Condensation rose like smoke every time she exhaled. She eyed the front door but passed it, instead looking for paths that might lead to the kitchen. There was no light and no sign of Dorran.
She pressed on the largest door and found herself facing a dining hall that looked like something out of a period drama. The table was large enough to seat thirty, but its settings had been cleared. The serving tables were bare. Everything had been cleaned scrupulously. The mahogany wood shone, the tiles had been scrubbed until they glistened, and even the chandelier reflected her candlelight back at her.
The tiles were too cold to stand on, so Clare backed out of the room and shut the doors. They moved silently, their hinges so well-oiled that they could almost fool her into thinking they were brand-new. They weren’t, though. The wood was old—well maintained, but old. A thousand tiny scratches and scrapes had been buffed out through the years.
Clare tried the next door. The room was empty except for more doors, like some kind of transitional room. One of the doors had a line of light flowing out from under it. As she moved closer, Clare began to hear noises—scraping, scratching, snapping. Interspersed between them was a whistle, not too different from how the wind sounded, except this one had a tune. It was low and mournful. Haunting.
As Clare stood on the door’s threshold, Beth’s voice of caution returned, begging her to retreat and go back upstairs. Her room might be lonely, but at least it was familiar and safe.
The tune dropped in pitch, and the scraping noise grew louder. Clare had come too far to go back. She clutched the candle tightly as she turned the door handle.
Beyond the door was a kitchen. The space looked larger than Clare’s entire cottage. The line of benches running around the room’s edge was broken by stove tops and a gigantic brick oven. Two thick tables with dried herbs suspended above them filled up the room’s centre. Pots and pans, blackened from use and sometimes dented, hung from the walls, between racks of knives, chopping boards, and kitchen utensils.
The room was dark, lit by only an oil lamp perched on the centre table and two candles spaced over the nearest bench. Dorran stood there, knife in hand and eyes wild.
They stared at each other for a moment, both silent and unmoving. Then Dorran exhaled and dropped the knife back onto the chopping block. “Clare. You startled me. You looked like a ghost.”
She glanced down. Her own candle lit her, but not well. She could only imagine what she must have looked like standing in the dark doorway. “Sorry.”
“Is everything all right?”
“Yes. Fine.” She stepped into the room, warily eyeing the knives on the wall and the bronze fixtures that flickered in the candlelight. “It’s dark in here.”
“I will fix that.” The aisle was narrow, and Dorran’s shoulder brushed Clare’s as he passed her. He flicked an oversized switch on the back wall, and sudden, sharp light bathed the room.
Dorran blew out the candles and the lamp as he returned to the bench. He’d been chopping leeks. Not far away, a pot simmered on the stove top. He pulled a chair out from under the nearest table and indicated for Clare to sit. Then he undid his coat and draped it around her shoulders before stepping around her and fetching something from a cupboard near the door. Clare gratefully hugged the fur coat around herself. The kitchen wasn’t quite as cold as the rest of the house, but it was still biting enough to feel through the dress.
“Here.” Dorran placed a pair of worn leather boots at her side. “These should stop you from freezing. I didn’t expect you to come looking for me, or I would have left the lights on.”
She wanted to laugh but didn’t know if it would be rude. “Do you always work in the dark?”
“No. But the storm took the power out.” He scooped the leeks into the pot and stirred it. “We have a generator—the house is so remote that we lose power at least three or four times a year—but our fuel supplies are limited. I am trying to conserve where I can just in case we are trapped for longer than a few weeks.”
“Oh!” She frowned up at the large, high-intensity lights set into the ceiling as she slid her feet into the boots. “Sorry. I didn’t realise. You can leave them off.”
His glance was sharp. “We can afford to keep them on for a while, especially since you are not familiar with the house.”
Dorran retrieved two bowls from under the sink, ladled the soup into them, then topped them with parsley. He placed one in front of Clare, and she saw that it was really more of a stew. Chunks of meat bobbed among the vegetables.
“This is nice. Thank you.”
“It is still tinned soup, I’m afraid, but I supplemented what I could.” He sank into the chair beside her. “We have nonperishable food and frozen meat and vegetables but almost nothing fresh.”
“I suppose your family wouldn’t want the food rotting while they were away.”
“Exactly.” He frowned. “The leek was a lucky find.”
“A moment ago, you said you were conserving fuel in case we’re trapped here for weeks. That’s not likely, though, is it? Winter’s only just begun. There’s usually a few patches of warm weather before the cold really kicks in.”
He didn’t speak for a moment but stirred his stew slowly. “I am not sure what to think. This storm arrived unnaturally quickly.”
Clare closed her eyes and once again tried to dredge up memories of that final day. She remembered brewing coffee that morning. It had been a fair day then. Sunlight—not warm but bright enough—had been coming through her window.
That was her last reliable memory. Everything after that felt jumbled and was mixed in with what had to be dreams. Her recollections felt like someone had dumped two jigsaw puzzles into one box and told her to solve them.
She’d been driving to Marnie’s. She was sure that was real. And she’d been on the phone with Bethany, though she couldn’t remember what they had been talking about. But it had been snowing heavily. Beth had been worried about her. She thought her older sister might have been telling her to go back home, but it had been too late for that. She’d been closer to Marnie’s house than to her own.
She thought she remembered something about a news station. That had to be a dream. She only watched TV in the evening and never followed the news because it just depressed her. And she had passed a car on the side of the road, but that had been so unreal that she wasn’t sure whether it was an actual memory or not.
But she did remember the snow. “The storm came out of nowhere, didn’t it? I wouldn’t have gone driving if I’d known it would be that bad.”
“The same for myself. We had barely even had frost the week before. Realistically, my family should have been able to stay here for at least two or three more weeks, but my mother likes to make our journey to Gould early, before there is any chance of snow. I asked to be let out not long after leaving the forest. The sky was clear then. An hour into the walk home, snow was falling between the trees, and I could hear the wind howling. It was not long after that when I found you.”
“You walked home? From outside the forest?”
“It is less than four hours if you keep a good pace.”
“You must have really not wanted to go to Gould.”