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“Because you never told me.”
“I couldn’t. I can’t,” she said. “There are things we don’t talk about, and things I don’t remember, and things I remember that I can’t be sure are true.”
She rubbed her temples, then sagged with a sigh.
“I used to love it here, you know. Victoria and Caleb and I would go swimming in the pond every day during the summer and roam all over the woods. I used to play with... I can’t remember her name. Laura? Lena?” She trailed off. “It was so long ago. Maybe Caleb would remember.”
I caught her hand. “It’s going to be okay, Mom. But I need to stay. I have to find out what this place is,” I said.
“I know what it is,” she replied, head tilted, gaze unfocused.
“What?” I asked.
She looked at me with hooded eyes. “A cage.”
—
The dream always began the same.
I was looking up—and up and up—at Harrow. The spires tilted dizzyingly above. The taste of soil filled my mouth, and I could not move. Then the dreams wandered their own paths—through corridors of stone or among the twisted trees, where things of shadow and sharp teeth waited for me.
Tonight, I wandered the house. I watched its occupants playing out nighttime rituals. My mother curled with her back against Simon, sleepless and staring at the wall as he murmured sleepy words of comfort into her hair. Caleb sat at his desk in his study, an old, handwritten leather book open beside him, a glass of whiskey in his hand, untouched, with the ice slowly melting. Grandma Iris slept alone in a bed far too large for one person. Celia whimpered fretfully as dreams convulsed through her while Desmond snored, a book abandoned next to him on the bed.
In the woods, shadows moved with nothing to cast them, darkness within darkness. Their fingers were long and sharp, their necks stretched, their limbs distended. They were looking for something, but I didn’t know what.
On a forest path, the girl in the gray dress walked slowly and sang softly.
“There was a maiden, golden-haired,
Came to the fold, came to the fold.
She walked among the shadows there.
Her bones are white, her blood is cold.”
She paused in her singing. She looked behind her. Back at Harrow. Back at me. “Is that you?” she whispered. She sounded bewildered. She sounded hopeful. “Where have you been?”
But I was rushing away, rushing down, falling and falling and falling beneath Harrow’s stones, and I looked down. Below me opened a spiral, an endless seethe of movement, dragging me in. A voice whispered in my ear.
“Find the heart of Harrow.”
Then I woke, that familiar taste of soil making me gag. Harrow’s bell was ringing. And I wasn’t in my bed like I should have been.
Instead, I stood on the lawn with frost-rimed grass crushed beneath my bare feet, a pale mist of rain prickling my skin and leaving drops trembling in my hair. The morning sun stretched my shadow out along the grass. My hands were caked with dirt, and more was packed under my fingernails. I shivered, my breath a plume from my lips, confusion and fear swirling through me.
“What the hell are you doing out here?” a rough voice asked. I jumped and turned. Roman, Aunt Victoria’s husband, scowled at me from a few feet away. He’d ditched his funeral attire for a brown woolen sweater over a button up and slacks. His jaw-length hair must have once been black but was now mostly gray, parted in the middle. He was the sort of guy who seemed to have the twenty-year-old version of himself superimposed over him, and I could picture the arrogant prep school kid he’d been, his jaw sharpened, his hair jet black, but the haughty sneer the same.
Something about the sight of him scraped the fear from my skin, left me raw and prickly. “What do you care?” I snapped.
“It’s not safe to wander these grounds,” he said, but the scorn in his voice belied his apparent concern.
“I’m not wandering. I’m on the front lawn,” I said, head cocked. Harrow may have terrified me, but Roman did not. I focused on him, on that sneer. I focused on hating him, because that was so much safer than the question of how I’d found myself standing out here in the cold. “Everyone keeps saying it’s dangerous here. No one will say why.”
“Since you’re not staying, you won’t have to find out,” Roman replied.
“I am staying, though.” I should have shut up. But I couldn’t help it. “Didn’t you know? Grandpa Leopold left the house to me. So I live here now. Can you believe that?”
For about half a second, the satisfaction of seeing the expression on his face made it worth it. And then the bafflement turned to rage, and I realized I’d made a poor calculation. His face crumpled into anger, his hands knotting into fists.
