Chapter 19
The crying was relentless.
It began, as it did every night, with a sound. It was thin and sorrowful, then progressed into a soft, broken wailing.
Elizabeth was crying again.
The sound curled around the corners of my mind, refusing to let me sleep. My eyes opened slowly, listening.
The fire burned low now, reduced to a soft nest of embers. The shadows had grown longer, the corners of the room sinking into thick velvet darkness. Pale moonlight pooled on the floor like spilled milk, silvering the bedposts and my bare toes as I sat up.
I didn’t think. I simply moved.
The blanket slipped from my shoulders. The air was cool against my arms, but I didn’t reach for my robe. I padded to the door, my hand finding the latch as if it had done so many times before. It gave without a sound.
Not locked as I had expected.
I turned, glancing back at Poe’s sleeping form upon the mantle before slipping out quietly.
The corridor beyond was still. Hollow.
But the crying continued–somewhere distant, like the echo of a voice trapped under water.
I followed it.
My feet carried me through the halls with a strange, boneless ease. I was aware of myself, but not entirely in myself, as though I watched from just above my own shoulder. The sconces were unlit, but the moon illuminated the halls in strips and spears of light that only made the shadows blacker.
I passed a mirror. For a moment, I didn’t see my reflection. That should’ve frightened me, but it didn’t.
I simply kept walking.
The sound led me toward the east wing. The air chilled around me. The walls narrowed, and the floor sloped subtly downward. I moved slowly, my hand trailing along the worn wallpaper for guidance.
But no matter how many steps I took, the crying was always just ahead of me.
Then it stopped.
I froze.
A single door stood at the end of the corridor. Narrow. Red. The wood was warped and glistening with age. An iron handle curled like a serpent’s tongue at its center. I didn’t want to touch it.
But my hand lifted anyway.
I knocked once.
The door creaked open on its own.
A room lay beyond, small, windows barred like a cage waiting for me. The only light came from the bruised glow of moonlight slipping in through a jagged crack in the ceiling. The air was thick with mildew and dust, heavy with silence. At the far end of the room stood a woman.
Her hair hung over her face, her gown torn and soaked at the hem, as if she had walked through a river to find me.
Elizabeth.
“Lucy…” she hissed. “He’ll kill you too.”
She repeated the same warning she’d given me in the garden.
I couldn’t move.
Her face began to lift, her mouth parting wider, her voice becoming a shriek that didn’t belong in the throat of anything living.
Then I awoke.
Gasping.
My back lay against ice-cold stone. My nightdress clung to my skin with sweat. I pushed myself upright with trembling hands.
I was lying in the east wing.
Alone.
The door to the tower remained closed and locked.
The chill of the stone seeped into my spine, anchoring me to the floor. My limbs felt distant, as if they belonged to someone else. The shadows shifted around me. Nothing was still. Not even the walls.
Had I been asleep? Dreaming? Was I still dreaming?
Sleepwalking.
I must have been sleepwalking. That’s what it was. It had to be.
But even as I thought it, the memory of the crying woman, of her voice whispering, lingered so clearly in my mind.
I stumbled forward, one hand braced on the wall, trying to remember the way back to my room. My bare feet dragged over the cold floors. The corridor stretched longer than it should have.
My vision blurred, the halls warped.
My heart kicked against my ribs.
I tripped. The wall caught me before the floor could. I slumped hard against it, breath heaving, the weight of my own body suddenly unbearable.
“Lucy.”
His voice, soft and strained, uncoiled behind me.
Sylum.
His steps were slow and deliberate as he approached me, hands casually tucked into his pockets. His face blurred in and out of focus, features half-shadowed, half-moonlit. I could have sworn a small smile tugged his lips as he reached out to steady me.
“Lucy,” he said again, but his voice was muffled, as though I were hearing it from a great distance.
I blinked up at him, my lashes weighted, trying to focus. My thoughts wouldn’t string together. My mind refused to fully wake. My head felt like it had been wrapped in wool.
His hand brushed my brow, sweeping hair from my face with a tenderness that did not match the coldness gathering in his eyes.
He cupped my chin roughly, tilting it side to side as if examining me. He made a disapproving sound with his tongue.
Then, I felt another presence.
A woman stepped up beside him. I couldn’t see her clearly. Only the blur of pale skin, dark skirts, and a halo of golden hair before she stepped out of view. They spoke in low voices, urgent, but unreadable. The sound washed over me in waves of static.
Then, she laughed. Soft. Feminine.
“I told you she’s completely out of her mind.”
I tried to turn my head toward her, but Sylum’s hand remained under my chin, firmly keeping me in place.
He glanced up at her and smiled again.
My stomach turned at the sight.
I tried to speak, tried to ask who she was—though I was nearly certain it was Lydia—but I couldn’t even part my lips.
I tried to lift my arm, to reach for him, to say something. But, the words never made it.
“Hold her still,” he gritted out, voice hard and cold.
The woman shoved me forward, restraining my arms behind my back.
“W-what are…” I croaked, struggling against her hold.
Sylum reached into his jacket pocket withdrawing something unseen tucked in his palm. A gentle pop sound echoed through the hall, then a glass vile was pressed to my lips.
“Drink,” he commanded.
I turned my head, thrashing side to side. The pressure on my wrists eased as the woman adjusted her grip, but the relief was short-lived. He reached up and grasped my chin roughly again. He squeezed, finger and thumb pressing into my cheeks painfully until my lips parted.
Warm metallic liquid offended my tongue, burning as it slid down the back of my throat.
I cried out, trying to spit it out, only managing to breathe it into my lungs instead.
I coughed and sputtered, twisting and thrashing my body violently.
My elbow landed against something solid and the woman shrieked, then a loud thud as a cracking sound reverberated, falling silent suddenly as her cry faded.
Sylum peered over my shoulder in her direction, his eyes narrowing, his jaw clenching.
He slid one arm beneath my knees, another behind my back, and I was lifted.
Cradled against his chest. I pressed my cheek weakly to the front of his coat, unable to keep my head from lolling.
The scent of him was familiar, woodsy, but then again, something was off.
There was the faintest hint of something foul, almost medicinal, that turned my insides.
“Not yet,” he murmured, looking down at me. “But soon.”
I tried again to speak, but darkness crept up again, slow and unstoppable.
And I let it take me.
When I opened my eyes again, I was in my bed. Pale morning light mingled with the moon outside my windows.
I wasn’t even sure if I had slept at all.
The memory, if it was a memory, clung to me like a bruise. Elizabeth’s ghost. Sylum’s face above mine, emptied of warmth. The woman beside him, laughing softly.
It couldn’t have been real.
And yet my body remembered.
My limbs were heavy. My mouth tasted faintly metallic and my head throbbed with a dull, insistent ache that pulsed behind my eyes.
I rolled onto my side, the room tilting sharply with the movement. A wave of dizziness surged, and I squeezed my eyes shut until it passed.
Poe’s gaze met mine at once.
He had hopped closer on the nightstand, his black eyes unblinking, uncomfortably aware. I reached for him with shaking fingers, burying them in the slick warmth of his blue-black feathers.
“Have I been dreaming?” I wondered aloud.
He nuzzled into my hand, chattering softly, then lifted his head, throat bobbing.
“For the moon never beams,” he crooned, voice low and reverent, “without bringing me dreams.”
I exhaled a shaky breath and rolled onto my back, staring up at the canopy. The silky fabric above me seemed to ripple subtly, bending shadows in ways that made my stomach queasy. My thoughts folded in on themselves, looping until memory and imagination became indistinguishable.
I had to know.
Before fear could reason with me, before sense could intervene, I shoved the coverlet aside and swung my legs over the edge of the bed.
My heart stopped.
Blood.
Thick, dark, and copper-bright in the moonlight.
It soaked the front of my nightgown, streaking downward in ugly, uneven rivulets. My breath left me in a sharp, strangled gasp as I looked down further.
My legs were coated in it.
“No,” I cried. “No, no, no!”
I leapt from the bed with a scream that tore itself raw from my lungs, clawing at my gown, my blood-slick hands shaking uncontrollably.
“I’m bleeding… please, someone help!”
The room spun violently. My knees buckled, and I stumbled back, slipping on the rug as terror overtook me completely. I screamed again, raw and wordless, my body locked in the certainty that something inside me had broken beyond repair.
The connecting door flew open.
“Lucy!”
Sylum burst into the room in only his robe, hair disheveled, eyes wild with sleep and sudden horror. He froze for half a heartbeat—just long enough to take in the sight of me, blood-streaked and sobbing—then he was by my side.
“My God,” he breathed. “Lucy!”
He crossed the room in two strides, grasping my shoulders, forcing me gently but firmly to still.
“Are you hurt?” he demanded, panic roughening his voice. “Where is it coming from? Lucy, tell me!”
I couldn’t speak.
I shook violently, sobs wracking my chest as he searched me with frantic hands, checking my arms, my waist, my sides. He dropped to his knees, lifting the hem of my gown with shaking fingers, scanning my legs for wounds.
“There’s no cut,” he muttered, voice cracking. “There’s no… Lucy, where does it hurt?”
I collapsed against him, clutching at his robe, screaming incoherently as terror consumed all thought.
Footsteps thundered in the corridor.
“What is the meaning of this?” Isolde’s sharp voice cut through the air.
She rushed into the room, candle held aloft, her face blanching as she took in the scene.
“Good heavens!”
Mrs. Ashby followed close behind, her composure shattering the instant she saw the blood. The candle trembled in her hand.
“Sweet mercy,” she said with a sharp exhale. “Your Grace…”
The room erupted in voices—Sylum calling my name, his aunt demanding explanations, and Mrs. Ashby issuing sharp commands for linens and water.
But then, another scream, that wasn’t my own, echoed through the halls.
It rose from somewhere deep within the manor, piercing and unmistakably human. A scream of pure terror that sliced through the chaos like a blade.
Every voice in the room died at once.
Sylum went rigid beneath my hands.
Mrs. Ashby’s eyes widened in horror as she cast her gaze up and down the hallway.
Isolde’s mouth fell open, her face paling.
The scream echoed again, closer this time, reverberating through the bones of the house itself.
Poe took flight, wings beating wildly as he shrieked from above. “Nevermore! Nevermore!”
And in that moment, I knew that I had never been dreaming at all.