Door of Bruises (Thornchapel Book 4)

by Sierra Simone

  My mother is gesturing now, up to the moors. “It’s not just the stories—it’s in the archaeology too, only I didn’t understand it until now. It’s in the gap between the Neolithic and the Saxons—no mass graves, no buried kings. For centuries the people in this valley knew there was another way to live with it, I’m certain of it. And maybe the Kernstows forgot, I don’t know, maybe something changed or they became too desperate to trust anything other than death, but there was another way once. There can be another way now!”

  Ralph shakes his head. Even with wet eyes and a knife in his hand, he is unbearably handsome. Infused with charisma. Seeing him with the torc around his neck and the very air around him practically burning with his presence, I think I understand a little why our parents loved him. Why my parents in particular loved him.

  “Freddie couldn’t get through, remember?”

  “But he wasn’t trying to get through, he was trying to close it. Ralph, there is more than one way to sacrifice a life—”

  A quiet crack, like the snap of a dry stick, comes from behind us. My mother and Ralph turn toward the sound, Ralph stepping forward with his eyes on the trees.

  “Did anyone else come with you?” he asks in a low voice.

  “David doesn’t know I’m here, and I haven’t talked to any of the others. I came alone.”

  “The caretaker knows not to come here,” Ralph says, peering into the trees. The tears are drying on his face now, but there’s still desperation written onto every line of his body. My mother sees it too, taking his elbow and turning him toward her. Her eyes dart down to the knife in his hand and then back up to his glassy hazel eyes.

  “We have time before night comes,” she whispers. “Please believe me. I’ll make you believe me. I’ll snap my fingers and make you crawl until you believe me.”

  Ralph shudders at her words, the pulse in his throat beating fast under his torc. “Adelina, don’t torment me,” he breathes. “I can’t take it. I can’t take knowing what I’ll never have, and I’ll never believe you that this is supposed to be a blessing when—”

  The cracking noise comes again, and Ralph steps between it and my mother, which is when she lunges for the knife in his hand.

  He turns to stop her, to grapple it back, and then someone else is there, clambering over the wall, and just as I look, the world splits open in a flash so bright I’m blinded by it, and I lurch forward to help or to run, I don’t know—

  And I jolt right into the outstretched arms of Auden Guest. Deafening thunder is still rolling through the library from the lightning strike, and he’s holding me like I’m a child in need of comfort, which I am in a way, I am.

  “It’s just a storm,” he says, coming to sit on the couch and pulling me into his lap. He rocks me slowly, slowly, murmuring to me until the adrenaline ebbs away, until my brain is able to process that I’m fine, I’m not in danger, the knife in the chapel isn’t real, my mother’s pleas aren’t real. They happened too long ago to hurt me now.

  I look up at Auden, trying to remember what my mother said, needing to tell him.

  Not a warning, but a blessing.

  A blessing.

  But it’s hard to speak, it’s hard to force the words past my lips, and I’m dangerously close to falling asleep again.

  “You’re burning up,” he says, pressing his wrist against my forehead. “Proserpina . . . ”

  The anguish on his face is nearly unbearable to see. It looks so much like his father’s that day in the chapel.

  “A blessing,” I manage to tell him before sliding back into a sleep filled with bright, fever-fed dreams. This time, without my mother.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Auden

  Four days later, and Poe is out of hospital and back at Thornchapel. Specialist appointments have been lined up; I’ve brought in a rose cutting so it can be tested for sporotrichosis or something similar; they’ve scanned all the scans and bled all the blood for an array of tests. Currently she’s taking anti-inflammatories like the others, and she’s also claiming she’s well enough to work in the library, which I allow on the condition that I be in there with her to make sure she’s not overtaxing herself.

  By her request, we haven’t told her father. In fact, no one’s parents know—the consensus being that the parents would somehow intuit the connection to Thornchapel and either demand their children leave—or come here themselves and cause an even bigger mess.

  As someone who has no parents left to worry over him, I suspect they’re making a choice they might regret later, but my protests haven’t persuaded them. And in this at least, I’ve allowed myself to be overruled. For now.

  To be honest, I haven’t the will to fight them on it. With Saint and Poe sick, with Rebecca and the others sick too, I am consumed with a quiet, desperate panic. It is all I think, all I feel.

  They cannot die.

  They cannot.

  In any event, the library has become something of a private hospital this past week. Everyone is able to care for themselves for the most part, able to walk and talk and move and eat, but there is a slowness to them, a languidness that’s near to the sultry indolence of summer, but burning with fever and pain rather than lust. And every now and again, their eyes slide to the side, and I know they’re seeing their own particular visions. Wrens and tombstones and mothers.

  Everyone insists on helping Poe look for answers, especially now that it’s all anyone can do. They sit and flip through books, searching for anything that will close the door. Anything that isn’t murder.

  “This is interesting,” Poe says from her chair. Her cheeks are rouged with sickness, but she’s more lively tonight than she has been, and I’m trying to modulate my relief. I’m trying to dampen my hope. If she and everyone else can just hang on until . . . Until what, I don’t know, but at least until Samhain. At least until I can try to close the door.

  “The locals Reverend Dartham talked about in his journal said that if the door should appear, then the Guests have done their duty and gone to the altar in the woods. But at least for the outbreaks during the Restoration and during King Stephen’s reign, there wasn’t a Guest in Thornchapel at all.”

  Rebecca closes her book around a plastered finger. “That is interesting.”

  “In the 1100s, the two Guest brothers of Thornchapel were listed among the knights leaving from Dartmouth for the Second Crusade,” says Poe, holding up a slender volume she’s been reading. “And during the Restoration, the Guest landowner—Robert Guest—was on the Continent for his Grand Tour. It makes me wonder . . . ”

  I know what she’s thinking. I’m thinking it too. “There wasn’t a Guest here the other times the sickness came.”

  “It would explain why the sickness spread over the valley at some times, and not others.”

  The rain has stopped for now, but it’s been several days of moody, disconsolate fog, and we’ve kept the fire going in the library to drive away the damp. A log cracks and slides partway off the grate as we think about this.

  “It does seem like the door comes more often than the sickness,” Becket agrees from his chair.

  “It also explains why Estamond’s mother was so emphatic about closing the door,” Poe says, her eyes on the crumbling log in the fire. “She knew the illness was coming if Estamond didn’t. It makes me think the Kernstows have done it before—shut the door if the Guests couldn’t, I mean. The plague during King Stephen’s time ended around midwinter, even though the Guest brothers didn’t return from the Holy Land for two more years. And the Restoration outbreak stops listing deaths after All Saint’s Day, even though Robert Guest was still in Italy at the time.”

  I get up to stir the fire and add another log. “They must have shut it when it first appeared then. And not waited as we have.”

  “Yes, but—” Poe sighs and shifts in her chair a little. “I still think there must be another way. In my dream, my mother said that ‘it awakens’ was meant as a blessing. That the Dumnoni
i saw it that way—which we now know matches the pollen record Tobias included in the report, because after the cists, there’s no record of the roses coming from the chapel until Saxon times. In my dream, my mother said we don’t have any evidence of human sacrifice during that era either. No bones. No mass graves or king graves.”

  “That was the time of the Kernstows,” I point out. “At least according to the scant history we have. And if the Kernstows knew another way—a way that wasn’t ritual murder—why wouldn’t they have told the Guests? Why wouldn’t they have remembered later, in Estamond’s time, that there was another way?”

  “The Kernstows hated the Guests,” Poe reminds me. “Is it so hard to imagine them hiding this final secret from them? After they’d taken literally everything else? As for Estamond, she lived thirteen hundred years after Wessex expanded its borders. Is it not possible that the knowledge was lost by then?”

  “They remembered enough to watch the door, to close it when they needed to,” I counter. “How could they forget something as salient to closing it as no one needs to die?”

  Her shoulders slump a little. “I don’t know. Life was hard on the moors—perhaps one generation died before they could tell the other everything. Perhaps they lost faith in anything other than death, like my mother thought.”

  Another moment of silence.

  “A blessing,” St. Sebastian says finally, like he’s been bothered by this the whole time. “How could having to sacrifice someone be a blessing?”

  “The Thorn King was killed in the woods and his blood fed the land,” Becket replies. “That’s what Dartham’s journal said. Maybe they saw it as essential to renewing not only the land, but any life that was tied to it.”

  “Or maybe it’s a blessing for the king,” I say. “If he dies, his blood will protect his people. I suppose that would be the sort of reassurance I would want to hear at the end. The idea that my death would be in service of something good and vital, and—” I stop. I find that I can’t say anything more, not without my voice changing. I turn back to the fire and start nudging things with the poker so no one can see my face.

  “In my dream, Auden,” Poe says slowly, carefully, “your father wasn’t threatening my mother. He wasn’t acting like someone who’d lured her there to kill her. He was wearing the torc alone in the chapel before she got there . . . ”

  I noted this too, when Poe first told me about her dream while I was sitting by her bedside in the hospital. It matches nothing of what I’ve known about my father, nothing of the manipulative man who wrought destruction and cul-de-sacs wherever he went. But if there was anything he believed in, it was Thornchapel.

  It was being a Guest.

  And I do believe that he loved Adelina, in his way. He was certainly obsessed with marrying me to her daughter—obsessed in a way that suggested vicarious interest, a desperate sort of do-over with the past.

  Of course, if he had murdered her, he might have still felt the same way.

  “It’s something to think about,” I say, adding another log and then standing. The room suddenly feels too close, too intimate, even with the high ceiling and soaring windows. I’m about to offer to get everyone a fresh pot of tea when Delphine speaks up.

  “Saint, your mum is in this one!”

  We all look over to the book she’s flipping through, which is not a book at all, but a volume of bound newspapers. “Well, she wrote this article,” Delphine amends.

  “Why are you looking at newspapers?” Rebecca asks with some exasperation. “We’re meant to be searching through the old stuff.”

  “I thought,” Delphine says, a little primly, “that it would be interesting to read the local papers from when we were here that summer, from when our parents opened the door. We were too young to know what was going on then, weren’t we? We wouldn’t have known if something important was happening in the valley, and I’m glad I did, because look!” With some effort, she manages to flip the volume around to show us the page she’s looking at.

  Mysterious Sheep Disease Strikes Valley is the top headline of that day’s edition. I step closer so I can make out the date. It’s the year our parents opened the door. After Lammas.

  “Is there anything about the villagers getting sick later on?” I ask.

  “Let’s see—Auden, stop hovering, you’re in the light and the print on this is so small—here. Thorncombe Residents Take Ill; Local Officials Urge Farmers to Quarantine Livestock. It looks like three people were sick when this article was written, and then . . . ” She flips a few more pages. “By the week before Halloween, it was closer to fifteen or twenty residents. Only one had died—a farmer whose farm borders Thornchapel. Everyone else seems to have recovered. Well, except the sheep, the poor dears.”

  “You’re brilliant for thinking to look there,” I tell Delphine, and she beams.

  “I was rather good at school, you know. Everyone always forgets this because I know how to contour, or something.”

  “I’ll never forget,” I promise, dropping a kiss onto her forehead. I can feel her fever burning my lips as I do. “How does a fresh pot of tea sound?” I ask, and then without waiting for an answer, I go to the kitchen.

  I am irritated with myself as I go through the familiar ritual of water, kettle, pot. I was going to come in here, collect my thoughts, and then re-emerge with the cool, resolute certainty I’ve been attempting to exude when I’m with the others. I was going to metabolize my feelings quickly and efficiently, and then get back to the business of saving my friends and my valley.

  But I’m not metabolizing, I’m not collecting anything. My thoughts feel like the leaves on the trees outside—flapping, trembling, dangling—and then suddenly torn off and blown away. I can’t hold on to a single one of them, much less gather up many and restore some kind of order.

  I used to be so sure of things. How was I so sure of the world and its problems and my responsibilities to them? When I knew so little?

  How did everything change so fast?

  A petal tumbles out of my eye, dropping to the floor as I try to rub away the bleary pain it leaves behind. I throw it in the bin.

  The door to the kitchen opens, and Sir James prances over to lick Abby’s hand, his tail going in big circles as she reaches down to pet him.

  “Abby,” I greet, coming in to kiss her cheeks, which are cool from the damp air outside. “I figured you wouldn’t even want to think of this place while you were on holiday, much less stop by.” I’m very grateful there’re no lights on in the kitchen right now, and the shadows can camouflage my rose-colored eyes.

  “I left my reading glasses,” Abby tells me, returning the kisses. She’s much shorter than I am, and she has to raise up on the balls of her feet to do it, even when I’m already bending down. I pull away to see that the fine lines around her eyes and mouth are etched more deeply than usual.

  “I’m sure they’re in here somewhere,” I assure her, turning to help her look. “How has your holiday been?”

  “Very poor. I’m sure you’ve heard about the illness going around—my aunt is in hospital right now, and I’m going up to Exeter tonight to stay with her.”

  Her glasses are resting on top of an old recipe book still open on the hutch, and I hand them to her. “I’m very sorry to hear that,” I say sincerely. “Is there anything I can do to help? You need only say the word.”

  “I know,” she says, managing a watery kind of smile. “You are good like that. I suppose you heard that little Gemma Dawes died?”

  I have the disorienting feeling of the floor tilting beneath my feet. “What?”

  “Just this morning. Only seventeen years old, you know. My friend Joanie’s daughter. Such a damn waste—” She’s crying now, waving me off when I step forward to offer a touch or a hug. “I should go. I need to get to the hospital before visiting hours end.”

  “Please, let me know if you need anything,” I tell her, “and don’t even think of coming back until your aunt is better. Plea
se.”

  She gives me a quick, teary shake of her head. “I’m sure it will be quite all right soon,” she says, her words full of forced, determined optimism. “Of course they will be.” And then with a quick wave, she’s gone through the door—undoubtedly because she doesn’t want me to see her crying.

  I finish with the tea things and set them on a tray. My hands are shaking badly enough that I make myself stop and clench them into fists.

  Gemma Dawes.

  This year’s May Queen. I can see her now, all red hair and shy smiles as she handed Charlie his victor’s bouquet after he won the race on May Day. Young and pretty, the quintessential village beauty. Sweet not on the vigorous, football-playing types, but on Charlie, who spent most of his free time in Saint’s library reading.

  And now she’s dead.

  I bring in the tea tray and find that everyone is still occupied with research. They seem well enough—all sitting upright, no one looking lost in pain or delusions or both—and so I quietly excuse myself, saying something about needing to work in my office, and leave.

  I don’t go to my office. Instead, I pull on some lace-up boots and my favorite wool coat and go outside. By myself, since my faithless dog is currently busy entreating bits of biscuit from the others in the library.

  I’m not bothered by it, however, not really. It’s better that I be alone right now anyway.

  The roses have come up to the south terrace now, crawling between the empty graves and over the walls of the walled garden, like a tide of silk and thorns. Tomorrow, I think, they will reach the house. By Halloween, it will be covered with them.

  As before, there is a small and winding path which twists through the roses and into the woods, and from there, into the chapel itself. I follow it, not noticing much, barely aware of the thorns as they snag my trousers and coat, my thoughts on red-haired Gemma Dawes and old newspaper articles and Guests going off on boats to join pointless, immoral wars.

  On my father, alone in the chapel with a knife, wearing the torc.