Page 80 of Winterset

Reed shrugged. “One has to wonder what they were doing there alone, if he had been locked up for the past several years in the nursery. What started the fire? Given his history, I would be suspicious.”

“Yes, no doubt you are right.” Anna could not help but think with horror of what ran in her family, lurking in her own flesh and blood.

When they reached Winterset, they went straight up the stairs to the nursery. The door to the nursery was indeed a sturdy door with a lock. Fortunately it was not locked, so they did not have to search for the key. Reed opened the door, and they stepped inside.

The rooms were dark, the curtains drawn, and Reed strode over to push aside the curtain and let in some light. Anna looked at the bars crisscrossing the window, and she could not suppress a shiver. Reed looked at her in some concern.

“Are you all right?”

Anna nodded. “Yes. It is just…a little unsettling.” She rubbed her arms, feeling cold despite the fact that it was summer. She wasn’t sure why she felt unnerved here—whether she actually sensed something abnormal, or whether her emotions were simply colored by what Mrs. Parmer had told them about the place.

They walked through the rooms—three small bedrooms and a larger schoolroom. The rooms were clean, the shelves empty. There was no sign that anyone had ever lived here, including children. What furniture there was, was all adult-size. A large humpbacked trunk stood against one wall in the schoolroom, and Reed crossed over to open it.

“Well,” he said, looking down into the trunk. “Here are the lord’s masks.”

Anna went quickly to his side and peered into the trunk. The inside was filled with masks, some metal, others wooden, and still others made of clay or cloth or—Anna reached down and touched one—of animal hide. Reed began to pull them out and line them up on the floor. Some were amazingly realistic renditions of animals—there were a few that even had protruding snouts. Others were more like stylized drawings of animals, and others seemed to be mythical beasts or more human-looking beings that were what Anna supposed Mrs. Parmer had termed “demons.” Teeth were painted on some; others had actual animals’ teeth glued to them.

Even laid out here on the floor, the masks looked eerie and bizarre. She could well imagine how frightening they would appear hanging all over the walls, teeth bared.

“Lord de Winter seemed to favor wolves,” Reed commented.

Anna nodded, glancing over the masks. There was, indeed, a preponderance resembling wolves.

Reed lifted out the last mask and laid it down, saying, “There are books on the bottom of the trunk.”

“His journals?” Anna looked in at the rows of identical brown books.

“I presume.” He reached in, took one out and began to glance through it.

Anna did the same. The pages were filled with words in a small, cramped hand. She glanced through them. Though at first glance they appeared to be sentences, with periods and commas, the strings of words made little or no sense.

“Gibberish,” Reed said, flipping through the pages.

“I can make out a few things. This looks like king, maybe. Oh, and here, I think this says Wolf People.” She could make out little else. Some of the words were written, as Mrs. Parmer had noted, in something that was definitely not English—nor any other language Anna had ever seen.

She laid the book aside and picked up another one. It was much the same. As she went down through the stack, she noticed, however, that there were more and more words that made sense and even sentences that were understandable, although wildly irrational.

“Reed, look—here it says, ‘We are the descendants of the Beast.’ And here, ‘not cursed, but blessed.’”

Reed moved closer, reading over her shoulder, “‘At night I roam with my…’ What is that?”

Anna peered at where he pointed. “‘Brethren?’”

Reed nodded. “‘At night I roam with my brethren. None can see us. None know the power we hold. We walk between the worlds, and all is dark.’”

“His mind was clearer at this time,” Anna mused. “Perhaps they are earlier books, or maybe he went through more lucid periods. Didn’t Mrs. Parmer say that he had ‘spells,’ or something like that?”

Anna flipped through more pages. “Here—wolves again. ‘We are the Children of the Wolf. The power is in us. None can reach us, none can stop us.’ Who is this ‘we’?” she asked.

“God knows. The wolves? People that only he saw?”

“Oh, look. ‘When I was fifteen, the King of the Wolves spoke to me.’ But this makes no sense—‘Come down from the mountain and bury beneath my skin.’” She turned the page. “Here is some more about the King of the Wolves talking to him.”

Reed picked up another journal and paged through it. “This one is gibberish again.” He searched through the others remaining in the trunk, glancing through them and setting them aside until he found one that was more intelligible.

“All right,” he said, his eyes scanning down the page. “Here he says something about being superior, part wolf, part man. Apparently he thought he had the sense of smell of a wolf and their acute hearing. ‘I walk upright, but I have the heart of my brothers. At night I walk in the woods and converse with them. But none hear, for we speak without words.’”

Anna shuddered. “Ugh. This is all horrid. I cannot bear it.”