Chapter 11
Chapter
Eleven
It’s been three days since I discovered the letters from Effie to Eachann, since I found salt at the closet door, since I realized that Effie has been trying to communicate something to me.
I’m not going to jump to conclusions and say she’s doing so from beyond the grave because I’d rather not believe I inherited a haunted cottage, but she at least gave me some blueprints to survive this place before she died—it’s up to me to try and figure them out.
But as much as I love a puzzle, figuring it out hasn’t come easily to me. Mainly because the more I think about it, the foggier my brain fog gets, and the more I creep myself out.
So I keep busy, working in the studio and keeping my mind occupied, hoping my subconscious will do the heavy-lifting and come to an epiphany.
I press the flowers. I draw and paint, trying to meet my deadline.
I try not to look at the box I’ve placed on top of the chest in the corner of the sitting room, but every now and then I fail.
I sit cross-legged with it in my lap, turn it in my hands.
and try four ways till Sunday to find a latch, and the seam stays where it is, and nothing about the box opens.
It won’t give up its secrets, no matter how much I threaten it. I’m this close to smashing it open with a hammer, but something tells me that would bring me seventy million years of bad luck or something.
The next night I go down to the rocks at dusk. I sit on the flat black ones at the foot of my spit for an hour and a half and watch the water darken with the sky. Alasdair never comes up out of the water to meet me. I walk back to the cottage with my legs cold and my pride colder.
He said if you’re not there, I go home. I wasn’t there night after night, so…he went home.
And maybe he’d meant home for good.
Which could be for the best. I mean, there’s a—possibly senior citizen—serial killer on the loose, which my great-aunt may have been complicit in, plus talk of drowned wives and who fucking knows what else.
I should be happy and relieved that my sexy, potentially murderous neighbor isn’t coming to visit me anymore.
But I’m not.
And then one morning, I wake up and I am just done.
I’m done with the box that won’t open. I’m done with the letters I’ve read four times. I’m done with sitting in a cottage waiting for a man who’s already told me he’s not going to come. I am, mostly, done with myself. Done with being in this cottage and letting things happen to me.
I need to make things happen for myself.
I’m going over to that motherfucking castle and knocking on his god damn door.
I’m aware this is a bad idea. I’m aware that the rational thing—the thing Maddie would say, the thing the woman I was a year ago would do—is to call Sinclair, hand him the letters, and let him do his job.
I’m aware that I’m choosing a man over a detective, a stranger over a uniform, the version of this story with monsters in it, over the version that seems more straightforward.
I’m choosing it anyway. I don’t even need to talk myself into it.
My brain, my soul, every witchy part of me that has been passed through the Galloway bloodline, wants to believe in creatures and ghosts and that something fantastical might be at play here.
I have no fucking idea what that could be, and maybe in the end this really is a case of cold-blooded murder from a psychopath, but either way I’m going to figure this all out or die trying.
Okay. Hopefully not the “die trying” part.
I barely get a cup of coffee down before I’m on the move.
I put on my wellies and the wax jacket. I put my hair up.
I think about bringing the box and seeing if Alasdair can help me with it, but something tells me, very strongly, that the box should remain in the cottage and definitely out of his grasp.
The sky is growing lighter through the trees by the time I’m at the end of my driveway. By the time I’m on the main road, the wind has picked up. Halfway down his access road, the rain comes.
It comes down the way rain here does when it’s been making up its mind all morning—all at once and with relish—the kind of downpour that gets past the wax of any jacket in under a minute.
I push my hood up and keep walking because there is no shelter between here and the castle and going back would be worse.
Though at the moment, I can’t imagine anything worse than this.
I’m soaked to the bone, and it is fucking miserable.
I keep slogging through, and a couple of soaked minutes later, I come to a sudden stop.
The white horse is in the same clearing as before.
He’s standing there calmly, his pewter mane gone dark and ropy with the wet, his eyes black and unblinking. I stop on the track and wipe away the rain from my eyes.
I should keep walking. I know I should keep walking. He bites. I know.
But I take a slow step toward him. Then another.
He doesn’t move. He lets me come. I get within five feet, close enough to see the breath blooming at his nostrils, close enough to see the wet on his lashes, close enough that the part of me that read The Black Stallion is purring like a child who’s been told yes.
Yes, I’m the special one, I’ll tame you.
I put my hand out.
My hand isn’t even fully extended before the horse’s head comes up sharply—not at me, not even toward me, just up, like he’s been spooked by something in the forest—and he’s gone, a clean, fast turn, and he’s thundering through the trees, the white of him visible for a beat between the trunks and then nothing.
The clearing is empty. The rain falls into the space where he was.
I stand there with my hand still half-extended, feeling slighted and a little embarrassed. The part of me that thought he’d let me touch him was loud, but I have a feeling that horse spooking just saved me from a grave mistake.
I lower my hand, shove it in my damp pocket, and walk on.
The castle in the rain is a different castle.
The downpour makes it streaked and shining, the stone gone dark, water sheeting from the broken parts of the parapet, running down the curtain wall in fast bright lines.
It’s only now that I notice another building behind some brush and a rocky outcrop—maybe that’s the stable where he keeps the bay horse?
—and a ruin of sorts with a car parked beside it.
So, he does have a car. It’s an old one, too; though I guess I expected that. A boxy khaki-green Land Rover from ‘70s it looks like. It seems to be in mint condition, but that could just be the rain covering up its flaws.
I stare at it for a moment, then turn my attention to the castle. I scramble down into the ditch and up the other side, gracelessly, slipping and sliding, through the gateway into the courtyard.
The foxgloves in the courtyard are bowed flat. The wild roses are dropping their last petals into puddles. I walk through with the rain in my face, and head straight to the door.
I knock.
The knock sounds faint, swallowed up by the rushing rain. I knock again, harder.
The door opens.
He stands in a dark blue sweater with the sleeves shoved to the elbows and an open book in his hand, his finger keeping the page, his hair a little disheveled like he’s been sitting in a chair reading for a long time. He sees me and his face does a thing I have not seen it do before.
It opens.
It’s the only word for it. The way his flawless, carefully-composed face seems to come apart at the seams, opening like the clouds do for the sun, uncovering a smile that is so full it almost has light in it.
He looks at me, soaked to the bone with my hair plastered to my skull, and he smiles like he’d been given a gift he had long stopped expecting.
For a few seconds I forget how to breathe.
“Iris,” he whispers in awe.
“Can I come in?”
“Aye, you certainly can.”
He steps back from the doorway and I cross the threshold of the castle.
The hall is cool stone and warm light. The book in his hand goes onto a small table inside the door. He has not stopped smiling and it does silly things like let loose a swarm of butterflies in my chest.
“You’re soaked.”
“The rain started halfway down your road.”
“Here, take off your coat,” he insists, and I shuck it off, the water dripping all over his floor. He takes it in his hands and hangs it up for me.
“Come, I’ll start a fire,” he says.
He touches my shoulder lightly to guide me and brings me through into the room I saw from the courtyard window.
The room is cold but it’s still warmer than outside, the numerous candles giving off heat of their own.
The leather chair he was reading in is pulled close to the hearth, as is the small wood table beside it.
“Sit,” he commands, “by the hearth.”
“I’ll ruin your chair.”
“It’s survived worse.”
He goes to a heavy wooden chest at the side of the room and takes out a folded length of cloth and brings it back.
I can’t tell if it’s a blanket or a piece of tapestry, all deep crimson velvet, worn to thinness in places, an embroidered crest at one corner, the gold thread of the crest tarnished almost to black.
He drapes it over my shoulders and I immediately feel warmer.
I reluctantly sit down in the chair, my body immediately sinking into the soft leather, thanking me for getting off my feet.
The walk down here has woken the fibro up the way the damp always does, the ache settling deep into my hips and the small joints of my hands, and I must give a certain look without meaning to—a wince perhaps, I can’t control my face—because he goes still, watching me, and his brow draws down.
“You’re in pain,” he notes, looking me over attentively.