I step closer. “Why did you stay, if you hated it so much?”
She does not look up from the cups. “I don’t hate it. I just know what it is. Besides, I loved your aunt. That was enough.”
The confession is a stone dropped in a well, and I feel the ripples down in my own marrow. I watch the way her hands move, the care she takes in lining up the handles, the way her left thumb brushes the rim as if testing for invisible cracks.
I think of the photos, of how close she stood to Maeve, at her hand on Maeve’s shoulder. At the way they looked at each other. They were in love. Or, at least what passes for love at Hemlock.
For the first time since I arrived, I see Mrs. Whitby as a person and not just a warden.
I think of the letter. “She wanted you to be free, too,” I say, reciting the words from memory, “breaking the chain, setting us all free.”
Whitby’s composure shatters. She sits, abruptly, as if her knees have gone soft. She places both palms flat on the table, fingers splayed for balance. Her breath comes fast, then slower, then not at all for a moment.
“I am old,” she says, voice stripped of all pretense. “Too old to start over. But you—” She stops, shakes her head. “You could be the end of it.”
I do not answer. The kitchen is cold, and the only sound isthe faint clatter of a spoon as Whitby’s hand betrays her, shaking harder now.
After a time, she stands, shoulders hunched, and begins to clean up. The cups are spotless, but she wipes them again and again, as if scrubbing at a stain that will not lift.
I watch her, knowing I should say something, do something. But I am frozen, held in place by the gravity of what I’ve inherited.
Whitby’s back is to me when she says, “It will not let you go easy, you know. The house. The hunger. It’s all a curse.”
“I know,” I say. And I do, even if I don’t know what that means.
She nods once, then returns to her work, the silence between us now something almost like peace.
I leave her there, in the cold, and walk the halls with the letter in my pocket and the knowledge that, for better or worse, the script is now mine to finish.
That night,the house is a lung, drawing and exhaling in slow, measured breaths. Every creak is magnified, every sigh in the pipes a warning. I cannot sleep, not really, but I submit to the ritual—blanket up to the chin, hands flat on my chest, eyes closed to the pattern of shadow on the ceiling.
At some hour past midnight, the dream begins.
I am in the east wing, at the farthest reach of the corridor where the wallpaper peels in long, curling tongues and the baseboards are raw with water damage. The door at the end is not the battered slab I remember, but something beautiful and monstrous—walnut inlaid with silver, the panels carved in relief with thorn branches and coiling serpents. There is no handle, only a knocker shaped like a tongue.
I know, in the way of dreams, that this is the room that has never been opened. The one no one speaks of, not even in drunken whispers. I approach, and the door swings wide, the hinges silent, the darkness beyond absolute.
Inside, the room is cavernous. My aunt is there, sitting in a high-backed chair draped in black velvet. Her face is both exactly as I remember and entirely wrong—eyes too bright, skin almost luminous in the gloom. She does not move, but her presence is magnetic.
I try to speak, but my throat is dry. The words die in the passage from brain to mouth.
My wrists are bound with chains, real and cold and so heavy they burn. I do not struggle. Instead, I kneel. The chains drag at my skin, raising bruises in the shape of flowers.
My aunt regards me with a smile, small and sharp. She inclines her head, and at that gesture, the chains slither loose, falling to the floor in a spill of sound. They evaporate into smoke, which rises and curls around my fingers before vanishing entirely.
The room pulses with noise—not music, not speech, but the aggregate of every secret ever whispered in these walls. The air is thick with it, dense enough to choke. I breathe in, and for the first time, it does not hurt.
I rise to my feet, taller than I ever was in life. My aunt opens her arms, as if to embrace, but I do not move to close the distance. Instead, I stand my ground. The old woman nods, approving, and the room shudders, the floor vibrating underfoot.
I turn away, stepping through the dark, the feel of metal gone but the imprint left behind.
I wake to the taste of iron on my tongue and the certainty that I have seen something essential.
The bedroom is cold. The radiator is silent. I sit up, breathclouding in the air, and only then do I notice the window is wide open to the night. Again.
I am sure it was closed. Absolutely sure.
The wind licks at the curtains, stirring them like the train of a dress.
