It was another long moment before Effy found her voice. “Is that normal?”
“Yes,” Wetherell said. “We usually wait until low tide to drive into town, but the timing of your arrival was . . . unfortunate.”
That was putting it mildly. As the car climbed farther up the hill, the roar of the waves grew dimmer, but a thick mist descended, shrouding the trees in white cloaks. The road narrowed, fog closing in on all sides. Effy’s throat tightened.
“How much further?” she asked.
“Not very far now.”
And then something burst from the tree line and the mist and out in front of the car. Effy saw only a flash of it. There was dark hair, tangled and wet, moving as fluidly as water. Where the headlights caught it, she also saw a pale yellow curve of bone.
“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.