Chapter 16
Chapter
Sixteen
Istand with Hazel and Cedar behind my father’s desk, the surface now covered with the flowers, grasses, and seeds we collected from the garden. I silently add the bottle of milk of the poppy and aniseed that Cedar brought back from my shop.
“Ready?” Cedar says after a long while of the three of us simply staring at the ingredients in front of us.
I nod. “Ready.” I pick up the dagger with a cautious hand, adjusting to the weight of it in my palm before I start chopping.
I cut flower petals as small as the dagger will allow me, grinding seeds in a mortar from the kitchen, using the pommel of the dagger as a pestle and crushing them down to nothing.
It was pure luck that had us somehow finding every ingredient on this list still hidden somewhere out in that garden. We even managed to find one lone sunflower peeking through the brush.
I add the petals to the bowl, mixing with the tip of the blade before I add in the sap from the red maple that stands just near the small family graveyard. It transforms the mixture into the consistency of a light paste. It thickens more and more as I stir it.
“Okay,” I say, my voice sceptical. “I think that’s it.”
“It says here,” Cedar says, still studying the paper, “to let it melt on your tongue.”
Nerves swirl in my stomach. What are we doing? Following an old suspicious recipe, hoping it will do what, exactly? I feel like a fool looking at this paste made of flowers and seeds, hoping it will give me all the answers to an unknown question.
“Opium poppy is a hallucinogen,” Hazel says. “So we need to be careful. I don’t know what we are going to see when it is mixed with all of this.” She gestures towards the paste. “So let’s just keep each other tethered, okay?”
“Are we actually doing this?” Cedar asks.
I feel like a coot, but I would be an even bigger one if I didn’t at least try. As I hear the grounding sound of a bird chirping from outside, I nod. “We’re doing this.”
I scrape a chunk of the paste out of the bowl with the dagger, and I lay it on the end of my tongue. The taste is strong—bitter and sweet simultaneously.
Cedar’s face pulls as she licks some off the blade, and her eyes close as she lets the taste simmer on her tongue.
Hazel merely scrunches her nose before her face is back to normal and her eyes are watching over us, waiting for any kind of reaction.
Nothing happens as little particles slip off my tongue, the paste dissolving in my mouth with every second it sits on my tastebuds.
I look around as it thins, the last of the bitter mixture disappearing into my mouth. Everything looks as it did a moment ago—no drastic hallucinations, no weird reactions. Just nothing.
“Did we do it right?” Cedar asks.
“I am sure of it,” I say, picking up the paper once more to go over the instructions again, but I checked with every ingredient added that I wasn’t missing anything.
And I didn’t. We did it right.
“I don’t believe your parents would have kept this for no reason,” Hazel says.
“Well, maybe it wasn’t even theirs.” I shrug.
“That doesn’t explain the dagger,” Cedar says, her brows pulled tight.
Coots alright.
This mixture could be for anything—it could be some kind of drug taken on solstice, or a medical mixture. I don’t know why I thought it would answer all of my questions. It just proves how desperate I am, how I’ll grasp at anything to understand what I’m missing here.
But that’s because I know I’m missing something.
I’m scolding myself internally when a shimmer of light catches my eye. I turn my head in the direction of the light, and when I see what looks like streams of golden sunshine peeking through a crack in the wall, my eyes go wide.
I blink furiously, assuring myself it is no more than a trick of the mind. But it’s there. I walk towards the wall, my heart pounding in my chest as I look at the crack from different angles, and from every direction light spills from the fissure.
“Can you guys see this?” I ask, not taking my eyes away from the light.
“See what?” they say simultaneously.
That makes me turn. Dragging my eyes away from the wall, I look to see my friends with confused expressions on their faces as they look back at me. Dread rolls in my stomach.
“The crack, the light,” I say, looking back to check if it’s still there. It is.
“What light, Everleigh?” Cedar says.
“You can’t…you guys truly can’t see this?” My heart skips a beat. Why can’t they see what I am seeing?
They both shake their heads. “What are you seeing precisely?” Hazel asks.
I walk closer to the wall, letting the light flood every corner of my vision.
“There is a crack in the wall,” I say, hesitantly reaching my hand out and running my finger over the edges of it, where the paint peels away, as if it is hiding from the light.
How can this be real? “And the light…there is a golden shining light coming from somewhere within the crack.”
As I look closer, I swear there is something inside. Somewhere this light is coming from. Nerves curdle my stomach. It feels all twisted, the way it did when I used to sneak a biscuit from the kitchen without my mother’s permission as a child.
I hesitantly reach my hand through the beams of light shooting from the wall, curling my fingers around the edge of it. I don’t understand how it’s possible. I don't know if I want to understand, so instead I just pull.
The crack tugs open with the force of my grip, the beams of light widening as I yank even harder, opening the gap until I see what lies behind it. And when I do, my entire body goes numb.
My eyes go dry as I stand looking at what is in front of me, scared to so much as blink in case it disappears.
A dark mahogany desk stands in the middle of a room, with books and papers scattered atop it.
Glass jars are stacked right on the edge, looking like they could topple with a mere whisper of wind.
The room looks untouched, preserved. Like the nature that has taken over this house hasn’t been able to reach this room.
It’s a study. A study within a study.
“It looks like some sort of study,” I say, my voice sounding thin to my own ears.
It looks far away, but at the same time it’s almost as if I could merely step straight through the crack and find myself standing in front of that desk. But trying that would be dangerous. I’m unsure where I would truly end up. Is this room really part of this house?
But I can’t just stand here—I need to know what this is, to try to understand what my parents were doing, who they truly were. “I’m going in there.”
“Be careful, Everleigh.” Hazel’s voice floats towards me as I step through the crack, a forceful wind tugging at me until my feet land on perfectly kept wooden floorboards.
They appear to be the same ones that run through the main house, but where those are grey and fragile with dust, these look freshly stained, without a speck of dust coating them.
And as I look up, there are no little particles floating in the air or covering any of the books scattered around the room. The potted plants hanging from the roof look freshly watered, shades of green trailing towards the floor. In fact, there are plants everywhere.
Vials sit in a wooden rack on a shelf jutting out from the wall, small cuttings of plants and flowers living inside of them. Things that should have died in the last five years are sitting here like not a second has passed.
The tips of my fingers go numb, my stomach churning with unease. This shouldn’t be possible. This isn't possible, yet here I stand
Hurt suddenly stabs me right in my chest. I walk over to the bookshelf stuffed with books. I pull one from the shelf. Lamiaceae Plants and Their Medicinal Benefits.
My brows pull together as I toss the book to the floor, before grabbing another, this one having a handwritten title.
Balms and Salves; Wound Care and Other Uses.
That one lands on the floorboards as well, a thud echoing through the small space.
I pull spine by spine and every book I find has something to do with plants and their medicinal uses.
Was my mother a healer? An apothecary? She couldn’t have hidden something like that, not once we were older than ten and zero.
Maybe she could have hidden it from Silas and Finnick, but not from me. There were so few times that I wasn’t glued to her side. Maybe it was then that she was doing this, in the quiet moments. But why would she hide it?
When we were children, the threats to healers were null. Witch hunts and accusations were words we didn’t hear, so why would she keep this a secret?
I reach a section of soft leather-bound books, their pages thick, with twine wrapped around each one to hold them closed.
I pull one off the shelf, and unwind the cord, flicking open the pages to see my mother’s handwriting scribbled over the pages. I can’t help but pause to read it.
Ambrose came home covered in dust today.
He is always covered in dust, but today some more than usual.
Finnick ran straight up to him as soon as he heard his boots on the wooden floor, and I can promise I felt the baby kick in my stomach when his laugh barrelled through the room.
I couldn’t be mad when he dirtied my dress with his dusty hands, not as he got on his knees and spoke to my belly.
Definitely not as he smiled up at me from his knees…
A drop of water lands on the page, the ink spreading over my father’s name. I look up to find the source, but when I feel moisture on my cheek, I realise the source is me—my eyes flooding with tears.
These are my mother’s journals.
I hear the sound of a voice calling my name, but it’s blurry, like I am underwater, and it reminds me that I disappeared, and that Hazel and Cedar are still in my father’s study. I
don’t understand why they couldn’t see the fissure like I could, but I don’t have time to figure it out here and now.
I start collecting the books I threw on the floor, piling them into my arms one by one.
I walk over to the crack, my stomach swirling with all of this new knowledge that has somehow left me even more confused.
I take one book and throw it through the crack.
I hear a thud, which I hope means that it landed on the other side.
I toss another, and another, until all the books about herbal remedies are through.
I turn back to the bookshelf, but I pause when I see a small wooden box sitting on the shelf where I just ripped the books away.
Something draws me towards it, like an invisible force is tugging at where my feet stay planted on the floor.
Perhaps the same force that pulled me into this room itself.
I step forward, carefully pulling it out and letting my fingers trail over the delicate vines engraved into the wood. The pattern is eerily similar to that of the hilt of the dagger.
If you were to ask me if I believe in coincidences, I would say yes, but this doesn’t feel like any chance of fate.
I can feel my heart pounding rapidly in my chest and can almost hear my mind spinning with all the questions flooding it. I close my eyes, taking a deep breath and steadying myself before I delicately lift the lid of the box open.
I’m unsure what I was anticipating, but it wasn’t seeing three vials filled with dark liquid lying on the soft velvet lining.
My lips fall open as I lay the box down, holding one of the vials up to the light flooding in through the pristine window.
At first, I thought it was black, but now that I see it in the light, I realise that it’s blue.
A deep blue that resembles the bottom of the river.
The colour of the night sky when it is littered with stars. I’ve never seen anything like it.
A small velvet bag is also hidden within the box, and when I hear the faint call of my name once more, I don’t think twice before slipping the vials into the bag and stuffing it in the pocket of my skirts.
My mind is like a labyrinth, theories running wild in my head about what is sitting in my pocket.
I try to ignore the thoughts as I collect the rest of the journals from the shelf and hold them tight.
If there is so much as a hint in one of these journals that might explain the secrets hidden in this room, then I won’t risk letting a single one slip through my fingers.
I let my body stop moving, and take one long and deep breath, grounding myself in this moment before I open my eyes again. This is real. Whatever it is, this is real.
When I look over the desk once more, something glimmers under the sheets of paper, catching my eye. I safely put the journals down, lifting the paper to find my mother’s golden locket lying discarded on the desk.
My throat thickens as I gently pick it up, the gold chain rattling. I never saw her without this, not until I saw her colourless body lying in a wooden casket. A wooden casket that was most likely crafted by my father’s own hand before he too was laid to rest beside her.
She wasn’t wearing this on the day that she died. I tried to find it before their funeral, to clasp it around her neck so it could be buried with her, but I never could find it. Because it was here, hidden in this room among all the other secrets we never knew about.
I swipe at my stinging eyes again before I tuck the locket into the same pocket of my skirts, pick up her journals, and close my eyes as I step back through the crack in the wall.
When I open them again, I see the pile of books on the floor in front of me, and Hazel and Cedar looking at me with wide eyes.
“Holy tadpoles,” I whisper. “It worked.”