The steps levelled out into a stone floor. Shelves rose around Clare, the bottles glinting in a way that reminded her of eyes in the dark. She kept her breathing shallow, her ears straining to pick up any unnatural noises as Dorran wove between the shelves. In the distance, she caught the sound of dripping, and behind her, something that might have been a sigh or an echo. Dorran was moving too fast. Clare started to lose him amongst the shelves. She broke into a jog and staggered as her shoe clipped an uneven stone. She caught her balance against one of the shelves. Its bottles clinked as they rocked in their holders.
Dorran had stopped. Even though he faced her, he looked half like a stranger. His deep-set eyes were full of shadows. The candlelight painted unnatural angles over his face as its flame guttered. They stared at each other, unmoving, and Clare’s heart felt like it was about to burst.
“Clare? Are you all right?” His voice was distorted by the wine cellar’s echoes.
Clare didn’t trust herself to speak, but she gave two quick nods. Dorran adjusted his hold on the boards and held out a hand, and Clare moved to his side. He wrapped his arm around her shoulders. They walked side by side, and for a moment, Clare could hear only their breaths.
They reached the back wall. Clare recognised the place she’d seen a hollow one scrabbling at the ground. She nodded towards it. “The door must be somewhere here.”
Dorran bent and let the wood fall against the end of the closest shelf. “Keep the light steady.”
She held it high while Dorran explored the wall. His gloved fingers dug into the gaps between the stones, feeling for any sort of opening.
A soft noise intruded. A shudder ran through Clare, and the candle flickered. The scratching noises were back. Fingernails on stone… digging, digging, digging.
“Dorran.” She kept her voice to a whisper. “Do you hear that? The scratching noises?”
He stopped his search. They both held their breaths. The scratching ran around them, distorted but persistent. Clare strained to hear where it was coming from. The cellar was disorienting, and the noise was so faint, it was almost possible to lose it under the sound of her pulse.
Dorran watched her, his expression unreadable. “Do you still hear it?”
“Yes. Don’t you?”
He frowned, staring into the blackness, and after a moment, he shook his head. “I do not.”
Clare swallowed around the lump in her throat. “I’m not imagining it.”
“No. You’re not.” He stripped off his gloves as he stood. A finger brushed loose hair back behind her ear. His eyes were sad but intense. “I promised you I would not doubt you again. And I don’t. You are better at hearing them than me. Please, stand guard. Tell me if they come closer.”
She nodded. Dorran’s fingers lingered a moment, grazing her jaw, then fell away. He turned back to the wall and ran his hands across the surface.
He believes me. She couldn’t hear the scratching noise any longer. Part of her already wanted to believe she’d imagined it. The cellar was making her paranoid, and it would be easy to extrapolate a simple echo into something malevolent. But the other part of her held steady. She’d doubted her senses once before, and it had nearly killed Dorran. She wouldn’t make that mistake again.
Dorran pressed his shoulder against part of the wall. It shifted back. Hinges, old and rusty, groaned as they turned, and the door drifted inwards.
“There.” His smile glinted in the thin light. “We found it. Are you ready?”
She didn’t feel ready. Dorran waited in the opening, his dark eyes trying to read hers. She knew he would let her return upstairs, into the safety and warmth of their room, if she asked. He would probably even be grateful for it. But that would mean he would have to enter the passageway alone. Clare’s fingers ached from how hard she gripped the lamp, but she lifted her chin and stepped through the doorway.
Chapter Five
The wooden hallway was wide enough that Clare and Dorran could stand side by side. The pathways would have been built by the house’s original owner, a woman who had constructed Winterbourne deep in the forest to hide away from the world, following her husband’s death. Clare guessed she had designed the passages to be her refuge—a way to move about the house without staff or relatives knowing.
Dorran stopped inside the door and glanced down the passageway’s length. It stretched away in both directions, the smooth walls vanishing within feet. The lantern wasn’t as bright as Clare would have liked; already, she couldn’t see much of the wine cellar. Just the glint of two bottles that looked horribly like eyes.
“We will have to nail this one closed from the inside.” Dorran ran his hands across the wood door. On the other side was stone, designed to blend into the cellar’s walls. Clare nodded. They had no way to drill into the stone without specialised tools. She tried not to let her panic rise as they stepped inside the passageway and pulled the door closed behind them.
With their exit sealed, the hallway’s sickly musky scent intensified. It smelt like rancid meat and rats. The hollows were responsible: a mixture of wet, decaying clothes, greasy hair, and injuries left open and allowed to fester. Clare tried not to imagine how many of them had paced the hallways for their smell to permeate it.
Dorran lifted one of the wood pieces, braced it across the door, and held out a hand. Clare passed him a nail and the hammer. For a moment, her ears were filled with the hard thuds of metal impacting wood. Dorran drove the nails in at opposing angles, ensuring they could not be pulled out easily. Once the first board was secured, he picked up a second but paused before positioning it.
“I
