“Why are you lying to me, Foxbrush?”
“I’m not, I—” He made the mistake of looking into her eyes, which were very wide and very blue and very much fixed on his. All the manly resolve with which he’d been blessed fled him in that moment, and he bowed his head. “She wasn’t a goat girl,” he whispered.
Daylily opened her mouth to speak, then closed it and frowned as she considered his words. “What was she, then?”
“She was . . . it was . . .” Foxbrush licked his lips and dropped his voice to a whisper. “Leo was bewitched.”
“How intriguing,” Daylily said dryly. She shook her head. “Don’t bandy words about, my dear Foxbrush. All I ask of you is—”
“It’s true!”
No one ever interrupted Daylily. Her eyes flashed. But she saw the expression on Foxbrush’s face before he turned his back on her and stood with his head bowed and a hand pressed into the desk for support. So she said nothing and waited for him to continue.
“It’s true,” he repeated in a lower voice. “But we don’t speak of such things here. We all know it, and we all pretend not to. The monster does not exist according to us here at Hill House. But the whole mountain knows the truth of the matter.” He was, Daylily noticed, trembling. “Leo was bewitched, and it wasn’t by a goat girl. I know this as sure as I’m standing here. I . . . I saw her myself.”
Not a feature moved on Daylily’s face, and she was silent for some time. At last she said in a cool voice, “I have no doubt that you believe everything you have told me.” She got to her feet but did not grace Foxbrush with a glance when he turned back to her. Instead she gathered her skirts and started toward the door, saying to herself as she went and not caring who heard, “I’ll get to the truth of this matter yet. Whatever it may be.”
Tell me what you want.
Leo stirred fitfully, somewhere between the waking world and the world of dreams, comfortable in neither. Over and over, the phrase circled through his mind. Sometimes he thought he dreamt it; others, he believed he heard the voice in his ear.
Tell me.
He startled awake at last and sat up in bed. The moon was bright and shining through those dragon-eaten curtains, which again looked so much like a tall woman to him. Leo forced himself to stare at them, and they devolved back into drapes of velvet edged in moonlight. But his heart continued pounding.
“What do I want?” he muttered to himself, picking at his bedclothes and finally pushing them back altogether and swinging his legs over the side of the bed. His feet sought across the cold floorboards until they found slippers, and he shrugged himself into a dressing gown. Hardly knowing what he was doing, he left his room without a candle and made his way down the passageway, down the stairs.
“What do I want?” A midnight snack, perhaps? He rubbed his eyes as though he could somehow rub the sleep right out of them, but his head remained woolly. He crept into the kitchen, which seemed so ghostly and abandoned with the fire banked and Redbird not at her post. No one to guard the larder. But food was definitely not what Leo desired just then.
The back kitchen door creaked when he opened it, and he cringed at the sound. He left it cracked open for fear it might latch behind him, then stepped out into the gardens. “What do I want?” he murmured as he went. He had gone a good ten paces before he stopped and scratched the top of his head. “And what, by Bebo’s crown, am I doing out here?”
Tut, tut, tut, o-lay o-leeeee!
The silver birdcall sang from the forest, unlike all the other sounds of the night. It was a song of morning, of dawn, and strange in the moonlight. Leo followed it across the lawn. They would all think him mad if they caught him at this. Could he pass it off as sleepwalking? Or should he turn around and go back to bed like a sensible person?
O-lay o-leee!
There were words, almost. But not quite. Leo thought that if he had slightly different ears he might be able to understand them. As it was, the song was lovely, if eerie in the semidarkness.
He saw the marble stones of the graveyard and shivered. Not once, in all his boyish imaginings, had he thought to explore the Hill House graveyard after dark. Not that he believed in ghosts, of course, but . . . well, maybe he did.
Tut, tut, tut!
“Dragons eat that bird,” Leo muttered. But somehow he felt compelled to follow the song. He crossed the lawn and passed through the low gate that marked the edge of the graveyard. The white panther statue of Hill House’s founder snarled at him in the moonlight. But that wasn’t half so bad as the shadows cast by all the markers and stones. For the first time since returning to Hill House, Leo wished for Bloodbiter’s Wrath. For all the good a beanpole would do against shadow frights and ghosts! But he passed between the marble stones, following that birdsong as it led.