“I am not!” Jane yelled, and wrenched herself free with an eruption of rageful strength. She fell to the floor, crawling backward. “I know exactly what I see! This house crawls with spirits, and I let Augustine lie to me once about that; no more. This house is infested. They have taken him, and killed him, and I will set him free again.” Her fingers swept in an arc around her, their ridges coated with chalk and salt from her days of drawing. “I will fix this! You will not remove me!”
“Mrs. Lawrence—” Mrs. Purl began, and then was gone.
The foyer was smaller than it had been before. There was no door.
Jane was alone.
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
THE WALL THAT split the foyer of Lindridge Hall spanned neatly from floor to vaulted ceiling and was made of pristine, unbroken, familiar stone. It was white and cool to the touch.
And Jane had conjured it.
She had not meant to. She had not intended to, not like she had intended to move the book, not like she built her circles. But she had done it. She had, in one terrified, overwhelmed, desperate moment, gone from wanting to be left alone to living in a world where she simply was.
She sat for a long time in front of the wall, listening for the sounds of voices beyond it. But if Mrs. Purl and Mrs. Luthbright remained, they were silent. She hoped they had left. She hoped they had fled. She hoped that she had not unmade them with a thoughtless working.
And what of the world outside of Lindridge Hall? What would she see if she looked through the windows? Would the hills still roll in their gentle way? Would farms dot the landscape, would the dead tree still stand out in the front garden, would Larrenton and Camhurst and, beyond them, cities she had never been to or heard of—would they all still exist?
She was too afraid to look.
Instead, she stared at the wall, and felt a different kind of dread, spreading through her limbs and making them heavy. Choking her. The wall was familiar, terrible in how it matched, exactly, the featureless stone that had replaced the crypt door. It led to only one conclusion:
She had sealed the crypt.
She had locked Augustine away from her in a moment of terror. There had been no circle around her, and yet, perhaps helped along by the magic that had soaked into the cellar over generations, Jane had sealed the crypt. Just as she had panicked as the servants had tried to drag her to salvation, she had, exhausted and terrified, given over to desperate dreams of safety.
And the wall had come.
Augustine was dead, and he was dead because of her.
She wanted to be angry. To blame him, because he had hurt her, terrified her, looked at her with a bewitched light in his eyes that he refused to fight. His physician’s godhood, stoked by the ghosts of his failures all around him, had stopped his ears. And even before that, he had made her love him, had pulled down the walls around her with his generous spirit, his aching tenderness. It had all been his fault, because he had loved her and so made himself vulnerable, desperate to save her.
But he hadn’t deserved to die. She hadn’t wanted to kill him.
If she had this power inside of her, the power to make a wall exist where none had before simply because she was afraid, why couldn’t she unmake it now that the fear had passed? Why had she been forced to forgo sleep, to learn secrets she had not strictly needed?
A thousand answers presented themselves: because she had not felt as strongly when she tried to return the door as she had when she created the wall; because it was easier for her to want to be alone than it was to form connection; because she had felt guilty for her own actions, and not desperate for his safety, not really.
She remembered how happy she had been in the arms of his ghost, and she hated herself.
Eventually, Jane rose, her knees screaming with pain, her head swimming. She had slept only a few hours in Augustine’s arms, not enough by far to undo the damage she had wrought upon her mind, but rest was a thousand miles away. Instead, she made her way to where the crypt door had stood, and stared again at featureless white stone.
“Should I try to open it, Augustine?” she asked, voice so quiet that the stillness of the hall absorbed it. “Is there any point? Nobody will mourn you. Nobody will mourn me. We are together in that, at least.”
There was no answer. The house did not roar. The pipes did not groan. She did not hear his voice, his breaths, his sobs. Lindridge Hall was silent.
She was too much of a coward to try to pull the wall down. Instead, she went into the sitting room and, head bowed, pulled the curtains tight over the windows, dropping the room into darkness. She went back to her circle and sat within it, and built it up, brick by brick, then tore it down again. Mindless motion, mindless experimentation.