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“Neat,” I said for lack of a better response. “I’ll see you around, then.” I turned to go.
“It won’t bother you, so long as you follow the rules,” he said. I turned back, but he was shoveling dirt again.
I walked away, the steady sound of shoveling fading behind me as I headed in the direction that Mr.Locke had indicated, and before long I came to the lake. The edge of the water was scabbywith frost, and wisps of morning fog clung to the air above it. Around the right side of the lake was a structure of crumbling stone—what looked like it had once been a circular building with Greek columns. There was no sign of Bryony, which was almost a relief. I didn’t know if I was up for navigating another conversation with the Harrow Witch so soon.
I made my way around the water. The false ruins were overgrown, and graffiti decorated the stones haphazardly—mostly names, a few random phrases.Beware the witchwas spray-painted in yellow next toMissy + Darren 4everand the ominousdon’t let the shadows know your name. I wondered how many kids from Eston snuck onto the grounds. The shattered beer bottles and stubbed-out cigarettes suggested the answer was quite a few.
I halted by a half-toppled wall, looking out at the misty pond. It was beautiful, in an eerie way. I rested my hands on the top of the wall.
—the stars shining black—tell me what you see!—just a small incision—
Whispers swarmed around me so quickly that I felt as if I was falling. Falling through a field of stars that shone black, an impossible luminous darkness in which something vast moved, a violent, threshing convulsion in slow motion.
She has looked upon his face, said the whisper in the stone.
I jerked back with a stifled cry—and realized someone was watching me. She stood on the other side of the lake, right at the edge of the water, her hair wind-tumbled about her shoulders. Bryony. Our eyes met, and I had the curious sensation that if Ireached out my hand, it would find hers, as if no space lay between us at all.
And then she turned and walked away.
I felt a pang of disappointment—and then I realized that she wasn’t leaving. She was coming around the lake. I stayed where I was, some part of me needing to know that every step toward me was her choice.
“I was looking for you,” I said when she finally reached the toppled stones. “Your father said you were here.”
“I like to come here,” she replied. Her fingertips trailed over the top of one low wall. “The dark soul is easier to talk to here at the folly. Something about the stones. Have you worked out what that book says?”
I shook my head. “It’s all in some kind of code.”
“Obviously,” she said with a little snort of amusement. I flushed.
“Desmond is going to see if he can crack it,” I told her quickly.
She walked along the edge of the folly, hand on the wall. I turned in place to hold her gaze. “I thought you said you couldn’t trust your family.”
“I have to trust someone.”
“Do you trust me?” she asked, head tilting curiously.
I didn’t answer. I didn’t know how to explain why the answer that leaped to my lips wasyes, without hesitation. “I don’t think your father likes me,” I said instead. Lightly, like I didn’t know for sure. And like I didn’t know why.
“Really?” That seemed to surprise her; she stopped in hertracks at last, her hand dropping to her side. “Dad likes everyone.”
“But no one likes me,” I said, shrugging. “I scare them. Or they adore me, and then hate me when they realize it isn’t real. You and my family are the only people I’ve met who don’t react that way.”
“I don’t like you either,” she pointed out.
“It’s not the same. You seem to have decided to dislike me all on your own,” I said.
“That’s why you keep following me around? Because I dislike you honestly?” Bryony asked, brow arched.
“You have no idea what a relief it is to be hated because of something I understand,” I said. She gave a sort of abortive laugh, like she couldn’t decide if I was joking or not, and then she frowned.
“It sounds like how people react to Harrow,” she said thoughtfully. “Some of them are repulsed by it. Frightened or hateful, without knowing why. And others are spellbound. Drawn in. Until they leave, and it’s like they’re waking from a dream, and the clash between what they felt then and what they feel later makes them afraid. You were born here, weren’t you?”
I nodded.
“So was I,” she said. “My mother had me at home. She couldn’t stand Harrow, though. She left when I was young.”
“Like mine.” We must have both lived here at the same time. Another piece of my past forgotten. I wondered if we had ever played together—but I imagined angry little Bryony, five years old and already fiercely set against the family in the big house. No, we wouldn’t have been friends.
