Her hands quivered.
What was wrong? It was darker, perhaps, than usual, the ambient light from the kitchen failing to penetrate the night. It was cooler, perhaps, than it ordinarily was, but that might have been her anxiety. It was quieter, with no chattering of television or clink of mugs, but that could have been simply the lateness of the hour. A bulb flickered – no, it was just car lights reflecting off the glass face of the clock on the hallway table. The clock said 6:21.
She couldn’t move.
It seemed impossible to be trapped here by dread and nothing more, and yet she stood. She told herself that she had crawled through mysterious caverns, stood under the sparks of a nightmare dragon, and been in the presence of a desperate man with a gun, and so the mere fact of her very own house with no obvious threat shouldn’t paralyse her.
But she couldn’t move, and Gansey did not stir, either. One finger was pressed absently against his left ear. His eyes had the glassy look that she recalled from his panic attack in the cave not long ago.
She had half a thought that they were the last two people left in the world. She would step into the living room and find nothing but bodies.
Before she could catch herself, a single note of a whimper escaped from her.
Be sensible!
Gansey’s hand fumbled into hers. His palm was sweaty, but it didn’t matter – hers was, too. They were both terrified.
Now that she thought about it, the house was not silent after all. Beneath the quiet, she heard something crackling and humming like discordant electronics.
Gansey’s eyes darted to hers. She squeezed his fingers tightly, gratefully. Then, at the same time, they released each other’s hands. They weren’t sure if they’d need both hands to defend themselves.
Move, Blue.
They started forward, gently, both hesitating if the floorboards began to creak. Both afraid to make a sound until they were sure of what they found.
Just: afraid.
At the base of the stairs, she rested her hand on the solid knob of the railing and listened. The hum she’d heard before was louder now, more dissonant and alive. It was a buzzing, wordless song, eerily voicing one note before modulating to another further up the unfamiliar scale.
A thud from directly behind them made Gansey start. But Blue was glad for this sound, because she knew it. It was the brush-clunk of her cousin’s giant clogs on the uneven floor. With relief, she turned to find Orla, comfortingly familiar and silly in her usual bell-bottoms. Her gaze was fixed on some place over Blue’s head.
“Orla,” Blue said, and her cousin’s eyes dropped to meet hers.
Orla screamed.
Blue’s hands acted without her mind, cupping over her ears like a child, and her feet followed suit, stumbling back into Gansey. Orla pressed her hands over her heart and screamed again, the sound cracking and pitching higher. It was nothing Blue had ever thought she’d hear out of her cousin. Some part of Blue darted away from it, making it not Orla’s face screaming, making it not Blue’s body watching, making it a dream instead of reality.
Orla fell silent.
Her eyes, though – she was still looking past Blue at nothingness. At something inside herself. Her shoulders heaved with horror.
And behind everything, that hum continued from somewhere in the house.
“Orla,” Gansey whispered. “Orla, can you hear me?”
Orla didn’t reply. She was looking at a world that Blue couldn’t see.
Blue didn’t want to say the truth, but she did anyway. “I think we have to find the sound.”
Gansey nodded grimly. Leaving Orla in her unseeing weeping, they crept deeper into the house. At the end of the front hall, the light of the kitchen seemed to promise safety and certainty. But between them and the kitchen was the blackness of the reading room doorway. Although Blue’s heart told her that the interior of the room was completely dark, her eyes showed her that there were three candles on the table within. They were lit. But it didn’t matter. They didn’t affect the blackness.
The strange, multiheaded buzz spilled from inside the reading room.
There was also a dull scuffling, like someone running a broom over the floorboards.
Gansey’s knuckles brushed tentatively against hers.
Take a step.
She took a step.
Go in.
They went in.
On the floor of the reading room, Noah twisted and twitched, his body impossible. Somewhere, he was dying. Always dying. Even though Blue had seen him reenact his death before, it never got easier to watch. His face turned to the ceiling, his mouth open in mindless pain.
Gansey’s breath hitched audibly.
Above Noah, Calla sat at the large reading table, her eyes focused on nothing at all. Her hands rested on top of scattered tarot cards. A phone sat beside them; she’d been in the middle of a long-distance reading.
The dissonant hum was louder than anything.
It was coming from Calla.