In the Night Wood
In the Night Wood
Dale Bailey
A FOREST. A BOOK. A MISSING GIRL.Charles Hayden has been fascinated by a strange Victorian fairy tale, In the Night Wood, since he was a child. When his wife, Erin – a descendant of the author – inherits her ancestor’s house, the couple decide to make it their home. Still mourning the recent death of their daughter, they leave America behind, seeking a new beginning in the English countryside.But Hollow House, filled with secrets and surrounded by an ancient oak forest, is a place where the past seems very much alive. Isolated among the trees, Charles and Erin begin to feel themselves haunted – by echoes of the stories in the house’s library, by sightings of their daughter, and by something else, as old and dark as the forest around them.A compelling and atmospheric gothic thriller, In the Night Wood reveals the chilling power of myth and memory.
Frontispiece (#ulink_57fdeb62-6a09-5c7e-926c-4681228b419b)
Copyright (#uf4327829-3f75-5443-a00e-074d320d2409)
HarperVoyager
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2019
Copyright © Dale Bailey 2018
Cover design by Andrew Davis © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2019
Cover images © Shutterstock.com (http://Shutterstock.com)
Frontispiece illustration © Andrew Davidson
Dale Bailey asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780008329167
Ebook Edition © September 2018 ISBN: 9780008329174
Version: 2018-11-23
Dedication (#uf4327829-3f75-5443-a00e-074d320d2409)
For Pam and Sally
Epigraph (#uf4327829-3f75-5443-a00e-074d320d2409)
The specific mode of existence of man implies the need of his learning what happens, and above all what can happen, in the world around him and in his own interior world. That it is a matter of the structure of the human condition is shown, inter alia, by the existential necessity of listening to stories and fairy tales, even in the most tragic of circumstances.
— MIRCEA ELIADE, THE FORBIDDEN FOREST
Gretel began to cry and said,
“How are we to get out of the forest now?”
— THE BROTHERS GRIMM, “HANSEL AND GRETEL”
Contents
Cover (#u4da83330-127d-504e-988a-71950ad0b434)
Frontispiece (#ub736c394-922a-52a2-81af-ce08fbf23e36)
Title Page (#ufa9411af-60f3-52fc-8024-a0a5835e6430)
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Once Upon a Time … (#ube791df6-9d5a-5f24-92d2-73d0ddd281e4)
Prelude (#u2fdc3665-7f13-510b-a256-52fb3d7fa543)
Chapter 1 (#ue0277e91-06c3-5e2b-bf92-607cc92fa91c)
Chapter 2 (#ubf654aa8-296b-52c6-b3de-1a9e21a8ca87)
Chapter 3 (#u922cc696-f2f5-5a44-91e0-905617aae8d4)
I: Hollow House (#u3e8e8ebb-b52e-51ad-85bd-8c20773c1a35)
Chapter 1 (#u0f65eb38-edd5-5357-8da1-e929cc2774b6)
Chapter 2 (#u8d3d820d-a350-544f-9b37-0ad6f5c8a32f)
Chapter 3 (#u85d414e7-da21-5f51-a691-f0a7e77349a4)
Chapter 4 (#u91a16943-baa5-563a-9e9f-28dd5a453f37)
Chapter 5 (#u25b89333-a976-5502-9a56-5309adf836c6)
Chapter 6 (#u4699cc19-6154-5dbe-9547-13cfd7db8268)
Chapter 7 (#ub03b76ea-1f18-5e2b-a45c-28b78658627f)
Chapter 8 (#u6d268465-8d6e-5ba0-99fa-0b24d52d4bf6)
Chapter 9 (#ue4820840-1d81-5ed4-9dfa-fdf4879a28fd)
II: Yarrow (#u0a7e7b18-f4c9-5bc6-b5a2-eefd127dcefb)
Chapter 1 (#ua6096376-36e1-5e7d-b8a0-6684843fb663)
Chapter 2 (#ua047a9bf-9f0b-55ec-a559-9ab9d83f3806)
Chapter 3 (#uc159caf8-32fb-5bfa-93d4-07ba426c45b7)
Chapter 4 (#ubb6a699d-9833-596f-b665-b215102419fd)
Chapter 5 (#uf832e566-f667-59f8-a97a-1fdc1afac14e)
Chapter 6 (#ua491d76a-4246-5944-ab29-3dbdaf54123d)
Chapter 7 (#u48c3a570-120c-5a76-8cbb-c8c1c3036d2f)
Chapter 8 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 9 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 10 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 11 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 12 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 13 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 14 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 15 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 16 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 17 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 18 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 19 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 20 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 21 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 22 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 23 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 24 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 25 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 26 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 27 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 28 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 29 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 30 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 31 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 32 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 33 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 34 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 35 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 36 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 37 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 38 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 39 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 40 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 41 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 42 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 43 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 44 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 45 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 46 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 47 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 48 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 49 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 50 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 51 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 52 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 53 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 54 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 55 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 56 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 57 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 58 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 59 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 60 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 61 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 62 (#litres_trial_promo)
III: In the Night Wood (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 1 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 2 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 3 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 4 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 5 (#litres_trial_promo)
Author’s Note (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgments
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
ONCE UPON A TIME … (#ulink_57fdeb62-6a09-5c7e-926c-4681228b419b)
PRELUDE (#ulink_114462a8-d6d3-5917-8bf2-d73bec8bb4b4)
By the time the Moon arose and let down her golden skirts, Laura was sore afraid. In the pale light she stumbled through a ring of sinister yews into a glade where stood a single bearded oak, hoary and not unkind.
“I met you once in a dream,” she said.
“And I you in my long, arboreal sleep,” replied Grandfather Oak (for that was his name).
“Isn’t that odd?” Laura said to the tree.
“Not at all,” said Grandfather Oak, nodding sagely. “The Story is rich in coincidence.”
“What kind of Story is it?” asked Laura.
And just then the North Wind swept through the trees, and Grandfather Oak shivered all his branches and dropped down a curtain of golden leaves. “It is not a happy Story,” he said. “But so few Stories are.”
— CAEDMON HOLLOW, IN THE NIGHT WOOD
1 (#ulink_afef761a-79f8-558f-9a0c-f1a7d4d9d209)
Hollow House came to them as such events befall orphans in tales, unexpectedly, and in the hour of their greatest need: salvation in the form of a long blue envelope shoved in among the day’s haul of pizza-delivery flyers, catalogs, and credit card solicitations. That’s how Charles would pitch it to Erin, anyway, sitting across from her in the night kitchen, with the envelope and its faintly exotic Royal Mail stamp lying on the table between them. Yet it felt to Charles Hayden like the culminating moment in some obscure chain of events that had been building, link by link, through all the thirty-six years of his life — through centuries even, though he could not have imagined that at the time.
Where do tales begin, after all?
Once upon a time.
In the months that followed, those words — and the stories they conjured up for him — would echo in Charles’s mind. Little Red Cap and Briar Rose and Hansel and Gretel, abandoned among the dark trees by their henpecked father and his wicked second wife. Charles would think of them most of all, footsore and afraid when at last they chanced upon a cottage made of gingerbread and spun sugar and stopped to feast upon it, little suspecting the witch who lurked within, ravenous with hungers of her own.
Once upon a time.
So tales begin, each alike in some desperate season. Yet how many other crises — starting points for altogether different tales — wait to unfold themselves in the rich loam of every story, like seeds germinating among the roots of a full-grown tree? How came that father to be so faithless? What made his wife so cruel? What brought that witch to those woods and imparted to her appetites so unsavory?
So many links in the chain of circumstance. So many stories inside stories, waiting to be told.
Once upon a time.
Once upon a time, at the wake for a grandfather he had never known in life, a boy named Charles Hayden, his mother’s only child, scrawny and bespectacled and always a little bit afraid, sought refuge in the library of the sprawling house his mother had grown up in. “The ancestral manse,” Kit (she was that kind of mother) had called it when she told him they’d be going there, and even at age eight he could detect the bitter edge in her voice. Charles had never seen anything like it — not just the house, but the library itself, a single room two or three times the size of the whole apartment he shared with Kit, furnished in dark, glossy wood and soft leather, and lined with books on every wall. His sneakers were silent on the plush rugs, and as he looked around, slack-jawed in wonder, the boisterous cries of his cousins on the lawn wafted dimly through the sun-shot Palladian windows.
Charles had never met the cousins before. He’d never met any of these people; he hadn’t even known they existed. Puttering up the winding driveway this morning in their wheezing old Honda, he’d felt like a child in a story, waking one morning to discover that he’s a prince in hiding, that his parents (his parent) were not his parents after all, but faithful retainers to an exiled king. Prince or no, the cousins — a thuggish trio of older boys clad in stylish dress clothes that put to shame his ill-fitting cords and secondhand oxford (the frayed tail already hanging out) — had taken an instant dislike to this impostor in their midst. Nor had anyone else seemed particularly enamored of Charles’s presence. Even now he could hear adult voices contending in the elegant chambers beyond the open door, Kit’s querulous and pleading, and those of his two aunts (Regan and Goneril, Kit called them) firm and unyielding.
Adult matters. Charles turned his attention to the books. Sauntering the length of a shelf, he trailed one finger idly along beside him, bump bump bump across the spines of the books, like a kid dragging a stick down a picket fence. At last, he turned and plucked down by chance from the rows of books a single volume, bound in glistening brown leather, with red bands on the spine.
Outside the door, his mother’s voice rose sharply.
One of the aunts snapped something in response.
In the stillness that followed — even the cousins had fallen silent — Charles examined the book. The supple leather boards were embossed with some kind of complex design. He studied it, mapping the pattern — a labyrinth of ridges and whorls — with the ball of his thumb. Then he opened the book. The frontispiece echoed the motif inscribed on the cover; here, he could see it clearly, a stylized forest scene: gnarled trees with serpentine roots and branches twining about one another in sinuous profusion. Twisted, and bearded with lichen, the trees projected an oddly menacing aura of sentience — branches like clutching fingers, a hollow like a screaming mouth. Strange faces, seemingly chance intersections of leaf and bough, peered out at him from the foliage: a grinning serpent, a malevolent cat, an owl with the face of a frightened child.
And on the facing page:
In the Night Wood
by
Caedmon Hollow
Looking down at the words — like the frontispiece, garlanded with foliage — Charles felt his heart quicken. The age-darkened pages smelled like a cellar of exotic spices thrown open in an airless room, and their texture, faintly ridged underneath his fingers and laid through with pale equidistant lines, felt like the latitudes of a world yet unmapped. Those sly foxlike faces, peering everywhere out at him from tangles of leaf and briar, seemed to consult among themselves, a confabulation of whispers too faint to quite discern, there and gone again in the same breath. His finger crept out to turn the page.
“Charles.”
He looked up, startled.
Kit stood in the doorway, her thin mouth compressed into a bloodless line. Staring at her, Charles saw for the first time — as with an adult’s eyes — how old she looked, how tired, how different from her immaculate sisters, lacquered to within an inch of their lives. He thought of his grandfather, that stranger in the casket who shared Kit’s jutting cheekbones and deep blue eyes. It fell upon him like a blow, that image. It nearly staggered him.
“We’re leaving, Charles. Get your things.”
He swallowed. “Okay.”
She held his gaze a moment longer. Then she was gone.
Charles started to slide the book back into its slot on the shelf — but hesitated. He felt once again that sense of tremulous significance, as if the flow of events had been shunted into a new and unsuspected channel. As if thrones and dominions more powerful than he could imagine had stepped briefly from behind some hidden curtain in the air. The room almost hummed with their presence.
He could not surrender the book, this artifact of a life that, but for Kit, could have been his own: the manicured lawns and the vast rooms and the great library most of all. (Libraries would be the lodestone of his life.) He would have to tuck it into his knapsack and spirit it out of the house.
He would have to steal it.
As this conviction took root inside him, Charles felt a surge of panic. Terror and exhilaration vibrated through him like a plucked chord.
He wanted to flee, to cast aside the book and, for the first time all day, seek human companionship. Even the unbearable cousins would do. But he could not seem to pry loose his frozen fingers. As of its own accord, the book fell open in his hands, and he found himself flipping past the frontispiece and the title page to the text itself: Chapter One.
The initial letter of the opening sentence was inset and oversized and bound in ornate runners of leaf and vine. For a moment, his inexperienced eye could not decode it. And then abruptly, the entire phrase snapped into focus.
Once upon a time, it said.
2 (#ulink_80c42da9-57a0-53da-a4b6-eca73393033e)
But for the book, Charles might have forgotten the entire episode. For all Kit ever spoke of it, the whole day might have been an elaborate fantasy inspired by their itinerant existence in a succession of cheap walk-up apartments, sustained by a series of minimum-wage jobs (“Fired again,” she always told him ruefully when one of them headed south) and well-meaning but feckless boyfriends, most of whom exuded a sweet-smelling haze that Charles would many years later come to recognize as the scent of pot.
But the stolen leather volume had a way of turning up anew with each fresh move — in a box of mateless socks or shoved in among the well-thumbed paperbacks on Kit’s bedroom shelf. Finally, home sick one afternoon in Baltimore — they’d only just moved; he must have been nine or ten at the time — Charles actually read it.
The story showed up in his dreams for days thereafter, a hallucinatory montage of great trees pressing close upon a woodland path, a terrified child, a horned king, his pale horse steaming at the nostrils in the midnight air. Afterward, Charles could never be quite certain whether to attribute the eidetic quality of these images to the book itself or to the feverish condition he’d been in when he read it. He meant to go back and have another look, but the pressures attendant upon being the new kid at school (he was always the new kid at school, and a bookish, nerdy kid at that) intervened.
By the time he did try to go back, two or three moves later, the book had evaporated, vanished in one of the more recent relocations. And this time it really was forgotten.
It might have stayed that way had Charles not enrolled in a seminar in Victorian nonsense literature fifteen years later. He’d been on his own for years by then (sometimes it felt like he’d always been on his own, like he’d spent more time parenting Kit than vice versa), a scholarship kid who did well enough as an undergraduate English major to snag a teaching assistantship at one of the big state Ph.D. mills. There, he divided his time between a derelict apartment in the student ghetto, cramped classrooms, where he held forth on the merits of the thesis statement to bored freshmen only four or five years his junior, and the classes he was taking, where the air was thick with intellectual posturing and professional anxiety. He’d enrolled in the nonsense seminar out of necessity, when the class he’d really wanted — a course in literary theory taught by a fading Ivy League enfant terrible who planed in once a week to teach his classes and then promptly vanished — filled up before he could get in.
So it happened that Charles — at twenty-five, still scrawny and bespectacled, still a little bit afraid — found himself in the university library one cold February evening, reading up on Edward Lear. He’d just started nodding when his eye chanced upon a footnote referencing an obscure Victorian fantasist by the name of Caedmon Hollow. Now almost entirely forgotten (Charles read), Hollow had written only a single book: In the Night Wood.
The title jerked Charles fully awake. The library was silent, cool, and all but abandoned at this late hour. A hard snow ticked against the windows, but despite the chill, a thick column of heat climbed through him. Rereading the footnote, he felt time slip. He was a child again, alone in his grandfather’s enormous library with the cries of the dreadful triumvirate of cousins sounding far away beyond the great arched windows. Long-forgotten details from that single feverish reading flooded through him: a full moon looking down through the mists of the Night Wood; the Mere of Souls, black in its midnight glade; a child flying through the whispering trees; the Horned King upon his pale horse.
“Shit,” he whispered, setting aside the book. He stood and made his way across the reading room to a bank of terminals and tapped the title into the catalog. A few minutes later, clutching a call slip in one hand, Charles caught an elevator to an upper floor. Walking the labyrinth of stacks and dragging a single finger in his wake, bump bump bump across the spines of the books, Charles nearly missed it.
He supposed he’d been expecting the same beautiful, leather-bound volume he’d plucked from his grandfather’s shelf. The library’s copy was infinitely more practical, a thin, sturdy book bound in blue boards — or rebound, he surmised when he flipped it open to find the same baroque frontispiece. It was a woodcut, he saw, the lines strong and sure.
Wily faces peered out at him from behind the boles of the ancient, lichen-shrouded trees, their great splayed roots knuckling down into beds of rich, damp soil. As he gazed at them, the faces seemed to shift and draw back into the foliage, only to appear again, peeping out at him from some neighboring bower of wood and leaf. He imagined that he overheard their whispered conversations in the air around him.
He started back toward the elevator, flipping to the first chapter, that opening invocation —
Once upon a time
— ringing in his head. When he turned the corner and collided with someone strolling the other way, Charles had a brief and not unpleasant impression that he’d been enveloped in a feminine cloud, faintly redolent of lavender. Caught off balance, he threw out his arms to catch himself —
“Watch where you’re going!” the girl cried.
— and went over backward. He thumped to the floor, his glasses flying one way, his book the other. He was still scrambling for the former when the cloud of perfume enveloped him once again.
“Steady there,” the girl said. “You okay?”
He blinked at her owlishly. “Yeah, I —” His fingers closed over his glasses. He fumbled with them, and she swam briefly into focus, a small, lean brunette in her mid-twenties, with a prominently boned face and wide-set hazel eyes, bright with amusement — not beautiful, exactly, but … striking, Kit would have called her. Out of his league, anyway, that much was sure. “I guess I wasn’t looking where I was going.”
“I guess not.”
She took his hand and heaved him to his feet, startling him all over again. “Steady,” she said as he snatched at the nearest shelf. He was still trying to get his glasses adjusted — he thought he might have bent the frames — when she reappeared with his book.
“What was it you were so intent on, anyway?”
“Nothing,” he sputtered. “It was — I —”
Waving him into silence, she flipped the book over to see for herself. She laughed out loud. “Small world.”
“What,” Charles said, still fussing with his glasses. “You’ve read it?”
“Once upon a time, long ago.”
“Not many people have read it.”
“Not like I have,” she said.
“What do you mean?”
“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you,” she said, shoving the book at him. “Here. Hold still.” Shaking her head, she reached out and straightened his glasses. Maybe they weren’t bent after all. “Better?”
“Yeah, I guess so. Thanks.”
“You bet.” Reaching out once again — Charles forced himself not to step back — the girl brushed a speck of imaginary dust from his shoulder. “All set?”
“Yeah, I mean — Yeah.”
“Good.”
Smiling, the girl slipped past him into the stacks.
“Wait,” Charles said. “I wanted —”
But she was already gone, leaving a perfect girl-shaped vacuum in the air before him. “Shit,” Charles said, turning to look after her, but the library was cold and empty, a forest of nine-foot shelves branching off as far as the eye could see.
Then, in one of the few courageous acts in his life up to then, he gave chase. He turned the corner of one row of stacks and accelerated. “Hey,” he called. “Wait up.” And when he reached the next intersection — almost at a run — he nearly collided with her again. She was waiting there, leaning against a shelf, arms crossed, a sly smile upon her-face.
“You’re aching for a concussion today, aren’t you?” she said. “You sounded like a herd of wildebeests. I thought you were going to brain yourself.”
“I wanted to ask you something,” he said. “I wanted to know what you meant by ‘small world.’”
“That’s a complicated answer.”
“Let me buy you a cup of coffee.” Once the phrase passed his lips, the room seemed suddenly airless. He was not the kind of man to ask strange women out for coffee. He was, in fact, not the kind of man to ask out women at all — not for lack of interest, but for lack of confidence. Assuming rejection, he found it easier to save everyone the trouble. So when she said —
“Sure. Coffee sounds good.”
— he exhaled an audible sigh of relief.
3 (#ulink_7576697e-f492-533f-b93e-05758c0d0e4c)
Her name was Erin, her secret unexpected (to say the least).
Coincidence, Charles called it. Coincidence that he had plucked down that book in his grandfather’s library (she dismissed it all as chance). Coincidence that he had gone on to seek a Ph.D. in English. Coincidence that on a late night in the library with snow slanting out of the black February sky, he should run (literally) into the great-great-exponentially-great-something-or-other of Caedmon Hollow himself, who might have influenced, in subtle ways, Charles’s pathway to this place.
Fate, he thought. The Worm Ouroboros. The snake biting its own tail. He had come full circle. And for a moment Charles glimpsed a vast, secret world, intersecting lines of power running just beyond the limits of human perception — a great story in which they were all of them embedded, moving toward some unimaginable conclusion.
As secrets go, it wasn’t much of one, Erin confided. The branch of the family that had immigrated to America had generations ago fallen out of touch with the family that remained behind in England — there might have been some kind of conflict, a formal break. She didn’t know, or much care. But Caedmon Hollow had remained with them, as a legend if nothing more: an eccentric figure out of the distant past, who’d squandered much of his abbreviated life in drinking and debauchery, squandering as well the talent that had enabled him to eke out but a single volume of fiction.
“Everyone in the family reads it at some time or other. It’s like a ritual,” she said. “It’s not really a story for children, is it? It’s hardly a story at all, more like the ravings of a man half mad from drinking.”
“I suppose it is,” he said, recalling the strangely vivid nightmares his own reading had produced. “But it has a kind of power, doesn’t it?”
“I guess so. I haven’t forgotten it, anyway.”
“Is there more, do you think? Unpublished?”
“Methinks I hear your grad-student heart beat harder,” she said. “On the hunt for a dissertation topic, are we?” And when he blushed — he could feel the heat creeping up his face — she touched his hand, and he flushed still harder. “Teasing,” she said. “You can have my crazy old great-great-whatever. It hardly matters to me.”
So it began, their introduction to the fuel that love feeds upon: stories.
That night they shared their stories — the beginning of them, anyway, as they understood them then. They started at the surface as the best stories do. So they talked about their graduate studies (their gradual studies, he said, venturing a rare joke). They talked about their crummy apartments and their crummier cars. He talked about the pressure to publish. She talked about the Law Review.
And then, as the best stories do, they deepened.
They talked. She was an orphan, alone in the world. Her parents had died in a car accident three years ago. In a way, Charles was an orphan, too. Kit had hardly been a mother to him, and in his freshman year of college she’d moved to a commune in Nova Scotia. He hadn’t seen her since.
Dreams and aspirations, two cups of coffee, then three. They were both too wired to sleep, so they repaired to her apartment to talk some more. She checked his head to make sure he hadn’t injured himself when they’d collided, his lips brushed hers, and one thing led to another, as these things will.
Everything important that had ever happened to him had happened in libraries, Charles thought, drawing her down to him on the bed. Then he stopped thinking at all. They married six months later.
They lived happily ever after.
I (#ulink_3e0821ed-bec5-50d9-b7f8-7fae4a313f8c)
HOLLOW HOUSE (#ulink_3e0821ed-bec5-50d9-b7f8-7fae4a313f8c)
At midnight, by myriad ways and strange, through trees parted before her to direct her path, Laura crept down to look into the Mere of Souls, whence the Sylph had dispatched her. Of a time you could see things in the water, or so Laura had learned in the Sylph’s Tale, and she went to her knees, enamored of these mysteries. But no matter how she tilted her head or squinted her eyes, she could see nothing but clots of leaves rotting in the depths below.
Then the waters began to boil and the Genii of the Pool thrust his head above the surface. Weedy hair coiled around his face. His eyes were narrow and blue and cold. “What brings you to this place?” he said in tones thick with the thunder of distant waters.
Laura gathered up her courage and spoke, her voice quavering. “I was told in a Story once upon a time,” she said, “that you could see your Fate in the Pool if only you believed hard enough. And I believe very hard.”
“Some things are better left unseen,” the Genii rumbled, “and the Mere of Souls may lie.”
— CAEDMON HOLLOW, IN THE NIGHT WOOD
1 (#ulink_2403c3e5-7c68-59e3-a1e4-44a78a0207b2)
They hadn’t spoken for almost an hour — not since Harrogate, where he’d had some trouble with a roundabout and the solicitor’s car had vanished, eclipsed by traffic — when Charles Hayden caught his first glimpse of the Eorl Wood.
In the days prior to their departure from their home in Ransom, North Carolina, with its attendant griefs and sorrows, Charles had fooled himself into thinking that maybe, just maybe, things would be okay after all — that the quiet stranger who shared his home was the outward face of a new Erin, a sadder, wiser Erin, tempered, but no longer paralyzed, by knowledge of the myriad ways the world could betray you. He had fooled himself into believing that with enough time and effort, with enough patience, he might yet reach the core of warmth inside her. He had supposed that the core of warmth was still there.
Last night over dinner at the hotel, this pleasant illusion had crumbled around Charles. And over breakfast this morning with the solicitor — her name was Merrow, Ann Merrow — Erin had been pensive and morose. During the chaos at the roundabout, as Charles had whizzed around the circle in futility for the second time, Erin had roused herself long enough to point at one of the branching exits.
“I think it’s that one,” she’d said, and Charles had whipped the car across three lanes of traffic. He caught a flash of the sign mounted high above. Ripon and North Yorks, it read. Then a lorry blew by with an aggrieved blast of the horn, and he’d yanked his attention back to the road. There had been a time when a stunt like that would have elicited an impassioned orgy of outrage from Erin. Now, however, she barely blinked. Charles supposed she’d just as soon the truck had crushed the car like an aluminum can. If you got right down to it, he supposed he wouldn’t have much minded it himself.
Ahead, traffic cleared and the solicitor’s dusty blue Saab came into view. “Sorry,” Charles said, but Erin hadn’t replied. The last vestiges of Harrogate fell away in the rearview mirror and the alien Yorkshire terrain drew up around them, a rugged patchwork of hand-stacked stone walls, rolling pasturage, and narrow-windowed eighteenth-century farmhouses, the forbidding line of the moors looming always up behind them like the shoulders of sleeping giants, blanketed with earth.
It was a bleak prospect even on this clear April morning, and Charles found himself thinking of the Brontë children, tubercular and strange, more than halfway mired in fantasies wrested by sheer force of desperation from this unrelenting landscape, the remote Haworth parsonage and the churchyard before it, overcrowded with the dead. The present seemed to lie lightly on the land here, as though the narrow span of gray road, where the solicitor’s car hove momentarily into view at the crest of each new ridge, might simply melt away like a dusting of fresh snow, unveiling the bones of an older, sterner world.
That thought put him in mind of Caedmon Hollow and his own strange fantasy wrested from this same hostile terrain all those years ago — more than a century and a half now; Caedmon Hollow might almost have known the Brontës — and Charles felt a surge of excitement at the prospect of Hollow House awaiting them. In that moment of anticipation, he could almost forget Erin’s brooding silence, the trouble with Syrah Nagle, and — and the rest of it. He could almost forget it all.
Ahead, Merrow turned into a still more narrow road. It ran downhill between retaining walls of stacked stone for maybe half a mile. Then the road broadened, the walls drew away, and they were in civilization again, or what passed for it out here, anyway.
Suddenly they were in Yarrow. The village was old and steep, crowded into a rift between the hills. Merchants hugged the high street — a newsagent with a white cat drowsing in the front window; a pub, its lot crowded with the noon rush; a hardware store; and a florist (Petal Pushers, Charles noted with a humorless snort). At the far end of town before a crumbling stone house, Charles saw a sign reading Yarrow Historical Society. He made a mental note to come back and have a look at the place. They weren’t likely to have anything useful, but you could never say for sure.
He glanced at Erin, but if the change in scenery had made any impression on her, it didn’t show. Merrow made two quick turns, each road more narrow than the last. If they met an oncoming car, they would have to pull over to let it pass. Charles had the fleeting thought that in leaving Yarrow they had passed through the last outpost of the modern world.
The terrain here was sharper, more unwelcoming, the hills rising steeply on either side. The road wound through rugged outcroppings of stone and patches of wiry brush. Charles cracked the window and let the slipstream flow in, freighted with the scent of heather and flowers just coming into bloom, and cooler than it would have been back home.
Except this was home now, wasn’t it? Home and a fresh start. He glanced at Erin. She seemed to have dozed off. She’d tilted her head against the back of the seat and closed her eyes, and for a single heartbreaking moment, as the midmorning sunlight etched silver the line of her profile, she looked like the girl he had married nearly a decade ago. Then the car dipped into shadow, and the sorrow around her eyes and in the set of her lips sprang into relief.
Charles frowned and looked away, the thought echoing inside his head: a fresh start. God knows they needed it. Drumming his fingers on the wheel, he studied the road, ascending a sharp hill. The solicitor’s car hung at the crest a moment, then plunged out of sight. Yew trees clustered against the sky, their tips just visible above the ridgeline.
Anticipation flickered in him once again.
Beside him, Erin opened her eyes. “We there?” she murmured.
And then they topped the ridge. The valley bottomed out endlessly before them, and suddenly the Eorl Wood was there, bigger than Charles had expected, and more forbidding. The trees began halfway down the slope, like the wall of an ancient fortress, a palisade of enormous alder and elm and gnarled oak. The wood spread as far as the eye could see — lime, olive, jade, a thousand shades of green, fading here and there into glossy emerald patches of darkness.
When Charles saw it, his first thought was that he understood, really understood, the environment that had shaped the nightscape of Caedmon Hollow’s mystifying book. His second thought, coming fast on the heels of the first, was that the wood was collectively alive, a single vast organism spilling out across the valley in wild profusion, bigger than the eye could comprehend, improbably, impossibly bigger, that it was sentient, watchful, and that somehow —
— how? —
— it had been awaiting them.
“Jesus,” Erin whispered, and it was all Charles could do — the impulse took an active effort of will to resist — not to step hard on the brake and wrench the car back toward Yarrow.
Too late to turn back now.
Momentum seized them, the gray road blurring as the car gathered speed. At the base of the decline, Merrow signaled left and disappeared into the trees. If Charles hadn’t seen it happen, he would have missed the turnoff entirely.
He almost missed it anyway. He braked hard — the road ended in a turnaround maybe two dozen yards past the entrance — the force of the deceleration pressing him into the upholstery. He swung the car around and squared up to the entrance.
It gaped under the trees, a tunnel hewn into the flesh of the wood itself, flanked by stone columns shrouded in vines. Engraved words, eroded almost flush with the stone, were visible on the pillar to the right: Hollow House, and below that, 1848. There had been a gate there once, but no more.
A taillight flashed deep in all that emerald gloaming. Charles reached out for Erin’s hand. “We’re here.”
“So we are.” She gave him a forced smile in return, but her fingers remained dead in his grasp.
Charles sighed. He turned on the headlights, touched the gas, and nosed the car between the columns. The wood took them. When the sound of their engine died away under the trees, no evidence of their passage remained.
They might never have come that way at all.
2 (#ulink_502c5a49-6a6f-5ffd-8563-e5719928e82a)
An oppression of trees drew up around the car, and a doomed sense of claustrophobia seized Erin Hayden. For a moment it was all too much — the dark closing down upon them and the tires whispering their incessant tidings of arrival on macadam crumbling with time and carpeted with dead leaves.
Most of all it was the ancient oaks pressing close to the road, like old men, lichen-bearded and a little deaf, stooping close to listen. She imagined them straightening up as the car slipped by, leaning their hoary heads together to pass the news, a stir of leaf and branch rippling ever outward before them.
There was something disturbing about the idea, something watchful and abiding about the gloom under the trees. It was too much, too close.
She glanced at Charles, his face masked in streamers of light and shadow. He looked tired, haggard with something more than jet lag. She almost reached out to him, maybe would have, but an overhanging branch slapped at the windshield, startling her, and she turned away instead.
That was when she saw the child: a little girl clad in a simple white dress, maybe kindergarten age —
— Lissa’s age —
— or maybe a year older. She stood on the leaf-scattered shoulder of the road, staring toward them, so close she might have reached out and touched the car as it sped past.
“Charles?”
“Hmm?”
“Did you —” She broke off. She did not want to say it. It had been nothing, a trick of the eye, a flash of sunlight through the forest canopy or a patch of fog breathing up from the damp soil. We see what we want to see, her therapist had told her. As if that helped.
“Did I what?” Charles said.
“Nothing,” she said.
She was tired of seeing things.
For months after the funeral, back home in Ransom, she’d caught glimpses of Lissa everywhere, through a scrim of raindrops on the windshield as she wheeled by the kids at the bus stop or in the baleful fluorescent glare of the grocery store, just turning the far corner of an aisle. Something familiar in the set of the mouth or the flash of shoulder-length hair.
Then she’d blink and see that Lissa wasn’t there after all. The girl at the bus stop would shift the angle of her gaze and her face would fall into unfamiliar lineaments. Meeting the grocery store specter afresh among the frozen foods, Erin would see that she was younger than she had thought, that she had dark hair and a squared-off jaw, that she looked nothing like Lissa at all.
She’d mentioned it to Charles once and he’d flinched as if she’d struck him. After that she’d never brought it up to him again.
Until last night.
Last night, over dinner at the hotel, she’d seen Lissa once again.
One moment Erin had been sitting at the table, jet-lagged and silent, spooning an indifferent soup into her mouth. The next, she’d glanced up, reaching for her water glass, and the girl had been there: Lissa, a slim blonde apparition, standing silent in the dining room door. Erin gasped, and the water went over with a crash.
“Shit,” she’d said, half rising as she reached to right the glass. When she looked up again, the girl —
— Lissa —
— was gone.
“Here, let me get that,” a voice said at her shoulder. The landlady — a kindly heavyset woman, her gray hair pulled back from her round, smiling face — leaned over her, dabbing at the table with a cloth.
“What happened?” Charles was saying, but Erin ignored him.
“That girl,” she said, sinking back into her seat.
The landlady paused, the damp rag in one hand. “Girl?”
“There. She was in the doorway.”
“Did she cause this?” The landlady straightened, abruptly stern. “Sarah,” she called. “Sarah, you come in here right now. Always underfoot, that one,” she added, swiping at the spill, an expanding island of dampness in the linen cloth. “Sarah!”
“Listen —” Charles began, but Erin overrode him.
“It’s not the girl’s fault. Really. She startled me, that’s all. She looked so much like —”
Then the girl was there, eyes downcast, her hands clasped behind her back, and the words —
— my daughter —
— died on Erin’s lips.
The girl, pudgy and thick, with a fringe of dark hair veiling her eyes, looked nothing like Lissa. Nothing at all. Lissa had been airy, ethereal, like some elemental spirit that had settled inexplicably among them. This girl — Sarah — looked sullen and coarse, grossly earthbound.
“Sarah,” the landlady said, “have you been sneaking around again?”
“No, Nanna. I just walked by the door. I didn’t mean anything.”
The landlady gave the spill a final swipe. “That should do.” She snapped the rag at the serving station. “Bring me that jug, child. Quickly now.”
Charles stared at his plate, his mouth set in a thin line, while the girl complied. She moved slowly, cradling a pitcher in her small hands. She studied Erin from under her bangs as she refilled the glass.
The landlady smiled. “I’m very sorry.”
“No need to apologize,” Charles said. “Accidents happen.”
“Ever since her mother passed …” The landlady shook her head. “Can I get you anything else?”
“No,” Charles said. “Thank you.”
“You’ll let me know if you need anything, then.” The landlady turned back to the kitchen, herding the girl before her. Just before the child disappeared, she glared back at the table, and for an instant — the space of a heartbeat — she reminded Erin of Lissa once again. It was like the blink of a camera shutter: Sarah, pudgy and resentful; then Lissa. Lissa glaring back at her, her eyes reproachful and unafraid.
You let me die, those eyes said.
Then the shutter blinked again and Lissa was gone.
“Charles —”
His hands busied themselves with his silverware.
There was something wounded in his silence, something fraught and sorrowful. He looked like a little boy, scowling at his shoes lest a flash of further intimacy send pent-up tears spilling down his cheeks. Erin had wanted to touch him then, too, and in that moment of weakness, a confessional impulse seized her. A fresh start, he’d said. And why not? You didn’t start fresh with lies.
“Charles —”
His knife chattered against the rim of his plate. A dull reflection alighted trembling on the flat of the blade. He stared at the table.
“I saw her, Charles. It was her. I mean … I know …”
Then he did look up, his face pale and cold, his expression set.
“She’s gone, Erin. She’s —” He drew a breath, shook his head, sighed. “She’s … gone.” He stared at her a moment longer. “I’m sorry,” he said. He hesitated as if he wanted to say more, and then, biting his lower lip, he pushed back his chair and left the dining room.
“Madam?” The landlady stood in the kitchen door, wiping her hands on a towel. “Is there something wrong with the meal?”
“No,” Erin said. “The food was fine. Everything’s fine.”
But everything wasn’t fine. Nothing was fine. Nothing would ever be fine again. Erin leaned her head against the cool window and focused on the thrum of the tires, the hum of the engine. It would be all right, she told herself. Everything would be all right.
Yet the wood, vast and green and vigilant, still oppressed her.
Gone, Charles had said.
He was right, of course. That was the hell of it. Last night at dinner, she had seen not Lissa but another child, a dark, heavyset child with griefs and burdens of her own. If Erin’s heart had chosen to see something else, it was an illusion, nothing more.
Perhaps she’d gone mad. Sane women did not see dead children cruising the canned fruit aisle when they did their weekly shopping. Sane women did not see ghostly shapes in the shadows underneath the trees.
Charles downshifted, and the engine’s tone deepened. Tidal pressure swelled through her as the car leaned into a curve. A bulwark of ancient, moss-damp stone — ten feet at least, and maybe taller — shot up from the forest floor before them like the fossilized spine of a buried dragon. As the car hurtled toward it, Erin’s heart quickened.
Then the road dipped and a narrow aperture, hardly wider than the car, appeared in the stone. The car shot under an archway. The suffocating omnipresence of the wood, that sense of contained energies churning just beyond the range of perception, retreated. An instant of speeding darkness followed — how thick the wall must be! — and then they surfaced on the other side, into a treeless meadow, sunlight breaking across the windshield.
Charles slowed as the road dropped down into a deep, round bowl carved into the heartwood. He nosed the car up to a second wall — hand-stacked stone, perhaps waist high or a little higher. He killed the engine.
Erin reached for her satchel. “I guess we’re here,” she said.
3 (#ulink_9a2f984a-5350-54a1-8c5b-2584b10577c9)
They got out of the car and stood there in silence, transfixed.
About a hundred yards away, Hollow House — three stories of gray, castellated stone — stood at a slight elevation, moated by sculpted grounds, meadow, and walls. Like a stone cast into a pool, Charles thought. Axis mundi, still center of the wheeling world.
“Something else, isn’t it?” Merrow said.
Something else indeed. The photographs had not done justice to the house’s implacable aspect — its grim solidity, its tower and turrets, its dormers and crow-stepped gables.
Merrow said, “The original structure burned in —”
“Eighteen forty-three,” Charles said. “Everything but the library.”
Merrow gave him a perfunctory smile. “You’ve done your research.”
“Charles is all about research,” Erin said, adjusting her bag. “It must be hell to heat.”
Merrow laughed. “It’s been decades since the entire house was in active use. Mr. Hollow — Edward, that is, your immediate predecessor — lived in a thoroughly updated suite of rooms, though ‘suite’ hardly does it justice. It has good proximity to the library — handy for your research, Mr. Hayden. In any case, you’ll find Hollow House quite livable, I should think.” Merrow led them along the perimeter of the wall. “Shall we?”
“Where’s the gate?” Charles asked.
Merrow uttered something that might have been a laugh. “There’s a gate for deliveries at the back. Otherwise the wall is unbroken, one of the house’s eccentricities. I thought you’d prefer the front view — a formal introduction, if you will. Here we go.” She waved at a set of stone risers built into the wall — a stile, Charles thought, summoning the word out of dusty memories of some obscure Victorian novelist — Surtees maybe.
“Let me give you a hand,” Charles said, but Merrow ignored him, flitting up the stairs on her own, so that he found himself gazing at the curve of her rear end, sleek beneath her clinging skirt.
She looked down at him from the crest of the wall. Charles averted his gaze, heat rising in his cheeks. “You’ll want to be careful,” she said. “It’s a bit steep.” Before he could reply, she started down the other side.
Charles followed, the steps slick beneath his feet. He paused atop the wall to reach for Erin’s hand.
“I’ve got it, Charles,” Erin said.
The steps on the other side were broader and overgrown with moss. He’d just reached the bottom and turned back to look at her when Erin’s foot slipped. Charles lunged for her too late. She slid helter-skelter down the stairs, spilling her satchel, and smashed to the earth on one shoulder, breath bursting from her lungs with a plosive grunt.
“Are you all right?” he asked, but she waved him away.
“I’m fine.” She pushed herself to her feet, wincing, and reached for her ankle. “Just get my stuff.”
But Merrow was already collecting it: makeup and lipstick, her passport, an assortment of pens and pill bottles. A sketchbook. A framed photo. Merrow stood, looking at it. “Your daughter?” she asked, scraping mud off the edge of the frame. “She is very beautiful. The glass has cracked, but that can be mended easily enough, can’t it? Are you sure you’re okay?”
“I just twisted my ankle. I’ll be fine.”
She didn’t look fine. Mud streaked her jeans. She was flushed. When she took a step, she favored the bad ankle.
“Here, let me help you,” Charles said.
“Really, Charles, I’m fine.” And then, relenting, with a small smile, “Walk it off, right?”
“I guess so,” he said.
“Well, let me get your bag, at least,” Merrow said. “Come on.”
Together — with Charles and Merrow hovering to either side of Erin — they made their halting way toward the house. By the time they’d reached the stairs, six of them, climbing to a square portico, the door had been opened from within. A stout, fifty-something woman in full Mrs. Danvers livery — black skirts, white apron, even a black cap with her gray hair pinned up underneath — descended to meet them. It was like seeing a nurse in whites, complete with cap, in your local emergency room.
“Ah, Mrs. Ramsden,” Merrow said.
Mrs. Ramsden smiled. “Here, let me help you, now,” she said, reaching for Erin’s arm, and together they hobbled up the stairs into Hollow House.
4 (#ulink_500a9a3a-bca2-5773-96da-0b0ac756a2ca)
They stood in a vaulted entrance hall, like children in a tale, long lost and returned at last to break the spell that had been cast over their ancestral home. A great chandelier illuminated the tapestries and framed portraits that adorned the walls. Doors to the left and right stood closed. The high archway before them framed a long, luxuriously furnished salon.
“I saw you fall,” Mrs. Ramsden said. “That stile is a menace. I don’t know how many times I’ve told Mr. Harris we need to do something about it.” She sighed in exasperation with Mr. Harris as she led them through the salon, past twin oaken staircases that curved like the necks of swans to the gallery above. The balusters had been carved with an intricate motif of leaf and vine. Cunning foxlike faces peered out at them as they passed. “Anyway,” she added, “welcome home. The house isn’t always lit up this way, but we wanted to put her best face forward for you. I’d hoped to give you the grand tour, but I don’t think you’re in any shape to enjoy it, Mrs. Hayden. Let’s get you upstairs and see if we can’t find some ice for that ankle.”
They went up a back staircase to what had been Mr. Hollow’s living quarters: a house inside the house, Charles thought, and a luxuriously appointed one: polished floors and plush oriental rugs, Victorian-era furniture, built-in bookcases stocked with neat rows of leather-bound books. Capacious, high-ceilinged rooms — study, sitting room, dining room — radiated off the large central foyer, where a grand staircase curved up to an open gallery. “There are four suites and a maid’s room upstairs,” Mrs. Ramsden said, leading them down a wide hall into a breakfast room lined with windows, providing a panoramic view of the lawn. There was a second stone house down there. A cottage, really: a single floor, with narrow windows.
“That’s Mr. Harris’s house,” Merrow said, putting Erin’s satchel on the table. “He’s the estate’s steward.”
“We do hope you’ll be comfortable here,” Mrs. Ramsden said as she got Erin settled. “I’ll get you some ice.”
Merrow took out her phone. “Let me see if I can find you a doctor.”
“Please don’t bother. I just twisted it.”
“It’s no bother,” Merrow said and turned away, holding the phone to her ear. By the time Mrs. Ramsden returned with a dish towel and a large plastic bag of ice, Merrow was saying, “Yes, I expect you to come out here, John. We’re speaking of the new mistress of Hollow House. Yes, three should be fine. Yes, I’m sure she’ll survive until then. Good. Thank you, then.”
She ended the call and smiled — a little tightly, Charles thought. “Dr. Colbeck will be here at three,” she said. “Can you endure it for a couple of hours?” When Erin nodded, Merrow turned to Mrs. Ramsden. “Does Mr. Harris intend to join us?”
Mrs. Ramsden hesitated. “See, we thought you’d be arriving a little bit later. Mr. Harris ran into Yarrow. I expect him back directly.”
“Not the day I should have chosen for a trip into the village,” Merrow said. “Well.” She looked at Erin. “You seem to be in good hands. If there’s nothing else I can do for you …”
“You’ve done more than enough.”
“Then I’ll be off.” At the doorway, she turned. “Keys. Mustn’t forget the keys.” She reached into her purse and withdrew a heavy key ring. “I’ve marked the important ones. Mr. Harris will have to help with the others.”
A doorbell rang in the foyer.
“I suppose that’s him,” Mrs. Ramsden said.
“No doubt,” Merrow said. “I’ll let him in on my way out. In the meantime, if you need anything, please do ring me up. You have my card.” And then, smiling at Erin, “I’m sure you’ll be up and about in no time.”
5 (#ulink_1ab729f7-070f-5504-b0eb-ed675edc5ba2)
“The house operates on a skeletal staff, sir,” said Cillian Harris as he led Charles through the salon. “Mr. Hollow kept just enough people on to maintain the property — groundskeepers and housemaids. It’ll be a bit of a lifestyle change, sir.”
Charles glanced at Harris. He looked more like a linebacker than a steward: mid-thirties, with a thatch of unruly dark hair and a crooked nose — not unhandsome in a rough-hewn kind of way. His eyes were bloodshot, and though the man seemed sober enough, Charles was almost certain that he’d caught the scent of whisky on his breath.
It was just past two o’clock.
“Mrs. Ramsden sees to the living quarters and supervises the housemaids,” Harris was saying. “She’ll arrive most mornings around seven. I’m always available. I live in the cottage. You may have noticed it from the breakfast room. I manage the estate.” And then, almost as an afterthought, he said, “Under your direction, of course.”
“Well, let’s work on a more informal basis, then. Why don’t you call me Charles?”
“I couldn’t do that, Mr. Hayden. All my life I served Mr. Hollow, and my father before me, and never once did I call him by his given name. Mr. and Mrs. Hayden you must be to me, by force of habit if nothing else.”
Charles reminded himself that he was an interloper in a foreign land. The custom of the country and all that. “If you insist.”
Harris nodded. “I understand that you intend to do research.”
“Yes, Caedmon Hollow, his book —”
“I know his book all right.” Then, hesitant, as though he felt he was overstepping his bounds, “Never should have written it, if you want my opinion.”
Not really, Charles thought, but he said nothing.
“Well, you’ll want to be back before the doctor arrives,” Harris said. “Let’s just have a glance into the library.”
6 (#ulink_fc482c72-8404-5107-bc7e-5277484409f0)
“Tea?” Mrs. Ramsden said.
“Why not?” Erin said.
Mrs. Ramsden busied herself setting out the service: cookies on a platter, sugar cubes and milk, floral teacups and saucers. Everything had the pearly, translucent glow of bone china. “It’s been a long trip from America, I warrant. You must be tired.”
“Exhausted.”
“As soon as I set out your tea, I’ll leave you to rest.”
“Why don’t you join me instead? I’d enjoy the company.”
“I’m sorry, ma’am. I fear our different stations in life preclude such intimacies.”
“Oh, dear, Mrs. Ramsden, I am thoroughly middle class, I assure you.”
“Mr. Harris wouldn’t approve.”
“Well, Mr. Harris works for me now.”
Mrs. Ramsden offered her an uncertain smile.
“I insist,” Erin said. “We’ll finish up before he comes back. Charles will spend half an hour in the library alone.”
“I’ll have to get another cup.”
“Use that one.”
“Oh, that’s for Mr. Hayden, ma’am.”
“We can get him one when he gets back,” Erin said. “Please, sit down. What’s your first name, anyway?”
“Helen, ma’am.”
“Helen it is, then.” Wincing, Erin leaned forward to extend her hand. Mrs. Ramsden’s — Helen’s — was dry and cool. “I’m Erin. It’s a pleasure to meet you.”
“Likewise, ma’am. Let me just pour the tea.”
“Sure. If you’d reach me that satchel, too, I’d truly appreciate it. I’d get it myself, but —” She laughed without mirth at her predicament.
“Why don’t I see about fresh ice?”
“It’s fine. Really. Just hand me the satchel. And please, have a seat. I mean it.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
The “ma’am” was going to have to go, too, Erin thought. Baby steps. At least they were moving in the right direction. The satchel, on the other hand, was a mess: her sketchbook smeared with mud, her pens and pencils jumbled at the bottom. And the photograph, of course, the glass broken, as Merrow had said. It was unbearable to look upon it, impossible not to. She had to force herself to set it aside and dig out her meds, nearly two dozen jumbo-sized plastic bottles. She counted them, to be sure. She’d been doctor shopping, hoarding, afraid of not being able to get what she needed — wanted, her therapist would have said — in this benighted country. Effexor for the depression. Trazodone and Ambien to help her sleep. Her medicine chest, Charles called it. Her personal pharmacy.
Sometimes she hated Charles.
She shook out a Klonopin — she had half a dozen prescriptions for anxiety, Ativan, Xanax, you name it — and dry-swallowed the pill; then, impulsively, she shook out another one.
Mrs. Ramsden was right about one thing, though: the journey had been too much. The girl at the hotel. That small figure watching from the roadside. We see what we want to see, as her therapist had said, adding, Be careful or you’ll learn to love your chains.
She did not want this. She wanted to be free.
She would never be free.
Mrs. Ramsden — Helen — sat down at last. Sugar and milk, a shy smile across the table. She ignored the vials of medication. She cleared her throat. “You’ll want to know about the household, of course,” she said. “Mr. Harris handles most matters, but he generally gives me free rein in domestic affairs. In addition to myself, there are seven maids. They keep up the larger portion of the house. I’ll introduce you to them soon. I had hoped to do so today, but you’ll want to rest your ankle. I maintain the residential section myself, so you can expect to see me daily.”
“I hope we see a lot of each other. I imagine I’ll be lonely all by myself out here.”
Mrs. Ramsden hesitated. “I’m sure you’ll have plenty of company as soon as you recover from your fall.”
Which was hard to imagine. She and Charles hadn’t entertained in nearly a year now. Even the usual visits after … after Lissa … had been difficult affairs for all involved. While everyone had been generous and kind — their sympathies had certainly been genuine — the unacknowledged specter of Charles and Syrah Nagle had haunted every interaction, dividing her even from her closest friends in the end. You could not easily speak of it, yet you could hardly ignore it. So after the initial flurry of visits — the inundation of more food than she and Charles could ever eat, the follow-up phone calls, the two or three lunch invitations that she had declined — their social life had dwindled to nothing.
“Now, as to the matter of cooking —”
“We’ll cook for ourselves, Mrs. Ramsden.”
“I always cooked for Mr. Hollow.”
“Charles and I have always cooked for ourselves,” Erin said. But this too was a fraught subject, wasn’t it? Her parents had both been functioning alcoholics. The car wreck that had killed them — Erin had been a sophomore in college by then, and the drinking had escalated as soon as she moved out — had been no chance accident. By the time she was twelve, Erin was taking care of her own meals. Even in the early days of their marriage, she and Charles, both of them busy with careers, had more often eaten meals alone than together. Only after Lissa made her debut had Erin made a concerted effort to be home for dinner. Nor did she drink, at least in those days. She would not repeat the mistakes of her parents — or so she had vowed.
Now it didn’t matter, of course.
Now nothing mattered.
She glanced at Lissa’s photograph, helpless to stop herself, but if Mrs. Ramsden noticed, she didn’t say a word. She merely said, “You’re in no shape to cook, are you? And I would wager that your husband is indifferent in the kitchen at best. Husbands usually are. You could use some meat on your bones, if you don’t mind me saying so.”
“Mrs. Ramsden —”
“I serve promptly at five. I will brook no protests, Mrs. Hayden.”
“Can we at least revisit it after I’m on my feet again?” Erin asked, amused that Mrs. Ramsden, for all her deference, had already maneuvered her into asking permission. She had a feeling that she wouldn’t be doing much cooking. Which was just as well, she supposed. It wasn’t like either one of them had spent much time in the kitchen in the last year.
Mrs. Ramsden let the question pass. She smiled. “You’re an artist.”
“I sketch,” Erin said. It was a new endeavor, but it came easily to her. She’d loved drawing as a child. “I’m teaching myself.”
“May I see?”
Erin hesitated.
“I don’t mean to pry.”
“No, it’s fine.” Erin pushed the sketchbook across the table to her.
As Mrs. Ramsden flipped the pages, Erin turned her cup in its saucer, staring at the crest she’d seen at the top of so many letters from the Hollow estate over the last few months: a capital H entwined in green and gold foliage. It put her in mind of the first edition of In the Night Wood, passed from hand to hand down the generations of her family, the baroque initial letter of each fresh chapter. Someday, she supposed, she would have passed it on to Lissa.
“They’re very well done,” Mrs. Ramsden said, turning a page. “You have an eye.” She looked up. “It’s all the same girl, isn’t it?”
Erin bit her lip. Nodded.
“The girl in the photograph there?”
She couldn’t bring herself to answer.
7 (#ulink_9b094bcc-9880-5d5f-9e69-056024311d37)
“Erin?”
Alone in the breakfast room — Mrs. Ramsden had gone about her duties, whatever they were — Erin closed the sketchbook and looked up. The Klonopin had kicked in. She stood outside her emotions, aware of them but detached, an observer of her own inner life. The meds insulated her from her grief and anger, nothing more.
“Dr. Colbeck is here,” Charles said from the door.
Indeed he was. He towered over Charles, a gaunt, ginger giant: ginger hair, ginger beard, all knobby elbows and knees. Six-three or -four, at least, and vastly underfed. Ichabod Crane, she thought. Ichabod Crane was to be her doctor.
“Dr. Colbeck.”
The ginger stranger actually bowed slightly. He put a black medical bag on the table and took in the rows of pill bottles arrayed in front of Erin without expression.
“You’ll excuse me if I don’t get up.”
To his credit, Colbeck ignored this witticism. He smiled. “Please, call me John,” he said. Then: “So you’re the Americans who’ve inherited Hollow House. You’ve been much anticipated hereabouts.”
“Warmly, I hope,” Charles ventured.
“Of course. You’ll find the natives friendly enough, I think.”
“Did you grow up here?” Charles asked.
“Born and bred. My training eroded my accent somewhat; for good or ill I am uncertain.”
“Then you knew our benefactor?” Erin asked.
“Only in a professional sense. I took on Dr. Marshall’s practice ten years ago, when he retired. Mr. Hollow needed little care. He came of hardy stock. He lived to ninety-seven, and I doubt he was ill a day of it until the final crisis overtook him. He was a reclusive man. Cillian Harris attended to most of his affairs.”
“You’ll find us more approachable, I hope,” Charles said.
“I’m sure I will.” Colbeck cleared his throat. “Let’s have a look at that ankle.”
He knelt and took the ankle in question into his big hands. Erin winced, the pain brief but not insignificant. Then Colbeck was saying, “You appear to have a sprain, Mrs. Hayden, and a minor one at that. You should be up and around in a day or two. In the meantime” — he opened his bag, which, despite the rank of shiny instruments on view, disgorged nothing more sinister than an ankle brace — “in the meantime,” he said, “you seem to be doing the right things. Rest and elevation and ice, though no more than twenty minutes at a stretch. Compression” — he held up the brace — “helps as well, and you’ll need some support when you get back on your feet. Easy enough, yes? I can fetch some crutches from the car, if you like.”
“Why don’t you —” Charles started to say, but Erin overrode him.
“I think I’ll be fine.”
“I think so, too. The brace should be sufficient. Weight is the key. What your ankle wants is weight. Twenty-four hours, and then you’ll start trying to get up and around, won’t you. You can alternate paracetamol and ibuprofen for pain every two hours or so. Three or four days and you’ll be good as new.”
He leaned over to close his bag, and that was when his gaze fell on the photograph. “Oh my, she’s a lovely young girl. Your daughter, I presume.”
“Yes,” Charles said. “Our daughter. Lissa. Back home.”
The words hung in the air like undetonated bombs. Erin could not speak, but if Colbeck noticed anything, he didn’t acknowledge it. He just snapped the bag closed and stood, saying, “Nobody mentioned anything about a daughter.”
8 (#ulink_49b8ac44-786e-52f0-b4b5-0ced3e08da53)
Charles saw Colbeck out.
In the front yard, the doctor said, “What happened to your daughter, Mr. Hayden?”
“I’m sorry?”
“Your daughter. She must be, what, five, six at the most? One doesn’t usually leave a child that age behind when one plans an indefinite stay abroad.” He turned to look at Charles, his eyes knowing.
Charles stared back, something tightening in his chest. “I’m not sure it’s anything for you to concern yourself with, Doctor.” Just at the edge of rudeness, maybe a hair across.
If Colbeck noticed, he didn’t seem to care. He said, “You may have noticed that your wife had twenty-two vials of medication on that table, Mr. Hayden. I counted. You may also have noticed how remote Yarrow is. Unless you intend to drive to a surgery in Ripon every time you have a head cold, I’m likely to be your physician. It is in fact my business to know.”
Colbeck held Charles’s gaze. Charles looked away, surveying the green mass of the Eorl Wood. “She died,” he said.
“And your wife?”
“She hasn’t adjusted well. She blames me. There was an accident.”
“An accident?”
“And that really isn’t your business, Dr. Colbeck.”
Colbeck didn’t push it, though Charles, still staring at the wood, could sense his scrutiny. After a time, he said, “How long ago did this happen?”
“Almost a year ago. I could name the time to the day and hour if you must know. In your capacity as my physician.”
Colbeck didn’t take the bait. He sighed. After a time, he said, “I can offer you little in the way of comfort. I’m very sorry for your loss. I’m very, very sorry. Words are inadequate. But your stay here won’t heal matters between you and your wife. It may not heal at all, and if it does, it will leave a scar, quite a bad one. Sometimes marriages survive the loss of a child, more often not. In cases where one spouse blames the other …” Colbeck shrugged. “In the meantime, it might help to talk about it.”
“Erin was seeing a counselor at home.”
“And you?”
“No.”
“Perhaps you should consider it.”
“Perhaps.”
“I can give you the names of some good people. You’ll have to drive into Ripon for that, but I think the trip might be worth it.”
“That would be fine.”
“But you won’t go.”
“No.”
“Your wife —”
“I doubt it.”
“Well, I’ll ring you with the names all the same,” Colbeck said.
Charles turned to face him. “I should check on Erin now.”
Colbeck nodded. “Ice, twenty minutes on, twenty minutes off, Mr. Hayden. Try to get her up and moving tomorrow. It will be tender for a while.”
“Yes.”
“Good afternoon, then.”
“Thank you for coming out.”
“You’re quite welcome.” Colbeck paused. “At the risk of overstepping my bounds, Mr. Hayden, may I offer you two further pieces of advice before I go?”
“Why not?”
“In the matter of your wife, I counsel patience. These things take time. Fits and starts. Two steps forward, one step back is the rule. But even such halting progress gets you there in the end.”
“And the second bit of wisdom, doctor?”
“I should steer clear of the wood if I were you.”
“Why is that?”
“People get lost, Mr. Hayden.”
“I’ll be careful.”
“Do. And ring me if you need anything.”
With that, Colbeck put his back to Charles. He strode with long steps across the yard to the stile. On the other side, he wheeled around a battered four-by-four — it might have been red once, but had long since faded to a dull, no-color brown — and disappeared into the trees. Charles stood there, knowing that he should do as Colbeck had said and go in to check on Erin. But the doctor’s closing words lingered in his mind: I should steer clear of the wood if I were you.
Charles turned his gaze back to the forest. He had an obscure sense that something was watching him from the line of trees, but when he scanned the wall, there was nothing there.
9 (#ulink_f3477a67-87d0-531b-854f-45e1fd6c42af)
Nothing else happened that day.
Except that Charles and Erin slept in separate bedrooms, as they had every night since Lissa died.
Except that, somewhere in the deepest trough of morning, Charles opened his eyes.
He stood by the bed, dreaming of a black combe where a shallow stream hurried over a bed of broken stones and a green moss grew. The window had been flung open and a breeze caressed his bare skin, beckoning him toward the deep purple sky where a horned moon hung like a child’s toy, and the night wood, girdling the great house, whispered green thoughts in its green and leafy shade.
II (#ulink_ed4900ce-529f-56ac-bfab-b724d9c10894)
YARROW (#ulink_ed4900ce-529f-56ac-bfab-b724d9c10894)
When Laura told him of the little creatures in the trees with their daemonic physiognomies, the Helpful Badger said, “All manner of Folk live in the Wood. And they are all abroad under the Moon, for this night they must shrive.”
“They frighten me.”
“They are more often capricious than they are cruel,” the Badger said. He yawned and scratched a flea, adding, “There is only one whom you must fear. When you encounter Him, you must summon all your strength and courage and bring all your wit to bear.”
“Must I encounter Him?”
“The Story requires it of you,” the Badger said.
“But who is He?”
“I dare not say his name. But He long ago seduced the Wood Folk into betrayal and grievously wounded their rightful Lord, whom He banished into the Outer Dark. And now the Wood Folk must bow before him and shrive their sin in secret.”
“How will I know Him when He comes?”
“He wears a crown of horns.”
— CAEDMON HOLLOW, IN THE NIGHT WOOD
1 (#ulink_9d2722d2-2b82-536d-8ede-6e00f239136e)
It was haunted, of course, Hollow House.
But they were all haunted — Erin and Charles, Cillian Harris, Mrs. Ramsden, too. And though Mrs. Ramsden’s sins and failures and regrets, like those of Ann Merrow or Dr. Colbeck, have but glancing significance in this story, they were each of them protagonists in other tales, with their own dramas, their flights of joy, and their plunges into sorrow. Once upon a time: no life too humble, no event too insignificant.
Every story is a ghost story.
It was the photograph that haunted Erin and Charles, or, more precisely, the loss that it signified. A kindergarten photograph of a blonde girl, three-quarter profile, her hands crossed neatly upon the table in front of her, but otherwise unposed — her giggling smile (no doubt the photographer had ventured some joke), the soft curve of her jaw, her milky complexion — all this trapped behind a spider web of shattered glass.
For Erin, the photo was like a shallow well in a dry season. She dared not drink of it too often — yet she could not help herself. She drew it in her sketchbook time and again, laying out the lines of Lissa’s visage, lending it dimension and form with each careful stroke of her pencil. And then she would turn the picture to the wall and keep working, as if by this obsessive reproduction she could score the image into the tissue of her brain and heart. She would not forget her daughter’s face.
Already she could feel it slipping away.
For Charles the photo was like a jail, prisoning away the grief that could any moment escape to overwhelm him. As long as Lissa was locked behind the glass he could manage his days by rote — not unaffected, but functional at least. Erin feared forgetting. Charles longed for it. The burden of his sin (for so he thought of it) was too much to bear. Yet memory could not be contained. The shattered glass made the metaphor manifest. Looking at the photo now, he felt an inconsolable longing to go back, to start over and do everything right.
And Cillian Harris? Who could say? But he’d stiffened, like a man taking a small electric shock, when his gaze fell upon the photo that first day in the breakfast room. Briefly, to be sure — a breath, no more — but Charles had observed it nonetheless, and wondered.
The glass would have to be replaced, of course.
“I can’t look at her like this,” Erin said, too much reminded of the horrors of the day that Lissa had died. And now that Lissa had escaped, Charles had to lock her away once more.
He took the car and drove into Yarrow, to the hardware store he’d seen on the way to Hollow House. But Lissa had arrived before him. He saw her in a small child — was it her? — holding her mother’s hand as she leaned forward to smell the early spring flowers that bloomed in pots outside Petal Pushers. And worse yet, he saw her on the front page of the newspaper racked before the newsagent: the Ripon Gazette, the photograph unnerving, the headline worse: A FAMILY’S AGONY. He stepped inside, pressing his coins with tremulous fingers into the hand of a gruff man who barely acknowledged him, his eyes fixed on the television behind the counter.
Outside, in the bloodless English sunlight, Charles turned his attention to the paper:
The search continued for a missing six-year-old Tuesday near Yarrow. Mary Babbing was last seen riding her bicycle in front of her family home toward dusk last Sunday. Investigators —
Too much. Charles moved to discard the paper. He could not do so. Lissa stared up at him from the front page in lurid color. He folded it instead, tucked it under his arm, composed himself, blinking back tears.
Okay, then.
Mould’s hardware was next door.
2 (#ulink_e495415d-737d-5db9-b078-873a1650ed82)
Charles took a deep breath, pushed his way inside. The narrow space beyond felt claustrophobic, though the store wasn’t crowded. A single customer, lean, with a hank of dark hair hanging over his forehead, studied the packets of seeds on a wire rack. Charles nodded as he slipped past to the counter at the back of the store.
A tall, fleshy man stood there, wiping his hands on his apron.
“Ah, the stranger among us,” he said in a thickly accented voice. But Charles was the one with the accent here, wasn’t he — the stranger, as Mould (was he Mould?) had pointed out, in a strange land. Mould or not, the man was old, seventyish and hale, bald but for the unruly wisps of gray that clung to the sides of his head, thin of lip, bulbous of nose, tufted of eyebrow and ear. Eyes of pale, penetrating blue peered at Charles over half-rim glasses. Charles wasn’t sure he liked the eyes. They seemed to see more than they had any right to see. The old man extended his hand. It was callused, the thick, ridged nails clogged with crescents of grease. He was Mould after all, Trevor Mould. He said the name as they shook hands, and Charles winced, not at the name but at the fact that he seemed to have inserted his hand into a vise.
“Charles Hayden,” he said.
“No doubt. We’re glad to have you here.”
“True enough,” the seed-packet man said, joining them at the counter. He introduced himself as Edward Hargreaves, adding, “Hollow House hasn’t had anyone to warm its bones for near two years now. Longer if you think of how Mr. Hollow grew toward the end.”
“Wouldn’t leave the house,” Mould said. “I hadn’t seen him for years by the time he finally passed.” He reached out a hand. “Let’s have a look at that, shall we?”
Charles passed the photo across the counter.
“So beautiful at that age, aren’t they? Six, I’m guessing.”
“Five. Five and a half, she would have said,” Charles said, his neck burning.
Mould tilted his head. “Left her at home, did you?”
“Back in the States.” Not a lie, he told himself, but — something else. He couldn’t say exactly what. An omission, nothing more. Yet a lie by any other name —
He hesitated.
The truth would come out sooner or later. Given the amount of research it had taken to track Erin down to inform her of the inheritance, Merrow almost certainly knew. And now Colbeck knew. How long before all of Yarrow did as well?
He spoke without conscious volition. “She —”
“What’s that?”
Mould had turned to the rear counter to study the photograph.
“Nothing,” Charles said. “She couldn’t make the trip,” he said, for to speak it aloud was to acknowledge it as a true thing — to acknowledge his role in it. He swallowed.
“What happened to the glass?”
“My wife. She dropped it. She took a spill on the stile.”
“She’s all right, I hope?”
“Twisted her ankle. She’ll be on her feet again before the week’s out.”
Hargreaves shook his head. “Funny thing that, isn’t it? That wall.”
“Both walls,” Mould said. “Must have been a hell of a lot of work. Hard to say whether the intent was to keep something in or something out.”
“They say,” Hargreaves added, “that old Mr. Hollow kept the place closed up in the last years of his life. Wouldn’t so much as permit an open curtain.”
A chill passed through Charles. There was something haunting about the idea of the old man thrice imprisoned, inside the house, inside the great encircling walls.
“We can fix this up for you,” Mould said. “Later this afternoon, say? Joey, the one that does the glass cutting, he’s down to the King for lunch. He’ll be back in half an hour or so, and I can put him right on it. Say an hour. I hate to make you drive all the way back here.”
“That’s fine. I wanted to look in at the historical society.”
“Quiet village, Yarrow,” Hargreaves said. “I warrant you won’t find much there.”
“I’m interested in Caedmon Hollow.”
Hargreaves grimaced. “Not fit for children, that book.”
“Leave the man be, Ed.” Mould looked up. “If you tire of the historical society, you can always stop in at the King for a pint, can’t you? Anyway, we’ll have it ready for you.” He held out his hand as though he were finalizing some complex financial agreement, and once again, reluctantly, Charles inserted his hand into the vise.
“An hour, then,” he said.
3 (#ulink_86412a16-28fc-5b4f-b560-119db79502d1)
Charles didn’t know what he’d expected from the historical society: brochures advertising local attractions, maybe? Recessed lighting illuminating framed photos and polished glass display cases?
But no. The society was very much a work in progress. The foyer was gloomy and close. It smelled musty. The rooms beyond — the two Charles could see, branching off a broad hallway with a stairway to the right — were largely barren of any such displays. Framed photographs listed on their hangers. A handful of dusty exhibit cases stood half obscured by stacks of cardboard boxes.
“Hello?” someone called from the interior.
“Hello.”
A door opened and closed. In the shadows at the end of the hall, a figure appeared — angular and tall, female, beyond that he couldn’t say. The woman wiped her forehead with a cloth.
“Just here for a look about, are you?”
“I thought it might be interesting.”
“Ah. So you’re the American who’s moved into Hollow House.”
“That’s right.”
“You’re the talk of the town.”
He peered closer. “We are, are we?”
“Down to the King, you are,” she said. Then: “Feel free to have a look. We don’t have much, I’m afraid.”
“It looks to me like you have quite a lot,” he couldn’t help saying.
“A lot of rubbish. That’s what I’m here for, to excavate it all and figure out what’s worth keeping.”
“I thought you were the docent.”
“That, too. Listen, give me a minute to finish up. I’m sorting papers in the back here. Papers, papers everywhere and nary a drop to drink.”
Suddenly he liked her, this shadowy stranger at the far end of the hall.
“Then I’ll show you around a bit,” she said. “I’ll want to wash my face first, if you don’t mind.”
“And if I do?”
Was he flirting? An image of Ann Merrow’s taut rear end, muscles flexing as she climbed the stile, flitted through his mind. And then, worse yet, an image of Syrah Nagle —
He shunted the thought away.
“I’ll wash it anyway,” the woman said dryly, and with that she was gone.
Charles wandered into the adjoining room. He glanced at a set of photos — the high street from some distant era — picked up a stiff, yellowing copy of the Ripon Gazette, put it down again without bothering to read the headline, and ran a finger across the dusty surface of a glass display cabinet, leaving a long, clean snail’s track in its wake. He paused before a case of medals and fading ribbons. A yellowing index card pinned to the wall above it read, in faded typescript, Yarrow has contributed its share of young men to the conflicts of —
Charles turned away.
What on earth was he doing here, in a museum dedicated to a place where almost nothing had ever happened? Even Caedmon Hollow was an obscure figure in the annals of Victorian lit — a footnote, nothing more.
He’d hung his future on a footnote.
A wave of doubt swept over him. The scholar-adventurer indeed, he thought, turning to the next display, another constellation of fading black-and-white photographs: lean, grim-looking men posed beside farm animals and antiquated tractors, a young boy holding a prize ribbon against his chest. Black and white. Nobody smiling. The Yarrow Agricultural Fair began in the early 1800s and remains an institution —
Sighing, Charles drifted to the far end of the room. More photographs, he thought — but no, that wasn’t quite right. The images predated modern photography: daguerreotypes, and more than that, daguerreotypes of Hollow House. The first showed the place in ruins, roofless, the great rectangular stones of the exterior blackened by fire. The ones that followed — there were six of them, marching in a straight line across the wall — showed the house in various stages of reconstruction, culminating in an image of it in pristine condition.
Charles leaned forward to study the central image more closely: the roof framed with great beams, stacks of lumber and stones in the front yard below.
“Probably our best thing, that,” the woman said at his shoulder. “So far, anyway.”
Charles turned to face her, high-cheekboned and pale-complexioned, with a cap of close-shorn blonde hair, hazel eyes, a scattering of freckles across the bridge of her narrow nose. There was a smudge of dust over her right eyebrow. Apparently she hadn’t washed up after all. Or not very well, anyway.
“I’m Silva North,” she said.
“Charles Hayden.” He took her outstretched hand.
“Well, Mr. Hayden —”
“Charles.”
“Charles, then.” She nodded at the framed images. “The construction occurred between 1844 and 1848, following a fire that consumed most of the original manor house. The library and part of the salon survived, though badly damaged. Hollow’s wife, Emma, was not so fortunate. Tradition holds that Hollow set the fire himself, though why he might have done so is unclear. The book came out —”
“In 1850, to little fanfare,” Charles said. “Hollow committed suicide the next year.”
Silva North smiled. “I see that you’ve developed an interest in Hollow House since you’ve taken up residence.”
“Before that, actually. I’m working on — that is, I’m contemplating — a biography.”
“Rather limited audience for that, I should think.”
“I hope my book will change that.”
“Well, you’re in the perfect spot. There must be tons of stuff buried in that old pile.”
“I’m hoping so.” He hesitated, surveying the rat’s nest of boxes and papers. “I don’t know what your collection —”
And now Silva North laughed out loud, a rich, throaty laugh, not unkind. “Our collection,” she said. “Is that what brought you to our humble historical society?”
“I take it you are the society.”
“In a manner of speaking. The village pays me a modest stipend — all too modest, I’m afraid. And I get to live in the upstairs flat rent-free.”
“In return for?”
“In return for going through boxes. I decide what to keep and what’s rubbish. Mr. Sadler, who used to live here, died. Quite a hoarder, he was, with an eye to local history. That must have been twenty years ago. I was a girl. He left the house to the village, and they’ve been shoving boxes in here ever since. I volunteered to clean it out and put it in some order, open it to the public. A deal was struck, and here I am.”
“But why?”
“I have about half of a master’s in history from the University of York. And I’m interested in the village’s past. Unfortunately, it has produced no one of any great significance aside from our eccentric author. Strange book. Not quite right for children, is it?” She raised her eyebrows. “No white rabbits checking their watches.”
“No indeed.” Charles hesitated. “I was hoping that if you ran across anything about Hollow, you’d be willing to share. Have you?”
“The daguerreotypes, obviously. They were stashed away in a box of Mr. Sadler’s gas bills. God alone knows how they got there. Nothing else so far, I’m afraid.” She studied them. “They’d make splendid plates for your book, wouldn’t they?”
They would, Charles was about to say, but just then he heard the door open at the end of the hall, the patter of small feet in the corridor. The high, sweet voice of a little girl interrupted them, saying, “Mummy, I’m thirsty.” Charles turned, reeling when he saw the child, maybe five years old, six at the most, with blonde curls and blue jeans and an elfin and expressive face. The earth slid away beneath his feet. Subsidence, old ghosts rising up inside his mind: Lissa, he thought.
Charles stepped backward, Silva’s hand steadying him as the world came once again into focus: the musty smell of the place and the child in the foyer, the labyrinth of boxes.
Jesus, was this what Erin —
“Are you okay?”
“No, I” — deep breath, tears stinging at the corners of his eyes — “yes, of course, I —”
No words came.
Then Silva’s hand was gone. He could still feel its warmth on his back. “Who’s Lissa?”
Had he said it aloud?
He shook his head. “My daughter. She’s my daughter.”
Was, a malicious inner voice put in. Was your daughter.
“Still back in America?”
Always and forever, he thought. But all he said was “Yes.”
“You must miss her very much.”
“I’m thirsty, Mum.”
“Just a minute, Lorna.”
“They look very much alike,” Charles said. “It gave me a shock.”
“It must have. You look as though you’ve seen a ghost,” said Silva. “You need to come upstairs for tea.”
What he needed was air. “That’s very kind of you,” he said. “I don’t mean to be rude —”
“You dropped your paper.” She held it out to him as he turned away. The Ripon Gazette, Lissa staring out at him from the front page.
“Mary Babbing,” Silva said. “Tragic.”
Steadying himself, he said, “What happened?”
“No one knows, do they? She just evaporated. You expect things like that to happen in York or London. But not here.”
“Did you know her?”
“She was a classmate of Lorna’s.” And then, looking at her daughter, “We shouldn’t —”
“Of course not.”
Silva shook her head. “It’s a horrible thing,” she said.
4 (#ulink_e42e3967-e80f-53b0-88cd-c5220c5da0d1)
Charles knew about horrible things. Charles knew about ghosts.
On the way back to Hollow House, he parked in the turnout by the vine-shrouded pillars, the Eorl Wood looming up around him. He sat there, the car idling, his hands clenched on the wheel. Then he picked up the photograph and tore back the butcher paper Mould had wrapped it in.
Lissa gazed up at him, once again imprisoned behind her wall of glass. Only she wasn’t, was she? She’d escaped, after all. He’d seen her at the Yarrow Historical Society. He’d seen her in the Ripon Gazette. As if to confirm it, Charles reached for the newspaper in the passenger seat and unfolded it on his lap. He placed the photo beside it: Lissa and this other lost child, Mary Babbing. Who could say what horrors she might have endured?
A FAMILY’S AGONY, the headline said.
He leaned his head against the headrest, closed his eyes.
When he opened them again, he saw a figure in the Eorl Wood.
It gazed back at him, a green shadow in a green shade. Like a man, but not a man, antlered like a stag in rut. Cernunnos, he thought. The Horned God or King. The avatar of the Night Wood. He stared, breath frozen in his lungs. He blinked. The figure was gone, not there. It had never been there at all.
Charles shook his head. He put the photograph on the seat beside him, crumpled the newspaper into the space underneath, and eased the car into gear. He accelerated between the pillars and sped into the darkness underneath the trees.
5 (#ulink_60dd0071-4f32-530b-a22c-3b10b9148502)
Hollow House enveloped them.
As Erin’s ankle healed, she and Charles explored their new home, children in a haunted mansion in a tale: the downstairs rooms, the dining room to the right of the entrance hall, the drawing room to the left. The vast salon with its twin staircases and the adjoining library, accessible by lustrous wooden doors at either side of an enormous fireplace. And beyond that a handful of smaller rooms: the music room, the game room, an office where Cillian Harris managed the estate’s affairs. Bedrooms and sitting rooms opened off the gallery encircling the salon, everything luxurious, everything ornate but for the servants’ quarters on the top floor: narrow, dormered chambers with rusting iron bedsteads, vestiges of another era.
And everywhere the motif on the balusters repeating itself: leaves and vines, those cunning vulpine faces. They peered from mantels and window casings, from finely wrought moldings and armchairs. Stealthy and gamesome, they retreated into the foliage in one place only to peep out anew in another, entire rooms subtly aswarm — a trick of the eye, unsettling and strangely beautiful.
Lissa would have loved it, Charles thought, but they did not speak of her. They rarely spoke at all.
Work would save them, Erin’s therapist had once said.
So they went to work, each in their separate orbit. Charles took refuge in the library, all burgundy and leather, with heavy velvet curtains and plush carpets, a long table, and an antique silver globe mapping a world that had long since passed out of existence. Everything polished, everything gleaming. Comfortable chairs surrounded the cold fireplace. And books, ranks and ranks of them, stood shelved on every wall, behind glass doors with shrewd faces looking down from the corners of their frames.
“You’ll want to keep the curtains closed,” Mrs. Ramsden told him. “The spines of the books would dry and crack in the sunlight. Many of them are first editions, Mr. Hayden, quite valuable. A nice dim room and saddle soap once a year, that’s what they want.”
“I’m sure they do,” Charles said. And then: “Personal documents, Mrs. Ramsden. Anything relating to Caedmon Hollow? Any ideas where to start?”
“Cabinets on the west wall, perhaps, though anything that old is more likely to be in the archives downstairs.”
“Archives?”
“It was Mr. Hollow’s little joke,” she said. “What it really is is boxes, Mr. Hayden. Boxes and boxes and boxes. You have your work cut out for you, I’m afraid.” Then: “Will there be anything else, sir?”
“No, thank you,” he said.
And then he was alone, overwhelmed by the task before him.
6 (#ulink_ecc53874-9a47-500a-a89a-70db6bbdcbc9)
Erin, on the other hand, riding a smooth Xanax wave, set up in the dining room of the residence: sketchbook, pencils, and art gum erasers arrayed across the table. And Lissa’s photo, of course. She flipped through the pages of the sketchbook. Lissa and Lissa again. Page after page of Lissa. Erin had been an attorney once, trafficking in matters of ultimate finality: wills and estates, the complexities of the human heart, fear and love, envy, hunger, loathing, and desire. Families in grief and horror, families shattered, divided against themselves: the territory of ambiguity, the kingdom of the gray.
She’d closed her practice after the accident. She could no longer stomach the work. She lived in binary now.
Ones and zeros.
Before and after.
With every passing day, the before was increasingly lost, bleached out by time and grief and the medication that did not salve the pain but only dulled it.
The after didn’t matter.
She turned to a clean page, tapped a pencil against her teeth.
Mrs. Ramsden — Helen — put down a tray at Erin’s elbow: strong coffee, cream. Already, she’d mastered their tastes.
“Thank you, Helen.”
“You’re quite welcome, ma’am.” And then, turning back at the doorway: “I wonder if I might have a word with you.”
Erin looked up. “Of course.”
“It’s just …” Mrs. Ramsden approached the table. She picked up the photograph, stared at it for a moment, put it down. “I wanted to say how sorry I am for your loss.”
“My loss?”
“It’s a small place, ma’am. There are few secrets here.”
Erin put down the pencil. She bit her lower lip. “I suppose so.”
“If there’s anything I can do. If you want to talk …”
“That’s very kind of you.”
Mrs. Ramsden smiled.
“I don’t want to talk,” Erin said. She reached out and turned the photo facedown on the table. She tried to say it kindly: “I just want to be alone.”
“If I’ve overstepped —”
“No, Helen, please. I just — I can’t talk about it.”
“I understand, ma’am,” Mrs. Ramsden said. She nodded, slipped back into the kitchen.
Erin reached into her pocket for another Xanax, swallowed it with a sip of coffee, waited for it to unspool in her bloodstream. She stared at the blank page. After a time — she couldn’t say how long, the minutes had slipped away on the Xanax tide — she picked up her pencil and began to draw. She didn’t think, simply let her hand follow its own imperative. She might have been drawing in her sleep.
She supposed she’d gotten just what she wanted. She’d never felt so alone.
7 (#ulink_6ed15421-0f98-51a0-9876-eb0bc7527a70)
Plainclothes detectives came out from Ripon two stormy days later. Charles met them in the entrance hall, where they stood closing their umbrellas: McGavick, a burly man in his late fifties, his unruly hair sprinkled with gray, and Collier, close-shorn, younger by a decade and a half, compact and fit, his face prominently boned.
They talked in the library.
“I can remember coming out here as a boy,” McGavick said. “Mr. Hollow used to hold garden parties in the summer. Music, and lights in the trees at nightfall. And games: toad in the hole and football on the lawn. Before that wall went up and you had to come scrambling over the stile just to get near the place.” He shook his head. “The old man turned queer in the end, he did.” He looked up. “I trust you and your wife are finding the place to your liking.”
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Dale Bailey
A FOREST. A BOOK. A MISSING GIRL.Charles Hayden has been fascinated by a strange Victorian fairy tale, In the Night Wood, since he was a child. When his wife, Erin – a descendant of the author – inherits her ancestor’s house, the couple decide to make it their home. Still mourning the recent death of their daughter, they leave America behind, seeking a new beginning in the English countryside.But Hollow House, filled with secrets and surrounded by an ancient oak forest, is a place where the past seems very much alive. Isolated among the trees, Charles and Erin begin to feel themselves haunted – by echoes of the stories in the house’s library, by sightings of their daughter, and by something else, as old and dark as the forest around them.A compelling and atmospheric gothic thriller, In the Night Wood reveals the chilling power of myth and memory.
Frontispiece (#ulink_57fdeb62-6a09-5c7e-926c-4681228b419b)
Copyright (#uf4327829-3f75-5443-a00e-074d320d2409)
HarperVoyager
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2019
Copyright © Dale Bailey 2018
Cover design by Andrew Davis © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2019
Cover images © Shutterstock.com (http://Shutterstock.com)
Frontispiece illustration © Andrew Davidson
Dale Bailey asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780008329167
Ebook Edition © September 2018 ISBN: 9780008329174
Version: 2018-11-23
Dedication (#uf4327829-3f75-5443-a00e-074d320d2409)
For Pam and Sally
Epigraph (#uf4327829-3f75-5443-a00e-074d320d2409)
The specific mode of existence of man implies the need of his learning what happens, and above all what can happen, in the world around him and in his own interior world. That it is a matter of the structure of the human condition is shown, inter alia, by the existential necessity of listening to stories and fairy tales, even in the most tragic of circumstances.
— MIRCEA ELIADE, THE FORBIDDEN FOREST
Gretel began to cry and said,
“How are we to get out of the forest now?”
— THE BROTHERS GRIMM, “HANSEL AND GRETEL”
Contents
Cover (#u4da83330-127d-504e-988a-71950ad0b434)
Frontispiece (#ub736c394-922a-52a2-81af-ce08fbf23e36)
Title Page (#ufa9411af-60f3-52fc-8024-a0a5835e6430)
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Once Upon a Time … (#ube791df6-9d5a-5f24-92d2-73d0ddd281e4)
Prelude (#u2fdc3665-7f13-510b-a256-52fb3d7fa543)
Chapter 1 (#ue0277e91-06c3-5e2b-bf92-607cc92fa91c)
Chapter 2 (#ubf654aa8-296b-52c6-b3de-1a9e21a8ca87)
Chapter 3 (#u922cc696-f2f5-5a44-91e0-905617aae8d4)
I: Hollow House (#u3e8e8ebb-b52e-51ad-85bd-8c20773c1a35)
Chapter 1 (#u0f65eb38-edd5-5357-8da1-e929cc2774b6)
Chapter 2 (#u8d3d820d-a350-544f-9b37-0ad6f5c8a32f)
Chapter 3 (#u85d414e7-da21-5f51-a691-f0a7e77349a4)
Chapter 4 (#u91a16943-baa5-563a-9e9f-28dd5a453f37)
Chapter 5 (#u25b89333-a976-5502-9a56-5309adf836c6)
Chapter 6 (#u4699cc19-6154-5dbe-9547-13cfd7db8268)
Chapter 7 (#ub03b76ea-1f18-5e2b-a45c-28b78658627f)
Chapter 8 (#u6d268465-8d6e-5ba0-99fa-0b24d52d4bf6)
Chapter 9 (#ue4820840-1d81-5ed4-9dfa-fdf4879a28fd)
II: Yarrow (#u0a7e7b18-f4c9-5bc6-b5a2-eefd127dcefb)
Chapter 1 (#ua6096376-36e1-5e7d-b8a0-6684843fb663)
Chapter 2 (#ua047a9bf-9f0b-55ec-a559-9ab9d83f3806)
Chapter 3 (#uc159caf8-32fb-5bfa-93d4-07ba426c45b7)
Chapter 4 (#ubb6a699d-9833-596f-b665-b215102419fd)
Chapter 5 (#uf832e566-f667-59f8-a97a-1fdc1afac14e)
Chapter 6 (#ua491d76a-4246-5944-ab29-3dbdaf54123d)
Chapter 7 (#u48c3a570-120c-5a76-8cbb-c8c1c3036d2f)
Chapter 8 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 9 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 10 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 11 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 12 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 13 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 14 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 15 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 16 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 17 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 18 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 19 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 20 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 21 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 22 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 23 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 24 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 25 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 26 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 27 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 28 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 29 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 30 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 31 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 32 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 33 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 34 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 35 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 36 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 37 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 38 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 39 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 40 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 41 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 42 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 43 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 44 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 45 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 46 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 47 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 48 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 49 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 50 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 51 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 52 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 53 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 54 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 55 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 56 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 57 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 58 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 59 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 60 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 61 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 62 (#litres_trial_promo)
III: In the Night Wood (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 1 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 2 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 3 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 4 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 5 (#litres_trial_promo)
Author’s Note (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgments
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
ONCE UPON A TIME … (#ulink_57fdeb62-6a09-5c7e-926c-4681228b419b)
PRELUDE (#ulink_114462a8-d6d3-5917-8bf2-d73bec8bb4b4)
By the time the Moon arose and let down her golden skirts, Laura was sore afraid. In the pale light she stumbled through a ring of sinister yews into a glade where stood a single bearded oak, hoary and not unkind.
“I met you once in a dream,” she said.
“And I you in my long, arboreal sleep,” replied Grandfather Oak (for that was his name).
“Isn’t that odd?” Laura said to the tree.
“Not at all,” said Grandfather Oak, nodding sagely. “The Story is rich in coincidence.”
“What kind of Story is it?” asked Laura.
And just then the North Wind swept through the trees, and Grandfather Oak shivered all his branches and dropped down a curtain of golden leaves. “It is not a happy Story,” he said. “But so few Stories are.”
— CAEDMON HOLLOW, IN THE NIGHT WOOD
1 (#ulink_afef761a-79f8-558f-9a0c-f1a7d4d9d209)
Hollow House came to them as such events befall orphans in tales, unexpectedly, and in the hour of their greatest need: salvation in the form of a long blue envelope shoved in among the day’s haul of pizza-delivery flyers, catalogs, and credit card solicitations. That’s how Charles would pitch it to Erin, anyway, sitting across from her in the night kitchen, with the envelope and its faintly exotic Royal Mail stamp lying on the table between them. Yet it felt to Charles Hayden like the culminating moment in some obscure chain of events that had been building, link by link, through all the thirty-six years of his life — through centuries even, though he could not have imagined that at the time.
Where do tales begin, after all?
Once upon a time.
In the months that followed, those words — and the stories they conjured up for him — would echo in Charles’s mind. Little Red Cap and Briar Rose and Hansel and Gretel, abandoned among the dark trees by their henpecked father and his wicked second wife. Charles would think of them most of all, footsore and afraid when at last they chanced upon a cottage made of gingerbread and spun sugar and stopped to feast upon it, little suspecting the witch who lurked within, ravenous with hungers of her own.
Once upon a time.
So tales begin, each alike in some desperate season. Yet how many other crises — starting points for altogether different tales — wait to unfold themselves in the rich loam of every story, like seeds germinating among the roots of a full-grown tree? How came that father to be so faithless? What made his wife so cruel? What brought that witch to those woods and imparted to her appetites so unsavory?
So many links in the chain of circumstance. So many stories inside stories, waiting to be told.
Once upon a time.
Once upon a time, at the wake for a grandfather he had never known in life, a boy named Charles Hayden, his mother’s only child, scrawny and bespectacled and always a little bit afraid, sought refuge in the library of the sprawling house his mother had grown up in. “The ancestral manse,” Kit (she was that kind of mother) had called it when she told him they’d be going there, and even at age eight he could detect the bitter edge in her voice. Charles had never seen anything like it — not just the house, but the library itself, a single room two or three times the size of the whole apartment he shared with Kit, furnished in dark, glossy wood and soft leather, and lined with books on every wall. His sneakers were silent on the plush rugs, and as he looked around, slack-jawed in wonder, the boisterous cries of his cousins on the lawn wafted dimly through the sun-shot Palladian windows.
Charles had never met the cousins before. He’d never met any of these people; he hadn’t even known they existed. Puttering up the winding driveway this morning in their wheezing old Honda, he’d felt like a child in a story, waking one morning to discover that he’s a prince in hiding, that his parents (his parent) were not his parents after all, but faithful retainers to an exiled king. Prince or no, the cousins — a thuggish trio of older boys clad in stylish dress clothes that put to shame his ill-fitting cords and secondhand oxford (the frayed tail already hanging out) — had taken an instant dislike to this impostor in their midst. Nor had anyone else seemed particularly enamored of Charles’s presence. Even now he could hear adult voices contending in the elegant chambers beyond the open door, Kit’s querulous and pleading, and those of his two aunts (Regan and Goneril, Kit called them) firm and unyielding.
Adult matters. Charles turned his attention to the books. Sauntering the length of a shelf, he trailed one finger idly along beside him, bump bump bump across the spines of the books, like a kid dragging a stick down a picket fence. At last, he turned and plucked down by chance from the rows of books a single volume, bound in glistening brown leather, with red bands on the spine.
Outside the door, his mother’s voice rose sharply.
One of the aunts snapped something in response.
In the stillness that followed — even the cousins had fallen silent — Charles examined the book. The supple leather boards were embossed with some kind of complex design. He studied it, mapping the pattern — a labyrinth of ridges and whorls — with the ball of his thumb. Then he opened the book. The frontispiece echoed the motif inscribed on the cover; here, he could see it clearly, a stylized forest scene: gnarled trees with serpentine roots and branches twining about one another in sinuous profusion. Twisted, and bearded with lichen, the trees projected an oddly menacing aura of sentience — branches like clutching fingers, a hollow like a screaming mouth. Strange faces, seemingly chance intersections of leaf and bough, peered out at him from the foliage: a grinning serpent, a malevolent cat, an owl with the face of a frightened child.
And on the facing page:
In the Night Wood
by
Caedmon Hollow
Looking down at the words — like the frontispiece, garlanded with foliage — Charles felt his heart quicken. The age-darkened pages smelled like a cellar of exotic spices thrown open in an airless room, and their texture, faintly ridged underneath his fingers and laid through with pale equidistant lines, felt like the latitudes of a world yet unmapped. Those sly foxlike faces, peering everywhere out at him from tangles of leaf and briar, seemed to consult among themselves, a confabulation of whispers too faint to quite discern, there and gone again in the same breath. His finger crept out to turn the page.
“Charles.”
He looked up, startled.
Kit stood in the doorway, her thin mouth compressed into a bloodless line. Staring at her, Charles saw for the first time — as with an adult’s eyes — how old she looked, how tired, how different from her immaculate sisters, lacquered to within an inch of their lives. He thought of his grandfather, that stranger in the casket who shared Kit’s jutting cheekbones and deep blue eyes. It fell upon him like a blow, that image. It nearly staggered him.
“We’re leaving, Charles. Get your things.”
He swallowed. “Okay.”
She held his gaze a moment longer. Then she was gone.
Charles started to slide the book back into its slot on the shelf — but hesitated. He felt once again that sense of tremulous significance, as if the flow of events had been shunted into a new and unsuspected channel. As if thrones and dominions more powerful than he could imagine had stepped briefly from behind some hidden curtain in the air. The room almost hummed with their presence.
He could not surrender the book, this artifact of a life that, but for Kit, could have been his own: the manicured lawns and the vast rooms and the great library most of all. (Libraries would be the lodestone of his life.) He would have to tuck it into his knapsack and spirit it out of the house.
He would have to steal it.
As this conviction took root inside him, Charles felt a surge of panic. Terror and exhilaration vibrated through him like a plucked chord.
He wanted to flee, to cast aside the book and, for the first time all day, seek human companionship. Even the unbearable cousins would do. But he could not seem to pry loose his frozen fingers. As of its own accord, the book fell open in his hands, and he found himself flipping past the frontispiece and the title page to the text itself: Chapter One.
The initial letter of the opening sentence was inset and oversized and bound in ornate runners of leaf and vine. For a moment, his inexperienced eye could not decode it. And then abruptly, the entire phrase snapped into focus.
Once upon a time, it said.
2 (#ulink_80c42da9-57a0-53da-a4b6-eca73393033e)
But for the book, Charles might have forgotten the entire episode. For all Kit ever spoke of it, the whole day might have been an elaborate fantasy inspired by their itinerant existence in a succession of cheap walk-up apartments, sustained by a series of minimum-wage jobs (“Fired again,” she always told him ruefully when one of them headed south) and well-meaning but feckless boyfriends, most of whom exuded a sweet-smelling haze that Charles would many years later come to recognize as the scent of pot.
But the stolen leather volume had a way of turning up anew with each fresh move — in a box of mateless socks or shoved in among the well-thumbed paperbacks on Kit’s bedroom shelf. Finally, home sick one afternoon in Baltimore — they’d only just moved; he must have been nine or ten at the time — Charles actually read it.
The story showed up in his dreams for days thereafter, a hallucinatory montage of great trees pressing close upon a woodland path, a terrified child, a horned king, his pale horse steaming at the nostrils in the midnight air. Afterward, Charles could never be quite certain whether to attribute the eidetic quality of these images to the book itself or to the feverish condition he’d been in when he read it. He meant to go back and have another look, but the pressures attendant upon being the new kid at school (he was always the new kid at school, and a bookish, nerdy kid at that) intervened.
By the time he did try to go back, two or three moves later, the book had evaporated, vanished in one of the more recent relocations. And this time it really was forgotten.
It might have stayed that way had Charles not enrolled in a seminar in Victorian nonsense literature fifteen years later. He’d been on his own for years by then (sometimes it felt like he’d always been on his own, like he’d spent more time parenting Kit than vice versa), a scholarship kid who did well enough as an undergraduate English major to snag a teaching assistantship at one of the big state Ph.D. mills. There, he divided his time between a derelict apartment in the student ghetto, cramped classrooms, where he held forth on the merits of the thesis statement to bored freshmen only four or five years his junior, and the classes he was taking, where the air was thick with intellectual posturing and professional anxiety. He’d enrolled in the nonsense seminar out of necessity, when the class he’d really wanted — a course in literary theory taught by a fading Ivy League enfant terrible who planed in once a week to teach his classes and then promptly vanished — filled up before he could get in.
So it happened that Charles — at twenty-five, still scrawny and bespectacled, still a little bit afraid — found himself in the university library one cold February evening, reading up on Edward Lear. He’d just started nodding when his eye chanced upon a footnote referencing an obscure Victorian fantasist by the name of Caedmon Hollow. Now almost entirely forgotten (Charles read), Hollow had written only a single book: In the Night Wood.
The title jerked Charles fully awake. The library was silent, cool, and all but abandoned at this late hour. A hard snow ticked against the windows, but despite the chill, a thick column of heat climbed through him. Rereading the footnote, he felt time slip. He was a child again, alone in his grandfather’s enormous library with the cries of the dreadful triumvirate of cousins sounding far away beyond the great arched windows. Long-forgotten details from that single feverish reading flooded through him: a full moon looking down through the mists of the Night Wood; the Mere of Souls, black in its midnight glade; a child flying through the whispering trees; the Horned King upon his pale horse.
“Shit,” he whispered, setting aside the book. He stood and made his way across the reading room to a bank of terminals and tapped the title into the catalog. A few minutes later, clutching a call slip in one hand, Charles caught an elevator to an upper floor. Walking the labyrinth of stacks and dragging a single finger in his wake, bump bump bump across the spines of the books, Charles nearly missed it.
He supposed he’d been expecting the same beautiful, leather-bound volume he’d plucked from his grandfather’s shelf. The library’s copy was infinitely more practical, a thin, sturdy book bound in blue boards — or rebound, he surmised when he flipped it open to find the same baroque frontispiece. It was a woodcut, he saw, the lines strong and sure.
Wily faces peered out at him from behind the boles of the ancient, lichen-shrouded trees, their great splayed roots knuckling down into beds of rich, damp soil. As he gazed at them, the faces seemed to shift and draw back into the foliage, only to appear again, peeping out at him from some neighboring bower of wood and leaf. He imagined that he overheard their whispered conversations in the air around him.
He started back toward the elevator, flipping to the first chapter, that opening invocation —
Once upon a time
— ringing in his head. When he turned the corner and collided with someone strolling the other way, Charles had a brief and not unpleasant impression that he’d been enveloped in a feminine cloud, faintly redolent of lavender. Caught off balance, he threw out his arms to catch himself —
“Watch where you’re going!” the girl cried.
— and went over backward. He thumped to the floor, his glasses flying one way, his book the other. He was still scrambling for the former when the cloud of perfume enveloped him once again.
“Steady there,” the girl said. “You okay?”
He blinked at her owlishly. “Yeah, I —” His fingers closed over his glasses. He fumbled with them, and she swam briefly into focus, a small, lean brunette in her mid-twenties, with a prominently boned face and wide-set hazel eyes, bright with amusement — not beautiful, exactly, but … striking, Kit would have called her. Out of his league, anyway, that much was sure. “I guess I wasn’t looking where I was going.”
“I guess not.”
She took his hand and heaved him to his feet, startling him all over again. “Steady,” she said as he snatched at the nearest shelf. He was still trying to get his glasses adjusted — he thought he might have bent the frames — when she reappeared with his book.
“What was it you were so intent on, anyway?”
“Nothing,” he sputtered. “It was — I —”
Waving him into silence, she flipped the book over to see for herself. She laughed out loud. “Small world.”
“What,” Charles said, still fussing with his glasses. “You’ve read it?”
“Once upon a time, long ago.”
“Not many people have read it.”
“Not like I have,” she said.
“What do you mean?”
“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you,” she said, shoving the book at him. “Here. Hold still.” Shaking her head, she reached out and straightened his glasses. Maybe they weren’t bent after all. “Better?”
“Yeah, I guess so. Thanks.”
“You bet.” Reaching out once again — Charles forced himself not to step back — the girl brushed a speck of imaginary dust from his shoulder. “All set?”
“Yeah, I mean — Yeah.”
“Good.”
Smiling, the girl slipped past him into the stacks.
“Wait,” Charles said. “I wanted —”
But she was already gone, leaving a perfect girl-shaped vacuum in the air before him. “Shit,” Charles said, turning to look after her, but the library was cold and empty, a forest of nine-foot shelves branching off as far as the eye could see.
Then, in one of the few courageous acts in his life up to then, he gave chase. He turned the corner of one row of stacks and accelerated. “Hey,” he called. “Wait up.” And when he reached the next intersection — almost at a run — he nearly collided with her again. She was waiting there, leaning against a shelf, arms crossed, a sly smile upon her-face.
“You’re aching for a concussion today, aren’t you?” she said. “You sounded like a herd of wildebeests. I thought you were going to brain yourself.”
“I wanted to ask you something,” he said. “I wanted to know what you meant by ‘small world.’”
“That’s a complicated answer.”
“Let me buy you a cup of coffee.” Once the phrase passed his lips, the room seemed suddenly airless. He was not the kind of man to ask strange women out for coffee. He was, in fact, not the kind of man to ask out women at all — not for lack of interest, but for lack of confidence. Assuming rejection, he found it easier to save everyone the trouble. So when she said —
“Sure. Coffee sounds good.”
— he exhaled an audible sigh of relief.
3 (#ulink_7576697e-f492-533f-b93e-05758c0d0e4c)
Her name was Erin, her secret unexpected (to say the least).
Coincidence, Charles called it. Coincidence that he had plucked down that book in his grandfather’s library (she dismissed it all as chance). Coincidence that he had gone on to seek a Ph.D. in English. Coincidence that on a late night in the library with snow slanting out of the black February sky, he should run (literally) into the great-great-exponentially-great-something-or-other of Caedmon Hollow himself, who might have influenced, in subtle ways, Charles’s pathway to this place.
Fate, he thought. The Worm Ouroboros. The snake biting its own tail. He had come full circle. And for a moment Charles glimpsed a vast, secret world, intersecting lines of power running just beyond the limits of human perception — a great story in which they were all of them embedded, moving toward some unimaginable conclusion.
As secrets go, it wasn’t much of one, Erin confided. The branch of the family that had immigrated to America had generations ago fallen out of touch with the family that remained behind in England — there might have been some kind of conflict, a formal break. She didn’t know, or much care. But Caedmon Hollow had remained with them, as a legend if nothing more: an eccentric figure out of the distant past, who’d squandered much of his abbreviated life in drinking and debauchery, squandering as well the talent that had enabled him to eke out but a single volume of fiction.
“Everyone in the family reads it at some time or other. It’s like a ritual,” she said. “It’s not really a story for children, is it? It’s hardly a story at all, more like the ravings of a man half mad from drinking.”
“I suppose it is,” he said, recalling the strangely vivid nightmares his own reading had produced. “But it has a kind of power, doesn’t it?”
“I guess so. I haven’t forgotten it, anyway.”
“Is there more, do you think? Unpublished?”
“Methinks I hear your grad-student heart beat harder,” she said. “On the hunt for a dissertation topic, are we?” And when he blushed — he could feel the heat creeping up his face — she touched his hand, and he flushed still harder. “Teasing,” she said. “You can have my crazy old great-great-whatever. It hardly matters to me.”
So it began, their introduction to the fuel that love feeds upon: stories.
That night they shared their stories — the beginning of them, anyway, as they understood them then. They started at the surface as the best stories do. So they talked about their graduate studies (their gradual studies, he said, venturing a rare joke). They talked about their crummy apartments and their crummier cars. He talked about the pressure to publish. She talked about the Law Review.
And then, as the best stories do, they deepened.
They talked. She was an orphan, alone in the world. Her parents had died in a car accident three years ago. In a way, Charles was an orphan, too. Kit had hardly been a mother to him, and in his freshman year of college she’d moved to a commune in Nova Scotia. He hadn’t seen her since.
Dreams and aspirations, two cups of coffee, then three. They were both too wired to sleep, so they repaired to her apartment to talk some more. She checked his head to make sure he hadn’t injured himself when they’d collided, his lips brushed hers, and one thing led to another, as these things will.
Everything important that had ever happened to him had happened in libraries, Charles thought, drawing her down to him on the bed. Then he stopped thinking at all. They married six months later.
They lived happily ever after.
I (#ulink_3e0821ed-bec5-50d9-b7f8-7fae4a313f8c)
HOLLOW HOUSE (#ulink_3e0821ed-bec5-50d9-b7f8-7fae4a313f8c)
At midnight, by myriad ways and strange, through trees parted before her to direct her path, Laura crept down to look into the Mere of Souls, whence the Sylph had dispatched her. Of a time you could see things in the water, or so Laura had learned in the Sylph’s Tale, and she went to her knees, enamored of these mysteries. But no matter how she tilted her head or squinted her eyes, she could see nothing but clots of leaves rotting in the depths below.
Then the waters began to boil and the Genii of the Pool thrust his head above the surface. Weedy hair coiled around his face. His eyes were narrow and blue and cold. “What brings you to this place?” he said in tones thick with the thunder of distant waters.
Laura gathered up her courage and spoke, her voice quavering. “I was told in a Story once upon a time,” she said, “that you could see your Fate in the Pool if only you believed hard enough. And I believe very hard.”
“Some things are better left unseen,” the Genii rumbled, “and the Mere of Souls may lie.”
— CAEDMON HOLLOW, IN THE NIGHT WOOD
1 (#ulink_2403c3e5-7c68-59e3-a1e4-44a78a0207b2)
They hadn’t spoken for almost an hour — not since Harrogate, where he’d had some trouble with a roundabout and the solicitor’s car had vanished, eclipsed by traffic — when Charles Hayden caught his first glimpse of the Eorl Wood.
In the days prior to their departure from their home in Ransom, North Carolina, with its attendant griefs and sorrows, Charles had fooled himself into thinking that maybe, just maybe, things would be okay after all — that the quiet stranger who shared his home was the outward face of a new Erin, a sadder, wiser Erin, tempered, but no longer paralyzed, by knowledge of the myriad ways the world could betray you. He had fooled himself into believing that with enough time and effort, with enough patience, he might yet reach the core of warmth inside her. He had supposed that the core of warmth was still there.
Last night over dinner at the hotel, this pleasant illusion had crumbled around Charles. And over breakfast this morning with the solicitor — her name was Merrow, Ann Merrow — Erin had been pensive and morose. During the chaos at the roundabout, as Charles had whizzed around the circle in futility for the second time, Erin had roused herself long enough to point at one of the branching exits.
“I think it’s that one,” she’d said, and Charles had whipped the car across three lanes of traffic. He caught a flash of the sign mounted high above. Ripon and North Yorks, it read. Then a lorry blew by with an aggrieved blast of the horn, and he’d yanked his attention back to the road. There had been a time when a stunt like that would have elicited an impassioned orgy of outrage from Erin. Now, however, she barely blinked. Charles supposed she’d just as soon the truck had crushed the car like an aluminum can. If you got right down to it, he supposed he wouldn’t have much minded it himself.
Ahead, traffic cleared and the solicitor’s dusty blue Saab came into view. “Sorry,” Charles said, but Erin hadn’t replied. The last vestiges of Harrogate fell away in the rearview mirror and the alien Yorkshire terrain drew up around them, a rugged patchwork of hand-stacked stone walls, rolling pasturage, and narrow-windowed eighteenth-century farmhouses, the forbidding line of the moors looming always up behind them like the shoulders of sleeping giants, blanketed with earth.
It was a bleak prospect even on this clear April morning, and Charles found himself thinking of the Brontë children, tubercular and strange, more than halfway mired in fantasies wrested by sheer force of desperation from this unrelenting landscape, the remote Haworth parsonage and the churchyard before it, overcrowded with the dead. The present seemed to lie lightly on the land here, as though the narrow span of gray road, where the solicitor’s car hove momentarily into view at the crest of each new ridge, might simply melt away like a dusting of fresh snow, unveiling the bones of an older, sterner world.
That thought put him in mind of Caedmon Hollow and his own strange fantasy wrested from this same hostile terrain all those years ago — more than a century and a half now; Caedmon Hollow might almost have known the Brontës — and Charles felt a surge of excitement at the prospect of Hollow House awaiting them. In that moment of anticipation, he could almost forget Erin’s brooding silence, the trouble with Syrah Nagle, and — and the rest of it. He could almost forget it all.
Ahead, Merrow turned into a still more narrow road. It ran downhill between retaining walls of stacked stone for maybe half a mile. Then the road broadened, the walls drew away, and they were in civilization again, or what passed for it out here, anyway.
Suddenly they were in Yarrow. The village was old and steep, crowded into a rift between the hills. Merchants hugged the high street — a newsagent with a white cat drowsing in the front window; a pub, its lot crowded with the noon rush; a hardware store; and a florist (Petal Pushers, Charles noted with a humorless snort). At the far end of town before a crumbling stone house, Charles saw a sign reading Yarrow Historical Society. He made a mental note to come back and have a look at the place. They weren’t likely to have anything useful, but you could never say for sure.
He glanced at Erin, but if the change in scenery had made any impression on her, it didn’t show. Merrow made two quick turns, each road more narrow than the last. If they met an oncoming car, they would have to pull over to let it pass. Charles had the fleeting thought that in leaving Yarrow they had passed through the last outpost of the modern world.
The terrain here was sharper, more unwelcoming, the hills rising steeply on either side. The road wound through rugged outcroppings of stone and patches of wiry brush. Charles cracked the window and let the slipstream flow in, freighted with the scent of heather and flowers just coming into bloom, and cooler than it would have been back home.
Except this was home now, wasn’t it? Home and a fresh start. He glanced at Erin. She seemed to have dozed off. She’d tilted her head against the back of the seat and closed her eyes, and for a single heartbreaking moment, as the midmorning sunlight etched silver the line of her profile, she looked like the girl he had married nearly a decade ago. Then the car dipped into shadow, and the sorrow around her eyes and in the set of her lips sprang into relief.
Charles frowned and looked away, the thought echoing inside his head: a fresh start. God knows they needed it. Drumming his fingers on the wheel, he studied the road, ascending a sharp hill. The solicitor’s car hung at the crest a moment, then plunged out of sight. Yew trees clustered against the sky, their tips just visible above the ridgeline.
Anticipation flickered in him once again.
Beside him, Erin opened her eyes. “We there?” she murmured.
And then they topped the ridge. The valley bottomed out endlessly before them, and suddenly the Eorl Wood was there, bigger than Charles had expected, and more forbidding. The trees began halfway down the slope, like the wall of an ancient fortress, a palisade of enormous alder and elm and gnarled oak. The wood spread as far as the eye could see — lime, olive, jade, a thousand shades of green, fading here and there into glossy emerald patches of darkness.
When Charles saw it, his first thought was that he understood, really understood, the environment that had shaped the nightscape of Caedmon Hollow’s mystifying book. His second thought, coming fast on the heels of the first, was that the wood was collectively alive, a single vast organism spilling out across the valley in wild profusion, bigger than the eye could comprehend, improbably, impossibly bigger, that it was sentient, watchful, and that somehow —
— how? —
— it had been awaiting them.
“Jesus,” Erin whispered, and it was all Charles could do — the impulse took an active effort of will to resist — not to step hard on the brake and wrench the car back toward Yarrow.
Too late to turn back now.
Momentum seized them, the gray road blurring as the car gathered speed. At the base of the decline, Merrow signaled left and disappeared into the trees. If Charles hadn’t seen it happen, he would have missed the turnoff entirely.
He almost missed it anyway. He braked hard — the road ended in a turnaround maybe two dozen yards past the entrance — the force of the deceleration pressing him into the upholstery. He swung the car around and squared up to the entrance.
It gaped under the trees, a tunnel hewn into the flesh of the wood itself, flanked by stone columns shrouded in vines. Engraved words, eroded almost flush with the stone, were visible on the pillar to the right: Hollow House, and below that, 1848. There had been a gate there once, but no more.
A taillight flashed deep in all that emerald gloaming. Charles reached out for Erin’s hand. “We’re here.”
“So we are.” She gave him a forced smile in return, but her fingers remained dead in his grasp.
Charles sighed. He turned on the headlights, touched the gas, and nosed the car between the columns. The wood took them. When the sound of their engine died away under the trees, no evidence of their passage remained.
They might never have come that way at all.
2 (#ulink_502c5a49-6a6f-5ffd-8563-e5719928e82a)
An oppression of trees drew up around the car, and a doomed sense of claustrophobia seized Erin Hayden. For a moment it was all too much — the dark closing down upon them and the tires whispering their incessant tidings of arrival on macadam crumbling with time and carpeted with dead leaves.
Most of all it was the ancient oaks pressing close to the road, like old men, lichen-bearded and a little deaf, stooping close to listen. She imagined them straightening up as the car slipped by, leaning their hoary heads together to pass the news, a stir of leaf and branch rippling ever outward before them.
There was something disturbing about the idea, something watchful and abiding about the gloom under the trees. It was too much, too close.
She glanced at Charles, his face masked in streamers of light and shadow. He looked tired, haggard with something more than jet lag. She almost reached out to him, maybe would have, but an overhanging branch slapped at the windshield, startling her, and she turned away instead.
That was when she saw the child: a little girl clad in a simple white dress, maybe kindergarten age —
— Lissa’s age —
— or maybe a year older. She stood on the leaf-scattered shoulder of the road, staring toward them, so close she might have reached out and touched the car as it sped past.
“Charles?”
“Hmm?”
“Did you —” She broke off. She did not want to say it. It had been nothing, a trick of the eye, a flash of sunlight through the forest canopy or a patch of fog breathing up from the damp soil. We see what we want to see, her therapist had told her. As if that helped.
“Did I what?” Charles said.
“Nothing,” she said.
She was tired of seeing things.
For months after the funeral, back home in Ransom, she’d caught glimpses of Lissa everywhere, through a scrim of raindrops on the windshield as she wheeled by the kids at the bus stop or in the baleful fluorescent glare of the grocery store, just turning the far corner of an aisle. Something familiar in the set of the mouth or the flash of shoulder-length hair.
Then she’d blink and see that Lissa wasn’t there after all. The girl at the bus stop would shift the angle of her gaze and her face would fall into unfamiliar lineaments. Meeting the grocery store specter afresh among the frozen foods, Erin would see that she was younger than she had thought, that she had dark hair and a squared-off jaw, that she looked nothing like Lissa at all.
She’d mentioned it to Charles once and he’d flinched as if she’d struck him. After that she’d never brought it up to him again.
Until last night.
Last night, over dinner at the hotel, she’d seen Lissa once again.
One moment Erin had been sitting at the table, jet-lagged and silent, spooning an indifferent soup into her mouth. The next, she’d glanced up, reaching for her water glass, and the girl had been there: Lissa, a slim blonde apparition, standing silent in the dining room door. Erin gasped, and the water went over with a crash.
“Shit,” she’d said, half rising as she reached to right the glass. When she looked up again, the girl —
— Lissa —
— was gone.
“Here, let me get that,” a voice said at her shoulder. The landlady — a kindly heavyset woman, her gray hair pulled back from her round, smiling face — leaned over her, dabbing at the table with a cloth.
“What happened?” Charles was saying, but Erin ignored him.
“That girl,” she said, sinking back into her seat.
The landlady paused, the damp rag in one hand. “Girl?”
“There. She was in the doorway.”
“Did she cause this?” The landlady straightened, abruptly stern. “Sarah,” she called. “Sarah, you come in here right now. Always underfoot, that one,” she added, swiping at the spill, an expanding island of dampness in the linen cloth. “Sarah!”
“Listen —” Charles began, but Erin overrode him.
“It’s not the girl’s fault. Really. She startled me, that’s all. She looked so much like —”
Then the girl was there, eyes downcast, her hands clasped behind her back, and the words —
— my daughter —
— died on Erin’s lips.
The girl, pudgy and thick, with a fringe of dark hair veiling her eyes, looked nothing like Lissa. Nothing at all. Lissa had been airy, ethereal, like some elemental spirit that had settled inexplicably among them. This girl — Sarah — looked sullen and coarse, grossly earthbound.
“Sarah,” the landlady said, “have you been sneaking around again?”
“No, Nanna. I just walked by the door. I didn’t mean anything.”
The landlady gave the spill a final swipe. “That should do.” She snapped the rag at the serving station. “Bring me that jug, child. Quickly now.”
Charles stared at his plate, his mouth set in a thin line, while the girl complied. She moved slowly, cradling a pitcher in her small hands. She studied Erin from under her bangs as she refilled the glass.
The landlady smiled. “I’m very sorry.”
“No need to apologize,” Charles said. “Accidents happen.”
“Ever since her mother passed …” The landlady shook her head. “Can I get you anything else?”
“No,” Charles said. “Thank you.”
“You’ll let me know if you need anything, then.” The landlady turned back to the kitchen, herding the girl before her. Just before the child disappeared, she glared back at the table, and for an instant — the space of a heartbeat — she reminded Erin of Lissa once again. It was like the blink of a camera shutter: Sarah, pudgy and resentful; then Lissa. Lissa glaring back at her, her eyes reproachful and unafraid.
You let me die, those eyes said.
Then the shutter blinked again and Lissa was gone.
“Charles —”
His hands busied themselves with his silverware.
There was something wounded in his silence, something fraught and sorrowful. He looked like a little boy, scowling at his shoes lest a flash of further intimacy send pent-up tears spilling down his cheeks. Erin had wanted to touch him then, too, and in that moment of weakness, a confessional impulse seized her. A fresh start, he’d said. And why not? You didn’t start fresh with lies.
“Charles —”
His knife chattered against the rim of his plate. A dull reflection alighted trembling on the flat of the blade. He stared at the table.
“I saw her, Charles. It was her. I mean … I know …”
Then he did look up, his face pale and cold, his expression set.
“She’s gone, Erin. She’s —” He drew a breath, shook his head, sighed. “She’s … gone.” He stared at her a moment longer. “I’m sorry,” he said. He hesitated as if he wanted to say more, and then, biting his lower lip, he pushed back his chair and left the dining room.
“Madam?” The landlady stood in the kitchen door, wiping her hands on a towel. “Is there something wrong with the meal?”
“No,” Erin said. “The food was fine. Everything’s fine.”
But everything wasn’t fine. Nothing was fine. Nothing would ever be fine again. Erin leaned her head against the cool window and focused on the thrum of the tires, the hum of the engine. It would be all right, she told herself. Everything would be all right.
Yet the wood, vast and green and vigilant, still oppressed her.
Gone, Charles had said.
He was right, of course. That was the hell of it. Last night at dinner, she had seen not Lissa but another child, a dark, heavyset child with griefs and burdens of her own. If Erin’s heart had chosen to see something else, it was an illusion, nothing more.
Perhaps she’d gone mad. Sane women did not see dead children cruising the canned fruit aisle when they did their weekly shopping. Sane women did not see ghostly shapes in the shadows underneath the trees.
Charles downshifted, and the engine’s tone deepened. Tidal pressure swelled through her as the car leaned into a curve. A bulwark of ancient, moss-damp stone — ten feet at least, and maybe taller — shot up from the forest floor before them like the fossilized spine of a buried dragon. As the car hurtled toward it, Erin’s heart quickened.
Then the road dipped and a narrow aperture, hardly wider than the car, appeared in the stone. The car shot under an archway. The suffocating omnipresence of the wood, that sense of contained energies churning just beyond the range of perception, retreated. An instant of speeding darkness followed — how thick the wall must be! — and then they surfaced on the other side, into a treeless meadow, sunlight breaking across the windshield.
Charles slowed as the road dropped down into a deep, round bowl carved into the heartwood. He nosed the car up to a second wall — hand-stacked stone, perhaps waist high or a little higher. He killed the engine.
Erin reached for her satchel. “I guess we’re here,” she said.
3 (#ulink_9a2f984a-5350-54a1-8c5b-2584b10577c9)
They got out of the car and stood there in silence, transfixed.
About a hundred yards away, Hollow House — three stories of gray, castellated stone — stood at a slight elevation, moated by sculpted grounds, meadow, and walls. Like a stone cast into a pool, Charles thought. Axis mundi, still center of the wheeling world.
“Something else, isn’t it?” Merrow said.
Something else indeed. The photographs had not done justice to the house’s implacable aspect — its grim solidity, its tower and turrets, its dormers and crow-stepped gables.
Merrow said, “The original structure burned in —”
“Eighteen forty-three,” Charles said. “Everything but the library.”
Merrow gave him a perfunctory smile. “You’ve done your research.”
“Charles is all about research,” Erin said, adjusting her bag. “It must be hell to heat.”
Merrow laughed. “It’s been decades since the entire house was in active use. Mr. Hollow — Edward, that is, your immediate predecessor — lived in a thoroughly updated suite of rooms, though ‘suite’ hardly does it justice. It has good proximity to the library — handy for your research, Mr. Hayden. In any case, you’ll find Hollow House quite livable, I should think.” Merrow led them along the perimeter of the wall. “Shall we?”
“Where’s the gate?” Charles asked.
Merrow uttered something that might have been a laugh. “There’s a gate for deliveries at the back. Otherwise the wall is unbroken, one of the house’s eccentricities. I thought you’d prefer the front view — a formal introduction, if you will. Here we go.” She waved at a set of stone risers built into the wall — a stile, Charles thought, summoning the word out of dusty memories of some obscure Victorian novelist — Surtees maybe.
“Let me give you a hand,” Charles said, but Merrow ignored him, flitting up the stairs on her own, so that he found himself gazing at the curve of her rear end, sleek beneath her clinging skirt.
She looked down at him from the crest of the wall. Charles averted his gaze, heat rising in his cheeks. “You’ll want to be careful,” she said. “It’s a bit steep.” Before he could reply, she started down the other side.
Charles followed, the steps slick beneath his feet. He paused atop the wall to reach for Erin’s hand.
“I’ve got it, Charles,” Erin said.
The steps on the other side were broader and overgrown with moss. He’d just reached the bottom and turned back to look at her when Erin’s foot slipped. Charles lunged for her too late. She slid helter-skelter down the stairs, spilling her satchel, and smashed to the earth on one shoulder, breath bursting from her lungs with a plosive grunt.
“Are you all right?” he asked, but she waved him away.
“I’m fine.” She pushed herself to her feet, wincing, and reached for her ankle. “Just get my stuff.”
But Merrow was already collecting it: makeup and lipstick, her passport, an assortment of pens and pill bottles. A sketchbook. A framed photo. Merrow stood, looking at it. “Your daughter?” she asked, scraping mud off the edge of the frame. “She is very beautiful. The glass has cracked, but that can be mended easily enough, can’t it? Are you sure you’re okay?”
“I just twisted my ankle. I’ll be fine.”
She didn’t look fine. Mud streaked her jeans. She was flushed. When she took a step, she favored the bad ankle.
“Here, let me help you,” Charles said.
“Really, Charles, I’m fine.” And then, relenting, with a small smile, “Walk it off, right?”
“I guess so,” he said.
“Well, let me get your bag, at least,” Merrow said. “Come on.”
Together — with Charles and Merrow hovering to either side of Erin — they made their halting way toward the house. By the time they’d reached the stairs, six of them, climbing to a square portico, the door had been opened from within. A stout, fifty-something woman in full Mrs. Danvers livery — black skirts, white apron, even a black cap with her gray hair pinned up underneath — descended to meet them. It was like seeing a nurse in whites, complete with cap, in your local emergency room.
“Ah, Mrs. Ramsden,” Merrow said.
Mrs. Ramsden smiled. “Here, let me help you, now,” she said, reaching for Erin’s arm, and together they hobbled up the stairs into Hollow House.
4 (#ulink_500a9a3a-bca2-5773-96da-0b0ac756a2ca)
They stood in a vaulted entrance hall, like children in a tale, long lost and returned at last to break the spell that had been cast over their ancestral home. A great chandelier illuminated the tapestries and framed portraits that adorned the walls. Doors to the left and right stood closed. The high archway before them framed a long, luxuriously furnished salon.
“I saw you fall,” Mrs. Ramsden said. “That stile is a menace. I don’t know how many times I’ve told Mr. Harris we need to do something about it.” She sighed in exasperation with Mr. Harris as she led them through the salon, past twin oaken staircases that curved like the necks of swans to the gallery above. The balusters had been carved with an intricate motif of leaf and vine. Cunning foxlike faces peered out at them as they passed. “Anyway,” she added, “welcome home. The house isn’t always lit up this way, but we wanted to put her best face forward for you. I’d hoped to give you the grand tour, but I don’t think you’re in any shape to enjoy it, Mrs. Hayden. Let’s get you upstairs and see if we can’t find some ice for that ankle.”
They went up a back staircase to what had been Mr. Hollow’s living quarters: a house inside the house, Charles thought, and a luxuriously appointed one: polished floors and plush oriental rugs, Victorian-era furniture, built-in bookcases stocked with neat rows of leather-bound books. Capacious, high-ceilinged rooms — study, sitting room, dining room — radiated off the large central foyer, where a grand staircase curved up to an open gallery. “There are four suites and a maid’s room upstairs,” Mrs. Ramsden said, leading them down a wide hall into a breakfast room lined with windows, providing a panoramic view of the lawn. There was a second stone house down there. A cottage, really: a single floor, with narrow windows.
“That’s Mr. Harris’s house,” Merrow said, putting Erin’s satchel on the table. “He’s the estate’s steward.”
“We do hope you’ll be comfortable here,” Mrs. Ramsden said as she got Erin settled. “I’ll get you some ice.”
Merrow took out her phone. “Let me see if I can find you a doctor.”
“Please don’t bother. I just twisted it.”
“It’s no bother,” Merrow said and turned away, holding the phone to her ear. By the time Mrs. Ramsden returned with a dish towel and a large plastic bag of ice, Merrow was saying, “Yes, I expect you to come out here, John. We’re speaking of the new mistress of Hollow House. Yes, three should be fine. Yes, I’m sure she’ll survive until then. Good. Thank you, then.”
She ended the call and smiled — a little tightly, Charles thought. “Dr. Colbeck will be here at three,” she said. “Can you endure it for a couple of hours?” When Erin nodded, Merrow turned to Mrs. Ramsden. “Does Mr. Harris intend to join us?”
Mrs. Ramsden hesitated. “See, we thought you’d be arriving a little bit later. Mr. Harris ran into Yarrow. I expect him back directly.”
“Not the day I should have chosen for a trip into the village,” Merrow said. “Well.” She looked at Erin. “You seem to be in good hands. If there’s nothing else I can do for you …”
“You’ve done more than enough.”
“Then I’ll be off.” At the doorway, she turned. “Keys. Mustn’t forget the keys.” She reached into her purse and withdrew a heavy key ring. “I’ve marked the important ones. Mr. Harris will have to help with the others.”
A doorbell rang in the foyer.
“I suppose that’s him,” Mrs. Ramsden said.
“No doubt,” Merrow said. “I’ll let him in on my way out. In the meantime, if you need anything, please do ring me up. You have my card.” And then, smiling at Erin, “I’m sure you’ll be up and about in no time.”
5 (#ulink_1ab729f7-070f-5504-b0eb-ed675edc5ba2)
“The house operates on a skeletal staff, sir,” said Cillian Harris as he led Charles through the salon. “Mr. Hollow kept just enough people on to maintain the property — groundskeepers and housemaids. It’ll be a bit of a lifestyle change, sir.”
Charles glanced at Harris. He looked more like a linebacker than a steward: mid-thirties, with a thatch of unruly dark hair and a crooked nose — not unhandsome in a rough-hewn kind of way. His eyes were bloodshot, and though the man seemed sober enough, Charles was almost certain that he’d caught the scent of whisky on his breath.
It was just past two o’clock.
“Mrs. Ramsden sees to the living quarters and supervises the housemaids,” Harris was saying. “She’ll arrive most mornings around seven. I’m always available. I live in the cottage. You may have noticed it from the breakfast room. I manage the estate.” And then, almost as an afterthought, he said, “Under your direction, of course.”
“Well, let’s work on a more informal basis, then. Why don’t you call me Charles?”
“I couldn’t do that, Mr. Hayden. All my life I served Mr. Hollow, and my father before me, and never once did I call him by his given name. Mr. and Mrs. Hayden you must be to me, by force of habit if nothing else.”
Charles reminded himself that he was an interloper in a foreign land. The custom of the country and all that. “If you insist.”
Harris nodded. “I understand that you intend to do research.”
“Yes, Caedmon Hollow, his book —”
“I know his book all right.” Then, hesitant, as though he felt he was overstepping his bounds, “Never should have written it, if you want my opinion.”
Not really, Charles thought, but he said nothing.
“Well, you’ll want to be back before the doctor arrives,” Harris said. “Let’s just have a glance into the library.”
6 (#ulink_fc482c72-8404-5107-bc7e-5277484409f0)
“Tea?” Mrs. Ramsden said.
“Why not?” Erin said.
Mrs. Ramsden busied herself setting out the service: cookies on a platter, sugar cubes and milk, floral teacups and saucers. Everything had the pearly, translucent glow of bone china. “It’s been a long trip from America, I warrant. You must be tired.”
“Exhausted.”
“As soon as I set out your tea, I’ll leave you to rest.”
“Why don’t you join me instead? I’d enjoy the company.”
“I’m sorry, ma’am. I fear our different stations in life preclude such intimacies.”
“Oh, dear, Mrs. Ramsden, I am thoroughly middle class, I assure you.”
“Mr. Harris wouldn’t approve.”
“Well, Mr. Harris works for me now.”
Mrs. Ramsden offered her an uncertain smile.
“I insist,” Erin said. “We’ll finish up before he comes back. Charles will spend half an hour in the library alone.”
“I’ll have to get another cup.”
“Use that one.”
“Oh, that’s for Mr. Hayden, ma’am.”
“We can get him one when he gets back,” Erin said. “Please, sit down. What’s your first name, anyway?”
“Helen, ma’am.”
“Helen it is, then.” Wincing, Erin leaned forward to extend her hand. Mrs. Ramsden’s — Helen’s — was dry and cool. “I’m Erin. It’s a pleasure to meet you.”
“Likewise, ma’am. Let me just pour the tea.”
“Sure. If you’d reach me that satchel, too, I’d truly appreciate it. I’d get it myself, but —” She laughed without mirth at her predicament.
“Why don’t I see about fresh ice?”
“It’s fine. Really. Just hand me the satchel. And please, have a seat. I mean it.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
The “ma’am” was going to have to go, too, Erin thought. Baby steps. At least they were moving in the right direction. The satchel, on the other hand, was a mess: her sketchbook smeared with mud, her pens and pencils jumbled at the bottom. And the photograph, of course, the glass broken, as Merrow had said. It was unbearable to look upon it, impossible not to. She had to force herself to set it aside and dig out her meds, nearly two dozen jumbo-sized plastic bottles. She counted them, to be sure. She’d been doctor shopping, hoarding, afraid of not being able to get what she needed — wanted, her therapist would have said — in this benighted country. Effexor for the depression. Trazodone and Ambien to help her sleep. Her medicine chest, Charles called it. Her personal pharmacy.
Sometimes she hated Charles.
She shook out a Klonopin — she had half a dozen prescriptions for anxiety, Ativan, Xanax, you name it — and dry-swallowed the pill; then, impulsively, she shook out another one.
Mrs. Ramsden was right about one thing, though: the journey had been too much. The girl at the hotel. That small figure watching from the roadside. We see what we want to see, as her therapist had said, adding, Be careful or you’ll learn to love your chains.
She did not want this. She wanted to be free.
She would never be free.
Mrs. Ramsden — Helen — sat down at last. Sugar and milk, a shy smile across the table. She ignored the vials of medication. She cleared her throat. “You’ll want to know about the household, of course,” she said. “Mr. Harris handles most matters, but he generally gives me free rein in domestic affairs. In addition to myself, there are seven maids. They keep up the larger portion of the house. I’ll introduce you to them soon. I had hoped to do so today, but you’ll want to rest your ankle. I maintain the residential section myself, so you can expect to see me daily.”
“I hope we see a lot of each other. I imagine I’ll be lonely all by myself out here.”
Mrs. Ramsden hesitated. “I’m sure you’ll have plenty of company as soon as you recover from your fall.”
Which was hard to imagine. She and Charles hadn’t entertained in nearly a year now. Even the usual visits after … after Lissa … had been difficult affairs for all involved. While everyone had been generous and kind — their sympathies had certainly been genuine — the unacknowledged specter of Charles and Syrah Nagle had haunted every interaction, dividing her even from her closest friends in the end. You could not easily speak of it, yet you could hardly ignore it. So after the initial flurry of visits — the inundation of more food than she and Charles could ever eat, the follow-up phone calls, the two or three lunch invitations that she had declined — their social life had dwindled to nothing.
“Now, as to the matter of cooking —”
“We’ll cook for ourselves, Mrs. Ramsden.”
“I always cooked for Mr. Hollow.”
“Charles and I have always cooked for ourselves,” Erin said. But this too was a fraught subject, wasn’t it? Her parents had both been functioning alcoholics. The car wreck that had killed them — Erin had been a sophomore in college by then, and the drinking had escalated as soon as she moved out — had been no chance accident. By the time she was twelve, Erin was taking care of her own meals. Even in the early days of their marriage, she and Charles, both of them busy with careers, had more often eaten meals alone than together. Only after Lissa made her debut had Erin made a concerted effort to be home for dinner. Nor did she drink, at least in those days. She would not repeat the mistakes of her parents — or so she had vowed.
Now it didn’t matter, of course.
Now nothing mattered.
She glanced at Lissa’s photograph, helpless to stop herself, but if Mrs. Ramsden noticed, she didn’t say a word. She merely said, “You’re in no shape to cook, are you? And I would wager that your husband is indifferent in the kitchen at best. Husbands usually are. You could use some meat on your bones, if you don’t mind me saying so.”
“Mrs. Ramsden —”
“I serve promptly at five. I will brook no protests, Mrs. Hayden.”
“Can we at least revisit it after I’m on my feet again?” Erin asked, amused that Mrs. Ramsden, for all her deference, had already maneuvered her into asking permission. She had a feeling that she wouldn’t be doing much cooking. Which was just as well, she supposed. It wasn’t like either one of them had spent much time in the kitchen in the last year.
Mrs. Ramsden let the question pass. She smiled. “You’re an artist.”
“I sketch,” Erin said. It was a new endeavor, but it came easily to her. She’d loved drawing as a child. “I’m teaching myself.”
“May I see?”
Erin hesitated.
“I don’t mean to pry.”
“No, it’s fine.” Erin pushed the sketchbook across the table to her.
As Mrs. Ramsden flipped the pages, Erin turned her cup in its saucer, staring at the crest she’d seen at the top of so many letters from the Hollow estate over the last few months: a capital H entwined in green and gold foliage. It put her in mind of the first edition of In the Night Wood, passed from hand to hand down the generations of her family, the baroque initial letter of each fresh chapter. Someday, she supposed, she would have passed it on to Lissa.
“They’re very well done,” Mrs. Ramsden said, turning a page. “You have an eye.” She looked up. “It’s all the same girl, isn’t it?”
Erin bit her lip. Nodded.
“The girl in the photograph there?”
She couldn’t bring herself to answer.
7 (#ulink_9b094bcc-9880-5d5f-9e69-056024311d37)
“Erin?”
Alone in the breakfast room — Mrs. Ramsden had gone about her duties, whatever they were — Erin closed the sketchbook and looked up. The Klonopin had kicked in. She stood outside her emotions, aware of them but detached, an observer of her own inner life. The meds insulated her from her grief and anger, nothing more.
“Dr. Colbeck is here,” Charles said from the door.
Indeed he was. He towered over Charles, a gaunt, ginger giant: ginger hair, ginger beard, all knobby elbows and knees. Six-three or -four, at least, and vastly underfed. Ichabod Crane, she thought. Ichabod Crane was to be her doctor.
“Dr. Colbeck.”
The ginger stranger actually bowed slightly. He put a black medical bag on the table and took in the rows of pill bottles arrayed in front of Erin without expression.
“You’ll excuse me if I don’t get up.”
To his credit, Colbeck ignored this witticism. He smiled. “Please, call me John,” he said. Then: “So you’re the Americans who’ve inherited Hollow House. You’ve been much anticipated hereabouts.”
“Warmly, I hope,” Charles ventured.
“Of course. You’ll find the natives friendly enough, I think.”
“Did you grow up here?” Charles asked.
“Born and bred. My training eroded my accent somewhat; for good or ill I am uncertain.”
“Then you knew our benefactor?” Erin asked.
“Only in a professional sense. I took on Dr. Marshall’s practice ten years ago, when he retired. Mr. Hollow needed little care. He came of hardy stock. He lived to ninety-seven, and I doubt he was ill a day of it until the final crisis overtook him. He was a reclusive man. Cillian Harris attended to most of his affairs.”
“You’ll find us more approachable, I hope,” Charles said.
“I’m sure I will.” Colbeck cleared his throat. “Let’s have a look at that ankle.”
He knelt and took the ankle in question into his big hands. Erin winced, the pain brief but not insignificant. Then Colbeck was saying, “You appear to have a sprain, Mrs. Hayden, and a minor one at that. You should be up and around in a day or two. In the meantime” — he opened his bag, which, despite the rank of shiny instruments on view, disgorged nothing more sinister than an ankle brace — “in the meantime,” he said, “you seem to be doing the right things. Rest and elevation and ice, though no more than twenty minutes at a stretch. Compression” — he held up the brace — “helps as well, and you’ll need some support when you get back on your feet. Easy enough, yes? I can fetch some crutches from the car, if you like.”
“Why don’t you —” Charles started to say, but Erin overrode him.
“I think I’ll be fine.”
“I think so, too. The brace should be sufficient. Weight is the key. What your ankle wants is weight. Twenty-four hours, and then you’ll start trying to get up and around, won’t you. You can alternate paracetamol and ibuprofen for pain every two hours or so. Three or four days and you’ll be good as new.”
He leaned over to close his bag, and that was when his gaze fell on the photograph. “Oh my, she’s a lovely young girl. Your daughter, I presume.”
“Yes,” Charles said. “Our daughter. Lissa. Back home.”
The words hung in the air like undetonated bombs. Erin could not speak, but if Colbeck noticed anything, he didn’t acknowledge it. He just snapped the bag closed and stood, saying, “Nobody mentioned anything about a daughter.”
8 (#ulink_49b8ac44-786e-52f0-b4b5-0ced3e08da53)
Charles saw Colbeck out.
In the front yard, the doctor said, “What happened to your daughter, Mr. Hayden?”
“I’m sorry?”
“Your daughter. She must be, what, five, six at the most? One doesn’t usually leave a child that age behind when one plans an indefinite stay abroad.” He turned to look at Charles, his eyes knowing.
Charles stared back, something tightening in his chest. “I’m not sure it’s anything for you to concern yourself with, Doctor.” Just at the edge of rudeness, maybe a hair across.
If Colbeck noticed, he didn’t seem to care. He said, “You may have noticed that your wife had twenty-two vials of medication on that table, Mr. Hayden. I counted. You may also have noticed how remote Yarrow is. Unless you intend to drive to a surgery in Ripon every time you have a head cold, I’m likely to be your physician. It is in fact my business to know.”
Colbeck held Charles’s gaze. Charles looked away, surveying the green mass of the Eorl Wood. “She died,” he said.
“And your wife?”
“She hasn’t adjusted well. She blames me. There was an accident.”
“An accident?”
“And that really isn’t your business, Dr. Colbeck.”
Colbeck didn’t push it, though Charles, still staring at the wood, could sense his scrutiny. After a time, he said, “How long ago did this happen?”
“Almost a year ago. I could name the time to the day and hour if you must know. In your capacity as my physician.”
Colbeck didn’t take the bait. He sighed. After a time, he said, “I can offer you little in the way of comfort. I’m very sorry for your loss. I’m very, very sorry. Words are inadequate. But your stay here won’t heal matters between you and your wife. It may not heal at all, and if it does, it will leave a scar, quite a bad one. Sometimes marriages survive the loss of a child, more often not. In cases where one spouse blames the other …” Colbeck shrugged. “In the meantime, it might help to talk about it.”
“Erin was seeing a counselor at home.”
“And you?”
“No.”
“Perhaps you should consider it.”
“Perhaps.”
“I can give you the names of some good people. You’ll have to drive into Ripon for that, but I think the trip might be worth it.”
“That would be fine.”
“But you won’t go.”
“No.”
“Your wife —”
“I doubt it.”
“Well, I’ll ring you with the names all the same,” Colbeck said.
Charles turned to face him. “I should check on Erin now.”
Colbeck nodded. “Ice, twenty minutes on, twenty minutes off, Mr. Hayden. Try to get her up and moving tomorrow. It will be tender for a while.”
“Yes.”
“Good afternoon, then.”
“Thank you for coming out.”
“You’re quite welcome.” Colbeck paused. “At the risk of overstepping my bounds, Mr. Hayden, may I offer you two further pieces of advice before I go?”
“Why not?”
“In the matter of your wife, I counsel patience. These things take time. Fits and starts. Two steps forward, one step back is the rule. But even such halting progress gets you there in the end.”
“And the second bit of wisdom, doctor?”
“I should steer clear of the wood if I were you.”
“Why is that?”
“People get lost, Mr. Hayden.”
“I’ll be careful.”
“Do. And ring me if you need anything.”
With that, Colbeck put his back to Charles. He strode with long steps across the yard to the stile. On the other side, he wheeled around a battered four-by-four — it might have been red once, but had long since faded to a dull, no-color brown — and disappeared into the trees. Charles stood there, knowing that he should do as Colbeck had said and go in to check on Erin. But the doctor’s closing words lingered in his mind: I should steer clear of the wood if I were you.
Charles turned his gaze back to the forest. He had an obscure sense that something was watching him from the line of trees, but when he scanned the wall, there was nothing there.
9 (#ulink_f3477a67-87d0-531b-854f-45e1fd6c42af)
Nothing else happened that day.
Except that Charles and Erin slept in separate bedrooms, as they had every night since Lissa died.
Except that, somewhere in the deepest trough of morning, Charles opened his eyes.
He stood by the bed, dreaming of a black combe where a shallow stream hurried over a bed of broken stones and a green moss grew. The window had been flung open and a breeze caressed his bare skin, beckoning him toward the deep purple sky where a horned moon hung like a child’s toy, and the night wood, girdling the great house, whispered green thoughts in its green and leafy shade.
II (#ulink_ed4900ce-529f-56ac-bfab-b724d9c10894)
YARROW (#ulink_ed4900ce-529f-56ac-bfab-b724d9c10894)
When Laura told him of the little creatures in the trees with their daemonic physiognomies, the Helpful Badger said, “All manner of Folk live in the Wood. And they are all abroad under the Moon, for this night they must shrive.”
“They frighten me.”
“They are more often capricious than they are cruel,” the Badger said. He yawned and scratched a flea, adding, “There is only one whom you must fear. When you encounter Him, you must summon all your strength and courage and bring all your wit to bear.”
“Must I encounter Him?”
“The Story requires it of you,” the Badger said.
“But who is He?”
“I dare not say his name. But He long ago seduced the Wood Folk into betrayal and grievously wounded their rightful Lord, whom He banished into the Outer Dark. And now the Wood Folk must bow before him and shrive their sin in secret.”
“How will I know Him when He comes?”
“He wears a crown of horns.”
— CAEDMON HOLLOW, IN THE NIGHT WOOD
1 (#ulink_9d2722d2-2b82-536d-8ede-6e00f239136e)
It was haunted, of course, Hollow House.
But they were all haunted — Erin and Charles, Cillian Harris, Mrs. Ramsden, too. And though Mrs. Ramsden’s sins and failures and regrets, like those of Ann Merrow or Dr. Colbeck, have but glancing significance in this story, they were each of them protagonists in other tales, with their own dramas, their flights of joy, and their plunges into sorrow. Once upon a time: no life too humble, no event too insignificant.
Every story is a ghost story.
It was the photograph that haunted Erin and Charles, or, more precisely, the loss that it signified. A kindergarten photograph of a blonde girl, three-quarter profile, her hands crossed neatly upon the table in front of her, but otherwise unposed — her giggling smile (no doubt the photographer had ventured some joke), the soft curve of her jaw, her milky complexion — all this trapped behind a spider web of shattered glass.
For Erin, the photo was like a shallow well in a dry season. She dared not drink of it too often — yet she could not help herself. She drew it in her sketchbook time and again, laying out the lines of Lissa’s visage, lending it dimension and form with each careful stroke of her pencil. And then she would turn the picture to the wall and keep working, as if by this obsessive reproduction she could score the image into the tissue of her brain and heart. She would not forget her daughter’s face.
Already she could feel it slipping away.
For Charles the photo was like a jail, prisoning away the grief that could any moment escape to overwhelm him. As long as Lissa was locked behind the glass he could manage his days by rote — not unaffected, but functional at least. Erin feared forgetting. Charles longed for it. The burden of his sin (for so he thought of it) was too much to bear. Yet memory could not be contained. The shattered glass made the metaphor manifest. Looking at the photo now, he felt an inconsolable longing to go back, to start over and do everything right.
And Cillian Harris? Who could say? But he’d stiffened, like a man taking a small electric shock, when his gaze fell upon the photo that first day in the breakfast room. Briefly, to be sure — a breath, no more — but Charles had observed it nonetheless, and wondered.
The glass would have to be replaced, of course.
“I can’t look at her like this,” Erin said, too much reminded of the horrors of the day that Lissa had died. And now that Lissa had escaped, Charles had to lock her away once more.
He took the car and drove into Yarrow, to the hardware store he’d seen on the way to Hollow House. But Lissa had arrived before him. He saw her in a small child — was it her? — holding her mother’s hand as she leaned forward to smell the early spring flowers that bloomed in pots outside Petal Pushers. And worse yet, he saw her on the front page of the newspaper racked before the newsagent: the Ripon Gazette, the photograph unnerving, the headline worse: A FAMILY’S AGONY. He stepped inside, pressing his coins with tremulous fingers into the hand of a gruff man who barely acknowledged him, his eyes fixed on the television behind the counter.
Outside, in the bloodless English sunlight, Charles turned his attention to the paper:
The search continued for a missing six-year-old Tuesday near Yarrow. Mary Babbing was last seen riding her bicycle in front of her family home toward dusk last Sunday. Investigators —
Too much. Charles moved to discard the paper. He could not do so. Lissa stared up at him from the front page in lurid color. He folded it instead, tucked it under his arm, composed himself, blinking back tears.
Okay, then.
Mould’s hardware was next door.
2 (#ulink_e495415d-737d-5db9-b078-873a1650ed82)
Charles took a deep breath, pushed his way inside. The narrow space beyond felt claustrophobic, though the store wasn’t crowded. A single customer, lean, with a hank of dark hair hanging over his forehead, studied the packets of seeds on a wire rack. Charles nodded as he slipped past to the counter at the back of the store.
A tall, fleshy man stood there, wiping his hands on his apron.
“Ah, the stranger among us,” he said in a thickly accented voice. But Charles was the one with the accent here, wasn’t he — the stranger, as Mould (was he Mould?) had pointed out, in a strange land. Mould or not, the man was old, seventyish and hale, bald but for the unruly wisps of gray that clung to the sides of his head, thin of lip, bulbous of nose, tufted of eyebrow and ear. Eyes of pale, penetrating blue peered at Charles over half-rim glasses. Charles wasn’t sure he liked the eyes. They seemed to see more than they had any right to see. The old man extended his hand. It was callused, the thick, ridged nails clogged with crescents of grease. He was Mould after all, Trevor Mould. He said the name as they shook hands, and Charles winced, not at the name but at the fact that he seemed to have inserted his hand into a vise.
“Charles Hayden,” he said.
“No doubt. We’re glad to have you here.”
“True enough,” the seed-packet man said, joining them at the counter. He introduced himself as Edward Hargreaves, adding, “Hollow House hasn’t had anyone to warm its bones for near two years now. Longer if you think of how Mr. Hollow grew toward the end.”
“Wouldn’t leave the house,” Mould said. “I hadn’t seen him for years by the time he finally passed.” He reached out a hand. “Let’s have a look at that, shall we?”
Charles passed the photo across the counter.
“So beautiful at that age, aren’t they? Six, I’m guessing.”
“Five. Five and a half, she would have said,” Charles said, his neck burning.
Mould tilted his head. “Left her at home, did you?”
“Back in the States.” Not a lie, he told himself, but — something else. He couldn’t say exactly what. An omission, nothing more. Yet a lie by any other name —
He hesitated.
The truth would come out sooner or later. Given the amount of research it had taken to track Erin down to inform her of the inheritance, Merrow almost certainly knew. And now Colbeck knew. How long before all of Yarrow did as well?
He spoke without conscious volition. “She —”
“What’s that?”
Mould had turned to the rear counter to study the photograph.
“Nothing,” Charles said. “She couldn’t make the trip,” he said, for to speak it aloud was to acknowledge it as a true thing — to acknowledge his role in it. He swallowed.
“What happened to the glass?”
“My wife. She dropped it. She took a spill on the stile.”
“She’s all right, I hope?”
“Twisted her ankle. She’ll be on her feet again before the week’s out.”
Hargreaves shook his head. “Funny thing that, isn’t it? That wall.”
“Both walls,” Mould said. “Must have been a hell of a lot of work. Hard to say whether the intent was to keep something in or something out.”
“They say,” Hargreaves added, “that old Mr. Hollow kept the place closed up in the last years of his life. Wouldn’t so much as permit an open curtain.”
A chill passed through Charles. There was something haunting about the idea of the old man thrice imprisoned, inside the house, inside the great encircling walls.
“We can fix this up for you,” Mould said. “Later this afternoon, say? Joey, the one that does the glass cutting, he’s down to the King for lunch. He’ll be back in half an hour or so, and I can put him right on it. Say an hour. I hate to make you drive all the way back here.”
“That’s fine. I wanted to look in at the historical society.”
“Quiet village, Yarrow,” Hargreaves said. “I warrant you won’t find much there.”
“I’m interested in Caedmon Hollow.”
Hargreaves grimaced. “Not fit for children, that book.”
“Leave the man be, Ed.” Mould looked up. “If you tire of the historical society, you can always stop in at the King for a pint, can’t you? Anyway, we’ll have it ready for you.” He held out his hand as though he were finalizing some complex financial agreement, and once again, reluctantly, Charles inserted his hand into the vise.
“An hour, then,” he said.
3 (#ulink_86412a16-28fc-5b4f-b560-119db79502d1)
Charles didn’t know what he’d expected from the historical society: brochures advertising local attractions, maybe? Recessed lighting illuminating framed photos and polished glass display cases?
But no. The society was very much a work in progress. The foyer was gloomy and close. It smelled musty. The rooms beyond — the two Charles could see, branching off a broad hallway with a stairway to the right — were largely barren of any such displays. Framed photographs listed on their hangers. A handful of dusty exhibit cases stood half obscured by stacks of cardboard boxes.
“Hello?” someone called from the interior.
“Hello.”
A door opened and closed. In the shadows at the end of the hall, a figure appeared — angular and tall, female, beyond that he couldn’t say. The woman wiped her forehead with a cloth.
“Just here for a look about, are you?”
“I thought it might be interesting.”
“Ah. So you’re the American who’s moved into Hollow House.”
“That’s right.”
“You’re the talk of the town.”
He peered closer. “We are, are we?”
“Down to the King, you are,” she said. Then: “Feel free to have a look. We don’t have much, I’m afraid.”
“It looks to me like you have quite a lot,” he couldn’t help saying.
“A lot of rubbish. That’s what I’m here for, to excavate it all and figure out what’s worth keeping.”
“I thought you were the docent.”
“That, too. Listen, give me a minute to finish up. I’m sorting papers in the back here. Papers, papers everywhere and nary a drop to drink.”
Suddenly he liked her, this shadowy stranger at the far end of the hall.
“Then I’ll show you around a bit,” she said. “I’ll want to wash my face first, if you don’t mind.”
“And if I do?”
Was he flirting? An image of Ann Merrow’s taut rear end, muscles flexing as she climbed the stile, flitted through his mind. And then, worse yet, an image of Syrah Nagle —
He shunted the thought away.
“I’ll wash it anyway,” the woman said dryly, and with that she was gone.
Charles wandered into the adjoining room. He glanced at a set of photos — the high street from some distant era — picked up a stiff, yellowing copy of the Ripon Gazette, put it down again without bothering to read the headline, and ran a finger across the dusty surface of a glass display cabinet, leaving a long, clean snail’s track in its wake. He paused before a case of medals and fading ribbons. A yellowing index card pinned to the wall above it read, in faded typescript, Yarrow has contributed its share of young men to the conflicts of —
Charles turned away.
What on earth was he doing here, in a museum dedicated to a place where almost nothing had ever happened? Even Caedmon Hollow was an obscure figure in the annals of Victorian lit — a footnote, nothing more.
He’d hung his future on a footnote.
A wave of doubt swept over him. The scholar-adventurer indeed, he thought, turning to the next display, another constellation of fading black-and-white photographs: lean, grim-looking men posed beside farm animals and antiquated tractors, a young boy holding a prize ribbon against his chest. Black and white. Nobody smiling. The Yarrow Agricultural Fair began in the early 1800s and remains an institution —
Sighing, Charles drifted to the far end of the room. More photographs, he thought — but no, that wasn’t quite right. The images predated modern photography: daguerreotypes, and more than that, daguerreotypes of Hollow House. The first showed the place in ruins, roofless, the great rectangular stones of the exterior blackened by fire. The ones that followed — there were six of them, marching in a straight line across the wall — showed the house in various stages of reconstruction, culminating in an image of it in pristine condition.
Charles leaned forward to study the central image more closely: the roof framed with great beams, stacks of lumber and stones in the front yard below.
“Probably our best thing, that,” the woman said at his shoulder. “So far, anyway.”
Charles turned to face her, high-cheekboned and pale-complexioned, with a cap of close-shorn blonde hair, hazel eyes, a scattering of freckles across the bridge of her narrow nose. There was a smudge of dust over her right eyebrow. Apparently she hadn’t washed up after all. Or not very well, anyway.
“I’m Silva North,” she said.
“Charles Hayden.” He took her outstretched hand.
“Well, Mr. Hayden —”
“Charles.”
“Charles, then.” She nodded at the framed images. “The construction occurred between 1844 and 1848, following a fire that consumed most of the original manor house. The library and part of the salon survived, though badly damaged. Hollow’s wife, Emma, was not so fortunate. Tradition holds that Hollow set the fire himself, though why he might have done so is unclear. The book came out —”
“In 1850, to little fanfare,” Charles said. “Hollow committed suicide the next year.”
Silva North smiled. “I see that you’ve developed an interest in Hollow House since you’ve taken up residence.”
“Before that, actually. I’m working on — that is, I’m contemplating — a biography.”
“Rather limited audience for that, I should think.”
“I hope my book will change that.”
“Well, you’re in the perfect spot. There must be tons of stuff buried in that old pile.”
“I’m hoping so.” He hesitated, surveying the rat’s nest of boxes and papers. “I don’t know what your collection —”
And now Silva North laughed out loud, a rich, throaty laugh, not unkind. “Our collection,” she said. “Is that what brought you to our humble historical society?”
“I take it you are the society.”
“In a manner of speaking. The village pays me a modest stipend — all too modest, I’m afraid. And I get to live in the upstairs flat rent-free.”
“In return for?”
“In return for going through boxes. I decide what to keep and what’s rubbish. Mr. Sadler, who used to live here, died. Quite a hoarder, he was, with an eye to local history. That must have been twenty years ago. I was a girl. He left the house to the village, and they’ve been shoving boxes in here ever since. I volunteered to clean it out and put it in some order, open it to the public. A deal was struck, and here I am.”
“But why?”
“I have about half of a master’s in history from the University of York. And I’m interested in the village’s past. Unfortunately, it has produced no one of any great significance aside from our eccentric author. Strange book. Not quite right for children, is it?” She raised her eyebrows. “No white rabbits checking their watches.”
“No indeed.” Charles hesitated. “I was hoping that if you ran across anything about Hollow, you’d be willing to share. Have you?”
“The daguerreotypes, obviously. They were stashed away in a box of Mr. Sadler’s gas bills. God alone knows how they got there. Nothing else so far, I’m afraid.” She studied them. “They’d make splendid plates for your book, wouldn’t they?”
They would, Charles was about to say, but just then he heard the door open at the end of the hall, the patter of small feet in the corridor. The high, sweet voice of a little girl interrupted them, saying, “Mummy, I’m thirsty.” Charles turned, reeling when he saw the child, maybe five years old, six at the most, with blonde curls and blue jeans and an elfin and expressive face. The earth slid away beneath his feet. Subsidence, old ghosts rising up inside his mind: Lissa, he thought.
Charles stepped backward, Silva’s hand steadying him as the world came once again into focus: the musty smell of the place and the child in the foyer, the labyrinth of boxes.
Jesus, was this what Erin —
“Are you okay?”
“No, I” — deep breath, tears stinging at the corners of his eyes — “yes, of course, I —”
No words came.
Then Silva’s hand was gone. He could still feel its warmth on his back. “Who’s Lissa?”
Had he said it aloud?
He shook his head. “My daughter. She’s my daughter.”
Was, a malicious inner voice put in. Was your daughter.
“Still back in America?”
Always and forever, he thought. But all he said was “Yes.”
“You must miss her very much.”
“I’m thirsty, Mum.”
“Just a minute, Lorna.”
“They look very much alike,” Charles said. “It gave me a shock.”
“It must have. You look as though you’ve seen a ghost,” said Silva. “You need to come upstairs for tea.”
What he needed was air. “That’s very kind of you,” he said. “I don’t mean to be rude —”
“You dropped your paper.” She held it out to him as he turned away. The Ripon Gazette, Lissa staring out at him from the front page.
“Mary Babbing,” Silva said. “Tragic.”
Steadying himself, he said, “What happened?”
“No one knows, do they? She just evaporated. You expect things like that to happen in York or London. But not here.”
“Did you know her?”
“She was a classmate of Lorna’s.” And then, looking at her daughter, “We shouldn’t —”
“Of course not.”
Silva shook her head. “It’s a horrible thing,” she said.
4 (#ulink_e42e3967-e80f-53b0-88cd-c5220c5da0d1)
Charles knew about horrible things. Charles knew about ghosts.
On the way back to Hollow House, he parked in the turnout by the vine-shrouded pillars, the Eorl Wood looming up around him. He sat there, the car idling, his hands clenched on the wheel. Then he picked up the photograph and tore back the butcher paper Mould had wrapped it in.
Lissa gazed up at him, once again imprisoned behind her wall of glass. Only she wasn’t, was she? She’d escaped, after all. He’d seen her at the Yarrow Historical Society. He’d seen her in the Ripon Gazette. As if to confirm it, Charles reached for the newspaper in the passenger seat and unfolded it on his lap. He placed the photo beside it: Lissa and this other lost child, Mary Babbing. Who could say what horrors she might have endured?
A FAMILY’S AGONY, the headline said.
He leaned his head against the headrest, closed his eyes.
When he opened them again, he saw a figure in the Eorl Wood.
It gazed back at him, a green shadow in a green shade. Like a man, but not a man, antlered like a stag in rut. Cernunnos, he thought. The Horned God or King. The avatar of the Night Wood. He stared, breath frozen in his lungs. He blinked. The figure was gone, not there. It had never been there at all.
Charles shook his head. He put the photograph on the seat beside him, crumpled the newspaper into the space underneath, and eased the car into gear. He accelerated between the pillars and sped into the darkness underneath the trees.
5 (#ulink_60dd0071-4f32-530b-a22c-3b10b9148502)
Hollow House enveloped them.
As Erin’s ankle healed, she and Charles explored their new home, children in a haunted mansion in a tale: the downstairs rooms, the dining room to the right of the entrance hall, the drawing room to the left. The vast salon with its twin staircases and the adjoining library, accessible by lustrous wooden doors at either side of an enormous fireplace. And beyond that a handful of smaller rooms: the music room, the game room, an office where Cillian Harris managed the estate’s affairs. Bedrooms and sitting rooms opened off the gallery encircling the salon, everything luxurious, everything ornate but for the servants’ quarters on the top floor: narrow, dormered chambers with rusting iron bedsteads, vestiges of another era.
And everywhere the motif on the balusters repeating itself: leaves and vines, those cunning vulpine faces. They peered from mantels and window casings, from finely wrought moldings and armchairs. Stealthy and gamesome, they retreated into the foliage in one place only to peep out anew in another, entire rooms subtly aswarm — a trick of the eye, unsettling and strangely beautiful.
Lissa would have loved it, Charles thought, but they did not speak of her. They rarely spoke at all.
Work would save them, Erin’s therapist had once said.
So they went to work, each in their separate orbit. Charles took refuge in the library, all burgundy and leather, with heavy velvet curtains and plush carpets, a long table, and an antique silver globe mapping a world that had long since passed out of existence. Everything polished, everything gleaming. Comfortable chairs surrounded the cold fireplace. And books, ranks and ranks of them, stood shelved on every wall, behind glass doors with shrewd faces looking down from the corners of their frames.
“You’ll want to keep the curtains closed,” Mrs. Ramsden told him. “The spines of the books would dry and crack in the sunlight. Many of them are first editions, Mr. Hayden, quite valuable. A nice dim room and saddle soap once a year, that’s what they want.”
“I’m sure they do,” Charles said. And then: “Personal documents, Mrs. Ramsden. Anything relating to Caedmon Hollow? Any ideas where to start?”
“Cabinets on the west wall, perhaps, though anything that old is more likely to be in the archives downstairs.”
“Archives?”
“It was Mr. Hollow’s little joke,” she said. “What it really is is boxes, Mr. Hayden. Boxes and boxes and boxes. You have your work cut out for you, I’m afraid.” Then: “Will there be anything else, sir?”
“No, thank you,” he said.
And then he was alone, overwhelmed by the task before him.
6 (#ulink_ecc53874-9a47-500a-a89a-70db6bbdcbc9)
Erin, on the other hand, riding a smooth Xanax wave, set up in the dining room of the residence: sketchbook, pencils, and art gum erasers arrayed across the table. And Lissa’s photo, of course. She flipped through the pages of the sketchbook. Lissa and Lissa again. Page after page of Lissa. Erin had been an attorney once, trafficking in matters of ultimate finality: wills and estates, the complexities of the human heart, fear and love, envy, hunger, loathing, and desire. Families in grief and horror, families shattered, divided against themselves: the territory of ambiguity, the kingdom of the gray.
She’d closed her practice after the accident. She could no longer stomach the work. She lived in binary now.
Ones and zeros.
Before and after.
With every passing day, the before was increasingly lost, bleached out by time and grief and the medication that did not salve the pain but only dulled it.
The after didn’t matter.
She turned to a clean page, tapped a pencil against her teeth.
Mrs. Ramsden — Helen — put down a tray at Erin’s elbow: strong coffee, cream. Already, she’d mastered their tastes.
“Thank you, Helen.”
“You’re quite welcome, ma’am.” And then, turning back at the doorway: “I wonder if I might have a word with you.”
Erin looked up. “Of course.”
“It’s just …” Mrs. Ramsden approached the table. She picked up the photograph, stared at it for a moment, put it down. “I wanted to say how sorry I am for your loss.”
“My loss?”
“It’s a small place, ma’am. There are few secrets here.”
Erin put down the pencil. She bit her lower lip. “I suppose so.”
“If there’s anything I can do. If you want to talk …”
“That’s very kind of you.”
Mrs. Ramsden smiled.
“I don’t want to talk,” Erin said. She reached out and turned the photo facedown on the table. She tried to say it kindly: “I just want to be alone.”
“If I’ve overstepped —”
“No, Helen, please. I just — I can’t talk about it.”
“I understand, ma’am,” Mrs. Ramsden said. She nodded, slipped back into the kitchen.
Erin reached into her pocket for another Xanax, swallowed it with a sip of coffee, waited for it to unspool in her bloodstream. She stared at the blank page. After a time — she couldn’t say how long, the minutes had slipped away on the Xanax tide — she picked up her pencil and began to draw. She didn’t think, simply let her hand follow its own imperative. She might have been drawing in her sleep.
She supposed she’d gotten just what she wanted. She’d never felt so alone.
7 (#ulink_6ed15421-0f98-51a0-9876-eb0bc7527a70)
Plainclothes detectives came out from Ripon two stormy days later. Charles met them in the entrance hall, where they stood closing their umbrellas: McGavick, a burly man in his late fifties, his unruly hair sprinkled with gray, and Collier, close-shorn, younger by a decade and a half, compact and fit, his face prominently boned.
They talked in the library.
“I can remember coming out here as a boy,” McGavick said. “Mr. Hollow used to hold garden parties in the summer. Music, and lights in the trees at nightfall. And games: toad in the hole and football on the lawn. Before that wall went up and you had to come scrambling over the stile just to get near the place.” He shook his head. “The old man turned queer in the end, he did.” He looked up. “I trust you and your wife are finding the place to your liking.”
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Dale Bailey
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Ужасы
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: A FOREST. A BOOK. A MISSING GIRL.Charles Hayden has been fascinated by a strange Victorian fairy tale, In the Night Wood, since he was a child. When his wife, Erin – a descendant of the author – inherits her ancestor’s house, the couple decide to make it their home. Still mourning the recent death of their daughter, they leave America behind, seeking a new beginning in the English countryside.But Hollow House, filled with secrets and surrounded by an ancient oak forest, is a place where the past seems very much alive. Isolated among the trees, Charles and Erin begin to feel themselves haunted – by echoes of the stories in the house’s library, by sightings of their daughter, and by something else, as old and dark as the forest around them.A compelling and atmospheric gothic thriller, In the Night Wood reveals the chilling power of myth and memory.