Blackthorn

The Gate

The car drops me at the bottom of the hill because the road doesn’t go any farther, and the driver won’t look at me when he takes my money.

I’ve seen this before. Not the road — the not looking. People do it when they know something they’ve decided isn’t theirs to say.

“You want me to wait?” he asks the windshield.

“No.”

He waits anyway. I feel him idling behind me the whole way up, headlights throwing my shadow long and thin across the gravel, and when the engine finally turns and fades I understand he was waiting to see if I’d change my mind.

Nobody warned me about the hill. Half a mile of it, steep enough that my suitcase drags like something living, pine on both sides so dense the September light comes through in coins.

I stop twice. The second time I take my phone out.

There’s nothing on it. There was nothing on it an hour ago, and there was nothing on it at the bus depot, and I know there’s nothing on it now, and I look anyway — and then I stand on a logging road in Maine and feel my face go hot in front of an audience of absolutely nobody.

You’re nineteen years old. Put it away.

I put it away.

Then, because there’s no one for a mile in any direction, I say out loud, “I’m Delphine, I’m from Vermont, I’m on the provenance track,” and I listen to how it sounds.

It sounds like a lie, which is interesting, because all three parts are true.

I say it twice more before I get to the top.

Then the trees stop, all at once, the way a held breath stops.

Blackthorn Hall sits in the clearing like it grew there. Four stone houses around a courtyard, black slate roofs, windows narrow as arrow slits. Ivy has gotten into the mortar on the west side and nobody has stopped it in a hundred years. Above the arch, the founding year: 1873.

I stand there with my hand cramping around the suitcase handle and I think, good.

Then I think, again.

The word arrives from nowhere. It sits in my head with the smug weight of a thing I’ve said before, and I hate it enough to shove it out.

I’m nineteen years old, I’m four hundred miles from anyone who knows my name, and I have never in my life been here.

You’ve never been here, I tell myself, and it comes out with the same shape as the sentence I practiced on the road.

All three parts true. Still sounds like a lie.

The gate is wrought iron, twice my height, and it’s standing open.

I stop in front of it and I do the thing I always do, which is take stock of every surface between me and where I’m going. Iron holds badly. Cold metal is a poor archive — it takes an impression and lets it go, like snow.

Still.

I switch the suitcase to my left hand. I flex my right, which is bare, because the right glove went somewhere between the bus depot and the last town and I’ve spent two hours pretending that doesn’t matter.

I don’t have to touch it. That’s the first thing to understand about me. Nobody makes me do this.

Before I do, I make myself work it properly, the way I’ve been doing it since I was twelve and figured out that guessing first is the only way to know whether you’re any good.

The hinge pins are original. The paint is eighteen layers deep and the top layer is wrong — modern, too blue. The scrollwork on the left leaf has been repaired at the second curl and whoever did it was competent and in a hurry.

And the bottom bar has a shine on it. Not rust, not wear from the ground. A polish, eighteen inches long, dead centre, at the height of a child’s foot.

Kids climb it. Generations of them. That’ll be the loudest thing in there and it’ll be nothing.

I touch it.

Cold comes up my arm, and under the cold —

Fingers here. Thousands. A century of hands on the same eight inches of iron. They come in a wash, meaningless, the way a crowd is meaningless. Arrivals. Departures. A girl crying in 1958. A boy carving something into the post with a penknife in the dark.

Children climbing. Dozens of them, exactly as I called it, and for one warm half-second I’m pleased with myself.

And then, under all of it, deeper than any of it, one impression laid so thick it has worn a groove:

A hand. Small. Warm. Four years old, maybe five, and gripping the bar hard enough to leave the shape of the metal in the palm.

And under the hand, a feeling. Not fear. Not wonder.

Recognition.

I take my hand off the gate so fast I hear my own shoulder pop.

The courtyard is empty. My breath is going too quick and shallow, and my palm is ringing like I slapped stone.

That’s wrong. Iron doesn’t hold like that. Iron doesn’t hold anything like that. To leave a groove in a bad archive you’d have to touch it a thousand times, or once with a force I’ve never encountered in eleven years of doing this.

And it was a child’s hand.

I look down at my own. Nineteen. Bitten nails. Ink on the side of the middle finger where the pen always rests.

I have never been to Maine before this morning. My mother died when I was twelve and she never brought me anywhere. There is no version of my life in which a four-year-old me stood at this gate and knew it.

So it’s someone else’s kid, I tell myself, walking, gravel loud under my shoes. So a professor’s daughter grabbed a gate ten thousand times because kids do that.

It’s a reasonable explanation. I’ve built a whole personality out of reasonable explanations.

It doesn’t touch the sound the word made when it landed. Again.

Inside the arch the temperature drops eight degrees and the noise of the world stops like a door closing.

The courtyard is flagstone, worn into shallow bowls at the center of each path where two hundred years of feet have gone. There’s a well head in the middle, capped with iron, and a lawn that somebody keeps at a length just short of loved.

I keep to the middle of the path. I don’t touch the well. I don’t touch the doors.

A girl is sitting on the steps of the north house with a suitcase of her own and a look on her face like she’s been waiting long enough to develop opinions about it.

“Please tell me you’re Sayre,” she says.

“I’m Sayre.”

“Oh, thank God.” She stands. She’s tall, brown-skinned, hair wrapped in a green scarf, and she’s wearing a men’s cardigan that’s losing an argument with its own sleeves. “I’m Marguerite Okonjo. Mars. They gave me your name three hours ago and I’ve been out here building an entire relationship with it. I know things about you. I’ve decided you’re a Virgo.”

“I’m a Scorpio.”

“That’s worse,” she says, delighted, and takes my suitcase out of my hand before I can stop her, and something in my chest that has been braced since the bus depot lets go about an inch.

Careful, I think. You like her already. That’s fast.

“Wren House,” she says, nodding at the door. “Third floor, which is a war crime, but we get the window that faces the water. Assignment’s by draw, did they tell you? They put every name in a bowl. Very old, very stupid, absolutely no appeals.”

“What did you draw?”

“Same as you. Wren.” She’s already climbing. “Everybody wants Ashgate. Nobody gets Ashgate unless their grandfather bought a wing.”

The stairwell smells like cold stone and floor wax and, faintly, under everything, like a fireplace that’s been out for a long time.

I run my hand along the banister without thinking. It’s oak, and oak holds, and the impressions come up in a fast bright blur — palms, palms, palms, a boy taking these stairs three at a time in 1994, a girl sitting on this exact step with her head against the wall at four in the morning, done crying —

— and then a flat spot. A dead patch. Six inches of banister with nothing in it at all, wiped so clean it reads like a hole in a tooth.

I stop walking.

“Sayre?”

“Sorry.” My mouth is dry. “Long hill.”

Objects don’t come clean. Not on their own. Not oak. You can’t scrub memory out of wood any more than you can scrub the rings out of it.

Somebody took that.

Mars is talking about the dining hall and the heating and a professor named Grieve who apparently makes you stand when you answer, and I follow her voice up the stairs with my hand held carefully away from the wood, and I think about a small warm palm on cold iron, and I think about six inches of nothing.

Two anomalies in ten minutes.

I’m not frightened. I would like there to be a record somewhere of the exact moment I could have turned around and gone back down the hill.

I’m not frightened.

I’m interested.

That’s the thing that’s going to kill me.

Our room has two beds, two desks, a fireplace bricked up in 1940, and the window Mars promised, which faces east over three miles of pine to a gray line of water.

She takes the left bed. I take the right without discussion, the way you do.

I unpack the way I always unpack, which is fast, and the last thing out of the case is the box.

It’s small, cedar, and it holds four things: my mother’s watch, which is stopped; a photograph; a river stone; and one glove, black, left hand, now useless without its twin.

Mars watches me set it on the desk without asking what’s in it, which is the second thing that makes me like her.

“Dinner’s at seven,” she says. “It’s a whole thing. Everybody’s on display, everybody’s pretending they’re not. First-years sit at the low tables and get looked at.”

“By who?”

“Everyone.” She pulls the scarf off her hair and shakes it out. “Second-years, mostly. The societies start counting heads in September even though the ballot isn’t until November. And the Ashcroft boy will be there, and half the room will spend two hours not staring at him, which takes more energy than staring.”

Something moves in my chest. Not recognition. Nothing so clean.

Just a — tilt. Like the floor going half a degree off level and back.

“The what boy?”

Mars looks at me in the mirror.

“You’ll see,” she says.

I go down early. Not to eat — to get the hall empty for two minutes, because I want to know what the room is before it’s full of people.

That’s a lie I tell myself well enough that it almost holds. What I actually want is the long table, because it’s chestnut, four hundred years old by the look of it, and a surface like that is a library.

The hall is lit by candle sconces and one window at the far end that runs the whole height of the wall. Portraits down both sides, all of them dark with varnish, all of them men.

I put my bare hand flat on the table.

And I get nothing.

Not a thin read. Not a difficult one. Nothing — the same clean nothing as the banister, but four hundred years of it, an entire hall’s worth of dinners and arguments and elbows scoured down to bare grain, and the silence of it is so total that for one second I think the gift is gone, that it finally burned out, that I’m just a girl with her hand on a table.

Then, at the very bottom, faint as a pulse through a wall, one thing survives.

Her.

A girl. Not me. Sitting where I’m standing, hands flat on this wood exactly like mine, and she is terrified, and she is thinking one sentence over and over with enough force to press it into the grain like a thumb into wax:

Don’t come back. Don’t come back. Don’t come back.

I pull my hand away.

The candles gutter in a draft from somewhere. Down the hall, a door opens and the low roar of arriving students comes in with it, and I stand there with my heart going and my palm burning and no idea at all what my face is doing.

Which is when I look up.

He’s in the doorway at the far end. Dark coat, dark hair, a stillness that doesn’t belong to anybody our age. Twenty at most. He hasn’t come in. He’s just stopped there with one hand on the frame, and he isn’t looking at the room.

He’s looking at my hand on the table.

And then at me.

For one full second, across ninety feet of candlelight and four hundred years of dead chestnut, this boy I have never seen before looks at me with an expression I recognize down to the bone, because I’ve been wearing it since the gate.

Again.

***

Author’s Note

WELCOME TO BLACKTHORN HALL! 🏛️✨🌲

Sayre’s (Delphine’s) Gift: Tucking her suitcase under her arm, she “reads” history through touch—but how could she feel a childhood hand on the iron gate if she’s never been here before?

The Missing Memory: Someone is erasure-scrubbing the memories of objects. Who can wipe centuries of history from old wood, leaving a “dead patch” in its place?

THAT ENDING: Locked eyes with the “Ashcroft boy” and that haunting thought: Again. 👁️🖤

What do you think Sayre is actually feeling when she senses “recognition” on a gate she should have never touched?

Drop your theories below, hit Vote/Heart if you’re already hooked, and Add to Library so you don’t miss Chapter 2! 📚🔥