Gallant(34)

In her father’s gestures, she reads relief and sadness, hope and longing.

There are pieces she doesn’t understand, fragments that seem to dip out of reach, but it is a start. It is the first glimpse of a father she has never known, the ghost of him impressed on paper.

Olivia stops and stretches, feeling stiff. How long has she been at this? The rain is little more than mist now, and her eyes have begun to ache, so she closes the journal, running her hand almost absently over the twin grooves scraped into the front. And then, to her surprise, a ghostly hand falls over hers, and through. The ghoul’s touch is nothing, a cool shadow—still, she jumps, jerking back on instinct, only to realize it wasn’t reaching for her. Instead, its too-thin fingers drag through the air, tracing the same grooves in the cover of the book before drifting away. Olivia follows the ghoul’s hand to the window, where it rests against the glass.

Olivia cannot help herself. She looks straight at her mother’s ghoul, then, and for a moment—only a moment—she sees Grace Prior, interrupted here and there by the watery gray light, her face where it shows a mask of sadness, eyes focused on the world beyond the window. At the garden. At the wall.

For a moment—only a moment—before the weight of Olivia’s gaze grows too heavy, and the ghoul wavers and disappears.

Olivia leans forward, following the path those fingers made, from the journal to the window, where they hovered on the glass. As if reaching or pointing toward the garden and the wall.

Her gaze drops again to the dented green cover, those twin lines tugging something in her skull. She reaches for her sketchpad, turning through until she finds a drawing she made of the door in the wall, of the dark iron and its vine-shaped handle, of the gap where metal door met the surrounding stone. At the two bolts that stuck out, roughly the same distance apart as the marks on the front of the journal.

And then she’s up and on her feet, moving through the house.

Past the sitting room where Hannah snores before a dying fire, and up the stairs. Down the hall—Matthew’s door still shut—and into her mother’s room. She finds a pair of yellow galoshes in the back of the wardrobe, stuffing socks into the toes until they fit, leaves the sketchpad on the bed, and tucks the red journal under her pillow, taking only the green one with her.

It’s still light out, though for how long she can’t be sure, so she moves briskly through the house and out the garden door.

The rain has stopped, but the wind is up and the air is wet, and the clouds still hang heavy and low, their undersides dark with the promise of another storm. She presses the journal against her front as she trudges past the roses and down the slope to the wall, slowing only when the door comes into sight.

Last night I went beyond the wall. And I met Death.

But her mother met her father, too.

Somehow, despite the weather, the door isn’t even wet. The stone wall leans forward, just enough that the metal has stayed dry, and if Olivia weren’t so consumed with her quest, she might think it strange, might add it to the way the shadows bent, even when the sun was out, to the cold air that gathers against the stone like mist.

A ghoul shudders at the orchard’s edge. Not the old man, but her uncle, or at least, the pieces of him. She draws the rest in her mind, imagines him not as a specter, but a man, leaning, arms crossed against the nearest tree. The ghoul stares at her, and she stares back, but it doesn’t dissolve under her gaze. It takes a step toward her, and Olivia finds herself thinking, Stop, thinking, Stay there, and to her surprise, it does.

The ghoul’s face twitches, and it shifts back into the shadow of the trees, leaving her alone before the wall.

Olivia traces her fingers down the edge of the door, following the gap between the iron and the stone. Save for the two bolts jutting into the sliver of space, it is the width of a thumb. Or a journal spine. She bites her lip and slips her mother’s journal between the door and the wall.

It is not the same shape it was, so many years ago.

It is a little wider now, the pages Anabelle once tore out returned imperfectly, age foxing the edges and warping the cover.

And yet, it fits. The green journal slides spine first into the gap with all the ease of a key in its lock, those two old bolts kissing their familiar grooves.

This is where her parents met.

This is how they spoke. Letters and drawings passed back and forth through a door that does not work in a wall that leads nowhere.

Olivia’s fingers drop from the journal, and it sits there, resting comfortably in the gap for the length of an inhale. And then the world breathes out. The wind picks up. A sudden gust rustles her dress and tugs at her hair and knocks the journal from its perch.

If the wind had blown the other way, the journal would have tumbled toward her, fallen at her feet. But it blows at her back, and the journal tips through the gap, vanishing beyond the wall.

Olivia hisses through her teeth.

She pulls on the old door but of course it’s locked, so she hurries to the edge of the wall, the place where the stone crumbles away to nothing, the grasses on either side growing together, this side tangling with that.

It is just a step, she tells herself.

And yet, she hesitates. Glances back over her shoulder at the garden and the looming house, Matthew’s warning heavy on the air.

But she is not afraid of stories.

Sure, there are strange things in the world. Dead things that lurk in shadows. Houses full of ghosts. But this is just a wall, and standing here, at the edge, she can see the field beyond. Peering round the broken stone, she spots the journal lying in the wet grass, waiting to be retrieved.