Rowan squinted and leaned in. “It’s lovely, Em.”
Emily smiled and, kissing her on the cheek, she left Rowan and headed down the hall to her room. Before climbing into bed, Emily bolted the heavy wooden door and checked the latch on the window. Outside, the snow fell in steady waves, and she was glad for the warmth of the fire that was lightly burning in the hearth. She ought to have been able to relax into sleep, but she found herself uneasy still. She went to the closet and peered inside, telling herself she was making sure she’d hung up her skirt in such a way as it wouldn’t show wrinkles tomorrow. She took a deep breath and made to pull back the covers, but she found herself paralyzed by a sudden inexplicable fear that she ought not to go to bed at all—that she ought to stay up all night keeping watch, back to the wall, eyes on the window.
But Emily was not a girl who gave in easily to her fears. She was a strong girl and a sensible girl. So with a quick dip and a check beneath her bed, which she told herself was for stray stockings, she eased her mind, drew back the covers, climbed in, and blew out the candle.
It was very dark when Emily awoke. So dark that she felt certain that an impenetrable cloud had passed before the moon, blotting out any light it might bring. She told herself that she ought to go straight back to sleep, but there was an odd kind of fear coursing through her veins, curdling her blood like poison.
And then she heard it: a steady drip drip drip from her bath chamber. Water, though she knew this was not possible. The water to the bath chamber froze in the evening, and they didn’t begin the process of thawing it out and getting it flowing again until the morning. And yet … drip drip drip.
Her heart seemed to sit in her throat. The noise grew louder, and she knew she would have to do something about it. After all, it was possible that there was a leak in the roof, and if that was the case, it would need to be dealt with.
Peeling back the covers and climbing out of bed, she lit the candle lamp, and the room erupted into strange shadows. They quivered as she walked, and for a moment, Emily almost thought she saw movement at the edge of the room, but she steadied her fear. There was no one in the room with her. It was a physical impossibility—the door was bolted and the window locked—and Emily didn’t believe in ghosts or specters or whatever the villagers were talking about since Arlene’s murder.
Slowly she took a step toward the washroom, her bare feet recoiling at the cold floor. She moved across the room with her heart beating a steadily increasing rhythm until she was at the door. Holding her breath, she stepped inside. In a fluid motion, she shined the light around the small room, making certain there was no one inside. She let out a long, relieved exhale.
And then from the corner of the room there was another exhale, mirroring her own, and Emily fought a scream. Thrusting her arm out, she bathed the dark corner in light. It was empty.
She was going crazy. She had to be. She was imagining things. There was no other explanation. But then she heard it again.
Drip … drip … drip.
It sounded as though it was coming from above. She raised her arm above her head, tipping the candle lamp at the ceiling, but she could find no source for the noise.
And yet standing there in the cold, she felt certain that what she sensed was something very like evil. She could feel it as surely as she could smell the wax from her candle. And then she felt breath on the back of her neck, and she froze. She closed her eyes and shook her head. It wasn’t possible. She was letting a frightened mind get the better of her, and she refused to be owned by her fears like a child. So despite the sensory information to the contrary, Emily turned round utterly convinced that she was alone in that washroom.
The last thing she saw before her candle was extinguished by a thick, rotting breath, a breath that smelled of dirt and death, was the horrifying sight of the fangs just moments before they sank into her neck.
11. DEATH
IN THE MORNING when they found her, she was in her bed. Rowan, having thought her friend the worse for ale, had left her to sleep in, but when she became concerned, she’d gone up and pounded on her door, finally retrieving the skeleton key from the kitchen pantry.
She knew as soon as the key turned in the lock that there was something wrong. An odor wafted from the room, and stepping inside, Rowan found that she was overwhelmed by it. Something dank, earthy, rotten, and above all that, something starkly metallic.
Upon first examination, the room seemed undisturbed, but then Rowan noticed the misshapen lump in the bed. People did not sleep like that. Whatever it was, it was not a person. She moved slowly at first and stopped a foot from the bed, her hand reaching out over the white downy covers, hesitant.
“Emily?” she called, though her voice was hoarse, and it came out as more of a whisper than anything else.
Silence.
She took a deep breath and then, stepping forward, pulled the sheet back.
It took her a moment to understand what she saw. An ivory shape, and beside that, a crimson stain—a perfect circle of blood soaking the bottom sheet, and even, it seemed, seeping into the mattress.
“Emily!” she said again, only this time it was a shriek as she reached out to shake her friend, her hand meeting with cold flesh, sticky with blood. She shook her head, beginning to cry. Emily’s body was twisted and broken, seeming to curl in on itself at the wrong places, only to jut out again at even odder angles. Her eyes were wide open, frozen in a perpetual state of fear. She was naked save for the blood, and her neck … her neck had been ravaged beyond recognition.
“Father!” Rowan cried, and then she screamed, a high, piercing sound that caused her father to drop a cup and saucer in his study down below, the china shattering into slivers of white and blue.
The rest of the morning passed in a haze. People came and went. They made assessments. And how silly they all seemed to Rowan. There was only one assessment: Emily was dead. Nothing else mattered at all.
She sat in her father’s study, drinking tea and staring out the picture window, not seeing. Footsteps sounded everywhere. People had descended on the house. She could hear them stomping up the stairs and down the hall to Emily’s room. So much noise. It was hurting her head, hurting her soul. Later, she thought, when Emily gets home, I will tell her.… But she stopped herself when she remembered Emily would never get home.
And then she heard something that didn’t make sense—footsteps overhead in what could only be her own room. There was no reason for anyone to be in her room. Her head swimming from the medicines Dr. Temper had put in her tea, Rowan lifted herself from the couch and started for the stairs. As she climbed, the walls seemed to expand and contract. The floorboards seemed to swell.
Before she even reached her room, she knew whom she would find inside, and when Rowan stumbled in, the world slipping like loose marbles beneath her feet, she could barely contain her anger. There she was, Merrilee, the back of her nut-brown hair facing Rowan as she stood at Rowan’s desk.
“Get out!” Rowan screamed, and footsteps came quickly down the hallway. “Get out, you runt!” There were voices behind her, urging her to be kind to Merrilee, and then someone’s hands on her shoulders. She pushed them off and, lurching across the room, grabbed Merrilee by her wool sleeves and spun her around.
“Get out of my room!” Rowan screamed again. “Get out!”