Chapter Text
My father had made it very clear that the only reason I was being allowed on this trip was because with my mother going out on a vacation of her own, there would be no one to stay at home with me, and I ‘clearly couldn’t be trusted to stay home alone’. As if I was going to burn down the house or start murdering people the second I wasn’t being watched like a hawk.
And yet, I couldn’t manage to be upset, because our very destination was a place I had long since been trying to plan a way to get to.
Cairnholm.
It was where my grandfather had grown up, where I suspected his last words were meant to take me.
“Find the bird, in the loop. On the other side of the old man’s grave. September third, 1940.”
Those were the words that haunted my mind both day and night, slipping in and out of my conscious thought, and yet somehow, I was no closer to solving their mystery than I was to figuring out if I was really crazy or not. Actually, I might've been closer to determining if I was insane – if my parents’ shrewd looks and disappointed cuffs to the head were anything to go by, I was quickly slipping away from ‘sane’ and steadily devolving into ‘delusionally paranoid’.
Lovely.
But anyways.
Whatever issues I had with my own head, I thought I at least owed it to the late Abraham Portman to try and puzzle out his last request. And now that I was being brought along to Cairnholm (though for all the wrong reasons), I finally had the opportunity to try and make some real progress.
The box of photographs safely flattened and tucked inside my new journal (allegedly a going-away gift from my mother – I suspected she just didn’t want to go to the trouble of actually ‘saying goodbye’), I hoisted my suitcase into the car and shut the trunk, moving up to join my father in the front seat.
My journal and all my other important possessions were safely stored away in my backpack – my phone, now returned (though outfitted with so many parental controls I didn’t even want to turn it on), my journal, the money I’d managed to save up and hide in a rip between two of the backpack’s pockets, a few articles of clothing in case the airport lost our luggage, a new book on the home front in Britain during World War II (a hard find, but I’d already read all about America and I figured if I was going to Europe, might as well). Everything I needed that wasn’t already in my suitcase. The only thing missing was my army jacket that my grandfather had given me, and I was wearing that.
“Ready to go, champ?” My dad said, turning the key in the ignition as he gave me an obviously fake smile. Ah, so we’re pretending that everything is Fine[TM] today.
Well, two could play at that game, so I nodded. “Yep, I’m good to go.”
The car sped down the street towards the airport, and I wondered why exactly the sense of foreboding in my stomach had yet to dissipate. I was going where I wanted to go, wasn’t I? So then… why did something still feel so wrong?
oOoOo
The Priest Hole, as it was called in polite company, was, for lack of a better term, an absolute wreck.
I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why exactly my father had thought that this place was a ‘prime vacation spot’. The whole place looked and smelled like something that had crawled out of the garbage, reeking of week-old beer and… other, less pleasant things. The first thing my father had done upon our arrival (and upon dropping off our possessions in the probably-infested room we’d rented) was to encourage me to ‘go make some new friends or something’.
“Don’t go on about your history bull,” he said, his tone becoming something slightly left of disgusted. “Nobody wants to hear about that. The past has already passed, so just try to be normal for once. Go make some new friends or something. Don’t be the weird kid like you are at home – it’s not normal to only have one friend, especially not a delinquent. I know that kid you hang around isn’t all there.”
I bit back a retort. Defending Ricky’s honour wasn’t much use when Ricky himself wasn’t there to be offended in the first place. I hadn’t even seen Ricky in months, too trapped under my parents’ thumbs for there to be any chance of having friends that weren’t pre-approved or ‘recommended’ to help me make better business connections. It didn’t matter that all the Prestons and Westleys I’d been introduced to were awful people – if I couldn't be civil enough to befriend them, then it was clearly my fault for not trying hard enough. At least, according to my father, it was.
Besides, the quicker I just agreed with whatever vitriol my dad spewed, the quicker I could finally, finally have that breath of freedom I’d been waiting months for.
“I’ll try my best,” I said tiredly, hoping he would just go already.
My dad gave me a disapproving look, but sighed and turned away regardless. “I’m going to go look for those birds and see if I can get a photo. You’ll be back at the hotel at 6:00 PM. No later.”
As set in stone as always – 6:00 PM would be my curfew if I wanted to keep that ounce of freedom I’d been granted, it seemed. And calling it a hotel? It wasn’t even a motel , it was a literal bar no matter how he tried to spin it. And they called me the delusional one.
I had until somewhere around sundown to do… whatever I wanted. That was going to take some getting used to. Not that I expected to be able to keep this freedom once I was dragged back home, of course – as soon as I returned to my house, it would probably be right back to the room for me. In the meantime, though, I decided that I had earned the right to have a little fun for once.
“Hey, does this town have a library?” I wondered, leaning against the bar while the owner, Kevin, wiped down a glass with a rag that was downright filthy.
He snorted. “A library? Thassa good one, kid. Closest thing we got’s the old man at the fish shop – he could probably tell you anything you want to know, if it’s really that important.”
I sighed, shrugging. “Nah, it’s fine. Thanks anyways.”
My dad had suggested I go make some friends, but… in all honesty, I didn't really want to interact with the locals that much. My only experience with the town’s teenagers so far was two boys named Worm and Dylan who tried (and failed miserably) to rap, and I wasn’t really eager to repeat that particular experience.
Instead, I decided that I would do some exploring for myself.
“No library…” I mused, thinking of how best to phrase my query. “But you’ve got other stuff, right? What else is around here that might have some history in it?”
The barkeep shrugged. “Hell if I know, kid. ‘Ere’s the Bog Mummy down at the museum, and my buddy says there’s an old abandoned children’s home out in the woods somewhere, but it’s not like anyone goes to those old places.”
“But there’s a cairn somewhere, right? I mean, the island is called Cairnholm, after all.”
‘“Oh, yeah, there’s a cairn. Better ask the old man ‘bout that one, though.”
Back to square one, apparently. It looked like the only way I was getting anywhere with this was if I asked the ‘old man’, so off I went into town to find him. Unfortunately, the problem with going through town was that I had to avoid all the people strolling about. It wasn’t bad, necessarily, if I had to interact with one of them, but at this point I wasn’t prepared for interaction beyond what I already planned to do. Talking to one stranger was enough, I didn’t need to navigate a conversation with any more.
oOoOo
The stranger was, quite literally, no help at all. I didn’t get a single detail from the old man that I hadn’t known already. All he’d had to say about the cairn was that it was ‘somewhere by that old empty mansion’, which I took to mean the abandoned children’s home that Kevin had mentioned. Square one was becoming a veritable campground for me, what with how much I kept ending up back there.
So, as much as I would probably be getting in trouble for it, I left the town, heading out into the wilds of the island in search of the mysterious abandoned mansion said to be a former orphanage.
My grandfather had told me that he grew up in an orphanage with a bunch of other kids, all of them sporting some sort of oddness – though, he had never given me much detail on the kids he talked about the most. All I had was the few names he told me – Claire, Victor, Bronwyn, Enoch, Charlotte, and Horace. Everyone else had been unnamed, only referenced vaguely in his stories about monsters and magic… stories I still couldn’t help but think of as true, if only partly. He had told them with such confidence, such reality, that even now, when I thought I was supposed to be able to tell the difference between fantasy and reality, I still thought of them as history instead of fiction.
It was pathetic of me. That much, I knew for sure. And yet, try as I might, I couldn’t shake the feeling that there was more to the world around me than just what everyone else saw.
As I traipsed through the woods, dodging canes of thorn and stray branches, I realized one rather important fact.
I had no idea where I was going.
Unfortunately, to rectify this grievous error, I would have had to return to the town. And not only did I not want to, but I wasn’t entirely sure that I knew the way back. Outside of the town, the island was a wilderness of thorny vines and poking branches, the underbrush reaching out to grab my pant legs at every step I took.
But somehow, I was still forging ahead, despite the obvious errors I had made in judgement, not to mention the mild danger lurking in the forest around me. I had to find that house. I didn’t know why it felt so important, but a mystery left unanswered–
Ah.
There it was.
The mansion was ancient, broken-down and destroyed, roof caved in and floors collapsing, but… this was it. This was what I had sought out, and now, I had finally found it. The old children’s home that my grandfather had grown up in, and, I hoped, some answers.
Gingerly navigating the spiky underbrush surrounding the place, I pushed a branch out of the way and entered the empty clearing that surrounded the mansion. It was both unsettling and strangely nostalgic, the smell of rotting wood mixing with the dozens upon dozens of what looked like once-cultivated flowers blooming all over the wrecked property. The ground was muddy and uneven, causing me to stumble as I approached the fallen-in door, the glass window at the top long since warped and shattered.
And in one gentle motion, I pushed the ruined wood that used to be the door aside, and entered the house. The foyer was full of dust, a steady drip, drip, drip informing me that somewhere in this house, there was a pool of water forming. I kept my steps light as I walked across the bowed floors, feeling the saturated wood squish ever so slightly beneath my sneakers.
There was a curved staircase with a once-impressive bannister to one side, and a dust-hazed doorway to the other. Choosing the staircase, I ascended slowly, getting a feel for where would creak and bow and squish, and where wouldn’t. When I reached the landing, I could see the upstairs and the downstairs at the same time, and the hole connecting the two.
Peeking into the rooms on the second floor, I saw remnants of what must have been the childrens’ lives. Deteriorated paper on a dust-covered desk, shelves of crinkled books, beds both made and unmade with moth-eaten patterned comforters pulled over stiff muslin sheets. I saw a faded globe full of holes, a pair of cracked glasses folded neatly beside a tattered tweed coat, a half-finished knit scarf made out of yarn that might have once been green but was now stained and falling apart from years of being left out in the weather’s reach, the fibers of the yarn now fused together. The knitting needles were still sticking out of the ends next to a soggy dust-laden mess of squishy-looking debris, the last vestiges of what was once the ball of yarn.
These were real people. Someone was knitting a scarf that they never got to finish… that they’ll never come back to. It made me feel sick to think of, an aching twist in my gut growing as I realised the weight of the mansion I was standing in. Someone would have woken up each day and put on those glasses and that coat. Someone tended that overgrown garden outside. Someone studied off of that globe, cared enough about it to keep it in their room. These were real kids that didn’t make their beds and had to write messily to keep up with lessons, who did crafts and had hobbies, who got up every morning and lived their lives… until they didn’t.
I moved on from the second floor. I didn’t think I could have stayed there another minute.
The third floor was similar, but one of the rooms had a tarnished brass plaque outside, the words barely legible anymore with letters worn away by time and the elements, but still there all the same: Ab a m Port n. Abraham Portman.
This had been my grandfather’s room.
Pushing open the soggy, rotted door, I found a fairly uniform room, similar to all the ones I had seen downstairs – if a little neater. The most recognizable thing was a steamer trunk that rested at the foot of the bed, the wood beneath it looking slightly bent from holding up its weight for so many years. Crouching down, I tugged at the lock, but the rusted metal held true, keeping the old box sealed.
In what was probably an incredibly stupid decision, I hauled the trunk out of my grandfather’s old room, dragging it along the old floor. The wood creaked beneath my feet, but I ignored it, trusting the floors to stay up for just a little longer while I dragged the steamer trunk to the giant hole that went straight through the house. If I could push it through the edge of the hole, it would catch on the wood beneath, landing on the second floor of the house – and hopefully, breaking open. I had noticed that each hole was smaller than the one above it, and I was counting on that fact to keep the trunk within reach.
With an almighty shove down into the splintered floor surrounding the hole, the trunk fell through, the floor cracking and breaking underneath. It hit the second floor with a deafening bang… and then kept falling, down to the first floor.
And then through the first floor.
Wincing as I looked down, I saw the trunk far away, all the way in the basement. It was certainly open now, the cracked and fallen lid obvious even from this far away, but now I had to go and get it. I had to go all the way down into the basement of this abandoned, half-broken orphanage.
Muttering out a tired curse, I started going back down the stairs again.
It didn’t take long before I reached the bottom, staring reluctantly into the open darkness beneath me, illuminated only by the beam of sunlight that shone through the hole above and fell on the trunk, lighting it up like a video-game cutscene. With a deep breath, I steeled my nerves, and entered.
Holding up my phone light so I could see where I was going and to make sure I didn't step in anything… unpleasant (there hadn’t been any bodies here, after all, and I really didn’t want to find out where they had gone), I looked around the dark basement, twitching every time I heard the water dripping again. The shelves were filled with jars that smelled of formaldehyde, and as if that weren’t bad enough, I had taken a closer look at one of them and realised something incredibly unpleasant. Each jar was full of some sort of… organ, by the looks of it – this basement seemed to have been a storage room for them. I didn’t know why there were jars of organs, human or otherwise, and quite frankly, I didn’t think I wanted to know.
But here was the trunk, busted open by my ingeniously stupid plan, and I wasn’t leaving until I’d gone through it.
Most of its contents, I could discard – moth-eaten, raggedy clothes were the main contender – but a few of the smaller possessions, I was more intrigued by. There was a broken camera, obviously in pieces for a long time and not simply wrecked by the fall. By the looks of it, a few pieces from inside were missing, making it functionally unusable even in its glory days.
Yet more interesting than the vintage camera were the things that came with it – the photographs. There was a stack of them, held together by the deteriorated pieces of an old cord and tucked away in a small, falling-apart matchbox, just like the ones from my grandfather’s room. I slid the matchbox open and thumbed through them, marvelling at the oddities I saw.
The first of the pictures was of two girls, likely twins, standing for a photo in front of a fake seaside backdrop, wearing matching darkly coloured party dresses – but both girls had their backs turned to the camera, showing off their identical dark locks. The next was of a little girl in a white dress admiring her reflection in a pond. No, reflections. Two little girls looked back at the one, the second reflection’s face darkened and blurred. Next was a boy in a jockey cap and aviator’s goggles, his arm, shoulders, and face all covered with bees, though he looked perfectly content with that. Then, the last of the set was two people I recognized from another of my grandfather’s photographs – the clown-dressed twins, one feeding the other what appeared to be a length of balloon string.
“These must’ve been all the photos he left behind,” I mumbled, tucking them away and pocketing the matchbox. Standing up, I left the basement and the house, returning to the overgrown front lawn. I’d been in here long enough.
But I hadn’t even been outside for a minute when I heard someone else’s footsteps in the underbrush, approaching the house, and the voice that came with them said something I had never expected to hear.
“Abe? Is that you?”
It was a girl’s voice, clear yet quiet, and I turned around to see who it was – but as soon as the shadowy figure of the girl caught sight of me, she turned and bolted.
“Hey, wait!” I called, starting after her. Hopefully, she wouldn’t be too scared of me, but she’d just run away after mistaking me for Abe. The name couldn’t be a coincidence, especially not with how many people told me I looked exactly like my grandfather when he was young.
I followed the mysterious girl through the woods, marvelling at her agility – she obviously knew the forest better than I, able to avoid all the branches and snags that caught me in their grasp. I hadn’t seen any girls my age in town, so either she had been inside… or she wasn’t from the town. Maybe she lived out here, far away from Cairnholm’s main village.
Bursting through a line of trees, I followed the sound of her footsteps through what looked like a stone ruin. Is this… the cairn?
From the looks of it, there was a tunnel past the cairn, yawning and open, and in a surprising burst of confidence, I felt sure that that was where I needed to go. That tunnel was my destination – every instinct in me was confirming it. It felt safe – it felt right.
And so, following my instincts and the mysterious girl who called me by my grandfather’s name, I went inside.