Chapter 4 The Storm and the Door
The Storm and the Door
The storm arrives on the hour, punctual as a train. Or Mrs. Whitby’s daily diary. Dinner was uneventful, as Larkin had apparently been struck by a headache.
By dawn, the gardens are erased under a drift of new snow, and the house groans with the strain of wind against its bones.
I watch from the Blue Room window, hands wrapped around a cup of black coffee, the surface rippling with each shudder of the pane.
The snow is relentless, falling in sheets, fencing the manor off from the rest of the world.
Breakfast is a solitary affair. A tray appears at my door. Coffee, toast, marmalade, and a pair of soft-boiled eggs in cups lined up like soldiers on a plate. I eat in silence, reading the letter from the lawyer again, tracing my aunt’s name as if it might change in the daylight.
I decide to walk the perimeter, to take stock of the land that has, for better or worse, become mine.
The boots I wear are not made for deep snow, but the crunch underfoot is solid and satisfying.
The world is muffled, transformed into a tunnel of white and gray, the lines of the hedges and trellises just visible beneath the crust. I follow the path from yesterday, wondering if Lane has things to do outside when it snows or if he hibernates like a big bear.
I don’t have to wonder for long. I find him at the gate to the orchard, clearing ice from the hinges with a short-handled axe. He’s wearing a wool hat now, ears flattened beneath the knit, and a pair of gloves with the fingertips cut away. He doesn’t look up until I’m practically beside him.
“You’ll freeze out here,” he says, not unkindly.
I shrug. “I wanted to see the snow before it gets worse. I’m surprised you’re out here working, though I suppose I shouldn’t be.”
He sets the axe aside, leans against the gate post. The stance is defensive, but there’s a restlessness in him, an energy that seems barely contained by the layers of wool and canvas.
“You get the house, you get the headaches too,” he says. “No one tells you that.”
I smile, brittle. “They told me about the money, not the weather.”
He huffs. “Money never lasts. The cold always does.”
I gesture at the orchard, its rows of trees black and skeletal against the snow. “You manage all this yourself?”
He considers, then nods. “Mostly. Some of the staff help with harvest, and I usually get a helper for the grounds in the summer, but the rest of the year, it’s me.”
I look at his hands—huge, battered, surprisingly gentle as he brushes snow from the latch. “You like it?”
He hesitates, then glances at me sidelong. “I don’t need to like it. It needs doing.”
The wind picks up, funneling between the trees and making the orchard whistle. Lane folds his arms, chin sunk into his collar.
“What do you think of it so far?” he asks.
I don’t answer right away. The honest answer is that I haven’t decided what I think. There’s too much here. Too much opulence. Too much decay.
Too much strangeness.
“It’s dark. But in a beautiful way,” I say. “I don’t know what I’d do with it.”
He stares at me, eyes narrowed against the wind. “Everyone thinks they’re here to own the place. But no one ever does. Not really. It’s the other way around.”
There’s an edge to the words, a bitterness that doesn’t quite fit with the rest of him.
“It’s just a house,” I say, though I know already that it’s not.
Lane smiles, but it’s more like a wince. “Sure. You keep telling yourself that.”
We stand together at the threshold, not moving.
The snow swirls around us, landing on his beard and melting instantly.
I realize I’ve never been this close to him before, close enough to feel the heat coming off his body, the electricity of proximity.
He’s taller than I remembered, his shoulders wide enough to block out the sun, if there were any left.
“Storm’ll last a week, maybe more,” he says. “Roads get buried out here. Sometimes takes days before they plow it out.”
I swallow, thinking of the long driveway, the isolation. “That sounds like a warning.”
He shakes his head, slow. “Just telling you. Some people, they get stuck out here, things go bad. Place has a way of getting in your head.”
I shiver, but not from the cold.
“Is that what happened to you?” I ask.
He looks at me, really looks, and I see something flicker behind his eyes—a memory, a pain, a confession unsaid.
He doesn’t answer, but he doesn’t deny it, either.
For a long moment, neither of us moves. The wind slams a branch against the gate, and Lane catches it before it can hit me, his gloved hand wrapping around my arm with more force than necessary.
“Careful,” he says, voice pitched low. “Wouldn’t want you hurt.”
The touch is brief, but it lingers, burning through the fabric of my sleeve.
He lets go, steps back, gestures at the house. “You should go inside. It gets worse from here.”
I don’t move, not right away. I want to say something clever, something that will break the tension, but my mouth is dry and the words won’t come.
Lane turns, picking up his axe, and heads into the orchard, boots sinking into the snow with every step. I watch him go, his figure shrinking between the rows of trees, until all that’s left is the echo of his warning, and the certainty that I have no idea what I’ve gotten myself into.
Back inside, I strip off my boots and coat, stand by the radiator until the feeling returns to my hands. I stare out at the garden, the orchard, the blank horizon beyond.
The storm erases everything, wipes the slate clean.
I wish it worked the same way inside.
The snow stops, eventually, but only after the wind has scoured every inch of the estate into a blank, shuddering silence.
By midafternoon, the sun makes a cameo, and the Blue Room fills with a fractured glow, cold as moonlight.
I drink coffee on the sill and stare down at the formal garden, now a series of white scars and shadow trenches.
The drifts have rendered the footpaths impassable; the hedge maze is nothing but an embossed print on a bedsheet.
The air inside is syrupy with heat, too thick for breathing.
I close the radiator vent and still sweat in the thinnest blouse I own.
By three o’clock, the restlessness becomes unbearable.
I decide, with the fatalism of the recently paroled, to explore the parts of Hemlock House I’ve so far avoided.
The East Wing, for instance, has been studiously ignored by both Mrs. Whitby and Larkin.
Even Lane, in his gruff way, implied that the wing was best left to itself.
The corridor leading there is narrow, a tunnel of wallpaper and stale air.
The paper itself is a faded fleur-de-lis pattern, punctuated by long, vertical tears.
At regular intervals, the old house has puckered and split, exposing the lath beneath like a wound gone septic.
The floorboards are uneven, swelling with each step, and the dust is fine as cornstarch. My boots leave prints behind me.
There’s a feeling, not quite fear but its caffeine-addled cousin anxiety, that builds as I walk.
Maybe it’s the cold coming through the windowpanes—older glass, thinner, trembling in the wind—or maybe it’s the certainty that I’m somewhere I shouldn’t be.
But why shouldn’t I be? Ever since my arrival, I’ve accepted the rules here as if they’re gospel, but I own this place now. When will it start to feel like it?
The further I go, the more the house seems to close in, the ceilings lowering, the walls bowing just so.
Here and there, I see patches of the original wallpaper, the color preserved beneath an abandoned painting or the outline of a vanished cabinet.
Some spots are almost pristine, others colonized by a fine haze of mildew.
There are stains on the ceiling, too, old watermarks that have bloomed into nebulae of ochre and brown.
Halfway down the corridor, the carpet runner gives out and the wood beneath is so warped it feels like walking the spine of some giant fossil.
I pass a door that looks as if it hasn’t been opened in a century—no knob, just a black keyhole.
I kneel, out of some compulsion I can’t name, and peer through the hole.
All I see is darkness and a single, pale strand of cobweb glinting in the shaft of light from behind me.
I touch the door and the dust sticks to my palm, gritty and cold.
Further on, the air changes. It smells less like dust and more like something chemical—paint stripper, maybe, or the ghost of some ancient cleaning fluid. They used all sorts of unsavory things back in the day, and if anywhere has an overstock of Victorian chemicals, it would be Hemlock House.
There’s a window at the end of the hall to the left, crusted with frost, and the light that comes through it is blue and trembling.
I catch my reflection in the glass—hair wild, lips cracked, dark circles under my eyes that haven’t gone away since I got here.
The scar in my brow is more visible than usual.
I haven’t bothered with makeup since arriving and I think I look like a before photo in an ad for vitamins.
The corridor stops at a door unlike any other in the house.
It’s taller, maybe a foot above the others, and black—not painted, but stained so deep that the wood grain is nearly invisible.
The surface is carved with what looks like a repeating pattern, but the closer I look, the more the pattern shifts, splitting and recombining.
The handle is old brass, shaped like a woman’s hand, of all things. I hesitate, flexing my own fingers as if comparing them for size. The air around the door is colder, though the source isn’t clear; maybe it’s the draft from the stairwell, or maybe just the way some spaces hoard their own weather.