I said. “I’m nothing like you.”

  There was something wrong with him or something wrong with my eyes; as he walked nearer, he seemed to have an unnerving gait, unnatural to humans, and one I could not have noticed while he stood still behind his desk. I looked from his eyes to his legs and felt the world spin—his feet were like any man’s but they were backward, heels pointed to the front, toes to his spine.

  “No.” The word tumbled out again. The warmth of the room, the threat of this thing coming close while I could do nothing . . . My vision whirled sickeningly. “What—what are you? I’m not like you. I’m not . . .”

  The world was going suddenly black, and the last things I felt were his arms catching me and his breath on my forehead.

  “You are, Louisa. You will see.”

  On the Wailing Bairns of

  Ben Griam Mor

  To say that I hold the honorable Zachary Moorhouser in esteem is an understatement; however, our opinions on the nature of the so-called screaming subclasses notably diverge. His work on the dervishes of Far East nations is to be lauded, but in his seminal Demonologica, he fails to even mention, much less adequately describe, the smallish, almost pixie-like creatures found on or about Ben Griam Mor.

  It should surprise no one that the mist-shrouded summit of that beloved Scottish hill is home to fairy descendants. However, it should come as a surprise that these folk have escaped the attention of nearly all modern mythological scholars. In my humble opinion, no study of the occult, magicked, or demonic would be complete without mentioning the Wailing Bairns of Ben Griam Mor. While in pursuit of these rarefied folk, I lodged primarily at Garvault. There, after several days of useless inquiry, I stumbled upon a seriously inebriated fellow in the local tavern.

  He was, as the barman helpfully told me, deeper in his cups than usual. When I approached the man, he was eager to regale me with his story, after, naturally, I supplied him with a fresh ale. In a frenzy, he told me of a macabre event he’d witnessed not far from the very mountain I searched. While gathering mushrooms in a small wooded area, he stumbled upon a cottage. As he had been out hunting fungus for some hours, his rations were depleted, and he decided to ask the cottage owners for sustenance before starting back to Garvault. He could see quite clearly into the house, as it was well lit, and he saw a large family sitting down to supper, which only made him more hopeful that he might make his return journey on a full stomach.

  His hopes were quickly dashed, however, when he watched as an argument broke out at the table. The parents were attempting to quiet their child, an odd, gangled youth who seemed to the drunkard unnaturally pale. The child then stood on the table, stamping her feet, and threw back her head, unleashing a piercing scream. He said he heard it so clearly and painfully through the shut windows that he was knocked off his feet. When he stood and gained his senses, he saw a most horrible image: the family, all but the screaming child, were dead, their heads gone completely, erupted into gore, as if their skulls had been lanced like boils.

  The girl saw him watching through the window and bolted, coming, he realized in a panic, for him. He fled.

  With a spotting of these creatures at last confirmed, I eagerly took out my notebook to scribble down his story. When I asked for greater detail of the child, he began to waver. Perhaps she was not so young, but closer to ten and five. No! Ten and seven! Older! A young woman, practically an adult, he said. In his drunkenness he made these corrections clumsily, and I quickly surmised he was embarrassed that he, a grown man, had been fearful of a little girl.

  I have concluded that most sightings of the Bairns are likely altered in a similar fashion, the tellers hesitant to express fear of a child. It is likely the Bairns are thus often confused with the more common banshee and harpy, and not given their proper place in the magickal order.

  Rare Myths and L
egends: The Collected Findings of H. I. Morningside, page 6

  How did I sleep, filled as I then was with dread and suspicion?

  But I did sleep, and deeply, waking to the natural light of dawn filtering through a crack in the draperies. The tick dipped to one side, and I gasped to find I was not alone. The girl, Poppy, and her hound sat watching over me as I slept.

  At once I pulled the blankets to my face, recoiling.

  “Don’t touch me,” I murmured. She seemed not at all surprised by my revulsion.

  “Too many shocks, that’s what Mr. Morningside said. It always happens this way, you know, when a new person joins us. Even Chijioke fainted when he saw a Resident for the first time,” the girl replied with a giggle. Her hound snuffled in agreement. He gently lowered his tawny snout to my arm, laying it there as if to comfort me. Bartholomew, at least, looked normal enough, but now I knew not to trust a single thing in this house.

  His feet. His feet were on backward.

  “Am I dreaming?” I asked, more to the world itself than to her. “Is this a nightmare?”

  “He said you would say that.”

  Under the blankets I pinched myself. No, definitely awake. I groaned.

  “I want to leave,” I said, glad that I could move my arms and legs again. “At once. You mustn’t try to stop me.”

  “He said you would say that, too.” Poppy grinned, pushing the silky hair away from her face. I had never been superstitious, never spurned a person when birth cursed them with a wine stain on their face. But were those not called the Devil’s mark? How fitting that name seemed now. “Nobody will stop you from trying, but you can’t go. The book says so, and that means it’s final. Done and dusted, as the master says.”

  Not if I have anything to say about it.

  Poppy ruffled the dog’s ears, and he glanced up at her with his fathomless chocolate eyes before turning them back to me. I had to admit, his warm little head on my arm was soothing. It was then that I noted someone had set my wrist and bound it. The pain was distant now, just an echo. All of it—the fear, the urgency—was distant. But only for now. There was too much to think about, and I would need to be alone for a long while to digest it all.

  And Lee. God, I hadn’t even thought of him. Were he and his uncle here because they deserved death? It didn’t seem possible.

  The girl was not in a hurry to leave, humming softly to herself while she made figure-eight patterns on the blanket with her pinkie finger. This small, soft, pale child might in fact be a killer. I pulled the blanket more snugly around myself.

  “Are you really going to hurt Mrs. Eames?” I asked, a tad sheepish.

  Poppy’s bright eyes flashed toward me. “Oh no,” she said with a tittering laugh, “I’m not just going to hurt her, I’m going to kill her.”

  “How? How could you do such a thing?”

  She shrugged, patting the dog’s head. “The same way I do all the others.”

  “And what way is that?” Did I truly want to know? My curiosity had cost me so much already, but the urge to know more yet remained.

  “With my voice!” she chirped. She grinned and opened her mouth very wide. There was nothing out of the ordinary about her mouth, just a young girl’s teeth and tongue. “I can scream louder than anyone I know, so loud it really, really hurts when you hear it.”

  “Won’t that hurt the rest of us, then?”

  “No, not a bit; Mary will protect you,” she said simply. “She’s quite good at protecting people.”

  Mary. Just the evening before I had shared a pleasant supper with these people, liking them, thinking them my peers. Even potential friends. My brain now pounded with the confusion of it all—there had been signs, of course, that the house was a touch odd, but this was something else entirely.

  And I would be escaping it as soon as possible.

  “I would like to sleep more now, Poppy,” I said with a thin smile. In truth, I needed time alone to think and plan. After all, it was just a book, wasn’t it? Whatever grand speeches Mr. Morningside made about it, it was a book, and books could be moved, or lost.

  Or burned.

  Those living shadows wandering the halls would make it more difficult to steal covertly, but they also made me want to steal all the more. This was a horrible place, and I would feel no guilt taking from it what I wanted—ensuring my freedom. America, so far away, with an ocean between here and there, was just what I needed.

  “Right you are!” she crowed, hopping down from the bed and scooping up Bartholomew. “Come along, little pup, Miss Louisa has had a bad night, but we’re all going to help her, aren’t we? We all get on so well together here. Soon she’ll be our best and truest friend.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  When I emerged from my chambers an hour later, I half expected to be met by one of those foul shadow creatures. Residents, Mr. Morningside had called them. Residents indeed.

  The hall outside my door was empty, but that hardly made me feel safer. I felt watched now, marked, a bright red poppy in a field of white daisies. Every choice available to me became equally urgent. If I was going to be stuck here, then the least I could do was warn Lee before he became stuck, too, or worse, killed. The pain in my wrist was all but gone, the sturdy splint around it expertly applied. I wondered at who had fixed me up, and I wondered at the fact that murderers could treat me, a relative stranger, with such tenderness.

  It didn’t matter, in the end. Only a fool would linger in Coldthistle House once they’d learned its secrets. And I was no fool. I decided to tackle the problems in order of simplicity: food would be easiest, and so I made my way slowly to the foyer and then the kitchen, watchful for any signs of the Residents.

  Nobody bothered me. I heard the muffled chatting from morning tea coming from the downstairs parlor, and I heard Lee’s laughter as he found some anecdote or another uproariously funny. I didn’t necessarily like his uncle, but I struggled to imagine what Lee Brimble might have done to be drawn to the book and this place. He seemed so kind, so well meaning . . . But then again, so had my fellow employees, and perhaps he too possessed some dark secret.

  I had a few of my own, of course—truancy, magic tricks, and stealing, for example—but those vices now struck me as tame, even silly.

  The stoves were still warm from baking, but the kitchen was otherwise quiet and abandoned. Where had everyone gone? Were they deliberately hiding? I hurried to the pantry and swiped a piece of brown bread and a few slivers of dried apple. When I escaped Pitney, I had done so on an even emptier stomach. Life there had made me no stranger to hunger. Our punishments often involved going for days with only crusts and water.

  I bolted down the bread and took more time with the apple slices, pocketing one or two for a later emergency. For now, Lee would have to wait—I had no earthly idea how to tell him about all that I knew. We were only just acquaintances, and there was no reason at all for him to trust me or the outrageous stories I might tell. Instead, I took the back exit out of the kitchen and into the brisk cool of morning. My clothes were just heavy enough to ward off the chill, and if I made an escape in earnest I would need to bring the blankets from my bedding for extra warmth. I had escaped Pitney with help from my sort-of friend Jenny, who caused a distraction while I slipped out a window and into the night. Unless I could convince Lee that my stories were truth and not madness, I would be escaping completely on my own.

  This venture out would serve only to survey. If, by some stroke of luck, Lee’s driver was about and going to town on a stagecoach when the post approached, I would seize the opportunity. First, I needed to test the word of Mr. Morningside.

  The grass outside was thin, scraggly. Trees grew on the perimeter of the grounds, and there only tentatively. The house itself was the only thing allowed to be tall and imposing. The barn stood off to my left, the gardens farther beyond that, and more behind the manor. I walked straight out from the door, feeling completely exposed. There was no bush or tree to hide behind, and anyone
enterprising enough to glance out a window would see me striding out toward the fence at the far edge of the property.

  I call it a fence, but in truth it was merely a few withered planks that seemed to be held aloft by sheer coincidence. The thought made my heart clench. If Mr. Morningside and his merry band of murderers really worried about escapees, they might bother to build a proper fence, tall enough to keep people in and trespassers out. Instead, it looked like a stiff wind might topple the whole structure, and anyone in moderate physical health could scale the beams and hop right over.

  Six crows sat on the fence, regarding me, then scattering and reconvening on the roof of the house behind me.

  A greater barrier than the fence was the unbelievable number of holes dotting the ground. They were bigger than any field animal might make, everywhere and of varying depth. One, obscured by a clump of grass, nearly made me fall flat on my face. I picked my way across the field, wary now of all the pits. What on earth had torn up the ground so? It was almost as if someone had shoveled down a foot or two, searching frantically for something. . . .

  At last I reached the fence, noticing that as I neared it the scars on my fingertips began to ache. Initially I thought little of it, chalking it up to a sort of phantom pain, but the discomfort persisted and intensified. It was like hearing a voice in a faraway room, and then hearing the person who spoke move closer and closer, their voice amplifying. The pain amplified that way, and with it, a voice.

  It was just a whisper at first, in that same unknown language I’d heard when I’d passed the green door and found the book. This time, however, I knew it was not the fence calling to me; nor was it the door or even the book.

  This voice, this whisper, came from inside me.

  The pain and the voice reached their peak as I laid my hand upon the bleached timbers of the fence. I clenched my teeth through it, determined to endure. If this was all that kept me from freedom, I would be stronger. But strength meant nothing when I pushed my hand out a little farther, beyond the fence, and felt a heat like lightning scream from my fingertips to the base of my skull. It brought me crashing to my knees with a scream, the voice echoing in my head almost more painful than the raw flames searing up my arm.