Gallant(36)

She pushes, but it doesn’t move. She searches for a keyhole—but there’s not even a handle, nothing but a film of debris on the metal, dead ivy and leaves that flake away like rust or skin.

She presses her eye to the narrow gap and sags with relief when she sees Gallant—the real Gallant—still sitting on the other side, dusk settling over the garden. Her mind goes to the strange metal sculpture in the study, the two houses facing each other across the twisting spheres.

A shadow moves across a window—Hannah—and Olivia pounds on the door, expecting the sound to carry, to echo, but it doesn’t. The iron swallows the noise like silk, or down, or moss. And as she watches, Hannah lifts one hand to close the shutter. Locking out the dark. And her.

Olivia takes a step back and feels the small crunch of something beneath her boot.

Looking down, she finds a handful of small white seeds scattered at her feet. She bends to take one up, feels the point between her finger and thumb and realizes they are not seeds at all, but tiny teeth. She looks around and sees a handful of other bones, thin and brittle. Bits of beak and paw and wing, and her first thought is, here are all the animals she should have heard and seen at Gallant.

She doesn’t realize her hand has closed over the little tooth until it jumps. Shudders like a bee against her palm. Olivia gasps, cold prickling up her arm as she lets go, and by the time it hits the ground, it is not a writhing bit of bone, but a mouse.

A small, gray-furred thing that skitters away into the wasted garden.

Olivia stares down at her palm, now empty, and wonders what the hell is happening, if she fell in the field and hit her head. If this is yet another dream.

She looks up at the house that is not Gallant.

The shutters hang open, and a pale glow suffuses the windows. A light is on somewhere inside.

She hovers for a moment, uncertain what to do, wishing she had more than a journal in her hands, but knowing she can’t stay here, standing like a solitary tree beneath that eerie sky, exposed. She cannot go back, it seems, and so at last, her feet carry her forward.

The ground rustles like dry paper under her boots, too loud in the silent garden. Even the wind seems to hold its breath as she creeps forward, her yellow galoshes practically glowing against the charcoal world. (She cannot tell if the night has rendered this place colorless, or if there truly is no color in it.)

All around her, wilted flowers droop on thin, stiff stems, roses look as if a single breath would send the petals scattering, and branches stand bare save for leaves that look as though they died in place. All of it brittle, wasted.

A fragile rose leans into her path, and Olivia brushes her fingertips across the petals, expecting them to crack and crumble. Instead, she feels a sudden prickle in her hand, like the promise of pain the instant a knife slips and cuts, the moment before you bleed. She jerks back, studying her fingertips, but there is no wound, only a strange chill creeping across her skin. She shivers and shakes out her hand.

And then she sees the plant she touched, no longer dead, but blooming, wild. New blossoms force their way up and out, a season’s growth in a matter of moments. Olivia watches, stunned, torn between the urge to flee and the longing to run her hands over the other flowers, just to watch them grow. Only two things stop her: the cold that lingers on her skin; and the way the rose leans forward, as if reaching, hungry.

She backs away, turns her attention to the looming house. There is the small door, sitting at the top of the slope, or she can round the garden and the house, climb the steps to the wide front doors and knock and wait to see what answers.

The thought makes her shiver, fingers tightening on the battered green book.

She heads for the garden door, stopping only to slip off the yellow boots, the rubber and the color both as loud as voices in this silent place. The blue of her dress is just as bright, but there’s nothing to be done for that. She is setting the boots by the door when something moves in the garden to her left. She feels more than hears it and turns round, eyes scanning the darkened grounds.

A ghoul stands amid the ruined flowers.

A woman, maybe Hannah’s age.

Olivia can see through the specter, here and there, like a tattered curtain, but there is more to it than just an elbow or a cheek. It has limbs and legs, and in one hand, a dagger. And when Olivia looks right at the ghoul, it doesn’t disappear. Doesn’t even wane or waver. It just stares back, and there is something familiar in the set of its jaw, the line of its brow. But it’s the look on its face that chills Olivia. Fear.

She glances past it, one last time, down the garden to the wall, the door shut fast, the edges blurring into fog, and then Olivia reaches for the garden door. She brings her hand to the knob, expecting it to soften and crumble, give way to ash, or smoke, a phantom door in a phantom house. But it holds firm against her fingers. The handle turns. The door swings open.

She steps into the house.

And realizes she isn’t sure what to do.

She thought the answer would rise to meet her when she crossed the threshold, like dust shaken free. But the door is a door, and the hall beyond is a hall, and when she looks around, she sees a drearier, colorless version of the Gallant she knows, but otherwise, there is nothing. No one.

And yet, she does not feel alone.

She clutches the green journal to her chest, wishing she’d brought the other book, the red one from the time before, and tries to remember her mother’s words.