The Sweet Far Thing
Page 23

The fog clears, and I’m mounting the stairs of Spence, past the enormous portrait of Eugenia Spence. I climb until I find myself on the roof in my bedclothes. The wind rips through me. On the horizon, storm clouds gather. Down below, the men continue their work on the East Wing. Their hands are as quick as an owl’s blink. The stone column rises higher. A shovel strikes the ground and will not go farther. It has hit something solid. The men look to me. “Would you like to open it, miss?”
The lady in the lavender dress opens her mouth. She’s trying to tell me something, but there is no sound, only alarm in her eyes. Suddenly, everything moves very fast. I see a room lit by a single lamp. Words. A knife. The lady running. A body floating upon the water. I hear a voice like a whisper in my ear: “Come to me….”
I wake with a start. I want to sleep again but I can’t. Something’s calling to me, pulling me downstairs and out to the lawn, where a full moon spreads its buttery light over the wooden skeleton of the East Wing. The turret rises into lowlying clouds. Its shadow reaches across the lawn and touches my bare toes. The grass is cold with dew.
Upon the roof, the gargoyles sleep. The ground seems to hum beneath my feet. And once again, I am drawn to the turret and the stone there. I step down into the hole. The framing of the East Wing looms above my head, and the night clouds move like lashes from an angry whip. The crescent eye glows, and in the faint light, I see an outline in the stone that matches the amulet’s shape.
A tingling begins in my fingers. It travels through my body. Something inside me wants release. I can’t control it, and I’m afraid of whatever it may be.
I put my hands to the stone. A surge of power pushes through me. The stone glows white-gold, and the world pitches. It is like looking at the negative of a photograph: Behind me is Spence; before me are the skeletal East Wing and, farther on, the woods. But if I turn my head, shimmering there is another image of something else that stands between. I blink, trying to clear the image.
And when I look again, I see the outline of a door.
“Gemma, why have you brought us out here in the middle of the night?” Felicity grouses, wiping sleep from her eyes.
“You’ll see,” I say, shining the light of a lamp over the back lawn.
She shivers in her thin nightgown. “We might at least have brought our cloaks.”
Ann wraps her arms about her middle. Her teeth chatter. “I w-want to go b-b-back to b-bed. If Mrs. Nightwing should f-find us…” She glances behind us for signs of our headmistress.
“I promise you won’t be disappointed. Now. Stand here.” I position them beside the turret and place the lantern at their feet. The light washes them in an unearthly white.
“If this is some childish prank, I shall kill you,” Felicity warns.
“It isn’t.” I stand on the ground above the old stone and close my eyes. The night air nips at my skin.
“Gemma, really,” Felicity complains.
“Shush! I need to concentrate,” I snap. Doubt whispers cruelly in my ear: You can’t do it. The power’s left you.
I won’t listen. Not this time. Slowly, I let go of my fear. The ground vibrates beneath my feet. The land itself seems to call to me, pulling me under its spell. My fingers thrum with an energy that both frightens and excites. I open my eyes and put out my hand, searching for the hidden door. I don’t see it so much as feel it. The sensation is one of exquisite longing and joy. A wound of desire that cannot be healed. It’s whispering to me secrets I don’t comprehend, languages I do not know. The wind howls. It whips up small tornados of dust.
The land shimmers. The faint outline of the door appears again.
“Blimey,” Ann gasps.
Felicity reaches out tentatively. “You believe that leads to the realms?”
“On the night of the fire, the Winterlands creature came to take Sarah,” I remind them. “And Eugenia Spence offered herself in Sarah’s place. She threw her amulet—this amulet—to my mother and sealed the door into the realms. The East Wing burned. All traces of the door were gone.”
“We don’t know that this is the same door,” Ann says, shivering. “It could lead anywhere. To the Winterlands, perhaps.”
“I’m willing to take that chance,” I say, embracing the glimmer of hope I’ve been offered.
“W-we c-c-could be trapped,” Ann says.
“We’re already trapped,” Felicity says. “I want to find out what has happened to Pip.” She takes my arm. I grab the lantern.