“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.
And it’s red. Just like the one in her dream.
She runs her thumb over the gilded G, hardly worn, imagines her mother being given not one, but two. A set. She holds her breath as she peels back the cover, the air rushing out when she sees the words, the handwriting soft and full of curls, the way it was in the first pages of her journal, before the hand lost its steady grip, before the entries grew strange and broken and blotted out.
Olivia spent years poring over the riddle of her mother’s book, scrutinizing every line for clues. Now she turns through page after page, marveling at the wealth of new words.
Arthur is in such a mood today.
She flips past, finds Hannah’s name.
Hannah said that if I ruin one more dress, she’ll make me wear trousers. I told her that would be fine, so long as I could have a pair of boots to match.
Several pages later, she finds Edgar.
Something let the bird out of its cage, and now I cannot find it. Arthur says it’s lost now, and Edgar says it’s for the best, that birds like sky more than windowsills. I left the window open, hoping it would come back, and Father nearly had my head.
How strange, to see the doors flung open onto another life.
There is no mysterious “you” in these entries, no mention of moving shadows or bones with stories like marrow or voices in the dark. There are drawings, here and there, sketches of a birdcage, a rose, a pair of hands, but they are small and precise, folded in along the margins of the words, so unlike the wild, amorphous inks in the other book.
Olivia skims a dozen mundane entries—musings on how Arthur is driving Grace mad, on her mother’s absence, her father’s worsening cough. On Hannah and Edgar and the fact no one seems to notice they’re falling in love—before she snags on one.
Last night I went beyond the wall.
Olivia’s breath catches in her throat, her eyes already rushing on.
I wanted to see it for myself. I wanted to know if it was real, or if I’m expected to grow and wither here for nothing more than superstition. Wouldn’t that be funny? If it were just a story, passed from one Prior to the next until all of us forgot that it was fiction? All of us, given to the same mad delusion?
That big wide world, and us just sitting here, staring at a wall.
Father calls it a prison, and we the keepers, but that is a lie. We are as much prisoners here. Bound to these grounds, this house, that garden.
Olivia stops, Matthew’s voice echoing through her head. We came to Gallant once, and now we cannot leave. We are bound here. She pushes him out of her thoughts and reads on.
Arthur says that death waits beyond the wall. But the truth is, death is everywhere. Death comes for the roses and the apples, it comes for the mice and the birds. It comes for us all. Why should death stop us from living?
So, I did it.
I went beyond the wall.
I shouldn’t have. I thought—but it doesn’t matter what I thought. Of course I’m not the first. Of course the stories are not fictions. I am not sorry. I’m not—But I understand now.
I will never go back.
Olivia’s heart quickens as she turns the page.
No one ever needs to know.
I should not even write it here, but some part of me knows that if I don’t, I’ll begin to doubt myself. I’ll think it was a dream. But you can’t dream words onto paper. So here. Last night, I went beyond the wall.
And I met Death.
The words scrawl like weeds across the page. Olivia traces her fingers over them, half expecting them to twitch beneath her touch. Ink has dripped onto the paper, as if the writer’s pen hovered, uncertain, before taking up again.
Not met, but saw, and that was close enough. With his four shadows and his dozen shades, all silent in the bones of the ruined house. It sounds like madness written down. It felt like madness when I witnessed it. A mad world, a fever dream.
Arthur caught me after, in the garden, shook me hard and asked if I’d been seen, and I said no.