According to Matthew, there is something beyond the wall.
Olivia chews her lip. It is ridiculous, of course. She can see the space beyond, the open field stretching out to either side. But she cannot bring herself to round it. Instead, she returns to the door.
There is a narrow gap where the iron gate meets the wall, the width of her finger, the space interrupted by a pair of bolts, and the sight of it tickles something in her mind, but she cannot place it. She rises on her toes, pressing her eye to the gap.
She has read enough stories about doorways, thresholds, and for a moment she imagines herself balanced at the edge of something grand, something dark or dangerous—but when she looks, all she sees is a field of tallgrass, swaying in the breeze, the craggy mountains in the distance.
Her heart sinks a little, and she pulls back, feeling silly.
Of course, the wall is just a wall. Nothing more.
Something cracks, and to her right a few bits of stone tumble free, the sound like rain on an old tin roof. It’s one of the spots Matthew tried to patch—she can tell by the color, lighter than the surrounding rock—but the mortar is brittle, already flaking, traces of it shed onto the grass, as if the wall had stirred and shaken off the mends like dust. Up close, she sees the source of the latest crack: a thin gray weed has forced its way through. She reaches out to pull it before remembering the cut along her palm and Matthew’s fury. Instead, she takes up a fallen stone and wedges it back in place.
“Olivia!”
Her name rings out, drawn thin across the yard, and when she looks back, one hand to her eyes to shield the sun, she sees Edgar waving, the ladder leaning on one shoulder.
“Give me a hand?” he calls, and Olivia jogs toward him, out of the cold shadow and into the sun, the warmth shocking but welcome. As she crosses the grassy rise, she hears the soft scrape of more stones coming free.
Chapter Thirteen
The candle dips and gutters but doesn’t go out.
It’s late, but Olivia sits, wide awake, in the center of her bed. She turns through her mother’s journal, hoping for answers, but finds only the same entries, so long memorized, and maddeningly vague.
There is no rest
slept in your ashes
When you came apart
want to fall asleep but he always finds me there Her mother and her cousin, both haunted by their dreams. Did Grace wither, like Matthew? Did the skin beneath her eyes bruise and her face go thin? Was it madness, or sickness, or was she simply so tired that they became the same? And if it happened to them, will it happen to her?
It hasn’t found you yet . . .
Olivia turns from the journal to her sketchpad, the drawings she made of Matthew and the house and the garden wall. She feels as though she’s standing at the center of a maze, each turn a question she cannot scale, each break leading her deeper into the tangled dark.
She keeps one ear tuned, braced for the sound of Matthew’s screams, but the hall is quiet, the shadows in her own room empty. The only sounds are the soft whisper of the candle burning and the brittle creak of the pages turning.
Olivia presses her palms against her eyes, frustration welling with the urge to slam a door or break a pot in a garden shed, something to drag the feelings out, give them shape and sound. Instead, she shoves the books away and slumps back against the pillows.
A second later, she hears the telltale crack of a pencil hitting the floor, then rolling beneath the bed.
Leave it, she thinks, but she has the strangest feeling that if she does, the house will snatch it up, swallow it down into the cracks between the wooden boards, the gaps between the floors, and it is her favorite pencil. She sighs, throwing the covers off, and gets up, crouching to look beneath the bed.
She braces herself for a rotting face, the grizzly gossamer of dirt-stained hair, a broken smile. The ghoul in the dorm used to lie like that, beneath the cots, chin resting on its folded arms in the dark, as if anyone but Olivia would see it there.
But there is no ghoul beneath the bed. Only dust and darkness and the faint outline of her pencil, just out of reach. As Olivia lies flat and stretches forward to grab hold, she sees something else. A solid shadow, wedged like a secret between the headboard and the wall, its bottom corner sticking down.
It’s a book.
She cannot tell if it simply fell behind the bed and got stuck, or if it was hidden there on purpose, but when she tucks the pencil behind her ear and pulls at the shape, it comes free. Her heart lurches at the feel of it—thin and soft. Not a book at all.
A journal.
Olivia shimmies backward into the pool of candlelight on the bedroom floor and sits there, studying the cover. A gilded G curves across the front, and she stares, perplexed. It is her mother’s journal. Only it’s not, because when Olivia stands, she sees her mother’s journal, the one she’s always had, sitting among the tangled sheets where she left it. Besides, her mother’s journal is green and worn with age, dented by those two strange lines, pages sticking too far out where they were torn and put back. This one is soft, and clean, and far less abused.