Door of Bruises (Thornchapel Book 4)

by Sierra Simone

  Sir James and I walk back to the south lawn, and driven on by an impulse I can’t name, I push into the trees, where a narrow path still remains to the chapel. It might be because the path is hard-packed and unfriendly to new growth, but I have this semiconscious, paranoid fear that it’s the door’s doing. That the door wants us to have a way back to it.

  It’s a nonsense thought. But what about all of this isn’t nonsense right now?

  The fog has started to thin—not because of the sun, which is still hidden behind the heavy, hovering clouds—but because of the wind the storm is bringing with it, a restless kind of wind that pulls on the trees and sends gold and scarlet leaves fluttering everywhere as I walk. The roses too suffer the same fate, and wet black petals cover the path like a carpet, muffling my footfalls and sketching out a path to the chapel through the trees.

  But I don’t go to the chapel.

  Instead, I push my way through an opening in the roses, swearing viciously every time the thorns snag on the wool of my coat or the fabric of my trousers, wishing I’d brought my leather gloves to aid with pushing the thorny canes of the roses back. But at last I reach my destination.

  At last I reach the River Thorne.

  It is the same chirpy, splashing river as always—shallow and stone-filled and flowing fast—and it’s also not. Instead of being bordered by the usual trees and ferns and moss, the river’s edge is now crowded with rose bushes, which weep dark petals into the water. Some float and others drown, but they all rush on, on, on down to the village. Down to Thorncombe and the rest of the Thorne Valley.

  The other side, however, is blessedly free of roses, and so I cross the petal-strewn river to get to the other bank, where I find the path up to the moors. And from there I make my way to Reavy Hill.

  This was a favorite spot of St. Sebastian and me that summer—the perfect mix of convenient and isolated. I stared at his profile set against the sunset here. I used to watch his wine-stained mouth with a hunger that scared me at the time.

  For that reason, I’ve been fond of this place, but there is another inducement to come up here today, and that’s because it’s the sole vantage that gives an observer a comprehensive look at my ancestral grounds.

  I climb onto a rock and sit, the wind whipping at my coat as I take everything in. The chapel, covered in roses, the forest in its vibrant shades of October, its floor black with torn petals. The roses creeping up my lawn, and the exposed graves that lie in their path. The river carrying petals to the village, the valley, the sea.

  From here, it’s laughably easy to make out the pattern of the cists in the earth. Of course it had seemed familiar to me when I first saw them, of course it did. It was my Thornchapel, standing stones and altar and door, rendered in miniature like one of my models for work.

  It was my home.

  And so, armed with this new insight, it is only a small sequence of postulations to arrive at a scenario which accounts for the graves. The door came—or whatever form the door took back then—and the roses came with it, blanketing the grounds. Presumably, the people living here also took ill, and they knew enough to connect the door to the disease. Perhaps there was no path through the woods that time, or perhaps they were afraid to approach the door.

  Or perhaps they killed the king at the door and then brought him back to be buried with his people.

  Whatever the case, they constructed a mirror of their poisoned world, and then they killed a man to make it right again.

  What if he’d consented? Does that make it less horrifying? Does it make it more so? I can’t imagine renouncing my life, kneeling with a holy person behind me ready to strangle me or cut my throat or smash my head in, I can’t imagine it at all.

  Until, that is, I remember Rebecca. Then the imagining becomes abruptly clear.

  Yes, I would die to save my friend.

  I think she would have chosen it. If she felt there was no other way.

  That’s what Poe said about her mother, and I understand why Poe is so haunted by this now, why it fills her thoughts. It is frightening enough to consider what would drive someone to commit a ritual murder.

  But to consider why someone would consent to it . . .

  “You look very handsome like this, brooding in your peacoat,” a voice complains from behind me. “It’s not fair.”

  I turn to see St. Sebastian standing below my rock, glaring up at me.

  “Not fair to whom?” I reply.

  “Everyone except you,” he sighs.

  I pat the rock next to me. “Fancy a bit of brood with me?”

  “I suppose if you’re offering.”

  He climbs easily onto the rock, supple muscles bunching and stretching under his jeans and ubiquitous T-shirt, and despite the roses and the graves and my sick friend back at the house, lust tugs at my groin. I want to lick him everywhere. I want to run my fingernails over his nipples until I give him the goose bumps the cold hasn’t. I want to sprawl my legs and watch as he services me with his mouth as he kneels between them.

  He settles close to me, cross-legged. Even though we are inches apart, I swear I can feel the heat of him, the energy of him, as viscerally as if he were pressed against me. I feel as if a particularly picky cat has sought me out and decided to sit nearby.

  I’m keenly aware that the wrong movement or word might send him sloping away.

  With difficulty, I turn my eyes away from him and back to Thornchapel.

  “You didn’t come from the house,” I observe.

  I see the lift of his shoulder out of the corner of my eye. “It was bin day in the village, and I had loads of stuff from my mom’s office to get rid of. I got up soon after you, I think, and went to go drag my bins out. I decided to come up here after I was done to have my own brooding sesh.”

  I want to look at him again, but I settle for a small smile, ducking my face into the collar of my coat so he won’t see it. “What did you need to brood about?” I ask, after the urge to haul him into my arms has passed. “Rebecca? The door? Bin day?”

  “The first two, yes. And very nearly the third thing, because I found out—well, it’s the first time I’ve been back in almost a week because of school, and Auden”—his voice is hesitant now, threaded through with a trepidation I recognize because it so expressly mirrors my own—“there are roses in the village now. Creeping up from the river. And my neighbor is sick. She was being loaded into an ambulance when I got to my house. The EMTs told me she’s the third person from Thorncombe to be brought to the hospital this week.”

  “Oh.” My heart thuds and pumps dread everywhere in my body. “Oh God.”

  “I went down to the newsagent’s to ask around. There’s a good handful of people who are sick now—fever, bleeding, hallucinations—including Charlie and Gemma.”

  “The May King and Queen from the village?” I ask. “But they’re only teenagers.”

  “I don’t know if age matters when it comes to this, Auden.”

  I look from the house to my hands, which lay uselessly in my lap. Useless like the rest of me. “Do you think the doctors will be able to help?”

  “They weren’t able to help Rebecca, were they? It’s hard to imagine antibiotics or something not working, but if it doesn’t, if it’s like it is when it’s happened before . . . ”

  “Then they will die. Unless the door is closed.”

  I feel Saint looking at me. “There’s got to be another way to close it, Auden. And we’ll find it, I know we will.”

  “That’s usually my line.”

  “Well, you didn’t say it, so I had to. I’m worried you’re thinking of very stupid things right now.”

  I shift so I can look at him again. “Me too.”

  It’s the first time he’s seen my eyes in the light, and his lips part. “Your eyes.”

  “I know. I know.”

  He stares at me with worry, with fascination too, and that’s when I notice the moisture on his forehead, the barely-there smudges under his lowe
r eyelids. The dread in my blood is more than dread now—it’s panic.

  “No,” I say, moving onto my knees so I can look at him better. “No.”

  He looks down, but he lets me touch his face, cradle his jaw.

  “You can’t be sick,” I say fiercely. “I won’t allow it.”

  “It’s only been since this morning,” he says. “Just a fever. And I saw—I saw the graveyard. You know the one. The headstones and the wall and the tree we sat under when you drew on me. I woke up and they were all in your room.”

  I press my forehead to his. “Stop it,” I plead. “Stop being sick right now.”

  He huffs out a laugh against my mouth. “Even you can’t boss this around, Auden Guest.”

  “I can try.”

  “Yes,” he says sadly. “You can.”

  “Will you go to the doctor?”

  “Of course. I’m not putting all my health eggs into the magic door basket, I promise.”

  The relief is minor, but palpable. I relax a little and let my hands fall from his face. “Will you go back to school?”

  “No,” he says slowly. “I don’t think I will. Two of my classes can be managed remotely, I think, but a third I’ll need to retake. But I want to stay here.”

  “I want you here,” I say ferociously, and he nods.

  “I know you do.” He blinks then, and yawns. “I could fall asleep right now, you know, I’m that tired.”

  I move so I’m sitting again, and then I guide him to lay his head on my lap, which he does without any resistance whatsoever.

  “Sleep,” I say. “I’ll wake you when it’s time to go back.”

  And he nods against my leg, his breathing already slowing. I stroke his hair as the storm rolls over us without breaking, and as the breeze sends leaves and petals dancing everywhere.

  He sleeps and I keep my eyes trained on the woods below, on the chapel and door within them, thinking of Estamond’s words to me a long time ago.

  That is the price, you see.

  The price of what?

  You will learn.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Proserpina

  One week before Samhain, I fall asleep in the library as a storm darkens the daylight into lightning-split murk.

  Auden’s in his office. Rebecca and Saint have both drifted off to nap—they’ve been feeling a little better the past few days after the doctor prescribed them some strong anti-inflammatories but they still tire easily—and Delphine and Becket, who’ve also developed fevers this week, are resting in their rooms. As a precaution, Auden’s halted the last stages of the old wing’s renovation, and he’s given Abby paid leave for the next few weeks, too. So aside from the six of us, the house is empty.

  And it feels like it. It feels like an empty church in here. Or maybe a passage tomb. Our very own Newgrange, filled with old books, older blankets, and half-empty bottles of Night Nurse.

  Exhaustion has been nipping at my heels all day, and so as the fog and clouds resolve themselves into a hearty, thundery rain, I leave my piles of books and notes and find a squashy sofa to lie down on. Even with all the blankets heaped around me, I shiver. And when I look across the library, I see my mother standing by the window, her arms crossed and her expression fixed on the forest outside. She’s wearing her favorite type of outfit—practical cargo pants, a sturdy button-down shirt with a tank top underneath, boots meant for hopping in and out of excavation trenches. There’s an orange Rite in the Rain notebook dangling from her fingertips and a pencil jabbed through her messy bun, and she looks like she’s just strolled into the room from a dig somewhere dusty and blue-skied. But of course she didn’t. She didn’t because she’s dead, so very dead, and this isn’t real.

  She’s not real.

  But I still like watching her as I fall asleep anyway.

  Sleep comes like a shipwreck. I’m sinking, sputtering, kicking, and then suddenly I’m on the unfamiliar shore of a dream. A new dream—one I haven’t had before.

  For a moment, I think I might be awake again, and this is a vision, because there is my mother, in more sturdy, sensible clothes, wearing more sturdy, dig-ready boots, but she is also in a coat now, and there’s no notebook dangling from her fingertips, only a single piece of paper instead.

  Fog drifts everywhere. The trees are dripping leaves of orange and red, and when I look down, I see stray black petals tossing and tumbling around my feet.

  I know, with a certainty that goes deeper than logic, that this is Samhain, twelve years ago.

  I know that I’m seeing the day she died.

  I’m walking with her in the dream, and we’re moving fast, so fast I can barely keep up. She’s striding from an already-departing cab to Thornchapel’s doors and not bothering to knock before she pushes them open. They swing into a silent hall, opening into the grayish darkness of mid-afternoon. Which at this latitude makes the shadows stretch and stretch and stretch—

  My mother goes to the library, calling out Ralph’s name. Even in her obvious distress and worry, her voice is sunny, bright, assertive. I could listen to her saying Ralph’s name over and over again for a hundred years and not get sick of it.

  I miss you, I try to say, but it’s not that kind of dream. It’s the kind of dream where I am less than a ghost, not even a shade. She won’t hear me or see me, and I can’t change anything, affect anything, undo any tragedies or speak any long-denied declarations. I am a presence only to myself, and I’m bound to her movements, drawn along in her wake as she leaves the library and searches the old wing, calling for Ralph the entire time.

  The house is as it was that summer—carpeted in an ugly green, musty in some places, thoroughly decrepit in others. But it’s not like that summer in that it seems to be completely empty—there’s no sign of the Guests at all. There is only my mother and her increasingly urgent calls.

  When she finishes with the inside of the house, she wastes no time going to the south lawn, where the maze still sprawls like something from a storybook. And where, at the very edges of the forest, I can make out the bruise-colored smudges of roses growing between the trees.

  In the distance, I see the caretaker with a wheelbarrow—the same one who will later give evidence to the police—but my mother pays him no mind. She walks as fast as she can into the maze, under the reaching arms of Demeter and Persephone, taking the bends and turns with the rushing efficiency of someone who knows the way.

  And before long, we are slipping between the splashing fountain and the statue of Adonis and Aphrodite, taking the stairs quickly in the dark, taking the tunnel just as quickly. Very soon, we are in the woods.

  The black roses came this time too, although not as thickly it seems. Instead of crowding the forest and climbing eagerly toward the house, they’ve merely crawled up the trees and settled into the cracks of the stones and boulders along the way. My mother stops to look at them one time only, crouching down and examining a bloom and some dark rose hips dangling nearby, before she resumes her half-jog to the chapel. That paper is still between her fingers, folded into crisp, neat squares.

  I think I know what’s on that paper.

  Actually, I know I know what’s on that paper.

  But as we reach the clearing, I abruptly find that I don’t want to know a single thing more. I don’t want to see a single thing more. I want to go back to the house and listen to her voice as she calls for her ex-lover, I want to follow her around and watch the light move through her hair. I want to stare at the no-nonsense watch on her wrist and remember all the times I sat in her lap watching the numbers change while she graded papers.

  I don’t want to see her step into the chapel, I don’t want to see if Ralph is there.

  I don’t want to see her die.

  I try to stay in the forest, I do. I bend all of my will toward it. I focus as hard as I can. Stay. Stay.

  Stay.

  Do not go.

  But this is a dream, and in a way, it’s not even my dream, not truly, and I�
��m pulled there, I’m pulled closer to where I don’t want to be. I don’t even lift my feet, and I’m suddenly inside the chapel, inside the crumbling walls covered with the door-roses, listening to my mother argue with Ralph.

  She’s crying.

  He’s crying.

  I look up to see them talking, shouting, gesturing—her with the paper in her hand—him with an old-fashioned knife in his. He doesn’t brandish it at her, he isn’t holding it like a man contemplating murder, he’s only waving it as he talks, as if he’s forgotten he’s holding it at all.

  The torc gleams around his neck.

  “I won’t let you,” she’s saying, and the words are fierce and unwavering despite the tears on her face.

  “You should,” he chokes.

  He looks so much like Auden. The same light brown hair, the same hazel eyes . . . the same long, elegant nose and wide mouth. He even cries the same way Auden cries, in a quiet, resigned way that’s far more powerful than any plangent wailing ever could be. “I meant to tell you that when you called me. That you should let me. That you need to let me. It has to be this way—kings go to the door at Thornchapel. They must. Convivificat.”

  “I’m telling you,” Mom is saying, her voice frantic. “It’s not a warning. It’s never been a warning, nor a threat—it’s not what we thought, Ralph, I swear—”

  “It needs death.”

  “It needs sacrifice. They’re different—”

  “I’ve already tried symbolic sacrifice, Adelina, it doesn’t work!”

  “There’s another way. We saw it in the stories. Not symbolic at all, but not this either. Not suicide or murder!”

  “The stories are too fictionalized, and you know that. You know I can’t risk it.”