The bell of St. Cynog's swung crooked on its rusted bracket, its tongue striking the lip at a slant that made the note land wrong. Maren Ashcroft had been listening to it for the better part of an hour, and she had decided, in that slow cartographer's way of hers, that the sound was not a sound at all but a kind of wound, a fissure in the air that no mending could close.
She stood in the churchyard with her notebook open against her forearm and a pencil tucked behind her ear. The rain had stopped an hour ago, but the grass still drank, and her boots left dark prints on the path that led to the rectory door. A yew tree watched her from the corner of the yard, black and patient, older than the walls of the church itself. She had measured it once, three years back, when she first came to Hollow Marsh to record the marshfolk's death rites. Sixteen feet around the trunk. The vicar at the time had told her the tree was planted on the grave of a saint. She had written that down in her notebook and underlined it, because she had learned early that the things people underlined were usually the things they most feared to be untrue.
The rectory door was the colour of clotted cream, gone grey where the weather had stripped it. A knocker in the shape of a lamb's head hung at chest height, and Maren lifted it, felt the iron bite cold into her palm, and let it fall.
Inside, something shuffled. A glass, perhaps, set down too carefully on a table. Footsteps, then, but hesitant, the gait of a man negotiating furniture he could not see.
The door opened inward, and Father Dowd stood framed against the dim hall behind him. He was tall and thin in the way of men who have stopped eating with any purpose, his cassock hanging from his shoulders like a sail from a slack mast. His eyes were pale and unmoving, the colour of river water over sand. He blinked when Maren spoke, though the blink meant nothing; she had been told by the innkeeper that the priest had been sightless for twenty years.
"Father Dowd," Maren said. "My name is Maren Ashcroft. I wrote to you about my sister."
"Yes," he said. The word came out slow, as if he were tasting it. "Yes. I remember your letter. You have her handwriting, you know. The same pressure on the downstrokes." He stepped aside, a careful motion, and gestured her in with a hand that trembled only slightly. "Come in, Miss Ashcroft. The house is not what it was, but the kettle is."
The rectory hall smelled of damp wool and something sweeter beneath it, something Maren recognised as the particular sweetness of a man who drank in the mornings to make his hands steady. She followed him down a narrow passage where the wallpaper had begun to peel in long tongues, and into a parlour where a fire had been laid but not lit. The room was full of the particular silence of a place where conversation had become rare.
Father Dowd lowered himself into a chair by the cold hearth and waved her toward the settee. "Lenna," he said, and the name came out of him like a held breath. "Yes. I knew her. I knew her very well, in fact. She came to me for counsel. She came to me for..." He trailed off, his hands finding the arms of his chair and gripping them.
"Father," Maren said, settling onto the settee with her notebook balanced on her knee, "I need to know what you did for her. In your own words. I need to know what rite, and when, and why."
He was quiet for a long moment. The clock on the mantel ticked, a small, dry sound like a finger tapping wood. Then he rose, crossed to a sideboard, and poured himself something from a dark bottle into a glass that was not quite clean. He did not offer her any. He drank, set the glass down, and returned to his chair with the careful navigation of a man who had memorised his furniture.
"An exclusion rite," he said. "That is what you would call it. That is what the manuals would call it. But the manuals..." He made a small gesture, dismissive and weary. "The manuals were written by men who had never stood in a marsh at midnight. They wrote their Latin and they crossed their t's, and they went home to warm houses, and they never heard the sound that comes after."
"After what?"
"After the rite is spoken." He drank again, a smaller sip this time. "Your sister came to me in November. She had been hearing a bell. Not the church bell, no, but a bell that rang in her own head, a bell that nobody else could hear. She described it to me with great precision. She said it rang every hour on the hour and once between, at the half. She said it had a crack in it, a flaw in the casting, and that the flaw produced a note that was..." He paused, searching for the word. "Wrong. Not wrong in pitch, you understand. Wrong in... intention."
Maren wrote. Her pencil moved in small, exact strokes, the hand of a woman trained to mark coastlines and bury sites. "And you performed the rite."
"I performed the rite." His voice had gone flat. "I had read of it in a book that belonged to my predecessor, a man who had been here for fifty years and who had left behind, in a locked drawer, a manuscript that he had not had the courage to destroy. The rite was simple. A circle of salt. A reading from the Gospel of the Hawthorn. A declaration of exclusion spoken three times, each time to a different quarter. The book said the rite would close the ear of the afflicted to the sound that was not of this world."
"And did it?"
Father Dowd was silent. The fire, unlit, gave nothing. Outside, the yew tree shifted in a wind that did not reach the parlour, and the bell of St. Cynog's rang its crooked note, and the priest's hands tightened on the arms of his chair.
"She screamed," he said at last. "Your sister. She screamed for eleven hours. I sat with her through every one of them. I held her hand. I gave her water. I prayed every prayer I knew, and I knew a great many prayers, Miss Ashcroft, more prayers than a man of my small faith deserved to know. And she screamed. Not words, not at first. Just sound. A long, unbroken sound, like a rope being pulled through a narrow gap. And then, toward the eleventh hour, she stopped."
"Did she speak?"
"She spoke. She said, 'I cannot hear it any longer, Father.' She said, 'The bell is gone.' She smiled. She thanked me. She walked out of this house under her own power, and I closed the door, and I poured myself a drink, and I sat in this chair, and I did not move until morning."
Maren's pencil had stopped. She looked up. "And then?"
"And then she stopped coming to Mass. And then the ferryman told me he had carried her across the marsh on a night when the fog was so thick he could not see his own hand. And then the undertaker's wife, Mrs. Grae, came to me with a question about burial procedure, and I knew, by the way she asked it, that she had dressed a body recently. And then your letter arrived."
Maren sat very still. The notebook on her knee felt heavier than it ought to have. She could hear the blood moving in her own ears, a sound like water under ice, and beneath it, so faint she could not be certain it was there at all, a faint, off-centre note, a single stroke of metal on metal, coming from nowhere and everywhere at once.
"Father Dowd," she said, and her voice was steady, because she had trained it to be steady, "where is my sister now?"
He did not move. His pale eyes stared past her, at a point on the wall where the wallpaper had buckled into a small hill. "I do not know," he said. "I have told you everything I know. I have told you more than I have told anyone. And I will ask you, Miss Ashcroft, not to write any of it down, because if it is written, then it is real, and I am not certain I can bear for it to be real a moment longer."
His hand found the glass again, and he drank, and the bell of St. Cynog's rang its crooked note once more, and in the silence that followed, Maren heard, or thought she heard, another bell, faint and cracked and patient, ringing somewhere just beyond the edge of hearing, waiting for her to listen.
The brass knocker was shaped like a fox's head, its ears worn smooth by a century of passing hands. Maren lifted it, let it fall, and listened to the three knocks travel through the door and into the chapel beyond, where they died against stone.
No answer came.
She had not expected one. The chapel had been locked when she had come past it the day before, and Father Dowd, when pressed, had only said that the sexton had the key and the sexton was not to be relied upon. Maren had walked away from that conversation with a borrowed key in her pocket, a length of iron that smelled of dust and something faintly chemical, and the priest's voice following her down the lane, repeating that he had told her everything, that he had told her more than he had told anyone, that he could not bear for any of it to be real.
The lock turned with a reluctance that suggested it had not been asked to do its job in some time. The door swung inward on hinges that complained in a register just below singing, and the chapel of St. Cynog exhaled at her, a breath of cold air and old wood and the mineral tang of damp plaster.
She stepped inside.
The nave was narrow, the pews close on either side, the floor of flagstones worn into shallow bowls by generations of feet. A single aisle ran the length of the building toward the chancel, where the altar stood beneath a window of clear glass, the February light falling through it in a pale rectangle that lay across the altar cloth like a laid-out shroud. There were no flowers. There were no candles. There was only the light, and the cold, and the smell of the place, which was the smell of a building that had been forgotten by everyone except the weather.
Maren closed the door behind her and stood for a moment, letting her eyes adjust.
The crooked bell was silent. She had not heard it strike since she had left the rectory, and she was not certain now whether she had truly heard it at all, or whether Father Dowd's confession had planted the sound in her head the way a name repeated often enough begins to feel like a bell. She set that thought aside. She had learned, in the years since she had first begun to follow the marsh trails and record the things the parish clerks would not commit to paper, that the ear hears what the mind has been prepared to hear, and that the most dangerous hauntings are the ones a person carries with them into a room.
She had come for the choir loft.
A staircase at the back of the nave, half-hidden behind a screen of warped oak, climbed steeply into the darkness above the chancel arch. The handrail was missing in places. The treads bowed under her weight and complained in a voice like the chapel door. She climbed carefully, one hand on the wall, the other on the banister, and counted the steps as she went, a habit left over from her apprenticeship, when her master had insisted that a room could be read by its measures the way a person could be read by their gait.
Twelve steps. A landing. A second flight, narrower, turning back on itself. Six more steps, and then the loft opened around her, low and timbered, smelling of dust and old varnish and the faint sweetness of wood that had been sealed against the damp for a very long time.
The pews in the loft were older than the ones below. They were not pews, really, but benches, rough-hewn and set into the timber framing, their backs scarred by generations of choirboys whose knives had found them in the long hours of evensong. Maren moved along the first bench, running her fingers over the wood, feeling the grain and the cuts and the places where the surface had been polished smooth by a hand resting in boredom or in prayer. She was looking for nothing in particular. She was looking for everything.
The second bench had a knot in it the size of a closed fist. The third had a strip of brass tacked along its edge, green with verdigris. The fourth was split along the seat, the two halves separated by a gap wide enough to lose a coin in.
She reached the fifth bench and stopped.
Names. Dozens of them, carved into the wood in letters that varied from careful to careless, from childish block capitals to the slanted cursive of an adult hand. Initials mostly, paired and ringed with rough hearts, the kind of thing boys and girls cut into the backs of pews when the sermon ran long. Some of the carvings were old, the wood darkened around them by a century of polish. Some were newer. Some were sharp enough to catch the light.
Maren crouched and read them, one by one, and the names blurred together, a congregation of the forgotten, until one of them sharpened into focus.
L. ASHCROFT.
The letters were cut deep. The L had a long loop, the way a child learns to make a long loop when she has been taught by a governess who believes in flourishes. The rest of the name was plain, no heart around it, no initial paired to it, just the name alone, as though the girl who had carved it had known exactly who she was and had not needed anyone else to complete the thought.
Maren pressed her thumb into the L. The wood was cold. The wood was old. The wood had been touched by her sister, or by someone who had borrowed her name, and either way the L was a fact she could take with her when she left this place, a small hard fact in a morning that had been all fog and confession.
She sat back on her heels and let out a breath she had not known she was holding.
The trapdoor was beneath the bench. She had seen it from below when she had climbed past the chancel arch, a rectangle of newer wood set into the older floor, with a ring of brass in its centre. She had assumed it opened onto the roof space above the nave. She had assumed wrong. The loft floor was pierced at this point by a square opening that had been boarded over with a sheet of ply and then concealed by the bench itself, which had been positioned to cover it exactly, so that a person standing at the back of the loft would see nothing but a row of choir seats and would never think to wonder what lay beneath their feet.
Maren moved the bench. It was heavier than it looked, and it resisted her, and the legs scraped against the floor with a sound that made her wince. She got it aside at last and crouched over the opening and saw, in the dim light from the small window at the end of the loft, a ladder of iron rungs descending into a darkness that smelled of chalk and stagnant water.
She did not climb down. Not yet. She sat on the edge of the opening and let her legs hang over the side and looked at the trapdoor itself, the way it had been cut, the way the hinges had been set so that it would swing upward into the loft rather than down into the space below. Someone had designed this. Someone had wanted a person to be able to climb up through the floor of the loft without having to move the bench above, which meant someone had wanted the bench to stay where it was, which meant someone had wanted the trapdoor to remain a secret.
She reached into her satchel and took out the tuning fork.
It was silver, and she had found it three days before, in the thatch of a ruined cottage on the far side of the marsh, wrapped in a piece of oilskin and tucked into a place where a person would only think to look if they had been told to look there. A tinker had told her. The tinker had said that his grandmother had kept it above the door of her bedchamber for forty years and that it had been given to her by a priest who had come to her village one winter and had asked for shelter and had left it behind when he went away again. The tinker had said that the fork had a sound, and that the sound was not the sound a tuning fork ought to make, and that his grandmother had told him to give it to the first person who came asking about the bell at St. Cynog's.
Maren had not been asking about the bell. Maren had been asking about burial customs on the marsh, and the names the marsh people gave to their dead, and the songs they sang at the lowering. The tinker had listened to her questions and then had brought out the fork and had pressed it into her hand and had said that she was the one, that he could tell, and that she was to take it to the chapel and hold it over the place where the bell had fallen and that the fork would tell her what the bell had seen.
She had not believed him. She had taken the fork because it was silver and silver was worth the weight, and because the tinker had looked at her in a way that had made refusal feel like cruelty.
Now she held the fork over the trapdoor and waited.
For a long moment there was nothing. The loft creaked around her. The wind moved in the eaves. The smell of chalk and stagnant water rose from the opening and mixed with the dust of the old wood. Maren began to think that the tinker had been a madman and that the fork was nothing but a piece of silver that had been bent into the shape of a tuning fork by someone who had mistaken it for something it was not.
Then the fork sang.
It sang without being struck. It began at the lower end of its register and climbed, the note tightening and brightening until it was a thin wire of sound that Maren could feel in the bones of her hand and in the roots of her teeth and in the soft place at the back of her skull where the thoughts she did not want to think lived. The note climbed higher. It climbed past the range of the chapel bell. It climbed past the range of any bell she had ever heard. It climbed until it was no longer a sound but a pressure, a point of stillness in the air above the trapdoor, and in that point of stillness she heard, very faintly, very far away, the sound of a bell that was not the bell of St. Cynog's.
The fork stopped as suddenly as it had begun.
Maren sat very still, the silver cold in her hand, the silence loud in her ears. Below her, the darkness waited. Somewhere in that darkness, something was waiting too, and the waiting had the patience of a thing that had been waiting for a very long time.
The loft held the silence like a held breath.
Maren lowered the fork into the opening inch by inch, the way she had been taught to lower a plumb line into a well, feeling for the weight of the world beneath her. The silver passed through air that felt thicker than air had any right to feel. It passed through the smell of chalk and stagnant water. It reached the surface of whatever was down there, and when it touched, the fork sang again, this time a single sustained note that did not climb but sat, humming, in the center of her chest.
A face appeared in the trapdoor.
It did not rise out of the darkness. It was simply there, as though it had always been there and the darkness had only just now decided to step aside and show her. The face was narrow, the bones fine, the skin the grey-white of river clay. The eyes were open and the mouth was sewn shut with thread that looked black in the dim light of the loft, the stitches small and even, the work of someone who had taken a great deal of care with it.
Maren did not move.
The face watched her. It did not blink. It did not breathe. It simply watched, with the patience of a thing that had been waiting for a very long time.
Then the face opened its mouth. The stitches held. The mouth opened beneath the stitches and the face behind the mouth began to sing, a soundless singing that Maren felt rather than heard, a vibration that began in the silver of the fork and traveled up through her arm and into the place behind her eyes where the choristers lived. She saw them, then. Not as shadows. Not as impressions. As people.
A girl in a white shift, her hair loose down her back, her hands folded over her stomach as though she were waiting to be bled. A boy with a cap of dark curls and a face that had not yet learned to be afraid. An old woman with a face like crumpled paper and eyes that moved, tracking Maren across the darkness of the loft. They stood in a row, shoulder to shoulder, their mouths all sewn shut in the same careful pattern, their eyes all fixed on the silver fork in her hand.
The girl in the white shift raised one hand and pointed.
Maren followed the pointing finger. It led her to a beam above the trapdoor, a beam she had walked under a hundred times and never thought to look at twice. On the underside of the beam, scratched into the wood with something sharp, were three words in a hand she knew.
Lenna was here.
The silver fork went cold in her hand. The cold climbed her wrist and her arm and her shoulder and settled somewhere behind her sternum, and she understood, in the way that one understands things that one has always known and only now allowed oneself to see, that her sister had not run away at all. That Lenna had come to the Beldam Hotel. That Lenna had climbed into this loft. That Lenna had knelt over this trapdoor and lowered something silver into the darkness below and heard the singing and had written, in her clear and careful hand, the only three words she had time to write.
Lenna was here.
Then Lenna was gone.
The choristers were gone. The face in the trapdoor was gone. The loft was just a loft again, dusty and cold, with the wind moving in the eaves and the smell of chalk rising from the opening and the silver fork lying silent and spent in Maren's hand. She sat on the edge of the trapdoor for a long time. She did not weep. She had not wept since the night her sister had disappeared, and she was not going to weep now, not here, not with the taste of chalk in her mouth and the cold of the silver still climbing her bones.
She folded the fork into the handkerchief and the handkerchief into her pocket and she climbed down the ladder and crossed the loft and descended the back stairs to the kitchen. Mrs. Grae was not there. The fire had burned down to a heap of white ash. The cat sat on the hearth and watched her with the indifference of a creature who had seen everything and judged most of it wanting.
Maren drank a cup of water from the pail by the door. The water was cold and tasted of iron. She drank it anyway, and then she drank another, and then she went to the window and looked out at the street.
Father Dowd was crossing the street toward the inn. He walked with the careful haste of a man who had been sent for and was trying to pretend he had come of his own accord. Maren went to the door and opened it before he could knock.
"Miss Ashcroft," he said, and then stopped, because he had been going to say something else and the something else had fled. He stood in the doorway with his hat in his hands and his mouth half open and his eyes moving past her into the dimness of the kitchen as though he expected to see something standing behind her that he did not want to name.
"Come in," Maren said. "The fire is out, but there is water."
"I do not want water," Father Dowd said. He came inside anyway, because he was a priest and priests went where they were needed, even when they were not sure why they were needed. He set his hat on the table and sat in the chair by the cold hearth and looked at his hands.
"I went to Mrs. Grae," he said.
"I know," Maren said. "What did she tell you?"
"She told me that I had no business asking," Father Dowd said, and there was a faint, wry note in his voice that Maren had not heard before. "She told me that the records of the parish are not the records of the dead. She told me that if I wanted to know what was in the ground beneath the Beldam, I should ask the ground."
"And will you?"
Father Dowd was quiet for a moment. The cat moved from the hearth to the table and sat between them, regarding them both with the same flat, unblinking gaze.
"I am a priest," he said, at last. "I have spent forty years asking questions of the living. I have buried the dead and married the living and baptized the children and tried, when I could remember how, to love my neighbor as myself. I have done all of these things badly, and I have done them anyway, because that is what one does when one has been given a post and has not the courage to resign it."
He looked up at her then, and his eyes were the eyes of a man who had been afraid for a very long time and was only now allowing himself to say so.
"I will go to the ground," he said. "I will go to the ground because you have asked me to and because Mrs. Grae has shamed me into it and because there is a child in that ground who ought to be in the church records, and if she is in the ground then she ought to be in the records, and if she is not in the ground then I ought to know that too."
Maren nodded. She did not trust her voice. She went to the pail and poured him a cup of water and set it on the table beside his hat, and he drank it without comment, and they sat together in the cold kitchen and listened to the wind move in the eaves of the Beldam Hotel and waited for the bell to chime thirteen.
The bell waited until midnight.
It began, as Mrs. Grae had said it would, with the twelve proper chimes, each one a little slower than the last, each one a little heavier, the bronze sounding less like bronze and more like the voice of a throat that had not been used in a long time and was remembering how. The twelve chimes ended and the silence that followed was the silence of a held breath, the silence of a thing that was about to be said.
The thirteenth chime sounded.
It was not louder than the others. It was not softer. It was simply different, in the way that a single wrong note in a familiar song is different, in the way that a face seen in a crowd that one knows and cannot place is different. The note climbed and did not come down. It hung in the air of the Beldam Hotel and it filled the lobby and the stairs and the rooms and the loft and the kitchen and the well and the chapel of St. Cynog's and every mirror in the building.
Maren stood in the kitchen and watched the small mirror above the pail. The face in the mirror was her own and was not her own. It was the face of a girl in a white shift, her hair loose down her back, her hands folded over her stomach. The girl opened her mouth to speak, and the stitches that held it shut did not give, but the voice came through anyway, a soundless voice that Maren heard in the bones of her skull and the roots of her teeth.
I waited for you, the voice said. I waited and you did not come.
Maren pressed her hand to the glass. The glass was cold. The face in the mirror pressed its hand to the glass from the other side, and for a moment the two hands aligned, palm to palm, finger to finger, and the cold of the glass passed through Maren's hand and climbed her arm and her shoulder and settled behind her sternum beside the cold of the silver fork.
I am sorry, Maren said. She did not speak aloud. She shaped the words with her mouth and hoped they would carry through the glass.
The girl in the mirror shook her head. The stitches at her mouth pulled and the skin around them whitened, but she did not stop speaking.
I do not want your sorrow, she said. I want you to open the door.
The mirror went dark. The face was gone. The kitchen was just a kitchen again, cold and dim, with the wind in the eaves and the cat on the table and Father Dowd sitting in the chair by the hearth with his hat in his hands and his eyes full of a terror he had no intention of naming.
Maren turned to him.
"The thirteenth chime," she said. "Did you hear it?"
"I heard it," Father Dowd said. He did not look at her. He looked at his hands. "I have heard it before. Once. A long time ago. I had hoped I had imagined it."
"You did not imagine it."
"No," he said. "No, I did not imagine it."
Maren sat down across from him. The cat moved between them and settled into the shape of a perfect loaf and began to wash its face with the fastidious air of a creature who had decided that whatever was about to happen was none of its concern.
"Tomorrow," Maren said, "I am going to open the door."
Father Dowd looked up at her then. The terror in his eyes did not leave, but something else moved into the space beside it, something that was not courage and was not resignation but was perhaps the thing that lives between them, the thing that one calls upon when one has run out of reasons to stay in the chair and has not yet found a reason to stand.
"Tomorrow," he said. "Yes. I will come with you."
The wind moved in the eaves. The cat washed its face. Somewhere in the lobby of the Beldam Hotel, the clock ticked on, counting the seconds until morning, counting them with the patience of a thing that had been counting for a very long time and was in no hurry to stop.