Gallant(44)

Something cracks inside her, a soft, hitching breath.

The tears come then, bitter and hot.

She hates them even as they fall.

She has only cried twice, once when she was old enough to read the book and realize that for all her games and all the lies she told herself, her parents were never coming back. And once after Anabelle tore the pages out. Not when she heard the horrible rip, but later, after she’d risen up to fill the jar with bugs, after she’d dumped them in Anabelle’s bed and crawled back into her own, she’d curled up in the dark and sobbed, the torn pages of the journal clutched against her chest.

Her mother’s journal. She keeps flexing her fingers, desperate to feel the familiar weight of the book. But it’s gone. Lost beyond the wall, and the grief hits her in a wave.

It is not the words she mourns—she has memorized them all—it is her father’s drawings, the ones she’d only just begun to understand. It is the object itself, the indentation of the pen on the paper, the grooves in the cover, the letter in the back, Olivia, Olivia, Olivia, her name written over and over in her mother’s hand.

The mother who fled this place.

Who warned her never to return.

The mother she misses, despite the fact she never knew her.

A slight draft slips through the room, though the window is shuttered and the door is closed.

And then the ghoul is there. There is less of it than the ones beyond the wall—half a shoulder is missing, part of a hip, an arm—but it is there, ankles crossed, leaning forward elbow balanced on one knee, chin resting on its palm.

Her vision blurred with tears, Olivia can almost imagine the woman on the bed is real. Perhaps she is. Real, she is learning, is a slippery thing, not a solid black line but a shape with soft edges, a great deal of gray.

She doesn’t look up, afraid that the ghoul will disappear. She sits there, head bowed among her mother’s dresses, even as she senses movement, even as she feels the ghoul rising from the bed and stepping forward into the pool of cotton and wool and silk, sinking to its knees in front of her. They would be nearly eye to eye if she looked up.

And she cannot help herself. She does.

When Olivia lifts her gaze, the ghoul flickers slightly, like a candle in the breeze, but then steadies. Perhaps it has never been the looking that banished ghouls. Perhaps it is the thinking, the pointed go away she’s always lobbed at them as she glared.

Now Olivia stares at what’s left of her mother.

What happened to you? she thinks.

It is not like Uncle Arthur, with his face half gone. There is no gunshot wound, no blade, no culprit, but the ghoul is painfully thin, and there are hollows beneath its eyes, and Olivia remembers the entries in the journal, the sleep her mother could not find, her fear of drowning in her dreams.

Tired can be a kind of sick, Edgar said, if it lasts long enough.

Whatever illness took her mother, it is taking Matthew too. And she doesn’t know how to stop it, doesn’t know how to keep it from coming for her next.

Why did you leave Gallant? she wants to ask.

Why did you leave me?

The ghoul’s hand drifts up, and Olivia holds her breath, hoping it means to speak, to sign, but its fingers simply brush the air beside her face, as if to cup her cheek or tuck a strand behind her ear, and Olivia cannot help herself, she throws her arms around her mother’s neck, desperate to be held.

But here, the ghouls aren’t real enough to touch. Here, they are only fragile shadows of the dead, and her hands go straight through. She tumbles forward, landing among her mother’s dresses. Pain lances through her wounded palm. And when she scrambles up again, she is alone.

Olivia sags, wishing, for the briefest moment, that she were back beyond the wall.

Gallant has gone quiet.

Not the eerie quiet of the other house, or the restful quiet of a place asleep, but the tense quiet of bodies retreating to their corners. Somewhere, Hannah is leaning into Edgar. Somewhere, Matthew lies awake and waits for dawn.

The windows are shut fast, and she knows that day won’t break for another hour, at least. Matron Jessamine used to say this was the darkest part of the night, after the moon and before the sun.

Olivia hauls her small suitcase to the bottom of the stairs and leaves it there.

She pads barefoot through the empty halls, the way she did her first night here. Already, she has learned the layout of the sprawling house, and she finds her way without a candle past the row of portraits to the music room, her mother’s red journal tucked beneath her arm.

The piano sits abandoned in the dark.

No Matthew. No moonlight. The garden nothing but a wall of textured black.

Olivia climbs into the bay window with the red journal. It is far too dark to read, but she doesn’t plan to read. Instead she peels back the cover, turning past curling text until she finds the final entry. And then, turning once more, to the blank pages beyond.

There, she begins to write.

If you read this, I am safe.

Her father’s drawings are lost, but her mother’s words are safe, read a thousand times and pressed into the pages of her memory. And there, in the dark, her pencil hisses over the page as she resurrects each and every one.

I dreamed of you last night.

If I gave you my hand, would you take it?

What will we call her?

And with every reconstructed line, she understands, Grace Prior wasn’t mad. She was lonely and lost, wild and free, desperate and haunted.