A Study in Drowning(12)

“Mr. Wetherell.” She gasped as it disappeared into the mist again. He hadn’t even let up on the gas. “What was that?”

If she hadn’t just swallowed one of her pills, she wouldn’t have asked at all. But Wetherell must have seen it, too. She couldn’t have imagined it: the pink pills were for obliterating her imagination.

“Most certainly a deer,” Wetherell said, in an offhanded way that seemed almost too offhanded. “The deer in the South have developed some peculiar adaptations. Webbed feet and scaled bellies. Biologists have speculated that it’s evolutionary preparation for the second Drowning.”

But Effy had seen no scales. She had seen a wild knot of hair, a crown of bone. She scrubbed at her face again. What would the doctor have said? Was it possible for two people to have the same hallucination?

The car made a strenuous, halting turn, and the mist seemed to cleave apart in front of it. Wetherell stopped right beside an enormous oak tree. Its branches heaved and bowed with the weight of dangling moss. He reached over and opened the glove box, removing a small flashlight. Wordlessly he clicked it on and stepped out of the car, even though Effy could not see a house rising out of the mist.

She heard him begin to drag out her trunk. Effy opened the door and followed him around to the back of the car. “Are we here?”

“Yes,” Wetherell said. He dropped her trunk into the grass, which was so thick that it seemed to swallow the sound. “Just up this hill.”

The mist made it difficult to see more than a few steps ahead, but Effy felt the incline in the soles of her feet. She trudged after Wetherell, his flashlight parting the mist. After a few moments of walking in silence, following only the faint outline of Wetherell’s back, the fog thinned again. She could see that they were in a small, close circle of trees, the branches overhead knit together so thickly that no sky showed through.

A stout, clumsy shape emerged: a stone cottage with a thatched roof. It was so old that the earth had begun trying to reclaim it—grass was growing over the south-facing side, giving it the appearance of a large head with green hair, and vines were threaded through every crevice in the walls.

Wetherell stamped right up to the door and opened it with a blunt and businesslike shove. There was the rasp of metal against stone, like a knife being sharpened.

Effy couldn’t help the choked sound that came out of her. “This isn’t—this can’t be Hiraeth?”

Halfway through the door, Wetherell turned and gave her that now familiar pitying look. “No,” he said. “But the mistress has requested that you stay in the guest cottage. You can view the house tomorrow, when it’s light.”

The mistress. Myrddin’s obituary had mentioned that he was survived by a wife and a son, but neither had been named in the article. She only knew Ianto from his letter, which hadn’t spoken of his mother at all. Her skin prickling, Effy followed Wetherell inside.

He set down her trunk and began to fiddle with an oil lamp on the wall, which, after a moment, flared to life. Effy looked around. There was a small wooden desk in the corner, and a tub for washing, but the cottage was dominated by an enormous four-poster bed, which looked absurd against the crumbling, lichen-covered stone of the walls. It had a delicate, filmy canopy that reminded Effy of cobwebs. Its green velvet duvet was tucked under at least a dozen pillows, their gold tassels wilting like cut stalks of wheat.

Everything seemed worn out, somehow, weather-blanched and faded as an old photograph. It felt colder inside the cottage than out.

“No electricity,” Wetherell said frankly. He lit a second oil lamp, hanging over the door. “But the taps work, if you’re persevering.”

Effy looked at the two rusted taps above the tub and said nothing. She thought of her mother’s voice, crackling on the other end of the phone line. Bad decision after bad decision.

Wetherell finished with the lamp and handed her the box of matches. Effy took them wordlessly. “Well, I’ll send someone to fetch you in the morning.”

“How far is it to the house?”

“A ten-minute walk, give or take.”

“Depending on the roads?” Effy tried a fragile smile.

Wetherell looked back at her without humor. “Depending on a great many things.”

Then he was gone, and Effy was alone. She had expected to hear him stomping through the grass, but everything was unsettlingly silent. No crickets chirping, owls hooting, or predators shifting behind the tree line. Even the wind had gone quiet.

After growing up in Draefen, with the sounds of the city playing on a relentless loop, cars always honking and people always shouting, Effy found the silence intolerable. It was like two daggers driven into her ears. She drew in a deep breath and let it out again tremulously. She could not allow herself to cry. Today’s pill had already been swallowed.

Standing there in the cold, damp cottage, Effy considered her options. There were very few, and none of them good. She could try to stumble her way through the dark back to Saltney, but she would be at the mercy of the cliffs and the sea and whatever waited out there in the mist. She thought of the thing she’d seen dart across the road, and her stomach folded over on itself.

Even if she did make it down, there were no trains until morning. And then what? She would ride back to Caer-Isel, back to her decrepit dorm room, back to the spiders and soap scum, back to her terrible attempts at cross sections and boys who whispered about her in the halls. Back to Master Corbenic. Back to staring across the snowy courtyard at the literature college, full of envy and longing. She would call her mother to tell her the news, and her mother would sigh with relief and say, Thank you for being reasonable, Effy. You have enough problems to deal with as it is.