Chapter 24 #2
“Some entity moved Teague like a puppet and—” She swallowed and forced herself to continue. “It did the same to me the day I declined to join you in your carriage. My feet walked toward the edge, step by step, against my will. Every part of my mind refused, and yet, I walked.” She shuddered.
“I know,” he said. “Thom told me. I realize now that I should have told you everything I knew before that happened.” He cast her a sidelong glance. “I was wrong.”
Despite the grave topic they discussed, she could not help but laugh. “It costs you much to admit that.”
His smile was a spare curling of his lips.
He led her off the path where it curved around an outcrop of granite and the headland opened, the ocean visible on three sides.
A section of the old boundary wall ran along the edge here, the stones worn with age, the top low and flat, warmed by the sun.
He gestured toward it and she sat, angling her body so they faced each other as he joined her on the wall.
“I believe it was not one entity that accosted me on the path, but two,” she said. “I could feel them in the place my will should have been, two presences, distinct from each other.” She paused and when he did not fill the gap, she said, “The Trevelyan brothers.”
“I, too, have seen them. As I have seen the Lady Jane. As I saw the woman draped in black outside the shop in London.”
The knot in her chest loosened at his words, easing the tightness she had carried, the deeply buried fear that she was imagining the whole of it despite all the evidence that she was not.
“London…”
“The day Granger came to tell you of your inheritance.”
She remembered thinking that there was a man outside the shop. She remembered the woman, too, there then gone, as if she had never been there at all. “You were outside in the rain,” she said.
“I was.”
“I saw her through the glass. I thought I imagined her.”
“You did not.”
She exhaled slowly. “Yes, I know that now. I had been catching glimpses of strange things for days. Probably since Catherine’s death, but I did not know it then.
That is the way it works, the ability passing from one generation to the next.
” She paused. “How long have you seen…ghosts? Your whole life?”
“No. It began the day Jory died.” He took her hand and stroked his thumb along her palm.
“These things we see… Ghosts. Spirits. Entities. Wraiths. Call them what you will. They are not here by choice. I have believed that for years. And I believe some, those that have malice and hate and rage like the Trevelyans, are held here by something older and stronger.”
She thought about that a moment, about the chemist’s stories and the sensation that something hovered outside the coach door the day she had arrived in Fowey and the creaking floorboards in the third room.
About the entity on the path and, more frightening still, the terrifying thing she had encountered in the cellar.
That was the thing that was older and stronger.
“Catherine called it the Occupant,” she said, looking out at the water, more blue than gray today.
She remembered feeling the slick, oily coil of vile intent pressing against her, probing for the smallest gap.
“I do not believe it manufactures malice but rather feeds on it, finds what already exists and nurtures it, slithers in like water finding its way through a gap.”
He was quiet a moment. “The Trevelyans are not willing participants in what they have become. They are held. Compelled.”
“As they compel others,” Minerva whispered, remembering the horror of their will supplanting her own. “One of them fights it still, even all these many years later. I felt anguish beneath the malice.”
“But he cannot break free of the Occupant,” Dashiell said.
Minerva stared at him, digesting his words, thinking how terrible it would be to remain trapped for hundreds of years.
She drew a slow breath and then told him of her visit to the cellar that first time with Kitty, of the certainty that something terrifying was down there with her, of Catherine’s journal, of the pages where her handwriting was neat and precise and the pages where it was a nearly illegible scrawl.
She told him of the words written on those pages, wondering if things that made no sense to her might make sense to him.
When she finished, she realized she was looking at the ground now instead of at him.
She had been holding all of this inside, unwilling to speak of it even with Kitty.
She lifted her head and looked at him then, at the hard planes and angles of him and the mouth that rarely smiled and the copper eyes, all of which had become dear to her.
“There is something else,” she said. “Last night, I was alone in the kitchen. I opened the cellar door. I told it I knew what it was.” She paused. “And then I looked at my feet and found myself on the first stair with no memory of stepping down. As if I had answered its call.” She shuddered.
He was quiet for a moment, and then he said, “I must go down there.”
Trap it. Trap it. Trap it in the stone. Pull it in, but not alone. Need another who can see.
“No,” Minerva said.
His brows rose.
“We must go down there,” she corrected him.
He studied her face, perhaps measuring her resolve. Then he offered a short nod. “Together.”
“Yes.” She waited for his argument and when none came, she asked, “When?”
He rose and offered her his hand. “Now.”
An entity cold and dark and ancient inhabited the cellar. It had already sent her fleeing up the stairs with her heart hammering and her rational explanations crumbling. It was dangerous and terrifying. She was afraid. Terrified.
But he was with her.
Pushing to her feet, she took his hand.