The Buried House

By Dorian Wolfe

A dark bargain.
A sister dead.
An immortal's tomb.

 

Clara's favorite sister married the lord of the Buried House, a haunted, hidden place — and then vanished from Clara's life. Or so her crippled, bitter sister Maye told her. But when a mysterious letter reveals that their vanished sister is dead, Maye admits to killing her.

 

But only the Buried House knows the real story. It will tell — for a price. In this haunting tale of sisterhood, magic, and monstrosity, Clara must decide if her sisters are worth that price.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dorian Wolfe
• Release date: Sep 7, 2021
• ISBN: 9798201339371

Book preview

1

Clara stared at the letter. At the stationery, printed with cheerful violets, single stalks wearing bright flowers. The words blurred and ran together in front of her eyes, becoming a field of dead, gray grass from which those smiling flowers dared to watch.

Is something the matter, Clara? a frosty, deep voice half-whispered.

Clara pinched her nose to hide her sniffle as her second-oldest — oh, she was the oldest of them, now — sister, Maye, stalked into the drawing room. Maye could make her prim, stiff footsteps well-heard even on the ankle-deep, amber carpeting that extended from the frescoed wall on the one side to the mahogany-paneled wall on the other. Her footsteps were the only thing that ever announced her, and her ivory-handled walking stick’s sharp clack on wood or hiss on carpet, and perhaps a few words; she never wore their mother’s soft, floral perfume. The one that had clung, last of all, to their mother’s silver-canopied bed, and had finally died away into a dream. That perfume had gone to the — to the Buried House.

Maye kept talking, her voice like the purr — and sometimes the growl — of a tiger. "Anaïs has been dead for two weeks. That’s what his letter said. It’s time to stop this teary nonsense. Who do you think you are, being so selfish, crying all the time? You’re like a yapping little dog, never silent, making simply everey-thing more grim wherever you go. Maye swallowed. She was only your sister."

Clara pinched the letter between her thumb and her second finger, squeezing it until it felt like a sliver of stone locked in her hand. She was your sister too! she said. Her voice broke into a soft cough at the end, making a parody of her heart-felt declaration.

Maye sat carefully on one of the high-backed, ornately-carved wooden chairs. A throne, really, though the word was out of fashion these days. She crossed her ankles demurely under the rustling lavender of her gown. You’re not to go outside today, Clara.

Clara jerked her head up. Her eyes found the dark pupil at the center of Maye’s one bright blue eye, and glared straight into that pit of dark. Not that she had been planning to go outside today, not with the snow tumbling like spilled down feathers from the sky. She didn’t fancy a mouthful of cold — dry air or wet snow — or a numb, red nose.

And now that Maye had told her not to, she wanted nothing more than to go outside and stare into the bulging white sky and catch a fistful of soft cold crystals. Why? And who are you to —

Cook told me what you did this morning, Maye interrupted. She caught you trying to mar the frescoes with black. She tipped her head — just a little, but Clara didn’t even have to look to know. In one of the corners, one of the pastel blue clouds that edged the fresco of the legend of Icarus was blotched with black, a black that smelled of turpentine and leached an astringent taste into the air.

Clara couldn’t deny it. She was no liar.

She had been so angry this early morning, life seeming to go on, while her favorite sister couldn’t go on. And Maye didn’t seem to care. She had been behaving more bizarrely than ever, slowly taking things like food and blankets, and a pistol — a pistol! — to the stables. Something every day. As if she were capable of some adventure in the wilderness, climbing and straining to snow-tipped peaks, and shooting bone-thin wolves.

And today, Maye had invited her only friends, the twins, to visit for a card game of their own devising. The girls would be coming over that evening. A pitiful party, but it was the biggest party Maye had ever thrown. The biggest party they had had in two years, since Anaïs left for the Buried House. Clara wasn’t invited, of course.

Black, dark, was the only right response to it all. Bury everything that’s too joyful and sweet. Though she had repented of destroying the beautiful artwork before she went too far. Evidently Cook had caught her at just that little bit, not shouting, not even saying anything, just tattling to Maye. Cook: there was one who knew to disguise her footsteps.

Clara had been angry, yes, until the letter came from nowhere and sapped the vicious energy from her as she read it over and over again. Her sweet sister’s last words to her.

To my dearest sister, Clara, the letter said. If you are reading this, what we feared was indeed the truth. That the lord of this unnatural place was an unnatural husband, in one way or another. — Most likely, that is. It is, of course, possible that I have died from some other cause. You will be the judge, my dear.

I wish I did not have to leave you with Maye.