Chapter Five
The wooden hallway was wide enough that Clare and Dorran could stand side by side. The pathways would have been built by the house’s original owner, a woman who had constructed Winterbourne deep in the forest to hide away from the world, following her husband’s death. Clare guessed she had designed the passages to be her refuge—a way to move about the house without staff or relatives knowing.
Dorran stopped inside the door and glanced down the passageway’s length. It stretched away in both directions, the smooth walls vanishing within feet. The lantern wasn’t as bright as Clare would have liked; already, she couldn’t see much of the wine cellar. Just the glint of two bottles that looked horribly like eyes.
“We will have to nail this one closed from the inside.” Dorran ran his hands across the wood door. On the other side was stone, designed to blend into the cellar’s walls. Clare nodded. They had no way to drill into the stone without specialised tools. She tried not to let her panic rise as they stepped inside the passageway and pulled the door closed behind them.
With their exit sealed, the hallway’s sickly musky scent intensified. It smelt like rancid meat and rats. The hollows were responsible: a mixture of wet, decaying clothes, greasy hair, and injuries left open and allowed to fester. Clare tried not to imagine how many of them had paced the hallways for their smell to permeate it.
Dorran lifted one of the wood pieces, braced it across the door, and held out a hand. Clare passed him a nail and the hammer. For a moment, her ears were filled with the hard thuds of metal impacting wood. Dorran drove the nails in at opposing angles, ensuring they could not be pulled out easily. Once the first board was secured, he picked up a second but paused before positioning it.
“I have been thinking. About your car and about Beth.”
“Yeah?” She offered him the nails.
“If we are to reach your sister, we will have to learn more about the hollows. About how to handle them, how to fight them, how to escape them.”
“Right.”
He drove in the first nail then lined up the second. “And the supplies in your car would be a boon. As it is, we will run out of food in four days.”
Clare squeezed her eyes closed. She hadn’t expected it to be so soon. “Is that all we have?”
“Yes. Initially, I had planned to ration it. But you were not well. Your body needed fuel to heal.”
And Clare had refused to let Dorran ration his own food. When she’d found out that was what he was doing, she refused to eat unless he ate at the same time. She didn’t regret that. Not even when faced with their dwindling supplies.
“The garden is growing well,” Dorran continued. “A few of the plants, especially the leafy ones, could be harvested within five or six days. But it will not be enough to survive on, and we are still a few weeks away from sustainable food. I considered sprouting some of the seeds. But the amount we would need to eat to even last a week would wipe out our store, and that, of course, would put an end to our garden.”
“You’re thinking about going to the car.”
“Yes. If we can find a way to reach it and to bring the food home, we will not have to go hungry.”
“And it’s like a practice run for getting to Beth.”
“Exactly.”
The passageway didn’t feel as cold or dark as it had a moment ago. Clare bit her lip, a cautious sense of hope starting to form. If they could reach the car, then surely, they could make it outside the forest. And if they could get outside…
Dorran kept his head down as he finished nailing the second piece of wood. He hadn’t voiced the idea just to make idle conversation, she realised. He’d felt her stress and brought up the plan to give her something less grim to think about. Not for the first time, Clare felt a pang of gratitude that they were together.
She pulled the hand-drawn maps out of her pocket as Dorran put down his hammer. They unfolded the pages against the stone wall, and Clare held her lantern close. Dorran marked off the entrance they’d sealed, then he drew two red lines through the empty space to indicate which direction the passages went.
“Left or right?” Dorran asked.
“Right.” Clare could see lilting stairs leading upwards. More than anything, she wanted to put some distance between them and the wine cellar.
Unlike the main parts of the house, the wooden passageways weren’t flat. They constantly led upwards and downwards with sets of two, three, or four shallow steps at a time. It disoriented Clare. For a house as proud and rigid as Winterbourne, the uneven stairs felt like a dirty secret hidden away where no one could see.
She hated having her back exposed. Every time she tilted her head, she glimpsed leaping shadows in her peripheral vision. She thought she heard the scratching again, except this time, it faded in and out of hearing, never close or loud enough for her to be certain it was there. Still, it teased her senses and terrified her subconscious.
The familiar question kept playing through her mind. How many are there? How many?
She imagined them creeping up behind her. Scuttling. Moving so quietly that their noises were buried under her footsteps and gasping breaths. She could almost feel them behind her, close enough to snatch at the hem of her dress, close enough for their bony fingers to tangle in her hair and yank her back into the yawning darkness. When the tension grew too immense for her to bear, she turned. The pathway was empty.
She hated the tunnels. She hated the house. But Winterbourne was the only thing keeping her and Dorran alive. She squared her shoulders and lifted the lamp higher to light their path.
Behind her, the soft scrabble of grasping fingernails seemed to seep out of the house, coming from every corner and every crevice, unstoppable and repugnant, like a stain bleeding through the walls.
Chapter Six
They sat in their nest of blankets in front of the fire, shoulder-to-shoulder as they watched the flames. A pot of soup sat in the coals, warming. Clare felt as though she could finally breathe again.
Even after two trips into the furnace room for more wood and eight sealed doors, they hadn’t finished working through the ground floor. Her nerves were raw. She imagined she could still hear the scratching sounds in the back of her mind.
Dorran reached forward to stir the pot as wisps of steam began to rise. As he settled back at Clare’s side, he kissed the top of her head. “Today was a challenge. You did well.”
“You did most of it,” she countered. Still, she relaxed against him, enjoying how solid and safe he felt.
He murmured happily, his fingers running over her arms, his eyes closed. For that moment, everything felt right again. Clare could forget about the monsters crawling through their house. She could forget about the world outside the forest. She could even forget the scratching noises. She had Dorran. And in that moment, she realised she’d found the answer to a question she’d asked herself earlier. Could I spend the rest of my life in Winterbourne? She smiled. Yes. I could. As long as Dorran is with me, I could live anywhere.
The moment ended, though. The soup bubbled, and Dorran reached forward to take it from the heat before it spilt over. He divided it into two bowls and placed one in Clare’s hands.