Gillian set the book down fast, as if it had grown too hot to hold. “Please tell me Gregory doesn’t keep wine in that room.”
“No. They told him he had a wine cellar, then the cook said he wanted nothing to do with that room.”
They stared at each other for a long, awkward span of heartbeats. Then both lunged up out of their seats to all but dash out of the sitting room.
* * *
This time,the weight of the darkness came from within her own mind. No screaming, no whimpers and sounds of sorrow. Just blackness, deepened by the knowledge of what waited at the bottom of the stairs.
Gillian shone her flashlight down the stairs and peered after the beam of light. “I’m not a connoisseur of cellars, mind you, but this one is the creepiest I’ve seen.”
“It doesn’t help that we know what happened down there,” Hanna said, armed with her own light and a cloth shopping bag. “All right. We’re doing this. Let’s go.”
Her heart hammered in her chest, in her ears, as she took the first steps down into the basement below. At first, she thought it drowned out the screams she had heard before. No whimpers, no small voice begging for release, no infant squalling.
Wooden steps creaked beneath their feet as the plans moaned in protest. A pipe groaned in the walls as one of the people upstairs ran water. The house complained of the aches of old bones on an older foundation. Ordinary sounds and the plain, expected chill of the air in an underground chamber.
Hanna breathed a sigh of relief.Were we imagining it before? Or did what happened upstairs the other night change this place for the better? Maybe I scared the Widow off, and the souls here have found rest without her tormenting them.
It seemed too much to hope for, but hope had become her watchword of late. Hope she could find a job after the incident with Steven Dawson. Hope she could be with Gregory. Now, hope to lay the spirits in Greenhill Hall to rest.
Once they had descended the stairs into the quiet of the below, Hanna directed her flashlight to the wine cellar door she’d found before. “There it is.”
“It’s well hidden. Though I don’t suppose Marion Pritchard wanted everyone traipsing through it,” Gillian said. She batted at a cobweb that clung to one of the low beams. “We’re going to be filthy after we get out of here.”
“It’s starting to look that way. Come on. Watch your head. There’s more spiderwebs.” Hanna wiped a hand on her jeans. “Hope they’re uninhabited.”
They were mostly uninhabited. By the time they’d reached the door, they’d only had one incident of arachnid violence and a potential bruise on Gillian’s shoulder where Hanna smashed the spider flat.I like ghosts better than spiders, I think. Maybe we should have just come armed with flamethrowers.
The hinges on the wine cellar door had accumulated so much rust, they almost screamed when Hanna pushed the door open. Both women jumped. Yet when they trained their flashlights on the room, they saw no more than shelves with wine bottles lined in neat rows. A bare light fixture, devoid of bulb, dangled from the ceiling.
Gillian gusted out a heavy breath. “I’m not sure what else I expected. The ghost of Marion Pritchard, waiting to put us into bottles?”
Hanna couldn’t bring herself to laugh. It felt like tempting fate, poking it with a stick harder than they were already. Instead, she nudged a small box against the open door so it couldn’t easily blow closed, then stepped over to the first wine rack.
Dust had covered the bottles in thick, grey layers. She could see where someone must have cleared a stripe of it away at one point, perhaps when the cook investigated the room, but more debris had covered the cleaned place since.
She didn’t want to see what the bottle held. Still, she ran her hand over the length of it. Cold so intense she feared it would burn her lanced through her palm, up her arm until her tattoo burned with it. Chunks of dust fell away beneath her aching hand. Green glass glinted in the glow of the flashlight. Atop it sat a label, browned by age, with neat script written on it.
Patricia, 26 July, 1929
Beneath the label sat a scattering of tiny teeth beside a dark curl of hair. A child’s voice wept with desperate fear in her mind.
Hanna swallowed hard to force the bile back down. Her voice sounded far away in her ears. “It’s true.”
Gillian’s hand felt too warm on her shoulder. The doctor leaned in. “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. That crazy bint really did it. Hanna, are you all right?”
“I’m fine. This is just, ah, shocking,” Hanna said.
“It’s horrifying. I’ve heard of mothers keeping their children’s teeth, or snippets of hair from first haircuts, but nothing like this.” Gillian moved to the next rack to brush off the bottles there. “William. Ruby. These other names, I don’t recognize. Some of these bottles don’t even have names. Just hair, or teeth, or– That’s a distal phalanx. A finger bone.”
Hanna looked over the bottles, then set about clearing off the rest. “What about Stuart? Or Janette?”
“I don’t see them.” Gillian dusted her hands off on her jeans. “That’s odd. I thought for sure she would have them here. She threatened those ‘special measures’ and I thought this must be them.”
“Apparently not.” Hanna frowned and peered around the room. Wine racks covered the walls, some empty, others bearing grisly trophies. One rack even had bottles of deep, red wine from top to bottom.
At least, Hanna hoped it was wine.