Gallant(10)

What if no one is home?

What if she has come all this way and—

But then the bolt draws back, and the door swings open. Not all the way, just enough for a woman to look out. She is stout, with rough-hewn edges and wild brown curls, threaded with silver. She has the kind of face Olivia has always loved to draw—every emotion played out on skin, open, expressive. And right now, every line and crease folds into a frown.

“What in God’s name . . .” She trails off at the sight of Olivia, then looks past her to the empty drive, and back again. “Who are you?”

Olivia’s heart sinks, just a little. But of course they would not know her, not by sight. The woman studies her as if she is a stray cat that’s wandered by accident onto their step, and Olivia realizes she is waiting for her to speak. To explain herself. She reaches for the letter in her pocket as a man’s voice pours down the hall.

“Hannah, who is it?” he calls, and Olivia looks past the woman, hoping to see her uncle. But when the door opens wider, she knows at a glance that it’s not him. This man’s skin is several shades darker than her own, his face too thin, his bearing winnowed with age.

“I don’t know, Edgar,” says the woman—Hannah. “It appears to be a girl.”

“How odd . . .”

The door swings wider, and as the light spills over Olivia’s face, the woman’s eyes go wide.

“No . . .” she says softly, an answer to a question she didn’t voice. Then, “How did you get here?”

Olivia offers up her uncle’s letter. The woman’s eyes dart over the envelope, then the contents within. And even in the thin hall light, she can see the last of the color go out of the woman’s face. “I don’t understand.” She turns the paper over, searching for more.

“What is it?” presses Edgar, but Hannah only shakes her head, her gaze returning to Olivia, and though Olivia has always been good at reading faces, she cannot make sense of what she sees. Confusion. Concern. And something else.

The woman opens her mouth, a question forming on her lips, but then her eyes narrow, not on Olivia, but the yard behind her.

“You best come in,” she says. “Out of the dark.”

Olivia looks back over her shoulder. The sunset has bled away, the night deepening around them. She is not afraid of the dark—has never been, but the man and woman seem unnerved by it. Hannah opens the door wide, revealing a well-lit foyer, a massive staircase, a maze of a house.

“Hurry up,” she says.

It is hardly the welcome she expected, but Olivia gathers her suitcase and steps inside, and the door swings shut behind her, walling off the night.





The master of the house is not alone.

He has three shadows, one short, one thin, one broad, and they watch as he rises from his chair, falling silently behind as shadows do.

There is a space between the second and the third, and a keen observer might guess that once, perhaps, there had been four. Perhaps, but now there are only three, and they follow their master as he makes his way through the house that is and is not empty.

There are dead things watching from the corners. Things that once were human. They bow their ghoulish heads and shrink back as the master and his shadows pass, making themselves small in the hollows of the house. Now and then, one glances up and glares, eyes sharp. Now and then, one remembers how they came to be in there in the dark.

The master drags his nails against the wall and hums, the sound carrying like a draft. There are other noises—the wind outside whispers through the tattered curtains, and a piece of plaster cracks and crumbles free, and the whole place seems to groan and tilt and sink—but the ghouls are silent, and the shadows cannot speak, so his is the only voice that carries through the house.





Part Two


The House





Chapter Five




Olivia has never been in such a house.

The foyer arches like the bones of some great beast, and lamps fill the space with soft yellow light, and she looks around, marveling at everything she sees: the grand staircase, the high ceilings and ornate floors. Her eyes skip from painting to pattern, wallpaper to rug to glass to door as Hannah ushers her out of the foyer and down the hall into a sitting room, two chairs and a sofa arranged before the fire. Olivia scans the room, searching the edges of her sight, but there are no teeth, no eyes, no signs of ghouls. She looks to Hannah and Edgar, expecting one of them to fetch her uncle, but they just stand in the doorway, trading quick, hushed words as if she cannot hear.

“Just read it,” says Hannah, pressing the letter into his hands.

“It makes no sense.”

“Did Arthur even know . . .”

“He would have said something. . . .”

Edgar frowns. “She looks just like—”

“Grace.”

There is an ache in the way Hannah says the name, and in that moment she knows—she knows—that the G on the front of her mother’s journal, the one worn to nothing by her fingertips, stood not for Georgina, or Genevieve, or Gabrielle, but Grace. Relief pours through her. They knew her mother. Perhaps they know what happened to her.

“Olivia,” says Edgar, as if testing out the name. “Where did you come from?”

She gestures at the envelope, the address scrawled across its front. Merilance School for Independent Girls.