Chapter 15
Ever since I was a little girl, people have had a tendency to spill their secrets at my feet. Drunk middle-aged women over for dinner at my parents’ manor would tell me that their husbands had never touched them, not even on their wedding night. Men would wander off to the balcony to smoke, find me perched atop the railing, my feet dangling over the edge, and confide in me that they’d never felt successful enough for their titles. Or they’d tell me about the working-class woman they let their aristocratic parents talk them out of marrying. Every one of them had a gaping hole in their soul, one that success and riches had never even begun to fill.
I guess I have one of those faces. Gentle eyes free of judgment. Or perhaps I’ve always seemed the type of girl with too few friends to risk telling their secrets.
Either way, people do not hold their tongues in my presence.
Guilt taps against my soul as I remember the walk earlier today with Simon. He’s a nice boy, one I think might wish to be a friend to me here.
But it had worked.
All it had taken was asking him if he’d ever wanted to escape, and he’d told me exactly where Peter keeps his faerie dust reserves.
Besides, I have to get John and Michael out of here. Something is off about this island, these boys. There’s a grisly truth hiding in the shadows, crawling in the canopy, waiting to strike. I’m not sure what happened here that has Victor so embittered—that has Simon so nervous around Victor—but I keep replaying something he said.
Peter did nothing.
He’d almost told me in the forest, but something had stopped him.
I keep counting up my memories like I’m a vendor in the market numbering my stock to make sure a petty thief hasn’t run off with anything.
There are memories I wouldn’t mind this island taking from me—the feel of velvet underneath my fingernails and hot, greedy breath against my flesh. The last flash of light in my parents’ eyes before their spirits slipped from their bodies through the gashes in their throats.
But I won’t let this island take my brothers’ memories.
I won’t let it make me forget who Peter is.
I’m afraid of what I might succumb to if I let myself forget his dreadful shadows, the way they taunted me as a child.
As if thinking of them invited them in, the thought of shadows caressing my skin slithers through me, tantalizing me with their beautiful lies.
I could take away your pain.
If I can’t remember, I’m not sure I’ll have the strength to resist.
It’sa shame Peter doesn’t keep the faerie dust in the Den. Although, the idea of sneaking through Peter’s quarters sends chills against the lining of my stomach. Perhaps it’s better he hides it in the cliffs.
I’ve been wracking my brain all day to figure out a way to scale the cliffs at the edge of the beach. I almost asked for John’s help. He has the sort of mind that would probably engineer a system for us to scale the cliffs twice as quickly as mine will take. But I don’t want John coming with me. He’s sacrificed enough already for our family. Not just his finger, but the time and mental energy he spent—wasted—on trying to find a way out of our parents’ bargain.
Besides. Someone needs to stay behind to watch Michael.
So I wait until night falls, though I have to guess at it since there are no windows in our room, and for John’s and Michael’s breaths to deepen.
Then I sneak on the pads of my feet and make my way outside.
Every timeI pass through the reaping tree, the process is shorter. Like there’s less and less for the tree to take from my innermost being.
I try not to think about that as I break into a run across the wet sand of the beach. The tide has come in, swallowing up most of the beach’s surface, but there’s still enough of a path for me to run down without having to worry about clambering barefoot through the brush, though occasionally I have to traverse piles of rocks.
The kelp that lines the beach during the day sloshes up with the tide, wrapping its slimy claws around my ankles. Simon told me earlier that the awful-looking plants with shiny bulbs for heads are actually edible, but even the idea of that makes me nauseous. Every time one grazes my skin, I can’t shake the feeling that their tendrils are like those of the jellyfish, just waiting to wrap around my limbs and drag me paralyzed underneath the sea.
The bluish moon has already traversed a quarter of tonight’s black sky by the time I make it all the way down the beach and to the cliffs that bar it from the rest of the island.
I stare upward, frustrated at how difficult it is to see out here. I had counted on the darkness, grabbing a lantern from the hall, but it does little to illuminate my path with the thick fog that creeps up from the surface of the crashing water.
Waves slap against the stubborn facade of the cliffs, whipping the rocks into a slow submission.
Luckily, the cliffs themselves are rather jagged. Not only does the texture provide plenty of handholds, but as I stare upward with my hands on my hips, I glimpse alcoves and small plateaus that will make for adequate rest stops.
So I loop my lantern through my belt—Simon supplied it to me along with a set of trousers and a tunic after commenting on how impractical my ball gown was—and climb.
The rocks at the base of the cliffs are still slick from the waves lapping up and staining the bottom surface, but once I scale several feet carefully, the rocks dry out.
It’s effortful work, and I can’t help but thank my past self for climbing the clock tower’s outer brick facade all those years.
John doesn’t know about that, of course. He thinks I only ever climbed the ladder.
It’s a strange thing, thinking about my younger self partaking in such recklessness. But there’s something about the pounding of blood against my temples, the way my lungs fight for breath, that clears my head of anything besides what’s directly before me.
Not falling—I can focus on that.
I never was able to banish the fears of what all might transpire in the future. But climb high enough, and the simple need to survive drove them out for just a moment.
Eventually, our excursions to the top of the clock tower didn’t affect me like they once did. The ladder felt too stable, too easy, the rungs a tether that kept me from floating away from the knowledge of what my future held.
I was twelve when I first climbed the clock tower from the outside.
It’s positioned in the center of my parents’ manor, in the middle of a gardened courtyard. Meaning I had to make my climbs in the middle of the night. That wasn’t so much of a problem, though. Sleepless nights made my acquaintance from a young age.
The clock tower is styled with bricks stacked perpendicular to one another. The alternating pattern looks expensive, but it serves the unintended functionality of making it possible to scale. It had taken years for me to build up the strength and endurance to make it to the top, of course. I’m not sure how many nights I spent on one of the decorative platforms jutting from the tower, mustering up the courage to climb back down.
One time, I slipped and landed on a platform below. I broke my ankle and told my mother I’d tripped down the staircase.
Still, scaling the outside of the clock tower did what the inside ladder could no longer accomplish. It allowed me to drown the fear of something I couldn’t control in the exhilaration of something I could. There’s something empowering about using a fear you choose to smother the one you don’t.
Of course, the clock tower wasn’t quite this high.
When I come to the fifth alcove, I’m sweating so profusely my palms have gone slick and I have to rest on the platform for a while until my hands dry again. It takes longer than I want it to with the humidity fighting against me.
But I slowly fall into a rhythm. Climb, rest, climb, rest, until I finally reach the top of the cliffs.
There’s part of me that longs to gaze down, to take in the great heights which I just climbed, but wisdom reminds me that if I don’t find the faerie dust, I’ll have to climb back down. So perhaps looking isn’t in my best interest.
The cliffs themselves jut out over the water and come to a point. It’s there at the tip I find a ramshackle warehouse. I can hardly believe my luck as I race over to the dingy structure. When I reach the door, I find it locked, but that was to be expected.
I pull out one of the many hairpins left over from how my hair was styled for the ball. I haven’t been able to bring myself to take it down. Not when it was my mother who insisted on running a brush gently through my tresses before the maids set to work on their task.
I can’t think of my mother now. Not when John and Michael are still alive and I need to keep my focus honed on saving them.
When we were ten, John and I got on a spy kick and read all the books in our parents’ massive library on the subject. It took us several weeks of sheer determination to learn how to pick a lock. Looking back, I realize it was quite impressive for ten-year-olds, which is likely why my parents allowed it to persist. Eventually, after many grueling fights and bickering and tears that rendered John’s glasses smudged and useless, we successfully picked the lock to our father’s study.
Of course, as soon as he found us roaming around in there, we were sentenced to grounding for a month. During our imprisonment, we continued to practice from our separate rooms. By the time our punishment was over, we’d become rather proficient at the process.
I tenderly place the two pins into the lock, feeling for the gentle give that will tell me the first is in place. Nurturing the lock takes a while, especially since my hands are still shaking from the exertion of my climb, but eventually it sends the feedback I’m looking for down the little pin. Like it’s pressing a gentle hand to my shoulder to urge me to continue.
There’s a rhythm to lock picking that reminds me of strumming my fingers against a harp, losing myself and my thoughts in the gentle hum of its strings. My excitement builds as I feel the tension of my pick, indicating I’m about to succeed, but then a sensation I haven’t experienced in a long while washes over me.
A cool dread seeps through my veins, begging me to let it in. And now I’m not the one breaking in but the one being broken into, the walls around my mind and heart crumbling as the darkness seeps into the cracks, threatening to overcome me.
Someone, a woman, cries out in the distance, her beautiful voice ringing in my ears.
The makeshift picks fall to the earth, lost to the dust that’s the same shade as I cover my ears with my palms to drown out the sound.
Horror, damp and dark, slips through the spaces my fingertips can’t seal, whispering atrocities in my ears. Begging me to come and see, to come and lay my eyes upon its terrors.
Shadows, dreadful and fierce, take shape around me, forming into shapes of people, tall and small, adults and children chanting words I can’t grasp. And through it all, a woman’s voice slices deep into my soul. Screaming, begging for me to listen, to drown in her sorrow with her.
They urge me to turn around, to face them for what they truly are, to hear their stories, but I know these kinds of stories. The ones that will torment me until I’m paralyzed, feverish.
Except now, my mother won’t find me seizing on the ground. My father won’t pick me up and carry me to the soft comforts of my bed, where my mother will place a cool cloth against my head and nurse me back to health, reassuring me that the shadows aren’t real. That my nightmares, the visions, aren’t real.
The nightmares beg to differ.