Chapter 3 #2
I hung back from the group, phone in hand, taking pictures of various details. The way the light fell through the old glass windows. The worn spots on the floorboards where generations of feet had walked. The small, human touches that made history feel real.
But the dress kept catching my attention. Every time I moved, the rough fabric rubbed against my skin. It was hot and uncomfortable. I couldn’t stop thinking about the people who’d worn clothing like this every single day, who’d had no choice but to endure.
“You’re doing the thing,” Jenna whispered, appearing at my elbow.
“What thing?”
“The thing where you disappear into your head and forget you’re supposed to be having fun.”
“I’m documenting.”
“You’re hiding behind your phone.”
I lowered it. “I’m not hiding.”
“Mads.” She squeezed my arm. “I know this year’s been hard. The anniversary and everything. But you’re allowed to just... be present. You don’t have to perform being okay.”
My throat tightened. “I’m working on it.”
“I know.” She smiled. “Now come on. Patricia’s taking us to the gardens, and Marcus is already making jokes about colonial horticulture that are going over exactly no one’s head.”
The gardens were extensive—manicured paths winding through tropical flowers and fruit trees, everything labeled with neat plaques. Frangipani and hibiscus, banana plants and something called a breadfruit tree that looked prehistoric.
“You can return your costumes on your way out,” Patricia called out as the group spread across the gardens. “Just leave them on the hooks inside!”
“Thank God,” Marcus said, already heading back. “I’m about to die of heatstroke.”
Jenna followed him, but I lingered.
At the far edge of the property, partially hidden behind a wall of bougainvillea, I spotted something that wasn’t on the tour map.
A gate.
Iron scrollwork, ornate and old, with a chain looped through the bars and a faded “No Entry” sign hanging crooked from one post.
“What’s back there?” I asked Patricia as she passed by me on her way back to the office.
“Oh, that’s the old kitchen garden,” she said. “It’s not maintained anymore—too overgrown. We’re hoping to restore it eventually, but for now it’s off-limits. Safety concerns.”
Off-limits.
The two words that had never stopped my dad when I was a kid, as he pulled me through every roped-off section and “Staff Only” door of every historical site we’d ever visited.
You can’t learn history from just the sanitized parts, he used to say. The real stories are in the places they don’t want you looking.
I glanced back at the main gardens. Jenna and Marcus were already near the costume building, laughing about something. Patricia was gathering the rest of the group near the koi pond.
Do something unplanned, Marcus had said.
Be spontaneous, Jenna had said.
Before I could talk myself out of it, I took a deep breath, and slipped through the gap between the gate and the post.
The garden on the other side was nothing like the manicured grounds I’d left behind.
Wild, overgrown, the kind of place that felt forgotten by time.
Vines twisted through crumbling stone walls.
Flowers I couldn’t name grew in riots of color—purple and red and white.
The air tasted different here. Heavier. Like rain and old stories.
The rough dress caught on a branch as I pushed forward, the fabric tearing slightly at the hem. I tugged it free and kept walking.
A path, barely visible through the undergrowth, led deeper into the garden. I followed it, phone forgotten in my pocket, just meandering along. The sounds of the tour group faded behind me until all I could hear was the wind in the leaves and a bird calling somewhere—three notes, descending.
The path ended at a clearing.
At its center stood a stone structure. Not quite a wall, not quite an altar. Maybe the foundation of something that used to be a building? Weathered gray stone, covered in moss and carved with symbols I didn’t recognize. Celtic, maybe? No, older than that. Stranger.
The air hummed.
Not a sound, exactly. More like a feeling, the way you can sense a thunderstorm building before the first lightning strikes. My skin prickled beneath the rough linen.
“You’ve wandered far to find what you’ve already lost.”
I spun around.
A woman stood at the edge of the clearing, silver hair falling past her shoulders, down her back to her waist. Her face was flawless, and yet.
.. I’d swear she was ancient. The way she held herself reminded me of statues of ancient goddesses.
She wore a cloak despite the heat, the color of midnight. And her eyes were almost silver.
“I’m sorry,” I said, pulse jumping in my throat. “I didn’t realize anyone was back here. The tour guide said—”
“She knows nothing of doors.” The woman moved closer, gliding across the ground without seeming to walk. “Only of surfaces and stories told in daylight.”
Okay. This was officially weird.
“I should get back to my friends,” I said, taking a step toward the path.
“Should you?” She tilted her head, considering me the way a crow considers something shiny. “Or should you pay attention to where your feet have carried you? Doors open for a reason, child.”
“Doors?”
“Thresholds. Choices. The places between what was and what might be.”
She gestured toward the stone structure. “You feel it, don’t you? The pull.”
I wanted to say no. I wanted to be my normal, logical, rational self who believed in spreadsheets and schedules and things that made sense.
But I’d be lying.
Because I did feel something. A pull, like she said. Like the stone was humming my name in a frequency only my bones could hear.
“What is this place?” I asked.
“Old.” She smiled, sad and knowing. “Older than the plantation, older than the sugar trade and the ships that brought sorrow here. This land remembers what everyone has forgotten.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“No. But it’s true.” She reached into her cloak and pulled out something small and dark. When she opened her palm, I saw a black feather. Too large for any bird I knew, iridescent and gleaming despite the shadows.
The wind picked up. The feather lifted from her palm and drifted toward me, spiraling in the air like it was dancing to music I couldn’t hear.
I caught it without thinking.
The moment my fingers closed around it, the world shifted. Just slightly—a tilt, like the ground had decided to be something other than solid.
“Choose carefully,” the old woman said, her voice suddenly distant, like she was speaking from the bottom of a well. “Fate opens doors, child. But you’re the one who walks through them.”
“I don’t understand.”
“You will.”
She stepped back, and the air wavered around her—like mirage and shadow and something else, something that made my eyes hurt to look at directly.
When I blinked, she was gone.
Just—gone.
No footprints remained in the soft earth. No rustling of branches to show which way she’d walked. Nothing but the feather in my hand and the certainty settling in my chest that I had not imagined her.
Logic. There had to be a logical explanation.
Maybe heat exhaustion. Maybe that margarita had been stronger than I thought. Maybe this rough dress was making me hallucinate somehow—
The stone hummed louder.
I looked at it—really looked. The carvings seemed to shift in the dappled light, forming patterns that were almost words, almost pictures, almost something I could understand if I just moved a bit closer.
Don’t touch it, the rational part of my brain said. This is how horror movies start.
But the other part—the part that had followed my dad through a hundred historical sites, the part that believed stories had power, the part that maybe, possibly, secretly wanted something unplanned to happen—that part was already moving.
I reached out, pressing my palms flat against the stone.
It was warm. Fever-warm, like it had been sitting in direct sunlight, even though I was in the shade. The humming traveled up my arms, into my chest, resonating in my ribs like a second heartbeat.
For a moment, nothing happened.
Then the world split apart.
Light exploded behind my eyes—white and blinding and everywhere at once.
Sound collapsed into a single ringing note that went on and on.
The ground disappeared. The sky disappeared.
Everything disappeared except the light and sound and the sensation of falling through something that wasn’t quite space, wasn’t quite time.
I tried to scream. Tried to pull my hands back.
But it was too late.
Darkness rushed in to fill the space where light had been. Cold replaced warmth. Silence swallowed all sound. I was falling, I was flying, I was being pulled apart and put back together.
Then, just as suddenly as it started—
It stopped.
I was on the ground. Grass beneath my hands. Real, solid earth.
My ears rang. My vision swam. I gasped for air like I’d been underwater, every breath burning. The rough dress was soaked with sweat, clinging to my skin.
Slowly, the world came back into focus.
I was still in the garden.
But it was different.
The manicured paths were gone. The labeled plants were gone.
The neat stone walls and careful restoration—all gone.
Instead, wild sugarcane grew in thick stands, tall enough to block the view.
The air was different—thicker, carrying the smell of smoke from cooking fires and something sweet and heavy. Molasses, maybe.
And the sounds.
Voices. Distant, speaking in accents I couldn’t quite place. The clang of metal. Someone singing in a language I didn’t know.
I pushed myself to my knees, head spinning. The black feather was still in my hand. The stone behind me looked the same—ancient and weathered—but the clearing had changed. Or I had changed. Or—
“No,” I whispered. “No, no, no. This isn’t—this doesn’t—”
A bell rang. Not the gentle wind chime from the tour group, but something deeper. Louder. The kind of bell that called people to work or prayer or—
What happened?
I stood on shaking legs, looking for something familiar. Anything that would make sense. The villa, the tour group, my friends in their ridiculous costumes...
I looked down at myself, at the rough linen dress I was still wearing. Through the sugarcane, I caught a glimpse of white stone. The great house.
Relief flooded through me. Okay. I was still at Rose Hall. I’d just gotten turned around. Heat exhaustion, dehydration, too much tequila at eleven in the morning. I’d find Patricia, rejoin the group, laugh about my little episode.
I pushed through the sugarcane toward the house.
And stopped.
The house was there. Same structure, same bones.
But not the same.
The paint was fresh, pristine. The gardens were different—less English formal, more practical.
The windows had different glass, wavy and old.
And in the distance, past the house, I saw fields that hadn’t been there before.
Fields of sugarcane stretching to the horizon, dotted with figures bent over the crop.
People working.
People in clothes that were wrong. Simple, rough fabric. Styles that looked like something from a museum exhibit.
From a history book.
Like the dress I was wearing.
I reached for my phone, but my pocket was empty. Lost when—when whatever had happened. The only thing in my hand was the black feather.
Don’t panic, I told myself. There’s an explanation. There’s always an explanation.
But my hands were shaking, my pulse was racing, and somewhere deep in my chest, underneath the fear, was a terrible suspicion that maybe—just maybe—the old woman hadn’t been crazy.
Maybe she’d been right.
I’d walked through a door.
The bell rang again in the distance. Closer now. My legs gave out.
I sat down hard in the grass, the rough dress tangling around my legs. The black feather slipped from my fingers, caught by the breeze and carried away on the wind.
I stared at the house in front of me—familiar and impossibly foreign at the same time.
Something was terribly, terribly wrong.