Door of Bruises

Chapter 2

Chapter Two

AudenTen days after the two loves of my life leave me, the phone rings.

“Guest,” a voice says after I answer. “You should come down here.”

I stand and go to one of the many windows in my home office. Out on the south lawn, my oldest friend stands in an emerald-green jumpsuit, facing the house and looking up at me. Behind her, the workers hired to demolish Thornchapel’s maze have stopped working, and they’ve all gathered around something I can’t see.

Something low. Something in the ground.

“Can it wait?” I ask, glancing back at my desk. I’m supposed to be finishing a proposal for Historic Environment Scotland—a visitors’ center situated near the Ness of Brodgar in Orkney—and I’ve already told Isla I’d have it on her desk this afternoon. Earlier than she needs it, yes, but what else do I have to do? When St. Sebastian has left me and Proserpina has followed him?

“I’m afraid it can’t wait,” Rebecca says. “We found something.” She pauses, and then adds, “Auden . . . ”

“Yes?”

“We’ll need to stop construction.”

Worry kicks in my stomach. Any number of capricious variables can halt construction—bad weather, any weather at all, planning difficulties, parts delays, labor delays, labor disputes, protected birds roosting in the construction equipment—but there is only one variable that truly worries me. Only one that no amount of money can fix, that no force of will can bend into submission.

“f**k,” I mutter, already moving. “I’ll be down straight away.”

A charcoal sky hangs above the world. Broken slabs of stone litter the site.

“We knew there was rock,” Rebecca Quartey says. She looks down at the exposed chasm before her feet, frowning at it like it’s a badly trained submissive. “But there was no reason to think . . . ”

She’s right, there really had been no reason to think this was possible. This had been a maze for a century and a half, and a labyrinth before that. When Rebecca had asked if I wanted a ground survey when I’d first hired her, I’d waved her off, telling her I didn’t need an overpriced map of hedge roots and dormice nests. I knew the maze’s secrets already, I knew about the tunnel leading down to the woods. There was no reason to think this place was anything other than a Victorian diversion, an elaborate gate Estamond had erected to conceal her comings and goings to and from the chapel.

“How many of them are there?” I ask, squatting down to peer inside the pit. Now that all the hedges are gone—the statues removed, the gravel scraped away—the site is mostly damp, dark earth. The site is mostly as it should be.

Except for the squarish slabs of granite embedded right into the soil. Except for the chambers underneath them.

Those are not at all as they should be.

“We’ve found seven that would have been underneath the maze itself,” Rebecca answers, and then points to the middle of the site, where the now-exposed tunnel opens like a hungry mouth. “And then the one by the tunnel makes eight.”

She hands me a small torch and I click it on. The slab at our feet has been shifted enough to reveal the empty space underneath, lined with more stones to create a box. Like a granite chest that’s been sunk into the earth and then lidded.

A kistvaen. A cist.

A Dartmoor grave.

When I shine the torch inside, I see more soil, and then the unmistakable shape of a mostly-buried axe head, which appears to be a dull greeny-brown. If there were any doubt that these could be some kind of naturally occurring coffins in the landscape, it’s extinguished then.

What a f*****g bind.

“It’s bronze, Auden.”

“So it is,” I say, standing up. “We’ll have to make the call.”

“The planning authority first. Then they’ll call the shovelbums.”

The archaeologists. Neither Rebecca nor I are strangers to this particular roadblock. Like flooding or subsurface clays with unpleasantly high plasticities, archaeology is yet another construction hazard waiting to happen, and archaeologists are the natural, necessary evil that follows. Like plumbers after a broken pipe, or stumbling heiresses after a few hours in the tents at Henley. Cause and effect. Catalyst and reaction.

It’s not that I hate archaeology—or archeologists. Of course not. Yay history, and all that. But I would rather it not interfere with the things I want to do . . . such as remake the face of my ancestral home into something that would horrify my very dead but no less loathsome father.

I run my free hand through my hair, trying to think. “We’ll need to let the project manager know—a full excavation could take weeks, even if I’m leaning on them to go faster, and we’ll have to furlough the workers until it’s over. I’ll also make sure the archaeology team knows the thorn chapel is off limits. I don’t want to risk any curious excavators wandering back and seeing the door. At least not until we understand it better.” I pull at my hair once more before dropping my hand. “I’ve a friend from school who does rescue archaeology. I’ll see if his firm is available.”

Rebecca nods. “If you can handle the authority and commissioning the excavation, I’ll deal with the rest.” Then she pulls her lower lip into her mouth and releases it with a decisive exhale. “There’s one last thing I think you should see.”

She leads me past a few more slabs, these still covering their chambers underneath, and together we walk to what used to be the center of the maze. There’s no real pattern to the graves that I can discern—they seem dropped into the earth at random, as if a giant stood here and carelessly emptied his morbid pockets—but the one near the center is uncomfortably close to the tunnel entrance. Too close to be coincidental.

“This was the first stone we moved,” Rebecca explains as we get closer. “We thought it was part of the tunnel entrance at first, but then . . . ”

“Another grave?”

She shakes her head slowly. “I don’t think so. But I don’t know what it is either.”

I click the torch on again and approach the cist—only to realize it’s not a cist at all, but something much, much bigger. A space large enough for a person to stand in, to take a few steps in even. I get on my stomach, ignoring the damp kiss of the earth through the linen of my popover shirt, and shine the light farther inside. This chamber has fared better than the last one—I can still make out parts of the stone floor at the bottom—although I don’t see anything else on the floor. No bronze axe heads, no beads or jewelry or burned bits of bone. There’s only the stone. But that’s more than enough, because—

“You see it?” Rebecca asks quietly.

“Yes,” I say, shining the torch this way and that, trying to make sense of it. The walls are covered with carvings of double spirals—spirals just like the one Proserpina found at the Kernstow farmhouse, just like the ones that decorated the ends of Estamond’s torc. A carved coil going clockwise, which then leads into another coil, this one carved in a counter-clockwise fashion.

And in between the spirals are other shapes—two other shapes, I realize—laid out sporadically and rather crookedly.

“I thought those could be antlers,” Rebecca says. She doesn’t get on her stomach, instead squatting very easily for someone in heeled boots, pointing to the angled tines carved between the double spirals. “And those other shapes—what do they look like to you?”

I don’t need to think about it long. “They look like roses.”

Not roses like one sees in medieval heraldry or on the walls of Knossos, with flat petals and overzealous sepals poking out underneath. No, these roses are surfeits of silky petals unfolding into glory, practically spirals in their own right.

What color were the roses in their minds when they carved these walls, I wonder. Pink roses? White or red?

Black?

I get to my feet and turn off the torch, handing it back to Rebecca as I pivot to take in the scattered cists. “It’s like a field of bones.”

“It was a field of bones,” Rebecca says, stepping forward to a cist that faces the chamber with the rose-and-spiral-etched walls. They are only a few steps apart, almost as if they are facing off against each other, almost as if this grave was meant to be within reaching distance of the spiral chamber. It reminds me of something, but the harder I try to think of what it is, the more it eludes me.

“ . . . a handful of centuries,” Rebecca is saying to me. She uses the side of an elegant ankle boot to nudge the soil around the grave. “The soil here might be too acidic for unburnt bone to last longer than that. The archaeologists may find some cremains, however.”

“You’re saying Thornchapel eats bones.”

She gives me a look indicating I’m being dramatic, which is something I’ve never been able to help. “I’m saying Dartmoor eats bones. Most moors do. Because of the low—”

“If you say pH to me, I’m going to stop listening.”

Rebecca gives me a stare that would singe the eyelashes off a lesser man. “Because of the low pH, you absolute dickhead.”

I sigh.

“But,” Rebecca goes on, “we are quite lower down here, in our valley. The soil is different. Who knows what they might find?”

I think of Adelina Markham, buried behind the altar by my father, and I squint at the trees under the dark sky, as if I could see through them to the chapel itself and the grave it once hid.

The chapel. The memory of kissing St. Sebastian there, of feeling that lip jewelry against my mouth as the rain streaked down around us, comes so abruptly that I have to close my eyes.

A hand touches my elbow, right above where my sleeve is rolled up. I open my eyes to see Rebecca looking at me with an expression of pure empathy.

“Are you okay?” she asks quietly.

“You know I’m not.”

She nods.

She does know, just as I know that she’s also not okay. We’ve spent the last ten days in the same loop of misery and work. Getting up early, staying up late. Working until our eyes hurt and until not even tea sounds good anymore, drifting through the house like wraiths with iPad Pros, sighing over emails like widows sighing over embroidery.

Because working is the closest we can come to forgetting, even just for a moment, that the people we love aren’t here.

“Get inside and call the planning authority,” she says. “I’ll see you tonight.”

I start to leave, and then I stop. “Quartey.” On the edges of the lawn, the trees stretch and hiss and sigh. “Thank you,” I tell her.

“Of course.”

“No, not for the work. For coming back.”

She stills, her face turned to the ground. Her braids are pulled into a high bun today, and so I can see the effort it takes for her to keep her face schooled and expressionless.

“You’re the one who comes back, Bex. Always.”

There’s a quiver to her lips as she looks up at me, and I’m seeing what almost no one else has ever seen: Rebecca Quartey trying not to cry.

“Heeeey, hey, hey,” I say gently, pulling her into my arms. She’s tall, but I’m taller, and she can nestle her face into my neck, which she does. And soon I feel why, with the tears wetting my throat and her shuddering breaths coming in fast and hard against my wet skin. “It’s okay, Bex. I’m here. I’m here.”

As she cries, I carefully angle us away from the workers clustered around the excavators and backhoes on the other side of the site. I know Rebecca would be furious with herself if anyone in a professional setting saw her cry, and I understand why she can’t afford to be seen as emotional, as anything less than perfectly composed.

But I also understand why she can’t hold it inside any longer, I understand that sometimes it’s a seemingly irrelevant remark or gesture or memory that brings reality crashing back in.

The woman she loved hurt her. The woman she loved embarrassed her in a way that’s nigh impossible to forgive. And now all she has left is work and an equally broken-hearted—but useless—best friend.

Her wet eyelashes move against my throat. I hold her as tight as I can, kissing her temple, and murmuring, “Hey.” I have little practice soothing people—only my mother soothed me as a child, and it only happened when I was too young to really remember it. But Rebecca herself has taught me over the last few months how to care for someone in pain. How to show love and concern when someone is vulnerable in your arms. It’s the heart of kink, after all. Pain and concern. Vulnerability and safety. No reason it can’t work with friends too.

I kiss her again, and then squeeze her into my chest as I rub my hands along her back. “It’ll be okay,” I murmur. “It’ll be okay.”

When she speaks, her voice is thick. “I want it to be okay. I want it to be okay so badly. I hate myself for feeling this.”

After a minute, she says, ducking her face into my collarbone, “I never stood a chance, you know.”

“Against what?” I’m thinking of Thornchapel, of the door, of the graves. Of my father’s sins, of the prices we’ve all paid for those sins.

I never stood a chance against those things either.

“Not what—who,” Rebecca sighs. “I never stood a chance against her.”

The evening is cool, like the sky promised it would be.

A rumpled vista of yellow gorse and pinky-purple heather greets me as I reach the equinox stones, panting from my punishing run from the house. I stagger in uneven circles as I unscrew the cap of my water bottle and take an ill-advisedly long drink—gulping the water down and immediately feeling nauseous. I stop drinking and focus on pulling in precious air, very aware that the wind seems to be gasping with me. Aware that the grass and gorse around my feet are slowly tossing in agitation, as if trying to catch their breath too.

I thought a run would clear my head, but it didn’t. Instead, I feel even fuller of everything: my missing Poe and my missing St. Sebastian, Rebecca’s grief, Delphine’s seclusion, Becket’s forced retreat. The graves. The chapel.

The roses.

The door.

I can nearly see the chapel from here, although not quite. The view from Reavy Hill would be better. Instead, I can see above the lip of the Thorne Valley, I can see out to the myriad villages, tors, farms, fields, hedges, rivers, and rocks that make Dartmoor the beautiful place it is. I can see nearly to the farthest north end of the valley, where the Kernstow farmhouse huddles against the wind, bleak and beleaguered.

It was the Kernstows first, before the Guests. But it was always a king.

For centuries and longer, it seems, people have been going to the door. The door which is now open.

And what’s terrible is I don’t even care.

I don’t even care right now, because I turned into my father and St. Sebastian ran from me, and I made Proserpina run after him, because I’m a monster who should be alone and I’m a man who can’t be trusted.

I’m the wrong kind of king.

I should go back to the house. I should go back and eat the supper Abby’s prepared for Rebecca and me, and I should sit in the library with my friend and work in silence until one of us breaks down and gets the gin or the scotch or whatever our nightly poison will be.

I should go home and pretend I’m not checking my phone every five minutes, pretend I’m not miserable at the prospect of more and more days like this. Working at Thornchapel, working in London. Sleeping alone.

Regretting everything and yet not regretting enough.

Would I do it again? Would I tie antlers to my head and chase St. Sebastian through the forest knowing we shared a father? Would I make him vow to be mine forever and ever?

I don’t even have to ask myself that. Of course I would. I won’t absolve myself, I won’t release myself from the utter wrongness of lying, but when it felt like the other option was saying goodbye . . . losing him once I’d finally gotten him back . . .

No, I would have held on to him with my teeth if I could have.

See? I told you.

The wrong kind of king.

I turn away from the moors—currently misting over with an effete evening rain—and make to go back down to the house below, and that’s when I see it, tucked against the base of a standing stone. A small sheep . . . or a large lamb. I think it’s asleep until I realize its eyes are open, and it’s in fact quite dead.

I pull out my phone to call the Livestock Society—dead animals are common enough that I’m familiar with the reporting process—but the reception up here is s**t. I’m going to have to wait until I get back to the house to report it. With a sigh that would definitely earn the label of dramatic if Rebecca were around, I get closer to take a quick picture in case the livestock people want it.

I see it on the screen of my phone before I see it on the sheep itself: a rope of thorns caught around one hoof. Strung along the thorns like fruit on a vine are several black roses, looking fresh and full and totally out of place up here in the open hills and the green grass.

The sheep must have wandered into the chapel and back out again. It’s not uncommon for the sheep to find their way down there, not at all, but the sight of the roses gives me pause all the same.

I walk closer, approaching the carcass like it’s a trap designed to snare lonely architects, and then crouch in front of the animal to examine it more closely. It must be recently dead—there’s no bloating of the belly, no awkwardly jutting legs indicating rigor mortis. No flies, no nothing. It looks like it simply laid down to rest next to the standing stone and never got up again.

Unease crawls along the back of my neck and I stand up.

It’s nothing, it’s absolutely nothing at all. This is Dartmoor, sheep—alive and dead—are everywhere. That it could have been in the chapel is nothing. That the animal doesn’t look sick or injured or anything other than half garlanded with the roses from near the door is nothing.

I’m just on edge because I miss the two other pieces of my heart, because I found eight graves within sight of my bedroom window today. It’s nothing and perhaps if I keep telling myself it’s nothing, I’ll believe it.

I turn and jog down the hill as the rain finally comes, as listless and feeble as I feel.