Winterly (Dark Creatures Book 1), стр. 54
“No, thank you,” she answered, “I shall wait for the rest of the household to rise before I break my fast.” She was thereat informed that his Lordship and the others had already eaten. “Upon my word, he eats very early.”
“My master has always been in the habit of keeping odd hours.”
And keeping odd servants. “Be so kind as to point me in the direction of the library.”
“It is just through there, miss.” The rangy creature pointed a long, white finger towards a door at the far end of the gallery that lead towards the northern wing of the lower floor. “All the way at the end.”
She thanked the housekeeper and proceeded towards the library, lest she glimpse again that vitreous green flash in the dark—the nocturnal eyes of some predator.
“You will find that we Winterlys are a nocturnal breed.” The words of the master himself replayed in her thoughts. A nocturnal breed of what exactly?
Emma’s teeth slid anxiously to and fro across her bottom lip as she pondered her predicament. How could she possibly explain to Milli that they were amongst strangers that were, Emma was coming to suspect, possibly not altogether human. Was Ana right, was this place really cursed? Had it been the family ghosts howling on the ramparts last night? Was Mrs. Skinner merely the frightful genius loci of Winterthurse? What then was its master?
The library was as dreary and dark and cold as the rest of the castle. She pulled her shawl more snugly about her shoulders and made her way carefully around the shadowed furniture towards the heavy drapes. The room was instantly bathed in welcoming light as she pulled them aside. The prospect from the library window looked out across untamed moorland.
The Winterthurse library was an enormous, rectangular space with Tudor and Stuart furnishings. The shelves were built into the entire length of the paneled walls that stretched the height of the room, reaching as high as the coffered ceiling, easily two-stories. The whole was stocked with hundreds of dusty tomes.
At one end of the room were two high-backed chairs facing a large, gothic fireplace with a black stone mantlepiece; it was in desperate want of a fire to warm the room.
Behind her, at the opposite end of the fireplace, was a very strange mural painted across the plastered wall, faded by time. She clasped her hands in front of her midriff, lest she be tempted to touch the ancient artwork. A grotesque and fascinating mural it was too.
“Do you like it?”
Though she hadn’t made a sound when Mrs. Skinner had startled her, this time Emma did shriek. Very loudly. She had not seen Winterly sitting in the high-backed chair because that corner of the room was still, even now, much enveloped in shadows. And he seemed to belong to the shadows.
“For heaven’s sake, man! Why did you not say anything when I entered? You nearly stopped my heart!”
He rose from the chair, chuckling, and came to stand beside her. “I could not very well greet you in the dark, now could I? You would have stopped your heart regardless of when I’d spoken.” His eyes were thankfully no longer unnatural. He stroked his chin thoughtfully. “You are very skittish today, Miss Rose.”
“I have a right to be.” She narrowed her eyes meaningfully, willing him to understand her.
He cocked his head to the side. “Do you?” But his question, such as it was, seemed more of a soliloquy than a reply. “Yes, perhaps you do.”
Were they finally to speak candidly? Could she bear it just yet?
He nodded to the mural. “Do you like it?” He was unwilling, it seemed, to give up his secrets just yet. Unwilling to give up the game, or explain his transmogrified eyes. “It is as old as the castle itself.”
She shifted her attention back to the painted wall. Most of the tapestries and paintings in the castle were hunting scenes, but this was something altogether morbid, perhaps dating back to the Normans. It seemed to portray a king atop his charger pointing an accusatory finger at a crowd of peasants whilst, in the fiery foreground, a village was being laid to waste.
No doubt noticing the confusion etched in Emma’s countenance, Winterly explained, “It is William the Conqueror you see there, punishing the Irish Scots for their cannibalism.”
“Cannibalism?” The word turned Emma’s stomach.
“Ay, but one might suppose it to be nothing more than hearsay and rumormongering propagated by the English.”
“Let us hope so.”
“Although St. Jerome himself mentions bearing witness to the practices of the anthropophagi,” he said, lifting his chin to indicate the ancient Irishmen in the mural, “when he was a boy in Gaul. So perhaps there is truth in legend.”
“Monstrous!”
“It is believed that before Whitby Abbey was destroyed by Henry the VIII there was a glazed window in the choir that was to have mirrored this exact scene.”
She raised her eyes from the mural to him. “What do you believe?”
“I believe it is human nature to make monsters of those they do not understand.”
“Well, I certainly don’t understand how the consumption of human flesh can be anything but monstrous.”
“It is only cannibalism,” he said, redirecting her gaze to the mural, “when the predator is as human as its prey.”
“What are you saying?”
“I am saying that these creatures may have been mislabelled. Look again.”
She stepped closer to the painted wall, pushing her glasses further up her nose, and finally saw what she had failed to notice before. The eyes of these anthropophagi were all strangely black and lifeless, their faces gaunt and white, and their teeth were all far too sharp to be considered normal. Or human.
She gave an involuntary shiver. “What are they if not human?”
“They are known by many names, but mostly they are myth and nightmare.” He moved to stand behind her. “Demons perhaps.”
“Demons?” She backed away from the