Chapter Twenty-Four
TWENTY-FOUR
It takes him only a second to notice they have gone the wrong way.
Left leads to the narrow back staircase that opens into the rest of the mansion. Right ends in a stained glass window with the ivy grown so thick and vicious over it that all light has been swallowed.
The garden wants in in in.
There is no exit this way.
He tries to warn Laurie, but air escapes his lungs in a punctured gasp and his vision blurs from the brief exertion. His ribs feel as if they’ve been split open beneath the bandages, and the pain makes him almost drop the field guide. Behind them, Bane bellows as he scrambles to his feet.
“Laurie. You little shit! I’m going to rip your head off!”
Evander’s fingers slip from Laurie’s, his palm too clammy with sweat. He is not a bird meant for flight; he is broken wings and forgotten petals left to dry between pages of an old book and he doesn’t know how to believe he could be anything else.
But Laurie reaches the last door in the hall and yanks at the locked knob, swears, then grabs a dusty marble bust from the closest pedestal. Cobwebs dangle from the eye sockets. With one grunt, Laurie slams it against the doorknob.
The lock shatters.
The force sends him reeling backward and crashing into Evander, who barely holds him up while his own legs buckle. He yelps as Laurie tosses aside the bust and then drags Evander through the door as it moans open.
Inside, murky light smothers the walls in a soft dove gray, shadows tall enough to swallow a person. Laurie slams the door behind them and drags over an antique dresser to block the way. Two seconds later, a heavy weight pounds against the door. Bane roars.
“Don’t you dare do this, Laurie! You know what will happen! You know what will happen to you!”
The dresser jerks but doesn’t budge as Bane hurls himself against it again and again.
Laurie backs up, breathing hard, and then glances at where Evander is melting toward the floor.
“I—I—I can’t.” Evander hates how wrecked he sounds, how pathetic. “I—I don’t feel okay. I’m—”
“No, no, you’re fine.” Laurie quickly pulls Evander back upright and pushes some of the tangled curls out of his eyes. “This is all part of my plan.”
The door wrenches again and Bane shouts profanities.
Every blow makes Evander curl farther in on himself.
Whatever surge of adrenaline he had has ebbed and his muscles feel stiff enough to snap.
He still wears only the thin knit pajama shorts and his bandages are far too tight around his shuddering ribs.
They hide most of his scars but not the long one that stretches hip to hip from the shovel.
Laurie hasn’t said anything yet about the way Evander looks, but he will; he will be uncomfortable or disgusted or pitying. Or sorry. And it isn’t his fault. It’s his grandfather’s.
Evander can’t take any more lies. They are building up inside him, crowding up his throat in fistfuls of brutal thorns, and eventually he will bleed out from the effort of swallowing it all down. He is so sick of being quiet about everything that hurts.
“Wait, what the hell is this?” Laurie turns in a slow circle.
“You just said you had a plan,” Evander snaps, but he, too, is finally taking in the musty, airless space.
It’s his bedroom.
An uncanny, icy unease spreads through his chest and he has a sudden flash of vertigo, as if maybe he dreamt their escape. As if, maybe, he is once again curled on his carpet, his fingers tracing the bloodstained whorls where once upon a time Byron Lennox-Hall pulled out his teeth.
He cut the day out of his memory with such finality that it feels made-up, especially considering he still has teeth. So then what the hell did Byron pull out of him?
what do they want with you why are they keeping you what are they doing to you—
Everything in this place is a mirror image to the bedroom they just left: the four poster with the exact same quilts, the overstuffed bookshelves with the same titles he’s grown up reading, wallpaper covered in dead-eyed fauns.
But it’s all slightly off: furniture to the left, bloodstains gone from the carpet, a fireplace where he now has a writing desk.
Evander coughs and dust motes dance in front of his face. Except it’s not dust. It’s pollen.
Then his eyes finish adjusting to the gloom.
The garden has devoured this room whole.
Vines thread around bedposts and the quilts are layered in leaves.
Shrubs nestle where the pillows should be and lichen patterns the wallpaper so thickly it suffocates the dead-eyed fauns.
Mushrooms bloom from the old book spines and the carpet is lush with clover.
But there’s no dirt, no water. These plants shouldn’t be so violently, viciously alive.
“This isn’t—possible.” His voice cracks.
Slowly, slowly, every leaf and soft green tendril begins to turn toward Evander and Laurie.
Black petals open from buds tightly folded, pistils lolling out like red tongues.
They were in the field guide: King’s Sleep.
Black trumpet-shaped petals with white berries.
Ingesting leads to paralysis. The toxic flowers are everywhere in this room. Absolutely everywhere.
The banging stops as if Bane’s given up. Or else he’s gone to find a better way to break it down.
An invisible ticking clock speeds up in the back of Evander’s skull. He’s breathing too fast as he watches a vine unwrap from the bedpost and reach for him.
“Tell me what’s going on.” Evander backs toward the door “How is—How?”
A faint sheen of panic has crossed Laurie’s face, too, and he covers his mouth against the pollen, hurrying over to the ancient fireplace so he can feel around the mantel. His touch leaves deep grooves in the dust.
“I don’t know, okay? I’ve never been in here before,” he says. “All I know is that there are tunnels in the walls and I’m sort of pretty sure—”
“That doesn’t sound goddamn sure, Laurence.”
“—that one connects to this wall. Can you not ‘Laurence’ me?” He looks determined, but the way he’s groping at the whorls and divots in the mantel’s marble carvings says he’s freaked out by the replica room too.
“I found the tunnels years ago, but I didn’t explore much because I was scared of getting caught.
But I want—need—to show you something. Hope you’re not claustrophobic. ”
“I am actually!” Evander nearly shouts, even though he’s trying to hold himself together.
But he’s staring at an inside-out version of his own bedroom and he has this sudden, sickened memory of lying bundled up in blankets by the fire, reading as it crackles merrily. His room doesn’t have a fireplace. He can’t have this memory. Unless he lived in this room once.
His eyes flick to the window, to the lack of window seat. He stood there and watched Laurie in the garden. He remembers it with the sharp precision of a slap.
All those times they’d forced him to take those heavy sedatives must have messed with his memories. It would be so easy to move him while he was disorientated and dizzy to a new bedroom. They could just gaslight him out of any confusion he had.
What? No, everything is the same as it always is. You’re confused. You’re sick, Evander.
Be
fucking
quiet.
What if the rest of the locked rooms in the north wing hall are the same? And every time the garden crept in through the windows, the door, the wallpaper, they moved Evander and made him forget.
the garden
wants you
back
Laurie makes a triumphant sound and yanks a hidden lever in the mantel. A door in the wall opens with a gravelly moan and reveals a narrow entrance into a pitch-black chasm. The dark pulses, liquid and frothing.
Laurie sucks in his breath as he squeezes through the crack. “There’s more room once you’re in.” His voice sounds disembodied from inside the wall.
Already suffocation presses a hard hand over Evander’s mouth and a low keening noise slips from his lips. “No, no. I’ll die. You’re trying to kill me. I can’t, I can’t, I—”
Laurie’s arm reaches out through the crack, pale and skeletal, palm open for Evander to grasp. Desperation fills his voice. “Please?”
Incandescent rage surges through Evander. “No.” It comes out a snarl and he backs up even farther, still clutching the field guide in one hand and the key in the other.
But a massive weight slams against the door and the dresser skids forward. Another crash and the wood around the doorknob splinters. Evander shies away, panic shoving his heart into his stomach.
“I’ll hold on to you.” Laurie’s voice sounds hollowed out, but there’s an urgency to it. “Evander, come on. This is the only way I can get you out.”
Another blow smashes into the door behind him and Evander lets out a strangled moan before fitting his fear back into the curdled cage behind his ribs. He plunges through the crack in the wall.
As soon as he’s through, the entrance groans closed. Tight hysteria splays fingers over his ribs and he can’t breathe. Can’t think. Can’t move. The space can’t be wider than the width of a coffin and, as the entrance clicks shut, it narrows even farther.
Walls press in on him. Inky fingers wrap about his throat and begin to squeeze. He’s choking. Dying. Tipping toward the gritty floor strewn with decades of filthy decay.
The field guide slips from his hands and skids into the dark.
“Hey, hey.” Laurie catches him and hauls him back to his feet. “Breathe.”
Evander’s lungs strain, frenetic and airless.
Laurie scoops up the field guide and shoves it into the waistband of his own jeans. Then his hand closes over Evander’s, the key trapped between their fingers.
“Once we get around the corner, there’s more light, I swear.”
A dull roar pulses in Evander’s ears. He can’t do this, he can’t—
“You buried me alive.” It comes out choked. “You-you-you’re doing it again. It’s j-j-j-just like last time—”
“No,” Laurie whispers. “Because I’m in here with you.”