Door of Bruises (Thornchapel Book 4)

by Sierra Simone

  “The Eleusinian mysteries were lost in less, and hundreds and hundreds of people did those, rather than just one family,” Delphine agrees. “So I understand Estamond not knowing. But if the fairy tales were inspired by real stories, wouldn’t the people who returned from the door have told other people? Wouldn’t they have told the Guests?”

  Auden makes a face. “I don’t know that my ancestors would have listened. If they were anything like my father. They would have thought they already knew the best way to handle the door.”

  “I don’t know that other people would have listened either,” Rebecca says. “These experiences are recounted as fairy tales, not as a legitimate record.”

  “It’s always possible some Guests listened though,” I say. “We can’t know that they didn’t. We only know that the knowledge was lost by the time Randolph Guest lived, and then it died completely with the Kernstows. Everything else is a guess.”

  “Exactly,” Becket says. “Which is why you shouldn’t do this on the basis of a guess.”

  “Do what? Prevent someone from killing themselves? No one has to die this way,” I say, desperate for them to understand. “Don’t you see? The worst that will happen to me is that I’ll be in a new place.”

  “We don’t know this new place, Poe,” Saint says. “We don’t know what it’s like. Say this works and you’re able to walk through it. What happens to you when you get there? There’s no guarantee of your safety or your future—”

  “That’s the same in any world,” I say softly. “That’s part of the deal when it comes to life. There’s no promises.”

  “But the wren,” Saint says. “Rebecca’s wren—”

  “Yes!” Auden cuts in and gives Rebecca a pleading look. “Rebecca, remind her of what you saw, remind her of what the door showed you!”

  Rebecca is still giving me that appraising look, her eyes narrowed and her lips pressed together in thought. She doesn’t answer right away, and Saint explodes with, “How can you be standing there agreeing with her when you saw that wren die—”

  “I’m not agreeing,” Rebecca counters sharply. “I’m listening.” She pauses, and then adds, with less sharpness and more hesitation, “Becket said we might have been wrong about the wren, remember? That it wasn’t a threat or a warning, but something else. What if I was wrong? What if the door is safer than we thought?”

  Auden turns away from Rebecca with wild eyes and a frustrated stab of his hair with his fingers—like she’s a defecting general and now he has to salvage an entire battle on his own.

  “If you go and you can’t come back, then St. Sebastian and I will never see you again,” Auden says to me. His voice has a hoarse, urgent edge.

  My throat hurts and there’s a hot stinging in my nose. “I know,” I whisper. “It has to be a sacrifice, remember?” I try to give him a reassuring smile. “And you’ll have each other.”

  “We’re meant to be a three,” he argues.

  Tears spill from my lids and I push them off my cheeks with one hand, the other hand still clutching the flask. “You were planning on leaving Saint and me here,” I point out.

  “That’s different,” he says, voice pained. “It’s my job to give everything to you.”

  “Poe,” Saint says, stepping forward. Becket mirrors Saint’s step and I start to feel like a castled king on a chessboard. “What’s in that flask?”

  “Poe—your hands,” Delphine exclaims.

  I take a step backward, holding the flask tighter with my crimson-stained hands, refusing to answer. I’m very close to the door now.

  “Enough of this,” interrupts Becket. “I am going to close the door today, not Poe, and that’s all there is to it. I’ve known this was coming for me since I was a teenager. This is my destiny.”

  “Firstly,” Auden says, turning to the ex-priest and sounding miffed, “this is my destiny. Secondly, only I’m allowed to be dramatic here, on the grounds that I am the king, and also I’ve always been the dramatic one.”

  “I’m not being dramatic,” Becket says. “I deserve to die.”

  “You deserve to die?” Saint echoes in disbelief.

  Becket turns to me. In the twilight, his eyes are a shade of indigo that belongs on the other side of the door. “I was the one who killed your mother, Proserpina,” he says. The words come out cleanly, simply, as if he’s rehearsed them many, many times. “Twelve years ago. It was me.”

  The words slice through my mind like the lightning above us. Bright, hot. Branched into jagged sprigs that seek the earth.

  I’m already shaking my head, already saying, “No, Becket, no, you didn’t. Remember? You saw Ralph burying her. You told me he killed her—you said that he killed her.”

  “I lied,” Becket says. His eyes are burning into mine. “I lied because I had to stay close to the chapel, near to the door. It’s why I came back to England in the first place—I needed to be here in case it opened so I could be the one to close it. I owe your mother that, Poe, and I owe God that too. If I’d told you what happened, you wouldn’t have allowed me near you, or near here, so the lie was unfortunate but necessary if I were to atone.”

  The drums roll through the chapel still, as does the thunder, but the rest is quiet, hushed. I stare at Becket, handsome, brilliant Becket, who I’ve let inside my body, who I’ve cried for and worried over and trusted with my proximity and my friendship.

  Nothing is making any kind of sense. Becket doesn’t lie. Becket doesn’t kill. Becket charms old church ladies and fucks like it’s his singular goal in life. Becket prays and prays and prays.

  He can’t have done this.

  He can’t have done this.

  My mind is buzzing with static now, my thoughts breaking into pieces and hissing into nothing before I can properly think them to myself. “You’re a priest,” I whisper. “You’re holy. You’re righteous. You wouldn’t have.”

  “Maybe I’m holy and righteous because I did an evil thing once,” he says softly. “Maybe I’ve been trying to atone my entire life, trying to smother the guilt with good deeds.”

  “No,” I say, because I know that much isn’t true. “You love God like no one else I’ve ever known. You would have always been a priest. No matter what your past held.”

  He gives me a sad smile. “Perhaps. I don’t deserve that kindness from you. But thank you for it anyway.”

  “I don’t understand,” Auden says, stabbing his fingers through his hair. “You killed Adelina Markham? But why? How? You would have been, what, fourteen? Why would you have killed her? And...” He trails off, looking at the space between me and Becket. Maybe wondering how safe I am right now.

  It’s a question that flits through my mind too. If he killed my mother, is he capable of killing me? But I’m too deeply stamped with our friendship, I suppose, because I’m still stunned, I’m still in a place of disbelief, and my trust in him remains.

  “All my life,” Becket says, “I’ve been tormented by this . . . ardor. Ardor for the divine. Zealousness. As a child, my priest told me it would temper with time; as a seminarian, my mentor told me to tie it up and starve it. When it’s with me, I feel God very deeply. And I feel everything else less. My body, for example, I don’t notice if it’s hungry or if it’s tired. Or the space I’m in, I’m not aware if it’s hot or if it’s cold. When I’m in the zeal, sometimes it’s difficult to perceive . . . clearly.”

  “Is that what happened twelve years ago?” Auden asks, his voice soft.

  I look at Becket, and I remember the dream. “You were outside the chapel,” I realize. “They heard you. But then my mother tried to get the knife away from Ralph . . . ”

  “I thought they were fighting,” Becket says miserably. “I thought he was trying to hurt her. I couldn’t hear everything they were saying, and I thought—I thought if I didn’t help . . . ”

  There’s torment etched into his face now, clinging to his brow and his mouth. “Like I said, the zeal makes things cloudy sometimes. If I had
n’t been—if I’d been clearer—then I think I would have understood. Or I would have done something differently. As it was, I charged out of the trees and over the wall. I was trying to tackle him, pin him to the ground so she could run away, but I slammed into them both. We all fell to the ground together.” He closes his eyes. “She fell on the knife.”

  I’m crying again, but I don’t know who I’m crying for.

  Myself twelve years ago, or myself now.

  My mother, flying across an ocean to save an ex-lover from doing the unthinkable, only to die herself. Ralph, who walked into the chapel to die and instead buried the woman he loved.

  Becket. Young and reckless, hazed with a mysticism I’ll never understand.

  “The noise she made then.” Becket exhales, opens his eyes. “I knew. We rolled her over, Ralph tried to staunch the bleeding, but the knife must have struck somewhere vital. There was so much blood. And she managed to say, at the last . . . ” He sucks in a breath. “She said it’s okay.”

  He lifts his gaze to mine. “It’s okay. I don’t know whom she was saying it to. Both of us maybe.”

  That would be so like my mother. Trying to comfort someone, trying to make something as sunny as possible, even when there is no light to be found at all.

  “She had something in her hand—a note—and she was trying to lift it up, trying to wave it maybe, but her hand dropped to the ground. I remember taking the note because it seemed like that’s what she wanted, but before I could read it, Ralph let loose this howl like . . . like his soul had been ripped out of his body and I was responsible.” Becket looks at the ground now. The same ground he killed my mother on. “I was responsible. I knew it even then. Instinct made me run anyway. I hid in the woods, and the rest of what I told you that day in the church is true, Poe, because I did watch him bury her from the trees by the light of the fire. I did wait hours and hours until he was done to leave. I was terrified that he’d kill me if he found me, that he’d hurt my parents instead of me. Above all, I was terrified that I’d never be able to stop the wrong person from dying at the door again. Every choice I’ve made—every truth I’ve hidden—has been to that end. So I can be here. So it can be me when the times comes.”

  I’m not ready to absolve him of murder or lying. But I have to be fair; in fact, I find I want to be fair. Because he is dear to me and a good person, and sometimes there is tragedy without sin, even here at Thornchapel.

  “It’s okay,” I tell Becket now, echoing my mother’s words. “It’s okay. It was a mistake. You were trying to help.”

  He shakes his head. “I wasn’t good enough or smart enough, and I wasn’t even needed. And then later, I was such a coward, hiding in the trees and clutching that note like it would undo what I had done.”

  I blow out a breath. “The note. You sent it to me.”

  “I mailed it hoping you would come. I had dreams that you would, that you were here again. But I also mailed it knowing you deserved to have it. Whatever it meant, it was vital to her, so vital that she came back to the chapel. If anyone should inherit it, it’s you. Not the stupid boy who killed her.” This last part he says with such self-hatred that it scalds everyone in the chapel.

  “So you see,” he says heavily, “why I won’t let anyone else suffer. I owe it to you, Poe, for what I’ve taken from your life. I owe it to your mother.”

  I’m very, very aware that he’s still holding the knife, that it would take nothing for him to use it on himself. That we are so deep in the moor that it would take a very long time for an ambulance to arrive. If he hurts himself, there might be no saving him, no reversing it.

  I can’t let that happen.

  We all take a collective inhale as he presses the point of the knife against his neck, and a very thin trickle of blood starts streaming down his throat. It catches the bevel of his clavicle under his button-down shirt. Auden surges forward at the same time Saint and Rebecca do. Startled, Becket lowers the knife the tiniest amount.

  I seize the moment. I might not get another.

  I tip the flask to my lips and I drink long and deep of the contents inside. It’s remarkably easy to drink. Spicy and rose-flavored. A little sweet.

  I finish and then take a long breath.

  I feel exactly the same. Not at all like I’m somehow bound to another world.

  Becket has staggered back from the others, still holding the knife, but no longer holding it at his throat. The bleeding on his neck has already slowed, although blood still gleams along the edge of the knife. It drips onto the ground.

  “This is hard enough,” he’s pleading with the others. “I only need a moment. You don’t have to watch.”

  “How fucking magnanimous of you,” Saint retorts. “We’d only have to clean up your body later and somehow explain to your parents and the police that you killed yourself for a magic door.”

  “Not to mention that we’d have to live without our friend. Our priest.” Auden steps forward, hands outstretched, palms up. “Give the knife to me.”

  “No, give it to me instead,” Saint cuts in. “We can’t trust Auden with it.”

  “I’m not trusting any of you with it,” Rebecca says shortly. “Give me the knife.”

  “Everyone,” I say. I mean to speak it loud, to shout it, but it comes out like a wisp of a word, like a whisper. The tea is finally working.

  “Stop. Stop.”

  Delphine is the first to hear. Her gold-brown eyes flick from my face to the flask and then back up again. “Poe,” she breathes. “What did you do?”

  The others turn to me with equally horrified expressions. Auden looks stunned in a way I’ve never seen before. What was it Becket said about Ralph when my mother died?

  Like his soul had been ripped out of his body and I was responsible.

  That’s what Auden looks like right now.

  “The roses,” I say faintly, trying to hold the flask up. The ends of my fingers are numb now. My arm is weak. “Like in the fairy stories. I had to be certain, you see. I had to make it so I really couldn’t come back. I was worried if I didn’t—if there was a part of me that hoped to return—then it wouldn’t be a sacrifice. Not really.”

  I’m so dizzy now. I feel my knees give, I feel the moment my balance slips like a wineglass on an unsteady tray, and I think, the door, I have to make it to the door. If I don’t, then I might die for real.

  I could die for real.

  I don’t want to die. But if I do, at least I will have spared the others, saved them . . .

  I step to the door, close enough to touch it now, but I stumble sideways, and somehow that stumble takes me to the ground, and then the air in my lungs is gone, gone like it was never there to begin with. I struggle to breathe and breathe, and I realize all this has happened in an instant, in only a second, and that the others are yelling, screaming, rushing toward me.

  On the other side of the door, I see a figure step into the torchlight. A narrow, utilitarian watch gleams from its wrist.

  Torchlight glints off the buttons of cargo pockets.

  I see green eyes and a smile like the sun.

  I’m so close to her, but I can’t breathe, I can’t think, but all I want is to reach her, to tell her I know why she left and why she never came back and that I love her. I try to crawl, but I can’t, and everyone is still screaming, and I think maybe she will come to me. Maybe she will step out of the door and hug me so hard it hurts, and suddenly it will be twelve years ago, and she’ll be alive still, and I will have my whole life ahead of me, and everything will go right this time. I’ll find Saint again and Auden, and we will spend all our years in a tangle of kink and a bramble of love, and when we die, we’ll be old and gray and so full of each other that we’ll be like cups overflowing with wine, love sloshing out with every movement, and it won’t feel like a burden at all to die, not then, not when every atom of ours has been baptized with the draught of a full and spirited life.

  Maybe it could happen. Maybe she’s just abou
t to step over the threshold and take me in her arms. Maybe the clock is about to turn back, and all this chapel’s wrongs will be righted, and Saint and I can live inside the cruel affection of our wild god for decades and decades more, the three of us with one beating heart, for all the years we deserve.

  Maybe.

  Everything is possible, after all.

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Auden

  Her eyes are glassy and staring at nothing, her red-stained hands limp on the petals covering the ground. Her lips are parted in the small, slack yawn of death.

  Becket was the closest when she fell, and so he has her in his arms already, he’s standing as I’m shoving myself past the corner of the altar with St. Sebastian on my heels. He’s cradling her in his arms. Right in front of the door.

  Our eyes meet, and suddenly I know. I know what he’s about to do.

  “Just like the sisters,” he says to me.

  “No!” St. Sebastian shouts, but it’s too late, Becket has stepped through, is setting Poe down on the ground on the other side. He kneels next to her and brushes her hair away from her face.

  Becket’s gaze finds mine again, across the threshold of the door. “Join us,” he whispers to me over the noise of the drums. “Join us when you can.”

  Petals begin tearing free of the roses, flying into a storm of flowers, and they are everywhere, like confetti, like rain, thick and fluttering, and the drums are so very loud now, and so is the thunder cracking through the valley over and over again, and so is the wind, whipping the trees until the branches groan and shriek and there’s leaves everywhere to join the petals, everywhere, everywhere. The chapel rumbles and shakes, and through all the petals, I see the door begin to swing shut.

  Seized with a sudden panic, a desperate intuition, I lurch forward, but it’s too late, the door is already almost closed and I can’t make it, I won’t make it through to my little bride, my wonderful Poe, my heart’s curious, summery half.