A Study in Drowning(44)
A similar coldness prickled Effy’s skin, and she almost said, Wait, stop. But it would be useless to mention the encounter to Preston. She knew without asking that he was not the type to believe in ghosts.
Mrs. Myrddin, on the other hand, was perhaps worth bringing up. “Be quiet,” she said tersely. “The widow must be in here.”
“I know,” Preston whispered back. “I’m being as quiet as I can.”
Effy held her breath as Preston turned the knob and pushed open the door to the private chambers. What spooled out in front of them was a narrow hallway, dust-choked and dark. The wooden floor was pocked with termite holes and the walls were bare, save for a small, rust-speckled mirror.
Effy was surprised to see it. Yet when she examined the mirror more closely, she realized the glass had been oxidized so thoroughly that there was no way to see a reflection in it. An odd disappointment settled in her belly.
She and Preston paused in the hallway and listened, but no sound echoed from either of the doors ahead. And just as it had the night before, even the thrashing of water against the rocks had gone silent. If Mrs. Myrddin was in her chambers, she must have been sleeping.
Or, a small voice nagged at Effy, she might not exist at all. It was not a thought she had any proof of, but when she thought of the ghost, her heartbeat quickened.
Keeping her voice low, she said, “Ianto’s room is on the left.”
“I hope he hasn’t locked it.”
There was something wrong with this section of the house. It seemed to exist in another world, cold and silent and strange, like a shipwreck on the ocean floor. The rest of Hiraeth creaked and groaned and swayed, protesting its slow destruction. The air here was stiff and heavy, and Effy moved through it almost in slow motion, as if she were wearing sopping wet clothes. In truth, it was as though this wing of the house had already been drowned.
Ianto’s door opened without so much as a shudder.
Effy didn’t know what she had expected to see on the other side. A beached mermaid on the bed, a heap of selkie skins? The ghost herself? The bedroom was disappointingly ordinary, at least as far as Hiraeth was concerned. There was an enormous canopy bed, not unlike the one Effy slept in herself, with moth-eaten gossamer curtains and dark blue satin sheets that made the mattress appear waterlogged. As far as she could tell, there was no mirror.
There was a wardrobe, its doors firmly shut, between which the sleeve of a black sweater was caught like a badger in a trap. A badger, Effy thought suddenly. Perhaps that had been the animal in the road.
There were piles of yellowed newspapers, but none of them pertained to Emrys Myrddin. The headlines were very arbitrary: An article about an art installation in Laleston. One about a series of burglaries in Corth, a town not far east of Saltney. Another was about a pony that had become a hero for bravely facing down a mountain cat; in the end, the pony had succumbed to its injuries and died.
Effy let the newspaper drift back down to the floor. “Nothing.”
“I’m not quite ready to surrender yet,” said Preston. “Where was that white space in the blueprints?”
“Along the western wall.” Effy pointed.
The western wall was just one huge bookshelf, only about half full. Silently Effy and Preston went about examining the spines, but they found no works of Emrys Myrddin there. Ianto’s reading taste appeared to be more lurid. Mostly mysteries and romances, the sorts of books she knew Preston would call pedestrian.
One erotic title stuck out to her: Dominating the Damsel. Effy slid it back into place with a shudder.
“I don’t understand,” Preston said, letting out a heated breath. “There can’t just be nothing. What sort of man scrubs a house so thoroughly of his dead father’s memory?”
It was the second time Preston had brought that up, and she wondered why the fact seemed to bother him so much. “I don’t know,” she said. “Everyone has their own way of grieving. You can’t know what you’d do until it happens to you.”
“As it happens,” Preston replied, “my father is dead.”
He said it so casually, so conversationally, that it took Effy a while to react. She looked at him, half turned toward her, the meager light clinging to his profile. His eyes, which were a pale brown, seemed intense but steady, like he was staring at something he had been watching for a long time already.
“Look at us,” she said finally. “Two fatherless children marooned in a sinking house. We ought to be careful that Ianto doesn’t decide to slit our throats over the new foundation.”
She’d meant to lighten the moment, but Preston’s mouth went thin. “If there’s anyone who would still believe in an old custom like that, it’s Ianto. Did you see the horseshoe over the door?”
“No,” she admitted. “But that’s an old folk tradition, to keep the fairies out of your house.”
Preston nodded. “And all the trees planted around the property are mountain ash. For someone who doesn’t keep any of his father’s books around, he certainly seems to have studied their edicts closely.”
Mountain ash, iron. Effy had even noticed a crush of red berries outside the cottage. Rowan berries were meant to guard against the Fair Folk, too.
Ianto had his father’s commissioned portraits of the Fairy King and Angharad hanging right above the stairs. Maybe that was another aegis. If he could keep the Fairy King trapped inside a frame, inside one of Myrddin’s stories, it would stop him from slipping through the front door.