And the Trees Crept In(70)
He nods. “I know. Especially me. And why not? I left you. I failed you.”
I take his hand. “Tell me my story, Gowan. Tell me what I just went through.” When he doesn’t answer, I say, “I told you my story once. Please tell me this one.” I hesitate. “I’m ready.”
He laughs. “Oh, I know you are. I was just deciding if I was ready.”
“Oh.”
He closes his eyes, takes a breath, and—“It was 2013 when a fourteen-year-old girl called Silla Daniels fled from her London home, where she had witnessed her mother’s murder at her father’s hands, and came to live with her aunt Catherine in a manor house called La Baume.”
I swallow. “She did, did she?”
“Absolutely. Now, things were beautiful at first, and Silla grew to care for a boy who lived there. He was the last of Catherine’s orphans, the last of La Baume Orphanage. His name was Gowan, and he liked to take care of the garden.” He grins, and I grin back. “Things were really good for three years, until Silla was seventeen. With rumors of another war, food shortages, disease rife, and her own personal demons, her aunt Catherine had a nervous breakdown. People started leaving the town. Silla and Gowan were alone, taking care of a little girl called Nori, who was Silla’s sister. It was decided that Gowan needed to leave the manor and the town, to get some help from farther away. The world was a scary place, with talk of World War Three being around the corner, but Gowan knew that if he didn’t go out in search of help, they would all die.”
He pauses, and sighs.
“Go on,” I say quietly.
“After Gowan had gone, the last bit of sanity that Aunt Catherine clung to snapped. She convinced herself she was being haunted by a menacing presence—the Creeper Man from her childhood—and she hanged herself. The Creeper Man was not a child-stealing demon,” he says, with a glance at me, “he was a legend that two bereaved little girls invented to explain the terrible tragedy that befell their little sister, Anne, in Python Wood. Silla herself absorbed this legend and clung to the idea, as did her little sister, Nori.
“Having found Catherine’s body, and wanting to protect Nori, Silla shut the attic door and forebade Nori to ever go in there. Silla was so traumatized by it that she developed an irrational (or so she thought) phobia of the attic stairs. A closed door might protect Nori from the sight, but not from the smell. The manor soon smelled of rotting flesh—”
“The meat! I could smell rotting meat! It was… my God. It was Cath?”
“Partly.” He swallows.
“Go on.”
“La Baume reeked of death. And then Nori got sick. She contracted something from a man she encountered in Python Wood. She helped wrap his head, which had a bloody gash, and she drank from his water, and then he moved on. Nori died, painfully, in Silla’s arms some weeks later.”
He pauses, I think because he can see me crying. Now that I’ve started, I don’t think I can stop.
“Silla refused to leave Nori’s side,” he whispers. “And she starved to death. When Silla woke, she was back in London, getting Nori ready for an escape. She came to La Baume, and everything went wrong, and she did not remember Gowan because he had left her, abandoned her, failed her—”
“Stop. Please, Gowan, stop.”
I can’t take any more. This story about torture, loss, hate, rage, suffering, death…
I don’t want to know more. What good can it do now?
It takes a long time for me to recover enough to learn the rest.
“When Gowan returned with food and supplies, everyone in the house was dead and rotting,” Gowan says emotionlessly.
I take his hand. “Oh, Gowan…”
“Rotting meat—” His voice breaks, and I see his jaw clench around his pain.
I stare at him with horror as I realize, and my voice is barely a breath. “Oh, God.”
“Ever since then, Silla has been in her own personal purgatory, trapping Nori and Catherine along with her in that decaying house, each of them caged, together and alone in their pain. Catherine, unable to forget the madness, unable to forgive herself so long as Silla couldn’t forgive her. Nori trapped because of her precious youth and her love for Silla, and Silla herself, trapped by her self-loathing, fear, guilt, and… rage.
“You were right when you said La Baume was cursed. It was cursed by you.
“You all repeated the terrible cycle of the last months of your lives in that house, over and over, exaggerating the worst elements of it, inserting clues but cutting off the truth—creating your own versions of hell, until this last time. When I came in.”
“Why now? Why didn’t you come before?”
“You died in 2016 when you were seventeen. I was only eighteen. I was… deeply affected by it, Silla. But I lived. I died an old man, alone in my chair, when I was ninety-two, in the year 2090. I could only come and find you when I was dead. Before all of this”—he gestures at the garden around us and the mountains in the distance—“I didn’t believe there was anything more. I lived my whole life thinking you were just a photo on my coffee table. Just a fading memory. And then I found myself in Python Wood, staring at you tilling the soil, seeing Nori spot me, but not recognize me. I knew we were dead, I just… I didn’t know what was going on at first. I kept having to leave to figure it out. I knew, though, that you had to free yourself. I could only try to convince you. And when that hole appeared… I knew that if you gave in to that, it would be over. Soul death.”