Teeth in the Mist

by Dawn Kurtagich

Genres: YA Horror; YA Historical Fantasy

Synopsis

A genre-bending epic horror-fantasy, inspired by the legend of Faust, that spans generations as an ancient evil is uncovered — perfect for fans of Kendare Blake and Ransom Riggs.

Before the birth of time, a monk uncovers the Devil's Tongue and dares to speak it. The repercussions will be felt for generations....

Sixteen-year-old photography enthusiast Zoey has been fascinated by the haunted, burnt-out ruins of Medwyn Mill House for as long as she can remember - so she and her best friend, Poulton, run away from home to explore them. But are they really alone in the house? And who will know if something goes wrong?

In 1851, 17-year-old Roan arrives at the Mill House as a ward — one of three, all with something to hide from their new guardian. When Roan learns that she is connected to an ancient secret, she must escape the house before she is trapped forever.

1583. Hermione, a new young bride, accompanies her husband to the wilds of North Wales where he plans to build the largest water mill and mansion in the area. But rumors of unholy rituals lead to a tragic occurrence and she will need all her strength to defeat it.

Three women, centuries apart, drawn together by one Unholy Pact. A pact made by a man who, more than a thousand years later, may still be watching....

This haunting and captivating mystery redefines the horror and fantasy space.

Release date: June 11, 2019

Publisher: Little, Brown Books for Young Readers

Print pages: 464

Sample

The monk hastens through the catacombs, past his brethren, who watch with inquisitive, yet chaste eyes. He is feverish, exultant. After twenty years of searching, he has found it at last.

He stumbles at the entrance to his alcove, stripping off his cassock and hood until he stands bare in the shadows. It takes a moment to light the rush candles.

He studies the pigeonholes, a number of which he carved with his own hands. They are the beds in which his scrolls rest. Their tanned scent is an old friend. It is an animal scent. Thick and putrid. This is his private collection. He is searching for the one he concealed twenty years earlier. Low down in the wall, it is hidden by his worktable.

He retrieves it with reverence.

It is old.

Older than time, but strong.

This one is not like others. Made from the skin, not of beast, but of man: flesh stitched together with spell-worked thread.

He unfurls it, the unholy words sliced into the scroll like wounds, still raw, and then he bends to remove the stolen parchment from his cassock on the floor—torn from a book in the great library. He places it next to the scroll, which seems alive, humming with power.

Yes, it seems to breathe. Yes.

He sits at his workbench. His hands tremble. Twenty years… twenty long years. He has sacrificed his life, his youth, his family, and his faith, and at last the answer has come to him. He knows the symbols. He knows the words.

It is an auspicious moment.

Here it is, then. He has acquired the Devil’s Tongue.

He closes his eyes. “Dimitte me.” Let me…

And begins to chant.

The candles glimmer and dance, rage, and then die. At once, the room is black; still like no room has ever been, nor will be for many years. It is a seeping gloom, which only grows thicker.

The monk releases his breath—which would fog, could he see it—and listens.

Torturously, the rocks rumble, growing louder. A demon stretching in his lair. Stones and sands fall from cracks in the walls.

A voice older than time is in the rocks.

It is the rocks.

The words quake in his core.

WHO DARES SPEAK MY TONGUE?

The monk replies and his words are no longer human.

The little boy arrived without warning, brought in a carriage during the blackest part of the night. Out of the window and through the mists, she saw a tall man in a dark cloak cross the cobbled street, carrying a bundle into the house. Downstairs, the door opened. She heard a man’s voice murmur, and then Father’s reply.

On tiny feet, she tiptoed down the hall, listening at the top of the stairs. And then the hooded figure looked up. She could not see any face in the dark space, but the little girl knew she had been caught.

“Evelyn’s daughter,” her father said. “Her name is Roan Evelyn Eddington.”

The hood turned back to her father. “Adam and Roan Evelyn.” And then there was a laugh. The kind that was not very happy at all, and that gave the little girl a horrible, churning feeling in her stomach. “Adam and Eve! What a perfect beginning.”

The little girl crept closer, so she could see her father’s face below her through the slats of the banister. And though many have said that children do not see the things that grown men see, the little girl did see, with the wide-eyed clarity of all children, that—despite his smile—her father was very afraid.

The man in the cloak turned, and she withdrew, all the way along the corridor and back into the safety of her bed with Isabel, her doll.

Footsteps on the stairs.

The strange cloaked man came closer down the corridor; she imagined a giant shadow creeping along the halls, and she tried to lie still, afraid he would come into her room—come for her. But he entered the room beside hers, and lay down a bundle upon the bed, the springs creaking slightly under the small weight. Then the man departed, his carriage pulled by two beastly horses, disappearing into the night. The man in black was gone.

The little girl waited for the sound of the hooves to fade away, and then she crept slowly along the short corridor and into the room next door.

The little boy rolled over and looked at her, his pale eyes wide with fear. Yet, when they rested on her face, they softened.

She smiled.

The little girl would never forget the summer the little boy came, brought in at night like a whisper in the dark. It was with him that she first discovered what would be thought of, years later, as a terrible burden, but which, very soon, she would consider to be…

magic.

She is a ghost ship sailing the mud of the mountain.

She is a specter parting the shrouding mists.

She is a shadow upon a midnight river; she is the eye of the storm.

In her hand, a heavy portmanteau. She drops it every few steps to catch her breath and pull her cloak closer about her face. Even her bonnet is black. She is searching for a dwelling that she is beginning to think might not be there after all.

Though she is alone on the mountain, the solitary state being her preference, she looks around with a sense of unease. Like a trickster, the mountain is full of traps and twists, dotted with sharp slate rocks that protrude from the earth like jagged teeth, stretching skyward.

Silly, she tells herself, for one to imagine the mountain could be hungry. And yet… she can sense something considering her, and there is appetite in that regard. She bares her own teeth in defiance. Something shifts in the earth beneath her feet, and she has the peculiar sensation of someone having passed her by, suddenly. But under the moonlight, she sees how very alone she is.

She glances behind her, down the track, and can still see the moving black shape of the coach that brought her here. A trick of the mountain perhaps, but she can hear the angry hoofbeats of the horses and, she thinks, the carriage master’s mutterings—“Stupid girl. Stupid, stupid girl…” No doubt it is true. To come all this way because of a slip of paper.

She pulls it from her pocket, unfolding it gently so as not to tear it. When first she found it, clutched in the hands of her dying father, it had been crisp and new. Now it falls like lace over her glove, threatening to disintegrate with one harsh touch. She knows the words by heart.

DR. A. MAUDLEY

MILL HOUSE

MEDDWYN

GWYNEDD

WALES

IN THE EVENT OF MY DEATH, ROAN EVELYN EDDINGTON SHALL FALL UNDER THE GUARDIANSHIP OF DR. A. MAUDLEY OF MILL HOUSE UNTIL SHE HAS ACHIEVED THE AGE OF TWENTY-ONE YEARS.

MAY GOD HAVE MERCY ON HER SOUL.

And beneath: two signatures. One of them is her father’s. The other, she supposes, belongs to this stranger, Dr. Maudley. She wonders, even now, whether she was right to take the note. Right to come all this way.

But what choice did she have? Where else had she to go?

She lifts her portmanteau once more and faces upward. Step by step, she climbs. The mountain stills—attentive—and she wonders at the utter silence. No birds, no breeze, nothing but the squelch, squelch, squelch of her boots in the mud. As though the world is holding its breath.

Her focus is unbroken until she feels something pressing in, like someone suddenly standing too close. Breathing. Watching. It overwhelms her.

She drops her bag. Raises her hands as if to defend herself, but instead of blocking a blow, her fingers begin to dance, drawing symbols or words or pictures in the air. All the while she is muttering beneath her breath, fighting off the thing pressing in.

It is large. So very large.

“Not today,” she growls, her voice throaty and deep. “Back with you!”

Her fingers continue their dance, even as the presence retreats, and her skirts begin to smoke at the hem.

She stops when she feels safe once more, wondering at the strange sensation she’d had of someone turning to look at her, enormous, like the regard of a titan. After a moment, she picks up her portmanteau and continues on. A sudden energy, like the retaliation of a naughty child, sends her portmanteau flying backward. The clasps click open, scattering clothing, undergarments, ink pots, quills, and journals into the mud.

She ignores the delicates sinking into the mire, grabbing instead for the books, wiping them urgently on her skirt, heedless of the filth or the stains she is leaving behind.

“Do not haunt me, Father,” she whispers, her gloves beyond saving. “I am paying the price. I have come here as you wished.”

I am in exile, she reminds herself, staring at the barren earth, remembering the countless times her father had said, There is safety in isolation, Roan.

Get up, she tells herself. Keep walking. Do not look back.

At last, the sodden fabrics and stained books are back inside her portmanteau, pages pressed firmly together, like a lover’s kiss. She peers up from under her bonnet to examine the heavens above as a rumble of thunder stutters across the sky; the darkness deepens as the clouds blot out the full moon. Then the heavens break open and drench her.

She takes a step… another… another. She is weighed down by the skirts, by the portmanteau, by a past whose burden she cannot bear. She does not see the figure watching her from within the heather and the slate rocks and the fog.

I am in exile. Keep walking. Do not look back.

Rapley Setters glimpses her on the track, standing on the mountain like a fey creature. She does not move, except to clean mud from the books in her hands with a grim expression, as seemingly solid as the mountain itself.

He frowns.

Why would a girl be walking up the mountain? There is nothing here except for Mill House. Surely she is not going there? She cannot be one of the three Dr. Maudley is expecting?

She is too young.

She is a girl.

He watches her struggle to her feet, her ridiculously wide skirts weighed down by the mud. She stumbles, and he sees her irritation, sees her pull once, twice, three times at her luggage before it finally comes free.

Sees the determination in her posture.

The thunder complains and she looks toward the sky, gazes in his direction, yet she doesn’t see him.

Her eyes… they unsettle him.

It quickly becomes apparent to Rapley that she has set herself an impossible task, and when the rains descend, dousing the landscape in curtains of white, and Rapley sees her kick her case with a growl, it brings a rare and unexpected half smile to his lips. Wild thing, he thinks.

He stands, enjoying the familiar cold of the rain as it drenches his clothing, and walks toward her, using the mountain to camouflage his approach. As he watches, something catches her attention and she turns, then steps back, eyes wide in a suddenly pale face. A fallen slab of slate rock, like a shelf, lies not quite flat on the ground, and beneath: a dark, dry space, big enough to fit her. Does she intend to crawl below it to escape the rain?

Fey, indeed.

But no, she moves away from it. The rain waterfalls off her bonnet, curtaining her expression from him, but he knows that she is afraid. He has hunted in these mountains long enough to recognize instinctive fear.

She backs away, one step at a time, her eyes never leaving that empty space. She moves gingerly, but then all at once; with a start and an indrawn breath, she turns and clambers up the mountain, her portmanteau forgotten. But where she has no doubt expected to find sheets of rain tumbling down upon the landscape, she finds instead: him.

Her cry echoes through the rocks and through Rapley’s skin; she might have fallen if not for his two strong hands, which clamp down around her upper arms like claws. Surprised to find a woman’s arms beneath his palms, he lets go, pushes her away. Too hard. She stumbles, falls, landing in her wide skirts.

She looks up at him and brings her hands to touch the places his have just been, the fabric of her jacket wrinkling beneath her small fingers. Her teeth are bared like a wolf’s.

Yet despite that—or because of it—she is… striking. Too-pale skin, too-dark hair. Too-dark eyes. He does not look into them. Full, pink lips, now pulled back to expose too-white teeth.

I’m sorry. The words linger in his mouth but he does not speak them. She is small. Birdlike. But vicious too, he thinks.

“Who are you?” she demands, and he struggles to meet her gaze.

“Who are you?” he returns, his voice curt.

She gets to her feet, so covered in mud that he cannot see where the mountain ends and she begins. His voice is gruff—more so than he intends. When was the last time he spoke?

“Answer,” he snaps.

“I’m—”

“What are you doing here?”

“My name is Roan Eddington—”

“Where are you going?”

“Mill House!” Her cheeks flush, like rose water dripped into cream. She is not embarrassed or afraid, however. He can see that she is enraged. This relieves and calms him.

Coming to Devil’s Peak as well. So. She is one of the three. “Do you mean the old mill?”

“You know it.”

“Yes. And I know Dr.—”

“Maudley.”

“Yes.”

She points to her portmanteau. “Then kindly show me the way.”

“Are you always so direct?” he asks through gritted teeth.

“I expect I’m as direct as you are rude.”

They stare at each other for an awkward moment, him searching—searching for the reason she should unsettle him so. At last, he strides over, hauls her portmanteau up beneath one arm, amused at her restrained anger, and sets off up the mountain at a stiff pace. This is no place for the likes of her.

He did not expect a girl. A highborn girl, at that.

“It’s dark,” he says, turning back when she doesn’t follow. “The mountain is not kind in darkness.”

If he were a different sort of man, he would offer his coat, if he had one. He would ask, Are you all right, miss?

Instead, he turns and walks on, carrying her load beneath his arm. He is not that man. Never was, and never will be. He frowns as a feeling of quiet discontent runs through his body, until he finally realizes what it is that bothers him so about the girl.

Her eyes.

They have no walls.

Mill House is a megalith of slate and gneiss, blackened with age. Roan stares up, noting how it disappears into the raging sky, though part of the house vanishes into the mountain, melting one into the other like some kind of awful chimera. The young man had dropped her portmanteau at the foot of a door that looked like a servants’ hatch, and disappeared back into the mountain without a word. “Off with you, then!” she had called. “Cretin.”

So. This is now to be her home. This is where her father had wished her to go. Safety in isolation. Roan scoffs at that. Certainly she will be isolated here. But why? And why this man, this doctor, whom she has never met nor heard her father speak of? She stiffens at the idea that Dr. Maudley may know more about her than she knows of him. And worse: that he knows more about her than she does of herself. The door, warped by long years of expansion and contraction, stands like a sentry before her. And in such a large house, she doubts anyone will hear her. Still, she raises her gloved hand and knocks. Nothing for a long time, so she knocks again, thinking she might have to spend the night out on the mountain, or else resort to breaking in through one of the windows. She pulls at her skirt-smothered crinoline and looks up. Letting her guard slip with a momentary but intense flash of anger, she kicks the door. It rattles on its hinges.

The door opens only a crack, and with speed. A woman with a severe, hardened face and gray hair beneath a cotton cap glares at her.

She spits out a sentence that Roan cannot understand, and when she simply stares, dripping beneath her bonnet and muddied up to her traveling cloak, the woman snaps, “What hour for calling is this?” in a churlish accent.

Roan bends to pick up her portmanteau but it slips from her frozen fingers, clattering onto the stone tiles.

“Well, come in,” the woman barks, “unless you want to drown where you stand.” She strides back into the house, leaving Roan to haul up her bag and follow. They are in a pantry, Roan sees, and beyond, a large kitchen looms dark and still.

“An unsociable hour,” mutters the woman, stalking over to a table and picking up a goblet, polishing it with a rag.

“It could not be helped.” Roan raises her chin, noting the steaming pie on the small table. “And it would appear you were awake.”

The woman raises her brows. “I’ve heard stranger things in my day. How you found a coach to bring you out at this time, I shall never know—nor want to,” she adds stiffly. She places the goblet beside several others and then grabs a brush and comes at Roan’s portmanteau like it is a creature for killing.

“Which one are you?” she asks briskly, kneeling down to scrub the mud from the bag.

Roan freezes. “Do you mean to say there are others?” She thought her father had wished her away from society, and that her arrival would be a surprise. She had told no one where she was going, nor had she sent advance warning. There had been no time. A chill of unease prickles at her neck.

The woman smirks. “Hark! She thinks she has sole claim to the Master’s kindness.”

Roan says nothing. Instead, she removes her coat and holds it out.

Knees cracking and with the aid of her hands, the servant gets back on her feet and takes the cloak. “I am the Master’s housekeeper here at Pant Tywyll.”

“I thought it was Mill House.”

The woman’s lip curls. “That is the English name. You may call me Mrs. Goode.”

Roan nods. “I am the new ward of Dr. Maudley.” It is the truth, yet a gamble. Should Dr. Maudley refuse her… The letter in her pocket feels suddenly heavy, burning with heat. “You may call me Miss Eddington.”

Mrs. Goode considers her for a moment with rheumy eyes and then inspects the cloak, clucking her tongue. “Drewgi,” she mutters. “I’ll have this cleaned and sent to you in the morning.” Her lip curls again. “Perhaps by the afternoon. You’re in mourning,” she adds, noticing Roan’s heavy black dress.

Roan makes no reply.

“Well, you have the complexion for it!”

Roan stares. Still no reply. Her fingers are itching.

break the neck easy as a chicken’s

Roan starts, spinning to look behind her. “What was that?”

“What was what?”

“I thought I heard someone.”

“At this hour? Everyone is abed.” Again, the tone of disapproval.

Roan shakes her head. “It must have been the rain.”

Mrs. Goode turns and, slowly, taking her time, walks over to the fireplace where she hangs the cloak and proceeds meticulously to straighten every wrinkle, every fold, every pleat.

crunch down so easy now

Roan spins. “There. Again. Did you not hear it?”

Mrs. Goode straightens. “I am not so old that my hearing is going, Miss Eddington. I hear nothing but the usual. Rain and rain and more ungodly rain.”

Roan shuts her eyes once Mrs. Goode’s gaze is diverted, the old woman bending low to fuss over a wicker basket tucked beneath the table. Roan slips off a glove and rubs her forehead. She clenches her hand against her brow, fingernails in the bed of her hand, cutting sharply. The pain is clarifying. She is weary from travel. That is all.

Roan swallows, slips her glove back on, and looks about the room. She notices a wall lined with bells, each one labeled with a brass placard: MASTER ROOM, STUDY, DINING HALL, BLUE ROOM, RED ROOM, YELLOW ROOM, and more. One in particular catches her attention: LIBRARY. The first good thing about Mill House she has seen thus far.

Mrs. Goode stands and brushes down her skirts. “Now, if you’ll follow me, I’ll take you to your chamber. Andrew will bring up the trunk once he’s in.”

“My chamber?”

Mrs. Goode narrows her eyes. “Did you expect to sleep in the kitchen?”

Roan shakes her head, then follows Mrs. Goode up a narrow flight of steps that hugs the walls. The house is a labyrinth of stairs, carven-oak panels and doors, and stained-glass windows, of tapestries, curios, crystals, masks, weapons, and giant Greek amphorae. Roan doubts she will be able to recall the way back in the morning.

At last, they reach what seems to be the main entrance hall. A large set of doors stand to the left. At any other hour, she would have been brought to this, the front of the house, no doubt. Unless the Mountain Man was simply too fond of games. The floors seem to be made from the same slate that peppers the mountainside, curved into squares and arranged with white marble in a chessboard style. Carven oak glares down from high walls, the burning sconces projecting a lattice of shadows.

They climb a grand stairway, likely the main set, to the second floor, then turn left to cross a landing. A long, dark corridor, lit only by Mrs. Goode’s candelabra, leers away from them, a yawning throat. Mrs. Goode produces a large ring of keys. They jangle like a death knell. At last, a narrow set of double doors is opened and Mrs. Goode stands back, lips pursed.

Roan recalls the placard on the kitchen wall. BLUE ROOM.

Every fold of fabric, every swish of material, every picture frame and every drawer handle—is a pale sky blue, or a variation on the same. The bed is a puffy blue monstrosity, while the walls are all bluebells and monkshood.

Roan’s throat closes. No.

a swish of blue…

a scream

Roan hears the scream, almost not there, but she hears it. Yet Mrs. Goode’s mouth is firmly fixed, as tight and unyielding as her corset.

The old woman inclines her head. “Good evening.”

“I will not stay here.”

Mrs. Goode gifts her with another of her cold smiles. “It is not, perhaps, as fine a room as those to which you are accustomed. This is a country manor.” She pauses. “It will grow on you.”

Both women are shocked when Roan grabs Mrs. Goode’s sleeve. She lets go almost immediately, but she has Mrs. Goode’s attention. “No—I… I cannot stay in this room.” She steps back. “Is there nowhere… smaller?”

Mrs. Goode’s eyelids crinkle like old paper. “Smaller?”

“Yes.”

Another smirk. “The Master has specifically instructed that you be assigned the Blue Room of the West Wing. There are to be no changes.”

“Dr. Maudley assigned this room to me? Are you certain?”

So. He was expecting her. Had Father written? Had he… known what would happen?

Mrs. Goode pauses overlong, then hands Roan an empty lantern and a bare candle from the candelabra, smiles, and pulls the doors closed as she says, “Good evening, Miss Eddington.”

Roan waits for Mrs. Goode’s footsteps to fade, and then flees the room, shutting the doors firmly behind her. Heart thumping in her throat, she backs away from the terrible blue as she might from a lion and glances down the corridor, raising her candle high. There is one more door, hidden in the depths of the gloom. Placing the candle in the safety of the lantern, she heads for the dark, bringing the meager light along with her. The shadows withdraw reluctantly.

At the door—for it is a single, unadorned thing–she clasps the handle, hoping it will yield. It does, and she steps inside, closing it quickly behind.

Do not let this one be blue…

The lantern reveals little about the space, except that it is considerably smaller than the Blue Room and most definitely not blue. The lantern’s grate casts splashes of dim light upon the stygian walls, cage-like. It is an otherworldly forest, the walls a dark green. She can make out, just barely, dark, still forms around her. Unidentifiable furniture.

She licks her lips.

Swallows.

She glances here, there—the unsettling stillness of the objects regarding her like silent judges. Like monsters. Waiting.

hello

Roan breathes harder while the rain hammers the window across from her, and a blinding flash of lightning momentarily reveals the basic layout of the room. A narrow bed on either side of a small window. A window seat, a desk, and a large wardrobe.

The walls. Not green. Black.

The shadows sit thickly beyond her scant pool of light and she flinches when thunder rolls hard over the mountain. Shivering, she tries not to panic. But the emptiness of th. . .