The Chain (The Secret of Spellshadow Manor #3)

There was a grumble of agreement. Jari and Alex knelt to pick Aamir up by his armpits and legs and carried him in an ungainly fashion up the creaking, questionably stable staircase. The others followed. On the next floor, there were even fewer signs of habitation, but the circular room wasn’t nearly as grim as the one below. Another curved staircase led up to a floor above, but Alex indicated for Jari to carry their friend over to the far wall of the first floor and set him down.

“Blankets!” exclaimed Ellabell, poking her head around a cupboard built into the curved wall. In her arms, she held a stack of soft-looking blankets, only slightly moth-eaten. They smelled musty, but they would keep them warm.

Jari took two, pulling one over Aamir’s sleeping body before settling down nearby to get some rest of his own. It seemed like a good plan, and everyone else followed suit. Even those who had slept on the boat were still weary, their slumber having been often interrupted by an oar bashing the sides of the vessel or a sudden jolt in its movement.

Alex took a blanket too but knew sleep would take a while to come.

As the others drifted off to different sections of the rundown lighthouse in order to lie down for a while, Alex began to explore. Despite the ache in his muscles and the itch of his dry eyes, he wasn’t tired. And so, he distracted himself with the tower. Moving stealthily past the sleepers on each floor—Natalie and Ellabell tucked away on the floor above Jari and Aamir—he investigated, though there wasn’t much to be found. There were a few tables and chairs and empty bookcases. The odd cupboard with an ancient jar of beans in it. Mostly, the four floors of the lighthouse were empty.

However, as he reached the fourth floor, the narrowest room by far, he saw there was a trapdoor in the ceiling above his head. There were grooves in the stonework where ladders had been removed, but that only served to increase his curiosity as to what was up there.

Glancing around for something to use, his eyes settled on a bookcase, pushed up against the banister of the stairs. It looked a little suspect in terms of stability, but it was the only thing that would reach. Heaving with all his might, he hauled it over to the side of the room, just below the trapdoor, and climbed stealthily to the top. It bowed beneath his weight as he reached up and pushed against the wooden slats of the trapdoor. To his delight, it gave, flipping open with a creak before crashing down onto the stonework of the floor above.

Excited, he pulled himself up through the gap and into the very top floor of the lighthouse, where the light itself was kept. Alex grinned as he stood up in the stunning room, which reminded him so much of a greenhouse. The walls and domed ceiling were made of glass, separated by slim lines of white-painted metal, and on the very top, Alex could make out the turning shadow of a weathervane.

At the center of the room was the fitting where the light should have been, though there was no longer a lantern within it, to warn sailors on the black lake. It still had the curved blinker that would fit around the lamp, causing the flash that would let sailors know of rocks and treacherous waters beyond, but there was no longer a glow. It had gone out some time ago, Alex thought, from the looks of the place. Regardless, it was a work of mechanical art that made Alex smile like a schoolboy; the mechanisms beneath were brimming with cogs and clockwork to make the mind race.

Beyond the strange, hexagonal glass dome, which was all still intact save for a few cracks beginning to appear in some of the panes, the warm glow of the sunrise was streaking through the sky. It was beautiful. Alex walked toward it, his eyes catching sight of a narrow metal platform that ran around the outside of the dome. It was then that he noticed one of the panes in the hexagon was a door and not a window.

Gently, he pushed down on the handle and opened the door with a grating squeak, careful not to shatter the fragile glass as it swung wide. The breeze that whipped against his face was fresh and cool, dancing up from the sparkling water beneath.

He tentatively pressed his foot down on the outside platform, checking its integrity. Satisfied it wasn’t going to crumble and send him plummeting to his death, he stepped out fully and walked along until he found a good spot to watch the sunrise. Sitting down, his legs dangling between the metal bars that acted as a barrier, he gazed with contentment as the kaleidoscopic sunrise shifted from rich pinks and fiery reds to burnished bronze and bold oranges, finally settling upon a golden yellow as the sky brightened to a beautiful azure that told of a warm day to come.

The daylight brought to life the world around him, the shadows falling away. In the surprisingly near distance, beyond the island, an exquisite, grand white building appeared, set back into the rise of a lush, green hillside. Along the shoreline, it sprawled like an Italian villa, with spires rising up from gleaming domed roofs, almost cathedral-like in their beauty. It caught the bright sunlight in the most stunning way, taking Alex’s breath away.

There were walls surrounding it, but they were not the grim, gray walls Alex was used to. These were of the purest white stone, adorned with elaborately carved statues that stood atop the battlements in measured intervals, reaching up toward the sky with delicately sculpted golden hands. There was nothing ugly and unforgiving about this place. Not like Spellshadow Manor. Everything here was beautiful and somehow welcoming. There was none of the insipid gray ivy, either, as far as Alex could see. The only plants he could make out were bouquets of roses, luxurious cream and deep red, surrounded by sprays of much smaller white flowers, set among vivid dark green leaves that hung from baskets against some of the walkways he could see in the brightening daylight.

There were figures, too, moving around the open piazzas of white marble and clustered in the beautiful, sunlit courtyards. He watched them for a while, mesmerized—seeing their glossy, perfect hair shining in the warm daylight. From nowhere, a choir raised its voice to the heavens, as angelic as Alex had ever heard. The music lifted from within the grounds and soared toward him. Tears prickled his eyes as he realized it had been months and months since he had heard proper music, and this song was like nothing he had ever heard before. He couldn’t put into words the way it made him feel.

Alex sat, helpless to do anything but watch and listen from his solitary spot, as he felt his worries slip away, if only for as long as this dream lasted.





Chapter 6





Alex had drifted off for a time, in the quietude of the lamp-room, though it had grown too hot as the sun burned brighter. It was late afternoon by the time the others awoke, looking more refreshed than Alex had seen them in a long time. There wasn’t any food left, but everyone had gathered on the first floor to share a bowl of water Natalie had fetched from the lake. Alex declined the offered dish as he leaned against the staircase banister, though his throat was fiercely dry.

“We found it,” he announced, once everyone had quenched their thirst.

“What do you mean?” Jari asked.

“Stillwater House—I’m pretty sure it’s Stillwater House, anyway. It’s not too far. And believe me when I say it’s beautiful.”

“It exists?” Jari frowned in disbelief.