To escape the dangers of wartime London, Millie has been sent away to Wickford Hall, but what lurks there is far more sinister than anything war might bring.
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THERE'S SOMETHING WICKED STALKING WICKFORD HALL...
As war rages on, Mildred Cunningham...
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When Millie awoke, she was shoved into the corner of her dorm room, bundled in the blanket pulled from her bed. The dull rising light did little to soothe her nerves; the calm silence of the early morning felt discordant with what she now knew. She unwound herself, taking in the chaos that surrounded her. Her clothes and books were strewn about the room. Some had been half-stuffed into her satchel, and the rest tossed aside. The chair from her writing desk had been pushed to the door, braced under the handle to keep it from being opened.
Last night, when she had returned from her nighttime excursion, she had been deep in panic. She had proceeded to tear the room apart, haphazardly packing for an imminent escape.
After finding the stack of her letters in the office—ones she had written and thought had been sent out—she knew she could no longer stay at Wickford.
Something was wrong here. Very wrong.
Thinking back on it, the lack of response from her parents and sister now made sense. How could they respond to letters they never got?
If they weren't sending her letters...
Then how had she received that letter from her sister?
That very letter was still lying unfolded on the writing table, left there from last night when Millie had tried to examine it in the weak moonlight. Millie went to it again and picked it up to inspect it. From what she could tell, it looked genuine. The writing was just as she remembered her sister's, though it wasn't as though she had anything to compare it.
Was it really from her sister?
Or was it some kind of expert copy?
Millie turned the letter over, searching for any sign of fakery. She may not be able to tell if it was real, but she also couldn't fathom why anyone would go through the effort of faking a letter from her sister.
All she knew was that she could no longer trust anything at Wickford.
She needed to get out of this damned place.
She had abandoned her escape last night, knowing it was too risky to travel to the village by herself, in the dark and the cold. First, she to come up with a better plan—
A high-pitched scream shattered the quiet.
A flock of birds to scattered into the sky, just outside her window. Millie dropped the letter, and leaned across the desk, looking out to see what was the matter. The scream had come from the garden below. The frost and grime that clung to the glass made it hard to see, but Miller could make out a servant girl on the gravel garden path. She had fallen back and was crawling away from something, a strange, mangled mass that Millie couldn't quite make sense of.
The servant, a girl about her sister's age, screamed again as she scrambled up from the gravel and fled back towards the house.
"She's dead!" she cried as she disappeared from view.
