Chapter 20 of 20·6 min read·The same night, shortly before dawn
The Record Beneath the Chapel
The second shadow vanished between the trees, but I kept seeing the place where it had stood.
Vale lowered his revolver. Snow settled on the barrel and melted against the heat of his hand.
“Keep moving,” he said.
We went downhill in a tight group, Eda wrapped in Vale’s coat, Perrin at my shoulder. The city waited below us in a spill of amber lamps and black roofs. My boots slipped on the frozen road. Each time I stumbled, Perrin’s hand hovered near my elbow without closing around it.
Auden’s shadow followed beneath me. It had lost the soft breadth it once carried. At the edges, the shape broke into threads that vanished whenever the streetlamps touched them.
I wanted to stop. I wanted to press both palms against the pavement and gather those fragments back into him.
The chapel archive waited below, and the watcher had pointed toward me.
I walked faster.
We reached Saint Orra’s shortly before three. The chapel had been closed for years, its bell tower webbed with scaffolding and its doors chained against the winter. A narrow passage ran along the rear wall toward the vestry. Eda took us there without hesitation, counting doors beneath her breath.
“The archive stairs are under the old sacristy,” she said. “The city sealed the upper entrance after the roof damage. There is another way through the coal passage.”
Perrin looked at the broken gutters and boarded windows. “You remember all this?”
“I remember what people tried to hide.”
She stopped at a door swollen in its frame. Vale forced the lock with the butt of his revolver. The noise moved through the chapel walls and returned in dull echoes.
Inside, the air smelled of wet stone, ash, and old wax. Vale lit a lantern. Eda found a stairwell behind a hanging length of torn canvas, and we descended into the dark.
The cold sharpened underground. My breath drifted before me. Auden’s shadow clung to the steps, lagging whenever I climbed. I slowed, and it gathered closer.
Perrin noticed. “Tamsin.”
“I know.”
“You don’t have to keep pace with us.”
“I’m not trying to keep pace.” I looked down at the thin shape. “I’m trying to keep him with me.”
Perrin’s face tightened. He turned the lantern toward the passage and gave me the privacy of looking away.
At the bottom, iron shelves filled a chamber beneath the chapel. Bound ledgers leaned against one another in rows, their spines blistered by damp. Water had seeped through the ceiling and left pale tracks across the floor.
Next
Tamsin must climb into the sealed bell tower to find Maris’s last record while the watcher moves through the chapel above and Auden’s shadow may no longer recognize her.
“Children’s ward transfers,” she said. “Nineteen years ago.”
Vale raised the lantern while she searched. Her fingers moved over the bindings until they reached a ledger swollen nearly twice its original size.
“Here.”
She carried it to a table. The wood sagged when she set the book down.
I stood opposite her, my gloves leaving wet marks on the cover. The ledger contained Maris Pell’s name. I had carried that name from Harrowmere like a coal, terrified of what it might burn through if I held it too tightly.
Eda opened the book.
The transfer entry was written in a clerk’s narrow hand.
Maris Pell. Age seventeen. Mother deceased. Shadow disturbance persistent. Discharged to Bellweather Rooms, forty-two Rook Street, under the supervision of maternal aunt, Odel Pell.
Below the entry, a second hand had added a line in dark ink.
Patient refuses to travel after dusk. Reports a man waiting ahead of her route.
My fingers curled against the table.
“She knew,” I said.
“She knew someone was following her,” Vale answered.
Eda shook her head. “She said the man appeared before she arrived. She said he was waiting in places where she had never been.”
Perrin bent over the page. “Was this written before the photograph?”
“The photograph was taken at Harrowmere,” Eda said. “The transfer came later.”
“Then the shadow in the picture followed her beyond the hospital.”
A line on the next page had been crossed out so heavily that the paper had torn. Beneath it, the clerk had written a new note.
Aunt absent upon arrival. Room vacant. Patient returned to chapel at dawn.
Vale’s eyes lifted. “Returned here?”
Eda turned the page with care. “There should be an intake record.”
There was. Maris had come back alone six days after leaving Harrowmere. She had no coat, no shoes, and a strip of silver-edged black ribbon wound around her left wrist.
The room seemed to contract around the words.
Perrin looked toward me. “The same ribbons?”
“Funeral ribbons,” Vale said. “A connection to Auden’s case.”
The record continued.
Patient states that the shadow is hers and the man is separate. Patient states that he does not follow grief. He follows those who try to escape it.
Auden’s shadow stretched toward the ledger.
It reached the table’s edge and stopped.
I touched the page. “What happened to her?”
Eda turned another leaf. The lower corner had been cut away.
“Someone removed the final entry,” she said.
Vale inspected the binding. “Recently?”
“The cut is old.”
A small paper packet had been tucked inside the ledger. It slid free when Eda lifted the torn page. The packet bore a name in faded pencil: MARIS PELL — PERSONAL STATEMENT.
My pulse struck hard against my throat.
Eda opened it. A single sheet lay inside, covered in writing that changed size from line to line. The first sentences had been written carefully. The last pressed so deeply into the paper that the words showed on the back.
I asked the shadow why it came before me.
No answer followed. The next line had been scraped away.
I asked whether it belonged to the dead.
Another gap.
I asked whether it wanted me or the grief that brought me here.
The final legible sentence read:
It wears the shape of a man because that is the shape I fear will come for me.
Below it, someone had drawn a door with a narrow window.
Perrin reached for the paper. I placed my hand over it first.
The shadow beside my boots jerked toward the chapel wall.
Vale extinguished the lantern.
Darkness took the archive.
A sound came from the passage above us: one slow footstep, then another. Snow or water dripped from the ceiling. The steps descended without hurry.
Eda breathed, “He found us.”
Vale drew his revolver. Perrin moved between me and the stairwell, though his shoulders were already shaking from exhaustion.
I looked down at Auden’s shadow. It had gathered itself beneath me, a thin black pool trembling across the stones.
“I won’t ask,” I whispered.
The footfalls reached the bottom step.
A tall shape entered the passage. It possessed the outline of a man and the depth of a stain. Lanternless darkness moved around it. Where its face should have been, the chapel’s distant streetlight showed through a narrow, pale gap.
Eda made a sound that belonged to nineteen years ago.
“It’s him.”
The watcher turned toward her.
Vale fired. The shot struck the stone beside the shape and filled the chamber with smoke. The watcher crossed the distance without seeming to move. Eda fell backward, clutching at her chest.
I stepped between them.
The watcher raised one hand.
Auden’s shadow rose from the floor.
It spread across my back and shoulders, thin as wet cloth. Cold pierced me first. Then warmth came beneath it, the last familiar warmth from the passenger seat of Auden’s car, from his hand resting over mine at red lights, from the scarf I still kept folded beside my bed.
The watcher struck.
The force drove me against the table. The ledger fell open at my feet. Auden’s shadow flared between us, and the man-shaped darkness broke apart into strips that whipped against the walls.
Perrin seized Eda and dragged her behind the shelves. Vale fired again, this time at the ceiling above the watcher. Stone crashed down. Dust rolled through the chamber, and the shape recoiled into the stairwell.
I reached for Auden’s shadow.
It had thinned to a grey smear.
“Auden.”
The shape remained still.
I said his name again. I said it the way I had at the window, at his grave, in the dark beside my bed.
Nothing gathered beneath it. No turn toward me. No remembered pull.
The name had fallen through him.
The pain was clean enough to make me bend over. My palm pressed against the ledger’s open page, smearing dust across Maris Pell’s final statement.
Perrin called my name from behind the shelves. Vale shouted that the passage was clear.
I picked up the paper packet and folded it inside my coat.
The watcher had gone, but its footsteps continued above us, climbing toward the chapel doors.
Eda gripped my sleeve. “Maris left another record.”
“Where?”
Eda looked at the drawing of the door. “The Bellweather Rooms were not her final address.”
“Then tell me where she went.”
Her eyes fixed on the grey shadow at my feet.
“She came back here because the watcher had already reached Rook Street. And the last place Maris wrote her name was beneath the chapel bell.”