“Yes.”
He kissed her tenderly, the touch heartfelt and lingering. “If you care about me at all, put your own safety first.”
“It won’t come to that.” Clare rose onto her toes to meet his lips in return and felt him shiver. “We’ll be okay.”
Dorran’s fingers brushed across her cheek as he smiled down at her. The wind screamed as a harsh gust funnelled snow into the attic. Reluctantly, he let Clare go and adjusted his grip on his crowbar. They turned to face the length of the attic. “Let us continue.”
Chapter Thirty-Three
From her new vantage point, Clare had a taste of how vast the attic really was. It had to run across the entire house, though its temporary walls helped break up the space. She suspected there were several other ladders leading into it.
Like the staff’s areas downstairs, comparatively little care had gone into maintaining the attic. Some of the walls had wallpaper, though age had worn away the glue and left strips of it hanging loose. Other walls had been given a thin coating of paint or left as bare wood. None of the furniture, not even the doors, matched.
“Sometimes staff were made to sleep here if there was a shortage of space below.” Dorran led her along the attic, his eyes bright as they searched around old furniture and inside cupboards. He spoke in a whisper, but Clare kept close enough to hear him clearly. “Which was far from reasonable. The attic can become cold, even in the warmer months, and there are always unused guest rooms below. But my mother would rather die than allow one of her servants to sleep in a guest bedroom.”
He used his crowbar to nudge open a cabinet. Inside was empty. They kept moving.
“They put up with it?” Clare asked, keeping her own voice to a murmur.
Dorran lifted his shoulders then let them drop. “She didn’t tolerate insubordination. They either bowed to her will or were removed from the house the same day. And many of them, especially the ones who had been here the longest, adored her.”
They reached another wall, which stretched halfway across the attic’s width. Dorran opened one of the doors, one arm held back to keep Clare behind him. He stayed still a moment as the lantern’s light danced over incalculable piles of cast-out goods, then he gave her a brief nod before stepping through.
The new section was messier with jumbles of furniture on ragged wood floors and old carpets rolled up in the corner. A broken tea set balanced inside a display cabinet. Dorran crouched to check under the furniture then led her onwards.
A gust of freezing air snatched Clare’s breath away. They turned towards it, and Dorran exhaled heavily, letting the lamp drop. “Ah. I think we may have just found how the creatures got into the house.”
They faced one of the larger holes in the roof. Dark, broken tiles littered the floor. The insulation had been torn, and snow was piled below the hole. It was easily large enough for a person to crawl through. Dirty scuff marks spread out from the opening, spiralling in different directions until they became too faint to follow.
Dorran muttered under his breath as he shook his head. “How did they scale the walls? Regardless, there is no purpose in searching the remainder of the house if they can easily come back in again. We will need to seal the hole. And not just this one, but any others that are large enough to allow the creatures through.”
Clare looked behind them. The roof was dotted with damage. She could see at least three other breaches that would be large enough for a person to fit through. One of them had its own set of dirty footprints leading away from it. Her heart sank. “I thought the wind and hail were breaking the roof. And I guess they were… but only because it had been weakened. I think the creatures made the holes themselves. I heard something that sounded like scratching on the roof my first night here.”
It was a horrible mental image—the distorted humans crawling over Winterbourne like insects, surrounded by the blizzard, frost growing in their hair and over their skin as they clawed at the tiles.
Dorran’s lips pulled back in a snarl. “If that is true, then closing the holes will not work. They can simply make more.”
“Can we seal off the attic? Barricade the trapdoors?”
“Yes. That may be the best option. Eventually, we will have to eradicate them from the attic as well, but I think this is the only choice we have at present. Please, would you hold this?”
He passed his lamp to Clare then led her out of the makeshift room and towards a stack of building equipment.
Massive planks, old tins of half-used paint, and workmen’s tool chests stood propped against the wall. Dorran opened one of the chests and retrieved a pot of nails and a hammer, then he began gathering boards. “From the house’s last expansion,” he explained.
Looking closer, Clare saw that all of the equipment appeared to be ancient. The wood was old and cracking in some areas, and the tool chests were all rusty. Dorran picked through the wood until he found pieces that seemed solid, then they crossed the room to one of the trapdoors.
For the next twenty minutes, the attic was full of deafening bangs as Dorran nailed shut three of the four trapdoors. They moved carefully. Every time Dorran put his head down to work, Clare stood as sentry, the lamp held high above them as she scanned the space. They didn’t try to search for the monsters, and they weren’t disturbed. Either the hollow ones had all moved to the lower levels, or the hammering was loud enough to keep them hidden.
As Dorran finished securing the third trapdoor, Clare asked, “Are there any other exits from the attic?”
He brushed sweaty hair out of his face as he stood. Plumes of mist rose with his every breath. “Just the one we came in by. We can carry some planks down with us and nail that shut from the outside. Then we will need to search the remainder of the—”
A low, quiet creak echoed from the back of the attic. They glanced at each other.
Clare spoke in a whisper. “Should we…”
Dorran looked conflicted. “We can leave and avoid confrontation entirely. But there is no guarantee the creature will not try to follow us or stop us from nailing the trapdoor shut. No. I had better deal with it now.” He picked up the crowbar, and Clare saw that he was clenching it tightly enough for his knuckles to turn white. “It will need to be done eventually anyway.”
Her stomach turned cold. Dorran moved towards the back of the attic, and Clare hurried to keep up with him. The lantern’s glow danced over the walls as it swung.
“Careful,” Dorran whispered. “Stay well behind me.”
Up ahead was the attic’s back wall, shielded by a folding screen. Clare could barely make out hints of motion in the gaps between the slats. Dorran circled around, moving silently as he tried not to draw attention.
Clare tightened her grip on the fire poker. This encounter felt different. Before, in the forest, they had been attacked. She had acted in self-defence. Now she was going to strike first. It left her feeling uneasy and dirty. She didn’t want to kill something defenceless, something that might just have been trying to hide.
You can’t think of them that way. The monsters were beyond reason and beyond saving. They had lost too much of their humanity. She’d seen their eyes in the forest. They were wild, driven by pure animalistic impulses. They barely felt pain. And they certainly hadn’t felt remorse when they’d bitten into her.
Even so… hunting them seemed wrong.
She thought Dorran’s mind might be running along similar tracks. She could see the tension in his face and across his shoulders. His eyebrows were drawn together, but the expression didn’t hold any ferocity. It was full of dread.