Page 49 of Emily Wilde’s Compendium of Lost Tales (Emily Wilde #3)

The moments that followed the housekeeper’s disappearance were spent in a state of agonized expectation.

For the faerie to reappear. For Wendell to reawaken. For something.

“What is happening?” I demanded of no one in particular, pacing back and forth.

I don’t think I’ve ever felt more frustrated, for I had no stories to guide me now, no academic knowledge to fall back on whatsoever.

Morning arrived, and it brought an improvement in the weather, the clouds beginning to break, the steady rain fading to a sunlit drizzle.

Mourners came and went, bowing in my direction but otherwise ignoring me, none seeming to sense the significance of what was happening.

Lord Taran’s response, when I told him what I had done, was one of flat disbelief.

“There are no doors to Death,” he said. “The Lady was mistaken—or, more likely, she invented a story to allow herself time to flee. The housekeeper has gone somewhere else, perhaps another realm, and gotten himself lost. Perhaps he is too embarrassed to return.”

“Not Death, ” I corrected him. “The Lady told me there is a place, half in this world and half elsewhere, where the spirits of the Folk linger for a time before they are truly gone. Only a short time—she said that I must make haste if I wished to pull Wendell out. She had never done anything of that nature herself, but she believed it was possible.”

Lord Taran only gave me a pitying look. Fortunately, Niamh arrived shortly thereafter and I was able to lay the matter before her.

“Emily!” she exclaimed, holding up her hands. “I’m glad to find you have left your rooms. But you will need to slow down.”

I forced myself to go back to the beginning, trying to keep my voice steady.

It was not easy. Not only because of my excitement, but I felt lightheaded—I could not remember the last time I had eaten anything.

If Wendell had been with me, he would have been appalled and not left off nagging me until I’d had some toast at least.

“My grandfather believed that the Lady in the Crimson Cloak knew of a door to Death,” I finished.

“I have hisjournal—though he was only a hobbyist, he was quite well-read. He cites several sources in arguing—well, essentially, for the existence of faerie ghosts. But I am not familiar with the names he references.”

Niamh took the journal from my hand, pausing to allow the braille enchantment to work, then ran her finger over the page I had marked.

“Robbins?” she said musingly. “I wonder if he means Archibald Robbins at the University of Amsterdam. He was seen as an iconoclast in my day; his theories concerned interactions between the Folk and the spirit world. A few reputable scholars still believed in ghosts back then and would debate whether some stories concerned ghostly or fae protagonists, but Robbins went further than many were comfortable with.”

“I’ve never heard of him,” I said with some indignation. I had thought myself familiar with the work of all dryadologists within the last century.

“He did not publish much before his death—which was nothing suspicious; he took a fall somewhere in Scotland. The Grampians, I believe. What little he did write was mostly retracted as scholarship evolved.” She paused.

“Helen W.W. could be a reference to Helen Worthington-West. She was before even my time. Wasn’t she at Cambridge? ”

I made a frustrated sound. “Of course! How did I not guess that? Bran Eichorn co-authored several papers with her. But then I have never bothered much with the writings of the spiritualists.”

“Not much value in it, except in tracing the development of dryadology itself,” Niamh agreed.

“One might as well study phrenology. Still, my research supervisor—a lovely man, but very much the product of an older era—encouraged me to read Worthington-West. She had some intriguing theories about bogles, or bogeys as they termed them then, but on the whole I found her ideas outdated and rather sensationalist. She presented a paper at a conference in Paris—it may have been ICODEF, before it was called that—in which she claimed to have interviewed a household brownie who had visited the afterlife and spoken with her recently deceased mother. Apparently this matriarch provided her daughter with instructions on what to serve at her funeral reception, including a recipe for lemon scones.”

“What!” I exclaimed. “Where was this published?”

“It wasn’t, unsurprisingly. I only know about it because my supervisor was at the conference.

There was quite the backlash.” Niamh paused thoughtfully.

“All this is to say that the Lady’s claim regarding doors to some sort of spiritual limbo, your grandfather’s references to ghosts—such things are not entirely without context in the field of dryadology.

Certainly the Worthington-West school would not have been surprised. ”

I gave a weak laugh and sank back onto the bench, resting my head in my hands. “I had thought that reading the histories of great faerie monarchs would prepare me for whatever Wendell and I would encounter here. Instead I should have spent my time on ghost stories.”

“So it appears,” Niamh said. I could tell that she was skeptical, if not outright disbelieving, but nevertheless her voice held a trace of hope. I noticed for the first time that her eyes were red and shadowed, and I recalled that she had known Wendell from his boyhood.

“And what does this old misanthrope have to say about your theory?” she said, adopting the familial, teasing tone she often used with Lord Taran, which always gave me a shiver of trepidation.

“Nothing whatsoever,” he replied. “I have no use for the arguments of scholars. And I am not so much a villain as to offer false hope.”

“That’s plain enough,” she said, her face falling a little. “How long has the little one been gone?”

Despair settled over me. “Two hours, perhaps.”

“You must eat,” Niamh said, placing a hand on my back. “You are trembling. Come with me.”

“I cannot.”

She sighed. “I will send for breakfast, then. And you will eat it, if I have to force it down your throat myself.”

—

Despite my weakness, I was sickened by the smell of breakfast when the servants placed it before me on a tray. Still, I made myself eat a few spoonfuls of egg and a piece of toast— Icould not countenance the strawberries or spiced porridge—knowing that Niamh was in the right.

The morning turned into afternoon. I sat and watched the dais, or wrote in my journal.

More Folk flitted in and out. Lord Taran departed, then returned.

I do not think he came to see if I would succeed, but rather how long I would hold on to hope.

Not once did he press me, though. Callum came and sat with me, and though I knew he meant well, I found his presence hardest to bear.

He looked at me with an understanding I wanted no part of.

Ivy continued to cover Wendell’s body. It was twining about his hair now, too, so thickly that only the odd clump of gold could be seen squeezed between the leaves.

Moths fluttered about the flowers, a snail made its slow way across his chest, and I caught sight of the odd cocoon being spun and the dark skitter of a spider.

I wanted to brush it all away, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t touch him.

As the day slipped into evening, I dozed off, Shadow snoring against my feet. I was startled awake by a cavalcade of flickering lights, which spun once around the room and were gone before I could even pinpoint what variety of faerie they were.

I lifted my head, trying to shake off the nebulous unease that accompanies awakening in an unfamiliar place.

The room was empty apart from a solitary brownie upon a ladder, who was lighting the lanterns, but a few Folk were still gathered outside on the stone steps—I could hear the murmur of their conversation.

I reached down to pet Shadow. But at some point, as I dozed, the dog had gone to lie next to Wendell’s body. I felt my eyes begin to sting. But then I noticed that the beast was not dozing—though his head rested on one paw—but gazing fixedly at the corner of the dais.

The hair rose on my neck. And I realized something else.

Shadow had not howled.

I went to crouch beside him, placing my hand on his head. Black Hounds are known for their haunting howl, which they let loose in the presence of death—or, in some stories, around those who are soon to depart. Yet not once since we entered the room with Wendell’s body had Shadow made a sound.

“What, my love?” I murmured. Shadow was not staring atthe place where the oíche sidhe had vanished, but to the left, around the other side of the dais. Which was where Wendell’s shadow would have been now, were there light enough to seeit.

“The door is in his shadow,” I murmured. I had seen the housekeeper go that way, but it still felt impossible, even amongst the many impossibilities of Faerie. “Isn’t it?”

The dog took no note of me. His world was that of smells, not theories.

And while he had never demonstrated any particular aptitude for locating faerie doors in the past, perhaps because he saw them as unexceptional features within the shifting tapestry of scent, his nostrils were twitching now. He stood.

“Shadow,” I said warningly.

He stood there for a moment, simply looking at nothing, and I thought that was the end of it and he would lie back down again, as he did whenever he sighted a rabbit on the campus lawn, remembering the effort it would require to catch it.

Then the dog made a motion with his snout that was like lifting up the hem of a curtain.

And then he stepped into the shadow, and was gone.

“Shadow!” I lunged forward, but caught only a few hairs of the dog’s tail. He could move quickly when he wanted to, which was not often.

I am not proud of this, but my immediate reaction was not to send for help, or to charge after him. Instead, I slumped against the dais and burst into tears.