Shana Abe - The Sweetest Dark

“Goodbye, Lord Armand,” I whispered. “Try not to get caught.”

I closed my door. I pressed my ear to the wood and remained there another whole minute until I heard him moving off, quick footfalls that faded into the more constant patter of the rain.

...

Jesse was not at home. I knew that without venturing even an inch into the sodden woods.

After Armand had left, I paused only long enough to remake the bed and blot up the water his coat had left on the floor. It was while I was doing that—on my hands and knees, my hair popped free of the measly two pins to tickle my neck—that I realized I was being surrounded by a new song.

Jesse’s song.

It rose around me in a lilting cadence, became a caress along my body, an invitation, our own secret code that echoed and repeated, and every single note meant come find me.

I stood and pushed the hair from my face. I crossed to my window to gaze down at the rainlit green, searching the fingers of fog that curled against the animal hedges and flower beds. The long, wet span of grass bereft of students or staff or too-early Sunday guests.

He definitely wasn’t down there. He didn’t seem to be outside at all. So … he must be somewhere within the castle.

Come find me.

My heart began a harder beat; I felt tingly, almost anxious.

Come.

Very well. I would.

I put on my oilskin, just in case. Then I went to answer Jesse’s call, sliding as carefully into the stairwell shadows as Armand had done a quarter hour before.

Downstairs, the maids were kindling batches of light, moving from lamp to lamp with their waxed-paper tapers to ward off the day’s dull chill. We’d entered that numbed, dragging stretch of hours before Sunday tea and after church, when Iverson’s genteel young ladies tended to wander off in their individual clusters to genteelly shred the characters of anyone beyond their circle.

Each year had claimed its own location, I’d learned. The older girls usually headed outdoors to brave the tame wilderness—and relative privacy—of the gardens, while the younger ones liked to remain ensconced safely inside, closer to the promise of biscuits and cake. On days such as today, however, all the girls in all the years recognized that they were made of spun sugar: Rain would surely melt them into puddles. Everyone was forced indoors.

The front parlor was out-of-bounds until four, so they’d draped themselves throughout the other common rooms instead. As I passed the library, I glimpsed Chloe and Sophia standing and chatting by the fire with every evidence of civility. But Sophia still had her cat’s smile, and Chloe’s cheeks were still red.

Perhaps it wasn’t so unpleasant to be without a family, after all.

I moved past the doorway without either of them noticing.

Jesse wasn’t with any of the other girls, anyway. He wasn’t in any part of the castle that I’d yet explored. The more I walked, the more I understood that even though I had gone all the way down to the ground floor, he was still below me somewhere, in the bowels of the keep.

I didn’t think students were allowed below the main floor. I knew the kitchens were there, as were most of the servants’ quarters; the professors and Mrs. Westcliffe had their own aboveground wing on the other side of the castle. No one had ever specifically told me not to go below stairs, however– probably because a true Iverson girl would never, ever dream of mingling with the help.

I could always say I’d gotten lost. The pillars of the world would hardly collapse. The sky would not shatter. I was barely a hairbreadth away from being the help myself.

The only entrance to the lower level I knew of was down at the far end of the main hallway. I lurked by the sole painting there, gazing up in apparent fascination at the portrait of a man in a tatty fur coat with what seemed to be a dead weasel wrapped around his head. He stared back at me with a cold smile I recognized very well.

Olin, read the little plate screwed into the frame, 5th dk Idylling.

Like brown hair and lunacy, it seemed hauteur was passed down the family line. At least the current duke was a finer dresser.

A pair of maids holding spent tapers swished past. The servants’ door opened; the maids went through; light and voices and the blue-smoke sting of lit cigarettes boiled up into the hall until the door shut behind them, and it was just me and the dead-weasel duke once more.

Jesse’s song sparkled louder, so beautiful and wanting, it felt like an ache in my bones.

Come, love.

I glanced up and down the passageway: I was alone. I inched toward the door and put my hand on the latch.

“No, not that way,” murmured Jesse, close enough that I felt his breath on my temple.

“A francba!”

I jumped back, smacking the wall, and knocked into the portrait, which clattered heavily and began to tilt. Jesse, very near and very swift, reached out and steadied us both, one hand on the frame and the other on my shoulder.

He was a genie, a wizard, a boy who’d materialized from nothing but cigarette smoke and shadows, because he had not been there a second ago.

“All right, Lora?” He waited for my nod, then used both hands to straighten the painting. “What did you just say?”

“What?” My heart was still pounding. I’d flattened a palm over it, pressing back the fright.

“Just now. You said something in a foreign language.”

“No, I didn’t. Did I?” I dropped my hand. “Where did you come from?”

Jesse stepped back from the duke and his disturbing attire—properly aligned once more, still smiling down at us bloody cold—and faced me, too tall and real and solid to have simply appeared from thin air.

“You’ll find this castle keeps many secrets, some ancient, some not.” His fingers clasped mine, instant warmth. “This is one of the oldest ones. I’ll show you.”

He stepped back again, and again, pulling me with him all the way to the wall, only the wall wasn’t there any longer. A gaping black space was where there should have been stone, where there surely had been stone when I’d first crept down this hallway.

One final step, and the darkness consumed him. His voice floated out to me.

“Don’t be afraid.”

“I’m not,” I replied, irritated that he’d guessed the truth. I made myself follow without him having to pull. “Of course I’m not.”

“Good. There’s a landing here, feel it? Hold on while I …”

We had paused just inside the wall, standing almost chest- to-chest. He shifted against me, his arm reaching past my head, and without any noise at all the wall closed up again, sealing us inside—what? I didn’t know. The innards of the castle, I supposed. It smelled like rats and dirt and rotting wood. It smelled like a crypt.

Jesse struck a match, held it to a lantern hung on a hook behind us. Yellow brightness bloomed.

We were in a tunnel. On a rickety wooden landing in a very narrow tunnel that plunged down and down into the depths beyond the light. There were stairs going down it, too, just as rickety, as clear an invitation to this is a bad idea as anything I’d ever seen.

Jesse grabbed the lantern, holding it up high. “The early defenders of this land built the fortress to withstand all manner of attacks. But they were men of short lives and brutal deaths, and they knew that nothing was ever foolproof. So the walls of Iverson are hollow. There had to be a way to get the castle folk out should the invaders get in. A secret way.”

“All the walls?” I asked, shocked.

“No, not all. But many.”

“Is that how you manage—”

“Yes.” His arm lowered. The lantern burned between us, painting gray and gold along the contours of his face; he sent me a sideways look. “Not the walls of your tower, Lora. Rest easy. You’re truly alone up there.”

Yes. Until His Right Royal Lordship decides to show up again.

“Does Mrs. Westcliffe know?”

“Not that I’ve been able to tell. It’s possible she knows about them but thinks them sealed up or filled in. Some are. In all the years I’ve been here, I’ve never seen any footprints in the tunnels, besides my own. I don’t think even Hastings knows about this. At least, not about all of it. He knows about the grotto, of course.”

“The … ?”

“Come on. It’s why I called you. You’re going to like it.”

He took my hand again, and the honey-sweet pleasure of his touch mingled with the thrill of fear that was skittering up and down my spine. The combination was nearly unbearable.

“You called me,” I whispered.

“And you came,” Jesse Holms answered, a green-eyed glance back at me, a half-smile that dissolved my bones. Then we were moving hand in hand down the rotting plank stairs.

I seethed with questions. I was ready to burst with them, and at the same time I was focused on putting one foot in front of the other, avoiding the gaps in the planks, trying not to examine too closely the rot in the wood or the thick pitch black that yawned beneath us. I could not smell an end to it. We might as well have been descending into the center of the earth.

It’s Jesse. I’m safe. It’s Jesse, so I’m safe.

I found myself watching either the lantern or the back of his head, both shining, both slipping deep into the dark heart of Iverson without falter, even when the air began to change and smell more of salt than stone. More of trapped waters than long-dead rodents.