CHAPTER 20
Remains
“When she turned about, she saw a large obelisk rising from a substantial cenotaph—a monument to those who had died but were interred elsewhere. Two dedications were etched into the marble face beneath the name HOLTZCLAW.”
TWILIGHT AT PRIMROSE
Gothic Fantasy / Supernatural Mystery / Horror Series
The enormous beasts sank their teeth into ruddy, raw flesh, rending and slobbering. Before long, the meat vanished into hungry jaws, and now two pairs of predatory eyes were trained on Helena.
“I’m afraid that’s all for now,” she said, standing with her back against the solarium door. “Are we ready to go walk about?”
Nanda’s ears perked while Makalu sniffed the floor for traces of beef.
“You’re the clever one, aren’t you?” Helena asked Nanda with a laugh, the female dog looking at her with such unnerving intelligence. “Right, come on, then.”
Helena put the dog whistle to her lips and blew. Though she heard only the faintest hiss, the two animals began to wag their tails and stare at the door expectantly. As soon as Helena opened way onto the arcade, Nanda and Makalu flew out ahead of her, bolting away in a rush of scraping nails and panting breath. Helena sprinted after them, wrapping a wool tartan blanket around herself, whistle at the ready.
The dogs had already found the side door that let out into the countryside and waited by it, staring at Helena as she came up the arcade. When she put the key in the lock, Makalu whimpered and raked at the door with his forepaws.
“Just a bloody second,” Helena sighed. She unlocked the door, opened it, and was nearly bowled over as the dogs burst past her. Nanda and Makalu shot out into the frosted hillside like canon fire, racing one another and stopping only to chase each other’s tails in circles. They gambolled and leapt, wrestled and rolled. In no time, their thick fur was caked with slush, mud, and dead grass.
“Fucking hell,” Helena groaned, thinking of the mess she’d be cleaning later.
A chilled wind was blowing—yet no icy rain this day—and the fresh air was entirely welcome after her morning spent in Falgrave’s dusty old tombs. Although that awful sense of sorrow from the master bedroom still clung to her, she was revived by the vastness of the countryside.
As she walked on, the distant black-brown shapes of the dogs suddenly disappeared beyond the crest of a hill. Helena grumbled and marched up the knoll, her boots sinking into the sodden soil. She blew the whistle again, and to her relief, the dogs appeared, meeting her on the hilltop.
“How clever,” Helena mused, looking at the little silver whistle, its distal end fashioned like the sleek head of a greyhound.
From the knoll, Helena could see out over the vastness of Falgrave’s property. A veneer of frost coated the inestimable acres of land, cut off only by a small pond in the distance and the edge of a sprawling woodland. She watched the dogs race downward towards a footpath that led through a smaller grove of trees. The two turned and looked up at Helena, somehow imploring her.
“Does your man take you that way?” Helena asked in the tenor of voice she might use for a small child. She pictured Greycross on a stroll with these two menaces, his hands in his coat pockets and a pipe between his lips, sauntering along, self-satisfied and grinning. The image made her laugh to herself.
She clambered down the hill, while the dogs waited for her on the footpath, watching her inch-wise and precarious struggle with keen curiosity. No sooner did she reach the beasts, than they took off again, disappearing into the shade of the woodland. Helena strode after, glancing around at the sooty, bare trees, the dry bramble bushes, and the scattering of large, ancient stones. Having lost sight of the dogs again, she simply followed the footpath and the twin sets of paw prints left on it. She heard rustling and cracking sounds in the woods to her right, noticed the tracks veered off the path that way, and stopped to look.
Nanda and Makalu were off in a small glade, sniffing around an old well—its base built of weathered flagstone, the ashen wood of its roof completely rotted, and what remained of its winch ruddy with rust. Looming over the glade were several enormous trees, each with long, skeletal branches that reached down like questing hands. She remembered the passage in young Greycross’s journal, of how he and his cousin battled the tree giants near the old well with their little wooden swords; the glade must have been an awe-inspiring thing for an imaginative child.
The dogs trotted into the adjacent thicket, stirring damp leaves and snapping fallen branches. As she watched them go, a distant structure caught Helena’s eye—the remnants of a chimney, its stones black and laced with dead vines. She wondered if perhaps a groundskeeper or tenant labourer had once lived on Falgrave’s estate. As she pondered this, Nanda and Makalu pushed deeper, nearly out of sight.
Helena blew the whistle, and thankfully, the dogs came running. “This way, my lovelies,” she said, heading back down the footpath with her furry companions flanking her.
The grove opened and the path led downhill, levelling out just before feeding into a more expansive woodland. The dogs overtook Helena and dashed onwards suddenly. Rushing behind—and nearly twisting an ankle—she pursued them deeper into the thicket, where scrubs and fallen limbs littered the path as though no one had walked it in quite some time.
Nanda and Makalu stopped ahead, both growling at something.
A sleek, light-footed creature suddenly flew from behind the trees, crossing the footpath immediately in front of Helena, knocking her flat onto her bottom. Stupefied, she watched as the dogs gave chase to a pheasant. The animals tore through dead underbrush, darting back and forth between the surrounding woodland and the footpath until the three of them vanished into the distance.
Helena got to her feet and tried the whistle. She waited for some time, and hearing no indication of the dogs coming back her way, she set off, following the wild scramble of tracks.
Coming around a bend, she saw a stone archway just off the footpath, splotched with mould and lichen. It was crowned with a begrimed angel, a morose figure forever kneeling with head and wings bowed. Moving closer, she peered through the threshold and gasped—beyond lay yards of old headstones and tombs. Glancing at the ground, she saw evidence in the mud and dead leaves that the pheasant chase had proceeded this way. As if to confirm this notion, she heard spirited barking along with the gamebird’s eek-eek somewhere amidst the cemetery.
Helena took a narrow walkway, moving amongst the sombre, weather-beaten statuary, gravestones, and crypts. The plots were overgrown with terrific tangles of browned weeds and brambles. Between the cemetery and the many chambers of mourning inside the manor house, Falgrave proved to have more dead residents than living. This thought chilled Helena to the bone. She cinched the blanket around herself and tried the whistle once more. After a few moments standing alone and in silence, she trudged on.
The first headstone Helena stopped to look at was cut in an early Middle Ages fashion—broad and shield like—and although the full epitaph was nearly erased from its face, she could read the name Alice and the dates 1475 – 1516. It was merely one of several others of a kind in a neat row. She noted how each of the interred were afforded plenty of elbow room, a far cry from the bodies that had been literally buried atop one another in London’s old necropolises.
Insidiously, she found herself drawn deeper into the cemetery, enamoured with its haunting solitude and dark tranquillity. Having forgotten all about the dogs and their wild hunt, she perused the graves, meandering from one to the next. She attempted to connect neighbouring plots to one another via the surnames on their markers, guessing at how the people beneath the soil had been related, and made a macabre game of calculating how old the dead were when they entered their final rest.
One thing Helena was particularly taken with was the beauty of the graves—the intricate carvings of cherubs, steeds, and roses, all set into the stone with painstaking effort, love, and reverence. There was even a headstone topped with a statuette of what looked like a foxhound, the epitaph reading: Our most beloved friend, Bastien.
Even Falgrave’s dogs have more dignified burials than people in the slums, Helena mused with a touch of bitterness. Fair enough, because I might just strangle Nanda and Makalu when I catch them.
Towards the centre of the cemetery, a mausoleum emerged from the frost and fog, an austere domed structure overgrown with winter-hardy tendrils of ivy, ringed in spiked wrought iron, and locked behind a heavy, rusted gate. Above the entrance was a marble slab engraved with the name GREYCROSS, rendered in old Lombardic script and softened by centuries of rain.
Helena envisioned the tomb chests of Daniel and Claire within—two lovers side by side in eternal silence, their recumbent effigies gazing blankly into vaulted dark. This sentiment caused a shiver to race up her spine, and she decided to pick back up the trail of the dogs she had lost.
When she turned about, she saw a large obelisk rising from a substantial cenotaph—a monument to those who had died but were interred elsewhere. Two dedications were etched into the marble face beneath the name HOLTZCLAW:
John Merrick
Born: May 8th, 1792
Died: October 21st, 1865
~
Delphine Claire (DuPriest)
Born: June 15th, 1795
Died: October 21st, 1865
In death, as in life, hand in hand
Two hearts joined as one
From earth to clay, from clay to sand
Helena smiled at the name Delphine, thinking of the girl John Greycross described so colourfully in his boyhood journal. But, considering the date of birth, she would have been much too old to be the pesky little nag; instead, Helena guessed her to be the Grandmamma Delphine mentioned in that same entry. Connecting the middle name Claire to John’s mother and the name John to he himself, she assumed these Holtzclaws were his maternal grandparents. She smiled to herself, feeling like the cunning and clever Clara Vaughan from the Blackmore novel, as she pieced together mystery after mystery at Falgrave.
Glancing back over the epitaph, Helena realized the dates of death were the same for John and Delphine, and the dedication suddenly rang with utter clarity. What had happened to the elderly couple on October 21st, 1865? She wondered about it, knowing only a tragedy of some sort was likely, but she pressed on with her duty to the dogs.
From behind the cemetery, where the thick of the woodland encroached upon the hallowed ground, Helena heard barking and the unmistakable muffled snarl of a dog with something clenched in its jaws. The rusty-hinge eek-eek of the pheasant rose in a frantic crescendo, then stopped abruptly.
“Oh, hell,” Helena said, blowing the whistle again. This time, Nanda came trotting out of the trees. She circled Helena’s dress and looked up at her, tongue waggling and eyes keen. “Has your brother caught his supper?”
Helena marched across the cemetery and slipped between the trees. Wading through dead and brittle scrub, she heard Makalu rustling about—not far now. A large stone, head-high and furred with moss, stood between her and a line of sight to the dog. She nearly breezed past before she was stopped by what was engraved into the rock—a sigil remarkably like the one on her new charm, and those worn not only by Gillis and Delores, but even the two hellhounds.
“What on earth?” she whispered, fishing the necklace out and comparing the two. Even to her untrained eye, there were many slight differences, but the character of both was unmistakably from the same culture—whatever culture that was.
Phoenician talismans, Greycross had said, calling to Helena’s mind the archaic peoples and desert kingdoms of the Old Testament. She ran a thumb over the charm’s surface as she studied the sigil on the old stone, unable to relate its peculiar shapes to any religious symbol she had ever seen, or to any written language she might have come across in all her time browsing library shelves.
Crunching and panting sounds advanced further into the woods, drawing Helena out of her contemplation. She continued the pursuit, trying the whistle several times. This only brought Nanda up behind her, trotting along obediently.
Thirty or more paces on, and another monolith appeared, this one too bearing the same carvings as the previous. The sigil was partially obscured by a veil of dead leaves, and when Helena brushed her hand against the stone to clear its surface, she felt the strangest sensation wash over her. Something within her pulsed for a moment, then fled as fast as it had come. She stood staring at the carvings, their shape and form utterly incomprehensible but oddly beautiful.
Gazing deeper into the thicket beyond, Helena could just make out several more stones, spaced at even intervals, obviously by design. Although she had never seen anything quite like these bizarre monuments, their presence did not engender any vague, ominous feelings as the master chamber had. Quite the opposite—they had a calming effect on her, even as she remained wound up over Makalu’s gallivanting. With a final look at the symbols, she turned about.
“Makalu!” Helena cried, trying things the old-fashioned way. “Makalu! Come at once, you heathen! Makalu!”
The devil on four legs suddenly appeared around the girth of an ancient oak, the limp body of the pheasant in his mouth. He had bitten into and broken the slender neck, and the crimson-crested head dangled as the dog pranced towards Helena.
“Disgusting,” Helena said with a laugh. “You awful, awful beast.”
She ushered the dogs back to the cemetery, and as they crossed its brush-tangled plots again, she had the oddest notion that those resting there wanted to keep her just a bit longer. Indeed, Helena had always had such intimations, like the voice of her heart that spoke when she met new people or found herself in dangerous scenarios—or the vague, eerie perceptions that arose in places some might say were haunted. Her imagination then conjured a ghoulish and absurd sight, drawn no doubt from the Penny Dreadfuls she consumed as a guilty pleasure, of the dead Falgraveans rising for one last party.
Helena laughed darkly, knowing since the time she was a young girl that death was final and absolute, and that no power on earth could bring back the dead.
When she finally neared the house again, the dogs picked up a sound just below Helena’s ability to detect, and judging the direction the dogs shot off in, it was coming from the front drive. Racing after them—and having more than her fill of the four-legged fiends for the day—Helena saw from a distance a man in a flat cap and thick wool coat driving a horse and cart. Nanda and Makalu raced beside him as he pulled in front of Falgrave, Nanda barking and her brother still clenching the limp, jostling pheasant.
“For fuck’s sake!” Helena panted. She blew the whistle for the hundredth time, but the dogs were too mad with excitement at the visitor.
As she approached, the driver brought the cart to a halt before Falgrave’s main entrance and bounded down, clapping his hands. “Good to see you again, my friends,” he said, welcoming the dogs as they rushed to him without hesitation. Nanda reared up and sullied his coat with grey muck, but he only scratched behind her ear, entirely unbothered. He then belly-laughed at the sight of the pheasant dangling from Makalu’s jaws. “What’s this? Have you brought me lunch, Mackie?”
“I’m so sorry,” Helena managed, still catching her breath.
He turned toward her, his face grandfatherly, his smile buried in a slatey beard. Removing his cap, he said, “Good afternoon, madam.”
Remembering Greycross’s note, Helena asked, “Are you the farrier, by chance?”
“That I am,” he said. “George Blethridge. I’ve not seen you about before.”
“Helena Marstowe,” she said, shaking the hand he offered her. “I’m the new housekeeper here at Falgrave.”
“Ah, got it,” he said. “It’s nice to see a pretty young face here for a change. Have you gotten to grips with this ancient ruin yet?”
“I’ve only just scratched the surface,” she said with a smile. “There’s something new and mysterious around every corner, it seems.”
“You’re not kidding, Miss Marstowe,” Blethridge said. “I’ve been shoeing horses for the Greycross family since young master John was still in nappies. Seen quite a bit inside. Daniel Greycross—God rest him—loved parties when he was home from his travels. Invited me and my family quite often. Indeed there are some strange and wonderful things inside this house, from places I couldn’t even dream of. Say, is John planning to put on one of those jolly good Christmas parties this year?”
“Yes, absolutely,” Helena said. “And I’ll be sure you receive an invitation, Mr. Blethridge.”
The farrier smiled with a twinkle in his tired eyes. “I’ll be on the lookout for it, Miss Marstowe.”
The front doors groaned open, and Gillis, seeing Helena and the farrier there, donned a scowl. “What’s this auld bastart claverin’ at ye for, Helena?”
He marched over, and before he came within striking distance, his stony face had already broken into a grin. He and Blethridge clasped hands and fell at once into easy conversation and laughter.
Helena glanced past Gillis and blanched—Nanda and Makalu had slipped through the wide‑open doors into Falgrave, muddy paws, begrimed fur, dead pheasant and all.
“No!” Helena cried, sprinting after them. When she reached the threshold and looked into the great hall, her heart shrivelled in her chest; she nearly wept at the damage already done. The freshly polished floor was smeared with foetid muck as the dogs pranced about like two filth‑ladened dandies. And there, at the feet of the looming angel like some sacrificial offering, lay the pheasant—its single dead eye glaring up at her from within its tomato‑red mask.
Gillis sidled next to Helena, laying a hand on her shoulder as he surveyed the hall.
“Thas mah fault,” he said solemnly. “Ah’ll go fetch the scrubbin’ cloots and help ye tidy up.”
“Thank you, Mr. Gillis,” Helena said, not knowing whether to sob or laugh.
“Nae problem,” he said, then picked up the pheasant by its feet. “Say, ye ever tried buttered pheasant baked wi’ apples and a wee dram? It’s tae die for.”
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