Chapter 1 #3
Then they were in Uncle Henry’s Room—oh, probably it was The Lavender Suite or something, but Uncle Henry had laid claim to it a century before and the name had stuck—and her words petered out.
It was ridiculous. It was absurd. There were tapestries.
There was a bed approximately the size of the M&T Bank stadium with actual posts at each corner and curtains you could draw around it so the servants couldn’t watch you sleep.
There was also, rather blessedly, electric light happening when you pulled the string by the door.
Except the light revealed what was at the far end of the wall.
Which was an even better reason to sleep with the bed curtains closed.
Uncle Henry, Ross explained, had been some big explorer type back in Queen Victoria’s day.
He’d gone to Africa back when taking other people’s stuff had been Britain’s chief stock in trade, and here was a lot of that stuff just gathering dust on a shelf, which those people’s descendants were probably agitating about getting back.
Uncle Henry’s tastes, it appeared, had run to the grotesque.
The half-dozen statuettes he’d decided to decorate his room with were—probably the words were ‘highly stylised,’ though Elena would also have accepted ‘creepy as fuck.’ Long-legged, hunch-backed, the small head well below the great round curve of the shoulders.
The V carved into the chest was a sharp nose, looking down, she realised.
She almost joked that they had the Enderbough features down, but Ross was flushed and visibly angry, now his dad wasn’t around to see it, and she judged the time wasn’t right for ribbing him.
The figures’ arms were carved into the torso, too short, crooked, tucked in. She honestly couldn’t say what it was about them that pushed all the creepy buttons, just as she couldn’t say why the hell Uncle Henry had wanted to bring them back with him, but here they were.
And there was something more. She remembered the brief flash she’d had of that nasty wings-spread carving over the front door.
The Enderby Angel. And these statuettes were absolutely different in every possible way from that image.
Except some part of her mind that didn’t show its working was telling her they were the same.
They slept with the curtains drawn, and Elena turned every one of those statuettes to the wall beforehand, shuddering as she touched the dark, oiled wood.
Her bladder woke her some time much later, and needless to say nobody had thought about en-suite bathrooms back in umpteen hundred and three when the house was built.
It took some courage to part the curtains.
Everything was completely silent, but that didn’t mean there wasn’t a hunched, beak-nosed shape waiting out there to scare the bejesus out of her.
She tried to remember where the john had been. Somewhere down the hall and then round a corner. Barefoot, a blanket clutched about her, she tottered out to find it.
And she couldn’t, of course, and she padded back and forth and up and down, only thankful it was too dark for all those portraits of Enderbough ancestors to properly glower at her.
Until she tried a door that she was absolutely sure was going to be Uncle Jas’s bedroom or something, and instead there was a somewhat rusty but tolerably modern bathroom, brass fittings and all, and she was able to relieve the internal pressure without making some dreadful faux pas that would further dis-endear her to Ross’s family.
And then she couldn’t find her way back.
Too many turns around dark corridors, too many pictures and vases and occasional tables that all looked the same in the nocturnal gloom.
And she pattered about on increasingly chilly bare feet, snagging the blanket on things and wondering how this already big house had grown to around the size of a city block.
She came to a balustraded balcony at the head of a flight of stairs, and she almost cried because it wasn’t even the stairs she and Ross had come up.
Down there was an entirely different entrance hall, a bigger one, with a stone floor spread with rugs.
It was enough to make her think she’d gone back in time or something, like in those kids’ books she used to read.
She was about to do something—run off or beat her fists on the nearest door or shout for a butler or burst into tears—when there was movement from below.
And then she was about to run down the stairs and gabble to whoever it was about being lost and where the hell was Uncle Henry’s fucking room when you needed it.
And then she didn’t, because there were four people below, and they were wheeling some sort of large trolley between them.
All normal so far, sure. Staff doing staff stuff, ready for the new day.
Except they weren’t staff. She saw Gil Enderbough there, and there were two other men and a woman.
They all wore coats over what looked like nightwear, if she was any judge.
They all had grim, flat expressions. And on the trolley—the gurney, she now realised—was a body.
Or she didn’t know that, but the lights were on down there, and she could see quite clearly.
It had a sheet over it, but she was studying medicine at Johns Hopkins and she knew what a body under a sheet looked like.
Unless Ross’s family were prone to med student-style pranks, that was what they had.
And not a fun body. Not even the simplicity of ‘Great Uncle Mordecai’s old heart troubles finally got the better of him.
’ The shape beneath the sheet was twisted at a painful angle, as though their last throes had almost snapped their back, and there was something dreadfully wrong about the way the sheet hung over the chest. The way it was pushed up by some angular shape, like splayed fingers.
Gil opened the big double doors, and freezing, fog-damp air rushed into the house like clammy Vikings.
Some part of her expected the lights to gutter, except of course electricity didn’t do that.
Up at the top of the stairs, shrouded in darkness, she just watched as the four of them manhandled the trolley outside and shut the door behind them.
The sole woman looked back, just before it closed.
Looked almost into Elena’s eyes, if only she could have pierced the shadows.
And Elena recognised her with a shock. Someone Ross had mentioned, one of the few times he’d been positive about his family.
Someone Elena could have guessed would be here if she’d only thought.
Someone she’d always wanted Ross to introduce her to.
Right now, seeing the woman go off with her fellow body-snatchers, Elena wasn’t sure she wanted to meet her anymore.
And then she turned and found Uncle Jas standing right there. Somehow silent and utterly unremarked in the shadows, despite the bulk of him. Seeing her. Seeing her see what she had seen.
No anger on his face, barely any expression at all. That was, perhaps, the most frightening thing about him.
“You appear to be lost,” he said, the very tonelessness of his voice imbuing the utterance with multiple meanings. “Why don’t I show you back to Henry’s room?”