Door of Bruises (Thornchapel Book 4)

by Sierra Simone

  I was reminded of something else. A painting. But that was an impossibility.

  The woman didn’t step forward, she didn’t move. She only tilted her head. “You are a Guest,” she said.

  I suppose it was a testament to how thoroughly my manners had been bred into me that I answered a ghost. “Yes.”

  My bloody hand continued to cradle the rose. My thumb hurt.

  “It was the Kernstows first,” the woman said, “before the Guests. But it was always a king. It has to be a king.”

  Her voice was pure Devonshire, big vowels and bigger rs, and shockingly loud. Unnervingly present. I could have been talking to someone from Thorncombe, talking to one of the gardeners who came in to tend the grounds. That’s how here she was.

  But she couldn’t be here, she couldn’t. Either my conception of reality had to bend or I was finally succumbing to St. Sebastian-leaving-me-without-a-word-induced insanity.

  “You’re not real,” I said, pointlessly.

  “And you’re not a king,” she replied. “Yet.”

  I could only stare. I used to pretend to be a king as a little boy—and for a brief time last summer, I made myself the king of one St. Sebastian, and he would be mine to kiss whenever my royal heart desired. But I knew better now. I knew that boys like me didn’t get to be kings—of pretend or kink or otherwise. Boys like me went to Oxford or Cambridge, they married girls like Delphine, they found respectable careers that had nothing to do with art and everything to do with being quality, with furthering the undefinable but all-important Guest-ness that had been assigned to me from birth.

  The woman touched her cheek—a mirror to the place on my own where a cut had healed into a bright pink divot. “That is the scar of a king,” she said, nodding to the healed wound. “A someday king.”

  She closed her eyes as her hand dropped, her fingertips settling on the curve of the torc around her neck. “You must remember,” she said, “because it will happen again. Who is John Barleycorn, little Guest prince?”

  John Barleycorn. It was a Burns poem, a folk song. I stared at her.

  “John Barleycorn is a memory,” she said, opening her eyes and answering her own question. “A memory of the kings who walked to the door.”

  I was utterly lost now. “The door.”

  “By dusk,” she said softly, and there was something like a shudder in her voice. “If it’s not done by dusk, it may be too late. It almost was for me, and through the door I saw—”

  Another shudder.

  “And it has to be a king,” she went on, her voice firming slightly as she spoke. “A true king would never let anyone go in a king’s place. That is the price, you see.”

  Fear, not cold but hot—hot and sticky like the blood dripping off my thumb—was all over me when I spoke. “The price of what?”

  There was a kind of tender pity to her words when she finally answered.

  “You will learn.”

  And then she nodded at my hand, as if all the answers were there.

  I looked down too, and when I looked back up, she was gone, with only the swirl of the mist to testify that she’d ever been there in the first place.

  With a sharp inhale, and long-delayed panic, I bolted from the chapel, and tore my way home as if every ghost in England was on my heels. And when I got home, I slammed the crumpled rose into the biggest book I could find, stripped off my clothes, and then stood in the shower for as long as it took for me to believe that I’d hallucinated the entire thing. I’d hallucinated Estamond because of my childhood games, I’d hallucinated the part about John Barleycorn because . . . well, because who knows why. So it hadn’t been real. None of it had been real.

  Except for the rose. The rose which later on I’d open the old, heavy book to stare at. The rose which grew brittle and dried but never, ever lost that distinctive, bruised hue.

  If nothing else, the rose had been real.

  It has to be a king. That is the price.

  Years passed, and I never told anyone what happened that day. Why would I?

  But if I had, maybe Proserpina and St. Sebastian would still be here at Thornchapel, maybe Delphine would be curled at Rebecca’s feet. Maybe Becket wouldn’t be enduring a sinner’s exile in Argyll. Maybe we would all be together. Maybe all would be as it should be.

  Then again, maybe not. I’ve learned caution when it comes to Thornchapel, to predicting how this place moves through people’s minds and bodies.

  I’ve learned caution about a lot of things.

  But I’ve learned too late, it seems.

  Chapter Two

  Auden

  Ten days after the two loves of my life leave me, the phone rings.

  “Guest,” a voice says after I answer. “You should come down here.”

  I stand and go to one of the many windows in my home office. Out on the south lawn, my oldest friend stands in an emerald-green jumpsuit, facing the house and looking up at me. Behind her, the workers hired to demolish Thornchapel’s maze have stopped working, and they’ve all gathered around something I can’t see.

  Something low. Something in the ground.

  “Can it wait?” I ask, glancing back at my desk. I’m supposed to be finishing a proposal for Historic Environment Scotland—a visitors’ center situated near the Ness of Brodgar in Orkney—and I’ve already told Isla I’d have it on her desk this afternoon. Earlier than she needs it, yes, but what else do I have to do? When St. Sebastian has left me and Proserpina has followed him?

  “I’m afraid it can’t wait,” Rebecca says. “We found something.” She pauses, and then adds, “Auden . . . ”

  “Yes?”

  “We’ll need to stop construction.”

  Worry kicks in my stomach. Any number of capricious variables can halt construction—bad weather, any weather at all, planning difficulties, parts delays, labor delays, labor disputes, protected birds roosting in the construction equipment—but there is only one variable that truly worries me. Only one that no amount of money can fix, that no force of will can bend into submission.

  “Fuck,” I mutter, already moving. “I’ll be down straight away.”

  A charcoal sky hangs above the world. Broken slabs of stone litter the site.

  “We knew there was rock,” Rebecca Quartey says. She looks down at the exposed chasm before her feet, frowning at it like it’s a badly trained submissive. “But there was no reason to think . . . ”

  She’s right, there really had been no reason to think this was possible. This had been a maze for a century and a half, and a labyrinth before that. When Rebecca had asked if I wanted a ground survey when I’d first hired her, I’d waved her off, telling her I didn’t need an overpriced map of hedge roots and dormice nests. I knew the maze’s secrets already, I knew about the tunnel leading down to the woods. There was no reason to think this place was anything other than a Victorian diversion, an elaborate gate Estamond had erected to conceal her comings and goings to and from the chapel.

  “How many of them are there?” I ask, squatting down to peer inside the pit. Now that all the hedges are gone—the statues removed, the gravel scraped away—the site is mostly damp, dark earth. The site is mostly as it should be.

  Except for the squarish slabs of granite embedded right into the soil. Except for the chambers underneath them.

  Those are not at all as they should be.

  “We’ve found seven that would have been underneath the maze itself,” Rebecca answers, and then points to the middle of the site, where the now-exposed tunnel opens like a hungry mouth. “And then the one by the tunnel makes eight.”

  She hands me a small torch and I click it on. The slab at our feet has been shifted enough to reveal the empty space underneath, lined with more stones to create a box. Like a granite chest that’s been sunk into the earth and then lidded.

  A kistvaen. A cist.

  A Dartmoor grave.

  When I shine the torch inside, I see more soil, and then the unmistakable shape of
a mostly-buried axe head, which appears to be a dull greeny-brown. If there were any doubt that these could be some kind of naturally occurring coffins in the landscape, it’s extinguished then.

  What a fucking bind.

  “It’s bronze, Auden.”

  “So it is,” I say, standing up. “We’ll have to make the call.”

  “The planning authority first. Then they’ll call the shovelbums.”

  The archaeologists. Neither Rebecca nor I are strangers to this particular roadblock. Like flooding or subsurface clays with unpleasantly high plasticities, archaeology is yet another construction hazard waiting to happen, and archaeologists are the natural, necessary evil that follows. Like plumbers after a broken pipe, or stumbling heiresses after a few hours in the tents at Henley. Cause and effect. Catalyst and reaction.

  It’s not that I hate archaeology—or archeologists. Of course not. Yay history, and all that. But I would rather it not interfere with the things I want to do . . . such as remake the face of my ancestral home into something that would horrify my very dead but no less loathsome father.

  I run my free hand through my hair, trying to think. “We’ll need to let the project manager know—a full excavation could take weeks, even if I’m leaning on them to go faster, and we’ll have to furlough the workers until it’s over. I’ll also make sure the archaeology team knows the thorn chapel is off limits. I don’t want to risk any curious excavators wandering back and seeing the door. At least not until we understand it better.” I pull at my hair once more before dropping my hand. “I’ve a friend from school who does rescue archaeology. I’ll see if his firm is available.”

  Rebecca nods. “If you can handle the authority and commissioning the excavation, I’ll deal with the rest.” Then she pulls her lower lip into her mouth and releases it with a decisive exhale. “There’s one last thing I think you should see.”

  She leads me past a few more slabs, these still covering their chambers underneath, and together we walk to what used to be the center of the maze. There’s no real pattern to the graves that I can discern—they seem dropped into the earth at random, as if a giant stood here and carelessly emptied his morbid pockets—but the one near the center is uncomfortably close to the tunnel entrance. Too close to be coincidental.

  “This was the first stone we moved,” Rebecca explains as we get closer. “We thought it was part of the tunnel entrance at first, but then . . . ”

  “Another grave?”

  She shakes her head slowly. “I don’t think so. But I don’t know what it is either.”

  I click the torch on again and approach the cist—only to realize it’s not a cist at all, but something much, much bigger. A space large enough for a person to stand in, to take a few steps in even. I get on my stomach, ignoring the damp kiss of the earth through the linen of my popover shirt, and shine the light farther inside. This chamber has fared better than the last one—I can still make out parts of the stone floor at the bottom—although I don’t see anything else on the floor. No bronze axe heads, no beads or jewelry or burned bits of bone. There’s only the stone. But that’s more than enough, because—

  “You see it?” Rebecca asks quietly.

  “Yes,” I say, shining the torch this way and that, trying to make sense of it. The walls are covered with carvings of double spirals—spirals just like the one Proserpina found at the Kernstow farmhouse, just like the ones that decorated the ends of Estamond’s torc. A carved coil going clockwise, which then leads into another coil, this one carved in a counter-clockwise fashion.

  And in between the spirals are other shapes—two other shapes, I realize—laid out sporadically and rather crookedly.

  “I thought those could be antlers,” Rebecca says. She doesn’t get on her stomach, instead squatting very easily for someone in heeled boots, pointing to the angled tines carved between the double spirals. “And those other shapes—what do they look like to you?”

  I don’t need to think about it long. “They look like roses.”

  Not roses like one sees in medieval heraldry or on the walls of Knossos, with flat petals and overzealous sepals poking out underneath. No, these roses are surfeits of silky petals unfolding into glory, practically spirals in their own right.

  What color were the roses in their minds when they carved these walls, I wonder. Pink roses? White or red?

  Black?

  I get to my feet and turn off the torch, handing it back to Rebecca as I pivot to take in the scattered cists. “It’s like a field of bones.”

  “It was a field of bones,” Rebecca says, stepping forward to a cist that faces the chamber with the rose-and-spiral-etched walls. They are only a few steps apart, almost as if they are facing off against each other, almost as if this grave was meant to be within reaching distance of the spiral chamber. It reminds me of something, but the harder I try to think of what it is, the more it eludes me.

  “ . . . a handful of centuries,” Rebecca is saying to me. She uses the side of an elegant ankle boot to nudge the soil around the grave. “The soil here might be too acidic for unburnt bone to last longer than that. The archaeologists may find some cremains, however.”

  “You’re saying Thornchapel eats bones.”

  She gives me a look indicating I’m being dramatic, which is something I’ve never been able to help. “I’m saying Dartmoor eats bones. Most moors do. Because of the low—”

  “If you say pH to me, I’m going to stop listening.”

  Rebecca gives me a stare that would singe the eyelashes off a lesser man. “Because of the low pH, you absolute dickhead.”

  I sigh.

  “But,” Rebecca goes on, “we are quite lower down here, in our valley. The soil is different. Who knows what they might find?”

  I think of Adelina Markham, buried behind the altar by my father, and I squint at the trees under the dark sky, as if I could see through them to the chapel itself and the grave it once hid.

  The chapel. The memory of kissing St. Sebastian there, of feeling that lip jewelry against my mouth as the rain streaked down around us, comes so abruptly that I have to close my eyes.

  A hand touches my elbow, right above where my sleeve is rolled up. I open my eyes to see Rebecca looking at me with an expression of pure empathy.

  “Are you okay?” she asks quietly.

  “You know I’m not.”

  She nods.

  She does know, just as I know that she’s also not okay. We’ve spent the last ten days in the same loop of misery and work. Getting up early, staying up late. Working until our eyes hurt and until not even tea sounds good anymore, drifting through the house like wraiths with iPad Pros, sighing over emails like widows sighing over embroidery.

  Because working is the closest we can come to forgetting, even just for a moment, that the people we love aren’t here.

  “Get inside and call the planning authority,” she says. “I’ll see you tonight.”

  I start to leave, and then I stop. “Quartey.” On the edges of the lawn, the trees stretch and hiss and sigh. “Thank you,” I tell her.

  “Of course.”

  “No, not for the work. For coming back.”

  She stills, her face turned to the ground. Her braids are pulled into a high bun today, and so I can see the effort it takes for her to keep her face schooled and expressionless.

  “You’re the one who comes back, Bex. Always.”

  There’s a quiver to her lips as she looks up at me, and I’m seeing what almost no one else has ever seen: Rebecca Quartey trying not to cry.

  “Heeeey, hey, hey,” I say gently, pulling her into my arms. She’s tall, but I’m taller, and she can nestle her face into my neck, which she does. And soon I feel why, with the tears wetting my throat and her shuddering breaths coming in fast and hard against my wet skin. “It’s okay, Bex. I’m here. I’m here.”

  As she cries, I carefully angle us away from the workers clustered around the excavators and backhoes on the other side of the
site. I know Rebecca would be furious with herself if anyone in a professional setting saw her cry, and I understand why she can’t afford to be seen as emotional, as anything less than perfectly composed.

  But I also understand why she can’t hold it inside any longer, I understand that sometimes it’s a seemingly irrelevant remark or gesture or memory that brings reality crashing back in.

  The woman she loved hurt her. The woman she loved embarrassed her in a way that’s nigh impossible to forgive. And now all she has left is work and an equally broken-hearted—but useless—best friend.

  Her wet eyelashes move against my throat. I hold her as tight as I can, kissing her temple, and murmuring, “Hey.” I have little practice soothing people—only my mother soothed me as a child, and it only happened when I was too young to really remember it. But Rebecca herself has taught me over the last few months how to care for someone in pain. How to show love and concern when someone is vulnerable in your arms. It’s the heart of kink, after all. Pain and concern. Vulnerability and safety. No reason it can’t work with friends too.

  I kiss her again, and then squeeze her into my chest as I rub my hands along her back. “It’ll be okay,” I murmur. “It’ll be okay.”

  When she speaks, her voice is thick. “I want it to be okay. I want it to be okay so badly. I hate myself for feeling this.”

  After a minute, she says, ducking her face into my collarbone, “I never stood a chance, you know.”

  “Against what?” I’m thinking of Thornchapel, of the door, of the graves. Of my father’s sins, of the prices we’ve all paid for those sins.

  I never stood a chance against those things either.

  “Not what—who,” Rebecca sighs. “I never stood a chance against her.”