Page 16 of Preaching to the Choir

“Jeffrey shouldn’t have done that,” Will allowed. “But it’s for the family, Ross.”

Closing her eyes, eclipsing that familiar face, Elena was left with no sense at all that she was in the presence of the same person that had been taken from the pantry the previous night.

“Vampires,” Melissa said. She was still mumbling a little, despite painkillers and anti-inflammatories. They’d all been let out of the pantry, given the house again, instructed not to step out of doors. Great-Uncle Godfrey had laid down the law himself, his voice gravelly and hollow like he was chewing rocks. There was something about the way he spoke that thrilled fear through Elena when she thought about going against his dictates. Even though he’d not been talking to her. She could see that very clearly. He’d been concerned with Melissa and Ross, just as Will had been promising them that things would be for the best. She had been included in neither category. She was entirely surplus to requirements.

“Changelings,” Melissa said. “Some-bloody-thing.”

“I mean…” Ross said awkwardly. “I can’t really… believe in that.”

“They’ve done something to him,” Melissa said. “That wasn’t… Will.”

“It was Will,” Ross insisted. “Except,” he admitted, “all right. Yes. But they told him something, or they threatened him with something, showed him something that whipped the poor sod into line. Maybe they said they’d… do something to us if he didn’t agree to collaborate with whatever’s… going on.” Hands fumbling with the air, trying to find the shape of what he was talking about.

“Ross, you notice that Great-Uncle Godfrey is the only one of the old folks still around?” Melissa demanded. “You see how depauperate the top table was?”

They’d been allowed breakfast. Godfrey had indeed been eating alone. The middle table had been a hotbed of conspiracy. Gilchrist and Jeffrey, Jas and Neera and the other parents and uncles and aunts, all talking finance and politics, but sneaking looks down the room at the bottom table. And the bottom table, well… Ross and Melissa and Elena at one end, and one of the rugger bros—Stewart, she thought—and the pale, thin girl. And the others, after a no-man’s-land a couple of chairs wide. Will and the others, sitting, eating, pale and calm and weirdly centred. So that Elena couldn’t help looking from Ross to Will and thinking before and after. And they’d passed the time of day, sure. And Will had even greeted Ross with a strained ‘M’learnéd,’ just as he always had. But it wasn’t the same and he wasn’t the same person. She was absolutely sure of it.

“I don’t know if what’s going on is some bloody supernatural shit or if Auntie Neera really does have a mad science laboratory on the grounds,” Melissa insisted, “but the old folks are dying off, all of them, one after another, and us—we—we’re changing as they do. It’s like they’re…”

“No,” Ross said. “Come on, now.”

“How far back do we trace our family tree, Ross? We all get the whole tedious screed of it, I’m sure. Queen Elizabeth, William the Conqueror, Charlemagne, Pope this, King that, never on the throne but always at the shoulder, right? Always an Enderbough, or Endersby, or Eversey, or whatever the fashion was. We had a book. Dad got it from his mother, Marianne de la Pole née Enderbough. All the family notables. You know what was on the cover?”

“I know,” Ross said heavily.

“That motto, Fidelity and Continuity. And a snake eating its own tail.”

“I know,” he repeated.

“They’re the snake,” Melissa told him. “We’re the tail. They’ll come for us.”

“Melissa, this is nonsense,” he said harshly. “Elena, back me up, here.”

Elena looked from one to the other. “I don’t know what to say, Ross. You didn’t see the body. Whatever killed your Great-Uncle Patrick wasn’t human. And whatever’s singing out there in the woods isn’t human. And something happened to Will. So what’s the explanation? What’s the line: ‘Once you’ve eliminated the impossible…’? We’re running out of possibles, Ross.”

She watched his internal struggle play out on his face, as it always did. When he was wrong-footed, Ross lost all ability to dissemble, and you could almost read his mind from the muscles of eyebrow, cheek and lip. It struck her that Will had been the same, but she’d be willing to bet it wasn’t true of him anymore. It made the recollected stillness and composure he’d had this morning all the more eerie. She wondered, if she were to examine his scalp, if she’d find surgery scars. Neat lines of sutures where some Will-ness had been cut away, or some Enderbough-ness implanted. To make him a fit scion of the family.

Or to make him an existing scion. Which was where Melissa had been going with her vampire talk. Ancient Enderbough intelligences transplanted generation to generation, so that what looked like Will might just be Uncle Patrick wearing his face… Except that was crazy talk. Despite the corpse, despite the singing and the bird monsters and all of it, surely she couldn’t push the boundaries of her credulity so far…?

“Let’s go wandering,” Ross said. He’d found some kind of equilibrium, and his jaw had that determined jut she’d always liked in him. In happier times.

“I’m game for another break-out attempt if you are,” Melissa said.

“I don’t mean that,” he explained. “Let’s go wandering inside the house. Nobody said we can’t do that. In fact, let’s go up. Let’s get into the attics.”

Melissa gave him a sideways look. “Are you expecting…?”

“I’m not looking for vampire coffins or body snatcher pods or anything like that, if that’s what you mean,” he said with dignity. “But it strikes me that this is the heart of the Enderbough dream, this place. This has been in the family for four hundred years and change. So a lot of junk accumulates. Old records, old things. And I know there’s a big attic here, runs above all the rooms on the top floor. I’ve seen the hatches to it. So let’s go up there and rummage. Because, fine, something pretty bloody weird is going on, and it’s obviously family weird, it’s an Enderbough thing and nobody’s going to give us a straight answer until it’s too late. But if there’s any way of learning the truth, then it’ll be stashed up there along with all the other forgotten rubbish. So let’s go hunting.”

A dusty set of stairs, cramped enough that they had plainly been part of the servants’ domain back in the day. To get to the stairs, a wall panel that had once been entirely hidden, so that the domestics could come and go without disturbing their eighteenth-century overlords, betrayed by later redecoration that had treated doors and wall differently. To find the wall panel, a vague memory Ross had of something the rugger bros had said, when they’d been looking for some fabled stash of cask-aged whiskey. Entering the secret parts of the house felt like descending underwater, even as they were trekking upwards. Elena constantly expected her ears to pop.

These were not servants’ areas now. The actual staff were billeted in the most modern wing of the house, brand spanking new and up to date as of nineteen-thirty-one, according to Ross. And she wondered just how that worked, because she was queasily sure that the staff at breakfast had turned up to find rooms that, perhaps, still had one or two mementos of the previous night’s occupants slipped down the side of the bed or under a chair. Except she hadn’t voiced that to the others. Even with how far and how wild Melissa’s speculations had grown, she wasn’t sure she could just say, ‘Oh, and I think your family is mass-murdering the servants.’ Even though they’d all seen the stakes and Ross had touched the tacky blood.

Then they were at the head of the stairs, clinging vertiginously to the worm-eaten wooden banister, and the attic stretched out before them like a mausoleum, like the Paris sewers, like that church in Eastern Europe where the walls were tessellated bones. Oh, not that, obviously. Nothing so on the nose as that. But even though they were at the top of the house, the same sense of a chill, subterranean space. Sporadic and grime-dimmed skylights turning the dust into glittering fly-dances and constellations. A long, low-ceilinged space vanishing into obscurity, as though here and only here was the true anchor for the house’s extensive plan, all that labyrinth below opened out into a great, hollow shell and then recluttered with stuff. Hundreds of years of stuff. Ancient mouldering furniture whose upholstery had been riddled by the attentions of rodent generations. Moth-eaten hunting trophies with hollow sockets where glass eyes had fallen out and rolled away. Great trunks stacked one on another, from iron-bound chests that could have been rescued from the wreck of the Mary Rose through Titanic-era footlockers and wartime crates stamped with ranks and service numbers and ENDERBOUGH. Wooden crates and the cracked leather of old suitcases. And off, into the shadows, a museum of family obsolescence. And presumably it had a far wall, but just as the rooms below seemed to multiply and breed, so did the gloom-strung space up here.

“Well,” said Ross, voice hushed like he was in a church and plainly losing heart at the scale of the task.

“Well, let’s get to it,” Melissa decided, pushing past him with an alarming creak from the top step.