letters stick out from the corner of his bag, and Bram picks them up and returns to his chair. The first is written by Matilda, but there are others.
Bram reads Matilda’s letter, then reads it again, before slipping it into the pages of his journal, between pages previously written upon, and once again begins writing by the pale light of the oil lamp.
He has so much more to tell. And so little time to tell it.
LETTER FROM MATILDA to ELLEN CRONE, DATED 8 AUGUST 1868
My dearest Nanna Ellen,
Or should I call you Ellen? I am, after all, an adult now. Can you imagine? All grown up, twenty-two years of age. A spinster! Sometimes I find it hard to believe how the years have flown. Where to begin? I know some may find it silly to write a letter to a recipient who will never read the words, but so much has transpired since you left us, much weighing heavily on my mind. And may I say, I miss you so? Somehow, through it all, I miss you.
Never far from my thoughts, regardless of how hard I have tried to forget you.
Oh, now I ramble. That is not my intent. I suppose I am a bit flustered at the thought of committing these words to paper, for to do so makes them more real, but do so I must. To think and write of all that transpired is an admission to myself, acceptance of what occurred. I am certain you would have me believe the shadows of my childhood imagination have simply been aggrandized over time, but I know that such is not the case. These years of reflection have given me the perspective to untangle the truth from fancy. I may not know you in the way Bram knows you, but, believe me, I know you well.
As hard as I have tried to forget the events of your final days in our home, the memories refuse to let go. They sit in a small room at the back of my mind, and when the door is about to close on them, when the last bit of candlewick is about to be snuffed out, they come pouring forth. I have had dreams, both night terrors and the wakeful sort, and sometimes the memories scream out in the middle of the day, drowning out all else around me.
Where did you go?
What became of you?
For years, I wondered if you really walked into the bog and disappeared beneath the water or if that was just a conjecture of my childhood’s imagining.
Then there was that crate, that horrid thing in Artane Tower, and its grotesque contents, the sight of which burned into my mind’s eye. Weeks passed before I found myself able to sleep through the night after finding that box.
We told them everything. We had to.
We fled the tower—we could have killed ourselves scrambling down those steps—and back home as if riding the very wind. We woke Ma and Pa straightaway. We told them of our findings between labored breaths. Realizing the hour and the fact that we had been out was enough to give them quite a shock, but we went on anyway. Bram and I did not care about any punishment that awaited us; this tale seemed far bigger than the consequences of our transgression. We told them everything. How we found the soil in your bed. How we observed you eat—or, truly, not eat. We even told them how we followed you and how you disappeared into the bog. But most of all, we told them about the crate in the tower and the severed limb lying within. Ma and Pa listened in silence, their eyes bouncing from Bram to me and back again as the words poured out, and when we finished, they watched us in silence still. Ma spoke first, her words short and thick with sleep. She turned to Pa and patted his arm. “Perhaps you should go and have a look, Abraham.”
Still wrapped in our coats, Bram and I both nodded our heads vigorously at that suggestion and leapt from their bed towards the door. Pa did not follow, though; instead, his head fell back upon his pillow. “In the morning,” he said. “We’ll go at first