My dear Clemmy,
Your letter arrived this morning, and I read it standing in the doorway between the kitchen and the sitting room because I didn’t want to be any closer to the wardrobe than necessary. I don’t know if that was instinct or cowardice, but either way, the Cottage approved — the kettle started boiling on its own, which I’m choosing to interpret as encouragement.
You said the seam is a threshold. I haven’t touched it. I won’t. But it’s growing, Clem. Not dramatically — not enough for anyone else to notice — but I can feel it widening the way you feel a splinter working its way toward the surface. A quiet insistence.
And something else happened.
Rowan stopped by yesterday. Not for the workbench this time. Not even pretending. He just stood in the doorway, smelling like cedar and cold air, and asked if everything was “alright in here.” Which, coming from Rowan, is practically a full-blown interrogation.
I told him I was fine. He didn’t believe me.
His eyes kept drifting toward the wardrobe, even though he never actually looked at it. It was like he was tracking something in his peripheral vision — something he didn’t want to acknowledge directly. You know how he is: steady as a tree trunk until something spooks him, and then he goes very still, like prey deciding whether to bolt.
He wouldn’t step past the threshold of the room.
He said the Cottage felt “off.” That the air tasted metallic. That the grain in the wardrobe looked “wrong.” And then he stopped talking entirely, which is how I knew he was unsettled. Rowan doesn’t waste words, but he doesn’t swallow them either — not unless something is pressing on him.
Before he left, he said, “Don’t open anything that isn’t yours.”
Clem, he’s never said anything like that to me. Not in all the years I’ve known him. And the way he said it — low, almost reverent — made my stomach drop.
I didn’t tell him about the dream. Or the pulse. Or the sawdust. I couldn’t. Not because I don’t trust him, but because I don’t want whatever this is to reach for him too. He’s wary enough already, and the Cottage seems to like him in that begrudging, territorial way she reserves for people who might matter.
As for me… I’m trying to stay calm. Truly. But the seam is changing. The symbols from my dream — the root-like ones — I swear I saw the faintest suggestion of one in the grain this afternoon. Like a shadow of a shape. Like something remembering itself.
I can feel the magic pressing closer, like it’s testing the edges of the room, the Cottage and yes, even me.
Something is gathering, Clem. And I don’t think it’s waiting much longer.
Write soon. Please.
With a cat who refuses to leave my side and a wardrobe that refuses to be ignored, Your bosom friend across the Pond – Marigold
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