Miss Warren’s breath clouded daintily around her face before disappearing in the small space of the carriage bumping slowly across the uneven country roads. The air tends to take on a chill around the river, even in the late afternoon when the sun had been shining not twenty minutes earlier.
The slow clip-clop of the horses’ hooves are muted in the vehicle, but Eliza suspects that even if she was to open the curtain and stick her head out of the door she wouldn’t hear a significant change in the tone.
She opens the curtains anyway, undoing the latch that keeps the rattling window just about closed.
She could reach out to touch the drooping fronds of the weeping willows that line the edge of the slow moving water.
“Best not do that, Miss Eliza,” her one other travelling companion warns her, “Folk around here here have made it very clear about their superstitions about this particular river.” Eliza rolls her eyes, but doesn’t make a move towards the window again.
“That’s all very well, Harry, but did you not tell them that they were being silly?” She asks lightly. Harry doesn’t respond to her in words, but his eyes look old, older than Harry’s 60 odd years, and they shine bright with either fear or sadness. Eliza has never been very good at reading other people’s faces. She supposes that it could be both.
The property comes into view scant seconds later, and lord, does it loom.
Her Grandmother’s house stands four storeys tall and sprawls across the length of the land. Grand brick walls were once a bright red, now brown and grimy with dirt and river mud. Eliza could see parts of the roof that had gone missing. A good half of it has gone into disrepair after not being looked after for a couple for. The will had been a long and arduous thing to sort through.
Eliza plans to bring the workmen in as soon as possible. She doesn’t think her grandma would have much appreciated the current state of the house.
Harry gets out of the coach first after it comes to a slow halt. He goes round to the back to haul the trunks down onto the damp gravel driveway of the house.
Eliza has gone ahead, reaching to bring the key she had fought her cousins off for two years out into the one lock it was meant for. He pauses for just a moment, taking in the unnecessary grandeur of the front door, with all its iron filigree depicting odd horned creatures and phases of the moon. Her grandma had been eccentric at best.
The key doesn’t go smoothly into the rusted lock. It takes some jiggling to get it to turn properly, but the clink of metal when all the tumblers move into place is very satisfying indeed. It takes a good heave from Eliza to push the door open. She can hear Harry telling her that he’ll do it, but Eliza never learnt that patience was a virtue. The loud creaking of the door echoes both in the house and outside in the frigid air.
The first couple of steps are loud, her heels striking cleanly against the hardwood. The less are rest so, the strong wood by the door gives way to creaky and splintered planks that bow slightly under her weight.
She hears Harry whistled lowly behind her and the thump of suitcases hitting the floor.
“It’s going to take a lot of work to get this house back into living condition, Miss.”
“I suppose I’ll have to find a room that isn’t so far gone that I couldn’t sleep in it,” she says as she starts off into the west wing.
“Miss, are- are you sure you won’t take the hotel room instead? It’ll be awful cold in this house.” Harry stutters a bit behind her, quickly picking the suitcases up and following her, as if she knows where she’s going. She doesn’t. She’s never been in this house before.
“No, thank you, Harry. I’ve waited two years to set foot in this property, I don’t think it would be right to keep it waiting anymore.” Eliza smiles thinly. She would rather just be left alone for a while, that last few weeks have been excessively stressful. Harry doesn’t look nearly so sure.
Eliza turns down a hallway. Left, always, because it seems like it’s be very possible to get lost in the endless corridors and rooms of this estate. The first couple of doors she opens are just simple storage cupboards. Most of them are empty, though some of them are filled with damp and mouldy linen, and others have cleaning equipment stashed in them.
The third door she tries opens up into a small bedroom, with a single bed, a Cabinet and a dresser out in the open. Anything else is covered in sheets, and a heavy layer of dust covers everything in earnest. Harry tries to set the cases down as softly as possible as not to disturb the room. They both sneeze anyway.
“Well, I suppose this will have to do,” Eliza says as she unlaces her cuffs and rolls them as high up her arms as they go. “Time to get cleaning.” Harry grimaces, but goes to fetch a bucket and mop regardless.
It takes them four hours to clean the room so that Eliza can say it’s up to any sort of standard. It might be slightly mouldy and dingy, but it’s hers.
Harry takes his leave, getting back to his family before supper is out on the table and “my wife has my head for being late”.
She’d packed a small bag full of food for the night, not knowing the state that the kitchen would be in. It wasn’t great. It sat on the bottom floor, just shy of being in the middle of the floor plan. The kitchen window had been open and all the counters around it had warped. They’d be unusable now. The pantry had some dried and tinned foods in it, so there was that at least, and since the stove and fireplace were on the other side of the room, Eliza could at least make warm meals when it came down to it. The water was pumped straight from the river, so that at least was working.
Further exploration uncovered a library, a study, a living room and who knows how many more bedrooms this place had. It was all a bit much. Eliza decided that she’d try and root around the library before she went off to bed.
The room was warm and carpeted, almost the only room in the house to be so. It was bracketed by other rooms as well, so tended to keep any heat in. There was a sunken armchair that stood next to a grand oak book shelf that stood at least twice as tall as Eliza did and just in front of a low coffee table that lived in the middle of the space. But it wasn’t the room that held her attention; it was the sizable leather bound book that sat open on the table. The page it lay open on had, in bold lettering across the top of the page:
CURSES AND CRUX’S, WIX ENCHANTMENTS.
The odd looking book may have been the last one her grandmother ever read, if the state of the house was any indication of who may have been (or not) in the house last.
Eliza went over to the Tome, there was no other word for it really, and started to thumb through the pages. Pages and Pages of handwritten, annotated witchcraft. It was absurd really, potions for ailments she’d never even heard of, spells to aid in garden growth? Curses to make sure you knew if a lover ever cheated on you. The pages were thick paper, handmade probably. She managed to get a papercut somewhere around “Charm for a good day at the Market”. Nearer the back, a lot of blacked out pages that she thumbed thoughtfully. Her grandmother must have had an interest in the Occult. Eliza didn’t care much for it herself, and decided to leave well enough alone.
Eliza closed the book and left it on the table for now. There was more to explore, but tomorrow maybe. She was tired from all the cleaning today. She backtracked into the kitchen to make her way back to the bedroom without much thought to the book or its content
In the library, without prying eyes nor a semblance of a witness, the book blew open. It’s front cover slamming hard on the table, pages rapidly turning of their own accord to the page it had lied open on beforehand. If there was anyone there, they would have noticed that it started to leak. Murky, inky black dripped from the pages, pooling around the table and dripping slowly off onto the carpet. If anyone was around to hear anything, they might have said that they heard distant, tortured screaming. They wouldn’t be able to tell if it was once voice or many, or whether it was even human in nature. The furniture started to warp and shudder, groaning under the pressure of new power.
The ink seemed to go on forever, climbing the walls, seeping through floorboards and swirling in ominous looking puddles. The night stretched on, and so did the ink.
Dawn broke over the river, and Eliza woke uneasily. The room had been cold, though if Harry ever asked, she’d say it was the most wonderful room she’d ever stayed in, through gritted teeth and a hard look in her eyes. There was a well in the courtyard that she washed her face in then want to go about her day. She thought she’d start the day by finding some good material to read whilst the workmen got here.
She didn’t notice that the tome was once again open on the table. She didn’t notice that the working had changed, and that the blacked out pages were no longer black.
There were new words in the book now.
We Accept the Blood Freely Given.
