by Jack Lewis
Mag fell onto her arse, then quickly recovered herself. A deep rumble sounded overhead, a warning from the humongous sack of grey clouds way above, bulging and looming directly over their heads.
She’d never seen lightning strike so close. It always used to be something she’d watch from the comfort of her window, waiting for the flash of light in the distance and then the accompanying rumble of thunder, counting the seconds to judge how far away it was. There was nothing comforting about the lightning here.
One second.
That’s all the time they were granted between the lightning and the thunder here in Harrow Woods.
A bolt crashed from the sky, a fork of burning light that struck another tree. A feeling of dread met with adrenaline inside her.
Loe grabbed Altair and this time didn’t give him chance to get himself up, instead yanking him to his feet. She pressed her shoulder into him, catching some of his weight, while Mag helped with his other arm.
“What about Jay?”
Loe eyed the slope. The grey sky above it. Featureless, no birds, no hint of light. “I can’t see him.”
“We’re gonna get fried out here. I don’t think we can support you all the way, Alt.”
Altair groaned. “I can walk. I’ll try.”
And he did. For just three steps, before hitting the ground.
They would never make it back through the forest to the hall. How could they? Not only would they need to help Altair, but it might be littered with more traps, and the lightning was striking the crap out of everything. She’d never felt so trapped.
But then again…
She pointed at the hill. “It loops at the top of the slope, doesn’t it? We climb up, we end up back at the hall.”
“I think so.”
“Then this loop shit is going to work in our favour for once. Help me with Altair.”
Chapter Nine
“Jay?” shouted Mag, standing in the front doorway of Harrow Hall. Her voice echoed into the forest beyond, now submerged in complete darkness. Her calls were met with no answers, only silence.
“Jay!” her voice was noticeably croakier than it had been, but that was understandable. It had been three hours since they’d helped Altair up the slope and ended back at Harrow Hall, only to find there was no sign of Jay.
“Come on,” said Loe. “I’ll find my torch, and we’ll head out.”
“Where the hell is he?”
“That’s what I want to find out.”
“You can’t go out there. Come on, be serious.”
“Oh? And why can’t I?”
As if in answer, a great fork of lighting smashed down on a tree, lighting up the surrounding area with an electric blue light that looked powerful enough to cook a person in their skin.
Loe huffed and leaned back against a wall, dislodging a painting from its hook. She caught it just before it hit the floor, breathing a sigh of relief. The last thing she needed was to start breaking what might be a family heirloom.
Mag took the painting from her and tossed it down the hallway like a discus, where it hit the door and smashed, sprinkling glass everywhere.
“What’s wrong?” called a voice from the study.
“Nothing, Alt. Go back to sleep.”
“Any sign of Jay?” he asked.
“Pretend you can’t hear him,” said Mag. “The last thing we need is Alt babbling.”
Loe stared at her half-sister. “I thought you’d be more worried about Jay than you are. Look at it out there! If he isn’t suffocating with a face full of mud, he’s going to get fried to a crisp. Or, he’ll get soaked and catch pneumonia.”
“Loe, you don’t know us. Okay?”
“Thanks.”
“Sorry, I didn’t man in to come out like that,” said Mag, putting her hand on Loe’s shoulder. “Jay is like a cat. He goes skulking around in all kinds of weather, he might be gone for days at a time, but he always comes back.”
“How do you know? You said you haven’t seen each other since…since when, exactly? I still don’t understand you guys.”
“We told you this. We lived with Mum for years after Dad kicked us all out. Altair was the first to leave home. He got a job outside of London, and he took his way out. Then Jay. Then a few years later, me. And yeah, we drifted apart after that, but that doesn’t mean we never saw each other at all.”
“So what about Jay?”
Mag leaned close and stared into Loe’s eyes. “Don’t tell Altair this, okay?”
She didn’t like this. She hadn’t come all this way to start getting beholden to secrets, to have to hide things from brothers she barely knew. Then again, what if she refused to keep Mag’s confidence? This might be a way to get close to her. To feel like she really did have a sister. It was tough to know what to do.
“Loe?”
Loe retuned Mag’s stare. “I can’t promise not to tell Altair. I’m not gonna start hiding things. I barely know you guys, and whatever secrets you’ve got, I don’t want to be dragged in. I just wanted…”
“What?”
“Never mind.”
Mag squeezed her shoulder. “You’re right. I shouldn’t have asked you to hide anything. Look, about five years ago, when I was still living with Pete, I got a knock on my door. At first, I thought it was a tramp, or something. But it was Jay.”
“Tramp? That’s not the best way to phrase that.”
“I just mean he looked like he’d had it rough. Turns out, he’d been in a bad way. Lost his job, lost his flat. He’d been couch surfing until he ran out of waves to surf on, and his friends all lost patience with him. He must have been really desperate, because he sought me out.”
“I thought he was doing well?”
“That’s the thing. He was. See, when we were younger, Dad set up grants for us. He put a wedge of cash in three separate accounts, ones we couldn’t touch until we were eighteen. That’s what Mum told me, anyway. I blew mine on a car. Jay never touched his, not even at his lowest. And he never has. He had all that money sitting there, and he’d rather sleep rough than use anything our dad gave him.”
“Why not tell Altair about this?” asked Loe. “We’ve all been through bad spells.”
“Because Jay…he…”
Her voice was quiet then. Strangled, almost. Loe was surprised; she’d never expected Mag to look like this. It was weirdly comforting to see her show a little vulnerability. Was that a bad thought to have? She didn’t know.
“It’s okay. You don’t have to say anything.”
“No, you’re my sister, and you’re stuck here in this hell hole. You should know. Jay, he…well, you know how things ended with Dad? What Dad did?”
Images flashed in her head.
Rope coiled around a neck.
A family car parked outside the hall. Children screaming.
Eyes bulging out of sockets, swollen cheeks.
“Yeah…” said Loe.
“Well let’s just say that Jay and Dad aren’t so different,” said Mag.
It took a second for the implication to hit home. She stared at the woods outside the hall with new horror. “What? You don’t think he…”
“Jay isn’t the picture of having his shit together, but he’s better these days. A lot better.”
“I still don’t see why you won’t go after him.”
“Because sometimes, you have to take the plaster off a wound and let it breathe, no matter how ugly it looks. When Jay needs alone time, give it him.”
Mag walked away, and Loe heard the creaking of floorboards behind her, getting softer and softer until she was completely alone.
She stood there in the doorway of Harrow Hall, faced in every direction by the forest that had no end, a maze of trickery and deceit that looped around and around on itself.
Jay needed time alone? Bullcrap.
She hunted around in the kitchen until she found the torch that Altair had given her yesterday. She put on an extra jumper – one of Mag’s, no surpris
e – and Alt’s overcoat, and she slipped out of the house, immediately getting assaulted by the deluge of rain.
Did she want to go into the woods alone? Hell no. Was it sensible? Same answer. But if she was out there alone, wet, and maybe hurt, how would she have felt if her siblings just stayed inside Harrow Hall?
That was a cold, cold thing that Mag had said, and Loe wasn’t buying it.
So she took a deep breath. Reminded herself what she needed to do to keep Clive in check, even as the monster stirred in her mind every time that she eyed the forest.
And then she walked toward the trees, straight toward the…
A hand gripped her shoulder and spun her around.
She raised the torch and swung it, connecting with bone.
“Argh, damn it!” said a voice.
She lost balance. The torch flew out of her hand, skittered over the ground and out of sight. She got to her feet, her right fist clenched and ready to sock whoever it was in the eye.
There was Jay, hair sopping wet and plastered to his scalp, face dripping with rain, clothes holding an extra five pounds of rainwater. He clutched his forehead, where blood trickled from the corner of his eye.
“Jay,” said Loe. “I’m so sorry! You caught me off guard.”
Although rainwater was trickling down his face and diluting the blood and spreading it over his skin, Jay was grinning. He held up a large, black key.
“We need to see The Door,” he said.
Chapter Ten
Emory touched the back of his head where it stung the most. When he pulled his fingers away, they were covered in blood. Damn it, why had he been so careless? Why did he have to stay and watch them? He should have just set the traps, collected the stupid tins, and left.
There was a crash behind him.
Have they followed me here?
No. They couldn’t. Impossible.
Chocked full of adrenaline, he turned around, only to find that he hadn’t closed the front door properly. The crash came from the wind blowing the door and then letting it slam back.
He sighed in relief, but even a breath of relief burned his lungs, taking him back to the woods, back to standing on top of the hill and fleeing from the Harrow man, and then something hitting his skull…
Emory bore the man no malice. In his position, he’d have thrown a rock, too. There was no place for hate in all of this, just duty. A familial duty passed from one on to the next.
His duty right now was to attend to his cut. Holding the bannister, he steeled himself for yet another scaling of Mount Stairs.
He made it up just three this time before his chest felt like it was full of lead, and even his throat burned through the effort. He stumbled away, cursing himself for giving up as he hobbled through the landing and to his kitchen, where he dabbed isopropyl alcohol on his cut and then covered it with a plaster.
Then he reached for alcohol of a different kind. A bottle of cognac, amber like lava and with just as much of a burn as the first gulp slid down his throat.
“Josiah?” cried a voice.
He took another gulp.
“Josiah?”
Another gulp, bigger this time. His throat burned, but this feeling was a pleasant one, a nice fire instead of pain.
“JO-SI-AH?”
“It’s Emory, mother. I’ll be a minute.”
Silence. He took another gulp then put the lid back on the bottle and set it aside.
“Josiah?”
Her threw the bottle down. Glass smashed, cognac sprayed everywhere.
“For god’s sake, will you not just give me a fucking…”
And then he stopped himself, already full of shame that weighed heavy in his chest and felt worse than his lungs could ever feel.
“I’m sorry,” he called out pathetically. “I’ll be a minute.”
If Mother wasn’t coming downstairs, that was because she was going through one of her particularly bad spells. She needed him, and that meant he’d have to climb Mount Stairs like it or not.
But other things needed him, too. The woods needed him. Or, he needed to be in the woods. He was unsure which.
All he knew was that the Harrows were running around the forest like idiots, leaving tins of bloody baked beans and sweetcorn next to trees. To what end, he could only speculate. Maybe they were leaving a trail, trying to find a way out of the maze, or to merely study it.
It wouldn’t do to let them learn too much. He needed to keep them here. He needed to carry out his role, only for as long as it took to…
…to what?
Father hadn’t seen fit to write that in his letter. Only that Emory had to keep them from leaving Harrow Hall and its boundaries. That if he failed, Mother would be alone. Because the Curse and the Obligation were swords with two points, and one could stick in Emory just as easily as it could the Harrows.
Damn it.
“Josiah?”
“I’m coming.”
If they were playing in the woods, he’d need to give them a new friend to play with. It was the only way to make sure they didn’t stumble on a way out.
It was time for them to meet Him.
Chapter Eleven
Loe could feel her heart pounding, her pulse throbbing faster and faster. Only, this didn’t feel like the times when Clive woke from his slumber. Deep under Harrow Hall, Loe and her siblings were once again facing The Door, and she could hardly contain her excitement.
It was clear that the others felt exactly the same. Jay was a ball of lightning, fidgeting and shuffling on the spot. Mag tried to look disinterested, but she was clenching her fists. Altair looked like his leg hurt so much that he wanted to drop, but he’d refused to be left out of this and had joined them with step after painful step.
The excitement wasn’t the only thing they shared. A thorough drenching had given them all a case of the sniffles, and the prevailing sound in the bowels of Harrow Hall was the four of them alternately sniffing and blowing their noses.
Even putting their snotty noses aside, they were a state. Alt could only hobble along using one of Stanway’s old crutches that they’d found in the kitchen. The corner of Jay’s eye had swollen so it looked like he’d been on the wrong end of a beating.
“I’m sorry again,” Loe said.
“I told you, it’s fine,” said Jay.
Jay tapped the door with the key, and the clink of metal on wood seemed to echo all the way out of the room and into the basement tunnels.
“The guy just dropped it and ran away?” said Mag.
“After I walloped him on the skull with a rock. What a shot it was, by the way.”
“What did he look like?”
“He scarpered before I could even climb the hill. He was skinny as a twig. That’s about as much as I can say.”
“So you followed him into the loop, and he wasn’t on the other side of it?” asked Altair.
“I ran up the hill and then saw the hall, just like always. But no sign of him.”
“Then he’s either stuck in the loop with us and he’s hiding, or he knows a way out,” said Loe.
“Wherever he is,” added Jay gravely, “He has a hell of a lot of expired tinned baked beans.”
“What about you? You were gone for hours,” said Loe.
“I know. Sorry, I should have told you, or I should have waited or something. But if I hadn’t looked for him then, we would have lost our chance.”
“There was no sign of him at all?”
“Nothing.”
“Okay,” said Loe. “At least we have the key.”
The key was longer than Jay’s hand and looked like it should be used to open the gates of an old castle. It was blacker than oil, and one end of it was rectangular with vines carved into the metal.
When Loe thought about what might be behind The Door when they opened it, about what might happen, she felt her heart palpitate. This caught her by surprise, and she realized something.
She should have been anxious.
&n
bsp; Well, she was anxious. But nowhere near as much as she should have been. Right now, excitement and curiosity were overriding her anxiety, and Clive was nowhere to be seen.
“So where’s the keyhole?” she said.
That was the problem. The Door was covered in carvings of vines and thorns, but there was no hint of a hinge, no clue of a keyhole. Although she couldn’t profess to be an expert in locksmithing, she was pretty sure that you needed a keyhole in order to use a key.
Alt stared at the door, rubbing his temples in a circular motion.
“Okay, Alt?” asked Mag.
“Just a headache.”
“This whole damn house is a headache,” said Jay. He kicked the door, creating a sound like a gong being struck. The door didn’t even shake.
Loe began tracing her finger over the metal, starting at the edges and following the door’s shape all the way around, standing on her tiptoes at the highest part. Then she began on the vines and thorns, feeling the cool metal meet her fingertips.
When she touched a large carved vine on the upper-right section, almost beyond her reach, she felt something.
Nothing major, but something.
Straining, she touched the vine again, and this time it moved a millimeter to the right.
“Way to go!” said Jay.
Mag nudged Altair. “It’s rusted, or something, like Jay’s brain. It hasn’t been used for a long time, if ever. Alt, you’re the tallest.”
Altair hobbled over, supported by a crutch under one arm, Mag holding his other. Standing in front of The Door, he reached up and pushed on the vine. It whined as it moved further and further left until finally, it revealed a keyhole.
“Alt? You’re the oldest, and it’s only right that the honor is yours,” said Jay, handing him the key. “You’re also the only one tall enough.”
“Oldest and tallest,” muttered Altair. “Aren’t I the lucky one?”
With a metallic screech, the key tumbled the lock and the vines parted, revealing the room beyond The Door.
*
Emory headed across the garden, noting with guilt all the different flowers and bushes and plants that had wasted away under his stewardship. He wished he’d been able to take over of this part of his father’s work, and not the grim duty that had been left to him.
