“We’re supposed to be his relatives,” I reminded her.
I ran my fingers over a set of carvings done just above the latches.
Two lanterns.
The one on the left was dark and still, but the one on the right had been lit and was casting its light into the world.
“Should we open it?” I asked, suddenly hesitant.
What if I was wrong? So he’d hidden the box? He didn’t know us any more than we knew him. Perhaps this held his money or important documents. Things you wouldn’t want to leave about in a house full of nieces.
Opening this could shatter any trust we had between us.
But he lied, I reminded myself. He didn’t know things he should have, and rather than admit that, he lied.
With a burst of confidence, I flipped the latches. Before I could open the lid, a hand fell heavily onto my shoulder, and the fingers curved around my collarbone as if to hold me back.
As Ezra peered down at me, I knew exactly how a squirming mouse felt, caught in the sight of a great horned owl. I wanted to run, but there was no way to leave. The only path into and out of the loft was the ladder he stood in front of.
“I—we—” I glanced at Merry. Her mouth hung open and her eyes were wide with fear.
“Just know,” he said, his voice low and even, “I will explain everything.”
He wasn’t angry. If anything, his eyes looked sorrowful, deep with repentance. That sent a wave of trepidation over me that settled just under my skin, persistent and chilling. My fingertips danced over the symbols. “What are these?”
“Lanterns,” Thomas said, stepping out of the shadows. They must have climbed the ladder while we were looking for the box, too intent on our quest to hear their footfalls. “To help light the darkness.”
I knew without a trace of doubt that he meant something beyond an absence of sunlight.
A cold sweat prickled at my neck. “What’s inside the box, Ezra?”
He didn’t blink. He didn’t move. I couldn’t even see him breathing, so frozen were we in this awful, horrible moment. “Open it and find out.”
At first it looked like nothing more than a simple medicine crate. The bottom was divided into sections, and every square held a corked glass bottle. Folded papers and a few thin journals were tucked into the top bands of the lid. Ink had bled through the backs of the pages, but the handwriting was too spidery to read. Along the side of the box was a deep compartment, crammed with an assortment of silver. Chains and medallions, crosses and bells. There were even a few stray bullets. They all nestled together in a twisted tangle, glimmering with dull luster.
“What is all this?” I pulled a vial free, watching as a silvery liquid danced against its confinement. The last bit of a faded label clung valiantly to its side, showing a hasty rendering of three crosses. “Holy water?”
Ezra shook his head. “It’s a bit more special than that. And much more potent. There’s a hidden catch on the side of the crate. If you press it…” He fidgeted with his glasses. “Everything you need to see is in there.”
After a moment of fumbling, I released the hidden compartment running along the bottom. It was full of papers and notebooks, a series of sketches, and journal entries.
Flipping through them, I took in a sharp breath.
Shadowy figures with wide-brimmed hats smudged the pages, their eye sockets left empty so that the blank paper seemed to glow with an eerie sheen.
“What…what are those things?” I whispered, scanning more pages. The notes were in a jumbled combination of English and Latin, too complex for me to make sense of, but I understood the pictures.
Mostly.
Beasts of myths and lore were rendered with a startling, lifelike quality, every bit as detailed as the drawings in Papa’s field guides—as if these things had been scientifically studied and catalogued with a meticulous hand. Water snakes with fangs and flared nostrils swam alongside boats whose crews were dwarfed by the serpentine monsters. Angry elfin men, with hooked nails and webbed fingers, leered off the page, their barbed tails nearly hidden in a haze of smoky pencil lead. A cloaked figure, too tall to be human, lurked in a forest glade, a glowering antlered skull for its face.
There was a small set of initials in the picture’s corner.
EEF, dated only months before.
“Is this…What is…I don’t understand.” Rational words failed me. I wanted to justify these away as the wild imagination of a skilled scientist, as doodled daydreams gone horribly wrong. They were the ideas for a story, for a book, for something. They could not be real.
These things were not real.
“What are they? What do they do?” I paused uneasily, feeling as if I was asking the wrong questions. “What are you?”
He let out a sigh, a slow hiss like the release of steam on canning day. “I’m sure you’ve figured it out by now, but I am not your uncle. My name is not ‘Ezra.’ ” He tapped at the initials on the crate. “My name is Ephraim Ealy Fairhope. And I’m from England.” His voice changed, altering into a more melodic cadence. One I’d heard before.
I turned toward Thomas. “And you?”
“My name is Thomas,” he said, dropping his trumped-up accent. “That much is true. And Ephraim is my father. I’m just not your cousin.”
“We’ve been sent here on a research expedition. When we stumbled across your farm, that day with the wolf, and Martha McCleary mistook me for Ezra…it seemed like the perfect chance to become part of the town, learn all we could. Usually when we arrive somewhere new—strangers in a strange land, as it were—it can be harder to find out what we need to know.”
My muscles ached as I listened to him, frozen in a strange motionless state, yet poised to fly if an escape attempt proved necessary. “What…what exactly is it that you need to know?”
“Strange occurrences about town, in the forests. Unusual crops, unusual weather. Mutations in livestock. Unexplained mysteries.”
“Amity Falls has had all of those things.”
He nodded. “We know.”
Merry shifted. “Do you think…is there something that’s causing it?”
He nodded again and stepped forward, then flipped the sketchbook back to the dark shadows with the hollowed eyes.
Eyes like Prudence Latheton claimed to have seen.
Eyes like Cyrus Danforth had shouted about all the way to the Gallows.
Eyes like those that haunted my brother.
Eyes that I had seen myself.