CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
Ceci
Old Hawarden Castle (Castell Penarlag)
Hawarden, Flintshire, Wales
The storm began just before dusk. Not a violent one at first. Only a shifting in the air, a pressure against the windows, a long mutter of thunder too distant yet to be taken personally.
By six, the sky had gone the color of old pewter, and the trees beyond the drive had begun to move with the restless, listing agitation she had come to recognize from her first day on the hill.
Duncan witnessed her noticing.
“You felt it?”
“Yes.”
Archie, at the far end of the library table, looked up from Greene’s committee names. “I hate when you two do that.”
Ceci gave him a distracted smile. The weather had been building in her for half an hour.
Leopold’s notes lay open before her. Vale’s letters sat in neat stacks to one side.
All afternoon, they had worked through the trail from Hart to Greene to the proposed Courier essays, but beneath every practical discovery, the gate had remained like a second pulse in the room.
Storm. Darkness. Witness.
Admission.
Closure.
The words had sat in her mind until the rumbling sky outside seemed less like weather and more like a summons.
She looked at Duncan.
“We have to go.”
Archie looked from one to the other and shut the ledger at once. “Absolutely not.”
“We know storm matters,” Ceci said. “We know witness matters.”
“And we know prudence matters,” Archie replied. Duncan had gone very still. He disliked impulsive action. She could see the argument with himself plainly. The gate called to his curiosity and offended his reason in equal measure.
Ceci stood.
“If Voss used it, if he knows how it opens, then every hour we don’t understand it is an hour he already owns.”
Archie rose too, looking annoyed and beautiful and unconvinced.
“That is not an argument. It is adrenaline in a nice dress.”
She stepped toward him. “Archie.”
The use of his name quieted him. Duncan came around the table.
“We do not touch the gate blindly,” he said. Relief flashed through Archie’s face.
Duncan went on.
“We observe. We test what Leopold wrote. We do nothing that cannot be undone.”
Archie closed his eyes. “I see I am outnumbered by romantic lunatics.”
“Three is apparently our number,” Ceci said. That made both men look at her, and for one brief, stupid second, the whole room warmed around the fact of them. Then thunder rolled again, and reality returned with useful hostility.
They left in coats and gloves, with lanterns, rope, and the sort of grim practicality Margaret would have approved of had she not been firmly of the view that none of them should ever leave the house after supper for reasons involving supernatural architecture.
The drive to the ruins felt shorter than it had any right to.
The first time she had come down from the hill beside Duncan, wet and disoriented, the walk had seemed to take an age.
Each return journey seemed to take less time.
The motorcar ate the distance, as if urgency had shortened the land itself.
By the time they reached the ruins, rain had begun in earnest.
The archway loomed black against the storm sky.
The red gate beneath it looked darker than she remembered, the old paint slick with weather.
Duncan brought the lanterns out first. Archie checked the rope with the air of a man hoping to be proved unnecessary and knowing better. They stood before the gate.
Wind moved over the ground in cold, searching breaths. Rain struck the broken stone and the tops of their coats. Thunder sounded again, closer now. Ceci felt the air shift almost at once.
“There,” she said.
Duncan came nearer, lantern raised.
“I feel it.”
Archie, beside her, swore softly. “This time I do too.”
That startled all three of them. The sensation was subtle and unmistakable.
The world around the archway seemed under strain, as if the air had tightened over the opening and every gust of wind pressed against something thinned but not yet torn.
Duncan looked up at the crossbeam where the old lettering hid beneath repainted wood.
“Witness,” he said.
Ceci moved to step under the arch.
The pressure sharpened.
Archie caught her sleeve. “Slowly.”
She nodded.
Duncan moved to one side of the opening. Archie to the other. The three of them stood in a rough triangle under the broken stone, the lantern light swinging, the storm gathering, rain pelting their shoulders. Ceci drew Leopold’s copied note from her coat pocket and read over the paper once more.
“Admission without witness appears unstable. Closure requires one who sees and one who remains.”
Archie looked at the gate. “And how exactly are we meant to distinguish between seeing and remaining?”
No one answered.
The thunder rolled directly overhead. Then, very softly, from the wall to Ceci’s right came the sound of metal touching stone. All three of them turned.
The bricked seam where the old aperture had once been now visible again, though differently. Water ran over it in thin silver lines, tracing edges that had been nearly invisible in daylight. Ceci took one step closer. Duncan’s hand closed around her wrist at once.
“Ceci.”
“It’s moving.”
The stone seemed to answer her. A thin shock ran up through the soles of her shoes, sharp enough to make her knees loosen. Duncan caught her before she could step back too fast.
“Ceci.”
“I’m all right.”
Archie raised the lantern. “You are extremely not.”
She looked down.
For one second, the wet grass beneath her feet had gone pale with frost. Then the rain struck it, and the white vanished. The seam in the wall shifted somehow, the mortar paling as if something older beneath it were pressing nearer the surface. Archie raised his lantern higher.
And there, where yesterday there had been only sealed stone, a narrow black square appeared for the briefest second, no larger than a cabinet opening.
A window.
Ceci’s heart slammed once against her ribs.
The little barred window.
It vanished again as quickly as it had come, but not before something pale had flashed within it.
A hand.
She gasped and jerked back. Duncan pulled her against him at once. Archie swore again, beautifully this time.
“Did you see it?”
“Yes,” Ceci said. “Yes.”
Rain struck harder.
The air under the arch had become charged now, so alive with wrongness she could feel it against her teeth. Duncan’s arm was still around her. Archie had come close enough that his shoulder touched hers on the other side.
Three witnesses.
Three bodies.
Three hearts beating too fast in the dark.
And then the gate opened. Only a little.
An inch, perhaps two. Enough for the latch to lift with a sound like a breath being drawn through old wood.
No one had touched it. The gap that appeared beyond the red plank was not black with night.
It was bright. A different kind of light, pale and electric and thin.
Ceci stared.
For one impossible suspended second, she saw what looked like a room beyond, white walls, metal shelving, the hum of fluorescent light.
Then it was gone.
The gate slammed shut.
The force of it shook the arch. Archie caught the nearest stone instinctively as dust came down around them. Duncan swore. Ceci clutched both men without deciding which one she had reached for first. The storm seemed to break fully overhead.
When the thunder passed, they were left panting in the rain, the red gate closed and ordinary again before them. Ordinary, except for the paper now trapped under the latch.
A single folded sheet.
Ceci stared at it.
Duncan saw it too.
“No one touch anything.”
“Very wise,” Archie said, still breathing too hard. “Shall we all admire the haunted correspondence from a distance instead?”
Duncan took his handkerchief from his pocket, folded it twice, then stepped forward with excruciating care and lifted the paper free.
The gate did not move again. Rain slicked the sheet in his hands.
He turned toward the lantern. It was not fresh paper.
It was old, creased, and written in a hurried, slanting hand.
Not Leopold’s.
Not Vale’s.
At the top, in ink blurred by age and perhaps by water long before tonight, were the words:
If anyone finds this, I came through in November 1907. My name is Eleanor Price. Do not trust the polite man who already knows what year you belong to.
Ceci felt her whole body go cold. Archie let out a humorless sound. “Well.”
Duncan unfolded the page further. The next line was worse.
He told me Britain could still choose Germany if enough of the right men were frightened into admiring strength.
For a moment, none of them spoke. The storm raged around the ruins. Lantern light shook across wet stone and faces gone pale. The page trembled slightly in Duncan’s hand.
Eleanor. 1907. Voss, or someone like him, already at work then or already using the same language. Already understanding how fear could be cultivated, democracy itself sounded tired and soft beside the promise of order. Ceci looked at the shut gate. It had not only answered.
It had sent warning.
She turned to the two men beside her.
“Whatever he wants,” she said, voice shaking now with anger rather than fear, “he has wanted it for a very long time.”
Duncan folded the page carefully, rain and all.
“Yes,” he said.
Archie stepped closer, his hand finding the small of her back on simple instinct.
“Then perhaps,” he said, looking at the gate with a brightness that had gone fierce, “it is time someone disappointed him.”
The three of them stood together beneath the storm, the warning in Duncan’s pocket, the old gate shut before them, and the future no longer abstract enough to misunderstand.