She nodded and followed almost precisely in Lee’s footsteps. An owl hooted overhead, standing sentinel somewhere in the leaves above us. There was more than enough moonlight to navigate by, but that brightness made me feel naked and vulnerable as we passed out of the safety of the trees and into the void near the cottages. No lights. No smoke from the chimneys. No signs of life whatsoever. Two homes lay before us in a pair, the third across from them on the other side of the dirt path. The third one was more recently painted, the door glistening with a fresh coat of white paint. A one-man cart leaned against the cottage with the white door, and the raspberry bushes surrounding the walk looked trampled.
Lee pushed his shoulder against the nearest cottage, peering around the edge to look at the one with the white door. We followed, waiting on him. Mary was right—something did not sit well with me. It wasn’t just the darkness in the houses but the unnerving silence. No dogs had noticed our approach, and any crofter this far from the safety of the village would keep a hound on alert.
And there was something else—something harder to describe as more than an overall sense of emptiness. It was like knowing someone was watching you from a distance. You could always feel it, that tickle on the back of your neck, but you could also feel when there was nobody around at all. If you wanted to steal a loaf of bread in the market or filch from the kitchens at Pitney, you had better grow eyes on the back of your head. The houses felt lifeless. Hollow. Not safe, but not populated either.
Yet George Bremerton had come this way. These cottages were important enough to mention in his personal items. It wouldn’t be right to pull Lee away now, not when he was closer than ever to some hint about his blood.
“Which one do you reckon?” Mary murmured.
Without thinking, I said, “The white door.”
“Aye,” she replied, too quietly for Lee to hear. “There’s darkness beyond that door, that’s how we know.”
“We?”
A twig snapped. And yes, it was near the door we had guessed. I turned to look at her but Lee had grabbed me by the wrist, tugging me out onto the dirt path and toward that glossy white door. “Come along, that will be my uncle . . .”
There was nobody out in the lane, just us and the owl and its mournful cry. George Bremerton would have been a welcome sight, in fact, but there was nobody hiding in the shadows around the cottage. That door, however, wasn’t locked; the knob had been bashed in, splinters hanging off the ragged edge.
“Careful,” I whispered, tugging on the back of Lee’s coat. “Look, someone’s broken in.”
He lifted his hand, hesitating, placing his palm on the door before making a fist. Oh no. Mary and I lurched forward at the same time to try to stop him from knocking, but it was too late. Thunk, thunk, thunk.
“Um . . . hello? Is anyone . . . There appears to be something wrong with your door.”
I flinched, holding my breath, but the door didn’t open on an angry, armed farmer or highwayman or anyone at all. Silence. Somehow that was worse. Lee knocked again, and again. It was polite of him, but after the third or fourth time it became clear nobody would answer.
Mary gently nudged my side. “Louisa . . . do you smell that?”
God, did I. “Copper. It smells like—”
“Blood,” she mouthed.
Lee hadn’t heard us. He shifted from foot to foot, weighing the options. “Then I suppose we just go in,” he said in a croak. His hand visibly trembled as he took the crooked knob and pushed, opening the door onto a scene of unimaginable horror.
“Lord,” he whispered, covering his nose and mouth with his sleeve. “It’s . . . Dear God, it’s everywhere.”
Blood. Coating the floor. Sprayed across the walls. Dripping down the stairwell in slow, sticky rivers. The smell was hideous; I could hardly breathe. And it was not just blood, but all the other soft, flingable parts of a human body—guts and pieces of guts, skin and sinew, all of it hanging from the lamps, the banister, the buck’s head mounted in the foyer.
In the gore covering the floor was a single set of footsteps. Large ones.
“We should go,” I whispered, already backing away.
“Uncle?” Lee called out, pushing bravely or stupidly into the depths of the cottage. The foyer had three exits—the stairs leading up, a passage to the back, and an open archway to the right. He chose the room to the right, still covering his face as he picked his way through the carnage. “Uncle, are you here? Is anyone here? Are you hurt, Uncle?”
My shoes squelched, sucked down by the still-wet blood coating the floor. I followed him through the house, avoiding unidentifiable body parts on the floor. An eyeball stared up at me from under a rocking chair and I felt my stomach drop and threaten to empty. It was almost too much to take in, too violent to make sense of.
Lee no longer called for his uncle. He had frozen in the middle of what must have been the cottage sitting room. Over the hearth, suspended by two ropes around the wrist, was the pink and dripping skeleton, untidily shredded, bits of skin and muscle hanging like tattered linens from the bones.
I heard Lee vomiting and forced down my own bile.
“This isn’t just a murder,” Mary said, standing next to me, her voice muffled by her own sleeve. “I think it’s a warning, aye? There’s a message.” She pointed to the splattered wall behind the hanging corpse. Someone had drawn a symbol in blood, a crude drawing of a lamb curled up and eating its own tail surrounded by a sun.
“Not much of a message if it cannot be discerned.” Lee coughed, righting himself and wiping discreetly at his mouth.
“That only means it isn’t meant for us,” I said. But I memorized it. If George Bremerton’s trip in this direction wasn’t suspicious, I didn’t know what was. Mr. Morningside was right—something was amiss with Lee’s uncle. Even if he had nothing to do with the massacre in the house, this address had been put down in his things. I hazarded a tiny step toward the hearth and the skeleton dangling above it. There had been a fire lit recently, the ashes still giving off a subtle heat. Something curled and white winked from the otherwise black pile of burnings, and I crouched down, careful to avoid the slimy foot just above my head.
I pulled the little curl of paper out swiftly, hissing from the heat of the ashes.
“What did you find there?” Lee asked. I could hear the lingering queasiness in his voice.
“Not sure,” I said. And I wasn’t, until I read the single, burned line of script. It was nonsense, but I kept it, hiding it in my palm and then sliding it into my sleeve, the old grifter tricks proving useful.
The only words I could make out were the last word of a sentence and the first few of another: traitor. The first and last children will ascend with or without your
“It’s nothing,” I told them. “Just a bit of rubbish that didn’t burn through.”
“Shhh!” Mary whipped around, clutching my shoulder. “Someone is here.”