WE REACHED COEURS Crossing and made the turn past Mrs. Blott’s cottage, shuttered and dark, its eyes squeezed shut, mouth puckered inward. Some primitive corner of my mind asked me why she had turned all the lights off, had let the front garden grow wild. Matthew slowed the car, at first to get an idea of the cottage’s upkeep, but then, once we had passed, maintained this pace out of necessity.
The wood, which in memory abided by the main road, waiting to run rampant until out of travelers’ sights, had become greedy in my absence. The road between my home and Mrs. Blott’s had fully changed. Weeds burst, luscious, from the gravel. Fallen branches made barricades. Twice Matthew stopped, got out to move them, but it was soon apparent that he’d need more than his own strength to clear a straight path for the car.
“I can walk the rest,” I told him. “You should go back and park at the cottage.”
He looked concerned, made signs of protest, but I swore that I was strong enough. That I needed a moment of solitude, I had to clear my head. As I spoke these words to Matthew, I believed them.
“Are you sure?” he asked me. “Truly?”
I said that I was. I would be fine. Coulton was gone, Rafe was gone, there was no one left to hurt me.
Matthew took a deep breath and scratched at the hair above his ear. He would see to the cottage, he said finally, clean up a bit, then join me. I thanked him, and watched him maneuver the car until it was facing the direction from which we’d come. He gave me a somber, single-fingered salute, and pulled away.
As soon as he was out of sight, I realized I’d made the wrong decision. The quiet of the empty road was an odd sort of quiet, the breeze was the wrong sort of breeze. The forest, I thought suddenly, was watching me, and whispering.
Still, I kept on to Urizon.
I’D ASSUMED MY home would be the same it always had been, the ivy perhaps thicker, the garden overgrown. I’d left in late spring, the drunken landscape thick with fog and dreamlike, as I imagined those moments leading up to one’s birth, the misty passages we travel before coming into color, into light. In spring, the gardens smelled mildewed and spongy. Trees offered up yellow buds of leaves.
Then there was Urizon in the summer, when I would sweat through my long sleeves and roll them to my elbows without consequence, spend all day out in my sand plot lazing in the heat while the old stone walls faded and baked. It was summer I’d been gone for, the whole of it, all the long days and blazing suns, the late, rainless thunders with their arduous crackling lights. My first full season not at home.
Now it was autumn, Urizon’s lawn bleached, the forest behind it orange-red. Some trees had already shed their leaves, and their bare branches made a latticework for the light to pass through, laying shadows like doilies against the building’s facade. An eastern turret pierced the sky, bloodying the late afternoon sun as it descended.
There were more trees than I remembered on the property, encroaching on the house. The ivy was thicker, and the garden appeared eerily overgrown. I could not find the stone bench that had sat beside the pillars marking the estate’s entrance. The wood seemed to have eaten it, as it had the front drive. Though spread wide, the house’s stance now seemed squat against the exorbitance grown up around it, its closed rooms useless as a paralyzed appendage. It should have been locked up and empty, but lights shone through the ivy covering the windows. The front door hung open. Black smoke rose from a chimney on the west side of the house.
For a moment I was certain this was Peter, home and waiting for me. My body folded into itself with relief, and I smiled. Then I remembered that we did not use the front door, that the foyer had been sheeted and dark for as long as I’d known. The day swirled dizzy.
I heard a rustling in the dry leaves that blanketed the yard and jumped back, fully alert, but it was only my dear Marlowe come to greet me. I laughed at my panic. Marlowe, at least, had not changed in my absence: his coat remained glossy, his body was strong. Joyous, I tripped toward him, my arms spread like wings, and pressed my forehead to his chest, absorbed his heat into my lonely fingers. Marlowe’s tail, wagging furiously, got caught up in some brambles, and he gave me a generous wet kiss once I released him. Then he was off through the tangled lawn, into the house. I rose to follow.
To enter the house, I had to climb overgrown bushes, finagle through flower beds, step over upturned benches that vines bolted to the floor. At one point I lifted my skirt and a twig tore my stocking, leaving a gash in the fabric and a bare slice of skin that I could not help but hit against the plants I passed, their patterns inverting, dead leaves turning green. There were so many that it seemed a pointless task to go correct them. I struggled to imagine the storm that wreaked such havoc on the yard, the winds that had cast trees at such odd angles, the strength of the sun that had encouraged such cancerous growth.
I climbed the three steps that led up to Urizon’s front entrance, surprised that after decades of disuse it had been possible for someone to open the door, that its hinges had not rusted, that weather had not painted it into another wall. I stepped through and turned to pull it shut behind me, but found it would not close. A barberry was rooted in the jamb, growing deep, its trunk firmly planted, branches fanning waxy fruit. I touched it with a finger, waited and watched as it shriveled and died. After several firm pushes, the iron door closed over its withered remains.
“There,” I said to myself, pleased to have imposed a bit of order. It was a small victory, and yet I felt better equipped to deal with whatever had taken up residence in the rest of the house. I expected a vagrant, a nest of squirrels, some runaway child from the village. There was no way to prepare for what lay before me.
Tree roots had burst up through the tiles in the kitchen. Drifts of dirt covered the appliances, pots had been knocked from their shelves. Jars of jam were smashed against the table, their glass jeweled in clusters, fruit red as precious gems. The refrigerator sat overturned, its innards rotting, and I plugged my nose against its smell.
I gazed upon it all with a fascinated detachment, assuming that I must be sleeping. The changes that had come upon the house would soon resolve into the home I’d always known, just as the strange women at the river all those months ago had turned into young girls at play.
“Peter?” I whispered, shutting my eyes when I reached his study door, squeezing my fingernails into my palms in an effort to will myself awake. I took a breath and pushed the door open.
The stump of a hollowed tree, teeming with insects, soft with age, had burst up through his desk. Books were thrown from the shelves by the vines that had replaced them, the closet where he’d kept his robe and slippers was filled with swarms of cicadas. Reeling back, I crushed a spent exoskeleton under my boot, and the crunch it made punctured my panic. The horror of my situation finally filled me. I vomited the lunch I’d shared with Matthew onto the remains of my father’s correspondence.
I called for Marlowe, who did not heed me. For the second time that day, recalling the singed horses, I smelled burning. The smoke I’d seen outside Urizon had come from the chimney of the library fireplace. I crept down the hall and pushed open the door, my heart racing.