Garsdale was a wet grey bruise at dawn. The platform lay empty except for a porter asleep against a crate, and the rails ran north into mist and south toward London, where the city was already waking to its own filth. I sat on a wooden bench with my back against the station wall, one hand pressed to my ribs, the other buried in my coat. The two stones in my pocket had not cooled all night.
Caleb bought the tickets. He came back with two first-class seats and a cup of weak tea in a tin cup.
"Train's due in twenty minutes," he said.
I nodded. The cut on my hand had begun to scab, but every breath still pulled at my cracked ribs. The world at the edges was too sharp and too slow at once, a leftover from the Eucharist, or from losing blood. I did not ask which.
When the train arrived, Caleb helped me into the compartment. It was small and clean, with padded seats and a coal brazier already burning low. The window was streaked with rain. I sat facing forward, away from Blackwood, and let the warmth settle into my joints.
Caleb took the seat opposite me. He placed the leather satchel between us, then reached inside and pulled out the diary.
It was small and dark, warped at the corners. A black thread had been wound around the cover and tied tight. Agnes's book. The housemaid. The creature that had worn Iona's face.
Caleb held it in both hands as if it might come apart.
"Father."
I looked at him.
"Do you want me to read it?"
I turned my head toward the window. The moors were moving past, grey and wet, broken in places by black stone walls. The yew under which we had buried Silas and his son was already far behind, but I could still see it if I closed my eyes.
"Read it for me," I said. "My eyes are shot."
Caleb hesitated. Then he untied the black thread and opened the book.
The pages were thin, some stuck together with damp, others torn. He peeled them apart carefully, one by one. The carriage filled with the smell of old paper, lavender, and the faint sweet rot that had hung in the dead-house at High Moor.
Then he began, his voice low and even.
"Entry the third. The men came again. They wore dark vestments, clean as new rain. The master called them brothers."
The rhythm of the train matched the words. I closed my eyes.
"One touched my forehead and said I had been chosen for a longer life. I did not want a longer life. I wanted them to leave."
Caleb paused, turned a page.
"Entry the fifth. They marked the others first. Anna screamed when the thread went in. The thread is black and it does not bleed. It moves when you look away."
I could hear the words under the wheels, under the rain, under the slow throb of my ruined hand.
"Entry the seventh. The first fever came after the landslide. The brothers said it was the old plague, that the earth had opened and let it out. Master Silas believed them. He would have believed anything that promised the boy a longer life."
Caleb's voice did not shake. I opened my eyes long enough to see him, head bent, reading by the grey light.
"Entry the ninth. Master Silas is not a bad man. After the mistress died, he sat with the boy every night. He read to him from a little book of knights, until the boy fell asleep holding his finger. He is not greedy. He is afraid."
A long pause.
"Do you want me to stop, Father?"
"No."
He turned another page.
"Entry the twelfth. The boy is getting worse. The master weeps. The brothers say it will pass, but his shoulders are no longer straight. His fingers have begun to grow together."
I saw Silas then, not as the Troll, but as the man on the floor, cradling the broken child against his stone chest. The same arms, before the stone.
"Entry the fifteenth. I dream of a song now. It is not mine. It comes from the wall, from the cellar, from the mouth of the dark. I wake with my lips moving."
The train jolted. Caleb caught the book against his knee and looked up. I said nothing.
He read on.
"Entry the eighteenth. I am not hungry anymore. I am thirsty in a way no water helps. The other maids will not look at me. I hear my own voice humming while I work."
"Entry the twentieth. They say we are becoming saints. I do not feel holy. I feel like something is going to hatch inside my spine."
The word caught in the warm carriage air. Hatch. I pressed my hand harder against my ribs.
"Entry the twenty-third. If anyone finds this, run from Blackwood. Burn the cellar. Do not let the men with smooth hands touch you."
Caleb stopped. The book stayed open in his lap, the last page curling against the movement of the train.
The light through the window dimmed. We were entering a tunnel, the stone swallowing the carriage. For a long moment, there was only the deeper rumble of the wheels, the smell of coal, and the soft sound of Caleb closing the diary.
In the dark, I put my hand into my pocket and touched the two red stones. They were warm.
"Father?" Caleb asked, somewhere across from me.
I did not answer.
The train went on through the dark, carrying us back to the city, carrying her words with us.