Reliquary

by Hannah Whitten

Genres: Horror

Synopsis

A young woman is lured to her late fiancé's remote island estate—only to uncover eerie family secrets, a haunting past, and a monstrous hunger stirring beneath the sea in this deliciously atmospheric horror debut from New York Times bestselling author Hannah Whitten.

When Claire’s fiancé mysteriously dies of an unknown neurological illness, she’s prepared to sink back into the lonely life she lived before. Orphaned by a freak boating accident in her childhood, she never expected to find connection like she did with Elias, anyway. Their relationship wasn’t perfect—his coldness, his secrets, his strange aversion to the ocean—but what relationship is?

When Elias’s family reaches out—his incredibly wealthy family, from whom he was estranged—and invites Claire to a three-day wake at Harrow Point, their family home on a private island, Claire is given the chance to find family again. To belong to something, just like she’s always wanted. Just like Elias knew she was desperate to have.

Even if that family is a little strange. Even if their coastal home stirs up memories of the accident that killed her parents and sister. Even if Ash, Elias’s older brother, seems insistent on Claire leaving as soon as possible.

As she dives deeper into the world of Harrow Point, she will uncover the nature of her own traumatic connection to the ocean. There is something swimming in the bowels of Harrow Point, and it is hungry…

Publisher: Orbit

Print pages: 432

Sample

Elias died on a Tuesday. It was easy to remember for the very reason it felt so surreal—Tuesdays were nothing days, too close to the end of one weekend and too far from the beginning of the next, a day when you never had plans but couldn’t really complain because at least it wasn’t Monday. If you saw something ridiculous, you’d say, Oh, just a normal Tuesday, and everyone would laugh because Tuesdays were so utterly bland.

But Elias died on a Tuesday, and it wasn’t bland at all.

Her ring twisted around her finger, the diamond turned toward her palm and digging in as she drove. A new car, his, Mercedes something or other, and she guessed she’d have to figure out how to transfer it into her name. Transfer everything.

Claire’s mind was a white void, no thought or feeling, only the immediacy of her stunned-still body and her jackknifing heart and the steering wheel beneath her hand, smooth leather that she scored with her thumbnail. Beside her, a cracked iPhone, screen dark. Elias had bugged her to upgrade it, said she was an idiot for keeping it. But she couldn’t afford a new one, and Elias would only pay for it if she swapped over to his phone plan, and she didn’t want to deal with changing her number. It’d lit up with the call from the hospital half an hour ago.

Hello, may I speak to Claire Sutherland? I’m so sorry, Miss Sutherland, there’s been…

They’d stopped there, leaving a gap in the conversation’s rhythm that was traditionally filled with the word accident. But that didn’t work here, not really.

An aneurysm wasn’t an accident. An aneurysm was a ticking bomb, a mine buried in the folds of your brain, waiting for the opportunity to explode. It would’ve been there forever, biding its time.

A honk; Claire swore and swerved out of the oncoming lane, a pickup truck whizzing by with another long press of the horn and a middle-finger salute. Usually Claire would return it, but only timidly and once they’d passed. Her fiancé had just died, so she didn’t. She only had enough energy to drive the car, as if Elias’s death had sucked the vitality out of her, too.

You’re welcome to come by at your earliest convenience, if you’d like to see him… The neurologist had some questions… Did your fiancé have any brain issues you were aware of, Miss Sutherland? Any disease, any injury?

“Tuesday,” Claire murmured as she pulled into a parking spot. The hospital lot was nearly deserted; she managed to park right next to the emergency room door. The car shuddered to a stop, and she sat there, still and slumped. “We get takeout on Tuesdays. I work late. Elias won’t cook.”

She didn’t know why she said it out loud. Maybe to see if it would shake the world back into order. Claire wasn’t someone who spent a lot of time thinking on esoteric subjects, but right now, she desperately believed in parallel universes. She desperately wanted to somehow phase herself into the one where Elias wasn’t dead, where he was calling in their usual order to that sushi place he liked, where he would leave his sneakers on the floor instead of the shoe rack. Where she would sigh, and pick them up, and put them where they were supposed to go, because she had learned that telling him off didn’t do anything but make him annoyed, and she didn’t want to deal with his annoyance.

Claire closed her eyes. Opened them. Same universe.

She opened the door and climbed out of her car.

Fluorescent lights buzzed overhead; an antiseptic burn scoured her nostrils. There were two other people in the waiting room. One an older white woman wearing Tinker Bell pajama bottoms and in bad need of a hairbrush. The other a young man with dreads and a trellis of dark bruises blooming across his nose, a bloody tissue protruding from one nostril. The nurse at the reception desk was playing on her phone, some matching game complete with tinny explosion sound effects. Her scrubs had rainbows on them. The desk had visible wipe marks from the last time someone had Lysoled it.

“Hi.” Claire shifted her weight on her feet. She still wore house slippers, UGG boots with a flimsy sole that Elias had given her for Christmas last year. Claire worked from home and spent most days in leggings and band T-shirts, despite the closetful of clothes he’d bought her. Her freelance social media management clients didn’t care what she wore. It was a miracle she’d remembered a bra. “I’m Claire Sutherland.”

The nurse swiped a combo (“Boom!” said an excited cartoon voice from her phone) before looking up with an expression on the fraying edge of polite. Blue eyeshadow streaked across her pale lids; her eyebrows were barely there. “And?”

She guessed calling the emergency contacts of dead men wasn’t something emergency reception took care of. “I’m Elias Ashbury’s fiancée.” Voice surprisingly even, surprisingly clear. That would be a problem later. She could already feel tears gathering in the wide cavity of her chest, crowding her rib bones, calcifying. Grief was sharp, she’d learned that before, and the longer you kept it trapped without release, the sharper its edges grew. But she was good at hollowing herself to allow it room, a skill Dr. Lark kept trying to train out of her. “He’s dead.”

The nurse’s phone fell from her hand, still tinkling, cartoon avatar still thrilled. Her arched brow slammed down, fixed itself in shame and then pity. The lady in the Tinker Bell pajamas glanced up at Claire, face inscrutable, before looking down at the tile again. Her foot bounced rapidly, the heel of her flip-flop slapping the floor like the bass in a frenetic metal song.

“Oh,” the nurse said. “Oh.” Her legs tensed like she would stand before she realized that she didn’t need to; turning from Claire, she grabbed the desk and pulled her rolling office chair to the black landline phone, fingers already flying over the numbers as she lifted the receiver. “She’s here,” she murmured, then nodded and hung up, office chair squealing as she rolled back in front of the window. Her face was composed now in what Claire thought of as Nurse Face. Gentle with sympathy but firm, approachable but not a pushover. Claire was very familiar with Nurse Face.

“Go through the double doors and to the left,” the nurse said, in a gentle-yet-firm voice to go along with her expression. “The neurologist will meet you.”

A subtle weight to the title, like she wanted Claire to know that this was a big deal, that the neurologist wouldn’t see just anyone. Claire bit the inside of her cheek to keep it from spasming.

“Thanks.” She walked toward the double doors. Unobtrusive cream, silver bar across the middle, standing out against the navy check of the tile. All hospitals must have the same interior decorators.

“I’m sorry for your loss,” the nurse said as Claire pressed against the metal bar, the locks disengaging with a mechanical squall.

“Happy Tuesday,” Claire said back.

The neurologist—Dr. Henry Cummins, he told her, shaking her hand while his was still covered in blue latex, making their palms squeak together—wanted her to know there was nothing they could’ve done. “He was lucky,” the doctor insisted, as if he was trying to convince himself, too. “It was quick and painless, and he was at his desk, instead of driving. It could’ve been much worse.”

Not for Elias, Claire thought. Seems like it was pretty much as bad as it can get for Elias.

They stood in silence for a moment, there in the sterile hallway under the buzzing lights. Claire was wearing an embarrassingly apt T-shirt, which she hadn’t really clocked until now. “Will Self-Destruct For Likes,” it read, with the little Facebook thumbs-up symbol beneath it. Claire hated this shirt, and she hated Facebook. Elias had bought it for her at a stall on Canal Street when he was in the city on business and buzzed from one too many cocktails, back when they had first started dating and the only things they really knew about each other were their jobs. It was laundry day, or she would never have worn it. It’d felt morbid in a funny downfall-of-society way when Elias bought it. Now it was just regular run-of-the-mill morbid.

She pulled her cardigan around her middle. Cashmere. Another Christmas gift.

Dr. Cummins cleared his throat. If Elias were here—here and alive—he would make fun of the good doctor’s name. Claire couldn’t think of anything funny.

The doctor checked the clipboard in his hand, too quickly to actually read anything on it, a physical tic to move them out of the condolences part of the conversation and into the meat of it. Claire didn’t know what the meat was supposed to be. Her aunt had taken care of all this stuff when she’d been in a similar situation before, right after the accident. Funeral arrangements, inheritances. She hadn’t really spoken to Aunt Margo in years, if you didn’t count cards. Once she turned eighteen, they had gone their separate ways, and she’d never felt the need to pick up the phone.

“There were some… anomalies,” Dr. Cummins finally said. He tucked the clipboard back under his arm, directing his gaze to the empty space over her shoulder instead of her face. “In the CAT scans. Some strange scarring that we can’t quite make sense of. Were you aware of any neurological conditions Mr. Ashbury may have dealt with? In his childhood, maybe? The lesions look like they’ve been there awhile.”

Claire shook her head. The sharp ball of grief in her chest grew thornier by the minute, but she could let it roll around without hitting anything. That was the key—take yourself as far out of your body as you can, give your feelings enough room to rattle without running into anything vital. Dr. Lark called it avoidance, Claire called it practicality. “I don’t know anything. We didn’t really talk about our childhoods.”

A slight widening of Dr. Cummins’s eyes; that was probably an awkward thing to admit about your dead fiancé. But he soldiered on, which she admired. “I’d like to have you look at these,” he said, turning on his heel to lead her down the hall. Claire fell in line. Her toes were cold in her slippers. “Maybe see if it jogs your memory? You’re the only person on Mr. Ashbury’s emergency contact list, and we’re having a hard time hunting down medical records.”

The way he said that was leading, like he thought Claire might have some insight, like she was holding out on him. She wasn’t. It was true; she and Elias hadn’t talked much about their childhoods, other than to acknowledge that they were both fucked up. Though his was fucked up in a way that included a sizable trust fund, so still better than hers. Maybe he’d been raised in a cult that didn’t believe in vaccines, treated everything with essential oils and dewormer. Maybe his über-rich parents had paid for the kind of boutique medical care that felt it was above such mundanities as databases and shot records. Who knew? Not her.

She never would, now. Elias would never be able to tell her anything about his fucked-up childhood ever again.

Breathe, tether yourself only by the barest thread, leave space for the barbed thing to shake, rattle, and roll. Claire imagined her growing grief like the logo on a DVD menu, bopping around dark edges, turning bruise colors.

Dr. Cummins led her down the hall to a bright room filled with filmy black-and-white photos stuck to light panels—copies of CAT scans. The inside of Elias’s brain. It felt like a violation to look at them. Claire had often wished she could read her reticent fiancé’s mind. Here it was.

“This is the one that… that caused it.” Cummins gestured to the scan in the center of the wall, the largest. “But as you can see, there were multiple lesions. Dating these things is an exercise in futility, mostly, but some appear to be at least eight years old, possibly older.”

He was right—the scans were lousy with white spots, places in Elias’s brain where they simply shouldn’t be, like his head was a seedy hotel mattress full of bedbugs. Even Claire, whose entire body of medical knowledge was gleaned from TV procedurals, could tell something was very wrong in Elias’s brain.

“The fact that he was living normally with this level of damage is astounding.” The doctor frowned, clearly frustrated. “There had to be some kind of condition. He should’ve been brain dead years ago.”

Claire caught the horrified look Cummins slid her, his mouth a perfect O, like he couldn’t believe that thought had slipped out of his mouth. But Claire didn’t call him on it, even though she really should; she didn’t say anything at all.

She stepped up closer to the scans on the wall, her hand rising to trace the thing that had killed Elias.

An aneurysm was a tiny detonation, short-circuiting the entire mass of animated meat that made you and turning it back into nothing but organic matter. The one that had turned Elias into medical waste was strangely shaped, spidering across the glowing wall.

The longer Claire looked at it, the more it looked like tentacles.

She drove home on nearly deserted roads, the radio turned down to an indistinct murmur, trying very hard not to think. It worked, mostly, until she saw the headlights.

They were behind her, too close, the kind of annoying LED that gleamed the color of Glacier Freeze Gatorade. By the time Claire registered them, she couldn’t remember how long they’d been following, but she had the feeling it’d been longer than was normal.

“It’s nothing.” Too robotic for even her to believe. “Don’t start all that again.”

All that: Thinking she was being followed. The tingling sense of a hunted thing prickling over the back of her neck. She was over it, she was medicated, she told Dr. Lark exactly what she wanted to hear so she could continue to be medicated. It’d been a problem a few years ago, before she met Elias, but it was a problem that had gone away once they got together and moved to their tastefully decorated million-dollar house in Connecticut, a fairy tale she’d never expected and still couldn’t quite believe. Still, her list of diagnoses spelled themselves out in her mind: anxiety, depression, a spicing of OCD. All helped by meds and talk therapy, even if she tried her level best not to talk much.

These headlights looked so similar to the ones she’d seen that night, the ones she’d seen that year in college, before she met Elias. Then after: the accident, the hit-and-run, standing on the side of a night road with her head too swimmy to call 911—

Claire slammed her brakes, swerved over onto the sidewalk, nearly taking out a mailbox bedecked in plastic flowers. Her wheels skidded, loud in the midnight silence, and she unbuckled her seat belt and pushed open her door in one ungraceful movement, so hard it almost rebounded back and got her in the knee.

“What?!” She yelled it as she stood from the driver’s side door of the new Mercedes, fists clenched, eyes fixed on the tinted windows of the car behind her, still bathing her in that Gatorade glow. It had parked, too, which she knew logically was a very bad sign, but she was too wired to stop now. Here’s what she couldn’t adequately explain to Dr. Lark, why her avoidance tactics were a net good: When she let herself feel, she became too impulsive, and it never ended well. She’d never given herself the opportunity to learn restraint. “What the hell do you want?!”

No one got out of the car. She couldn’t see through the windows to whoever was driving, so she found herself anthropomorphizing the vehicle instead. The too-bright headlights were cruel eyes, the grille a sneering mouth. It stared at her and didn’t answer.

She was flagging fast, exhaustion weakening her knees and making her head feel like an overfilled balloon. Claire clutched the car door to hold herself up. Puddled rainwater from earlier in the day soaked steadily into her slippers. “Leave me alone,” she murmured, too low for the driver to hear, for anyone but herself to hear. “Just leave me alone, please.”

Her knees crumpled, depositing her back in the driver’s seat. Claire rested her forehead on the steering wheel, not listening for the slam of a car door or the beat of footsteps or the hiss of an opening switchblade. Not caring if those things were coming. Elias was dead, and she had no one, and her shoes were wet.

After a moment, the blue light inside the car faded away. The other car was leaving, pulling back out onto the road, streaking through the night fast and nearly silent.

She pulled the Mercedes into the garage and jumped out, pressing her thumb to the security screen to silence the beeping countdown. The last thing she needed tonight was to deal with a too-solicitous cop checking up on her, the edges of their disposition sanded down by her obvious money and obvious whiteness. They’d say one almost-nice thing, and she would cry.

But when she stepped inside the house and divested herself of her wet shoes, she couldn’t make herself walk any farther than the kitchen right off the garage door, couldn’t even make it to the chairs at the farmhouse table. She slumped against the wall instead, with a long, ragged sigh.

The last conversation they’d had was an argument. Because of course it was. Their last conversation was also two days ago, because that’s how it went with Elias—if he got angry, he just ignored you. The few times he had deviated from this pattern had made Claire prefer being ignored.

Anyway, two days ago had been their fifth anniversary. They’d gone all out—five-star restaurant where Elias knew the chef and got a private table. Wine that probably cost four figures. He’d picked out her dress, and they’d made love—not fucked, not that time, it was different—before they even left the house, because he said she was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen. Good lovemaking, because whatever you called it, it was always good. And even after five years, it still surprised her that someone who looked like Elias Ashbury, tall and handsome and with the bluest eyes she’d ever seen, could have chosen her. Could love her.

He’d held her hand all through dinner, and she couldn’t remember anything they’d talked about. But she remembered that she was warm, warm the whole time, and felt so loved, and so safe, and everything was funny and everything made her smile.

Which was why she felt brave enough to ask about setting a date.

Here her memory clicked into 4K brilliance. Elias had still held her hand, but his went dead-fish limp. “What do you mean?”

Claire had shrugged, glanced away. She’d drunk quite a lot of that four-figure wine, and the fairy lights in the hanging foliage seemed like miniature suns. “It’s been three years since we got engaged. Seems like we should at least talk about it.”

His hold on her hand tightened. The diamond of her engagement ring had turned sideways, and the stone dug into the flesh beneath her middle knuckle. “Are you not happy?” Somehow demanding and heartbroken at the same time. “Look at everything I’ve given you, Claire, because I love you so much. You had nothing, and I picked you.” He dropped her hand, sitting back, shaking his head. “It’s about the money, right? You don’t actually love me, you just want—”

“Of course not!” She tried to grab his hand, but he pulled it away, splayed back in his chair like fucking Caesar at the gladiator rings or some shit, shaking his head some more. “Elias, it’s not about money. It’s just… you asked me to get married. I want to get married. Don’t you?”

And the hurt melted, at least a little bit. Elias didn’t take her hand again, but he did sigh, and soften. “Next year,” he said. Something in the undercurrent of his voice, some emotion she couldn’t identify. “Ask me next year.” He closed his eyes, sighed again. “I just love you too much, Claire.”

It’d been the same answer the other times she’d asked. He loved her too much to marry her. And she didn’t understand, but what did she know about love? Only what he’d shown her.

The house was quiet except for the bubbling of the fish tank in the living room. A massive one that covered a whole wall, emitting a blue glow that seeped in through the arched doorway, limned the stainless-steel appliances and marble countertops.

How the hell was she going to pay for this shit? Her freelancing made pennies. Everything was in Elias’s name. She’d have to move to a less expensive suburb, or into some closet in the city. God. God.

No reason to worry about it tonight. Not like she could do anything.

Claire wandered into the living room, where the tank and the octopus were.

She’d always called it an octopus, even though Elias told her that wasn’t quite right. It was some other kind of animal, closely related. To Claire, it looked like it was all leg. The one time she’d seen a mouth, it was circular and full of teeth. She didn’t like watching it move. Even now, she didn’t spare the tank more than a passing glance.

The passing glance was enough for her to see the envelope propped up against it.

Frowning, she reached out and snatched it away, still not wanting to get too close to the tank. When she did, she felt like the octopus—the not-octopus—watched her.

The front of the envelope was blank. She opened it.

Well. . .