CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Wren
My grandmother's house is the last one on the lake road: white board, black roof, a porch sagging on the left, and a birch that's got into the guttering.
Nobody's touched it in eleven years. The grass is up past the windows at the side and there's a rowan tree in the front yard so old it's mostly hollow.
Cassius stops the car forty feet from the gate.
"Right," I say. "So we—"
"I can't get out."
"What?"
He's got both hands on the wheel and he's staring at the house.
And I feel it before he says it, which is the thing I am still not used to, four days into having a piece of string between me and another person: something goes through him like a hand closing, and it arrives in my chest as a kind of pressure behind the sternum, and my whole body says back away from that about a house I have been driving towards for two hours.
"Cassius. What is that?"
"Under the eaves," he says. "Along the sill line. Round the door."
I look. It's a house. It's a sad white house with a birch in the guttering.
I get out and walk up to the porch with my torch, and I put the beam on the boards under the eaves, and I stop breathing.
The marks are everywhere.
Two curves crossing, one line struck through, carved into the wood — hundreds of them, thousands, so close together in places that the boards look grained.
Along the eaves. Round every window. Six deep across the threshold.
Somebody carved that mark into every accessible surface of this house for what must have been decades, and where the paint's gone you can see the older ones underneath, and under those, older still.
"How long has that been there?" I say.
"Longer than the house." He's out of the car now, standing at the gate, not touching it. "The wood's been reused. That board's ship timber — see the trenail hole? That's eighteenth century."
"Can you come in?"
"I don't know." He puts his hand out toward the gatepost and stops six inches short, and his whole arm goes rigid. "Ah."
I feel that one too. It comes down the string and hits me behind the eyes like putting your hand on a hob, and I make a noise and drop the torch.
"Sorry," he says instantly. "Sorry. I didn't—"
"Don't do that again."
"I won't."
"Cassius. What is it like?"
"It's like standing at the door of a furnace." He's got his hand against his chest. "Wren, this isn't a threshold. A threshold is a rule. This is — this is something somebody built."
I stand on my grandmother's porch in the dark with a torch, and I put my hand flat on the door where the marks are thickest, and something in my chest goes off like a struck bell — the same note, the exact same note, as the night I found the mark under Trevor Ansel's table.
The door opens under my hand.
Not creepily. It just isn't locked, and it's swollen, and it gives.
"Come in," I say.
"Wren—"
"I'm inviting you. That's the rule, isn't it, that's the whole—"
"It's not the same rule." He hasn't moved. "The invitation opens a threshold. It doesn't open that. Whatever your grandmother did to this house, she did it to keep out something she expected to be invited in by somebody she loved."
The wind goes through the birch.
"Try," I say.
He looks at me for a long moment. Then he steps up to the gate, and through it, and up the path, and each step takes him about four seconds and by the third one his hands have curled up and there's a sound coming out of him that I'm going to hear in my sleep for the rest of my life.
By the porch step his face has changed — the eyes gone to that no-white black, the mouth open, four hundred years of composure burned right off — and he gets one foot onto the boards and it steams.
And I feel all of it. Every step. It comes up the string and into me and my knees go and I am on my hands on the boards of my grandmother's porch shouting at him to stop.
He gets back to the gate and goes down on one knee in the long grass.
"I can't come in," he says.
"I know. I know, I felt it, don't you ever—"
"Wren."
"What."
"There's a car on the Halloran road," he says, "that has been behind us since the county line."
◆ ◆ ◆
So I go in alone, which is not how either of us wanted this to go.
The house smells of cold iron and mouse and, faintly, under it all, lavender, and my grandmother has been dead eleven years and her coat is still on the hook by the door.
I go through it with the torch. Front room with a sofa under a dust sheet.
Kitchen with a bread bin and a rack of jars gone black.
Stairs. Bedroom with the bed made. A bathroom with a cake of soap dried to the dish, and a hairbrush, and I have to sit down on the edge of the bath for a minute because there's hair in the hairbrush and it's the same colour as mine.
Outside, forty feet away, there's a man in the long grass who cannot come in, and I can feel him out there the entire time, like a radiator in a cold room.
The cold room is under the kitchen.
It's not a cellar. It's a proper old dairy cold room, cut back into the slope, stone-lined, with a slate shelf running the length of it and a door made of the same board as the porch — hundreds of the marks, carved so deep and so often that in places the wood's gone through.
The green book is on the slate shelf.
It's not one book. That's the first thing.
It's a ledger, and it's been rebound at least three times, and the green is only the outermost cover; underneath there's a red one and under that something that's just boards and thread.
The first eighty pages are in a hand I can't read, in a language I don't think is English.
Then a hundred pages of copperplate. Then, from about 1850, ordinary handwriting, generation by generation, each one taking up where the last stopped.
The last forty pages are my grandmother's.
I sit down on the cold stone floor with the torch in my teeth and I read for four hours.
◆ ◆ ◆
Here is what's in the green book.
One. We are not victims. That's the first line of my grandmother's section and it's underlined twice.
They will tell you the Verity line is prey.
Every one of them believes it, including the kind ones.
It suits them and it has suited them for six hundred years and I am telling you now, Wren — she writes my name, she wrote my name in 1994 — that we were the wardens and they know it and they have made themselves forget.
Two. The marks work because of us.
You cut the sign into wood — any wood, though old is better and ship timber is best — and you cut it with a blade that has your own blood on it, and while you cut it you say the thing that's written on page 112, which is four words long and which I am not writing down anywhere but here.
That's it. That's the whole method. A Verity woman with a penknife and a cut thumb can make a house they cannot enter, and no amount of invitation opens it, because it isn't a rule about hospitality. It's a rule about them.
Any of them. All of them. The oldest one there is. Cut it deep and cut it twice and it will hold for a hundred years, and the only thing that unmakes it is fire or a Verity taking it back.
I sit in the dark with my hand over my mouth for a long time.
Three. What our blood actually does.
Given freely, it gives them the world back. You will have seen this. They will look at you like you have opened a window in a shut room, and they will not be lying, and it is the most dangerous thing about us because it makes them love you and it makes you feel like God.
Taken by force, it turns.
Not at once. That is the cruelty of it and the mercy. He will have his hour. He will have his day. And then it curdles in him, and it takes what he had and it takes the rest as well, and there is nothing left in him but the grey and the wanting, for as long as he lives, which is forever.
That is the Long Hunger, child. It is not a condition. It is a wound and we gave it to them.
I put the book down and stare at the wall.
Seventeen men in a cellar in Salem in 1811. An hour of the world coming back. And then two centuries of nothing — every vampire in the hemisphere living in a grey room, and every one of them assuming it's just what they are.
It isn't what they are. It's what Aurek Vane did to all of them by taking her.
Four. And this is the one that stops my heart.
Aurek Vane is not dead and he is not sleeping and he did not go into the ground of his own accord.
My great-grandmother Anneke and four other women of this line put him under the cellar in Salem in the winter of 1813 with eleven hundred marks and a great deal of blood, and they took up the floor of that cellar afterward and moved the timber north, and it is in your porch and your eaves and the door you are standing behind while you read this.
He is in there still. He cannot get out and he cannot die and he has had two hundred years of the dark to think about what we are.
Wren, if the marks ever fail, they will fail from the outside first. Somebody will have to want him.
I turn the page.
The last entry is dated four months before she died, and the handwriting has gone bad, and it says:
Someone has been at the north eaves. Three boards taken clean off in the night. Not weather. Cut.
I am eighty-one and I cannot get up a ladder and there is nobody left to tell.