I gather up my spade and garden fork, shaking loose the fine gray sand. “Go away.”
I get up, turning my back on him, and head toward the manor, the scorching-red manor, and I hear his retreating footsteps. I turn, want to say I’m sorry, please stay but instead I watch him leave. Alarm bells ring inside me: DANGER. DANGER. Can’t he see the dark, the curse, in those trees? Can’t he feel the wrongness when he crosses into those shadows?
He’s already here.
I don’t think Nori was talking about Gowan.
I’m digging in the garden, looking for potatoes or turnips or carrots or worms, when I find another root. It can’t be the same root… but this is the same spot I found the other one. Only this one is three times bigger. And I pulled the other root out completely.
No. “This is not happening. It’s impossible.”
I look up
and scream.
The woods are closer. They are definitely closer. Every time I look away and then back, they seem to have moved, the trunks looming ever taller. I keep wiping my hands on my dress—get it off me, get it off—when I feel it.
Another root.
Sticking out of the dirt like another broken finger. Pointing, accusing. I know, it seems to say. I know, Silla Daniels.
The woods are coming. He’s here. I shake my head. No. No, this is not happening. Stop it. Stop it now. But I know that this land is cursed more than I know that Cath is mad. It has to be cursed. What else is there? I have felt it for a while now. First the town left, then (crazy) Aunt Cath went mad, and now the woods are closer and the garden is dying…
And I am not crazy.
I’m not like Cath.
I get to my feet, never taking my eyes off the trees for paranoid fear that they will be closer once again if I look away even for a moment. I step backward, toward the house, my feet finding their way, and when I’m through the doorway, I slam it shut and pray that the woods will not be right outside when I open it again tomorrow.
I hate the mirrors in this place. As if it isn’t big or creepy enough already, the largest mirror just makes the corridors longer, repeating ever onward to infinity. It’s warped in its age, and doesn’t reflect the truth. The edges are all blacked out and mottled like an old crone’s hand. The head on my first reflection is distorted: too narrow, eyes too dark. The next, her head is normal, but her neck is too long and thin. Each one not quite me. I am looking at hundreds of little almost-me’s, decreasing in size down an endless corridor until I can’t see the last at all. There is no last.
I lift a hand and wave at the me’s. They wave back, and when I laugh, they all sneer.
As I turn away, something about the reflection strikes me as not right, in a way I can’t put into words. Is the reflection out of time with me? Is it too dark at the very back there? The very last tiny me, waving? I rub my eyes and turn away, but then jolt at the idea that I’ve turned my back on hundreds of little versions of myself, all watching me. I glance back and they all do, too. But they are wrong. Somehow.
“Stupid,” I tell myself, and walk farther away.
I’m trying, even now, after three long years, to get a handle on this manor. There are still rooms I haven’t explored, and the idea of not knowing every inch of this place is suddenly very wrong. I need to know La Baume inside and out.
Besides. We’re now running dangerously low on food, and I need to try again to get Cath to tell me if she has any hidden supplies. And she’s not about to tell me.
And I’m not about to go up there and see her.
A creak behind me startles my thoughts away. I turn to look back down the hall, but see nothing. Not even the little me’s are big enough to make an appearance in the mirrors now.
But something is wrong.
“Nori, if you’re spying, then stop it.”
I wait for her to jump out, but there is nothing. Only a stillness that is too still.
I need to be firm with myself, so I turn away.
An old manor, at night. Who wouldn’t get the creeps?
Except I hear the creak again. Barely there. Like a shifting of weight on the floorboards.
“Cath?” I call.
The stillness becomes deeper.
And then I hear Cath upstairs, pacing above me.
Creeeeeeaaaaak. Creeeeaaaaaaak. Crrreeeeeeaaaaak.
And I know that whatever is at the end of the hall is not Cath.
So I run.
I don’t think about anything except the movement of my legs, and where I’m headed: the library.
I rush in and shut the door firmly behind me, ignoring the mocking voice inside telling me I’m a child for being so afraid of what is probably nothing. Probably.
The library is a monolith. Central to La Baume in the way the heart is to a human body. It’s a semicircular room, three floors high—a cylinder cut right through the middle of the manor. Standing in the center, you can look right up through each floor and the skylight to see the sky. It’s a sanctuary, but even here, the oppression of the house is all around, trying to press in.