The Children

In a flashback to 2004, a crew from Vogue arrives at the Farmhouse to conduct an elaborate, Elizabethan-themed photoshoot of the Sharpe family. Edith is sullen and uncooperative, chain-smoking despite the makeup artist’s protests. Llewellyn is withdrawn, and Ennis radiates disgust, having been bribed for his participation. Guin observes the stylists and the expensive dresses, feeling a sense of artifice. Edith is transformed into a beautiful but villainous-looking figure, and Guin can’t look away. After Edith’s makeup is done, the artist turns to Guin.

The photoshoot is difficult due to the family’s mood and the oppressive heat. As the sun sets, however, the light softens, and the family members momentarily relax. In that instant, the photographer captures the final, famously serene portrait of the four of them together.

After the Vogue crew hastily departs, a party begins but quickly falters. Ennis avoids Guin by planting himself among the guests, refusing to meet her eyes even as she tries to get his attention. Edith has a public crisis in the kitchen, screaming that she has lost her ability to write and there will be no sixth book. As soon as Edith begins sobbing, Ennis immediately leaves the woman he’s dancing with and goes to Guin’s side. Jonathan comes charging in and tries to manage the situation by playing loud music and claiming that Edith has these crises with every book. The party dies, and the guests leave or find rooms to sleep in.

Guin finds Ennis in his room. She sees the emotional armor he has built to protect himself. Frightened by the day’s events, she tells him that she feels like everything is about to change. He promises to stay awake and keep watch over her while she sleeps.

In the present, Guin prepares for Ennis’s art show. Having ended her engagement and alienated her publisher, she feels like her old life has been swept away. She receives a text from Fern, her contact at Hart & Crane, who has quit and wants to work with her, revealing that her memoir is selling well.

That evening, Guin arrives at the factory in Brooklyn to find a large, reverent crowd waiting in the street. The building’s upper windows have been filled in with concrete. When the factory doors open, the crowd moves inside in an orderly, solemn procession. Feeling a mix of terror and anticipation, Guin follows them.

Continuing the 2004 flashback, Ennis wakes Guin and urges her to get up and run. His left hand is wrapped in a bloody towel. When he opens his bedroom door, Guin sees that the hallway is filled with a swarm of bees. They force their way through the storm of insects, which hit them but don’t sting. Guin escapes through the back door and watches as the bees pursuing her drop dead in the grass, as if hitting an invisible wall.

Alone outside, Guin sees a fire start in the kitchen. Ennis joins her; upon seeing his bloody, wrapped hand, a flash of Edith’s missing finger crosses her mind. She screams, understanding that Ennis set the fire. As the house is consumed by flames that turn an unnatural blue, they flee into the woods.

Still in 2004, Ennis leads Guin to their childhood playhouse in the woods, where he has stashed sleeping bags and supplies, revealing that his plan was premeditated. He tells her that the Ninth City books are “poison” and that he started the fire to “fix it,” though his plan went wrong, and he never meant to hurt anyone. He makes her promise to stop writing stories. Guin then sees that his left ring finger is missing and that he’s wearing a new golden charm necklace shaped like a curled finger. He refers to Mother, an entity he had tried to convince of something. Their conversation is interrupted by a couple who stumble upon the playhouse. Ennis steps out with a shotgun and fires it. The man goes for help while the woman stays behind to comfort Ennis. His last words before being taken away are “Help my sister” (342). Guin will not hear his voice again for over 20 years.

Back in the present, Guin enters the factory for Ennis’s show, Mother. The doors lock behind the crowd, sealing them inside. The vast, dimly lit space is staffed by men in masks who look exactly like her father, Llewellyn, and serve champagne. A low, continuous sound of buzzing bees plays.

The walls are covered with enormous paintings that transform the woods and memories of their childhood into a fairy-tale landscape, blending real events with the stories that Guin invented as a child. Some depict things that Ennis shouldn’t know, including the bear that Guin encountered alone in the woods. As Guin looks at the art, she notices that the crowd has become disinhibited and hedonistic, as if drugged by the champagne. Feeling a rising panic, Guin escapes through a stairwell door held open by one of the Llewellyn lookalikes, who directs her to find her brother.

Guin climbs to the factory’s second floor and enters a dark, cavernous space. Ghost lights slowly illuminate a massive installation: a life-sized recreation of the Dreamers’ Graveyard from Edith’s final book. Guin walks through a nightmarish landscape of reconstructed buildings from her and Ennis’s past.

She sees Art Church, their father’s studio, filled with silent televisions playing Llewellyn’s old acting roles. She passes a replica of the narrow revival theater in Vermont where she and Ennis spent so many hours, as well as the studio of Anne, the artist who mentored them. Finally, she runs through the graveyard of dead dreams and arrives at a door: a perfect replica of the entrance to Edith’s third-floor writing room at the Farmhouse.

Guin enters the replica of Edith’s writing room. The desk is an exact copy, covered in carvings of miniature hands. Through the windows, a hyper-realistic projection displays a panoramic view of the fictional Ninth City.

Guin discovers that the desk drawers are a complex puzzle box. To open each locked drawer, she must use a magical item from the previous one, all of which are objects from the Ninth City books: fairy dust, an undertrain pass, and a tiny glass bell. In the final drawer, she finds Ennis’s necklace charm, a golden, curled-up finger. The charm is a key, opening an invisible door in the wall.

Guin recalls 12 years prior when she returned to Vermont after living abroad. She walked to the site of the Farmhouse, only to find it completely gone. In its place was a field of flowers growing in the exact shape of the house’s foundation. The orchard and Art Church were also gone. She stood at the edge of the woods, wanting to search for Ennis but frozen by the strangeness of the scene.

Guin steps through the door she unlocked in the installation. It opens into what appear to be the same woods from her past, and she can sense Ennis waiting for her.

Guin walks through a magical forest that is a perfect fusion of the real Vermont woods of her childhood and the fictional details from the private stories she wrote for Ennis. She follows a map taken from a “map tree” and arrives at a clearing containing the idealized fairy-tale cottage that she and Ennis had always dreamed of building.

Ennis opens the door. He’s older but recognizable. After a hesitant reunion inside the cottage, he confirms that she’s in a special place he has created. He then begins to tell her a story to explain everything.

Ennis tells Guin the origin story of the Farmhouse. A century ago, a “cunning woman” who lived in a cottage on the land—already a woodworker by trade—used a magical wish to summon a supernatural entity she called “Mother.” Mother offered her anything she wanted in exchange for “material”—men who possessed a creative “light.” The woman would lure these men to the cottage, where Mother would consume their creative essence. This, Ennis explains, is how their father, Llewellyn, lost his own creative spark.

Ennis continues his story. The cunning woman became the mistress of Edith’s great-grandfather, who tore down the cottage and built the Farmhouse for her. Fearing that Mother would leave her when she was dying, the woman trapped the entity within the house’s walls. Mother remained there for decades until Edith and Llewellyn arrived.

Ennis reveals that he discovered a secret door to Mother’s realm behind the wall in Edith’s writing room, which he opened using Edith’s finger-key necklace. Inside, Mother appeared to him as a perfectly loving version of Edith and explained that he, like his mother, had a “void” that allowed him to access her power. To belong to her fully, he had to sacrifice a piece of himself and make his own key, taking Edith’s place as Mother’s child in order to protect Guin, whom Mother desperately wanted.

Ennis explains that he realized Mother would never stop trying to claim Guin. Believing that Mother’s power was tied to the house, he set the fire to destroy her prison, hoping to save his sister. However, burning the house inadvertently freed Mother, who is now bound directly to Ennis.

He tells Guin that he now provides Mother with “tithes” instead of whole sacrifices by creating art installations that act as doors, allowing Mother to take small bits of creative hunger from audience members. He offers Guin a chance to join him in this world, where they can be together, safe, and free to be artists without hiding. They can make a new deal with Mother that will satisfy her.

Exhausted by her life of hiding and pretense, Guin agrees. Ennis leads her to meet Mother, who appears as the loving, idealized Edith she always wanted. Guin offers her left hand, and Mother painlessly takes what she needs: a finger. The three of them then enter Mother’s house together.

Sometime later, Guin and Ennis, now a formidable and unnerving duo, attend a meeting at their publisher, Hart & Crane. They are co-authoring the sixth book in the Ninth City series, with Guin writing and Ennis illustrating. Joined by their new publicist, Fern, they systematically take control of the meeting. They have the publisher’s publicist, Regina, removed, and they silence the condescending head of the publishing house, Benjamin Crane. They are unapologetic and commanding, making it clear that they’re in charge of their family’s legacy.

An article from Entertainment Weekly announces the forthcoming final volume of the Ninth City series, The Architect’s Key, written by Guin Sharpe and illustrated by Ennis Sharpe. The first 10,000 copies will include a unique, signed sketch from Ennis. In a statement, Guin claims that the book is a gift to the fans who have been part of their lives for so long.

An excerpt from the book reveals a new plot: Guinevere, who has lost her memory, is rescued from a tower by Ennis. He tells her that the ruler of the Ninth City, the Architect, is from Earth and that they’re going to send the Architect home and claim the city for themselves.