Page 8 of Preaching to the Choir

And then there he was, just as they were cracking open the second bottle of port, waving a glass hopefully in his good hand. He looked pallid unto death, grim and taut.

Being a good med student, Ross wouldn’t pour him anything. “They must have shot you up with all sorts, m’learnéd.”

“I’ll sign a waiver,” said the lawyer to the doctor. “I’ll take full responsibility. I need something.”

“Not without knowing what Neera gave you.”

Will made a sour face, but didn’t press it, just slumped into a chair. They were in a lounge of worn old horsehair upholstery, the slope of the roof testifying to the stairs above them. Probably some part of the servants’ area, Elena guessed, though the modern-day staff were obviously billeted somewhere else.

“Have you told them?” Will demanded of Melissa.

“I don’t know what to tell anyone,” she confessed. “You’d gone on ahead.”

An aggrieved look. “You didn’t see it?”

“What ‘it’?” Ross asked. “What happened?”

“I was attacked,” said Will with perilous dignity, “by a bird.” He obviously sensed that robbed most of the drama from his situation, because he hurriedly added, “I mean, this mad thing battered through the branches above me and then it was clinging to my shoulder and back. I can show you my Barbour. It’s ripped up all over where the claws went in. And then… wham! Beak to the collarbone. And this thing was big. I mean, vulture big, but it must have had a nose on it like a bloody javelin. Then Melissa turned up and it took off, I think. I mean, you must have seen it.”

She shook her head. “I hit it, but I didn't see it. I heard it flying into the trees, but…” Her face went blank and then jerked into life again. “And then the singing.”

“Singing?” Elena prompted. “You didn’t mention…”

“I… What with Will, I hadn’t…” She frowned. “It went right out of my head. I was only thinking about getting him back here. Will?”

He nodded slowly. “I’d… almost forgotten that. It was the weirdest thing, though. Weird high sound. More like a power saw than a bird. I think I thought it was something my head was doing because of the pain, honestly.”

“You’ve heard we’re all grounded?” Ross put in glumly.

“I did, and frankly, balls to that. Tomorrow, after breakfast, I’m going back into the woods with my phone. I’m going to find the bloody thing and get a shot of it. Because I am not having my own relatives tell me I fell on a tree.” He was getting quite animated, but then sagged back, suddenly two shades paler.

“You’re not,” Melissa pointed out. “But I can.”

“They said—” Ross started.

“They said in before nightfall,” she said grimly.

“And stay out of the woods whatever.”

“I mean, if they’re going with ‘dangerous trees’ I don’t think we have to take that terribly seriously, do we?” Melissa pointed out. “And if it’s something else then I think we need to know.”

Probably nobody got that much sleep, that night. Elena kept waking with a start, feeling that she’d heard something at the edge of hearing. Ghostly singing. Not the machine sound Will had talked about. No mechanical siren, but instead a Classical one. A chorus of high, uncanny voices out in the dark, surrounding the house. Or possibly it was screaming. Screaming was always an option.

She was up brighter and earlier than Ross, in the end. His restless night turned into a sluggish morning where he made a game attempt of levering himself out of bed but then just slumped back, saying he’d be good for Melissa’s expedition after lunch. For Elena, no sleep meant that she was just awake now, eyes wide, and incapable of staying still a moment longer even though she knew she would bitterly regret it later. Awake and, as her stomach now informed her, hungry. Turning up at the family table without Ross as her passport was a little daunting, but right then her stomach was being insistent, and so she washed and dressed and then had to find a servant to guide her down to the relevant room. And whilst the servant was a complete stranger, at least it was the same room this time. She’d been worried that breakfast would be a movable feast, designed to show off the insane warren of Enderby to its one clueless newcomer.

Except she wasn’t the only ignorant one, of course. None of the younger generation had been here before. The old ancestral pile wasn’t anyone’s actual home, site of no childhood memories. Just a shadow cast over them from the past. She wondered if the place had other uses, or whether it was just this one weird get-together and then it sat vacant for decades at a time. She could have believed it, except for the pool, which was surely installed some time more recently than the 80s or whenever.

The breakfast tables were only sparsely populated. It wasn’t only the youngsters who’d had a bad night. The middle table was mostly full, and she braved the withering regard of Gil and Uncle Jas and the rest. Melissa wasn’t there, and nor were the rugby bros. The only other youngster unenthusiastically picking over her eggs was an ascetic-looking girl Elena hadn’t been introduced to, and who didn’t look keen to have the pleasure.

She took a seat a few chairs away, and yet another servant was at her shoulder, offering her toast and mushrooms and some sort of smoked fish.

“Look, can I ask, how many people have they got catering this gig?” Elena asked, sotto voce. “There must be hundreds of you.”

The young woman looked at her blankly enough that Elena guessed English wasn’t her first language.

“So sorry,” she said, eyes swivelling as though to be caught talking to the guests was a fireable offence. “I am only here today. I don’t know. So sorry.”

Elena spread butter, then chewed over the toast and the information. I am, she decided, making too much of this. Big creepy house, weird English traditions, old family. Easy enough for someone from the US of A to build it all into something gothic and crazy like she was Catherine Morland at Northanger Abbey. There were plenty of ways for families to be weird without it needing to be, well, weird. It hadn’t exactly been easy to explain to Ross all the stuff her own folks did at Thanksgiving, honestly. And his family had been doing these weird things since before the Declaration of Independence so no wonder it was all a bit convoluted. No wonder they couldn’t keep staff for long. Or maybe that was all part of how they did things, something that had made perfect sense in 1703 for some reason and now it was just how things are done.