“Just what?”
“Don’t you feel it?”
I’m not expecting him to say yes. I’m expecting him to play dumb, to say,Feel what, Mina?and tell me I’m being paranoid.But he does say yes. He does. Then he reaches out and squeezes my hand with his own, drawing a quick, sharp breath from me.
Stepping through the doorwayis like stepping into a vacuum, as if all the air has been sucked from my lungs. The room is dark and cool with blotches of damp crawling down the walls. Torn curtains hang limply on skewed rails. In the farthest corner a pile of stained material—clothes or a sleeping bag, maybe—has been heaped. Something small and fleeting, glimpsed from the corner of my eye, scurries behind the skirting board as I cross the floor slowly, heading for the large fireplace. A floorboard creaks overhead, like a weight settling and I freeze, looking upward.
“It’s an old house,” Sam mutters. Still, his grip tightens on my hand just a little before he pulls away. He reaches up and traces a finger along a line of carvings on the wooden beam over our heads. “Look at these. Is that writing?”
The rafter is covered with a cross-hatching of scratch marks. They’re not new—the scarred wood has already darkened with age—but they run deep, as if carved with a heavy, deliberate hand. Sam is cursing himself for not bringing the camera when I see the scorch mark a little farther along the beam. I reach up on tiptoes, brushing aside a net of old cobwebs. The mark is small and black, almost invisible against the old wood. The shape resembles a tadpole, with a round head and curved, narrow tail. Like a comet. I rub it with my thumb. The old wood is worn smooth.
“I’ve seen this before. Outside the Webbers’ house. Someone drew it on the ground.”
“Looks like it’s been burned in.” Sam peers at it, so closehis nose is almost touching the wood. “See the way it’s been branded? Like a hallmark on silver.”
Another creak overhead, a floorboard shifting. This time, Sam does not smile.
“Do you think there’s someone here?” he asks, in a low, husky voice. His eyes glimmer in the dusty room. “Squatters maybe?”
I incline my head and listen. There is no more creaking, no sighing of old wood or rustle of movement.
“I don’t think so. Let’s hurry anyway, it’s already gone twelve.”
I turn away from him and on my next step something crunches beneath my foot. I slowly lift my heel to see broken glass glittering on the dark wood. There is more of it just ahead. I pick up a small chunk—it’s milky green and smooth, like sea glass—and cup it in my palm.
“This must be it,” I say simply. “The witch’s bottle Alice found in the chimney. There’s more of it over here, look.”
It’s like putting together a puzzle. The bottle has mostly broken into large fragments, some as big as my palm, and it’s an easy job to bring most of the pieces together. I find the base of the bottle nearest the fireplace—it must have bounced and rolled as it had fallen out the chimney—and inside it is a little liquid, tacky to the touch. I sniff it cautiously, recoiling at the sharp, bitter odor.
“Urgh.” I hold it out to Sam. “Does that smell like urine to you?”
He looks at me evenly, mouth curved in a slight smile.
“Are you trying to seduce me, Miss Ellis?”
“All right, all right. Pass me that newspaper, would you?”
It’s not a newspaper, as we discover when Sam lifts it by thecorner with a pinched finger and thumb. It’s a crumpled porn magazine. He hands it to me gingerly and watches as I rip out a couple of pages, trying not to look at the topless woman standing on the deck of a boat with frosted hair and a high-cut thong, tiny pink nipples like hard candy. I start arranging the pieces of broken glass onto it, wrapping them carefully in the damp pages so they don’t get damaged. I collect another piece of glass from the tiled hearth, half-buried in soot. It is the color of a blinded eye spotted with droplets of a gummy red wax. The largest of these droplets is about the size of a hazelnut and heavily dimpled, as if it were stuck with pins. I pick it free of the glass and turn it between my fingers thoughtfully.
“Mina?” Sam’s voice has a worried note in it. “Do you hear that?”
I look up.
“Hear what?”
We wait. The flies have drifted into the center of the room as if drawn by some obscure corruption. Sam looks anxious, staring up at the large, curved chimney breast. I open my mouth to speak and that’s when I hear it, too. A scratching sound inside the chimney. We both turn our heads toward it mechanically, eyes wide. In that dark, gloomy enclosure it feels as if the walls are suddenly rushing toward us, sealing us in.
“Maybe it’s a bird,” I say. A thread of soot patters into the grate. “It’s an old house, right? Stands to reason there would be all sorts of stuff nesting here.”
“We should go, Mina.”
“Okay, okay.” I wrap up the broken bottle and I notice, right at the back of the fireplace, another piece of that milky glass.
“Oh wait, one more.”
“Mina—”
Another scratching sound. It’s not panicked, like a bird or a squirrel would be. It’s as if something is slowly working its way loose.