In the Night Wood

“No one knows, do they? She just evaporated. You expect things like that to happen in York or London. But not here.”

“Did you know her?”

“She was a classmate of Lorna’s.” And then, looking at her daughter, “We shouldn’t —”

“Of course not.”

Silva shook her head. “It’s a horrible thing,” she said.

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Charles knew about horrible things. Charles knew about ghosts.

On the way back to Hollow House, he parked in the turnout by the vine-shrouded pillars, the Eorl Wood looming up around him. He sat there, the car idling, his hands clenched on the wheel. Then he picked up the photograph and tore back the butcher paper Mould had wrapped it in.

Lissa gazed up at him, once again imprisoned behind her wall of glass. Only she wasn’t, was she? She’d escaped, after all. He’d seen her at the Yarrow Historical Society. He’d seen her in the Ripon Gazette. As if to confirm it, Charles reached for the newspaper in the passenger seat and unfolded it on his lap. He placed the photo beside it: Lissa and this other lost child, Mary Babbing. Who could say what horrors she might have endured?

A FAMILY’S AGONY, the headline said.

He leaned his head against the headrest, closed his eyes.

When he opened them again, he saw a figure in the Eorl Wood.

It gazed back at him, a green shadow in a green shade. Like a man, but not a man, antlered like a stag in rut. Cernunnos, he thought. The Horned God or King. The avatar of the Night Wood. He stared, breath frozen in his lungs. He blinked. The figure was gone, not there. It had never been there at all.

Charles shook his head. He put the photograph on the seat beside him, crumpled the newspaper into the space underneath, and eased the car into gear. He accelerated between the pillars and sped into the darkness underneath the trees.

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Hollow House enveloped them.

As Erin’s ankle healed, she and Charles explored their new home, children in a haunted mansion in a tale: the downstairs rooms, the dining room to the right of the entrance hall, the drawing room to the left. The vast salon with its twin staircases and the adjoining library, accessible by lustrous wooden doors at either side of an enormous fireplace. And beyond that a handful of smaller rooms: the music room, the game room, an office where Cillian Harris managed the estate’s affairs. Bedrooms and sitting rooms opened off the gallery encircling the salon, everything luxurious, everything ornate but for the servants’ quarters on the top floor: narrow, dormered chambers with rusting iron bedsteads, vestiges of another era.

And everywhere the motif on the balusters repeating itself: leaves and vines, those cunning vulpine faces. They peered from mantels and window casings, from finely wrought moldings and armchairs. Stealthy and gamesome, they retreated into the foliage in one place only to peep out anew in another, entire rooms subtly aswarm — a trick of the eye, unsettling and strangely beautiful.

Lissa would have loved it, Charles thought, but they did not speak of her. They rarely spoke at all.

Work would save them, Erin’s therapist had once said.

So they went to work, each in their separate orbit. Charles took refuge in the library, all burgundy and leather, with heavy velvet curtains and plush carpets, a long table, and an antique silver globe mapping a world that had long since passed out of existence. Everything polished, everything gleaming. Comfortable chairs surrounded the cold fireplace. And books, ranks and ranks of them, stood shelved on every wall, behind glass doors with shrewd faces looking down from the corners of their frames.

“You’ll want to keep the curtains closed,” Mrs. Ramsden told him. “The spines of the books would dry and crack in the sunlight. Many of them are first editions, Mr. Hayden, quite valuable. A nice dim room and saddle soap once a year, that’s what they want.”

“I’m sure they do,” Charles said. And then: “Personal documents, Mrs. Ramsden. Anything relating to Caedmon Hollow? Any ideas where to start?”

“Cabinets on the west wall, perhaps, though anything that old is more likely to be in the archives downstairs.”

“Archives?”

“It was Mr. Hollow’s little joke,” she said. “What it really is is boxes, Mr. Hayden. Boxes and boxes and boxes. You have your work cut out for you, I’m afraid.” Then: “Will there be anything else, sir?”

“No, thank you,” he said.

And then he was alone, overwhelmed by the task before him.

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Erin, on the other hand, riding a smooth Xanax wave, set up in the dining room of the residence: sketchbook, pencils, and art gum erasers arrayed across the table. And Lissa’s photo, of course. She flipped through the pages of the sketchbook. Lissa and Lissa again. Page after page of Lissa. Erin had been an attorney once, trafficking in matters of ultimate finality: wills and estates, the complexities of the human heart, fear and love, envy, hunger, loathing, and desire. Families in grief and horror, families shattered, divided against themselves: the territory of ambiguity, the kingdom of the gray.

She’d closed her practice after the accident. She could no longer stomach the work. She lived in binary now.

Ones and zeros.

Before and after.

With every passing day, the before was increasingly lost, bleached out by time and grief and the medication that did not salve the pain but only dulled it.

The after didn’t matter.

She turned to a clean page, tapped a pencil against her teeth.

Mrs. Ramsden — Helen — put down a tray at Erin’s elbow: strong coffee, cream. Already, she’d mastered their tastes.

“Thank you, Helen.”

“You’re quite welcome, ma’am.” And then, turning back at the doorway: “I wonder if I might have a word with you.”

Erin looked up. “Of course.”

“It’s just …” Mrs. Ramsden approached the table. She picked up the photograph, stared at it for a moment, put it down. “I wanted to say how sorry I am for your loss.”

“My loss?”

“It’s a small place, ma’am. There are few secrets here.”

Erin put down the pencil. She bit her lower lip. “I suppose so.”

“If there’s anything I can do. If you want to talk …”

“That’s very kind of you.”

Mrs. Ramsden smiled.

“I don’t want to talk,” Erin said. She reached out and turned the photo facedown on the table. She tried to say it kindly: “I just want to be alone.”

“If I’ve overstepped —”

“No, Helen, please. I just — I can’t talk about it.”