Page 23 of House of Furies
And Lee. God, I hadn’t even thought of him. Were he and his uncle here because they deserved death? It didn’t seem possible.
The girl was not in a hurry to leave, humming softly to herself while she made figure-eight patterns on the blanket with her pinkie finger. This small, soft, pale child might in fact be a killer. I pulled the blanket more snugly around myself.
“Are you really going to hurt Mrs. Eames?” I asked, a tad sheepish.
Poppy’s bright eyes flashed toward me. “Oh no,” she said with a tittering laugh, “I’m not just going to hurt her, I’m going to kill her.”
“How? How could you do such a thing?”
She shrugged, patting the dog’s head. “The same way I do all the others.”
“And what way is that?” Did I truly want to know? My curiosity had cost me so much already, but the urge to know more yet remained.
“With my voice!” she chirped. She grinned and opened her mouth very wide. There was nothing out of the ordinary about her mouth, just a young girl’s teeth and tongue. “I can scream louder than anyone I know, so loud it really, really hurts when you hear it.”
“Won’t that hurt the rest of us, then?”
“No, not a bit; Mary will protect you,” she said simply. “She’s quite good at protecting people.”
Mary. Just the evening before I had shared a pleasant supper with these people, liking them, thinking them my peers. Even potential friends. My brain now pounded with the confusion of it all—there had been signs, of course, that the house was a touch odd, but this was something else entirely.
And I would be escaping it as soon as possible.
“I would like to sleep more now, Poppy,” I said with a thin smile. In truth, I needed time alone to think and plan. After all, it was just a book, wasn’t it? Whatever grand speeches Mr.Morningside made about it, it was a book, and books could be moved, or lost.
Orburned.
Those living shadows wandering the halls would make it more difficult to steal covertly, but they also made me want to steal all the more. This was a horrible place, and I would feel no guilt taking from it what I wanted—ensuring my freedom. America, so far away, with an ocean between here and there, was just what I needed.
“Right you are!” she crowed, hopping down from the bed and scooping up Bartholomew. “Come along, little pup, Miss Louisa has had a bad night, but we’re all going to help her, aren’t we? We all get on so well together here. Soon she’ll be our best and truest friend.”
Chapter Fourteen
When I emerged from my chambers an hour later, I half expected to be met by one of those foul shadow creatures. Residents, Mr. Morningside had called them. Residents indeed.
The hall outside my door was empty, but that hardly made me feel safer. I felt watched now, marked, a bright red poppy in a field of white daisies. Every choice available to me became equally urgent. If I was going to be stuck here, then the least I could do was warn Lee before he became stuck, too, or worse, killed. The pain in my wrist was all but gone, the sturdy splint around it expertly applied. I wondered at who had fixed me up, and I wondered at the fact that murderers could treat me, a relative stranger, with such tenderness.
It didn’t matter, in the end. Only a fool would linger in Coldthistle House once they’d learned its secrets. And I was no fool. I decided to tackle the problems in order of simplicity: food would be easiest, and so I made my way slowly to the foyer and then the kitchen, watchful for any signs of the Residents.
Nobody bothered me. I heard the muffled chatting from morning tea coming from the downstairs parlor, and I heard Lee’s laughter as he found some anecdote or another uproariously funny. I didn’t necessarily like his uncle, but I struggled to imagine what Lee Brimble might have done to be drawn to thebook and this place. He seemed so kind, so well meaning... But then again, so had my fellow employees, and perhaps he too possessed some dark secret.
I had a few of my own, of course—truancy, magic tricks, and stealing, for example—but those vices now struck me as tame, even silly.
The stoves were still warm from baking, but the kitchen was otherwise quiet and abandoned. Where had everyone gone? Were they deliberately hiding? I hurried to the pantry and swiped a piece of brown bread and a few slivers of dried apple. When I escaped Pitney, I had done so on an even emptier stomach. Life there had made me no stranger to hunger. Our punishments often involved going for days with only crusts and water.
I bolted down the bread and took more time with the apple slices, pocketing one or two for a later emergency. For now, Lee would have to wait—I had no earthly idea how to tell him about all that I knew. We were only just acquaintances, and there was no reason at all for him to trust me or the outrageous stories I might tell. Instead, I took the back exit out of the kitchen and into the brisk cool of morning. My clothes were just heavy enough to ward off the chill, and if I made an escape in earnest I would need to bring the blankets from my bedding for extra warmth. I had escaped Pitney with help from my sort-of friend Jenny, who caused a distraction while I slipped out a window and into the night. Unless I could convince Lee that my storieswere truth and not madness, I would be escaping completely on my own.
This venture out would serve only to survey. If, by some stroke of luck, Lee’s driver was about and going to town on a stagecoach when the post approached, I would seize the opportunity. First, I needed to test the word of Mr. Morningside.
The grass outside was thin, scraggly. Trees grew on the perimeter of the grounds, and there only tentatively. The house itself was the only thing allowed to be tall and imposing. The barn stood off to my left, the gardens farther beyond that, and more behind the manor. I walked straight out from the door, feeling completely exposed. There was no bush or tree to hide behind, and anyone enterprising enough to glance out a window would see me striding out toward the fence at the far edge of the property.
I call it a fence, but in truth it was merely a few withered planks that seemed to be held aloft by sheer coincidence. The thought made my heart clench. If Mr. Morningside and his merry band of murderers really worried about escapees, they might bother to build a proper fence, tall enough to keep people in and trespassers out. Instead, it looked like a stiff wind might topple the whole structure, and anyone in moderate physical health could scale the beams and hop right over.
Six crows sat on the fence, regarding me, then scattering and reconvening on the roof of the house behind me.
A greater barrier than the fence was the unbelievable numberof holes dotting the ground. They were bigger than any field animal might make, everywhere and of varying depth. One, obscured by a clump of grass, nearly made me fall flat on my face. I picked my way across the field, wary now of all the pits. What on earth had torn up the ground so? It was almost as if someone had shoveled down a foot or two, searching frantically for something....
At last I reached the fence, noticing that as I neared it the scars on my fingertips began to ache. Initially I thought little of it, chalking it up to a sort of phantom pain, but the discomfort persisted and intensified. It was like hearing a voice in a faraway room, and then hearing the person who spoke move closer and closer, their voice amplifying. The pain amplified that way, and with it, a voice.
