Page 117 of The Unknown

Or maybe I’ve simply gone insane.

Considering the events of the night, that’s the likeliest scenario.

I slide my fingers under the board and lift. Air whispers from the uncovered hole. An unsettling exhalation that smells of earth and dust and rot. It puffs against my face, but I don’t look away. I can’t. There’s something about that dark space that begs for my attention. Because the thumps have stopped, I have no doubt Daisy wanted me to find it.

I reach into the hole, fearful. As if some horrible beast lurks just within that chasm, teeth bared, waiting to bite. There’s not, of course. As I move my hand through the darkened space, I feel nothing but cold air brushing my knuckles. The hole itself seems to be empty.

But right when I start to remove my hand, I brush against…something.

Gasping, I slowly run my fingertips over it, feeling an array of surfaces. Smooth, cracked, cold.

I yank my hand from the hole and roam the cottage, gathering every lamp and candle I can find. When all of them are lit, illuminating the place in a pulsing glow, I return to the space in the floor. It’s still too dark. In order to see inside, I need to make the hole wider.

So I do.

Prying up more floorboards.

Lifting them free.

Tossing them aside in a heap of brittle wood.

I stop when the hole in the floor is roughly the size of a grave. A fitting comparison, it turns out, because when I look inside again, I see what is unmistakably a human skeleton.

Thirty-Three

I don’t scream.

The urge to do so never occurs to me.

I’m too walloped by shock for that. Too utterly terrified to make a sound.

The skeleton remains mostly intact, everything still connected save for the left leg, which has broken off and now gruesomely sits a few inches away. Random strips of fabric stick to the bones from neck to knee, as grayed and leathery as the wrappings of a mummy. Clinging to the skull are long strands of hair, shockingly white, the color telling me exactly who the skeleton belongs to.

Ruth Hume Semple.

All week, I’ve been living in her tomb, oblivious to her skeleton inches beneath me. The bones haven’t been buried. They merely lie on the same earth the cottage sits upon. A body at rest, but not in peace.

So it wasn’t Daisy who was responsible for the scratches and thwumps. That was all Mrs. Semple. Her way of telling me she was here—and begging me to find her.

Now that I have, I stare at what’s left of her face, transfixed by the two dark sockets where her eyes used to be. I think about what she saw,right before the end. Daisy, knife in hand, thrusting it forward. I wonder if she was surprised by that flash of violence—or if she knew exactly what Daisy was capable of.

I suspect she did.

And that Daisy knew it.

How else to explain the object resting on Mrs. Semple’s chest, still clutched in her skeletal fingers? Although ravaged by time and feathered with dust, I can tell that it’s a book. And that there’s a reason Daisy buried it with her. Mrs. Semple, after all, had been watching her, likely jotting down every suspicious thing she saw. The book, much like Daisy’s own partial confession stuffed into the wall, was evidence of her crimes. So into the hole it went.

Until now.

Removing the book, however, proves more difficult than expected. Mrs. Semple’s fingers, having spent the past century curled around its edges, are reluctant to let go. It takes several hard tugs to wrest it from her hands, which eventually drop away in a dry clatter of bones.

The book, now in living hands for the first time in a century, is a fragile thing. When I lift it to the lamplight, bits of dusty leather flake off, coating my hands. As I pry the book open, its spine emits a sickening crack that makes me think of human bone being snapped in half. The movement releases a puff of dust that rises like a ghost. Fitting. For this is akin to someone speaking from beyond the grave. A séance in book form.

A single piece of paper drops from the book and flutters to the floor like an autumn leaf. It’s just as brittle as one, just as likely to turn to dust in my hands. Rather than pick the page up and have it disintegrate entirely, I place it flat against the floor.

Slowly and delicately, I begin to unfold it, revealing a drawing of a young woman. She’s pretty, albeit in an unsettling way. Her features, a mix of hardness and softness, don’t quite mesh the way they do in a conventional beauty. The slightly rounded face and button nose suggestsomeone girlish and innocent. The mouth, though, gives the opposite impression. There’s a smile present, but only a hint, which makes it all the more tantalizing. As for the eyes, they’re dark and deep-set, the heavy lids suggesting knowledge beyond her years.

That it’s a picture of Daisy, I have no doubt. This is the very sketch Mrs. Semple made of her the morning the boat was set adrift. Looking at it now feels like seeing a ghost.