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)
The door is at the back of the room, set into the wall under the slope of the eaves, painted the same white as the wall with a small brass keyhole. The wood of the door looks older than the room somehow, and the handle is dark with use.
There are marks on the floorboards in front of it. I don’t remember seeing them before. It’s enough that I slowly cross the room toward it, the floorboards creaking noisily as I go. Which is another relief, because if someone really had been walking around up here, I would have heard it.
Up closer, I can see two small curved scuffs in the wood, the shape a door makes when it has been opened against floorboards more than once over the years. I carefully kneel and run my fingers along the scuffs. The arcs are recent enough that they have not gathered the same fine grey dust as the rest of the floorboards.
The closet has been opened. But when? Days ago? Weeks? Months? Years?
I’m about to get up when I noticed a gleam. I peer closer. There’s salt on the floor at the base of the door.
Just a few grains of coarse sea salt, the kind sprinkled all over the house. They sit just outside the closet’s threshold, on the floorboards, as if they spilled inside and have not been swept up.
I touch one. It dissolves slightly on the pad of my finger. I lick the next one to be sure.
Yup. Salt.
Someone has been pouring salt inside the closet, and, at some point, opened the door, making salt come out the opening.
And that someone was not me.
I sit back on my heels with my finger still pressed to the grain of salt and I look at the brass keyhole of the closet door. All this time I’ve been assuming it’s just a closet because that’s what the solicitor said—the spare bedroom upstairs has a large closet for storage—but now that I think about it, it takes up most of the room. A narrow A-frame like the rest, judging by the shape and length of the house, but there’s got to be at least four or five feet in there. It could be more of a small room than a closet.
I think about the wooden box downstairs.
I think about the carvings on its lid that look like letters from an alphabet I don’t know.
I think about Effie putting a key in a box and the box in the bottom of the trunk and the trunk under the stairs.
Did she leave me a map of some kind, like some sort of mystery to solve?
And if so, what’s the map for, and have I been reading it right?
The trunk was addressed to me, and her note was cryptic and disturbing as shit, but everything else in the trunk doesn’t seem to have much rhyme or reason other than she wanted me to discover them. She wanted me to learn something from them.
Only problem is, the more I discover, the more confused I get.
I think I have more questions for my new neighbor.
Chapter
Eleven
It’s been three days since I discovered the letters from Effie to Eachann, since I found salt at the closet door, since I realized that Effie has been trying to communicate something to me. I’m not going to jump to conclusions and say she’s doing so from beyond the grave because I’d rather not believe I inherited a haunted cottage, but she at least gave me some blueprints to survive this place before she died—it’s up to me to try and figure them out.
But as much as I love a puzzle, figuring it out hasn’t come easily to me. Mainly because the more I think about it, the foggier my brain fog gets, and the more I creep myself out.
So I keep busy, working in the studio and keeping my mind occupied, hoping my subconscious will do the heavy-lifting and come to an epiphany. I press the flowers. I draw and paint, trying to meet my deadline. I try not to look at the box I’ve placed on top of the chest in the corner of the sitting room, but every now and then I fail. I sit cross-legged with it in my lap, turn it in my hands. and try four ways till Sunday to find a latch, and the seam stays where it is, and nothing about the box opens.
It won’t give up its secrets, no matter how much I threaten it. I’m this close to smashing it open with a hammer, but something tells me that would bring me seventy million years of bad luck or something.
The next night I go down to the rocks at dusk. I sit on the flat black ones at the foot of my spit for an hour and a half and watch the water darken with the sky. Alasdair never comes up out of the water to meet me. I walk back to the cottage with my legs cold and my pride colder.