CHAPTER 1:
Elias Crowe had not been back to his aunt's house in twenty-three years. Not since he was twelve and she'd caught him reading one of her locked journals, the leather cover still warm from her hands. She had not shouted. She had simply looked at him with those pale, watery eyes and said, "Some doors, child, open both ways."
Now she was dead, and the house belonged to him.
The solicitor handed over the keys in a small manila envelope. Inside was also a single sheet of heavy cream paper, folded once. On it, in Aunt Lydia's spidery handwriting:
For Elias.
Use sparingly.
Burn the rest when you are done.
There is no undoing what is read.
No signature. No date. Just that.
The house stood on the edge of Blackthorn Moor, three storeys of blackened brick and narrow windows that stared like suspicious eyes. December rain had turned the gravel drive to mud. Elias's boots squelched as he approached the front door, the keys cold and heavy in his palm.
Inside smelled of damp paper and candle smoke. Every surface was crowded with books—shelves bowed under them, stacks rose from the floor like termite mounds. Lydia had been a collector, a hoarder of stories. She had never married, never left the moor for more than a day, and had earned her living restoring rare manuscripts for private clients who preferred anonymity.
Elias wandered from room to room, half expecting her to appear in a doorway, shushing him. In the study on the second floor he found what he had come for: her desk. A vast mahogany thing scarred with ink and knife cuts. Drawers lined with green baize. On its surface lay a single object beneath a square of black silk.
He lifted the silk.
An inkwell. Cut glass, octagonal, stoppered with lead. The glass was dark, almost black, and the contents inside moved sluggishly, as though reluctant to settle. Beside it rested a fountain pen—ebony barrel, gold nib worn to a needle point. No brand mark. No ornamentation except a faint engraving along the barrel:
Lettera vivit.
The letter lives.
Elias uncorked the inkwell. The scent that rose was metallic, like old blood mixed with wet earth. He dipped the pen. The nib drank greedily, more than it should have. When he lifted it, a single bead trembled at the tip, refusing to fall.
He turned to the fresh journal Lydia had left open on the blotter. Blank pages, thick cotton rag that drank ink like thirsty soil.
He wrote a test line.
The rain against the window sounds like fingernails.
The nib scratched softly. The words appeared in a deep sepia that darkened even as he watched, turning almost black.
Then the pen moved again—by itself.
His fingers had not twitched. His wrist had not shifted. Yet the nib slid sideways and added three more words beneath his sentence.
They are trying to get in.
Elias stared. The handwriting was not his. It was Lydia's—tight, angular, unmistakable.
He laughed once, a nervous bark that echoed in the empty house. A trick. Some weighted mechanism in the pen, a lingering prank from a woman who had always preferred solitude to company.
He capped the pen, closed the journal, and went downstairs to light a fire. He would deal with sentiment tomorrow.
That night he dreamed of ink spreading across paper like spilled blood, forming words he could not quite read before they sank into the page and vanished.