Page 61 of Holly & Hemlock
Larkin’s hand is still on mine when I say, “Let’s keep reading.”
And so we do.
The hours passin a succession of lamplight and increasingly frantic page-turning. Outside, the night comes down fast, erasing the world past the windows, making the library’s oil glow seem brighter and more dangerous. The room shrinks, heatless, each footstep echoing longer than the last. In the back of my mind, I am aware that no one has come to look for us, not Lane, not Whitby—no one. The house is complicit.
Larkin moves through the volumes like a priest through his own apocrypha. The brass sconces throw our silhouettes onto the wall, grotesque and multiplied, our bodies elongated and entwined even when we stand apart. The light pools in yellow stains on the paper, illuminating centuries of loss and longing. If I focus, I can hear the house listening: themovement of air through ducts, the settling of beams, the shivering of old glass.
We piece together the story in fragments, matching notations and birthdates, deeds and half-legible letters. It is all here, if you know how to read the negative space, the tale of a house built to memorialize a wound, to keep it open and raw.
At one point, Larkin finds a sheaf of architectural plans, bound together with string so fine it is almost invisible. He lays them out on the table, weighting the corners with old ink bottles. “Here,” he says, pointing at the ground floor. “See this overlay?”
I lean in. The main hall is set precisely atop an older footprint, a small square labeled “Anwen’s cottage—demolished.” The new house is mapped like a parasite over its host, each new room smothering something older, something essential.
“It’s deliberate,” I say, tracing the lines. “The house isn’t just built here, it’s built out of her.”
Larkin nods, expression severe. “They took her body, her boundary, and made it into architecture.”
There is a horror in it, but also a strange sense of vindication. I have always felt the house as something inside me, not outside; now I see that the reverse is also true.
He brings me another stack of papers. “Look at this,” he says, and flips to a page near the back. It is a ledger, listing repairs and modifications going back generations. Some notes are functional: “Replace windows, north face.” Others are less so: “Seal the Blue Room.” “Burn what cannot be buried.”
“Why keep it?” I ask, running my finger down the list.
“Because they believed, even then, that destroying it would only make it stronger. Every time they tried to erase her, she just found another way in.”
We work in silence for a time, and I find myself thinking of the curse as less of a malice and more of a hunger, a craving so deep it outlasts even memory.
“But why did Aunt Maeve think I could break it? She barely knew me. We’re missing something.”
Larkin doesn’t look up from the map he’s annotating, but his voice is deliberate, measured. “Because you’re not of here. You spent your life outside, not feeding the pattern. You’re a clean break. The house can’t use you the way it uses the rest of us.”
“I don’t believe it’s that easy,” I say, but my voice is unconvincing.
He closes the map, folds it with precision. “I do,” he says, and I sense, for the first time, that he is afraid—not of me, but for me.
I stand, pacing the cramped room. My shadow lurches across the walls, trailed by the phantom of Larkin’s, never quite overtaking it. “If the house wants to keep what it loves, then it will never let us go.”
He shrugs, the gesture taut. “Maybe. But maybe you can make it let go.”
He crosses to the window and looks out, seeing nothing but the reflection of his own face, haunted and unfamiliar. “When Maeve died, Whitby told me she saw a woman standing in the garden. She thought it was you. But you weren’t here yet.”
“Anwen,” I say, feeling the name land in the pit of my stomach.
“Maybe,” he says. “Or maybe just what the house wants you to become.”
I return to the table and begin sifting through the remainder of the folio. My hands shake, but I keep searching. Near the bottom, tucked between two blank pages, is a singlesheet, heavier than the rest. It is a genealogy, written in a hand I know well. My aunt’s.
It charts the lineage of Anwen’s descendants, the lines converging over centuries until only three names remain: Maeve and Louise, both crossed out in black, and below, my own, underlined twice in blue.
My aunt. My mother. Me.
“Anwen must have had a baby with her lover. That’s the only thing that makes sense if this geneology is accurate.”
I run my finger over the ink, feeling the indentation in the paper. My skin prickles, blood rushing hot through my ears.
Larkin is beside me now, reading over my shoulder. “That’s why she changed the will,” he says quietly. “She might not have figured out how to stop it, but you could. You’re the only one who could.”
My vision blurs at the edges. The lines on the page swim, merge, resolve into something I don’t want to see.
