Total pages in book: 153
Estimated words: 146289 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 731(@200wpm)___ 585(@250wpm)___ 488(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 146289 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 731(@200wpm)___ 585(@250wpm)___ 488(@300wpm)
What the fuck does that mean?
But he’s already opening the door. The cold off the bay comes in over the threshold, he goes through it, and pulls it closed behind him.
I sit at the table for a long time.
The key’s still in my hand. Heavy and cold, despite being in my palm, but seeming to throb with some energy I’m probably just imagining. The empty box is open in front of me.
I open my hand and I look at the key.
It’s just a key.
And yet I know it will open to something that will finally give me the answers I need.
The only problem is, I don’t know if they’re the answers I want.
The cottage settles around me, feeling quieter than ever with Alasdair gone.
I stand up, walk to the bottom of the stairs, and stand there with my hand on the banister and the key in my palm.
I look up into the dim of the upstairs corridor.
Chapter
Twenty
The closet is not a closet.
Surprise, surprise, something I thought was something in this damn house is not the thing I thought it was.
I stand in the guest bedroom with the Gothic key in my palm, the door to the closet-not-closet open in front of me. As the cold of an unused space comes across my face, it takes me a beat to understand what I’m looking at, the area dimly lit only from the light of the bedroom.
It’s a small room, maybe five feet deep, the same width as the bedroom, but a room nonetheless, tucked behind the wall where I had assumed there was nothing but eaves and pipework. The ceiling is low because it’s under the slope of the roof, and the air inside is colder than the bedroom by a few degrees. There’s a smell coming out of it. Beeswax, old paper. Something underneath that’s sharper. Pigment or linseed oil, maybe?
I duck and step in, but I don’t get very far. It’s enough that I pull on the cord hanging from the bulb and the light comes on, illuminating everything in a stark wavering light as the blub swings above me.
There are paintings upon paintings stacked against the walls, some hung, some leaned, some racked in narrow wooden racks. Canvases of many sizes, though none larger than two feet across. A small worktable along the far wall with brushes in jars and clay pots of dried pigment and a glass cup of old turpentine that has gone the color of weak whisky. A paint-stained smock on a peg. A small kerosene lamp on the table, with a box of kitchen matches beside it. A bundle of rowan twigs tied with red thread. A small dish of grey hair—I’m sorry Effie, but I can’t help but shudder at that one. Hair that’s not on a head is an ick of mine.
I take another step, and my feet crunch on something.
I look down and cringe, fearing the worst, like I just stepped on a bunch of dried out spiders.
There is salt on the floor.
On the floorboards in patterns. Circles. Several of them, drawn in coarse sea salt, some disturbed and redrawn, the older lines visible underneath the newer ones, the way a pentimento shows under a painting that has been reworked. Jars of more salt on a shelf above the worktable. A small leather-bound notebook on the table beside the lamp.
It’s all so witchy as fuck but I still don’t understand any of it.
I turn to the nearest painting to look at it closer and then…
Then I understand all of it at once.
It’s Alasdair.
A small oil portrait in a plain dark wood frame, his face in three-quarter profile. The angle of his jaw, the cleft in his chin, the Alasdair blue of his eyes.
The signature in the bottom right corner reads, E. Galloway. 1989.
I blink at it, my brain short-circuiting, then turn to the next.
It’s Alasdair again. Different painting. Smaller. His face turned to the viewer this time, his eyes finding mine in dots of vibrant cornflower. E. Galloway. 1972.
The next. Alasdair on the rocks of his spit, in dark clothes, looking across the bay. E. Galloway. 1994.
The next. Alasdair at a kitchen table I do not recognize, a candle in front of him, his hand on a book. E. Galloway. 2003.
The next. The white horse standing in bracken, mane long, eyes black. E. Galloway. 1981.
The next. A close-up of Alasdair’s hands. E. Galloway. 2017.
I keep looking at the paintings. There are dozens. Some half-finished. Some signed and dated and finished. The earliest one I find on the wall is dated 1962. The latest is dated 2023.
He is the same in every fucking one.
Thirty years apart, fifty years apart—it doesn’t matter. The same face. The same eyes. The same line of his jaw.
I sit down on the floor, my back against Effie’s worktable. There isn’t much room to sit but I sit anyway, because my legs have stopped wanting to hold me up.