In the Night Wood

2

Charles took a deep breath, pushed his way inside. The narrow space beyond felt claustrophobic, though the store wasn’t crowded. A single customer, lean, with a hank of dark hair hanging over his forehead, studied the packets of seeds on a wire rack. Charles nodded as he slipped past to the counter at the back of the store.

A tall, fleshy man stood there, wiping his hands on his apron.

“Ah, the stranger among us,” he said in a thickly accented voice. But Charles was the one with the accent here, wasn’t he — the stranger, as Mould (was he Mould?) had pointed out, in a strange land. Mould or not, the man was old, seventyish and hale, bald but for the unruly wisps of gray that clung to the sides of his head, thin of lip, bulbous of nose, tufted of eyebrow and ear. Eyes of pale, penetrating blue peered at Charles over half-rim glasses. Charles wasn’t sure he liked the eyes. They seemed to see more than they had any right to see. The old man extended his hand. It was callused, the thick, ridged nails clogged with crescents of grease. He was Mould after all, Trevor Mould. He said the name as they shook hands, and Charles winced, not at the name but at the fact that he seemed to have inserted his hand into a vise.

“Charles Hayden,” he said.

“No doubt. We’re glad to have you here.”

“True enough,” the seed-packet man said, joining them at the counter. He introduced himself as Edward Hargreaves, adding, “Hollow House hasn’t had anyone to warm its bones for near two years now. Longer if you think of how Mr. Hollow grew toward the end.”

“Wouldn’t leave the house,” Mould said. “I hadn’t seen him for years by the time he finally passed.” He reached out a hand. “Let’s have a look at that, shall we?”

Charles passed the photo across the counter.

“So beautiful at that age, aren’t they? Six, I’m guessing.”

“Five. Five and a half, she would have said,” Charles said, his neck burning.

Mould tilted his head. “Left her at home, did you?”

“Back in the States.” Not a lie, he told himself, but — something else. He couldn’t say exactly what. An omission, nothing more. Yet a lie by any other name —

He hesitated.

The truth would come out sooner or later. Given the amount of research it had taken to track Erin down to inform her of the inheritance, Merrow almost certainly knew. And now Colbeck knew. How long before all of Yarrow did as well?

He spoke without conscious volition. “She —”

“What’s that?”

Mould had turned to the rear counter to study the photograph.

“Nothing,” Charles said. “She couldn’t make the trip,” he said, for to speak it aloud was to acknowledge it as a true thing — to acknowledge his role in it. He swallowed.

“What happened to the glass?”

“My wife. She dropped it. She took a spill on the stile.”

“She’s all right, I hope?”

“Twisted her ankle. She’ll be on her feet again before the week’s out.”

Hargreaves shook his head. “Funny thing that, isn’t it? That wall.”

“Both walls,” Mould said. “Must have been a hell of a lot of work. Hard to say whether the intent was to keep something in or something out.”

“They say,” Hargreaves added, “that old Mr. Hollow kept the place closed up in the last years of his life. Wouldn’t so much as permit an open curtain.”

A chill passed through Charles. There was something haunting about the idea of the old man thrice imprisoned, inside the house, inside the great encircling walls.

“We can fix this up for you,” Mould said. “Later this afternoon, say? Joey, the one that does the glass cutting, he’s down to the King for lunch. He’ll be back in half an hour or so, and I can put him right on it. Say an hour. I hate to make you drive all the way back here.”

“That’s fine. I wanted to look in at the historical society.”

“Quiet village, Yarrow,” Hargreaves said. “I warrant you won’t find much there.”

“I’m interested in Caedmon Hollow.”

Hargreaves grimaced. “Not fit for children, that book.”

“Leave the man be, Ed.” Mould looked up. “If you tire of the historical society, you can always stop in at the King for a pint, can’t you? Anyway, we’ll have it ready for you.” He held out his hand as though he were finalizing some complex financial agreement, and once again, reluctantly, Charles inserted his hand into the vise.

“An hour, then,” he said.

3

Charles didn’t know what he’d expected from the historical society: brochures advertising local attractions, maybe? Recessed lighting illuminating framed photos and polished glass display cases?

But no. The society was very much a work in progress. The foyer was gloomy and close. It smelled musty. The rooms beyond — the two Charles could see, branching off a broad hallway with a stairway to the right — were largely barren of any such displays. Framed photographs listed on their hangers. A handful of dusty exhibit cases stood half obscured by stacks of cardboard boxes.

“Hello?” someone called from the interior.

“Hello.”

A door opened and closed. In the shadows at the end of the hall, a figure appeared — angular and tall, female, beyond that he couldn’t say. The woman wiped her forehead with a cloth.

“Just here for a look about, are you?”

“I thought it might be interesting.”

“Ah. So you’re the American who’s moved into Hollow House.”

“That’s right.”

“You’re the talk of the town.”

He peered closer. “We are, are we?”

“Down to the King, you are,” she said. Then: “Feel free to have a look. We don’t have much, I’m afraid.”

“It looks to me like you have quite a lot,” he couldn’t help saying.

“A lot of rubbish. That’s what I’m here for, to excavate it all and figure out what’s worth keeping.”

“I thought you were the docent.”

“That, too. Listen, give me a minute to finish up. I’m sorting papers in the back here. Papers, papers everywhere and nary a drop to drink.”

Suddenly he liked her, this shadowy stranger at the far end of the hall.

“Then I’ll show you around a bit,” she said. “I’ll want to wash my face first, if you don’t mind.”

“And if I do?”

Was he flirting? An image of Ann Merrow’s taut rear end, muscles flexing as she climbed the stile, flitted through his mind. And then, worse yet, an image of Syrah Nagle —

He shunted the thought away.

“I’ll wash it anyway,” the woman said dryly, and with that she was gone.

Charles wandered into the adjoining room. He glanced at a set of photos — the high street from some distant era — picked up a stiff, yellowing copy of the Ripon Gazette, put it down again without bothering to read the headline, and ran a finger across the dusty surface of a glass display cabinet, leaving a long, clean snail’s track in its wake. He paused before a case of medals and fading ribbons. A yellowing index card pinned to the wall above it read, in faded typescript, Yarrow has contributed its share of young men to the conflicts of —

Charles turned away.

What on earth was he doing here, in a museum dedicated to a place where almost nothing had ever happened? Even Caedmon Hollow was an obscure figure in the annals of Victorian lit — a footnote, nothing more.

He’d hung his future on a footnote.

A wave of doubt swept over him. The scholar-adventurer indeed, he thought, turning to the next display, another constellation of fading black-and-white photographs: lean, grim-looking men posed beside farm animals and antiquated tractors, a young boy holding a prize ribbon against his chest. Black and white. Nobody smiling. The Yarrow Agricultural Fair began in the early 1800s and remains an institution —

Sighing, Charles drifted to the far end of the room. More photographs, he thought — but no, that wasn’t quite right. The images predated modern photography: daguerreotypes, and more than that, daguerreotypes of Hollow House. The first showed the place in ruins, roofless, the great rectangular stones of the exterior blackened by fire. The ones that followed — there were six of them, marching in a straight line across the wall — showed the house in various stages of reconstruction, culminating in an image of it in pristine condition.

Charles leaned forward to study the central image more closely: the roof framed with great beams, stacks of lumber and stones in the front yard below.

“Probably our best thing, that,” the woman said at his shoulder. “So far, anyway.”

Charles turned to face her, high-cheekboned and pale-complexioned, with a cap of close-shorn blonde hair, hazel eyes, a scattering of freckles across the bridge of her narrow nose. There was a smudge of dust over her right eyebrow. Apparently she hadn’t washed up after all. Or not very well, anyway.

“I’m Silva North,” she said.

“Charles Hayden.” He took her outstretched hand.

“Well, Mr. Hayden —”

“Charles.”

“Charles, then.” She nodded at the framed images. “The construction occurred between 1844 and 1848, following a fire that consumed most of the original manor house. The library and part of the salon survived, though badly damaged. Hollow’s wife, Emma, was not so fortunate. Tradition holds that Hollow set the fire himself, though why he might have done so is unclear. The book came out —”

“In 1850, to little fanfare,” Charles said. “Hollow committed suicide the next year.”

Silva North smiled. “I see that you’ve developed an interest in Hollow House since you’ve taken up residence.”

“Before that, actually. I’m working on — that is, I’m contemplating — a biography.”

“Rather limited audience for that, I should think.”

“I hope my book will change that.”

“Well, you’re in the perfect spot. There must be tons of stuff buried in that old pile.”

“I’m hoping so.” He hesitated, surveying the rat’s nest of boxes and papers. “I don’t know what your collection —”

And now Silva North laughed out loud, a rich, throaty laugh, not unkind. “Our collection,” she said. “Is that what brought you to our humble historical society?”

“I take it you are the society.”

“In a manner of speaking. The village pays me a modest stipend — all too modest, I’m afraid. And I get to live in the upstairs flat rent-free.”

“In return for?”

“In return for going through boxes. I decide what to keep and what’s rubbish. Mr. Sadler, who used to live here, died. Quite a hoarder, he was, with an eye to local history. That must have been twenty years ago. I was a girl. He left the house to the village, and they’ve been shoving boxes in here ever since. I volunteered to clean it out and put it in some order, open it to the public. A deal was struck, and here I am.”

“But why?”

“I have about half of a master’s in history from the University of York. And I’m interested in the village’s past. Unfortunately, it has produced no one of any great significance aside from our eccentric author. Strange book. Not quite right for children, is it?” She raised her eyebrows. “No white rabbits checking their watches.”

“No indeed.” Charles hesitated. “I was hoping that if you ran across anything about Hollow, you’d be willing to share. Have you?”

“The daguerreotypes, obviously. They were stashed away in a box of Mr. Sadler’s gas bills. God alone knows how they got there. Nothing else so far, I’m afraid.” She studied them. “They’d make splendid plates for your book, wouldn’t they?”

They would, Charles was about to say, but just then he heard the door open at the end of the hall, the patter of small feet in the corridor. The high, sweet voice of a little girl interrupted them, saying, “Mummy, I’m thirsty.” Charles turned, reeling when he saw the child, maybe five years old, six at the most, with blonde curls and blue jeans and an elfin and expressive face. The earth slid away beneath his feet. Subsidence, old ghosts rising up inside his mind: Lissa, he thought.

Charles stepped backward, Silva’s hand steadying him as the world came once again into focus: the musty smell of the place and the child in the foyer, the labyrinth of boxes.

Jesus, was this what Erin —

“Are you okay?”

“No, I” — deep breath, tears stinging at the corners of his eyes — “yes, of course, I —”

No words came.

Then Silva’s hand was gone. He could still feel its warmth on his back. “Who’s Lissa?”

Had he said it aloud?

He shook his head. “My daughter. She’s my daughter.”

Was, a malicious inner voice put in. Was your daughter.

“Still back in America?”

Always and forever, he thought. But all he said was “Yes.”

“You must miss her very much.”

“I’m thirsty, Mum.”

“Just a minute, Lorna.”

“They look very much alike,” Charles said. “It gave me a shock.”

“It must have. You look as though you’ve seen a ghost,” said Silva. “You need to come upstairs for tea.”

What he needed was air. “That’s very kind of you,” he said. “I don’t mean to be rude —”

“You dropped your paper.” She held it out to him as he turned away. The Ripon Gazette, Lissa staring out at him from the front page.

“Mary Babbing,” Silva said. “Tragic.”

Steadying himself, he said, “What happened?”

“No one knows, do they? She just evaporated. You expect things like that to happen in York or London. But not here.”

“Did you know her?”

“She was a classmate of Lorna’s.” And then, looking at her daughter, “We shouldn’t —”

“Of course not.”

Silva shook her head. “It’s a horrible thing,” she said.

4

Charles knew about horrible things. Charles knew about ghosts.

On the way back to Hollow House, he parked in the turnout by the vine-shrouded pillars, the Eorl Wood looming up around him. He sat there, the car idling, his hands clenched on the wheel. Then he picked up the photograph and tore back the butcher paper Mould had wrapped it in.

Lissa gazed up at him, once again imprisoned behind her wall of glass. Only she wasn’t, was she? She’d escaped, after all. He’d seen her at the Yarrow Historical Society. He’d seen her in the Ripon Gazette. As if to confirm it, Charles reached for the newspaper in the passenger seat and unfolded it on his lap. He placed the photo beside it: Lissa and this other lost child, Mary Babbing. Who could say what horrors she might have endured?

A FAMILY’S AGONY, the headline said.

He leaned his head against the headrest, closed his eyes.

When he opened them again, he saw a figure in the Eorl Wood.

It gazed back at him, a green shadow in a green shade. Like a man, but not a man, antlered like a stag in rut. Cernunnos, he thought. The Horned God or King. The avatar of the Night Wood. He stared, breath frozen in his lungs. He blinked. The figure was gone, not there. It had never been there at all.

Charles shook his head. He put the photograph on the seat beside him, crumpled the newspaper into the space underneath, and eased the car into gear. He accelerated between the pillars and sped into the darkness underneath the trees.

5

Hollow House enveloped them.

As Erin’s ankle healed, she and Charles explored their new home, children in a haunted mansion in a tale: the downstairs rooms, the dining room to the right of the entrance hall, the drawing room to the left. The vast salon with its twin staircases and the adjoining library, accessible by lustrous wooden doors at either side of an enormous fireplace. And beyond that a handful of smaller rooms: the music room, the game room, an office where Cillian Harris managed the estate’s affairs. Bedrooms and sitting rooms opened off the gallery encircling the salon, everything luxurious, everything ornate but for the servants’ quarters on the top floor: narrow, dormered chambers with rusting iron bedsteads, vestiges of another era.

And everywhere the motif on the balusters repeating itself: leaves and vines, those cunning vulpine faces. They peered from mantels and window casings, from finely wrought moldings and armchairs. Stealthy and gamesome, they retreated into the foliage in one place only to peep out anew in another, entire rooms subtly aswarm — a trick of the eye, unsettling and strangely beautiful.

Lissa would have loved it, Charles thought, but they did not speak of her. They rarely spoke at all.

Work would save them, Erin’s therapist had once said.

So they went to work, each in their separate orbit. Charles took refuge in the library, all burgundy and leather, with heavy velvet curtains and plush carpets, a long table, and an antique silver globe mapping a world that had long since passed out of existence. Everything polished, everything gleaming. Comfortable chairs surrounded the cold fireplace. And books, ranks and ranks of them, stood shelved on every wall, behind glass doors with shrewd faces looking down from the corners of their frames.

“You’ll want to keep the curtains closed,” Mrs. Ramsden told him. “The spines of the books would dry and crack in the sunlight. Many of them are first editions, Mr. Hayden, quite valuable. A nice dim room and saddle soap once a year, that’s what they want.”

“I’m sure they do,” Charles said. And then: “Personal documents, Mrs. Ramsden. Anything relating to Caedmon Hollow? Any ideas where to start?”

“Cabinets on the west wall, perhaps, though anything that old is more likely to be in the archives downstairs.”

“Archives?”

“It was Mr. Hollow’s little joke,” she said. “What it really is is boxes, Mr. Hayden. Boxes and boxes and boxes. You have your work cut out for you, I’m afraid.” Then: “Will there be anything else, sir?”

“No, thank you,” he said.

And then he was alone, overwhelmed by the task before him.

6

Erin, on the other hand, riding a smooth Xanax wave, set up in the dining room of the residence: sketchbook, pencils, and art gum erasers arrayed across the table. And Lissa’s photo, of course. She flipped through the pages of the sketchbook. Lissa and Lissa again. Page after page of Lissa. Erin had been an attorney once, trafficking in matters of ultimate finality: wills and estates, the complexities of the human heart, fear and love, envy, hunger, loathing, and desire. Families in grief and horror, families shattered, divided against themselves: the territory of ambiguity, the kingdom of the gray.

She’d closed her practice after the accident. She could no longer stomach the work. She lived in binary now.

Ones and zeros.

Before and after.

With every passing day, the before was increasingly lost, bleached out by time and grief and the medication that did not salve the pain but only dulled it.

The after didn’t matter.

She turned to a clean page, tapped a pencil against her teeth.

Mrs. Ramsden — Helen — put down a tray at Erin’s elbow: strong coffee, cream. Already, she’d mastered their tastes.

“Thank you, Helen.”

“You’re quite welcome, ma’am.” And then, turning back at the doorway: “I wonder if I might have a word with you.”

Erin looked up. “Of course.”

“It’s just …” Mrs. Ramsden approached the table. She picked up the photograph, stared at it for a moment, put it down. “I wanted to say how sorry I am for your loss.”

“My loss?”

“It’s a small place, ma’am. There are few secrets here.”

Erin put down the pencil. She bit her lower lip. “I suppose so.”

“If there’s anything I can do. If you want to talk …”

“That’s very kind of you.”

Mrs. Ramsden smiled.

“I don’t want to talk,” Erin said. She reached out and turned the photo facedown on the table. She tried to say it kindly: “I just want to be alone.”

“If I’ve overstepped —”

“No, Helen, please. I just — I can’t talk about it.”

“I understand, ma’am,” Mrs. Ramsden said. She nodded, slipped back into the kitchen.

Erin reached into her pocket for another Xanax, swallowed it with a sip of coffee, waited for it to unspool in her bloodstream. She stared at the blank page. After a time — she couldn’t say how long, the minutes had slipped away on the Xanax tide — she picked up her pencil and began to draw. She didn’t think, simply let her hand follow its own imperative. She might have been drawing in her sleep.