The house felt like safety for the first time since I'd arrived, though I knew it wasn't. Locking the door didn't do much when the thing you were afraid of didn't knock.
Still, I turned the bolt. Twice.
Then I checked the windows again. And again. My heart was still pounding from the sprint through the woods, my hands trembling from whatever I'd nearly run straight into. I hadn't seen it, but I'd felt it. Like a pressure in my head, a presence behind my ribs, whispering just beyond hearing.
I stood with my back to the door, breathing like I'd just finished a marathon.
What the hell was that?
My mind tried to name it. Animal. Man. A trick of the mind. But my gut already knew better. That thing in the woods hadn't been natural. It hadn't been human. And it had been chasing me.
I should've gone back to the pub. Let Maggie make me a drink, let someone else's walls hold the night back. But I couldn't leave. Not yet.
Because the house held answers. I could feel it.
I forced my legs to move and crossed to the living room, flipping on the light. The ancient bulb buzzed and flickered.
Just what I needed.
In the study, I unrolled the map and spread it out on the desk, shoving aside stacks of books and loose pages. I dropped into the chair, the leather cold against my thighs, and smoothed out the map with both hands.
Three red circles. Three sites. One was the stone circle, where the air had been still, and all sound vanished. Unnerving and deeply wrong, but when I thought back, not frightening. Not really. I hadn't felt danger there.
The second, the waterfall. Beautiful and calming, yet the symbols carved into the stone the water rushed over had pulsed when I touched them, like little bursts of electricity moving into my fingertips where they traced the smooth lines.
Third, was the standing stone, where I had found the pendant.
All three were connected by faint, careful lines.
A triangle.
And right at the centre of it… the cottage.
My cottage.
I swallowed hard.
Rising from the chair, I began to pace, thinking. Not that it was helping. I headed back to the kitchen to grab a glass of water and squeezed past the bookshelf sitting in the centre of the hallway.
I paused, and frowned down at it, at the edges of the hatch I could see poking out from beneath the curled edges of the rug.
Despite several attempts, it resisted opening, and I had no idea what was below.
But I intended to find out.
Tomorrow, I'd go to the store in town. Buy a crowbar, gloves, whatever the hell else I needed. And I'd open it.
I was tired of secrets.
I had to know what was under the floor.
For tonight, though, I'd settle for the journals. Sylvia's voice was starting to feel like the only steady thing in my life. She hadn't given me comfort, exactly, but she'd left clues. Warnings. Hints at something bigger.
Sipping at the glass of water from the kitchen tap, I settled back into the chair and rifled through the journals. I was looking for something specific, the latest one. The one she'd been writing before she died.
If she was clued into the weirdness that was going on around this place, then surely, she'd have written it down.
With a soft grunt of approval, I found the journal and flipped through the pages.
June 3rd. The howling started again at dusk. I saw one of them, barely. A shape hunched and wrong. It stood where the earth splits behind the well. I don't think it saw me. Not yet. I hope it was Henry. I hope some part of him remembers me.
The handwriting had changed from the earlier journals, shakier now. She'd been getting older. Weaker.
June 5th. The eye grows hot when he is near. The guardians have turned. I cannot hold them. They hear him, even if they do not understand. He calls them. He remakes them.
I frowned, thumbing the edge of the page.
Guardians?
It read like the ramblings of the insane, of a schizophrenic, or someone lost to the real world.
The next entry was short.
They were protectors, once. Tied to the land. To the old blood. They walked as wolves under the moon and guarded the borders. But even they cannot resist him. He seeps into everything. A rot beneath the soil. He whispers, and they answer.
Werewolves.
It was the only thing that made sense of the way she'd written it. Guardians of the land… turned mad.
Driven so by a voice.
My throat tightened. Was that what I'd heard that first night, when I'd dreamed of something chasing me through the trees? A voice I couldn't quite understand, but one that reached into me anyway? That made my thoughts, not quite my own?
And was that what had driven the dog, the one that had attacked me, to madness too?
It was nonsense. The kind of thing you'd see in a horror movie. It wasn't real, werewolves weren't real!
My thoughts went back to the photo, that showed Jonathan, standing behind Great Aunt Sylvia when she was younger.
Could it be real?
Sylvia's final entry on the page was a single sentence.
They serve him now. Even if they don't know his name.
A chill crept down my spine.
Who was he?
I closed the journal and pressed my fingers to my temple. I'd come to this place to claim a bit of inheritance, a ramshackle cottage and a few old papers. Instead, I was sitting in a haunted house reading about werewolves and listening to invisible voices.
And worst of all, I was starting to believe it.
It was safer to stay here tonight. I didn't like the idea of sleeping here alone, but the thought of walking through the trees and along the lane back to the pub was worse. Especially if those guardians were still out there.
The pendant pulsed faintly in my pocket. I'd almost forgotten it was there. I held it in my palm for a long moment. Warm. Like it was alive. Like it knew.
I climbed the stairs slowly, switching on every light as I went. The bedroom was exactly as I'd left it, tidy, old fashioned and too quiet.
I set the pendant on the bedside table and peeled off my coat.
The bed creaked as I sat on it.
Then I saw it.
In the mirror, across the room, just beside the doorframe, a shadow stood.
Not mine.
Not anyone's.
It was darker than the room around it, like the space itself had soured. Vague at first, like the suggestion of a man. But as I stared, the shadow thickened.
My hand moved unconsciously to the pendant. It flared hot beneath my fingers.
The shadow changed.
It coalesced.
A man stood where the shadow had been.
His face was carved from hard years, lined and severe, framed by a greying beard. His clothing was old fashioned, like something out of the Victorian times. Dark wool, brass buttons, tall boots. His shoulders were broad, posture rigid, military.
But his eyes.
They were not human.
Not even close.
No whites, no irises. Just endless, obsidian darkness, like twin voids had taken root in his skull.
I couldn't breathe.
The pendant in my palm blazed, and the air warped around me.
In the mirror, the man turned. His gaze met mine.
And the world tilted.
Blackness rushed in, not like a faint, but like a falling into something bottomless. The room evaporated. The house vanished. There was no light. No up. No down.
Just him.
A voice echoed, not out loud, but inside of me. Whispering through bone and blood.
"Blood remembers."
And then…
Nothing at all.