Gallant(29)

That big wide world, and us just sitting here, staring at a wall.

Father calls it a prison, and we the keepers, but that is a lie. We are as much prisoners here. Bound to these grounds, this house, that garden.

Olivia stops, Matthew’s voice echoing through her head. We came to Gallant once, and now we cannot leave. We are bound here. She pushes him out of her thoughts and reads on.

Arthur says that death waits beyond the wall. But the truth is, death is everywhere. Death comes for the roses and the apples, it comes for the mice and the birds. It comes for us all. Why should death stop us from living?

So, I did it.

I went beyond the wall.

I shouldn’t have. I thought—but it doesn’t matter what I thought. Of course I’m not the first. Of course the stories are not fictions. I am not sorry. I’m not—But I understand now.

I will never go back.

Olivia’s heart quickens as she turns the page.

No one ever needs to know.

I should not even write it here, but some part of me knows that if I don’t, I’ll begin to doubt myself. I’ll think it was a dream. But you can’t dream words onto paper. So here. Last night, I went beyond the wall.

And I met Death.

The words scrawl like weeds across the page. Olivia traces her fingers over them, half expecting them to twitch beneath her touch. Ink has dripped onto the paper, as if the writer’s pen hovered, uncertain, before taking up again.

Not met, but saw, and that was close enough. With his four shadows and his dozen shades, all silent in the bones of the ruined house. It sounds like madness written down. It felt like madness when I witnessed it. A mad world, a fever dream.

Arthur caught me after, in the garden, shook me hard and asked if I’d been seen, and I said no.

I did not tell my brother how the tallest shadow found me in the hall, peeled away from his master like a long summer day. I did not tell my brother how he looked straight at me with those near-black eyes and pointed to the closest door, to the garden and the wall, head cocked. I did not tell my brother that the shadow let me go.

The entry ends. Olivia’s hands are already turning the page. The next entry begins: I wrote to him last night.

I went back, expected to find it gone, stolen like everything else that falls through the cracks, but it was still there, tucked between the iron and the stone, and I could tell by the angle it had been moved, and when I checked, I found that he had written back.

Another page, another entry.

I have lived at Gallant all my life. But home is meant to be a choice. I did not choose this house. I am tired of being bound to it.

Olivia turns, hoping for more, but the next page is torn, and the next, and the next, the following entries all ripped out, leaving only a few black beginnings near the binding, the inky curl of letters broken, words ripped in two. A breadcrumb trail of half-formed words.

Not comi—

a prisone—

togeth—

we can f—

tonigh—

Olivia lets out a frustrated breath and turns back to the beginning.

Her mother went beyond the wall. She saw death, and four shadows, and a dozen shades. The tallest shadow helped her home. It is the stuff of fairy tales. Or something darker. A girl losing her mind? And yet, she was well enough to know how it sounded written down. And hasn’t Olivia herself seen shades? The half-there girls back at Merilance. Her own mother and uncle trailing her through the halls of Gallant. Did Grace Prior see ghouls, too?

But what is the difference between a shadow and a shade?

Is it a riddle or a code?

She closes her eyes, trying to assemble the pieces, but her mind is too tired to find the edges, and nothing seems to fit, and eventually she blows out the candle with an exasperated breath and falls back into the bed.

And in the dark, she dreams.





Perhaps you are haunting me.

What a comforting thought.

Maybe it’s you in the darkness.

I swear I’ve seen it move.





Chapter Fourteen




There is a man in the garden.

He stumbles, as if sick or drunk, falls down, and gets back to his feet, dragging his tired body past the flowers, pale in moonlight, past the trellises and hedges, past Olivia, who sits watching on the low stone bench, unable to move. He surges by, legs unsteady as he passes the final row of roses, and heads for the sloping stretch of grass toward the garden wall.

“You cannot have me!” he shouts, words shattering the quiet night. His voice is hoarse, exhausted. “You will not win.”

He glances back over his shoulder, at the house, at her, and the light cuts across his haunted gaze, his hollowed cheeks. His face is half in shadow, but she recognizes that jaw, those deep-set eyes, the echo of Matthew’s, but older. Her uncle. Arthur.

She watches, helpless, as he stumbles again, but this time he doesn’t get back up. He sinks to his knees in the grass. An object glints in his hand, and at first she thinks it is a spade, but then the moonlight strikes the barrel. It is a gun.

“You say that you can make the nightmares stop.” He looks up at the wall, eyes glassy in the dark. “Well, so can I.”

The gun swings up against his temple.

Olivia wakes with the bang.

The sound rings through the room, and she is already up, racing barefoot toward the door. It was just a dream, she tells herself, but it felt so real. It was just a dream, but her dreams seem to reach into the waking world, and the gunshot is still echoing in her ears as she rushes into the hall. Matthew’s door hangs open, lamplight pooling on the wooden floor, but there are no sobs, no signs of Hannah or Edgar wrestling him back onto the bed.