The Iron Thorn

10 Graystone

I SAW GRAYSTONE for the first time through a dream haze, that gray drifting place between dreaming and waking.

Mist parted, running fingers down the pitted bars of a pair of iron gates. Rock walls crawling with moss closed the estate off from the outside world, and a crow atop a copper finial stained green with corrosion opened its beak and let out a dry caw.

The house itself sat at the edge of a cliff overlooking the Miskatonic Valley and the huddled, sleeping village of Arkham. The glowering mansion gave the impression of digging claws into the granite skin of the mountain, eyes of thick blue leaded glass staring down from pitch gables and finger-thin twin turrets, unblinking.

Graystone was a house of bones. Its black spires reached skyward from a swaybacked slate roof. Garrets and warrens of rooms spilled away from the four-chambered brick heart, the cross-shaped center of the house crawling with moss and vines that spelled out sigils and signs before my feverish eyes. Aluminum flashing and guttering gleamed like mercury veins in the dawn.

I moaned. Looking at Graystone was to look on something old and sleeping, and when it woke I feared it would be monstrously hungry.

“Get the door open,” Dean ordered, and I heard Cal’s limping walk on the gravel of the front drive.

“We shouldn’t just be breaking in like this,” he murmured. “Mr. Grayson would be within his rights to shoot us.”

“Listen, cowboy. I ain’t lost a customer yet and I’m not gonna start with one as pretty as Miss Aoife here. She needs a bed, bandages, and maybe a shot of whiskey, since I’m dry. Now can you gimp yourself up those steps and open me a door, or can you just flap your gums?”

“You know, I might be more of a pal if you’d quit ordering me around like we’re in some war serial,” Cal grumbled. “For a criminal, you’re real bossy.”

“What I am is her guide and my guiding ain’t done until I deliver my clients to their threshold,” Dean said. “And since Miss Aoife is the one paying me, I’ll order anyone else I damn well please.”

The crow followed us, landing on the brass Moorish lamp over the massive front doors. It hopped on skinny bird legs and its throat pulsed. Caw caw caw.

“Door’s open.” Cal’s voice went faint with shock. “Shouldn’t it … not be open?”

I watched the crow. I could see every feather on its body, every reflection in its black bead of an eye. The fever in me racked my bones with a violent cough as the bird stared.

“Let your clutch out, then, and go find Aoife a bed,” Dean said. “She needs to sweat out this foulness.”

Cal caught sight of the crow and shuddered. “Grim thing. I hate those nasty carrion birds.” He snatched stone from the iron planters flanking the front door, but Dean’s free hand shot out and knocked the stone back to the ground. “Bad, bad luck to harm a crow. He’ll run back to his witch and tell her all about you, you throw that stone.”

“They eat the dead,” Cal said. “It just wants Aoife.”

I tried to tell him I wasn’t dead yet, but I was shivering too violently. Dean’s fingers flexed, leaving deep marks in my flesh as he struggled to hold me. “That old boy’s just curious,” he told Cal. He tipped his head at the black bird above us. “Howdy, battle singer. We don’t mean any harm.”

The crow stretched its wings, lava-glass beak snapping. It regarded Dean for a moment, then shifted its gaze to me, and to Cal, who sneered at it, making a shooing motion with his hands.

Fluffing its wings in what I’d call irritation, the crow took flight, gliding over the iron-strapped walls and dipping into the valley like a spot of living ink on a vast misty page.

My memory went soft then, like a needle slipping off a phonograph groove. Next I knew, I’d left the hard surety of Dean’s arms for a feather bed that smelled like lavender and must, and I wandered through hell and ice as the fever wrung itself out of my flesh and my dreams. The dreams were black, twisting, and tasted of metal. I touched what Nerissa touched—diamond-edged shrieking clarity that let me see everything too bright, too sharp. The madness that let me see the magic she imagined wreathed our ordinary world.

In the fever dream, Dean was a blur, like a smudge of soot against clean skin. Cal floated bloodred and gold around the edges of my sight. The house, Graystone, whispered to me with a voice made of dry rot and dust, in the language of houses, all pops and creaks.

At last, it lulled me into the sleep beyond dreaming, the sleep in a dead space where there’s nothing but weary emptiness. I anchored myself there and would have gladly stayed for centuries.

When I woke again, I was disoriented. Night had thrown a velvet mask over the windows of the bedroom. Dean dozed in an overstuffed chair next to the bed, a pinup magazine much worn at the edges folded open on his chest.

“Cal?” I whispered. He was nowhere to be seen. Dean’s breath hitched, but he didn’t wake.

I swung my feet over the edge of the high bed, carved with animal heads for each post. The heads had enormous ears, bulbous eyes, fangs. Nothing from a natural history book.

Setting my feet on the itchy Persian carpet, I tested my balance. Every bit of me ached, as if I’d turned all the gears of the Lovecraft Engine by hand, but I was solid as the rock we’d climbed to reach Graystone, no longer plagued by dizzying illusion.

“Dean?” He shifted in his sleep, laying his head against the chair. A lock of hair escaped its comb tracks and snaked into his eye. I reached out to brush it away, got close enough to feel the warmth of his skin, and then pulled back. He’d just wake up, and I’d have to explain why I was out of bed. And thank him for saving my life, and admit that now I owed him something more than a fee. I hadn’t owed anyone except Conrad a thing in my life, and I wasn’t sure I liked it.

From below, a great ticking like a heartbeat echoed. I was thirsty and still half asleep, but I was sure the sound hadn’t been there a moment ago. My mind wasn’t playing tricks on me any longer—I was myself, clear and focused. The sound was real.

This was my father’s home, even if he hadn’t yet made an appearance. I was uninvited. Wandering about was for sneak-thieves and vagabonds, not respectable girls. Not for daughters.

I chewed on my lip, thinking, then picked up the oil lamp guttering by the bedside, its small flame throwing spook shadows across the velvet damask curtains and the water-spotted wall panels. At second glance, everything about the room was rotten at the edges, from the moth-chewed carpet to the notes uttered by the warped floorboards under my feet.

Glancing back once to make sure Dean hadn’t come awake after all to stop my exploration, I slipped out the high narrow door into a high narrow hall and followed the sonorous heartbeat of Graystone toward its source.