The Scratches

Chapter 11

The archive was locked.

I stood in front of it with my bucket still in my hand and my back aching from six hours of the east wing, and I jiggled the handle like that would do anything.

"Don't bother."

Doreen came around the corner with a laundry basket on her hip. She was the maid from the first morning, the one who looked at me like a stray dog.

"It's locked every night at seven," she said. "Archivist has the key and the archivist went home at five."

"Where's the archivist tomorrow?"

"Nowhere. He's ninety. He comes in Tuesdays." She shifted the basket. "What do you want in the archive anyway?"

"Nothing."

"Mm." She looked at me for a second too long. "You're a terrible liar. Somebody ought to tell you."

She walked off.

I stood there in the hallway with my bucket and my bad attitude and my knees screaming, and I thought about nine names in a locked room with a ninety-year-old man guarding them on Tuesdays.

Tomorrow was Friday.

I went to bed.

---

The next morning I got a uniform.

It was hanging on the hook inside my door when I got up — gray dress, white apron, and a little white cap, and I stood there in the dark looking at that cap for a solid minute before I put it on.

"Don't get excited," Mrs. Crane said when I came down. "The King's paying you out of his own pocket, not the household budget. That means you answer to me and you answer to him and nobody else, and if the Council comes sniffing around asking questions you say I work for the King and you shut your mouth."

"And the archives?"

She stopped slicing bread.

"What about the archives?"

"I need in."

"You need to scrub the west corridor."

"The west corridor's not going anywhere." I set my bucket down on her counter. "Neither is the archive. But the Council comes in six days and I've got nine names in there and I'd like to have them before some man in a robe asks me a question I can't answer."

Mrs. Crane looked at me the way you look at a dog that's learned to open the fridge.

"Tuesday," she said.

"Tuesday's too late."

"Then you're out of luck."

I opened my mouth.

"Don't," she said, and pointed the knife at me. "I've had forty girls come through these kitchens and every single one of them thought they were the first person to ever want in that archive. There's a reason it's locked, and the reason isn't that old men are stupid."

"What's the reason?"

She went back to her bread.

"Scrub the west corridor," she said.

So I scrubbed the west corridor.

The west corridor was the one that led to the blue room. I knew that because there was a guard at the end of it, and he watched me the whole time I worked, and neither one of us said a word for two hours.

Around noon Doreen came down the hall with a jug and set it on the floor next to me and didn't leave.

"You're doing it wrong," she said.

"I'm doing it the way Mrs. Crane showed me."

"You're putting too much water down. Now it's just a puddle with a sheen on it." She crouched down and pulled the brush out of my hand and did a square foot of floor in about four seconds. "There. Pressure. You don't need water to scrub a floor, you need to want to."

I watched her do it.

"Where'd you learn that?"

"Twenty-two years in this house." She handed the brush back. "You're the first one they ever gave a uniform to."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"It means the last three girls that walked out of that pit never made it to Tuesday." She stood up. "Drink the water. You look like a boiled ham."

She was halfway down the hall when she turned around.

"You want in the archive," she said. "The archivist's got a nephew. Works in the kitchen on Thursdays. Comes in at four."

And then she left.

I sat there with the brush in my hand and the water soaking my knees and I thought: there's a reason it's locked.

---

I went up to the tower at eight. My back was done. My hands were done. Every part of me was done, and I'd been in the castle four days and I'd gotten exactly one truth out of anybody, and the Council was coming whether I was ready or not.

I sat on the edge of the bed and pulled the pins out of my hair and brushed it out, and my neck hurt and my shoulders hurt and when I looked up to fix my part in the dark window, I couldn't see myself right. Just a shape.

I got up and lit a candle off the fire.

And that's when I saw them.

They were up in the beam. High, near where the ceiling came down to meet the wall, in the shadow the firelight didn't reach.

Claw marks.

I climbed up on the bed with the candle and held it up close and my hand was shaking so the light moved.

The wood was splintered in four parallel grooves. Deep. Notched into solid oak like a knife through butter, the edges smooth where something had dragged them. They ran maybe three feet across the beam, right over the head of the bed, and there was another set an inch above the first, and another set above that one, and they went up the wall and into the ceiling and out of the reach of my candle.

I sat back down on the bed. Slowly.

The room was at the top of the east tower. There was no way to get to those beams from the outside. No balcony, no ladder. The only way anything got up there was if it walked in through the door and stood in the middle of the room and reached.

I got up and went around the room with the candle.

The inside of the doorframe. Four grooves, old, the wood gray where it had healed over.

The bottom of the windowsill. Same four grooves. This set was fresh. There were splinters on the floor under it.

I knelt down and touched them.

"Okay," I said out loud. Just to hear a voice.

I thought about the first night. I thought about the thing coming through the door and crossing that room and folding itself down on top of me. It had gotten off. It had shifted and gone out with the guards. It hadn't had time to do any of this.

So this was old. This was older than four days.

Which meant the Beast had been in this room before.

I walked to the door and opened it and looked down the stairwell, and there was nothing down there, just the long spiral going down into the dark.

Then I came back in and I pulled the door shut and I locked it with the brass key in my pocket.

And I stood in the middle of that room with the candle burning down and I asked the empty room a question I already knew the answer to.

"How long has the Beast been sleeping in my bed?"

Chapter 11 Ends

Ch 11 Ends