CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE #2
Ceci’s stomach tightened.
Archie lifted the lantern closer.
“The rest is gone.”
“Not gone,” Duncan said. “Hidden.”
The wind moved harder across the hill. For one peculiar second, with Duncan on one side of the threshold and Archie on the other and the old lettering rough under her fingers, Ceci felt pressure in the air she had no words for.
The air around the gate seemed to tighten, and for a moment, the whole place felt strained in some invisible way, as if time would split once again.
She snatched her hand back.
“Did you feel that?”
Archie’s head turned sharply toward her. “Feel what?”
Duncan had gone still.
Ceci looked at him. “You did?”
He did not answer at once, which was answer enough. At last, he said, “The air changed.”
Every small hair rose at the back of her neck. It was the first time anything like this had happened here, and not only to her.
Archie watched them both with narrowing eyes. “I would like to be included in whatever deeply troubling revelation is passing between you.”
Ceci swallowed.
“The morning I woke here, he said there were moments before a storm when the world felt out of place.”
Archie looked from her to Duncan. “And now?”
“And now,” Duncan said, “it feels very much like that.”
Archie cursed softly.
Ceci stepped back from the archway and wrapped her arms around herself. The cold was sinking through the wool at last.
“What do we do?”
Duncan considered the gate as though it might answer him if he looked hard enough.
“We leave it for tonight,” he said. “Tomorrow, we return in daylight and examine every inch of it.”
It was such a Duncan answer that under any other circumstance, she might have smiled. Archie, apparently sharing the same thought, scrubbed a hand over his face. “That is impressively boring.”
“We do not touch it again in the dark,” Duncan said. “We come back in daylight with tools.”
“For what?”
“To see whether the opening was filled or shuttered. To examine the wood. To determine whether the latch has been altered.”
Archie folded his arms. “You sound distressingly happy.”
“I sound occupied.”
“That is your version of happy.”
Duncan ignored him.
Ceci looked once more at the sealed-up window, at the faded name on the gate, at the path she had walked, expecting nothing more consequential than ruins and a view. And then something else occurred to her.
“The old man,” she said. Both men looked at her.
“If the window existed once, somebody must have used it. Maybe not for tickets. Maybe for something else. Watching. Admitting people. Keeping them out.” Her thoughts were running faster now. “Voss said it was never meant to admit me. That sounds like intention. Or rules.”
“Or someone enforcing them,” Duncan said. The words fell into her like a stone. The old man. His unwilling small talk. His three pounds. The bored efficiency with which he had handed her a brochure, as if all of it were routine.
She had laughed at him in her mind. Called him Chatty Cathy. Assumed he was real because she had needed him to be ordinary.
“What if he wasn’t a man at all?” she said.
Archie opened his mouth.
Closed it again.
The silence this time came from all three of them. Finally, Archie said, with remarkable care, “I should like very much for us to define our terms before we begin suggesting supernatural ticketing staff.”
Ceci let out a breath that might have become a laugh if fear had loosened enough to permit it.
“I’m serious.”
“I know,” he said. “That is why I am alarmed.”
Duncan’s gaze remained fixed on the gate.
“No,” he said. “She may be right.”
Archie stared at him, eyebrows near his hairline. “I beg your pardon.”
“The old stories around these grounds,” Duncan said. “Thresholds. Admissions. Things that are invited and things that are not. My father dismissed them as remnants of older local superstitions, but Leopold took an interest. He collected the folklore.”
Ceci’s head snapped toward him. “Where?”
“In the library,” he said. “Or what remains of his papers.”
That was the next movement. The gate mattered, yes, but so did Leopold. And somewhere inside Hawarden, older knowledge had been waiting for them all along. The wind shifted again, colder now, carrying with it the smell of wet grass and old stone.
Archie looked at the ruins, then at Duncan, then at Ceci. “I would like to state for the record that I preferred matters when the greatest threat to our peace was Hart’s conversation.”
“No, you didn’t,” Ceci said. He gave her a brief look. “No. I suppose I didn’t.”
Duncan stepped back from the archway. “We leave it tonight.”
Ceci nodded, though every part of her strained toward the gate. It felt closer now, perversely, because it had acquired meaning. Because Voss had not only threatened her. He had pointed. Archie started back toward the motorcar.
Duncan remained where he was for one last second, looking at the gate with an expression she could not fully read. Then he turned to her.
“Tomorrow,” he said.
She looked at the sealed window. The old red wood. The faint hidden letters. The place where her life had apparently folded wrong.
“Tomorrow,” she agreed.
They walked back down the hill together, the ruins rising black behind them into the deepening Welsh night. Ceci did not look back until they reached the car. When she did, she could have sworn there was someone standing beneath the archway. A narrow shape. Motionless. Watching.
Her breath caught.
Then the wind moved through the broken wall, and the shape dissolved into shadow and stone.
“Ceci?”
It was Archie, holding the car door open. She forced herself to move.
Nothing there, she thought.
Or something that was not intended to be seen yet. Either way, by the time the motorcar turned back toward Hawarden, she knew one thing with terrible, perfect clarity. Voss had given her more than a threat. He had given her a door.