The mother who fled this place.
Who warned her never to return.
The mother she misses, despite the fact she never knew her.
A slight draft slips through the room, though the window is shuttered and the door is closed.
And then the ghoul is there. There is less of it than the ones beyond the wall—half a shoulder is missing, part of a hip, an arm—but it is there, ankles crossed, leaning forward elbow balanced on one knee, chin resting on its palm.
Her vision blurred with tears, Olivia can almost imagine the woman on the bed is real. Perhaps she is. Real, she is learning, is a slippery thing, not a solid black line but a shape with soft edges, a great deal of gray.
She doesn’t look up, afraid that the ghoul will disappear. She sits there, head bowed among her mother’s dresses, even as she senses movement, even as she feels the ghoul rising from the bed and stepping forward into the pool of cotton and wool and silk, sinking to its knees in front of her. They would be nearly eye to eye if she looked up.
And she cannot help herself. She does.
When Olivia lifts her gaze, the ghoul flickers slightly, like a candle in the breeze, but then steadies. Perhaps it has never been the looking that banished ghouls. Perhaps it is the thinking, the pointed go away she’s always lobbed at them as she glared.
Now Olivia stares at what’s left of her mother.
What happened to you? she thinks.
It is not like Uncle Arthur, with his face half gone. There is no gunshot wound, no blade, no culprit, but the ghoul is painfully thin, and there are hollows beneath its eyes, and Olivia remembers the entries in the journal, the sleep her mother could not find, her fear of drowning in her dreams.
Tired can be a kind of sick, Edgar said, if it lasts long enough.
Whatever illness took her mother, it is taking Matthew too. And she doesn’t know how to stop it, doesn’t know how to keep it from coming for her next.
Why did you leave Gallant? she wants to ask.
Why did you leave me?
The ghoul’s hand drifts up, and Olivia holds her breath, hoping it means to speak, to sign, but its fingers simply brush the air beside her face, as if to cup her cheek or tuck a strand behind her ear, and Olivia cannot help herself, she throws her arms around her mother’s neck, desperate to be held.
But here, the ghouls aren’t real enough to touch. Here, they are only fragile shadows of the dead, and her hands go straight through. She tumbles forward, landing among her mother’s dresses. Pain lances through her wounded palm. And when she scrambles up again, she is alone.
Olivia sags, wishing, for the briefest moment, that she were back beyond the wall.
Gallant has gone quiet.
Not the eerie quiet of the other house, or the restful quiet of a place asleep, but the tense quiet of bodies retreating to their corners. Somewhere, Hannah is leaning into Edgar. Somewhere, Matthew lies awake and waits for dawn.
The windows are shut fast, and she knows that day won’t break for another hour, at least. Matron Jessamine used to say this was the darkest part of the night, after the moon and before the sun.
Olivia hauls her small suitcase to the bottom of the stairs and leaves it there.
She pads barefoot through the empty halls, the way she did her first night here. Already, she has learned the layout of the sprawling house, and she finds her way without a candle past the row of portraits to the music room, her mother’s red journal tucked beneath her arm.
The piano sits abandoned in the dark.
No Matthew. No moonlight. The garden nothing but a wall of textured black.
Olivia climbs into the bay window with the red journal. It is far too dark to read, but she doesn’t plan to read. Instead she peels back the cover, turning past curling text until she finds the final entry. And then, turning once more, to the blank pages beyond.
There, she begins to write.
If you read this, I am safe.
Her father’s drawings are lost, but her mother’s words are safe, read a thousand times and pressed into the pages of her memory. And there, in the dark, her pencil hisses over the page as she resurrects each and every one.
I dreamed of you last night.
If I gave you my hand, would you take it?
What will we call her?
And with every reconstructed line, she understands, Grace Prior wasn’t mad. She was lonely and lost, wild and free, desperate and haunted.
And she did everything she could.
Even if it meant leaving her daughter.
Even if it meant letting her go.
There is so much she still doesn’t understand, but that, at last, she knows.
Olivia writes until she reaches the last entry, scrawls the letter to herself in the back of the red book.
Olivia, Olivia, Olivia
Remember this—
the shadows are not real
the dreams can never hurt you
and you will be safe, as long as you stay away from Gallant.
She stares at her mother’s words in her own hand for a very long time and then closes the journal and presses it to her front.
Exhaustion curls over her like smoke, but she does not sleep.
Instead, she keeps her eyes on the window, on the garden, the thinnest trails of daylight winding through.
She will not go back to Merilance. The car may come to take her there, but it is a long road, and it will have to stop at least once, and when it does, she will leave. She will run away, as her mother did, as she always meant to do herself. Perhaps she will flee into a city, become a vagabond, a thief.
Perhaps she will go to the ocean, sneak aboard a ship, and sail away.
Perhaps she will slip into that quiet little town and work in the pasty shop, and be a mystery to everyone who comes and goes, and she will grow up and grow old, and no one will ever know she was an orphan who saw ghouls and once met Death and lived in a house beside a wall.
The master of the house is angry.
He makes his way to the garden wall, a pair of yellow boots hanging from one hand like just-plucked fruit.
The shadows stand there, waiting.
“You let her get away,” he says in a voice like frost.
Their heads droop as one, eyes on the barren ground, and he wonders what excuses they would give if they could speak. He studies the door, where two small palms have struck again and again, knocking away the crust of long-dead leaves, exposing the iron beneath.
He runs a hand thoughtfully over the stain, then turns and makes his way back up the garden path. The dead roses lean away, but a single, bursting bloom hangs across his path, the petals full and heavy.
The master of the house traces the life back down its leaves, its stem, its roots.
“Very good,” he says, plucking the flower.
And then he smiles, a small, wicked smile, a smile the moonlight doesn’t land on, a smile just between the garden and his teeth.
Very good indeed.
Part Five
Blood and Iron
Chapter Twenty-Two
Rain drums its fingers on the garden shed.
The ghoul stares out from the corner.
Olivia shifts her weight, feels something crack under her shoe. She looks down, expecting to find one of the many clay pot shards littering the ground, but the piece is porcelain, roses and thorns curling over a white ground, and she knows it belongs to a vase, though she isn’t sure how. The ghoul holds a half-formed finger to the empty space where its lips should be. The rain has stopped, and Olivia knows she better be getting back, if she’s going to go, but when she steps outside, there is no gray gravel moat, no grim stone building, no Merilance.