Looking up, my eyes wandered over the hedge maze, finding the mausoleum where, to my utter astonishment, I spied a candle burning from within. Again.
“What in the world?” I murmured, straightening and squinting into the darkness. If the mystery girl had lit the candle previously, and she was now dead, who could be out there now? Was it someone else? What a coincidence that would be. I’d thought the candle had been a signal for Hargrove to meet with her in the hedge maze. Was a similar system being used for new players? And to what end?
I took the stairs to the first floor, intending to investigate, when I spied a servant standing at the door, looking half-asleep. I cursed silently, then decided to chance the servants’ hall to see if a guard was posted there as well. As luck would have it, the door was unmanned. An oversight on the part of Montoni and my aunt, or perhaps sloppy discipline on the part of the servants. Either way, it was fortuitous at the moment, and I tucked the inconsistency away in the back of my head, should I need it to escape my present situation in the near future.
Someone had left a cloak on a hook by the door, and I liberated it, throwing it around myself as I slipped from the servants’ door unimpeded. I made my way for the hedge maze, but decided to circumnavigate it for the moment, instead making directly for the mausoleum and the mysterious light. With each step, my feet disappeared into the fog, which coiled around me in unnerving tendrils. The mist seemed to test my flesh with each movement, as if feeling for a weakness, but I knew I was projecting. Fog was simply fog, no matter how disquieting it was.
As I reached the mausoleum, I slowed my steps, looking around for any signs of intrusion, but as far as I could tell, the area was silent, and I was unobserved. I crept to the entrance, my hands sliding over the cold marble and finding condensation on the surface. Before I lost my nerve, I stuck my head inside and gave it a thorough once-over, my heart thrashing in my chest. But no one was in the room.
I let out a breath and stepped within, eyes zeroing in on the candle, still lit and sitting in a window recess, where it flickered from the onset of a breeze.
I walked slowly around the small chamber. There were plaques in the wall, where the ashes of members of the family had likely been laid to rest in niches. And in the center of the room were two sarcophagi, laid side by side. I hesitated as I approached them, finding the names etched into each of them: Victor and Helena Morano. The parents of Henri and Blanche.
I swallowed hard and took a closer look to find the lid of Helena’s tomb askew. My eyes widened and I rushed to its side. I could just make out the interior of the sarcophagus.
It was empty.
Perhaps I was mistaken. Was her body never recovered? She had fallen from a cliff, intentional or not. Had it been to fall into the sea? I didn’t know enough of the circumstances to know for sure. Either way, I pushed the lid back into place.
I stepped over to Victor’s resting place, hesitating. Would he also be missing from his tomb? His body would have most certainly been recovered. It was sacrilegious, but I had to know. I gathered my strength before I could ponder the disrespect I was about to inflict on Henri’s father, and pushed on the lid. It seemed heavier than Helena’s somehow, and I had to really use my strength to get it to budge. As soon as an opening was discernible, I caught a whiff of decay. I grunted, unwilling to look within the tomb, and replaced the lid. At least the siblings’ father was in his rightful resting place.
My eyes found the candle again, and I frowned. Clearly, whoever had lit the flame was not in the mausoleum, so it was unlikely to be a late visit from a member of the family. That meant that it had to have been utilized as before, but by a different person. As a signal. And if whoever had stationed the candle in the window recess followed the pattern the mystery woman had used, they would be in the hedge maze.
I took a deep breath to gather my courage and left the mausoleum, making for the entrance of the maze. Medusa didn’t guard the opening here, but a single marble arm reached out from the hedges as if trying to escape from being pulled back inside by the shrubs. I’d never used this entrance before, so I hadn’t noticed the quirk, but it was a touch of macabre that I didn’t appreciate at the moment, what with the fog sucking at my every footfall.
I stepped into the hedge maze, trying to recall how it had looked in daylight, inviting with wide aisles and cheerful greenery. It was difficult to imagine this was the same place at all. The ground churned with a heavy mist, the dark hedges appearing like impenetrable prison walls, tall and imposing, threatening. I felt like the maze would devour me if I entered, but it would plague me to no end if I left this mystery unsolved.
Determined, I pushed through the maze. I didn’t meet a single dead end, this half of the maze clearly identical to the other. The designer’s imagination ended, it would seem, with the statues they’d depicted throughout.
The clearing was silent as I entered it, the fog making it appear more dreamlike than before. The base of the fountain was obscured, so it looked as if the goddesses were quite literally standing on a cloud.
I circled the fountain cautiously, remaining alert for anyone who might be lying in wait nearby, but no one seemed to be around. But if they weren’t here, where was the person who’d lit the candle?
I frowned, eyes roving the area more carefully, when I spotted something draped over the bench I’d previously hid behind while spying on Henri and Blanche. I sauntered over, expecting to find a discarded scarf or something frivolous from my aunt’s walks. Instead, what I saw made my blood run cold.
I stopped to stare a few paces from the bench, taking in the arm flung up onto the bench, as if gripping it for dear life, trying to pull its master from the hungry fog. I didn’t move for several seconds. My breathing stopped briefly as I considered who I might find at the other end of that arm. I didn’t want to find out, and yet I had to.
When I next drew breath, I forced my feet to move. The fog parted ahead of me like a vessel at sea, so that when I did reach the arm, the person it was attached to was briefly unobscured.
I gagged and had to swallow several times to keep my body from heaving. The arm wasn’t even attached to the man whose eyes stared up at the sky, unseeing. The arm was casually draped over the bench, blood oozing from a bloody shoulder. The man who lay beneath it had red hair and a spray of freckles across his face. I’d never seen him before, but his likeness to the mystery woman was undeniable. A brother or cousin. What he was doing here in her stead, I had no idea, but his chest was exposed to the night air, ribs ripped aside, as if whatever had done this to him had wanted access to his heart.
I took a step back. I felt light-headed, as if I might faint, but I dug my nails into my palms to keep myself present. I circled the bench, as if I might find a clue as to why the man had been out here, and what had done this to him, when the fog revealed another secret to me from its depths. Fournier. The man’s throat was gone, but he seemed otherwise unmolested. Blood trickled out from the corners of his mouth, and like the mysterious boy nearby, his eyes saw nothing.
As I gazed at the man I’d worked with closely toward the beginning of my stay at the château, I became aware of a noise emanating from the hedges around me. I blinked and took an unsteady step backward as I recognized it as a growl. The threatening growl of some beast.
Likely the very beast who had killed the men at my feet.
I willed the fog to swallow me as it had the corpses, but it passively whirled around me, unhelpful. Very carefully, as to make as little noise as possible, and to hopefully not alert a killer animal to my presence among the hedges, I crept toward the exit from the clearing.
When I stepped on a twig, it seemed to register like a blast of gunpowder in the dark. I winced and stared into the darkness.
The growling had stopped. And in a moment, in its place, I could make out the sound of crashing through the maze.
The creature had heard me. And it was coming for me.
I abandoned all pretense of stealth and ran.
In my flight, I wasn’t paying attention to where I was going. My mind reeled as I came to a stop at a dead end and was forced to turn around. I cursed myself, listening to the sound of crashing shrubs grow nearer and nearer.
