Chapter 5 #2
Elena looked from one to the other. “I don’t know what to say, Ross.
You didn’t see the body. Whatever killed your Great-Uncle Patrick wasn’t human.
And whatever’s singing out there in the woods isn’t human.
And something happened to Will. So what’s the explanation?
What’s the line: ‘Once you’ve eliminated the impossible…
’? We’re running out of possibles, Ross. ”
She watched his internal struggle play out on his face, as it always did.
When he was wrong-footed, Ross lost all ability to dissemble, and you could almost read his mind from the muscles of eyebrow, cheek and lip.
It struck her that Will had been the same, but she’d be willing to bet it wasn’t true of him anymore.
It made the recollected stillness and composure he’d had this morning all the more eerie.
She wondered, if she were to examine his scalp, if she’d find surgery scars.
Neat lines of sutures where some Will-ness had been cut away, or some Enderbough-ness implanted. To make him a fit scion of the family.
Or to make him an existing scion. Which was where Melissa had been going with her vampire talk.
Ancient Enderbough intelligences transplanted generation to generation, so that what looked like Will might just be Uncle Patrick wearing his face…
Except that was crazy talk. Despite the corpse, despite the singing and the bird monsters and all of it, surely she couldn’t push the boundaries of her credulity so far… ?
“Let’s go wandering,” Ross said. He’d found some kind of equilibrium, and his jaw had that determined jut she’d always liked in him. In happier times.
“I’m game for another break-out attempt if you are,” Melissa said.
“I don’t mean that,” he explained. “Let’s go wandering inside the house. Nobody said we can’t do that. In fact, let’s go up. Let’s get into the attics.”
Melissa gave him a sideways look. “Are you expecting…?”
“I’m not looking for vampire coffins or body snatcher pods or anything like that, if that’s what you mean,” he said with dignity.
“But it strikes me that this is the heart of the Enderbough dream, this place. This has been in the family for four hundred years and change. So a lot of junk accumulates. Old records, old things. And I know there’s a big attic here, runs above all the rooms on the top floor.
I’ve seen the hatches to it. So let’s go up there and rummage.
Because, fine, something pretty bloody weird is going on, and it’s obviously family weird, it’s an Enderbough thing and nobody’s going to give us a straight answer until it’s too late.
But if there’s any way of learning the truth, then it’ll be stashed up there along with all the other forgotten rubbish. So let’s go hunting.”
A dusty set of stairs, cramped enough that they had plainly been part of the servants’ domain back in the day.
To get to the stairs, a wall panel that had once been entirely hidden, so that the domestics could come and go without disturbing their eighteenth-century overlords, betrayed by later redecoration that had treated doors and wall differently.
To find the wall panel, a vague memory Ross had of something the rugger bros had said, when they’d been looking for some fabled stash of cask-aged whiskey.
Entering the secret parts of the house felt like descending underwater, even as they were trekking upwards.
Elena constantly expected her ears to pop.
These were not servants’ areas now. The actual staff were billeted in the most modern wing of the house, brand spanking new and up to date as of nineteen-thirty-one, according to Ross.
And she wondered just how that worked, because she was queasily sure that the staff at breakfast had turned up to find rooms that, perhaps, still had one or two mementos of the previous night’s occupants slipped down the side of the bed or under a chair.
Except she hadn’t voiced that to the others.
Even with how far and how wild Melissa’s speculations had grown, she wasn’t sure she could just say, ‘Oh, and I think your family is mass-murdering the servants.’ Even though they’d all seen the stakes and Ross had touched the tacky blood.
Then they were at the head of the stairs, clinging vertiginously to the worm-eaten wooden banister, and the attic stretched out before them like a mausoleum, like the Paris sewers, like that church in Eastern Europe where the walls were tessellated bones.
Oh, not that, obviously. Nothing so on the nose as that.
But even though they were at the top of the house, the same sense of a chill, subterranean space.
Sporadic and grime-dimmed skylights turning the dust into glittering fly-dances and constellations.
A long, low-ceilinged space vanishing into obscurity, as though here and only here was the true anchor for the house’s extensive plan, all that labyrinth below opened out into a great, hollow shell and then recluttered with stuff.
Hundreds of years of stuff. Ancient mouldering furniture whose upholstery had been riddled by the attentions of rodent generations.
Moth-eaten hunting trophies with hollow sockets where glass eyes had fallen out and rolled away.
Great trunks stacked one on another, from iron-bound chests that could have been rescued from the wreck of the Mary Rose through Titanic-era footlockers and wartime crates stamped with ranks and service numbers and ENDERBOUGH.
Wooden crates and the cracked leather of old suitcases.
And off, into the shadows, a museum of family obsolescence.
And presumably it had a far wall, but just as the rooms below seemed to multiply and breed, so did the gloom-strung space up here.
“Well,” said Ross, voice hushed like he was in a church and plainly losing heart at the scale of the task.
“Well, let’s get to it,” Melissa decided, pushing past him with an alarming creak from the top step.
It was out with the phone and on with their torches, watching the battery percentage dropping slowly—though amazing how much power the little things had, when they were denied the constant back and forth of communion with the wider world.
Elena wanted to ask what they were actually looking for, but she didn’t think Ross knew.
His answer would be something like he’d know it when he saw it.
She considered how that would come over: a little laugh at his own vagueness, a shrug, an uncertainty.
Then she tried to hear the words in the voice of his father, of Uncle Jas, Jeffrey, Neera, old Godfrey.
They would know it when they saw it. The declaration would leave no doubt.
It would have their subordinates bringing them all the treasures of the earth because there was an it, and they would know it.
And Will’s voice, too.
After an hour, going through the fourth trunk that was filled with ancient, musty-smelling formal clothes stowed away against some eventuality that had plainly become extinct around the same time as the dodo, she glanced back to see Melissa’s fickle torch like a distant campfire one way, Ross’s the other.
Each of them panning through five hundred years of family detritus in the hopes of finding gold.
The sheer, frustrating scale of the task, and the lack of any guarantee that there was even anything to find, made her shake with directionless anger.
She could hear Ross getting more and more slipshod, slinging things around, spilling the contents of boxes, breaking some priceless vase that nobody had laid eyes on for a century, cursing in his weirdly repressed, genteel way.
He would break soon, she knew. He’d come looking for the others, apologetic, awkward.
I thought it would just… be there. As though up in the attic there was a shrine explicitly dedicated to the Weirdness of Enderby, waiting to warn and educate the younger generation.
She could have given up, then. She knew Ross well enough to see that moment of admission on the horizon like a fishing boat pulling dejectedly for shore with empty nets.
They’d go downstairs, shower away the dust, change clothes, be there in time for dinner.
And maybe their absence had been noted in the interim and Jeffrey and company were charging about the grounds on horseback going spare, and maybe she could take some satisfaction from that thought.
She hauled aside a crate almost as tall as she was with a grunt of effort, feeling it scrape furrows in the boards, and found the shrine.
She screamed a little, in fact, because what her torch fell on was a ghastly gargoyle visage, a human face distorted and distended, with a hunched, winged thing emerging from the hideously stretched mouth.
A piece of stone, weathered and flecked with ancient lichen, that had perhaps stood over some Enderby portal before being replaced when the building was added to or repaired.
Now it was wedged in place up amongst the eaves, and below it was a little trio of pictures and a big, stuffed scrapbook.
The words Fidelitatis Et Perseverantiae were engraved beneath the hideous head.
Screwing her courage to the sticking point, she turned her torch upwards again.
The thing forcing its way from the mouth had angel wings still half-trapped, was clutching at the lips with too many little clawed hands.
Its own face was gaping open, split wide below a caricature of a nose, and a smaller winged figure struggled to be free of it even as its own maw stretched around a miniature prisoner.
For a moment Elena was frozen with vertigo, unable to tell if this was a succession of escapes, or if each figure was devouring even as it was devoured.
Bile rose and she fought it down. By then, Ross and Melissa had joined her.