The ghoul’s face twitches, and it shifts back into the shadow of the trees, leaving her alone before the wall.
Olivia traces her fingers down the edge of the door, following the gap between the iron and the stone. Save for the two bolts jutting into the sliver of space, it is the width of a thumb. Or a journal spine. She bites her lip and slips her mother’s journal between the door and the wall.
It is not the same shape it was, so many years ago.
It is a little wider now, the pages Anabelle once tore out returned imperfectly, age foxing the edges and warping the cover.
And yet, it fits. The green journal slides spine first into the gap with all the ease of a key in its lock, those two old bolts kissing their familiar grooves.
This is where her parents met.
This is how they spoke. Letters and drawings passed back and forth through a door that does not work in a wall that leads nowhere.
Olivia’s fingers drop from the journal, and it sits there, resting comfortably in the gap for the length of an inhale. And then the world breathes out. The wind picks up. A sudden gust rustles her dress and tugs at her hair and knocks the journal from its perch.
If the wind had blown the other way, the journal would have tumbled toward her, fallen at her feet. But it blows at her back, and the journal tips through the gap, vanishing beyond the wall.
Olivia hisses through her teeth.
She pulls on the old door but of course it’s locked, so she hurries to the edge of the wall, the place where the stone crumbles away to nothing, the grasses on either side growing together, this side tangling with that.
It is just a step, she tells herself.
And yet, she hesitates. Glances back over her shoulder at the garden and the looming house, Matthew’s warning heavy on the air.
But she is not afraid of stories.
Sure, there are strange things in the world. Dead things that lurk in shadows. Houses full of ghosts. But this is just a wall, and standing here, at the edge, she can see the field beyond. Peering round the broken stone, she spots the journal lying in the wet grass, waiting to be retrieved.
Olivia takes a breath and rounds the wall.
Her borrowed yellow boot crosses the line, and it is the strangest thing, but in that moment, she thinks of the statue in the fountain, the woman’s hand thrust out, not in welcome, but in warning, as if to say, Turn back, stay away. But the woman faces the world, not the wall, and Olivia’s boot lands soundly on the ground.
It is one step.
A single stride between here and there, the side facing Gallant and the one facing the fields beyond. One step, and she half expects to feel some magic current, some errant breeze forcing her forward or buffeting her back, but the truth is, she feels nothing. No warning shift, no sudden plunge, no skin-crawling sense of a world gone wrong. Just the old familiar thrill of doing something you’ve been told not to.
Just to be sure, Olivia takes a step back, onto the garden side.
Nothing. How silly she feels then, like a child hopping between paving stones as if some are made of lava.
She crosses the wall again, glancing back over her shoulder at Gallant—still there, unchanged—before turning her attention to the world beyond. It looks the same. An empty field, an unkempt version of the grassy slope, her mother’s green journal lying at the base of the wall where it fell. She marches toward it, but halfway there, another gust of wind kicks up. It flings the cover back, and steals the once-torn pages, scattering them across the still-damp grass.
Olivia lets out a silent yelp and chases after them.
One has snagged on a thistle nearby.
One has caught against a sturdy reed.
One she plucks out of the air as it sails past.
One lies dampened in the dirt.
The last has fallen farther out, in the field, and by the time she retrieves it, the hem of her blue dress is wet, her bare legs cold, her yellow galoshes slick with mud and leaves.
She trudges back to the wall, where the journal lies open, pages drifting back and forth in the breeze. She returns the damp and crumpled pages to the book, resolving to find tape or glue when she gets back to the house, to fix them in place.
It’s getting late—or at least, she thinks it is; the low clouds have erased the line between day and dusk, making it impossible to tell the time—so she tucks the journal under her arm and hurries back to the edge of the wall, hoping no one has noticed her absence. Hoping that Hannah is still dozing by the fire, and Edgar is still humming in the kitchen, and Matthew is still asleep in his bed, and not at the piano, his eyes trained on the garden and the gate. The way his mood would darken if he saw her rounding the wall.
But when she gets to the edge of the stone, it isn’t there.
Olivia looks up, confused.
It’s roughly twelve strides from the wall’s edge to the door—she measured—but she has walked that much, and now the crumbling edge hovers in the distance, another twelve ahead. She walks toward it, but with every stride, the wall grows longer, the end out of reach.
She breaks into a clumsy run, trying to outpace the stone, but it is always one step ahead. It goes on and on, and Olivia slows, breathless, panic worming through her limbs.
She twists round, intending to head back for the iron gate.
And stops.
The field is gone. There is no tall grass. No thistles. No wild world.
In its place, there is a garden.
Or at least, the shriveled remains of a garden. Withered limbs and wilting blooms, their petals pale, their leaves devoid of color. There is an orchard to one side, its branches bare, and the remains of a vegetable patch to the other, its contents long gone to seed and rot.
And there, at the top of the ruined garden, sits another Gallant.
Chapter Seventeen
Once, back at Merilance, Matron Sarah held a drawing class.
Olivia had already begun to teach herself—a habit started early. There was a kind of power in capturing the world around her, distilling it to lines and curves, a language of gestures that anyone could understand.
But in this class, the girls were told to draw themselves.
The matron gave each a sheet of paper and a pencil and showed them how to render their own face, how to measure the distance of their eyes, the angle of their nose and cheeks and smile. And then she set them loose.
A small stack of mirrors lay in the center of the table, some new and others silvered, some cracked and others whole. There weren’t enough to go around, so the girls had to share, stealing glimpses of themselves whenever they could, which meant the angles and the light were always changing, and when the time was up, and the portraits tacked on the wall, the room was full of faces, and every one of them was wrong.
A distorted reflection, strange, unnerving.
That is what Olivia sees when she looks at the house beyond the wall.
It has all the right features, arranged the wrong way. A drawing done too much from memory or a contour sketch, where you do not lift the pen, and all the lines connect and bleed together into something abstract, a stylized impression.
Overhead, the dusk has somehow dropped away, the sky an inky black. There is no moon. No stars. And yet, it is not empty. No, it is like a lake, a vast expanse of dark water. The kind of dark that tricks the eye. Makes you see things where there are none. Or miss things when they are there. The dark that lives in the spaces you know you should not look, lest you catch sight of other eyes, staring back.