I have burned her journals. I have sealed the basement. But the house remembers. It always remembers. If you are reading this, you have already begun the work of restoration. Finish it. Every board you replace, every wall you repair, you are strengthening the lock. But beware—the house does not want to be locked. It will try to change you. It will try to make you forget why you came.
Silas believes the house will open a door to something he calls the "True World"—a place of pure potential, where thought becomes matter and matter becomes thought. The Order believes that if they can open the door and step through, they will become like gods. brooke beretta
October 31, 1892
The man who had called himself Julian Cross smiled. It was the same smile Brooke had seen on the carved faces, too wide and full of too many teeth. "Clever girl. But if the house is dead, then I'm free. Truly free. And I've had a hundred years to think about what I want to do." I have burned her journals
I have done something terrible. To stop Silas, I used the house against him. I reversed the geometry—turned the key the other way. The door opened, but not where they expected. It opened inside them. They are still here, all twelve of them and Blackwood and my husband, but they are not alive. They are part of the house now. The faces on the banister? Those are the servants. The pattern in the parquet floor? That is Blackwood's spine. It always remembers
She went to the basement. She opened the book again. And she began to read. The restoration of the Ashworth House took eleven months. When Brooke emerged in October of the following year, thin as a rail and white-haired at thirty-three, the house behind her was no longer a Victorian Gothic nightmare. It was a ruin—not the picturesque kind, but a true ruin, collapsed in on itself like a dying star. The obsidian walls of the basement had crumbled to dust. The faces on the banister had vanished, their wood rotten and hollow. The parquet floor was splinters.