As Olivia crosses the house, the candle wavers, and so does her shadow. When she shifts the light from hand to hand, it leaps unsteadily around her, so it takes her a moment to realize she is not alone.
The ghoul stands halfway down the hall.
A woman—or at least, the pieces of her, hanging in the air like smoke. A curtain of dark hair. A narrow shoulder. A hand, drifting out as if to touch her.
Olivia jerks backward in surprise, expecting the ghoul to disappear. It doesn’t. Instead, it turns its back on her and moves swiftly down the hall, drifting in and out of sight like a body between lamplights.
Wait, she thinks, as it plunges away from her, as it reaches the door at the end and passes straight through. Olivia hurries after it, feet pounding across the rug, candle nearly guttering as she throws the door open onto shallow darkness. As she steps inside, the taper reveals a study, high-ceilinged and windowless. She turns, searching the corners, but the ghoul is gone.
Olivia lets out an unsteady breath. She always wondered if the things she saw were bound to Merilance. Whether the building was haunted, or she was. Apparently, it wasn’t the school. She turns to go, and the candle wavers in her hand, light dancing over bookshelves, a dark wood desk, before catching on the curve of metal resting there.
Olivia frowns, stepping toward the strange shape, nearly as tall as she is.
If there is a word for it, she doesn’t know.
It looks mechanical. Half clock and half sculpture. A kind of . . . orb, made of concentric rings, each set at a different angle. Up close, she sees that there are two houses set inside the piece, each one balanced on its own metal ring.
Her fingers twitch. She cannot shake the feeling that the slightest push would set the whole thing off balance and bring the model crashing to the floor. And yet, she cannot help herself. Her hand drifts up, and—
The door groans behind her.
Olivia turns, too fast, and the candle in her hand goes out, plunging the room into black.
Fear grips her, sudden and sharp. She abandons the study, blinking furiously, willing her eyes to adjust. But the shutters are all latched, and the darkness in the house is thick as syrup. She feels her way back down the hall, reminding herself she is not afraid of the dark, even though she has never known a dark like this. The house seems to grow around her, the hallways branching, multiplying, until she is sure she is lost.
And then, to her right, her vision lifts, the darkness thinning until she can just make out the edges of the space. Somewhere, there is a light. Not bright, but watery and white. She turns down a narrow hall and finds another, smaller foyer. And there, at the back of it, a door.
There are two kinds of doors in a house.
The kind that lead from room to room, and the kind that lead from inside to out—and this is one of those. Thin light spills through a small glass pane set into the wood. She has to stand on her toes to see through the window, and when she does, she finds a crescent moon hanging in the sky, showering the garden below in strands of silver.
The garden. The one she first glimpsed when the car pulled around the drive, the promise of something lovely tucked behind the house.
Even in the dark, it is a sight. Trees and trellised roses, gravel paths and groomed flowers and a carpet of grass. She wants to throw the door open and spill out into the night, wants to walk barefoot through the blades, wants to feel the velvet petals of the roses, lie on a bench beneath the moon, wants to breathe in the beauty before she is sent away.
She tries the door, but it is locked.
Olivia pats the pockets of her nightgown, wishing she’d brought her set of picks. But then she feels the gold key that fit her bedroom door. It’s a simple shape, little more than a W. And in a house with so many doors, would you really want more than one key? Olivia slides it into the lock and holds her breath and turns, expecting resistance. Instead, she feels the satisfying thunk of a bolt sliding free.
The handle is cool under her touch, and when she turns the knob, the door sighs open, just a crack, carrying cool night air and—
A man surges out of the dark.
He comes straight through the wooden door and into the foyer. Half his face is missing, and Olivia staggers back, away from the door and the man who is not a man at all but a ghoul. It scowls at her with one eye, a stained hand thrust out, not in welcome, but in warning. It cannot touch her, she tells herself, it isn’t there, but when it stomps forward, fingers curling into fists, she turns and runs blindly through the dark, somehow finds her way back to the staircase and the upstairs hall and her bedroom door, pulling it shut behind her.
And even though it’s only wood, she feels safer with it closed.
Olivia’s heart pounds in her ears as she climbs under the covers, pulling her mother’s journal to her like a shield. She has never been afraid of the dark, but tonight, she relights the lamp. As she sits, her back to the headboard and her eyes on the shadows, she realizes—
She left the key in the door downstairs.
Chapter Seven
Olivia doesn’t remember falling asleep.
She doesn’t remember getting up either, but she must have, because it’s morning, and she’s sitting at the little desk before the window. The shutters have been flung wide, and sunlight streams in, warm and bright where it falls on the desk, on her hands, on the journal there, the gilded G pressed into the cover. Her mother’s book, and yet, this one is different. It’s red where hers was green, and there are no twin lines gouged into the cover, and when she turns through the pages, the writing blurs, dissolving every time she tries to read it.
She squints, trying to make sense of it, sure that the letters are about to come together.
A hand comes to rest on her shoulder, the touch gentle and warm, but when she turns her head to look, it is rotting, bone visible through ruined skin.
Olivia sits up with a gasp.
She is still in bed. The shutters are latched, thin light seeping round the edges. Her heart pounds and her head spins and it takes her a moment to realize what that was: a dream. It is already slipping through her fingers, the details going thin, and she presses her palms against her eyes and tries to remember. Not the ghoulish hand, but the journal.
Olivia flings off the bedsheets and goes to the desk, half expecting to find the red book waiting on top, but it’s not there. Her gaze drops to the drawer in the front of the desk, the little keyhole like a spot of ink. When she pulls, the drawer resists, but it’s a silly excuse for a lock, and it takes only a hairpin and a handful of seconds to get it open.
Inside, she finds a pincushion stuck with needles. A small embroidery hoop, half-formed poppies in the center of pale cloth. A pot of ink, a handful of sketches on loose paper, and a few sheets of stationery, embossed with two elegant letters: GP.
Grace Prior.
Of course. This was her mother’s room.
Olivia runs her hand over the desk, the wood worn smooth with age. A strange urge washes over her, and she goes back to the bed, turning through the rumpled sheets until she finds the journal she’s always had, with its dented green cover. She sets it gently on the desk. There is no groove for it, no outline where the sun has bleached the wood, and yet, it fits. The pretty green book, so out of place at Merilance, belongs here, blends right in, like drawings made by the same hand.
Olivia pulls out the chair and sits in her mother’s shadow, hands resting lightly on the cover. The dream drifts back to her, and she closes her eyes and tries to conjure more before it slips away.