15. Where Lies the Hoax #3
Tossing my head back to let out a screech of frustration, something glints in the corner of my eye.
Up , not down. The bracelet is looped around the curtain’s finial; the Barbie I bought Tommy suspended beneath it, dropped from the makeshift noose.
Wide blue eyes stare down at me, full and pink plastic lips parted in a bleached smile.
The mildew creeps in faintly, and I inhale once, twice, desperate to get even a word in with my little shadow before she vanishes.
I drag my vanity chair to the window and reach up for the doll, but the second I touch it, the world rips wide open.
Ink slithers into my vision, and everything goes dark as I slip into a nightmare with my eyes wide open.
A thousand mouths split open in my ears, moaning in a chorus until they become one long cry.
I’m trapped in a tunnel of ribs as I stumble forward, tripping over dead skin, blood gurgling down walls of bone.
On my hands and knees, I gawk down at a floor made of what looks like ground beef.
All around me, disfigured bodies gnash their teeth, and through the sea of horror, I see her—a red-haired girl, skin shredded and rotted, eyes too wide.
She runs while glancing back at me, and my vision distorts into fisheye, her little face warped, a silent scream tearing her mouth wide until it cracks at the sides.
She’s screaming at me, “ Chess! ”
Thomasin. That certainty stabs me through the chest. “ Tommy! ” I call back, foot sinking into a hollow body as I force myself to run.
The cage of ribs buckles, stretches longer; Tommy holds her arm out, but the distance is too much. I push harder, close enough to where I can see the shape of her bones beneath the frock.
No , she mouths, stay back .
I’m almost there when the corridor tilts sideways and I slide down the pipe of it into a chamber made of rotting meat.
Massive braziers line the sides, iron cages above them, stuffed full of screaming spirits.
A man rises from the left, stalks towards Tommy and takes her by the throat.
The paintings in the undercroft are too kind; those oils lied, for the Godwyn I see before me isn’t a nobleman with a sharp jaw and kind blue eyes.
He’s not the handsome man from Cillian’s memory.
Here he’s a skeleton with meat pasted back on without a care for anatomical accuracy.
He doesn’t squeeze; he just holds that little girl’s neck in his hand whilst her feet kick at air until she realises she belongs to him. I’m running and running but never getting there, crying out her name. There’s a massive furnace at the head of the room, flames reaching towards them.
No, no, no—she’s too little. She’s just a baby, and I’m not moving fast enough.
I wail as Godwyn throws her underhand, and the iron circle swallows her.
Fat spits. The ghosts in their cages hammer their own bones against metal, and her childlike scream tunnels up through the floor until the fire deadens it.
Godwyn turns first to the cages, and the room rights itself to accommodate him. “ Down. ”
They quiet instantly, backtracking into piles like injured dogs. I freeze when he finally shifts, attention landing on me. Up close, he’s even uglier.
“ Thy dead are loyal, I do confess it ,” he says conversationally.
“ But hear me, Duchess-heir, thy test is thine alone. Each time a shade warns thee, I lay my hand upon it and cast it into the fire. When death re-knits them—as it must in this cursed place—I burn them anew. I shall do so as oft as thou call for help from thy dead. ”
My voice burns my throat, and I subtly move to pinch the skin of my arm. Nothing happens. “ What is this place? ”
Shit, is this hell? Am I in hell?
His smile is rotten. “ I summoned thee to see it plain: the reckoning pit thy house has sired. Call it purgatory, aye, if thou requires a church word. No heavenly gate opens, and no hell receives; the curse has sealed them. Here I am ferryman, judge and—where Heaven forfeits—God. All who perish under Redfordia’s eye fall into my river. ”
I look around at the cages, Godwyn’s voice ping-ponging around in my skull.
The spirits watch; between them is someone’s mother, a maid, a cook.
They stare in silence, in fear, cursed for no more than being loyal to the name Sheffolk.
I think of Lydia’s soft hands, of Pascoe’s lips on my forehead and Philip’s massive shadow in doorways.
Does Gran know how deep this curse runs?
I wonder if she’s even been summoned here, if she’s seen the shades of her parents, of those who loved her.
For once, I find myself grateful for that boating incident.
Can’t imagine Luciana burning here. Like Tommy.
Fuck, he says she’ll come back, but she’ll burn again if she dares to help.
And again. And again until there’s nothing left of her. Can’t let that happen. Won’t.
“ Then I’ll choose one who doesn’t wear my house colours ,” I say.
“ You say I can’t call my own, so I’ll call yours .
” A tic in his jaw, or in what’s left of it.
“ Your heir sleeps in my home, and he’ll be there until my grandmother says otherwise.
Eric Atherbourne owes me nothing, and he owes Sheffolk less.
What say you if I used him as a shield? ”
Because apparently fear makes me clever and cruel.
Godwyn’s mouth trembles. “Thy tongue is o’erbold, a twin to the wife I killed,” he says, almost fondly.
That very tongue runs away from me and spits the correction, “The wife you failed to kill. Even through whatever you and your little brother attempted to do.”
I flinch when he lifts the skin of his brow. “Failed? Beloved Francesca…” He chuckles in pity, barely reacting to the mention of Cillian, and the cages begin rattling. “Thou know’st the tale by halves, it seems.”
Where there was once ground beneath my beliefs, his words steal it from me.
And he lets me keep falling, unwilling to provide an explanation.
There’s that suspicion again, that he and Cillian did something that history never recorded.
I see the chamber, Adelina’s blood on the floor, as he tells his brother to ready himself.
“ Answer me. What say you? ”
His lids lower, head tilting. “ As for Lancaster’s get, I shall judge him as I judge all. A gold coin will always draw thieves, Francesca, even wealthy ones. Cast it into the furnace, and what once was coin shall gild my crown. ”
A gold coin. So that’s what Eric is to him, a lure, something in my possession that he needs to snatch. But the riddle rings as hollow as his ribcage, stopping just shy of promising to pilfer it.
Why press the word ‘wealthy’ when it’s rarely them who steal?
“ So I’m to believe you’ll strike at him?
” I needle. “ A rich man is too clumsy with his fat fingers. It’s the desperate who slip in best, the poor.
And you’ve already told me what kind of thief you are.
Ferryman. Judge. God . That makes you the richest thief of all.
Melt that gold, melt your own sigil—and even gods know not to gut themselves. ”
He doesn’t deny it. Doesn’t dare. My brief victory curdles into terror when he moves forward, and my back hits a wall of bone.
He snatches my left arm; pain detonates, and I bite down on a scream.
I can hear my flesh hissing beneath his touch.
Fucking hell, why does it hurt? Why does a memory hurt?
It feels like he’s pressed my arm onto a stove plate.
“ Aye, play thy games, Duchess-heir ,” he warns, breath stinking of carcass.
“ But thy dead and kin can still bleed for thee. Thou shall step amiss soon enough, and I shall grind them then. Keep thy coin; it will only blacken in thy hands, for though I touch him not, he shall hurt. Each act taken in thy name shall fill his lungs with guilt until he drowns. ” His face presses closer. “ My traitor comes for thee. ”
Then he shoves me?—
—and I’m tumbling from the vanity chair, crashing into the floor of my room.
I wheeze when my knees crack against the thick rug, pain bursting down my legs.
I’m still clutching Tommy’s doll, and I toss it into a shadowy corner with a curse.
It hits the wall limply, staring at nothing.
Each wheeze is deafening as I string everything together.
So that’s why Tommy flickered out after mutilating my keyboard, why her scent wavered after she brought me Gabriel’s cufflink. I’ve been foolishly and unconsciously trying to hold onto reason while she bargains scraps of her restless afterlife to warn me.
“Tommy, please ,” I whisper into the stillness, slowly pushing to my feet. “Please, stop. I’m awake now, I promise. You don’t need to bleed yourself for me, darling girl.” My throat burns with my apology. “Oh, I never meant for you to play his game a second time. I won’t let you.”
She doesn’t respond. Her weak presence presses a blade against the wound of my guilt.
Tommy’s restlessness should’ve been my biggest fucking clue.
The ghosts of Redford never panic, not unless something dark is stalking the halls, something they have true reason to fear.
And I, idiot heir, was too busy clinging to my sensible theories.
Too eager to believe Gabriel was the one, that Charlie had somehow pulled off this whole thing with the locket even though it made fuckall sense.
All because I wanted the horror to have its final chapter.
“Rest, Thomasin. I’ll take his damned test and pass for the both of us. I promise.”
The room stays silent, save for the sound of my whimper as I right the chair, climbing once more to reach for the bracelet still dangling from the finial.
My left arm screams at the first stretch, and when I glimpse down, I see the welt.
A full handprint, burned deep into the skin as though through some freak accident with a hair straightener.
It throbs for a moment or two before fading into nothing. Godwyn’s brand. Proof that it was real.
That he followed me back into the world of the living.