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)
I pick up the salt jar and walk to the back door, standing there with my hand on the latch, staring through the window at the ever-changing water.
I open the door an inch. The cold off the bay comes in, smelling of brine and fresh air and the faint smell of a campfire. I glance up at the castle and see the smoke rising from one of his many fireplaces. He’s there. He’s home.
But he’s sure as fuck not coming here.
I pour the thickest line of salt at the back step, as wide as my finger.
Then I lock every fucking door and window in this cottage and resalt everything, moving through the rooms with a manic energy in my chest.
After, I take a long bath, too hot, doused with copious amounts of salt for my screaming muscles that are angry at me for running around like a loon, and I get out after ten minutes because I can’t lie there with my eyes closed feeling so vulnerable.
I put on my flannel pajamas and make toast because I realize I haven’t eaten much of anything today. The toaster is terribly loud, the pop when it’s done making me jump, my heart racing. I butter the slice with a trembling hand and sit at the kitchen table with lavender tea; the sound of my chewing fills the cottage and my head.
Until…there’s something else…
Some other sound.
I stop chewing. I sit with the toast in my hand I listen.
A footstep on the gravel in the driveway.
Then another.
I don’t breathe.
The kitchen lights are on overhead and the windows are black against the night. I can see myself in the glass—my face, my wet hair, my pajama collar—reflected back at me in the dark.
I look at my reflection.
My reflection looks back.
I tell myself it is the wind at the eaves, that the gravel settles, that it is just an animal outside, a fox. I sit totally still and I keep my eyes on the woman in the window.
Her face moves.
Just half an inch, to the left. The shift of a face that has been still and turns slightly…
But I haven’t moved at all.
I’m frozen at this table with a toast in my mouth, and my reflection is doing what reflections never do— moving without me.
For one beat I see it. The second face fitting into mine in the glass.
The blue eyes filling in my brown ones.
Then it’s just me again.
My hair. My collar. My eyes wide.
I should get up and close the curtain, but I can’t make myself walk to that window. Instead, I manage to get to my feet and reach for the light switch on the wall. I flick it off without turning my head, and the kitchen goes dark, the reflection going with it.
There are no more footsteps.
There is only the wind.
Time for fucking bed.
I check the bedroom window, the salt at the sill. The horseshoe points up above the doorway, and I lock that door too for good measure. I flick on the lamp and read three pages of one of Effie’s notebooks, trying to figure out what kind of trouble I’m in—what the hell I’m supposed to do now—before the words start swimming, and my eyes go heavy with the kind of fatigue that’s been sitting on me for two days, the fibro coming up under the dread like a hand under a sheet, reaching for me and pulling me under.
I want to stay awake.
But I close my eyes and immediately fall asleep.
The first thing I do when I wake up is grab my robe and slippers and head straight out to the kitchen, peering through the window of the backdoor and onto the step.
The thick pale ridge of salt is exactly where I laid it last night. The line has not been broken. Nothing has crossed it. The bay beyond is silver-grey in the early light, and, beyond it, the castle.
Was it Alasdair last night walking around my cottage? Was that his face at the window? Had he come by earlier and seen the salt, then came back in the darkness to see if I had changed my mind? Or was that all in my imagination, rapidly running wild in order to catch up with the reality that Mhairi bestowed upon me?
I stand against it for a beat with my hand flat on the wood and do the calm assessment my therapist back home got me to do: Where are you? What did you do? What is the situation?
I’m in my great-aunt’s cottage. I salted the step against a monster, and the monster did not come in.
The monster did not come in.
I let out a breath I’ve apparently been holding since last night and press my forehead to the cool door.
I should not be relieved. I should be more worried. The salt holding means the salt has been holding for over sixty years against the same thing, which means everything I’ve been doing in this cottage to make myself feel better about Effie’s habits has been keeping a literal monster off the back step—a sentence so insane I can’t let it sit in my mind for more than a second.