1. Posy #2
“Gran.” I turn in a slow circle. “What the hell were you into?”
No answer. Obviously. But the room has the hush of a held breath.
Candles sit between the jars, half-melted and long cold, wax pooled beneath them in frozen waterfalls. The incense smell is stronger in here, old smoke gone sweet, still clinging to the stones after what must be years.
The desk pulls me over before I’ve decided to cross the room.
Papers cover its surface, page after page in my grandmother’s precise, slanted handwriting, except none of it is in English.
It’s the same curling script from the library shelf, dense and deliberate, broken up by diagrams of circles inside circles.
She wrote all of this. She could read all of this.
The woman sent me birthday cards with kittens on them.
I set the papers down. My hands aren’t steady anymore.
“Okay,” I tell the room. “That’s completely normal and not at all unsettling.”
I should leave. Walk out, close the weird door, call Derek back and tell him to sell this place to whoever’s willing to deal with whatever my grandmother was doing in here.
I look at the center of the room.
The pedestal stands about waist-high, carved from the same gray stone as the floor, wrapped in black iron chains gone dull with age. They’re not decorative. They’re serious chains, the kind meant to keep a vault shut. And sitting on top of the pedestal, held down by all that iron, is a box.
It’s the size of a jewelry chest, made of the same black iron as the chains, and its surface crawls with symbols that refuse to hold still. They only behave in my peripheral vision. The moment I look at them directly, they swim.
I blink hard. They keep swimming.
“It’s just an old house,” I announce, too loud in the hush. “Old houses have weird stuff. Old houses make noises. That’s definitely not…”
I stop.
Because underneath my own breathing, underneath the creak of my shoes on the stone, there’s whispering.
It’s faint enough that I could talk myself out of it. But it’s there, a murmur just below comprehension, words I could almost catch if I leaned a little closer.
I’m standing in front of the pedestal before I register that I’ve moved.
“Shit.” I step back, pulse going hard. “Nope. We’re not doing this. This is how horror movies start, Posy. This is the opening act of every haunted house film you’ve ever yelled at.”
The whispering continues. It doesn’t get louder and it doesn’t change. It persists, patient, as if I only now tuned into the right frequency.
And under the whisper, threaded through it, is a cadence I recognize. The cool, papery voice from the rose garden.
“This house keeps secrets, little one. Someday, when you’re ready, it will share them with you.”
Riley is going to murder me. That’s a problem for future Posy. Current Posy is apparently making terrible decisions.
The chains aren’t locked. They’re wrapped around the pedestal and tucked into themselves, hard to undo but not impossible, and I work at the iron links with fingers that won’t stop shaking.
The metal is so cold it burns. I keep going anyway, until the chains fall away and puddle on the stone with the rattle of loose teeth.
“Okay.” I flex my hands, trying to rub feeling back into them. “It’s just a box. It’s a weird old box in a weird old room in a weird old house. Nothing to freak out about.”
The whispering has stopped.
I liked it better when it was whispering.
The clasp is a simple hook and loop, black iron. Maybe it won’t even open, and I can go back to my normal life and pretend none of this ever happened.
I flip the clasp.
Pain lances through my finger, bright and sudden. I jerk my hand back with a yelp and watch blood well from a slice across my fingertip. The clasp is razor-edged beneath the dull iron, and it got me deep.
“Son of a…”
A drop of blood falls.
It lands on the seal inside the box, a circle that looks like wax but shimmers like oil, dark red and black swirled together, and the moment it touches, the temperature in the room plummets.
I can see my breath. Frost crackles across the stone floor, spreading outward from the pedestal in delicate fractals. The candles on the shelves light themselves one by one, and the flames burn a bruised red that no candle has any business producing.
“Oh no.” I stumble backward, clutching my bleeding finger to my chest. “Oh no, no, no, no.”
The seal begins to crack. Dark lines spider across its surface, pushed from underneath, the way an egg cracks when what’s inside wants out. And from those cracks, smoke pours.
Black smoke. It doesn’t drift. It moves with purpose, coiling upward, gathering itself, reaching for me.
Every survival instinct I own is screaming at me to run and never look back.
My feet won’t move.
The smoke keeps coming, more and more of it, rising from the box in a column that starts to twist and compress. Shoulders. The suggestion of a face.
“Gran,” I whisper, to the grandmother who left me this inheritance I never asked for, “what the hell were you into?”
The smoke solidifies into a man.
And he opens his eyes.