I recognized it. This was Grandad’s house.
“Shall we go inside?”
Kessian appeared at my shoulder like a ghost. I hadn’t heard him approach. He was there as if he’d always been.
“This is my grandad’s house.”
“I know. I used to visit and help him with the gardening.”
A stab of envy went through me. Kessian probably knew present-day Edwin Ashborne better than his own grandson did.
“How is coming back here meant to help me?”
“The more you see, the more it might make sense. Come on.”
We walked up the steps of the porch, through the door with its two stained-glass panels, into—
It should have been the foyer, and it was, but it was also a forest. The stairway banisters had grown into trees that twisted through the ceiling, branches sprouted from the walls, and the rug runner had a peculiar, cloying feel underfoot.
Worst of all was the sound.
There’d been a grandfather clock in the hallway, which tick-tick-ticked and chimed on the hour. I remembered, in early childhood, finding the noise so intolerable that I’d screamed and screamed whenever we visited. My parents thought I didn’t like Grandad, but it had just been the clock. We stopped coming around so often, until one Christmas, when I’d gotten old enough to understand how clocks like that worked, I jammed the pendulum with an old shoehorn to stop it from ticking.
The clock was there now, overgrown with foliage, its pendulum still swinging to and fro, but instead of ticking, the song of the strid issued from it, its tune like wind, percussion like rain.
“Do you hear that?” I murmured.
Kessian nodded. “What is it?”
The words caught in my throat. “That’s the song I heard. The one that lured me into the strid.”
“Oh.” Kessian’s expression changed, assessing the song differently. “It takes on a different sort of beauty when you put it like that.”
The grandfather clock lurched. We both jumped at the sound of something spraying inside. I expected blood, but the geyser of it began to leak. Black water hemorrhaged from the cracks around the glass-paneled door, gurgling into the hallway.
The clock didn’t tick, but my heart did. A heavy, rapidly accelerating drum. I took a step back from the clock, feet squelching in the sodden rug runner.
“I think we need to leave,” I said.
“Nothing here can hurt you.”
This failed to reassure me when a hand composed of shadows slammed against the inside of the glass. It arrested the swing of the pendulums, splashing through the water rising in the interior. The fingers squeaked against the pane as they slowly closed to make a fist. Then the hand drew back and punched through, glass shattering and frigid water bursting from within.
I backed away. I grabbed Kessian’s wrist and tried to pull him back, too, but he said, “It can’t hurt you. This is the safest place to confront your fear.”
The thing was emerging from the clock. It moved sinuously and with an irregular pace, like a dancer adapting to an off-beat tempo. Its arm came through first, prowling with its claws grasping the muddy floorboards. Then a shoulder jerked out, popping at an odd angle. The antlers rattled the pendulums and phased through like smoke.
I’d backed up to the front door, still grasping Kessian’s wrist.It can’t hurt you, he’d said, but it seemed plenty capable, and I didn’t understand how this vision could help me.
The wraith tilted its head, antlers scraping the ceiling, and pointed at the clock, whose hands abruptly spun backward, rewinding through time. The forest shrank away. The wraith vanished. The variety of clocks cluttering the hallway shrank and vanished, the yellowing wallpaper restored to white, until everything appeared just as it had when I was young.
It all melted away, and for a moment I thought I was back in the waking world because I was standing on the banks of the spring, but Kessian wasn’t there, and it was night. I watched the water, which bubbled and glowed. Something was emerging from it. I expected the wraith and took a step back.
But it wasn’t the wraith. A dark head of hair emerged, a face coughing up water. A young girl.
I leapt in, wading up to my waist to help her, and it was only when she swept her hair from her eyes and lifted her face that I recognized her.
Laurelie.
