“Thank you,” I said softly, taking the kerchief and scrubbing at my eyes. They were gritty, as if I’d looked into the maw of a sandstorm.
“You want to talk about it?” Dean moved closer, so that he filled up my slice of doorway, not as a shadow would but solidly, something I could grab hold of.
“Not here,” I said, glancing back at my room, contained by the iron nerves of the house. Dean cocked his head in confusion. “The walls have ears,” I explained. Bethina could be around any corner, and I didn’t believe that the house itself wasn’t echoing my words down into its bones, storing them for its own eldritch uses.
Dean lifted himself away from the jamb. “Grab yourself a wrap and come with me.”
“I … all right.” I shrugged into a wool cape I’d discovered with the dress and wrapped my school scarf around my neck. As Dean led us away from the landing, into the warren of hallways that made up the north wing of Graystone, I finally had to ask, “Where are we going?”
“I’m still your guide, I’ll have you know,” Dean said. “Trust me.” He stopped at a thin door at the very end of the corridor, too small to be anything but a closet. “You weren’t the only one who found a hidden surprise today, princess.” He popped open the door and gestured toward the open space. “After you.”
It was indeed a closet, the only contents a ship’s ladder leading up into darkness. A draft caught me and prickled my exposed skin. “Up?” I said, peering into the darkness. The way was black and fathomless, cold as space.
“Up,” Dean agreed. “I’ll catch you.”
I mounted the first rung and looked back at him. “I’m not afraid of falling.”
His mouth curled. “That’s my Aoife.”
I jostled as Dean put his hands on my waist and gave me a boost. Cal had told me to reprimand him for being familiar, but if I was honest I enjoyed that Dean didn’t treat me like I was something that might break. And I wanted to see what was up there.
I climbed, and even with Dean’s added weight the ladder was solid under my grasp, wood polished by decades of hands and feet. Gradually the cold grew sharper, a blade rather than a pinprick.
At last, we crested a platform, rotted wood on a rotating base with a skeleton of iron. The widow’s walk rode the ridgeline of Graystone like a ship in choppy seas, wind humming through the railing bars like water under the prow.
Dean swung his legs up and shut the hatch. We were alone on top of the world, moonlight and mist creating a landscape unearthly as the surface of Mars. I should have been scared to be up so high on an ancient, unstable structure, but the view was too eerie, and beautiful, for fear to reach me.
“Pretty boss view,” Dean said, lighting the cigarette he kept behind his ear. “Nothing like it in the city, that’s for sure.” He offered the Lucky to me after a quick drag. I shook my head.
“Told you, I don’t.”
“Figured I’d tempt you once more,” he said, and exhaled. The smoke formed shapes in the air, crow wings and creeping vines.
“Cal thinks I’m insane,” I blurted, folding my arms around myself to keep warm. Below the mist curled back on itself, a flock of dragons eating their own tails.
Dean looked askance at me.
“You’re about as far from cracked as they make ’em, Aoife. I’ve known brass statues that were crazier’n you.”
I grabbed the railing, letting the dead chill of the iron steel me. “My family has a … reputation. Back in Lovecraft.”
Dean shrugged. I knew because I heard the creak of his jacket. “ ‘Loony’ is just a title they slap on people who don’t fit the gray flannel life we’re all supposed to chase after. Lots of cats back in the Rustworks got the diagnosis, before they ditched out of the middle class and went downside.”
“Cal thinks I’m bound to lose my mind,” I said. Dean wouldn’t get my secret, not yet, but I had to let some of the pressure off before I burst like a faulty boiler, and the fact that he hadn’t just dismissed me as hysterical went a long way to that end. “My brother left me a letter, you know, that told me to find the witch’s alphabet. Well, I found it. It’s my father’s. It’s real as you and I standing here and Cal, he”—I shuddered a breath in and out—“he told me in so many words I was mad, that what I know I saw didn’t matter in the least because what he thinks counts more. Because he’s a boy or because … I don’t know. It’s horrid.”
My hands burned from deadened nerve endings in the cold, and it reminded me of the ink’s toothsome grasp, which only made things worse. I glanced at my palm. It was still bare. “Just because I can’t prove to Cal I saw an … an enchantment on the book doesn’t make me a liar. Cal should have trusted me.” That was the real pain of it—I trusted Cal, faithful and absolute. And all he could do in return was wring his hands over my maybe madness.
Dean came to stand next to me and slid his hand over mine. “You ain’t crazy, Aoife. I don’t care if you said you saw the Great Old Ones themselves returning from the stars, no one has the right to sling that at you.”
I looked down over the spires of Arkham, silent. Dean hadn’t heard what Cal had. He hadn’t read the book and learned about what the Graysons carried. What had my father called it? His Weird. His writings had casually unfolded a world utterly alien from my own, a world where a heretical legend pulsed through my blood surely as his.
Could he be right? I was his daughter, after all.
The village lay silent as a tomb in the night, the moon above a broach on a velvet brocade of stars. Ground fog spun over the valley, the top of Arkham’s church steeple and the twin towers of Miskatonic University thrusting upward like a desperate, drowning hand. Rooftops and chimney pots within Arkham’s outer wall vanished and reappeared, a ghostly town revealed only by moonlight’s gleam.
As I watched, a flame sprang to life at the outskirts of the village, and another. A great clanking borne on the wind echoed off the mountain, back to our ears.
The borderlands of Arkham blossomed with flame, one after the other. Green as a forest, the fire wasn’t oil or tar, but something else that sent acrid smoke up the valley toward my nose.
“What is that?” I said, waving it away. Dean flicked his cigarette end off the roof. It joined the constellation of fire for just a moment before winking out.
“Ghoul traps,” he said. “Keeping the beasties out at moonrise. That two-faced ghoul goddess of theirs hunts with the tide. Least, that’s what I heard around the Nightfall Market.”
I shuddered. I’d seen the low humps of ambulance jitneys rumbling through the streets the morning after a full moon, when even the Proctors’ nightly lockdown and extra patrols couldn’t keep the creatures from slipping in through the underground. Cal said if you turned the right way, you could hear the screams from Old Town as the disused sewer system opened and spewed forth its bloodthirsty citizens.
Cal. Cal and his look of pity when I’d shown him my palm. My heart tightened again, painful against my ribs.
“Burning aether tainted with sulfur,” Dean explained. “What I hear, the stench and the green light keeps them underground.”
“Cal called me crazy because I told him I found an enchantment on that book,” I said. Dean opened his mouth, but I held up my finger. “I need you to listen.”
“Right. Consider my trap shut,” Dean said, settling himself against the rail.
“I know I should say that magic isn’t real,” I said. That was what everyone I was supposed to trust in my life had told me.
Except Conrad. And I trusted him more than anyone. I swallowed the lump in my throat and continued. “But the ink in the book—it marked me, like a living thing leaves its tooth mark behind. And an enchantment let me see my father’s memories. I’m a rational person. I believe in science and I abjure heresy.” I sucked in a breath, the faint taste of sulfur parching my tongue. “But to hear my father tell it in his writings, it’s not heresy—nothing born of the necrovirus. Nor are all of the inhuman things in the world, the shandy-men and nightjars and the abominations … they don’t come from a person being infected. They aren’t people at all … they came from the … the Land of Thorn. Wherever that is.”