Chapter 17 The Legend of Holly & Hemlock
The Legend of Holly & Hemlock
Larkin is in the library, occupying a chair so aggressively Victorian it seems to have been bred, not made, for the suppression of comfort.
He sits at an angle, one ankle crossed over a knee, spine straight as a verdict.
A book—unread, unimportant—is draped face-down on the armrest, its spine bristling with orphaned bookmarks.
Larkin himself is immaculate: white shirt, collar open but not careless, hair swept back with enough force to signal both vanity and the will to dominate.
He looks less like a person than a photograph of a person, all edges and intent.
He doesn’t look up as I enter, but the shift in his posture is immediate. The muscles at the hinge of his jaw stand out. His hands, which are too elegant for fists, rest on the arms of the chair, flexing at the first knuckle.
“Afternoon,” I say, in the tone I used to reserve for truant gallery directors.
He closes the book—no glance at the page, so I know he was just waiting, not reading. “Miss Vale,” he replies, then, with a fractional smile: “Nora. What brings you to me with such purpose?” His smile turns into a smirk.
I approach him, hands in my pockets. “I want to know the truth about the house.”
A beat. He lifts one eyebrow, making it clear he is unimpressed by both the demand and the urgency. “I thought you already had the answers. The kitchen is still echoing with Whitby’s existential crisis.”
He’s baiting me. I decide not to rise. “I’ve read the drafts of the will. I know about the chain, the curse, whatever you want to call it. I want to know your version.”
He sets the book down on a lacquered table, fingers splayed on the cover as if bracing for turbulence. “My version?”
“Yes,” I say. “You grew up here. You know things no one else will say out loud.”
Larkin studies me, and for a moment his face is less mask and more mirror—reflecting, maybe, the exhaustion of someone who has been playing the same part since childhood. “Lane told you,” he says, not a question.
“He told me enough,” I say. “But you’re the only one who can fill in the blanks.”
He stands in a single, unbroken motion, comes to where I stand by the fireplace, and leans beside me, close but not touching. The sunlight cuts his features, the shadow slicing his mouth in half.
“When I was a child, I thought the house was alive,” he says quietly. “I don’t mean that in a sentimental way. I mean I was convinced it could bleed, that it had a nervous system running through the walls.”
He traces a line on the window’s edge with his finger, leaving a smear.
“Whenever I tried to leave—really leave, not just run down the drive but go somewhere else, change who I was—it found a way to call me back. Sickness, accidents, letters in the mail that had no stamp or sender. Even my own mind . . . it became a compulsion to me to return here. Even if I was excited, happy to go somewhere else. That excitement would never last. It was as if I had no control over my own thoughts.”
The story is so theatrical it should sound ridiculous. Instead, it makes the fine hairs on my forearm stand up.
“What did it want from you?” I ask.
He laughs, low, almost bitter. “The same thing it wants from everyone: to be remembered. To last. To keep the people it loves. To control them.” He leans closer, conspiratorial. “Hemlock is a jealous god.”
I watch the way his mouth moves. There is something about the flatness of his affect that makes every word more dangerous.
“If you knew all this, why didn’t you warn me?”
He shrugs. “No one believes warnings. They just make better ghosts.” He turns, putting the window at his back, the light haloing the edges of his hair. “What’s your theory?”
“I’m not sure. Maybe that there’s a reason I was chosen. And it’s not because my aunt loved me.”
Larkin’s smile is cold. “She didn’t love anyone.”
I nod, surprised by how much that hurts. “Did she ever tell you why she wrote me into the final will? Was there something she needed me to do?”
He looks at the floor, then at the dust motes swirling in the shaft of light between us. “She said you were maybe immune.”
The silence eats several seconds before I answer. “To what?”
He steps away, paces to the shelves, runs his hand over the cracked spines of a row of volumes labeled with Roman numerals instead of titles. “To the pattern. The compulsion. The thing that keeps us coming back.”
I follow him, watching the way his body moves—a precision that is almost mathematical. “Why would she think that?”
He pulls a book at random, flips through the pages without looking. “Because your mother left. It didn’t take her the way it took everyone else. Whitby, Lane, me—we’re all too invested. You’re an anomaly.”
“Lane said that was only because she was young.”
“Hmm. Perhaps. And perhaps Maeve based it all on some ridiculous notion.
“I don’t feel immune,” I say. “I feel just as trapped as everyone else.”
He looks up, and for a second I see the boy he must have been: clever, isolated, desperate for approval.
“If you were as trapped as us, you wouldn’t be asking these questions.
You’d be out there, shoveling snow, making peace with it.
” He closes the book, sets it on the table.
“You’re here because you want to break it. ”
I do not deny it.
Larkin crosses to the reading table and gestures for me to sit. I do, and he takes the chair across from me, folding his hands in a way that is almost ceremonial.
“I’ve read every book in this room,” he says. “The answers aren’t here.”
“Then where?”
He glances at the back wall, where the shelves thin out and the plaster bulges in odd, organic shapes, like tumors. “There’s another library. A private one. Past the servant’s stairs.”
I remember the hallway Whitby warned me never to use. “You’re not supposed to go there.”
He smiles, all teeth. “That’s why it matters.”
We sit in silence for a long minute, the only sound the faint, animal creak of the house settling. The light is fading now, the pattern on the floor dissolving into shadow. I feel the weight of every book, every story, pressing in on us from all sides.
“Will you take me?” I ask.
He tilts his head, as if evaluating a piece of art for hidden flaws. “You’re sure? The house won’t like it.”
I wonder what that means, but I decide I don’t want to know for now. “No,” I answer him. “But I want to see for myself.”
He stands, and for the first time since I have known him, Larkin looks almost afraid.
“Follow me,” he says.
We move through the halls, past the orderly rows of portraits to the the staff door near the kitchen.
He opens it and ushers me in. This corridor is narrower, with a lower ceiling, the walls painted a bland white.
This area is all utilitarian, with no rug lining the floor or paintings on the walls.
After a left turn, we come to one of the servants’ stairways.
Beyond it looks innocuous at first glance, but since I know it’s there, I see a hidden doorway made to blend in with the plaster.
The only tell is a thin outline and a shallow metal knob.
He opens the narrow door, reveals a staircase descending into darkness. The air here is colder, sharper, and the dust tastes like old teeth.
Larkin leads the way, his footsteps soundless. I follow, refusing to look back, refusing to let the house see me hesitate.
At the bottom, there is the second library—smaller, but denser, the books pressed into shelves like vertebrae. He flicks a light switch on the room illuminates with a golden glow. The air is thick with secrets.
He turns to me, voice barely above a whisper. “This is where we’ll find where the pattern starts.”
The private library is a reliquary for secrets that never expected to be disturbed.
The shelves bow under the weight of ledgers, treatises, family Bibles whose pages are as thin as the skin on a convalescent’s wrist. At the center, a battered table cowers beneath a storm cloud of loose parchment, dried flowers, glass paperweights gone cloudy with age.
Larkin crosses to the shelves, trailing his fingers over the crumbling leather spines until he stops at a shelf set lower than the rest, eye-level only if you were a child or if you cared enough to kneel.
He crouches, pulls a volume with both hands.
The cover resists, then gives with a breathy sigh, dislodging a puff of ancient dust that sparkles and falls.
He carries the folio to the table. Even in this light, I see it’s a primitive binding—cracked leather, the title etched in a script that shivers into illegibility. He opens it with the slow, steady hands of a surgeon about to make the first cut.
“It’s older than the house,” he says, his voice softened by reverence or fear, I can’t decide. “Dates to the first building on the hill. Before Hemlock, before even the town had a name.”
I sit across from him, as close to the lamp as I dare.
The pages inside are a confusion of languages and hands.
Some of the text is in Latin, some in a kind of local Old English dialect, and some is so old and misshapen it barely qualifies as language at all.
The margins crawl with annotations in a woman’s hand, looping, assertive, each note crowding out the text it was meant to clarify.
There are illustrations, too. Primitive woodcuts, the ink bled and faded, each image framed by a border of leaves. The leaves are holly and hemlock, drawn so obsessively I half expect the margins to prickle under my touch.
The first image is of a woman. Her face is oval, eyes dark, hair plaited into a crown of thorns and leaves. She is surrounded by plants, some in bloom, some gone to seed, and in her lap is an open book, its pages blank.