“And the writing on the walls. Then there’s Lady Ravendark. She’s a character inColdstone Abbey, the one I compared Elise to.” When she was still alive. He shuddered. “Lady Ravendark is a very lovely woman but an unfaithful wife. She eventually gets pushed down the stairs of her stately home by—” He stopped.
“By?”
“Her cuckolded husband,” Zeb said reluctantly. “But the point is, she gets pushed down the stairs, just like Elise. And the same book also has a truly horrible scene where a character finds herself trapped in a room that’s crawling with spiders.”
“Right,” Gideon said slowly. “That is a pattern, yes. Does it have sacrifices in a stone circle?”
“No. That’s inThe Stone Circle.”
“Are you serious? There is a Walter Wyckham book with a sacrifice on the altar of the stone circle? By hooded monks?”
“Robed druids, but yes. It also has a scene where a character is locked in the family crypt with a recently murdered corpse. He’sleft there overnight and goes raving mad. And just now Wynn asked me and Bram to put Elise in the crypt, and he nodded at me to go in first, and I remembered—I thought…”
He shuddered again, violently, as though he was chilled to the bone. Gideon put his arm round him, and Zeb leaned against him, feeling safe in the embrace even though he really wasn’t.
“I don’t know if he meant to lock one or both of us in,” he went on. “Clara Lackadayhas two brothers fighting over a fortune who are locked in a room, so maybe that was in his mind. And I don’t know, if he’d locked me in, if Bram would have objected or if he’s too addled by now. The point is, it’s all Walter. Even the basic premise is Walter.Clara Lackaday’s entire plot is her being trapped in a great house with a wall round the estate. I literally thought about that when I arrived. We’re in a cocktail of my grandfather’s books, and if I had to be caught in an authorial world, I would not have picked his!”
“Makes one think longingly ofFaraway Meadow,” Gideon agreed thinly. “What about Colonel Dash? Are there mysterious disappearances?”
“Several, most ending badly. And secret passages. And there’s also the sinister secretary.”
“Do I want to know?”
“He’s the villain ofColdstone Abbey, and father of Lady Ravendark’s baby, but it’s hinted he’s also sleeping with Lord Ravendark, inasmuch as you could hint it at the time. In the end he gets put at the bottom of a well, standing with water up to his neck, and left there knowing he’ll drown once he falls asleep.Which, of course, he does eventually, after lots of terrible hallucinations and slowly rotting away alive. It’s horrible.”
There was a nasty pause. Gideon said, “You don’t think—”
“I don’t know,” Zeb said. “I don’t know how much Wynn has planned or how mad he is. Not that ‘mad’ is the word, really. I think he’s perfectly sane, justwrong. If you told me he was possessed by Walter Wyckham’s ghost, I’d probably believe you.” He thought of the portrait, his ancestor’s sly smile on that cherubic face. “I just wanted to make sure you knew about the secretary and, uh, don’t go near any wells?”
It was just a joke. A whistling-in-the-dark joke, but a joke nevertheless, so it was unfortunate that his voice cracked on the words.
“Zeb.” Gideon’s arms closed round him. “Zeb. Sweetheart. It’s all right.”
“It is not all right! It isn’t nearly all right and I keep thinking of that cursed scene—”
“I’d rather not dwell on that. What else happens in the books? What about this Lord Ravendark?”
“The sinister secretary drops a chandelier on him.”
“There’s a chandelier in the hall.”
“I’ll look up,” Zeb said, feeling rather sick. “Oh God.”
“At least we know what’s going on, and that will surely help.” Gideon kissed his hair. “We’re getting out of here. Both of us. I promise.”
“You can’t promise me that. It’s not in your power.”
Gideon paused. “No, perhaps I can’t. But I can promise thatI won’t leave without you.”
“Well, don’t. What if you have to?”
“I will not leave without you,” Gideon said steadily. “That is a promise. Now stop recriminating: we need to work out what to do.”
“Not believe Wynn, for a start,” Zeb said. “I really thought he’d sent for the police, just like I’ve swallowed a great deal of lies since I got here.”
“We all have. I believed his lies about you.”
“But then you stopped. Whereas I—oh, hell. Gideon, I told Jessamine I was going to leave today. She was going to propose to me again and it was too awful and I said I was leaving, and the next thing, Wynn turned up with this plan for a funeral march for Elise and I felt obliged—”
