The Monster Beneath Blackthorn Manor

At the edge of Blackthorn Wood, someone had nailed a dead crow to a sign.

The sign read NO TRESPASSING. The crow had been dead long enough for its feathers to loosen in the wind, and the nails were new.

Dr. Thomas Ashcroft considered both facts while rain ran down the back of his collar.

He was a rational man. He believed in infection, bad architecture, the fragility of human memory, and the regrettable tendency of frightened people to make worse decisions together. He did not believe in monsters.

He did, however, believe that somebody had gone to considerable trouble to keep visitors away from Blackthorn Manor.

His brother had been missing for nine days.

Thomas stepped around the sign.

The track into the woods was narrow and pitted with water. On either side, blackthorn branches grew close enough to catch his sleeves. He carried a canvas medical bag in one hand and a flashlight in the other. The bag contained bandages, a bottle of water, a field dressing, and enough surgical equipment to satisfy the part of him that insisted on preparing for the worst even when he could barely imagine what the worst might be.

Calder had laughed at that habit once.

You’re the only man I know who brings sutures on a picnic, he’d said.

That had been before the funerals. Before their mother’s long illness hollowed out the family and Calder began speaking about people who could call the dead back if they were willing to pay. Thomas had argued with him, first kindly, then angrily, and finally so often that Calder stopped answering the phone.

Nine days ago, Calder had left a voice message containing only rain, a bell, and six words.

I found the place she went.

Thomas had listened to it seventeen times. He knew because he had counted.

The track bent toward a low stone wall. A woman’s voice spoke from beyond it.

“Turn around, doctor.”

Thomas stopped.

An elderly woman stood beneath an umbrella that looked older than both of them. She wore a coat the color of wet bark, with a basket hooked over one arm. Her face was lined and unsmiling, but her boots were polished and her back was straight.

“Do I know you?” Thomas asked.

“No. I know what you’re looking for.”

“Then perhaps you can help me.”

“I already am.”

She lifted the umbrella and pointed it back toward the village.

“Leave before the bells.”

Thomas glanced at his watch. A few minutes after five. The light was already fading beneath the trees, but there was no church for miles. The village chapel had lost its tower in a storm decades earlier.

“Who rings them?” he asked.

“No one who wants to be found.”

He might have dismissed the reply as local theater if he hadn’t noticed the basket. It contained fresh linen, a tin of salve, and small packets of herbs carefully tied with string. Someone here was supplying a patient.

“My brother’s name is Calder Ashcroft,” Thomas said. “He’s thirty-two, about my height, dark hair. He came here last week.”

The woman’s hand tightened on the umbrella handle.

“I’ve seen him.”

Thomas’s heart leaped. “When?”

“Long enough ago that he could have left.”

“Did he?”

“I don’t know.”

Her answer was direct, and it gave him less comfort than a lie would have.

“What’s your name?” he asked.

“Ysra.”

“Ysra, if my brother is injured, I can help him. If he’s involved with people who are frightening him—”

“Fear isn’t always the problem, doctor.”

The old woman looked past him into the darkening trees. Her face changed. For the first time he saw unmistakable concern.

“Go,” she said.

Then she turned and disappeared through a gap in the wall, moving far faster than he expected.

Thomas stood alone beneath the branches.

He should have followed her. She knew the place, and she had admitted to seeing Calder. He might have learned something useful without setting foot inside the estate.

Instead, from somewhere beyond the trees, a bell rang once.

The note was low and heavy, like iron dropped into deep water.

Every bird in the wood fell silent.

Thomas walked toward the sound.

Blackthorn Manor appeared without warning. The trees broke apart, and there it stood on a rise above the marsh: a house of dark stone with a steep central roof, tall narrow windows, and two wings that leaned away from the main building as though trying to escape it. Ivy covered the eastern wall. The western windows were broken. The chimneys had grown trees from their crowns.

He had expected a ruin. He had not expected the impression that it was waiting.

The second bell rang.

A movement flashed between two stone statues near the front steps.

Thomas raised his light. A small figure darted from one statue to the next. Not Calder. A child, perhaps eight years old, wearing a green raincoat too large for her.

“Hello?” Thomas called.

The girl froze.

“I’m not going to hurt you. My name’s Thomas.”

She looked toward the house, then back at him. Even from a distance he could see how frightened she was.

“You can’t be here,” she whispered.

“Neither can you, from the look of things. Where are your parents?”

Her lips trembled. “At the village. I wanted to see the garden.”

“All right. Come here, and we’ll walk back together.”

The girl took one step.

Something moved behind her.

At first Thomas thought a curtain had slipped through a broken window. Then the darkness gathered in a shape with too many limbs, too long and narrow to be human. Its head pushed through the doorway without touching the frame. The skin along its neck seemed to ripple like wet paper, and when it opened its mouth he saw a row of teeth that were not teeth at all, but tiny white hands.

The child screamed.

Thomas ran.

He did not stop to decide whether the thing was real. It was moving toward a child. He crossed the gravel drive in a few strides, caught the girl around the waist, and pulled her behind the nearest statue.

The creature reached for them. Its limbs made no sound against the gravel. Thomas swung his medical bag at its head, a thoroughly useless instinct that would later embarrass him if he lived long enough to consider it.

The bag passed through something cold and yielding. A smell like earth dug from a grave filled his mouth.

The creature turned toward him.

Then the ground split.

Black roots burst upward, thick as arms. They wrapped around the creature and dragged it backward. It shrieked, and the sound was so high Thomas felt it in his teeth. The thing tore at the roots, opening wounds that bled dark sap, but more roots rose in their place.

Behind them, a taller shadow appeared beneath the trees.

Thomas looked up.

For one impossible instant he thought he was seeing a woman. She stood upright and held herself with the stillness of someone listening to music no one else could hear. Her hair fell in black ropes over her shoulders. The shape of her face was almost lovely.

Then she stepped into the open and the illusion failed.

Antlers rose from her skull, branching through a crown of thorn. Her skin was dark as charred wood, with pale seams of light running beneath it. One arm ended in a hand that could have held a teacup; the other was longer, armored in bark and tipped with curved claws. Roots moved around her ankles, sinking into the earth wherever she walked.

She looked at the child first.

“Lily,” she said.

Her voice was low and rough, like a cello played beneath the floorboards.

The little girl began to cry harder. “I’m sorry.”

“I told you not to follow the bells.”

“I wanted to see the blue flowers.”

“Not after sundown.”

The creature’s strange face tightened with something Thomas recognized as worry. She crouched, carefully folding the clawed arm against her chest, and held out her other hand. The child reached for it without hesitation.

Thomas stayed where he was.

The thing caught in the roots was still struggling. The antlered woman turned toward it, and the grove around them seemed to lean in obedience.

She closed her hand.

The roots pulled the creature beneath the gravel. A moment later the ground settled, leaving only a dark circle where it had been.

Silence rushed back.

The antlered woman rose slowly. She kept herself between the child and the house. When she finally looked at Thomas, her eyes were a clear, impossible green.

“You should have listened to Ysra,” she said.

Thomas’s mouth had gone dry. His training offered him no useful language for what he had just seen. No diagnosis for a body made of thorns. No explanation for a thing with hands inside its mouth.

He found one question he could still ask.

“Are you going to hurt us?”

The woman looked almost offended.

“I’ve spent two hundred years preventing that.”

The little girl tugged at Thomas’s coat. Her voice was barely audible.

“She’s not the bad thing, mister.”

From deep beneath Blackthorn Manor, something knocked three times against the stone.

The antlered woman’s face emptied of expression.

“Not yet,” she whispered, though Thomas couldn’t tell whom she was addressing.