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“We can’t go in there,” Desmond said.
“It’ll be okay,” I told him. “We’ll stick together.”
“No, he’s right. They should stay,” Bryony said. Something passed between them, some agreement I wasn’t privy to.
“Fine. Go back to the house,” I said. “Wait for us there.”
Desmond gave Bryony a hard look. “Bryony—”
“I know. I’ll make sure she gets back in one piece,” Bryony promised. He nodded, and he and Celia went back the way we’d come.
“What was that about?” I asked her.
“He’s just worried about you,” she said. “Let’s get moving.”
I handed her the bags of bones and then slotted myself through the gap. The stone was cool and dry. The interior of the tunnel smelled earthy, and my dreams returned to me vividly.
Bryony led the way, her lantern glow scraping the walls of the narrow place. Stone gave way to earth, and as my hands trailed against the sides of the tunnel, they came away covered in dirt. I looked down. The dirt also coated my sneakers.
“Helen, the tunnel is curving,” Bryony said. “It’s getting tighter.”
“I know.” We were walking in a spiral. And soon we would be at its center. “I’ve been here before,” I said.
Bryony twisted to look back at me. “You have? When?”
“At night,” I said. “When I dream.”
We sank deeper into the earth as we walked, the tunnel sloping. We walked on and on and on. How could anyone have dug this? It must run under all the grounds of Harrow. The air grew close. Thready roots grew through the low ceiling, and here and there, thicker tree roots burst through the walls, forcing us to clamber over them. Finally, we rounded the last turn of the ever-tightening curve of the corridor and came to a stone door. The spiral of Harrow was chiseled into it. We’d reached the center.
“We’re under the house,” I said.
“Do we go in?” Bryony asked. It wasn’t that she was uncertain, I realized. She was giving me the choice—because it had to be mine.
“We go in,” I said, and reached for the handle of the door. It swung open on well-balanced hinges.
Beyond was a circular room with an earthen floor. In the center loomed a slab of gray stone, standing upright. Upon it was the familiar spiral. Above us, impossibly, shone the stars—impossible because as clearly as I saw the night sky, I saw the ceiling, too, solid stone and impenetrable. It was as if the room existed in two places at once.
“I’ve been here before,” I repeated, stepping through. Bryony drifted behind me like a shadow. “The night the Folded bit me. I was taken here.”
“Helen.” Bryony pointed at something near my feet, and I stared. It was a hand—or it had been. It lay palm up, pale bone protruding at the severed wrist, fingers curled. The flesh had rotted, and the delicate brown caps of mushrooms sprouted from its cupped palm. It wasmyhand—the one the Folded had bitten into.
I stumbled back from the thing. I’d been here, and someone had cut it off, and—what? I’d grown a new one? “How is that possible?” I asked. Bryony only shook her head.
There was still no sign of Jessamine, or any other figment, but this time I knew what to do. The same instinct that guided my hands when I crafted beauty from my scavenged bones led me now, and I knelt at the base of the pillar. I dug my fingers into the soft earth, baring a smooth curve of bone. A skull.
“Haley Cotter,” I whispered. I opened the bag at my hip and carefully removed the bones that Roman had stolen. The cloth that wrapped them snagged, and as I drew them out, the ring and barrette I’d retrieved from Celia tumbled onto the earth. Haley was nearly whole already. I set the stolen bones above her shallow grave and placed the purple barrette beside it.
The next skull was close by, a few inches deeper. “Lara Pearson,” I whispered. I gave her back what bones we’d found. There were others, too, buried haphazardly, those few the shadows had foraged. I made no attempt to arrange them in the shape of a body but settled them as gently as I could. They’d had enough of violence, and too little of comfort, these girls.
“Susan McConnell,” I said next. I couldn’t say how I knew her name, only that I did. Then came Margaret Bell, whose bones were the smallest of all, and Edith Grayson, who had been the oldest. And then—“Helen Beaumont,” I said, hands trembling. The shadows had found nearly all of her bones by now. I had only one to offer, a single rib which I laid on the ground. “Her name was Helen.”
“They scattered us,” the dark soul said. It knelt with me, and it wasn’t one of the girls, but it was all of them. Its image flickered. Different ages, different eras, all of them with the black eyes of Mary Beaumont.“We need to be whole.”
“We’ve brought you all we can,” Bryony said. My tongue stuck to the roof of my mouth. “We hoped it would help you—enough to tell us what to do. How to free you.”
The figment reached out and took my hands. She wasn’t thegirls anymore—she was Mary Beaumont, and she guided me to my feet, smiling sadly. “I promise I will tell you the truth,” she said.
“But first, I need to lie.”My grandfather’s voice, my grandfather’s face.
