For a moment, he was sure he heard his name being called. A whisper caught on the wind.William. But out here, so far from the manor, sound didn’t seem to exist. All but the thundering ache of his heart and the heavy breaths that left him.
He scrambled back, pushing against the glue of mud and rainwater. William knew his legs would’ve given out if he tried to stand. He’d turned the ground into a thick sludge, worsening the area. William didn’t want to stop fleeing, but that choice was taken from him when his back pressed against something hard and deathly cold.
A choked cry caught behind his teeth. He prepared himself to find someone standing in his way, blocking him. But whatever was behind him was motionless.
William turned to discover what was there. Not a person. Something worse.
Hidden within overground weeds waited a slab of stone. Moss and mould took up the grey face, but not enough to distort the very obvious carvings that’d been etched into the stone’s face. Words. Squinting, William lowered his face closer, trying to make out the words in the dim light. He lifted his finger, tracing the grooves, smudging mud across it.
It was a gravestone.
“Robert… Thomas,” William read aloud, letting the night bear witness to his discovery and deep-set fear. “No. God, no, no. No!”
It took a few more beats of his heart to truly understand what he’d found. When he did, his entire body seemed to pause. His breathing, his heartbeat, his mind. All that remained were the debilitating shakes left as the rain sunk into his bones and made home within them.
It was Robert’s gravestone, set into the expansive grounds of Hanbury Manor, hidden away from the world. It was a burial site. William rocked back, looking between the stone and his hands, and pieced together the final bit of the puzzle.
He’d woken up midway through digging up a grave.
It could’ve been hours that passed before Edward finally found William. William hadn’t moved a muscle since discovering where his sleepwalking had brought him – what it had made him do. He just sat amidst the downpour, watching the gravestone as if Robert would claw himself out of the earth at any moment. William had become a prisoner to his own mind, watching from a glass cage in the back of his head as the world carried on around him. He no longer felt the cold. He no longer cared for the mud smudged up his arms, across his trousers and beneath his nails. This was his terrible reality now, and he submitted to it.
Eventually, he saw the frantic sway of unnatural light coming from Hanbury Manor, followed by a man’s voice screaming his name. Edward was coming. William waited to be discovered, there was no energy left in him to call back.
William flinched as the torch’s beam laid upon him. What followed was the wet smack as Edward dropped the torch to the ground.
Then his hands. Those warm, hard and real hands that had become such a comfort.
“Oh, my God, William,” Edward said, kneeling before him, blocking Robert’s gravesite with his broad back. “Are you all right? Jesus, you’re frozen. How long have you been out here?”
Questions William couldn’t answer even if he wanted to. His teeth chattered so violently that if he even attempted to speak, his tongue would’ve been severed. Blood coated his tongue, sliding down the back of his neck like a worm of harsh copper.
Edward laid the back of his hand against William’s head, the warmth of him so intoxicating it finally gave William the cause he needed to take his eyes off Robert’s gravestone.
The men locked eyes with each other. William was oddly calm, Edward wild with worry.
“Come here,” Edward cooed, sorrow drawn tight in the lines across his brow. “Let me help you.”
“It wasn’t – me,” William managed, those three words taking so much energy that he almost passed out after speaking them.
Edward didn’t question William. He didn’t bother to retrieve his torch either – maybe he didn’t notice, but William did – the beam shone directly upon the gravestone, making the carved name impossible to ignore.
“I’ve got you.” Edward scooped William up from the floor with a great heave. He held him up, pressing his face to his chest. “I’m not taking my eyes off you for another second, I promise.”
With that, both men waded back through the overgrowth towards Hanbury Manor. William in Edward’s arms, his face pressed into his chest. What he felt within the confines of Edward’s ribs was the frantic beat of a heart full of terror.
William closed his eyes, focusing on the heat that oozed from Edward. He wished he could absorb it so deeply inside him that it would blaze through every vein. But the cold that had taken up residence inside him wouldn’t leave.
After what he’d experienced, he didn’t think warmth would ever find him again.
Just as the wash of Hanbury’s electrical light bathed them, William braved himself to open his eyes.
Something called to him – not a voice or a sound – but a feeling. It encouraged him to peer over Edward’s shoulder, the world swaying with each rushed step. What William found, far in the distance, clear only because of the glow of Edward’s forgotten torch, was a figure.
The outline of a shadowed person watched from beyond Robert’s gravestone. It was so dark that the features were impossible to make out except the two piercing eyes that watched, sinking like knives into William’s frozen skin.
In hindsight William would wonder why he didn’t cry out in horror or demand Edward to look back and see what he had. Maybe it was because William wasn’t scared of the shadow; in a way, he expected it to be there. Perhaps it had been all his time, keeping him company in the mud, the dark, the silence.
Shadow and man studied one another until the manor blocked the entity from view.
