Chapter 8 - Do Not Show

Kaniz found the page while she was taking my trousers off.

I had come up from the stable after dark with my shirt ruined and my wrists red, and she had been sitting on the floor by the egg crate with her knees drawn up, waiting. She didn’t ask where I had been. She looked at the shirt, and at my wrists, and at my face, and she got up and started undressing me without a word, the way she did every night. I had told her no at breakfast. I had been waiting all the way up the stairs for her to say something about it.

She unbuttoned my trousers, and the folded paper, which I had tucked back into my waistband, fell out onto the boards.

“That’s nothing,” I said.

Kaniz picked it up. She unfolded it, and looked at the woodcut for a long time, and her chain slid down her wrist and rang on the floor.

“It has cells,” she said.

“It’s nothing. Felix gave it to me. Felix gives me all sorts of things.”

“Four cells.” She put her finger on a little drawing of the cellar down in the corner, where the engraver had drawn four small square rooms in a row, each one with a little hatched door. She couldn’t read. She had told me once she had learned every page of the Tome from the pictures alone, in eight months, and she could read a woodcut faster than I could read a letter. “And there is a frame. You see? In the end one.” She held it up so the firelight came through the paper. “What does the writing say?”

“It says it’s an inn.”

“It says more than that. There are two lines.”

“DO NOT SHOW,” bellowed the Tome from the table.

I hadn’t known its eye was open. It had sulked there all afternoon with the eye shut tight, refusing to speak to anybody, and now it was wide open and gleaming in the firelight and fixed on the page in Kaniz’s hand.

“RIVER BELL INN,” it read out, at the top of its voice. “DO NOT SHOW. Underlined TWICE, in the hand of that pompous little gnome. Boy! There is a TOWER on that drawing! A square stone watchtower, at the corner of a curtain wall! It is not a fortress. It is not seven towers on a crag above a feature. But it is a TOWER, and I am a reasonable book, and I will accept it as a beginning.”

“Nobody is accepting anything.”

“Why does it say do not show?” Kaniz asked.

“Because nobody will buy it,” I said. “Felix said. Nobody has ever bought it and nobody ever will. That’s why it’s in the drawer.”

Kaniz looked at the four cells, then at me. My trousers were down round my knees in front of her, and my cock, which had been wrung out in a stable two hours ago, saw her standing there holding that paper and got ideas.

“I am sorry,” Kaniz said, “for this morning.”

“You didn’t do anything.”

“I put my finger on the window.” She folded the page carefully along its old creases. “I wanted you to see that I was not afraid of it. You saw something else.” She put the page on the table beside the Tome, and smoothed it flat with her palm. “I will not show you that window again. But I would like to see this inn.”

“Kaniz, I’m not…”

“Tomorrow we go and see it,” she said. “You said not tonight, and it is still tonight.” She took my hand and pulled me down onto the bed and lay down against my back, all of her, with her arm round my chest and her knees tucked behind mine and her mouth on the back of my neck. “Tonight I only want to sleep here.”

She was asleep in a minute. I lay awake with her breath on my neck and her tits against my back, and my cock interested in the arrangement, and the Tome reading DO NOT SHOW to itself across the room, over and over, in a low and happy voice.

“That page,” said Fenwick, “was in my desk.”

“Felix,” I said.

“Ah.” Fenwick closed his eyes for a moment. We were in his office, up a flight of stairs off the cloth market. It was narrow and it had a gnome desk, two chairs for normal people, and a certificate on the wall saying he was a licensed agent of the Ashbourne Property Exchange, which he obviously wanted me to read. Lily had one chair. Kaniz stood behind it with the window at her back, and the snow light came straight through her shift. I stood by the door with the Tome under my arm, ready to leave, and looked anyway. Everybody in that room could see her nipples, and I was the only one who knew what they tasted like. “Your friend,” said Fenwick, “has been in my office a number of times. I have not once let him in.”

“He does that.”

“I had gathered.”

Kaniz had been at Lily’s shop at dawn with the page, I found out later. She had walked across Ashbourne in the snow in her shift and her chain, and woken Lily up by knocking on the shutter, and held the woodcut up to the glass. Lily had come to the Nail with bread and her coat buttoned wrong, and taken one look at the four cells, and the big walled yard in the drawing, and said, “Oh, that’s a lot of yard,” and that had been the end of my morning.

“Tell me about it,” Lily said to Fenwick. “The truth.”

Fenwick sat down behind his desk. He folded his small hands on the blotter.

“The River Bell,” he said, “is a fortified coaching inn at the old ferry crossing, half a morning east of the walls. Curtain wall, gatehouse, stable yard for twelve animals, square watchtower, covered well. Fourteen bedrooms, six with beds. The roof is sound. The ferry moved upstream some years ago, and the road went with it, and the property was bought cheap by two young men who had grown up together and meant to restore it. They restored most of it. They died before they opened it.” He paused to straighten his blotter. “They have not left.”

“Ghosts,” said Lily.

“Two. The previous owners. They are, by the standards of the trade, very attached to the property.”

“Are they dangerous?” Lily asked.

“To life and limb, no. I have shown the River Bell to three clients in three years, Mistress Winterbrook, and all three walked out alive.” Fenwick looked at the window. “None of them walked out dressed.”

Lily looked at me. Kaniz looked at me. Under my arm, the Tome made a small, delighted sound.

“No,” I said.

“It’s an inn,” Lily said.

“It’s a haunted inn.”

“You love inns. You’ve lived in one for a year and you won’t leave it. You told me last week you’d rather sleep in Maple’s cellar than in any house in Ashbourne.” She stood up out of the chair and came to me and fixed my collar, which didn’t need fixing, and kept her hands on it. “And it has a yard.”

She smelled of bread and her shop, cold flowers and wet soil, and she was close enough for me to feel her breath on my chin. I had a whole pile of reasons to say no, and with her that close I couldn’t find a single one. “We’ll look,” I said. “We’ll look, and then I’ll say no.”

“Of course you will,” said Lily, and patted my collar flat, and kissed me.

The River Bell stood by itself on a bend of the river with nothing else in sight, and I didn’t like that one bit. The snow had stopped by the time we got there.

Fenwick drove the wagon himself. Lily sat beside him on the bench with a blanket round her knees, and I sat in the back with Kaniz and the Tome and a basket of Maple’s pies, wrapped in an old wool blanket, that Maple had pushed into my arms at the door without explanation. The road ran east along the river through bare willows until the ruts gave out, and for the last mile we were guessing where the road was under the snow.

It was a good wall. I’ll give it that. It was gray stone, twice my height, all the way round, with a gatehouse at the front that had murder holes in the arch and a heavy iron-bound gate standing open on one hinge. Above the wall I could see the slate roof of the inn and the watchtower, with notches cut along its top for archers. Down below, on the water, a stone landing ran out into the river, empty, with the old ferry chain lying across it under the snow.

“OH,” said the Tome. “Oh, look at the parapet. Boy, look at it. It is small. It is extremely small. But it is HONEST.”

We went through the gate into the yard. It was big, a long square of trampled snow with the stables down one side and the inn along the back, two stories of stone with a long gallery on the upper floor and iron shutters on all the ground-floor windows. Over the inn door hung a bronze bell the size of a bucket, green with weather.

Fenwick climbed down off the wagon and took out his folio. Lily climbed down after him and stood in the middle of the yard with her blanket round her shoulders, turning in a circle, looking at the long empty stretch of it beside the stables, and her face went still. I knew that face. It was the face she had made at the farm, over that dead garden.

The yard went cold.

The air dropped so fast that my breath came out white and the snow on the wagon bed crackled. Every iron shutter on the front of the inn swung open together and slammed shut again with a crash I felt in my teeth. Somewhere inside, a chain rattled down a flight of stairs, step by step. And a voice came from everywhere at once, low, right in my ear, and my skin crawled:

“Leeeeeave.”

Kaniz looked interested. Lily pulled her blanket tighter. Fenwick turned a page in his folio and made a small mark with his pencil.

“That is the standard welcome,” he said. “It goes on for some time.”

“Leeeeeave this place. Leave it, or—”

The snow heaved and broke open. A young man rose up out of it slowly, head first, gray and see-through with his hair hanging in his face. His shirt hung open and half-laced, and round his throat there was a dark bruised ring, and his eyes were two black holes, and his mouth was open on a howl. He rose until his feet were a foot off the ground and hung there with his arms spread wide.

“Leave,” he howled, “or join us in the…”

He saw me.

The howl stopped. The black holes of his eyes went, all at once, back to being eyes, and they were brown and fixed on me. The bruise round his throat faded. His hair fell out of his face, light brown and messy, and his mouth closed and opened again. He was pretty. He was so pretty it was stupid, lean and quick-looking, my age or near it, with a mouth that had obviously got him into a lot of trouble, and my cock knew it before my head knew anything. It stood up in my trousers and begged.

He was a ghost. I could see the stables through him. My cock had no interest in this information.

“Oh,” said the ghost. “Hello.”

“Kit,” said a second voice, from the inn door, in a tone of enormous patience. “You were doing so well.”

A second man stood in the doorway, under the bell. He was older and broader, dark-haired, in shirtsleeves with the collar open and work trousers and boots, and my cock, which was already busy, made room for him too. He had a dark wet wound showing under his ribs that he was obviously trying to make look frightening and that he let fade as soon as he saw everyone looking at it. He looked at me, and at Lily, and at Kaniz, and he took a long breath he didn’t need.

“Jory,” said the first ghost. He hadn’t taken his eyes off me. “Jory, look at his shoulders.”

“I am looking at his shoulders,” Jory sighed. “I am also looking at the lady in the blanket and the girl in the chain, and I am asking myself why Fenwick didn’t write to tell us he was bringing a good-looking one.”

“I wrote DO NOT SHOW,” said Fenwick, “for a reason.”

They gave us the tour. There was no stopping them.

Kit took me. He came drifting across the yard straight at me, and he didn’t stop until he was close enough that I felt the cold come off him, and he walked round me once, looking at all of me, and put his see-through hand on the edge of my cloak and tugged at it, testing.

“You’re cold,” he said. “Come inside. We have fourteen bedrooms. Six of them have beds.”

“I’ve heard.”

“Four of them have fireplaces,” said Kit. “And one has a lock. I fitted it myself. Do you want to see the lock?”

“I want to see the walls,” I said. “I’m checking the walls. For the Guild.”

“The walls are very good,” said Kit. “The walls are the best thing here. You can scream as loud as you like and nobody on the road will hear you.” He took my hand, or tried to; his fingers went cold and tingling through mine, and he looked at our hands with a small frown and tried again. “Come and see the bed in the warm room. It is very wide. I had it made wide on purpose. Jory said it was a waste of the furnishing budget.”

“It was a waste of the furnishing budget,” Jory said, from the door.

Inside, the common room was big and cold and full of gray light. It had a long oak bar down one side, carved with river birds whose wings were set with little pieces of blue glass, and a gallery ran round three sides of the room above it, with the doors of the bedrooms opening onto it. The hearth at the end was big enough to stand up in, and there was nothing in it but old ash. You could fit fifty people in that room. Nobody had been in it for three winters except two dead men.

I stood in the middle of it, and the back of my neck prickled, because I was pretty sure somebody I couldn’t see was watching me.

The Tome said, “THE TOWER. Where is the tower? Somebody show me to the tower,” and Kit turned to look at it under my arm, and his eyes went wide.

“Is that book looking at me?”

“I am looking at nothing else in this room, you translucent DRAFT, I am looking for my TOWER.”

“Jory,” said Kit, delighted. “Jory, the book has an eye.”

“I see it.”

“Can I touch the book?”

“NO,” said the Tome and I, together.

The bedroom tour lasted half an hour and covered four bedrooms. Kit did all of it. He walked backward in front of me down the gallery, talking the whole way, and in every room he stopped by the bed and explained, with demonstrations, exactly what he had imagined happening in it. He lay down on the wide bed in the warm room above the kitchen, and sank straight through it so that only his head and his bare feet stuck up out of the quilt, and he stretched his arms over his head and arched his back and showed me the angle the headboard was carved for, and I had to think hard about Fenwick’s hat to keep my cock down. He opened a wardrobe and showed me the shelf on top where he had put three previous clients’ trousers. In the fourth room he climbed up onto the bed, knelt in the middle of it facing me, and asked if I wanted to see what the lock was for.

“I have seen locks,” I said.

“You haven’t seen this one.” He leaned toward me across the bed and looked at my mouth. “You keep going red. Why do you keep going red?”

“It’s cold in here.”

“It isn’t that cold.” Kit looked down, with great interest, at the front of my trousers. “That isn’t cold.”

Downstairs, somebody shrieked.

It was Jory. I went out onto the gallery and looked down over the rail, and Jory was in the middle of the common room with both his see-through hands over his face, and Kaniz was in front of him in her shift and her chain with her chin up and the hem of the shift lifted up in both her hands to her waist.

She never wore anything under it, which I knew better than anyone in that room.

“That was all?” Kaniz asked him. “You flick the hem up with one finger, and that is the whole of your plan? Three years dead and that is what you have?”

“I…” said Jory, through his hands.

“If you want to see,” said Kaniz, “you look.” She lifted it higher, past her navel, to the bottom of her ribs, and stood there in the gray light of the common room with her chain hanging off her wrists and her bare cunt on display, perfectly calm. “You may look. My master does not mind looking. You may not touch without asking him.” She turned her head and looked up at me on the gallery, and her eyes went bright. “Master. Do you mind looking?”

I opened my mouth. Nothing came out of it. Beside me, Kit made a high noise through his nose.

Jory lowered his hands. He looked at Kaniz for a long time, carefully, and then up at me on the gallery with his mouth hanging open. Three years dead, and he’d only just found out about it.

“Your girl,” he said, “is not normal.”

“No,” I said.

“I like her,” said Jory, and sat down slowly on the edge of a table, and went straight through it onto the floor.

Lily came in from the yard at that moment with snow on her boots and her blanket over her arm. She looked at Kaniz with her shift round her ribs, and at Jory on the floor, and at Kit and me on the gallery, and she didn’t even slow down. She walked straight across to the hearth, took a handful of salt out of her coat pocket, and held it up in her fist for both ghosts to see.

“I always carry salt,” she said. “For slugs. I’m a florist. If either of you touches my dress, or my hair, or any part of me, I will salt this hearth, and I will ask you what you meant by it afterward. Do we understand each other?”

Jory got up off the floor. He bowed to her, slow and proper, and I’d have bet my boots he meant to serve her dinner.

“Mistress,” he said. “Perfectly.”

“Yes, mistress,” said Kit, from beside me, and I believed him.

“Good,” Lily said. “Is there a garden?”

The answer was a yard. Lily walked the length of it in the snow by the stables with her blanket round her shoulders and her head down, pacing, and she didn’t come back in for a long time, and I didn’t like it, because it meant she wanted the place.

Fenwick carried the Tome up the watchtower, and it came down weeping with happiness. Kaniz went down to the cellar with Jory, who couldn’t stop bowing at her since she’d shown him her cunt, and came back up half an hour later with dust on her shift and her cheeks dark and her lips pressed together hard, and when I asked her what she thought of the cells she didn’t answer me. She took my hand and held it tight, and looked at the floor, and after a while she let go and went back down the cellar stairs by herself.

The common room was the coldest room I’d ever been in, and nobody had lit the hearth in three winters, and Maple’s pies had gone stiff in their basket. So I lit it. There was dry wood beside it, a lot of it, stacked neatly and recently, and I didn’t think about who had stacked it. I knelt in the ash and built up a fire and lit it with my flint, and I sat down on the hearthstone with my back to the room and held my hands out to it.

Kit sat down beside me.

He held his hands out to the fire, too, close enough that the cold came off his shoulder against mine. He didn’t say anything for a while, only looked at the flames. Without all the talking he looked younger than he had on the bed upstairs, eighteen at most, and the bruise round his throat had come back, faint, and if he knew it was there, he didn’t show it.

“Nobody’s lit it,” he said. “Since.”

“Since what?”

He didn’t answer that. He put his hand down flat on the hearthstone between us, and after a moment, he slid it across the stone and put it on top of mine.

It was cold and tingling and not quite there, as it had been in the yard. The next moment it was there. The fire cracked, and the warmth came off it into my back and my side and down my arm, and I felt Kit’s hand on mine go from a cold draft to a solid hand, the weight of it, the skin of his palm, the calluses at the base of his fingers. He had work hands, which I hadn’t expected from the pretty one. It was warm. He looked down at it. His mouth fell open.

“Oh,” said Kit.

He kissed me.

He just turned his head and did it, no warning. His mouth was warm and real against mine and he tasted of cold air and woodsmoke, and his other hand came up and took hold of the front of my shirt, solid, and pulled me closer. I kissed him back. My cock had already decided before I had, and it was shoving at my trousers. I put my hand on the back of his neck, and I felt his hair, real hair, under my fingers, and he made a high, hungry noise into my mouth.

He pulled back first.

He sat there on the hearthstone with his hand still on my chest, and he looked at me, and his chin wobbled. In front of me, he began to fade. His hand went thin on my shirt, and then cold, and then it went through me, and he was gray again in the firelight with the bruise round his throat, looking at his own fingers.

“Sorry,” he said. “Sorry. I don’t know why I did that.”

“It’s fine.”

“It isn’t fine.” He laughed, short and ugly. “You’re going to leave. Everybody leaves. Fenwick brings them and they look at the rooms and they look at us and they leave, and you’ve got a girl in a chain and a girl with salt and a book with an eye, and you don’t want an inn in the middle of nowhere with two dead men in it.” He looked at the fire. “I know what you want. I could see it on you the minute you came through the gate. You want to go home.”

He was right. I wanted my small room at the Nail with the ring over the bed and Maple’s stew and nobody asking me for anything.

My mouth was still warm where he had kissed it.

Up in the gallery a door banged, then another.

“Kit,” said Jory, from the bottom of the stair. He sounded worried. “Kit, they’re leaving. Fenwick’s in the yard.”

Kit stood up off the hearthstone. He looked at me. He looked at the door. He chewed his lip for a second, and his grin came back, crooked and a bit mean.

“Well,” said Kit, “if they’re leaving anyway.”

Every door on the gallery flew open and slammed. Every shutter on the ground floor crashed open and shut, open and shut, over and over, until the whole inn rang with it. The fire roared up the chimney. The bell over the front door started swinging by itself and tolling, loud enough to hear across the river. Through a shutter as it banged open, I saw Fenwick’s tall hat come off his head in the yard and sail up into the air, turn over twice, and land on top of the watchtower.

And my clothes came off.

I felt my belt go first. It slid out through its loops all at once and flew off across the common room and wrapped itself round the leg of a table. My boots came off my feet while I was standing in them. My cloak went up into the gallery and spread itself over the rail. I grabbed for my shirt, and it went up over my head and off my arms before I could get hold of it, and my trousers went down, smallclothes and all, and stayed down, round my ankles, and were pulled, gently and firmly, off over my feet by somebody I couldn’t see.

“Kit!” I yelled.

“Sorry,” said Kit, from everywhere, not sorry at all.

“That’s not a nice thing to do to a guest,” said Jory, from the stairs. He was holding my smallclothes. He looked at them, and at me, with the expression of a man pricing a room. “They are very well made,” he added, to Kit.

“Jory! Not you too!”

“You lit the fire,” Jory said reasonably. “It’s the first fire in three winters. We’re feeling very strong.” He folded my smallclothes over his arm. “We’ll keep these. You can come back for them.”

Kaniz came up out of the cellar door at a run, took one look at me standing there naked with my hands over my cock, and burst out laughing. I had never heard her laugh like that. It went on and on. Lily appeared in the front door with the Tome in her arms, looked over the whole room in one go, and pointed at the wagon.

“Out,” she said. “Out, out, out.”

I ran.

I ran out of the River Bell barefoot through the snow with my hands over myself and Kaniz still laughing behind me and the bell tolling over the river, and I climbed up into the back of the wagon and pulled Maple’s pie blanket over my lap. Fenwick, hatless, snapped the reins. Behind us, in the gatehouse, Kit stood in the arch with one hand raised, waving, and I could see the yard through him.

Fenwick didn’t say a word for the first mile. After that, he turned round on the bench.

“DO NOT SHOW,” he said. “Underlined twice.”

“No,” I said that night, at the Nail. “No. Absolutely not.”

I said it loudly. I said it at the corner table in the common room with my back to the wall and Maple’s stew in front of me and my second-best shirt on, and I said it to Lily on my left and Kaniz on my right and the Tome on the table beside my bowl, and I said it so loudly that two carters at the bar turned round to look.

“It’s haunted,” I said. “It’s haunted from the cellar to the bell. It’s half a morning from anywhere. There’s no road. There’s no ferry. The previous owners took my trousers and kept my smallclothes, and when I go back for them, which I won’t, they’re going to make me ask nicely. I’m not buying a house where the ghosts make you ask nicely for your own smallclothes.”

“It has a tower,” said the Tome.

“It has a frame,” said Kaniz. She had stopped laughing somewhere on the road, and her eyes had gone dark, and she had been holding my hand under the table all evening. “In the end cell. And the rings are the right height.”

“It has a yard,” said Lily, and didn’t say anything else.

“It has two dead men in it who want to fuck everyone who walks through the door,” I said. “That’s the whole problem with it. I’m staying here.”

I put my spoon in my stew. I touched my mouth with my thumb.

I didn’t notice I’d done it. I only noticed because Lily was looking at me, and she had stopped eating, and I looked down at my hand and found my thumb on my lower lip, right where he had kissed it, pressing.

I took my hand away. I picked up my spoon again.

“That’s the third time,” said Felix, “since I came in.”

He was at the next table. He was sitting with his back to the wall with a cup of Maple’s wine and his legs crossed and his blond hair dry, as if he had been sitting there all night, and I would have sworn on Bertha that the table had been empty when I sat down.

“Go away, Felix.”

“You keep touching your mouth.” He turned his cup on the table. “And every time you do it, you say something terrible about the inn, very loudly.” His violet eyes moved from my mouth to Lily, who was staring into her stew, and back to me. “What happened to your mouth at the River Bell?”

“Nothing.”

“Nothing.” Felix smiled into his wine. “I imagine nothing was very pretty.”

“I’m not buying it.”

“Nobody said you were.” He set his cup down. “But I would like to make you a wager, Samuel, since you’re so certain. I don’t believe that you don’t care. I believe you walked into a haunted inn today, and something in it kissed you, and you haven’t been able to stop thinking about it since. I think if you went back there alone, for a night, with nobody to run behind, you’d come back wanting to buy it.” He leaned toward me. “Prove me wrong.”

“Prove you wrong how?”

“Spend one night at the River Bell. Alone. No Lily, no Kaniz, no book. From sunset to sunrise.” He held up one finger. “If you come back in the morning and still say no, and mean it, I’ll stop. I’ll never mention it again. I’ll never mention the board again, either.” He held up a second finger. “And if you come back in the morning and can’t say it, you owe me a night. My choice of night, and my choice of rope.”

Lily’s hand had gone still on the table. Kaniz’s hand had tightened in mine under it.

“That’s a stupid bet,” I said.

“Yes,” said Felix. “Are you afraid of it?”

I wasn’t afraid of anything. I was going to go out there, and sleep in the coldest room in the world, and keep my trousers on, and come back in the morning and say no to his face. I was going to prove to every single person at this table that I didn’t care about the River Bell at all. “Tomorrow night,” I said.

Felix raised his cup.

Under the table, I put my thumb against my mouth again, and held it there.