Dad must be on the battlements again.
In Claire Evans’ brief time at the castle, whenever she hadn't been able to locate her father immediately, she had eventually found him up on the wall, usually staring blankly into space. Claire didn’t like the look on his face when she found him up there; it looked to her like he was staring at things that she could not see.
When she had awoken on the cold stone floor to find the room empty, she had spent a few minutes assuming that she was locked inside the tower once more. Just like a princess in a fairytale, aside from the blood and the death and the constant terror.
Yet when she finally worked up the courage to try the door she discovered that it swung open easily, and she peered out into the courtyard, hoping that nobody would spot her. What she saw outside surprised her.
There were dozens of people in the castle now—Claire had watched them with wide eyes as they arrived in groups of eight or nine at a time—but the place actually looked more empty than it had previously. Of course a lot of people had been locked in the cells; all the people that Claire knew, in fact, but she found it strange that all the new people seemed content to hide in their rooms in the towers.
Maybe they're locked in, too.
Claire frowned, and stared up at the battlements. She couldn't see the wheelchair anywhere - usually if Dad made his way up to the wall alone, heaving himself up one step at a time, he left the chair at the base of the steps so he could easily return to it.
Maybe he left it somewhere else.
Yet when Claire ascended the steep steps she found the battlements deserted. The wall encircled the entire castle, and it was possible to walk all the way around it, passing through arches carved into each of the eight towers. She began to walk the perimeter, hoping to spot her father somewhere below.
Glancing down, Claire thought she understood why there was nobody to be seen: no one wanted to look at the grisly horror in the centre of the castle’s wide courtyard. A splash of terrible colour against the castle’s dull grey interior; a dark, queasy red stain that made her feel like she might be sick.
Claire had an idea that things were happening that were beyond her understanding, much like the vague memories she had of her parents splitting up. Conversations just beyond her earshot; pointed looks loaded with meaning that she was not supposed to see. She was a natural at puzzles, but the weirdness between her parents didn’t seem like a puzzle to Claire: it did not appear to be something that could be put back together.
She had given up trying to figure that problem out, and she figured the best course of action was to give up trying to work out what was happening at the castle, too. The new people were terrifying; understanding why didn’t seem to matter.
All that mattered to Claire Evans was that she was hungry, and cold, and scared. And that she missed her mother. Every time she thought about her, Claire’s heart ached in a way it never had before in her brief life. Eight—very nearly nine, her birthday was just a couple of months away—years of childhood innocence and happiness had been obliterated the moment her mother came for her, the ripped flesh of one of their neighbour’s cheeks hanging from her bloody teeth, her pretty face mutilated and twisted into a mask of rage and dark hunger.
The fear Claire had felt then had abated a little, but in some way she struggled to grasp, the constant sense of panic that had typified her time spent alone on the blood-soaked streets of Aberystwyth had been better than drifting aimlessly around the castle.
At first the castle had been source of endless delight. It was like living in a history book: every surface, every object older than Claire could imagine. Every item seemed to have a story to tell. She loved the ancient weapons and faded art and ornate furniture, and imagined herself to be like a princess in a fairytale, waiting in the castle for Prince Charming to rescue her and whisk her away on a white stallion. Now the castle was a place of pain: a place that gave her a whole lot of time to think, and inevitably that meant thinking about her mother.
Claire didn’t have a word for the way the loss of her mother felt, but she had become used to the sensation of terror, and she didn't think it was that which she felt in the castle. She had experienced genuine terror in Aberystwyth, on more than one occasion. She doubted that she would forget the way it had felt if she lived to be a hundred years old.
This was more like dread.
Claire had never understood the difference before. She thought she did now.
Terror had shoved her in the back and screamed in her ear, but it passed quickly. Dread seemed to harden in the pit of her stomach until she felt sick all the time, and it didn’t appear to be going anywhere.
Claire wasn’t sure which she preferred. Hard to choose when either emotion was tied so closely to watching people die horribly right in front of her.
She turned left on the battlements and began to walk along the wall, keeping an eye out for her father below, but trying not to look too closely. Trying not to see what was in the middle.
In Aberystwyth Claire had kept a count of the people she saw killed, totting up the numbers like jellybeans. It made the inexplicable chaos that unfolded around her seem almost like a game played on her mother’s tablet, as if she could somehow distance herself from the reality of it by avoiding thinking about it head-on. She definitely didn’t want to think about it head-on.
She finally stopped counting at number one-hundred-and-seven.
John would have been one-hundred-and-eight.
She saw the knife being dragged across his throat every time she closed her eyes; saw the obscene chasm in his neck as he began to fall backwards and the jet of dark blood that spurted across the stone floor. Now it seemed like head-on was the only way she could think.
When Claire reached the sharp left turn that would take the sea out of her sight and replace it with the town, she couldn’t help but glance down to the centre of the courtyard, as though her eyes moved of their own accord.
The body of John Francis.
Naked.
Nailed, upright, to a huge cross made of wood. At this distance, in the grey morning light, the dark blood that dried on his chest made it look like he was wearing an apron. You could almost believe he is alive, Claire thought. Apart from his neck.
Nausea tumbled in her stomach. John’s neck had been cut so deeply that bone was visible. His head hung at an impossible angle, as though it might topple off his body at any moment.
Claire looked away and took a deep breath.
Dread, Claire decided, was definitely far worse than terror. With dread, you knew what was coming and just had to wait for it to happen. You couldn’t miss it: dread was nailed up like a sculpture for everyone to see. To constantly remind them. Dread lingered in the shadows of every thought, infecting them and corrupting them until everything became frightening.
"Hello, girl."
Claire jumped, and nearly let out a scream. She had been so engaged in her own thoughts that she hadn’t seen Bryn Holloway ascending to the battlements. She had a sudden, overwhelming feeling that he had been up there all along, walking along silently behind her like a ghost. Closing in.
Of all the new people she had seen in the castle, Bryn scared Claire the most. He was slight, and quiet, and he hadn’t killed anybody. But there was something in his eyes, a sort of hunger that got under her skin and made her small hands shake a little.
"My mother would like to see you," Bryn said, with a smirk that Claire didn’t understand.
When Bryn put his hand on the small of her back and began to guide her toward the stairs that led down to the courtyard, and let his fingers linger there, Claire felt the oddly tender caress and had a sudden intuition that the memory of the man’s smirking grin would linger as long as the image of the terrifying hole that had been torn in John’s neck.