Page 33

The stones were cold, unyielding. If they had secrets beneath them, then they were loath to give them up.

Ralph watched as Ivy got on her hands and knees and ran her fingers over the edges of the slate floor. “What are you looking for?”

“I’m not sure, but I’ll know when I see it.” Rocking back on her heels, she let her gaze roam over the small room until it landed on the lectern. The floor was uneven beneath it, one of the large paving stones just barely protruding. She tested the stone with her fingers, but it wouldn’t budge.

“Here.” Ralph crouched beside her, his arm brushing hers as he pushed aside the lectern and crooked his fingers under the lip of the stone. “Bloody thing is heavy,” he muttered. He had her move to the other end. It was cumbersome, her arms screaming in protest, but together they were able to find just enough purchase, and the stone scraped away, inch by inch. When it was free, Ralph hoisted it the rest of the way and pushed it to the side.

Realistically she’d known that what she was looking for wouldn’t be right there, but Ivy still felt a pang of disappointment as all that greeted them was a floor made of hard-packed dirt. A bug skittered away as the lamplight fell upon it, and Ivy took a fortifying breath. “We’re going to have to dig.”

They fell to work. Fingernails full of dirt and arms on fire, Ivy was just about to admit defeat, when the glint of glass shone up at her. Hurriedly brushing away the rest of the dirt, they stared down into the dark recess. The smell of death and rot rushed up to meet them, filling the cell.

“Shit.” Ralph scrabbled backward, but Ivy just stared at the foggy glass coffin and the visage that grinned back up at her.

The monk looked like the skeletal reliquaries of the Roman Catholics, reclining with his mouth ajar, coins resting in his sunken eye sockets. Emerald and ruby rings hung loose on his bony fingers, and his crimson hood was as vibrant and soft as the last time he donned it. Someone, perhaps the first Lord Hayworth or one of the other monks, had taken some extraordinary measures to preserve him, send him off into the hereafter in extravagance. Yet there was something not right about the skeleton. The bones that should have been dry and white instead glistened, and the sagging skin was wet with sticky brown blood. A faint humming rose from the grave, low but persistent.

Ralph murmured something too low for Ivy to hear, and her stomach turned over on itself. Fighting the urge to replace the stone and pretend as if they had never found it, she leaned down, sliding her fingers under the lip of the coffin lid.

“Ivy,” Ralph warned, but his voice was faraway.

The humming grew louder. It was the sound of a thousand voices speaking, words pouring over each other so quickly that she could barely catch one before another drowned it out. Stories, memories, dreams. A frantic chorus of forgotten lives. Here was the epicenter of the storm which brewed in Blackwood, the words winding around the skeleton, each story preventing any further degeneration of flesh. It was not blood which pumped through his desiccated heart, but stolen memories. The monk would never stop feeding, never stop searching for the words and stories that would sustain his suspended state of rest.

All of the death, the stolen lives and dreams, the grief. All of it because of one man, and his selfish, twisted beliefs. Ivy yanked off the glass lid, rusted hinges giving way with a groan and then she was face-to-face with death incarnate. Without so much as a second thought, her hand closed around the femur, wet and repulsive to the touch. With a yank, she pried it off. Next came the head, smashed to the floor, the golden jaw flying off. The arms, the ribs, one by one the bones came off, sinew and flesh protesting, but no match for Ivy’s frenzied state. The humming built until it was a storm of words and screams, swirling about with no page to land on.

When the bones lay shattered on the floor along with all the gold and jewels, she finally allowed herself the chance to breathe. The humming voices had gone quiet, but there was still a prickling tension in the air. Then light, slowly building, like the sun breaking free of clouds on a stormy day. The cell filled with it, warming her skin and bringing her to a place and time that was at once beyond the scope of her memory, yet intensely familiar. The tolling of a single bell echoed through the chamber, the spicy scent of incense wrapping around her. The world went still, and Ivy could feel not just the absence of evil, but a loving presence hovering just out of sight, like a mother watching her child from the doorway of another room.

The sound of Ralph calling her name gradually came back to her, his hands around her waist, pulling her back from the edge of the grave.

“It’s over, Ivy. It’s over.”

She sagged against him, wanting more than anything for him to be right. If it was truly over, then the tugging in her heart would slacken, and she would be free.

“No,” she said, as much to force herself to accept the inevitable as to convince him. “It’s not. We have to stop Arthur from whatever it is he plans to do.”

Ralph scrubbed at his jaw, looked as if he wanted to argue, but he finally nodded. He put his ear to the door, listening. “I go first,” he said sternly. “If it’s clear, follow me.”

Ivy had assumed it was morning, but as they passed through the hidden door into the library, the sky beyond the window was an ashy gray, the sun just slipping below the horizon. Had they been in the cell for hours, or had an entire day passed? Feet still sore and blistered, she let Ralph help her pick her way through the burnt rubble.

“Wait.” Among the overturned shelves and burnt beams, a book lay face up, a splash of white in the darkness. “I’ve seen this book before, in my dream,” she told Ralph as she rummaged the book out of the debris and brushed ash from its cover. “It—it knows everything about me, all my dreams and memories.”

The book sat heavy in her hand. Here was the sum of her life, the dreams, both good and bad, that filled her mind. The salty summer days spent in Brighton, the blanket forts and evenings reading by lamplight. Wandering the stacks of the library as her father tunelessly hummed while he worked. All those precious memories and so many more, the patches needed to fill a moth-eaten quilt, all lay within the book.

But before she could read even one page, the book quavered in her palms. Pages flipped open on their own accord, the words fading faster than she could read them, as if erased by some invisible hand. Throwing it down, Ivy backed up into Ralph, and they stood together, watching as her memories disappeared. The monk had been the sinew that held together the body of the library, the memories and dreams the pumping blood in a symbiotic relationship. But now the monk was gone, and there was nothing to hold it all together.

Soon a cyclone of pages was whipping through the air. Somewhere deeper in the library all the books of every Hayworth and librarian must likewise have been evaporating. Where would all those stories, those memories, go once they were no longer condemned to the pages of the monk’s collection? Ivy braced herself, waiting for her memories to come flooding back, but there was no great flash of light, no moment of complete enlightenment. Ivy felt the same as she had a moment ago, moored to reality by the strange encounters in the cell, but unable to grasp any threads of her past, except for whatever the monk had thought fit to leave her with. The rest had disappeared into the ether with the monk, gone forever.