Page 13 of Preaching to the Choir

“Last time you jaunted about at night, Will got stabbed.”

“And this time there’ll be four of us and I’ll have a bloody shotgun. But we go now, because if we leave it then that window will be shut. And it’s a good night for it. It’s a—”

“Full moon,” Elena finished for her, feeling a weird sense of unreality about everything. Shock ringing about her mind and body and getting in the way of every thought.

And of course Melissa hadn’t meant it like that, had just been thinking about visibility and illumination, but Elena’s tone brought over exactly what she was thinking. So that Will gave out a hollow, hopeless little laugh. A laugh that said, No, but really… And then he met Elena’s eyes, and Melissa’s, the two who’d seen the corpse, and he swallowed and said nothing.

By the time Elena had shoved some essentials into a shoulder bag and put on an extra layer of clothes, Melissa was back with a grim expression.

“Gun’s gone,” she said shortly. “He knows we were out.” And there were a hundred clues, surely, that could have tipped off her father, from muddy shoes to one of the staff seeing them enter the woods. But the thought was still chilling.

“We get out now,” Melissa said, as much to herself as to Elena. As though she felt the enormous, centuries-long inheritance of the Enderboughs rearing up from the root-enmeshed earth of their ancestral home, reaching to snare her and drag her down.

Will turned up then, looking pale and frightened, all that Byronic poise gone. A kid, Elena thought. For all that he was her age, studying law at Oxford with a career and a future all picked out for him. Just a kid, at that moment. And then Ross was shrugging into his coat, pulling on the woolly hat with the bobble that she’d always made fun of.

The four of them exchanged looks. Elena could almost taste the pleading in the air. To her, this felt almost inevitable. Nice American girl goes to creepy old British family pile, meets creepy old relatives. Of course there’s a curse, there’s a cult, there’s something. More than that: nice Latina girl living in Columbia, OR, studying in Baltimore, MD, she’d had her fair share of seeing the skin peeled back to expose the nastiness beneath. Catching people unawares so that the racism showed like a shirt tail they thought they’d tucked neatly out of sight. And this was more, and it was older, but it felt like it was all on the same continuum. But for the other three, this was their family. And while Melissa had plainly been fighting against the bonds of kinship for a while, Will and Ross had coasted through their childhoods with a minimum of friction. Until now. They wanted someone to laugh and say it had all been a joke. They wanted Uncle Jas or Gilchrist or Neera to leap out with a party hat on and say it was all an elaborate hoax the family always put on for the younger generation. For Uncle Patrick to turn up, still alive and laughing at their confusion. They hadn’t seen the body.

And yet they were ready to go, despite that. Melissa and Elena’s words, the clearing and the stakes, the bird-thing, the singing. None of it added up to any coherent whole they could imagine, but there was some invisible secret all of these elements orbited about, detectable from its pull like a black hole.

When they reached the door, and Melissa had the key, and it turned in the lock, and the door opened onto a moon-drenched expanse of manicured lawn before the trees took up, Elena found that she hadn’t believed in it. Surely the older generation would have second-guessed them. Surely they’d be waiting at the door, or the key would have been hidden, or… something. Some barrier to turn them back before they even escaped the house. But no, Melissa’s insistent now had somehow outstripped the reaction time of their elders. Dealing with Patrick’s body, no doubt. Some crypt, some crumbling Poe-style mausoleum where body upon hideously ravaged body was locked.

In lieu of a shotgun, Melissa had brought a bundle of walking sticks to share out, each one solid and heavy enough to get a decent swing with. She looked as though the prospect of beating some monstrous bird to death was exactly what the doctor had ordered.

Except the doctor in question was probably Neera, Elena considered, whose Nobel-Prize-refusing halo had slipped somewhat, now. And who had a lab on the grounds, allegedly. And did Elena really believe that? Did she believe that one of the world’s most brilliant bioscientists was breeding mad bird monsters for… reasons? That was where all her speculations ran off a cliff, because why? Because, even taking the eccentricities of wealth into account, it all seemed a little… extra. A little above and beyond the call of weird old family tradition.

Melissa had thought about their escape. Once out, they didn’t cross to the trees straight away, but skirted the edge of the house, creeping through the rosebushes and ducking past even the darkened windows. Trailing a hand along the stonework was like walking through time. Elena could feel each successive re-edification, the new wings, the extensions, each with its own period’s signature materials and methods. And still she felt the house wasn’t huge, not even large enough to justify the confusing tangle of hall and hallways within. She thought of snail shells, constructed chamber by chamber in an organic process driven by nothing like thought.

Then they came to a wall with few windows, and those small and utterly lightless. As though only constant observation had been keeping them away, here the woods had crept closer to the house, a shorter distance for them to dash across before they were hidden from human eyes. And exposed to something else.

What if… But the way Melissa was hefting her stick was the answer to that. If they ran into whatever hunted in the woods she’d make the thing regret the meeting. And it’s used to prey that’s tied and helpless. Another shiver, above and beyond the cold.

They shared a look, nods all round, and then they ran. A crunching flurry across gravel, a slip and a skid on damp grass, and then the trees closed round them like deep water. Then there was a pause, a fickle light from a phone. A compass, some family heirloom, brass-bound and faintly nautical.

“Wall or fence all the way around the grounds,” Melissa explained. “Normally, estates like this, there are plenty of places you can hop in or out, where it’s just a low hedge or ditch. I reckon they don’t have the same gaps here. Because of whatever the fuck our folks are apparently doing. So: main gate. The big drive has a gatehouse next to it, and probably they’ve got staff there. To stop poachers or right-to-roam types or whatever.”

“Unless they let the thing in the woods do for them,” Will whispered, which Elena reckoned she could have done without.

“But I found a map.” And she had it up on her phone, a creditably still, clear photo of a creased old document under glass, up on a wall somewhere Elena hadn’t even found. Her estimation of Melissa only increased.

“This shows two other gates. I think one’s just… woods. Woods either side of the fence. Or, if the trail’s still there, there’s no sign of it from the house. But there’s a side trail here.” She jabbed the lit phone off into the woods determinedly, meaning here on the map but there in the world. “And there’s a gate. Probably locked, chained to fuckery, but there. We head this way and either we hit the trail that leads to it, or we hit the fence and work round. There’s a bridle path that runs most of the perimeter.”

“You’ve worked this out,” Ross noted.

“Ross, I do not get on with my parents and I do not get on with the wider family, present company excepted. They are not accepting of my life choices, let us say. I’ve been looking into back doors since I first got here.” She shook her head. “Not because I thought there was some fucked up monster-murder-sacrifice-god-the-fuck-knows-what going on, but just… for me.”

“Well thanks for letting us hitch a lift,” Will said. “Let’s move before my balls retract. It’s freezing.”

Something flapped in the branches overhead and they froze. And probably it was just a bird. A non-monstrous bird. A clumsy owl, maybe. But when Melissa broke the spell and headed off into the trees, they followed so close they were treading on one another’s heels.

The moon might have been full, and the boughs overhead might have been bare, but the light barely got a look in, as though the trees themselves were shedding darkness like old leaves. Elena barely had a chance to get spooked about their surroundings, because keeping up with Ross was a full-time job, and he was devoting the same concentration to keeping track of Melissa. It was only the occasional flash of her lit phone that steered them. Melissa herself seemed to be a font of confidence, using the ancient map and its contemporaneous compass as though she was Lewis, Clark, York and Sacagawea all rolled into one.

When she paused, though, even just to consult her tools once more, the quiet moved in on them. The trees loomed, in reality and in her imagination. Ancient woodland, ancient families, ancient secrets. How many other clearings with stakes? What had killed Patrick? What was the Curse of the Enderboughs? The jumbled facts kept trying to assemble themselves in her head like too many belongings in an overstuffed suitcase, jutting out too many different ways to get it closed. The family met here every generation, except they lived long enough that their generations were spaced wide apart. Wide apart, yet synchronised in some weird way. Will, Melissa, Ross, the rugger bros and the rest, all of an age. Gil, Uncle Jas, Jeffrey de la Pole, all of an age. Patrick and the other hale and hearty ancients likewise. And there was something terrible here, that they came back to. Unless the terrible thing was within them all along, and Enderby was just where they brought it, when it came time for the curse to strike… And it preyed on the Enderboughs, because it had most certainly done for Patrick. But that wasn’t the whole of its menu, because there had been someone tied in the clearing to…

She felt sick, something profoundly obvious fighting past her every attempt to overlook it, to leap and gibber right in the forefront of her imagination. Abruptly she stumbled, and then the solid ground to her left turned out to be a root-knuckled slope that she skidded down, as punishing as a flight of stairs. Ross let out a yell to warn the others, and came scrabbling after her into the utter dark. His hand, clutching her leg and gathering her up, was infinitely reassuring.

“God damn it, what are you doing?” came Melissa’s angry hiss from above. “We’re almost clear. We must be almost to the fence.”

“Well, please excuse the fact that we’re bumbling through a forest at two in the morning,” Ross shot back. “Just give us a hand, will you?”