Chapter 17 #2
My friends, it seems, are coming to the same conclusion.
Avery is up on the dais, investigating the altar, while Aaron sits in one of the pews, his gaze aimed at nothing, but his ears attuned to everything.
Meanwhile, in the back of the church, Rime paws at the walls like he’s looking for a secret door, and near the entrance, Topaz kneels and knocks on the stone floor.
Knock, listen, frown. Knock, listen, frown.
“Betts!” Avery hisses, waving me up to the altar. Her eyes are wide and her fingers rest lightly on the base of an empty candlestick.
“What?” I whisper back, “Are you seeing something?”
Eyelids fluttering, she stares past me, looking once more before she drops her hand and her shoulders sag. “Yeah, but I don’t think it means anything.”
Leo appears out of nowhere, jogging up to join us.
“I found the candlestick here.” Avery pulls back the corner of the altar tablecloth and points to a crowded shelf underneath. “It looked so old and out of place, I thought maybe it had something to tell me.” She lifts it like she’s doing a bicep-curl and puffs, “This sucker is heavy.”
“But what did you see?” I prod.
She shrugs. “Just some weird windows.”
“Weird how?” Leo asks.
“Ornate, but high up and small, like a basement window.”
“Could you see the walls around them?”
“Not really. Nothing but gray.”
Leo nibbles his lip. “Can you draw what you saw?”
“I don’t have anything to draw with.”
“Hold on.” I dash down to the nave, returning a few seconds later with a stubby pencil and a flyer leftover from this afternoon’s prayer meeting, both of which I found in a pew rack. I hand them to Avery and joke, “I’d better not go to hell for swiping these.”
“Oh, you’re going to hell, witchling,” she teases as she clears a space on the altar to draw. “But not for stealing church pencils.”
With a hooked left hand, she expertly sketches a squat rectangle, broken into three sections by decorative arches. “They’re wrought-iron tracery, I think. And they had these little fleur-de-lis things on their top points.”
I’m blown away by the detail of her drawing. And her memory.
As the others gather in the center aisle, I study the candlestick one last time. It’s definitely an oddball, simple and rustic, too utilitarian for a chapel. What was it made for and where did it come from?
I join the team in time to hear Topaz’s report. “I think there’s some sort of cellar under here.” She stomps a boot on the floor. “But it might be nothing more than the old foundation or a crawl space.”
“I heard all sorts of things, but nothing weird for a church,” Aaron volunteers. “Talking, singing. What sounded like a lecture or a sermon.”
“Me too,” I say. “Everything I felt was just normal church stuff.”
“Dead end?” Rime asks.
“Maybe not.” Avery holds up her sketch and explains where it came from.
“When we go out, let’s walk around the building and see if it has basement windows,” Topaz suggests. She points to Avery’s drawing. “Especially windows that look like that.”
I take out my phone and order Avery to hold up the paper. When the others realize what I’m doing, they all do the same, snapping photos so we each have our own copy of the window in question.
“It’s gotta be somewhere on this campus,” Aaron surmises. “Or in town.”
“I hope so,” I say. “I hope it’s wherever that candlestick was made, or where it was used, because it doesn’t look like it belongs in a church.”
Avery pockets her drawing. “I agree with Betts. The candlestick’s too plain and too old.”
“How old?” Rime asks.
“Hmmm, pre-colonial?”
What if it belonged to Browne?
“Browne was originally a goldsmith,” Leo says, apparently thinking along the same lines.
“I’m guessing that’s why he came with the Roanoke expedition.
He had a shop in London, in Cheapside, but not on Goldsmiths’ Row.
He probably couldn’t compete and thought coming here and owning land would raise his station. ”
Avery peers over her shoulder at the altar. “Yeah, but I’m pretty sure that candlestick is brass, not gold.”
Leo shrugs. “He would’ve been able to work in any metal he could find.”
We don’t have to be asked; we all go up to take a closer look.
I reach for the candlestick first, grunting as I pick it up. “Heavy,” I declare, setting it clumsily back onto the table. It’s also crude and lumpy, not smooth and polished like one would expect brass or gold to be.
“I think it’s iron underneath,” Avery says.
“Here,” Leo holds out a hand. “Let me have it.”
He doesn’t have to inspect it long to agree with Avery. “It’s definitely not gold.”
“I thought iron was supposed to make faeries sick,” she jokes. Or maybe she’s serious; it’s always hard to tell with her.
Topaz rolls her eyes. “If that were the case, we wouldn’t be able to survive more than about an hour in the Subworld.”
True. Iron and steel are everywhere. They wouldn’t even be able to use forks.
Rime chuckles. “And we’d be poisoned by our own blood.”
Aaron snorts. “Iron? It’s the twenty-first century. Everyone knows the real poison is gluten.”
I burst into a laugh and fist bump him.
Leo sets the candlestick back on the table with a thunk. “You can’t mold iron without a forge.”
We all stop snickering to look at him.
“A haunted forge?” Aaron asks.
Leo nods. “Where there’s centuries-old iron, there’s a centuries-old forge. And where there’s that forge, there’s strange phenomena. And where there’s strange phenomena—”
Aaron finishes, “There’s the macguffin.”
I frown. “There’re more holes in that logic than Swiss cheese.”