Page 7 of Preaching to the Choir

And probably Uncle Barty was ill or had a prior engagement, or alternatively that was Elena’s moment to open her mouth and let all the words out, but instead she could find no way into the conversation from outside. No polite way of saying, So, Great Uncle Barty, would you describe him as… horrifically twisted or malformed? What sort of shape would he make, if he was being carried out under a sheet? And partly it was just that these were not questions she could ever have asked anybody, but also it was that she really wanted Will and Melissa to like her and continue just being… normal and human and pleasant rather than icing her out like she’d very much expected them to.

Those thoughts dragged her far enough into her head that a moment later her ankle turned painfully under her and she was abruptly skidding off the notional trail, down a sudden dip in the terrain, ribbed with roots and snarled with brambles. Ross made a lunge for her, snagged her sleeve and only succeeded in adding one more rip to the collection she’d suddenly acquired. She ended up at the bottom of a depression, staring at what her mind processed as a great grasping fist of crooked tentacles. She froze. They froze. Or, in fact, hadn’t been moving at all. Were roots, in fact, dirt-caked, dead, the uprooted, rotting underside of a tree that had finally been undone by time.

If this was a film, she knew, I’d look round and come face to face with the body. Instead, Ross slithered down beside her, heedless of the thorns, asking her if she was all right.

She wasn’t sure, honestly. The shock was still with her, that had somehow been welded to what she’d seen or thought she’d seen the previous night. And then Will and Melissa were reaching down from above, and she decided that yes, she was fine. Just a bit of ungainliness that made her feel rather self-conscious, but nobody was making fun of her for it. Then she was back on the trail and actually her ankle was painful enough that maybe she wasn’t fine. And yes, yes, ‘walk it off,’ but maybe she should walk it off back in the direction of the house and put some ice on it?

That was Ross’s preferred course, and she acquiesced with as much grace as she could manage, leaving Will and Melissa to ramble on for a bit. Ross took her arm in one hand and the hamper in the other and they retraced their steps as best they could. Within three minutes they met one of the staff picking their way through the trees, sharp-creased uniform and all, as unlikely as if they’d run into Mr Tumnus doing his Christmas shopping. The young woman—it wasn’t anyone Elena remembered from before, making her wonder just how many people the Enderboughs had hired for this little get together—offered them an umbrella and said that she’d been asked to encourage people to return to the house, as being out in the grounds after dark was not recommended. Still hobbling, Elena could only agree. They sent the woman off after Will and Melissa and, soon after, the lights of the house were visible through the trees.

That was how Elena got to meet Neera Enderbough, the woman who’d turned down the Nobel Prize nomination.

Ross had brought her to yet another room she’d never seen before, this one a study with fish and birds and pinned butterflies cluttering the shelves in a triumph of taxidermy over taxonomy. Elena was plumped down into an overstuffed leather armchair with her leg on a footstool. An odd experience, to have a world-class biochemistry prodigy checking over her slightly sprained ankle.

Neera was of that middle generation that included Uncle Jas and Ross’s dad. She was handsome, strong-chinned, with the barest concession towards make-up. Her eyes were astonishing, almost amber. She was also one of the few members of the family who weren’t straight up white. Her mother, Elena gathered, was something big in the tech industry in India. Not here for the family get-together then? Neera shook her head, looking amused, and Elena tried to puzzle out that expression and the thoughts behind it. Neera’s father was here, certainly. One of the silver-haired patriarchs on the elders’ table at breakfast. And Elena would have assumed a race thing, because she reckoned some problems worked the same whichever side of the Atlantic you were on. Except Neera caught her look, as she wrapped something self-cooling and flexible about Elena’s ankle, and her lips quirked.

“This here is Enderboughs only,” she said. “The real family. A tradition, you know? Marrying into the clade isn’t enough to secure an invitation.”

“Right,” Elena said, and then “Oh. Oh, I see.” Shrinking a bit before that cool, amused gaze. “I, er…” She looked at Ross. “Someone maybe didn’t explain that.”

“Someone maybe didn’t explain that to me,” he said.

“Gil was never the best communicator,” Neera said smoothly. “There. Keep that on until you go to bed. You’ll be turning cartwheels by next morning.”

Elena moved her foot experimentally, feeling barely an echo of pain. “That’s…”

“Technically proprietary technology,” Neera said. “I should make you sign an NDA.” She grinned, ten years younger at a stroke, and it was impossible not to smile back. Then there was a commotion outside and Melissa burst in supporting Will, whose tan shirt was all over blood.

Neera descended on him instantly, and everyone else was shooed out of the room. Ross and Elena ended up sitting with Melissa who, now she’d actually got her cousin back to the house, was starting to shake.

“There was…” Her eyes were very wide, the pupils huge like she was desperately trying to drag in any sign of danger from all over. “Something in the trees. We thought it was an owl. Just… wings, and then…”

It had been dark. The complimentary-umbrella fairy hadn’t found them. They’d already been on their way back, though.

“I mean,” said Ross, “maybe it was,” he shrugged, “an owl. Maybe it was… something like rabies? I mean I’ve seen… birds of prey, you know, their feet… talons, isn’t it?”

“It was like he’d been stabbed.” She mimed jamming something sharp into her upper arm. “I hit it. It was… Not like a bird. I mean it felt solid, heavy. And gone. I could hear it crashing about in the branches. But Will… God, there was so much blood. Fuck!” She clenched her fists. “Fucking owls?”

Will wasn’t at table for the evening meal, but Neera drifted past the kids’ table to say he was fine, just under some painkillers, back on his feet tomorrow probably. And gone, letting any questions slant from her shoulders, until Melissa actually went so far as to grab her wrist. A frozen moment. A breach of propriety even Elena felt.

“A branch,” Neera said blandly. “Honestly, one day we should cut it all down, or at least hire some proper groundskeepers to clear out all the rot and old growth. But who has time to supervise all of that?” A bright, hollow smile that dared Melissa to contradict her. “Far too easy to lose your footing, end up scratched, bruised, or apparently even impaled.”

“Doesn’t he need,” Melissa managed, “a doctor? A hospital?”

“We honestly have more doctors and facilities here in this house,” Neera told her. She nodded to a sour, stern-looking man on the middle table. “Don’t you think his father would have already packed him off if there were any danger?”

Melissa’s expression suggested she wasn’t remotely confident of that, but she said nothing.

“I think it’s best, though,” Neera lifted her voice to encompass the whole of the lower table, silencing even the two bickering rugby bros, “that you all make sure you’re inside before dark. We don’t want this to be the family gathering that gets talked about for the next three generations for all the wrong reasons. Perhaps stay out of the woods entirely. Someone really needs to get a proper landscaper to look at this place.” With the absolute and implicit certainty that this would never happen.

And Elena thought about the woods that surrounded the house on all sides, unbroken save for a handful of trails barely wide enough to get the four-by-four down. And she thought about the fact that one of the staff, that ever-changing lottery of faces, had taken the keys to that four-by-four, and taken it somewhere to park it, and she was willing to bet Ross didn’t know where.

All of a sudden Enderby felt a whole lot more like a prison than a holiday.

An angel, he’d said. And there had been wings, and the thing between the wings had been roughly humanoid, but hideous. A devil, surely, save that there was a way devils were represented in art, and a way that angels were, indicating the relative attitude of the artists to the former and the latter. The thing above the door had most certainly been presented from a point of view of adulation and authority.

3.

Will joined them past midnight, pale and with his arm in a sling. Elena, Ross and Melissa had been sitting up, partly out of worry for him, but mostly because the whole of Enderby suddenly seemed hostile and strange. Something had happened, and none of the older generation were talking about it. There was a dangerous animal or a man with a knife or an extremely aggressive tree out there. And Melissa hadn’t seen what it was, hadn’t really witnessed the attack, just heard Will call out, but she was damn sure the party line about a deciduous assailant wasn’t true.