“No,” Preston said. “I’ve never even spoken to her on the phone. She’s old, and I imagine she values her privacy.”
But a chill prickled the back of her neck. “If she values her privacy so much, she wouldn’t have invited the university to poke around here.”
He folded his arms across his chest and replied defensively, “I’m only looking through her husband’s things, not hers. Whoever Mrs. Myrddin is, she’s not relevant to my scholarly inquiries.”
“But haven’t you wondered—outside of your scholarly inquiries—why she’s so reclusive?” All of it felt wrong, had felt wrong ever since she came to Hiraeth, and certainly ever since she saw the Fairy King. “When I’ve asked Ianto about her, he hasn’t said much.”
“We’re not writing a thesis on Myrddin’s widow, Effy. We should just be relieved she’s staying out of our way.”
Effy could think of at least five rebuttals, but in the end she just pressed her lips shut.
She looked back down at the blueprints. The private chambers, which Ianto had barred them from, consisted of two bedrooms and two bathrooms. Perfectly typical. All of it was perfectly typical.
Slightly demoralized but unwilling to admit defeat, she flipped over to the cross sections again.
There was the gabled roof with a very slight pitch, not large enough for an attic, or even a crawl space, as Preston had previously suggested. But along the eastern-facing wall of the house, just near Ianto’s bedroom, there was a narrow strip of white space, something the architect had forgotten to fill in.
Only no architect worth their salt forgot to finish their cross sections (just Effy, and that was mostly apathy, not incompetence), so she leaned over the desk and squinted, trying to measure the size of the empty space against her thumb.
“What is it?” Preston urged. “Do you see something?”
“Yes.” Effy pointed. “It’s not in the floor plan, which is odd, but if you look closely at the cross section, you can see this little bit of white space. Judging by the relative scale of the drawing, it’s just the size of a narrow closet and it’s off Ianto’s bedroom. I’d say it was a mistake on the architect’s part, but I already know you don’t believe in coincidences.”
Though Preston looked affronted, he didn’t argue. “Well, I can believe Ianto is hiding something of his father’s in there. He’s certainly cagey enough.”
“But we can’t go there now.” It was already late; Ianto had retreated to his chambers, and the thought of confronting him again made Effy feel queasy. Whenever her mind was not otherwise occupied, it was immediately filled with the image of the Fairy King, one hand on the steering wheel and the other reaching toward her. She shook her head, trying to dispel the memory.
“No, of course not,” said Preston. “But tomorrow morning Ianto will go out—he always goes down to church on Sundays; it takes about an hour. We can seize the opportunity while he’s gone.”
An hour. That was roughly as long as they had spent in the pub, and Ianto had been in such a vicious hurry to get back. Effy considered bringing it up, but what did it suggest, really? Nothing useful. Just her brain trying to make meaning out of the baseless terror that haunted her like a ghost.
Instead she said, “What about the irrelevant Mrs. Myrddin? You said she never leaves her chamber. She’ll be there, even if Ianto won’t.”
Preston glanced askance at the door, as though he expected someone to come bursting through. “We’ll just have to be quiet so that we don’t disturb her.”
“But what if we do disturb her?” Effy ventured.
“Then I suppose we’ll have to lie,” said Preston. He shifted a little as he said it, shoulders rising. “Just tell her Ianto sent us.”
“That’s not a very good lie.”
“Well, you come up with something, then.” He was very faintly flushed. “We’ll meet back here tomorrow morning. Ianto will be gone by sunrise.”
It still seemed like an extraordinarily bad idea. But Effy couldn’t think of any alternatives. “All right,” she agreed. “Meet here at dawn.”
Preston nodded. As Effy turned toward the door—slowly, so as not to aggravate her gouged knees any further—she felt his gaze on her still. She looked back over her shoulder and saw Preston look down hurriedly, shuffling through some papers on the desk, embarrassed to have been caught watching her.
His flush had deepened. Effy found herself thinking about how lightly he had touched her, and how the pads of his fingers were still stained with her blood.
“Preston?” she said. Her voice sounded strange: small, wondering. Almost hopeful.
He glanced up. “Yes?”
“Thank you.”
“For what?”
“For caring whether or not I die of sepsis,” she said.
“Oh,” he said. “Well, you can never be too cautious. People have died in much more banal ways.”
“Thank you for giving me the chance to die of something interesting, then.”
“As long as you don’t throw yourself out of any more moving cars.” There was a slight quiver on the left side of his mouth, as if he were trying not to smile. Behind his glasses, his eyes were solemn. “There are far more interesting deaths out there.”
Effy stepped out of the study and stood in the flickering glow of the naked bulbs that lined the hallway. The moment the door shut behind her, she felt suddenly cold and rooted to the ground, as if something invisible were holding her there. Her breath misted out from her mouth in pale wisps.
Yet it was not panic, the same way it had been when she’d seen the Fairy King. This was the opposite, in fact—an eerie and unnatural calm.
All around her there was a stunning, seething silence. The floorboards had stopped their groaning, and Effy could no longer hear the distant sound of the ocean rolling against the rocks, slowly dragging Hiraeth down toward the sea.
Preston was only on the other side of the door, but Effy felt so terribly alone, the house spreading out on all sides like reaching vines.
And then she saw it: a white glimmer at the end of the hall, as if someone had left a window open and the curtain was blowing. But there was no window, no curtain. There was the ragged hem of a dress and a flash of long silver hair. She caught just the end of each, and the heel of a bare foot, pressing up from beneath the surface of her phantom skin like a fisherman’s tangled net and the fleshy sea-thing caught in it.
Effy’s pulse juddered in her throat. The air had turned sharp and fragile and cold, as cold as the heart of winter. This frigid terror caught her by surprise—it was not the fear she’d known all her life, the fear of the Fairy King and his reaching hand. That was a danger she recognized.
This was nothing she knew. It was a novel horror, one that she could only parse once the ghost had vanished. At least—it had to be a ghost. Effy even took one cautious step toward the end of the hall, where the figure had disappeared. The door to the bedchambers was shut, and she had not heard it open. Whatever it had been had passed right through the wood.
It was fleeing something. The thought occurred to Effy as she retreated again, heart pounding crookedly. Watching a dress disappear around the corner and—impossibly—through the shut door was like staring at a dead crow in your path. Everyone, even the most skeptical Northerners, knew it was a death omen.
You didn’t fear the bird itself. You feared whatever terrible, unknowable thing its death portended.
After Ianto’s car had sped away and Effy had picked herself up off the road, she had swallowed one of her pink pills. The pills were meant to be a seawall against her visions, against the unreal world that always seemed to be blooming underneath the real one, like the beat of blood behind a bruise, waiting for its moment to break through.