“Why don’t you retire early tonight, dear?” she suggested, her voice overly bright. “You’ve worked so hard today. You must be exhausted.”
I was, in fact, exhausted.
The fatigue had settled deep into my bones, and my vision blurred at the edges. The discoloration in my hands had deepened, creeping further up my arms. I caught her staring at them now, a frown creasing her forehead.
“You are probably right,” I agreed, standing with effort and tucking my hands behind my back. “Thank you for supper, Agnes.”
“Sleep well, dear,” she said, already moving through the kitchen door.
I stared after her for a moment, then turned and made my way toward the stairs. The house, I was learning, felt different in the evening. The darkness altered the proportions of the place, stretching the corridors until they breathed around me, expanding and contracting like the lungs of a patient, hungry beast. My footsteps echoed against the wooden floors as I climbed, each creak unnaturally loud in the silence.
I was halfway up the staircase when the voice spoke, so clear and distinct that I actually paused mid-step.
She lied to you.
The thought arrived with the certainty of something that had observed the evidence and drawn a conclusion,wearing the shape of my own reasoning but moving through my mind in that voice that was not quite mine.
I tightened my grip on the bannister and kept climbing. I had reached the landing and taken perhaps three steps down the hallway when the voice came again.
Hawthorne isn’t here. See for yourself.
I stopped walking.
The corridor stretched before me, its closed doors standing sentinel on either side, none containing anything I had any right to know about—each one a locked compartment of a life I had been employed to exist adjacent to, not within.
This was not my concern, I chided myself silently. Wherever Hawthorne was supposedly resting, was none of my business.
Unfortunately, curiosity had always been my defining vice. When I was a child, my father said it would get me into trouble one day—that my need to understand, to investigate, to uncover hidden truths would lead me somewhere I should not go.
And he had been right about so many things.
I glanced down the corridor toward my room, then back toward the other closed doors. Checking would not hurt anything, just a quick look to satisfy this gnawing uncertainty. Then I could retire with a clear conscience, knowing I had not ignored something potentially important.
The rationalization was thin, but I was willing to accept it.
The first room was a guest bedroom—the bed made, the washstand empty, and the curtains drawn against the night. It held the stillness of a room that had not been occupied in some time. I closed it gently.
The second was much the same. Furniture was positioned neatly, the surfaces were clean. It revealed the maintenance of a space that was ready to receive someone and had been ready, perhaps, for a very long time.
My footsteps sounded too loud in the corridor as I crept through the hall, each creak of the floorboards announcing my presence to anyone who cared to listen. I told myself no one was listening, though I was not entirely convinced.
The third room was smaller, its walls bearing faded pastoral scenes that must have once been cheerful and had become, with time, something considerably less so. Lambs danced in a field and shepherdesses watched them with expressions of placid contentment—all of it muted to the color of old memories by years of disuse. Their flat painted eyes tracked me across the threshold with a persistence that was obviously my imagination but felt, regardless, like surveillance.
I pulled that door shut more quickly than the others.
A fourth room held storage, covered furniture creating strange silhouettes in the dark, shapes that my exhausted mind turned into things they were not, before resolving into the ordinary geometry of forgotten things.
I moved further down the hallway, into the narrower branch of the corridor I had not yet explored, where the lampscarcely reached and the shadows were correspondingly deeper and more committed to their work.
Four more doors revealed much of the same—rooms that had perhaps once been happily occupied, now devoid of any sign of human life.
I stood in the hallway with that certainty settling through me in cold increments, and tried to decide what to make of it. Unless there was another staircase that led to rooms I was unaware of—which I was almost certain there was not—Agnes had lied.
The knowledge made me wonder how many other things she had told me that might be untrue.
I turned back toward my own corridor, toward my room and the temporary safety it represented. My steps slowed as I passed the rose door. The one room I had not checked. I paused, my hand rising toward the handle before I had consciously decided to reach for it.
Open it, the voice said, eager now.See what he’s been hiding from you.
