by Darcy Coates
He was still cold, but she thought she was starting to feel traces of warmth beneath his skin.
Clare didn’t mean to fall asleep. But as a storm moved in over Winterbourne and the patter of hail began to drift through the stone walls, she found she had no more strength to keep her eyes open.
Finally giving in to the weariness, she let the noises of the house flow around her. The crackling fire. The sharp pipe of the wind funnelling through gaps in the roof. And the clattering as the windows rattled, which sounded far too much like overgrown fingernails tapping to be let in.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
“Hmm.” Clare squinted her eyes open. Straight ahead, her fire roared. More wood had been fed into it since she’d fallen asleep, and the heat was enough to not only warm her, but most of the dining room as well.
The curtains had been drawn over the windows, blocking the view of the gardens. Only the window with the broken curtain rod was uncovered. The storm battered snow against the glass, the white flecks half-hidden by fallen night. The dining room lights had been turned on, and the room felt safe and comfortable.
Clare tilted her head back. Dorran sat by her head, wearing the gown she’d brought him. His long legs were stretched towards the fireplace. He looked like himself again. Symptoms of exhaustion lingered in the lines around his mouth, but the colour had returned to his skin, and the alertness was back in his eyes. His hair was nearly fully dry, and he’d pushed it back from his forehead, leaving the sharp angles of his face clear. He smiled down at her. “Hello. How do you feel?”
“Hey. I’m good.” Relief ran through Clare, burning her throat. She tried to sit up but stopped as she realised her dressing gown was still undone. Dorran had draped a blanket over her to cover her. She hurried to tie the gown, heat blooming across her face. She hadn’t meant to fall asleep. Or for Dorran to wake while she was still lying next to him.
“I owe you thanks.” Dorran turned away while she fastened her gown and leaned towards the fire, stoking the coals. He either hadn’t noticed her embarrassment or was pretending he hadn’t. At least she could always count on him to be a gentleman. “I would not have made it back inside without you or survived the cold without your help.”
“I didn’t do anything special.” Clare shuffled onto her knees and wrapped her arms around herself.
“On the contrary.” Dorran moved back to sit at her side, close enough that their shoulders would have brushed if she leaned towards him. A small smile lifted the corners of his mouth. “You were incredible.”
Clare suddenly felt too warm. Dorran held a bowl towards her, filled with water from the pot by the fire. She hadn’t realised how thirsty she was until then. She drank until she felt sick. As she lowered the bowl, she realised Dorran was still watching her. His lips parted a fraction, as though he were on the edge of speaking, but he exhaled and looked away instead.
A vicious gust of wind screamed around the house. The windows shook, their frames clattering. Dorran’s expression darkened.
Clare felt her uneasiness return. “Is something wrong? Are you hurt?”
“No. I am fine.” He tried to smile again. “Just… attempting to reconcile myself to a world where monsters exist.”
The gust faded, and the eerie silence returned, lying thick through the house. Still fogged from sleep, Clare’s mind balked at the memory of the creatures. It felt more like a distant nightmare than reality. She closed her eyes and forced the words out. “I remembered what happened on that last day. The day you found me. I was driving to my sister’s. She has a bunker.”
Dorran inclined his head to show he was listening, but he didn’t try to interrupt her. He must have sensed how difficult she was finding it to recount her experience.
“Something happened that morning. I don’t know what, but it was all over the news. Areas were becoming uncontactable. They called them ‘quiet zones.’ Phones stopped working, Wi-Fi stopped working, and people who went into those areas didn’t come out again.” She pulled her knees under her chin and watched her toes curl on the rug. “They don’t know what it was, whether it was a war or a natural phenomenon or what.”
“So you were travelling to your sister’s to be together, to be safe.”
“Right. But on the way there, I think I entered one of the quiet zones. My phone disconnected. And then…” She took a breath and dragged her fingers through her hair. “Those things drove my car off the road. Whatever happens in the quiet zones, they were caught up in it. I guess it changed them somehow. I don’t know into what. They’re not human anymore, though.”
Dorran let the silence rest over them for a moment. When he spoke, his voice was hoarse. “Do you remember what areas were affected?”
“Lots of places. All across the world. And they were spreading fast. Unless they stopped…” The whole world will be gone.
He closed his eyes and exhaled through his nose. “While I was walking home, when I was in the forest, I thought I heard a noise. I dismissed it at the time. But it must be related.”
“I heard it too. Some sort of crackling noise. Then something that sounded like a helicopter. I don’t know if it was the military or what caused the quiet zones or something else. At least seeing the car brought my memories back.” Clare chuckled weakly. “So now we know why the phone lines are still down. And possibly why the weather has been so bizarre.”
“And what happened to the garden.”
Clare’s stomach turned. She leaned her head forwards so that her hair would help hide her face.
“I owe you every apology for doubting you all this time.” Dorran’s eyebrows had lowered again, and his lips were pressed tightly together as he stared at the fire. “All this while, I have been trying to tell you that what you saw and heard were figments of your imagination. When you described the figures you saw—women with holes in their sides—I couldn’t reconcile that with reality. I thought you were seeing waking nightmares. It took me seeing it with my own eyes to believe you, and for that, I am deeply sorry.”
Clare shrugged, heat spreading over her face. “You were trying to help me. If our positions had been reversed, I don’t know if I would have been able to believe you either.”
“Regardless, I made you doubt your own mind. And that is a cruel thing to do.” He shook his head. “You trusted me when I asked for it. And I want to give you that in return. I will not doubt you again.”
“What if I try to tell you something really crazy, like dragons made their nest in the attic?”
He smiled. “Not even then.”
“Thank you.” She chuckled as a painful kind of happiness filled her stomach. The best word she found to describe it was bittersweet. She didn’t know what was happening to the outside world or if there even was an outside world any longer. But she had Dorran. He was alive, and he didn’t hate her. And that counted for a lot.
Dorran inclined his head towards her, and when he spoke, his voice was soft. “I also wanted to apologise for what I said in the garden. I never wanted you to be afraid of me, and I never meant to grow angry. But I did. And I regretted it immediately. I should have followed you when you left, but I allowed myself to stay in the garden. To calm down, I told myself. When I finally went after you to apologise, you were gone.”
A log in the fireplace broke, sending a shower of sparks dancing into the chimney. Dorran faced the fire but glanced at her. Guilt and grief hung about his eyes.
“I didn’t realise you would leave the house. When I saw your snowshoes were missing and the door was open, I was terrified. If you had become lost in the forest or succumbed to the snow…” He drew a shallow breath. “I thought I had sent you to your death.”
“You can’t get rid of me that easily.” Clare leaned a little closer, nudging his shoulder with hers, trying to break him out of his melancholy.
He smiled. “Ah, Clare. Never leave again without at least giving me a chance to beg you to stay.”
Clare’s throat ached, but she smiled. �
�All right.”
Gale-force winds shook the windows. They both looked up at the noise, and Clare pulled her knees closer to her chest. Even though the fire was warm, she still felt cold.
“I think it is safe to believe we are not just waiting out the snow any longer,” Dorran said. “We must turn ourselves towards both short-term and long-term survival.”
Clare thought of the destroyed garden and tried to breathe around the rising dread. “How much food do we have left?”
He didn’t answer for a moment, and when he did, Clare thought he was trying to sound optimistic. “We have some. And the garden was not a complete loss. You managed to save some plants. And after you were gone, before I realised you had physically left the house, I did what I could to replant the remainder. Some will not survive. Growth will have been stunted in most of them. But it is significantly better than starting from scratch.”
Remembering a detail that had been lost in the scuffle in the forest, Clare took a sharp breath. “There’s food in my car. I was bringing it to my sister’s. There’s enough to last two people at least a couple of weeks.”
“Good! That will make a difference.” He chewed his lip. “The only issue that remains is retrieving it. I don’t know how many of those creatures are still in the forest, but there are at least several. They seemed reluctant to leave the trees. The eight that followed me to the pond were just the ones I could coax out.”
“They looked thin. They might starve if we leave them alone for long enough.” Clare felt uneasy just saying it.
“We will hope for it. But there is another, slightly more pressing matter.” Dorran looked towards the ceiling and the dozens of rooms hidden out of sight. “Some must have found a way inside the house—the ones you saw. I do not know how. The doors and windows stayed locked this whole time, but they are in here with us.”
“I’ve seen three. One with a hole in her side. One with a twisted back. And one with a spine that pokes out of her skin.”
“Heaven help us,” Dorran muttered under his breath. “I would rather face death than a fate like those creatures.”
She shared his sentiment. The thought of being twisted, losing her mind, and having her body broken was unbearable. Clare’s wrist was stinging. She glanced at it and saw a smear of dried blood where the skin had been broken. Her heart skipped a beat. “Do you think it’s—”
“It is not contagious.” Dorran took her chin and turned her head so that she looked him in the eyes. His voice and expression held conviction. “It is not. You will not turn into one of them.”
She nodded, but frightened tears stung her eyes.
Dorran’s hand moved from her chin to stroke the side of her face, and his voice softened. “You were badly scratched when I found you. At the time, I thought it had come from the crash, but I can guess now it was the creatures’ doing, correct?”
“Yeah.”
“If it was contagious, I think we would have known about it well before now. Do not let it frighten you. That matter aside, the bite looks painful. Wait a moment. I will take care of it.”
He rose, and Clare knew he was going to fetch the first aid kit. She grabbed at his dressing gown to keep him in the room. “No. If those creatures are in the house, we can’t split up.”
“Hm.” He rubbed at the back of his neck. “We cannot stay here forever either. Soon we will need water and food. Plus, the garden will need additional care if we are to save what we can.”
“I have a theory.” Clare rose so that she could stand at Dorran’s side. Together, they faced the closed dining room doors. “I don’t think they like light.”
“No?”
“Any time I’ve seen them has been in shadow. Either at night, when the lights are off, or when natural light was blocked out.”
“They were reluctant to leave the forest’s shelter,” Dorran said. “You may be right. And it might be why they came into the mansion in the first place. The building was darker.”
“When I saw one in the wine cellar, she reached for the candle. I think she wanted to snuff it out.”
“Which means light doesn’t hurt them, but they are repulsed by it. So having the lights on helped keep them away.” Dorran laughed. “Well, I did one thing right by you.”
She moved a little closer to him. “You did a lot of things right. Where do you want to go? The bedroom?”
“It might be the safest location. The bathroom will give us water, and it has only two doors to defend. The windows would be too high for them to reach, unlike the rooms on the ground floor.” Dorran nodded at the curtains he’d drawn over the dining room’s windows. “I tried to hide our presence, just in case. The creatures seem broken, but they are unnaturally strong.”
“They bent the door on my car.” Clare squirmed at the memory. Dorran was right—she didn’t think windows would present much of an obstacle if the monsters wanted to get through.
“The bedroom will be farther from the foyer’s door in case we need to run,” Dorran said. “But I don’t feel that is a huge disincentive. Where would we run to?”
“Exactly. The bedroom, then?”
“It seems to be the best choice to me, for the short term, at least. Once I have made sure you are safe there, I will secure the garden and fetch some food to tide us over.”
“Or,” Clare countered, “we stay together, visit the kitchen and garden together, and I don’t have to spend twenty minutes imagining all the ways you could die.”
He lifted his eyebrows. “I would prefer knowing you were safe.”
She retorted by lifting her own. “You said you’d let me win as many arguments as I wanted if we got back to the house.”
“Of course I did.” He sighed. “Evidently, I should not make promises in dire situations. We will go together.”
Chapter Thirty
Clare gathered the things they would need: Dorran’s wet boots, the blankets and pillow, and the radio. They were an armful, but she balanced them against her chest as Dorran took up a fire poker and approached the door.
“If anything comes at us, try to get your back against a wall or into a corner. I don’t like the idea of fighting these things inside the house. If we’re attacked, our preference will be to retreat to safety and regroup. Agreed?”
Clare nodded aggressively. “Yes.”
Dorran sent her a fond smile, then his face darkened as he opened the door. Cold light dripped through high windows to illuminate the space. Ahead, the staircase hung like a dark ribbon along the back wall. To their right, doorways led deeper into the building. The sense of hollowness that Clare had begun to associate with the foyer washed over her again. It was too sparse.
Dorran led her across the space in an arc to avoid straying too close to any of the doors. As they passed the stairs, he picked up a ring of keys hanging near the phone. Moving quickly and quietly, they went through the narrow doorway at the back of the foyer and stopped in the stone chamber while Dorran lit a candle.
Clare found it impossible not to stare at the gaping wine cellar archway as they passed it. At least one of the creatures had its nest down there. But there was no way to barricade the opening. The archway was tall and wide, and it had no door. Even if they managed to drag furniture into the space and build a blockade, there was nothing to secure it to, and Clare suspected the creatures wouldn’t have a hard time beating it down. That meant the archway would be left open. And she could do nothing about it.
Clare inhaled deeply when she stepped under the garden’s warm lights. The space, full of the musty smell of damp earth and with a gentle heat rising from the floor, had always felt like a sanctuary. Dorran shut and locked the metal door, and they turned to face the gardens.
Dorran had done good work in rescuing the plants. Most of them were wilting as shock set in, but he’d replanted them all into neat lines. Clare noticed he hadn’t disturbed the erratic, desperate planting she’d done before he arrived.
He filled the watering can from the tap an
d began moving through the rows, tending to and examining the plants one at a time. Some would die, and others would be stunted, but it could have been a lot worse.
Dorran nodded to her. “If you feel up to it, would you plant some new rows? It will help replace the lost crops.”
“Right.” Clare placed her luggage on the chair in the garden’s corner then crossed to the seed bench and chose several bottles. While Dorran watered, she populated a new patch of ground. They worked efficiently. Clare had nearly finished a row of snow peas when a scraping noise made her look up. Dorran righted his watering can and stared at the frosted window in the door.
A silhouette lurched past. It moved erratically, twitching, and was gone before Clare could even flinch back. Dorran placed his watering can on the bench and crept towards the door.
“No,” Clare whispered as he reached for the handle. He looked back at her and must have seen the dread in her face because he withdrew his hand. The window remained empty. After a few moments of silence, both she and Dorran returned to their work.
Clare tried to keep her head down but couldn’t stop herself from watching the door out of the corner of her eye. She sensed that Dorran’s attention was divided too. It wasn’t possible to see far through the window. The glow from the candle on the other side of the stone room gave her a sense of space, but every distinct detail had mixed into one solid blur. The creature could be hidden anywhere out there, waiting, holding its breath, knowing that she and Dorran would have to leave their shelter eventually.
When Dorran returned the watering can to its shelf, Clare knew they couldn’t delay their journey back into the main parts of the house any longer. She licked dry lips as she stacked the jars of seeds back onto their shelves. Then she gathered her bundle of bedding material while Dorran picked up his fire poker.
“Into the kitchen next, yes?” he asked.
She tried to look more confident than she felt. “Yes.”
