Craven Manor(57)

Then his torch picked up a shadowed doorway ahead. Daniel quickened his pace and burst into the room at the top of the tower. His breathing was painful, and frost prickled his lips as the moisture on them froze. He panned the light over the space, moving slowly and trying to understand each of the bizarre items littered there.

The tower room was circular and no more than ten feet wide. A bundle of blankets and a pillow made a crude bed against one wall. An empty rusted pail lay on its side against the opposite stones. Two small novels had been stacked beside it. Immensely thick curtains, so old they were barely more than rags, framed the narrow window.

The window! He turned off the light as he swore under his breath. If Bran had been looking towards the house, he would have seen Daniel’s light. He could only pray the mansion’s owner had remained facing the cottage.

“Eliza?”

The tiny room offered nowhere for her to hide. He would have assumed her ghost was invisible, except he’d already seen her at the window several times.

Something about the space felt off. Daniel squinted in the thin moonlight coming through the window as he tried to pinpoint what was making the hairs rise across the back of his neck. The bed was so small that an adult would struggle to lie in it, even with their legs tucked up. He knelt beside it and plucked at the blanket. The cloak of dust covering it was just as thick as what lined the stone floor. A small object lay nestled under the pillow, and Daniel, feeling guilty for disturbing the personal space, tweaked the decayed clump of fabric and feathers back.

A small hand-sewn cloth doll had been hidden beneath the pillow. Its eyes were crooked, and it barely had any wool hair left. Even after being lost for so long, it was clear the doll had been much loved. The threads were all loose from where it had been held, stroked, and squeezed. This was a child’s room.

He turned towards the bucket. A dark powdery substance coated its insides, underneath the pervading dust. He swiped a finger over the grime and rubbed it between his index and thumb. It was gritty and held a strange, almost oily texture.

Charcoal. He recoiled, wiping his fingers clean on his jeans with feverish urgency. He’d found the bucket Annalise’s burnt bones had been stored in.

The two books on the floor were both small. One was a work of fiction. The other, the Bible. Daniel turned to look at the window. Wooden shutters had been left open. The curtains were bedraggled and moth-eaten, but a hundred years ago, they would have done a remarkable job at blocking out all traces of light.

So this was Annalise’s room. A burning revulsion flooded Daniel’s stomach and made shivers dig into him. Mrs. Kirshner had said Eliza was a kind, if shy, woman who loved her daughter. If that was the truth, why had Annalise been sequestered in a space that was barely better than a prison cell? The bed was well used. She must have spent months, if not years, in the tiny room.

Daniel’s uncertainty was morphing into panic. He’d felt so confident about his purpose, convinced that Bran was the evil party, and certain that Eliza deserved to be freed. Now, he didn’t know what to think—but the tower door was already open, and its lock couldn’t be reaffixed.

A noise echoed in the small space—fingernails dragging across stone. Daniel’s heart lurched as he turned to face the open doorway, his only escape from the prison.

The entryway was empty. Daniel swallowed as he took a hesitant step towards the door. The scratching was relentless. The source was impossible to pinpoint; the sound seemed to be coming from ahead of him, his sides, above, and below all at once. Moonlight lit the tower room, but it couldn’t penetrate more than the first two staircase steps.

Get out, you idiot! Get out! He took another step forwards. As he reached towards it, the door shifted. His nerves were keyed tight, and Daniel lunged for the escape. He was a second too late as the door crashed closed.

The boom was impossibly loud. Daniel yelled, but the door’s reverberations drowned out his cry. He pressed his hands to his ears and staggered back, tripping over the bed and hitting the wall.

Eliza isn’t gone. Terror clenched his insides. It felt like a vice squeezing his chest until his heart felt ready to burst and every inhale threatened to crack ribs. He looked from the door to the window and back. The door had no lock or handle on his side. It had been designed to prevent escape. He imagined himself as the tower’s new victim, hidden away and trapped there for an eternity, spending his years pacing at the window and scratching at the door. Craven Manor’s pet, its dark secret, he would never be discovered again.

No. No. No. The word bounced through his head, loud enough that he had to open his mouth to give it a way to escape. “No!”

Daniel crossed to the window. The torch felt cold in his shaking fingers. He knew his cottage had an uninterrupted view of the tower, but he couldn’t see it in the wan moonlight. He didn’t even know if Annalise had stayed by the house when he didn’t reply to her knocks, or if Bran continued to watch over her. But he had to try.

He turned on the light and guessed a direction. The beam was weak. He could barely see the circle it cast, but he prayed it would be enough to catch Bran’s attention as he panned it across the trees.

Making a deal with the devil to save my soul. His grandmother had said the phrase to him once, when she’d signed the papers authorising the chemotherapy. The words had never felt more real, or more awful, to Daniel. He was begging a killer to save him from death.

The scratching, scrabbling sounds had grown closer. Stress made Daniel’s skin prickle as though a low electrical current ran through him. He kept the light moving, searching for the cottage among the trees, hoping against hope Bran would turn to look at the tower. Underneath the scratching came the rasping, dry breaths.