Blood and Roses🔥

Chapter 4: Keeper of Records

Thornwood was not a town so much as a scar where a town used to be.

Liora drove the winding mountain road with both hands locked on the steering wheel, her knuckles pale against the vinyl. Her grandmother's old sedan had protested the entire journey from the cabin, coughing smoke on the inclines and shuddering on the descents, but it had not died. She took that as a small victory. Small victories were all she had left.

The broken rose sat on the passenger seat beside her, wrapped in a dish towel she had soaked in cold water. She did not know why she had brought it. She had stood in the cabin doorway for a full five minutes, arguing with herself, trying to convince her own hands to throw the thing into the stove and watch it burn. But some stubborn, irrational part of her had refused. The rose was evidence. Proof that something had happened out there, something she could not explain but also could not ignore. She needed answers. Answers required proof.

The road curved sharply, and the town revealed itself in fragments through the bare trees. A gas station with a single pump, its paint peeling in long grey strips. A post office the size of a garden shed. A diner called Edie's with a flickering neon sign that spelled out OPEN in buzzing pink letters. Beyond that, a few scattered houses with smoke trailing from their chimneys, a church with a leaning steeple, and a building that might once have been a school but now sat dark and empty, its windows boarded over.

Liora counted twelve structures in total. Thirteen if she included the rusted water tower that loomed over everything like a skeletal sentinel.

She pulled into the gravel lot beside the diner and killed the engine. The silence rushed in immediately, filling the car like water. Thornwood was not just quiet. It was watchful. She had felt it the moment she crossed the town line, a prickling at the back of her neck that told her eyes were on her, even though she could see no one.

She left the rose on the seat.

Inside, Edie's Diner was warm and stale, smelling of old coffee and older grease. A radio crackled behind the counter, tuned to a station that played nothing but static and occasional snatches of country music. Three patrons sat at widely spaced tables. An old man in a flannel shirt, staring into his mug like it held the secrets of the universe. A woman with grey hair pulled into a severe bun, buttering toast with mechanical precision. A younger man near the window, his face hidden behind a newspaper that was at least a week old, judging by the yellowed edges.

All three of them looked up when Liora entered. The weight of their attention pressed against her, and for a long moment, no one spoke.

"You're Margot's girl."

The voice came from behind the counter. A woman had emerged from the kitchen, wiping her hands on a stained apron. She was broad-shouldered and heavy-set, with iron-grey hair cropped short and eyes that had seen too much to be surprised by anything. Her name tag read EDIE, slightly crooked, pinned over her heart.

"Her granddaughter," Liora said. "Liora."

"Figured." Edie gestured toward a stool at the counter. "Sit. You look like you've been chewing on barbed wire."

Liora sat. The vinyl cushion exhaled beneath her. Edie poured coffee without asking, sliding the mug across the counter with practiced ease.

"Milk's on the counter. Sugar's in the jar. You eat yet?"

"I'm not hungry."

"Didn't ask if you were hungry. Asked if you'd eaten." Edie's tone was not unkind. It was the voice of a woman who had spent decades feeding people whether they wanted it or not. She turned to the grill without waiting for an answer and cracked two eggs onto the hot steel.

Liora wrapped her hands around the coffee mug. The warmth seeped into her fingers, and for the first time since the forest, she felt something loosen in her chest.

"I need to ask some questions," she said. "About my grandmother. About the property."

Edie's spatula paused, just for a heartbeat, then resumed its rhythm. "Ashwood Hollow. Nasty piece of land, that one. Should've sold it decades ago."

"She didn't want to."

"She didn't want to set foot on it, either. But she also didn't want to let it go." Edie flipped the eggs with a flick of her wrist. "That woman held onto things like a dog with a bone. Grudges, mostly. Secrets, more so."

Liora straightened. "What kind of secrets?"

Edie turned, her expression unreadable. "The kind that stay buried. If you're smart, you'll leave them there."

The eggs landed on a plate. Toast followed, buttered and golden. Edie set the plate in front of Liora with the finality of a judge delivering a verdict.

"Eat," she said. "Then go see Henry Calder at the records office. If anyone in this town knows the dirt on that property, it's him. He's been the keeper of records since before your grandmother left, and he's too old and too mean to care about keeping secrets."

"The records office. That building across from the church?"

"That's the one. Looks abandoned, but it's not. Henry lives in the back. Says he likes the quiet." Edie wiped her hands on her apron again. "Fair warning. He doesn't like visitors. And he especially doesn't like questions about Ashwood Hollow."

"Why?"

Edie met her eyes. Something flickered in the older woman's gaze, something that might have been pity or might have been fear.

"Because the last person who went digging into that property's history," she said, "was your grandmother. And whatever she found sent her running so fast she never looked back."

*****

The records office was a single-story brick building wedged between the church and an empty lot overgrown with dead weeds. Its windows were grimy, its door was heavy oak with a tarnished brass handle, and the sign above the entrance had faded to near illegibility. Liora had to squint to make out the words: THORNWOOD COUNTY RECORDS, EST. 1902.

She pushed the door open. A bell jangled somewhere in the depths of the building.

The interior was chaos. Shelves lined every wall, floor to ceiling, stuffed with ledgers and folders and loose papers that had yellowed with age. Cardboard boxes sat stacked in the corners, their contents spilling onto the floor. A single bulb hung from the ceiling, casting a sickly yellow glow over a desk buried beneath mountains of paperwork. Dust motes drifted through the air like snow.

"Closed."

The voice came from behind a stack of boxes. Liora stepped deeper into the room, craning her neck, and spotted a figure hunched in a wooden chair near the back wall. Henry Calder, she presumed. He was ancient, his face a roadmap of wrinkles, his hair a wild white tangle. He wore a cardigan with holes in the elbows and spectacles that sat crookedly on his nose.

"Mr. Calder? I'm Liora Thornwood. Margot's granddaughter."

"Don't care who you are. Closed."

"The sign on the door says open."

"The sign lies." He did not look up from the ledger he was reading. His finger traced a line of text, his lips moving silently.

Liora did not leave. She had spent too many years watching her grandmother out-stubborn the world to be cowed by a cranky old man in a cardigan. She walked forward, weaving through the stacks, until she stood directly in front of his desk.

"I need information about Ashwood Hollow," she said. "Specifically, about a grave on the property. An unmarked grave, near the old garden wall."

Henry's finger stopped moving. He went very still.

The silence stretched. The single bulb hummed overhead. Somewhere in the building, a pipe creaked.

Then, slowly, Henry Calder lifted his head and looked at her.

His eyes were the color of slate, pale and flat and utterly unreadable. But something moved behind them. Something that had been sleeping for a long time and was now, reluctantly, stirring awake.

"An unmarked grave," he repeated. His voice had dropped, losing its cranky edge, becoming something quieter. Something careful.

"Yes."

"You found it?"

"I found a rose. Growing where the grave should be."

The old man flinched. It was a small movement, barely a twitch of his jaw, but Liora caught it. She caught, too, the way his hands tightened on the ledger, the knuckles whitening beneath paper-thin skin.

"Mr. Calder," she said, leaning forward. "What do you know?"

Henry stared at her for a long moment. Then he closed the ledger with a soft thump and set it aside.

"Your grandmother," he said, "came to me forty-two years ago. Asked the same questions you're asking now. I gave her the records she wanted. Three days later, she fled Thornwood and never came back."

"What records?"

"The land deeds for Ashwood Hollow. The original ones, from before the county was even a county. She wanted to know who owned the property before her family did." He paused. "She also wanted to know about the executions."

Liora's blood went cold. "Executions?"

Henry removed his spectacles and rubbed his eyes with a weary hand. "Thornwood has a history, Miss Thornwood. Ugly history. The kind most towns bury and pretend never happened. But records don't lie. Even when people want them to."

He rose from his chair with the slow, pained movements of a body that had long since stopped cooperating with its occupant. Shuffling to a shelf near the back wall, he ran his fingers along the spines of ancient ledgers until he found the one he wanted. It was bound in cracked black leather, its pages brittle and brown at the edges.

"This is the county registry from 1689 to 1745," he said, setting it on the desk. "It documents every birth, death, marriage, and criminal proceeding in Thornwood during those years. Including the witch trials."

"Witch trials?"

"Three of them. 1712, 1723, and 1734. A total of eleven people executed. Seven women. Four men." Henry opened the ledger to a page marked with a faded ribbon. "One of those men was executed on the land that would later become Ashwood Hollow. His name was struck from the records, as was the custom. But the date of his execution is still here."

Liora looked down at the page. The handwriting was spidery and faded, difficult to read. But she could make out the date.

October 31st, 1723.

And beneath it, in smaller script, a single line that made her heart stop.

Buried in unconsecrated ground at the edge of the Thornwood property. Rose thorns placed in the mouth to prevent the dead from speaking.

"The man they executed," Liora whispered. "What was his crime?"

Henry met her eyes. His expression was grim.

"They didn't call it a crime. They called it a condition. The records say he was not entirely human. That he had made a pact with something in the forest. That he could not die." He paused. "So they buried him alive, in the hope that the earth would hold what rope and fire could not destroy."

Liora's hand moved to her thumb before she could stop it. The thumb that had bled on the grave. The thumb that had healed in hours.

She thought of the pulse beneath the soil. The voice that had spoken her name. The roses that had vanished and reappeared, leading her into the forest like breadcrumbs in a fairy tale.

"His name," she said. "You said his name was struck from the records. But you know it. Don't you?"

Henry was quiet for a long time. The bulb hummed. The dust drifted.

Then he said, "Malrik."

Not a question. A confirmation.

The name landed in the room like a stone dropped into still water. And from somewhere deep beneath the floorboards, something answered. A vibration. A pulse. So faint that Liora felt it more than heard it, a tremor that traveled up through the soles of her shoes and settled in the hollow of her chest.

Henry felt it too. She saw it in his face, the way the blood drained from his cheeks, the way his hand gripped the edge of the desk.

"You need to leave Thornwood," he said. "Tonight. Get in your car and drive and don't look back."

"I can't do that."

"Then you're a fool. Just like your grandmother was a fool. She thought she could outrun what was buried on that land. She was wrong." He leaned forward, his slate eyes burning with an intensity that had not been there moments before. "The roses are not just flowers, Miss Thornwood. They are a warning. And a promise. As long as they bloom, he is not gone. He is waiting. And the Thornwood blood is the only thing that can set him free."

Liora's voice came out steadier than she felt. "Set him free? Or destroy him?"

Henry did not answer.

His silence told her everything she needed to know.