Dark Terrors 3: The Gollancz Book of Horror

Estate CAITLÍN R. KIERNAN

Rough and hungry boy, barely nineteen, that first time Silas Desvernine saw the Storm King, laid bright young eyes to raw granite and green rash rising up and up above the river and then lost again in the Hudson morning mist. The craggy skull of the world, he thought, scalped by some Red Indian god and left to bleed, grain by mica grain, and he leaned out past the uncertain rails of the ferryboat’s stern, frothy wakes-lash on the dark water and no reflection there. He squinted and there was the railroad’s iron scar winding around its base, cross-tie stitches and already the fog was swallowing the mountain, the A.F. Beach’s restless sidewheel carrying him away, upriver, deeper into the Highlands, towards Newburgh and work in Albany and he opens his leathery old eyelids and it’s deadest winter 1941, not that wet May morning in 1889. Old, old man, parchment and twigs, instead of that boy and he’s been nodding off again, drifted away and her voice has brought him back. Her voice across the decades, and he wipes away a stringy bit of drool at the corner of his mouth.

‘Were you dreaming again?’ she asks, soft, velvet tongue from her corner and he blinks, stares up into the emptycold light spilling down through the high windows, stingy, narrow slits in the stone of the long mansard roof. And ‘No,’ he mumbles, No, knows damn well there’s no point to the lie, no hiding himself from her, but at least he’s made the effort.

‘Yes. You were,’ she says, Jesus that voice that’s never a moment older than the first time and the words squeeze his tired heart. ‘You were dreaming about Storm King, the first time you saw the mountain, the first morning…’

‘Please,’ no strength in him, begging and she stops, all he knows of mercy. He wishes the sun were warm on his face, warm where it falls in weaktea pools across the clutter of his gallery. Most of his collection here, the better part, gathered around him like the years and the creases in his stubbled face. Dying man’s pride, dead-man-to-be obsession, possessions, these things he spent a life gathering, stolen or secreted but made his own so they could be no one else’s. The things sentenced to float out his little for ever in murky formalin tombs, specimen jars and stoppered bottles, a thousand milky eyes staring nowhere. Glass eyes in taxidermied skulls, bodies stuffed with sawdust; wings and legs spread wide and pinned inside museum cases. Old bones yellowed and wired together in shabby mockeries of life, older bones gone to silica and varnished, shellacked, fossilized. Plaster and imagination where something might have been lost. Here, the teeth of leviathans, there, the claws of a behemoth; a piece of something fleshy that once fell from the sky over Missouri and kept inside a bell jar. Toads from stones found a mile underground. Sarcophagi and defiled Egyptian nobility ravelling inside, crumbling like him, and a chunk of amber as big as an orange and the carbonized hummingbird trapped inside fifty million years.

A narwhal’s ivory tooth bought for half a fortune and he once believed with the unflinching faith of martyrs that it was a unicorn’s horn. Precious bit of scaly hide from the Great Sea Serpent, harpooned off Malta in 1807, they said and never mind that he knew it was never anything but the peeling belly of a crocodile.

‘There’s not much more,’ she says, ‘A day, perhaps,’ and even her urgency, her fear, is patient, wetnurse gentle, but Silas Desvernine closes his eyes again, prays he can slip back, fifty-two trips wrong way round the sun and when he opens them he’ll be standing on the deck of the ferry, the damp and chill no match for his young wonder, his anticipation and a strong body and the river rolling slow and deep underneath his feet.

‘No,’ she says, ‘I’m still here, Silas.’

‘I know that,’ he says and the December wind makes a hard sound around the edges of this rich man’s house.

After the War, his father had run, run from defeat and reprisal and grief, from a wasted Confederacy. World broken and there would be no resurrection, no reconstruction. Captain Eustace Desvernine, who’d marched home in ‘65 to the shallow graves of wife and child, graves scooped from the red Georgia clay with free black hands. And so he faded into the arms of the enemy, trailing behind him the shreds of a life gone to ash and smoke, gone to lead and worms, hiding himself in the gaslight squalor and cobbled industrial sprawl of Manhattan; the first skyscrapers rose around him, and the Union licked its wounds and forgot its dead.

Another marriage, strong Galway girl who gave him another son, Silas Josiah; the last dregs of his fortune into a ferry, the Alexander Hamilton, sturdy name that meant nothing to him but he’d seen it painted on the side of a tall building. So, the Captain (as Silas would always remember him, the Captain in shoddy cap and shoddier coat on wide shoulders) carried men and freight from Weehawken to the foot of West 42nd Street. Later, another boat, whitewashed sidewheeler, double-ender he’d named the A.F. Beach and the year that Robert E. Lee died, the Captain began running the long route between New York and Albany.

And one night, when Silas was still eighteen years old, almost a man himself and strong, he stood beside his father in the wheelhouse of the A.F. Beach. The Captain’s face older by the unsteady lamp as they slipped past the lights of West Point on their way downriver. The Captain taking out his old revolving pistol, Confederate-issue Colt, dullshine tarnish and his callused thumb cocking the hammer back while Silas watched, watched the big muzzle pressed against the Captain’s left temple. Woman’s name across his father’s lips then, unfamiliar ‘Carrie’ burned for ever into Silas’ brain like the flash, the echo of the gunshot trapped between the high cliffs, slipping away into the river night and pressed for ever behind his eyes.

‘Are you sure that’s the way it happened?’ she asked him once, when he told her. Years and years ago, not so long after he brought her to his castle on Pollepel Island and she still wore the wings, then, and her eyes still shone new dollar silver from between the narrow bars of her cage.

‘I was young,’ he said, ‘Very young,’ and she sighed, short and matter-of-fact sigh that said something but he wasn’t certain what.

Whole minutes later, ‘Who was she?’ and him already turned away, unpacking a crate just arrived from Kathmandu; ‘What?’ he asked, but already remembering, the meaning of her question and the answer, absently picking a stray bit of excelsior from in his beard and watching those eyes watching him.

‘Carrie,’ she said. ‘Who was Carrie?’

‘Oh,’ and ‘I never found out,’ he lied, ‘I never tried,’ no reason, but already he felt the need to guard those odd details of his confessions, scraps of truth, trifling charms. Hoarding an empty purse, when all the coins have gone to beggars’ hands.

‘Ah,’ she said and Silas looked too quickly back to the things in the crate, pilfered treasures come halfway around the world to him, and it was a long time before he felt her eyes leave him.

Pollepel Island: uneven jut of rock above water where the Hudson gets wide past the Northern Gate, Wey-Gat, the long stony throat of Martyr’s Reach, greenscab at the foot of Newburgh Bay; white oak and briar tangle, birch skin over bones of gneiss and granite. Bones of the world laid down a billion years ago and raised again in the splitting of continents, divorce of lands; birth of the Highlands in the time of terrible lizards, then scraped and sculpted raw, made this scape of bald rock and gorge during the chill and fever of ice ages. And Pollepel Island like a footnote to so much time, little scar in this big wound of a place.

Silas Desvernine already a rich man when he first came here. Already a man who had traded the Captain’s ragtag ferries for a clattering empire of steel and sweat, Desvernine Consolidated Shipyard, turning out ironclad steamers, modern ships to carry modern men across the ocean, to carry men to modern war. And Pollepel chosen for his retreat from industry, the sprawling, ordered chaos of the yard, the noise and careless humanity of Manhattan. First glimpse, an engraving, frontispiece by Mr N.P. Willis for American Scenery: tall sails and rowboat serenity, Storm King rising in the misty distance. The island recalled from his trips up and down the river and the Captain had shown him where George Washington’s soldiers sank their chevaux-de-frises, sixty-foot logs carved to spikes and tipped with iron, set into stone caissons and dropped into the river off Pollepel to pierce the hulls of British warships.

And this valley already a valley of castles, self-conscious stately, Millionaire’s Row decades before Silas’ architects began, before his masons laid the first stones, since the coming of the men of new money, the men who nailed shining locomotive track across the nation or milled steel or dug ore and with their fortunes built fashionable hiding places in the wilderness; cultivated, delusory romance of gentleman farmers in brick and marble, iron spires and garden pools. But Silas Desvernine was never a man of society or fashion, and his reasons for coming to Pollepel Island were his own.

Modest monstrosity, second-hand Gothic borrowed from his memory of something glimpsed on a business trip to Scotland, augmented with the architect’s taste for English Tudor, and the pale woman he married, Angeline, his wife, never liked the great and empty halls, the cold and damp that never deserted the rooms. The always-sound of the river and the wind, restless in the too-close trees, the boats passing in the night.

If he’d permitted it, Angeline Desvernine would have named the awful house, given a name to tame it, to bind it, make it her home, maybe, instead of whatever else it was. But No, Silas said, stern and husbandly refusal, and so no poet ostentation, no Tioranda or Oulagisket or Glenclyffe on his island, just Silas’ castle, Silas’ Castle.

His dream, and the long night on the Storm King is never precisely the same twice and never precisely the way things happened. And never anything but the truth. The dream and the truth worn thin, as vellum-soft, streampebble-smooth, these moments pressed between the weight of now and then and everything before, and still as terrible.

Younger but not young, reaching back and she takes his hand, or Angeline takes his hand, neither of them, but an encouraging squeeze for this precarious slow climb up and up, above the river, while Prof Henry Osborn talks, lectures like the man never has to catch his breath, ‘Watch your step there. A lot of loose stone about,’ and Silas feels sixty instead of forty-five.

Somewhere near the summit, he lingers, gasping, tearing water eyes and looks down and back, towards his island; a storm coming, on its way up the valley and so twilight settling in early, the day driven like dirty sheep before the thunder-heads, bruisebelly shepherds and the muddy stink of the river on the wind.

‘A shame about this weather, though, really,’ Osborn sighs. ‘On a clear day, you can see the Catskills and the Shawangunks.’

Of course, Osborn wasn’t with him that day, this day, and he knows that dimly, dim dream recollection of another history; another climb mixed in with this, the day that Osborn showed him a place where there were broken Iroquois pottery and arrowheads. Osborn, man whose father made a fortune on the Illinois Central and he’s never known anything but privilege. The rain begins, then, wet and frying noise, and Henry Osborn squints at the sky, watches it fall as the drops melt his skin away, sugar from skeleton of wrought iron and seam welds; ‘On a clear day,’ he whispers from dissolving lips, before his jaw falls, clank and coppertooth scatter, and Silas goes on up the mountain alone.

No one ever asked him the why of the collecting, except her. Enough whats and wheres and hows, from the very few who came to the island. The short years when Angeline was alive and she held her big, noisy parties, her balls for the rich from other castles down the valley, for gaudy bits of society and celebrity up from New York City or Philadelphia or Boston. Minor royalty once or twice. The curious who came for a peek inside the silent fortress on Pollepel. Long nights when she pretended this house wasn’t different, and he let her play the game, to dull the edge of an isolation already eating her alive.

Later, new visitors, after The Great War that left him more than wealthy, no counting anymore, and Angeline in her lonely grave on the western edge of the island, their son gone to Manhattan, the yard run by so many others that Silas rarely left the island. Let whatever of the world he had need of come to him, and never more than one or two at a time, men and women who came to walk his still halls and wonder at this or that oddity. All of them filled with questions, each their own cyclopedia of esoteric interrogations, lean and shadowy catechists, a hundred investigators of the past and future, the hidden corners of this life and the next. Occultists, spiritualists, those whose askings and experiments left them on the bastard edges of science or religion. They came and he traded them glimpses of half-truths for the small and inconsequential things they’d learned elsewhere. All of them single-minded and they knew, or mostly thought they knew, the why, so no point to ever asking.

That was for her, this one thing he’d brought back to Pollepel that he was afraid of and this one thing he loved beyond words or sanity. The conscious acquisition that could question the collection, the collector.

‘I have too much money,’ he said once, after the purchase of a plaster replica of Carnegie’s Diplodocus skeleton to be mounted for the foyer and she asked the sense of it and ‘It’s a way of getting rid of some of the goddamned money,’ he said.

She blinked her owlslow, owlwise blink at him, her gold and crimson eyes scoffing sadly.

‘You know the emptiness inside you, Silas. These things are a poor substitute for the things you’re missing.’ So he’d drawn the draperies on her cage and left them drawn for a week, as long as he could stand to be without the sight of her.

Nineteen eighteen, so almost three years after his son was pulled screaming from his wife’s swollen body, pulled wet and blind into the waiting, dogjawed world; helpless thing the raw colour of a burn. His heir and Silas Desvernine could hardly bear the sight of it, the squalling sound of it. Angeline almost dying in the delivery nightmare of blood and sweat, immeasurable hours of breathless pain and there would be no others, the doctor said. Named for father and grandfather’s ghost, Eustace Silas, sickly infant that grew stronger slowly, even as its mother’s health began to falter, the raising of her child left to indifferent servants; Silas seeing her less and less often, until, finally, she rarely left her room in the east wing.

And one night, late October and the first winter storm rolling down on Pollepel from the mountains, arctic Catskill breath and Silas away in the city. Intending to be back before dark, but the weather so bad and him exhausted after hours with thickheaded engineers, no patience for the train, so the night spent in the warmth and convenience of his apartment near Central Park.

Some dream or night terror and Angeline left her rooms, wandered half-awake, confused, through the sleeping house, no slippers or stockings, bare feet sneakthief soft over Turkish carpets and cold stone, looking for something or someone real. Someone to touch or talk to, someone to bring her back to this world from her clinging nightmares. Something against the storm rubbing itself across the walls and windows, savage snowpelt, wild and wanting in and her alone on the second story: the servants down below, her child and his nurse far away in another part of the house that, at that derelict hour, seemed to weave endlessly back upon itself. Halls as unfamiliar as if she’d never walked them, doors that opened on rooms she couldn’t recall. Strange paintings to watch over her, stranger sights whenever she came to a window to stand staring into the swirling silver night, bare trees and unremembered statuary or hedges. Alien gardens, and all of it so much like the dream, as empty, as hungry; lost in her husband’s house and inside herself, Angeline came at last to the mahogany doors to Silas’ gallery, wood like old blood and his cabinet beyond, and how many years since she’d come that way? But this she recognized, hingecreak and woodsqueal as she stepped across the threshold, the crude design traced into the floor there, design within designs that made her dizzy to look directly at.

‘Silas?’ and no answer but the storm outside, smothering a dead world. Her so small, so alone at the mouth of this long and cluttered room of glass and dust and careful labels, his grotesquerie, cache of hideous treasures. Everything he loved instead of her; the grey years of hating herself flashing to anger like steam, then, flashing to scalding revelation. Something in her hands, aboriginal weapon or talisman pulled from its bracket on the wall and she swung it in long and ruthless arcs, smashing, breaking, shadow become destroyer. Glass like rain, shatter puddles that sliced at the soles of her feet, splinter and crash and the sicksweet stench of formaldehyde. Angeline imagining gratitude in the blank, green eyes of a two-headed bobcat that tumbled off its pedestal and lay fiercely still, stuffed, mothgnawed, in her path.

And the wail rising up from the depths of her, soul’s waters stagnant so long become a tempest to rival the fury and thundervoice of the blizzard. Become a war-cry, dragging her in its red undertow, and when she reached the far side, the high, velvet drapes hiding some final rivalry: tearing at the cloth with her hands, pulling so hard the drapes ripped free of brass rings and slipped like shedding skin to the floor.

Iron bars and at first nothing else, gloom thick as the fog in her head, thick as jam, but nothing more. One step backwards, panting, feeling the damage to her feet, and the subtle shift of light or dark, then, all the nothing coalescing, made solid and beautiful and hateful, hurting eyes that she understood the way she understood her own captivity, her own loneliness.

And the woman with wings and shining bird eyes said her name, Angeline, said her name so it meant things she’d never suspected, some way the name held everything she was in three syllables. One long arm out to her, arm too long and thin to believe, skin like moonlight or afterbirth, fingers longer still and pointing to the door of the cage. Padlocked steel and the interlace design from the threshold again, engraved there like a warning; ‘Please,’ the woman in the cage said, ‘Please, Angeline.’

Angeline Desvernine ran, then, ran from even the possibility of this pleading thing, door slammed shut behind her, closing it away and closing away the fading illusion of her victory. Almost an hour before she found her way back to her own room, trailing pools and crusting smears of blood from her ruined feet; crawling, hands and knees, at the end. She locked her door, and by then the sound of servants awake, distant commotion, her name called again and again, but there was no comfort left after those eyes, the ragged holes they’d put in her. No way not to see them or hear that silk and thorny voice.

Most of the storm’s fury spent by dawn, by the time the maids and cooks and various manservants gave up and called for someone from the stables to take the door off its hinges.

First leadflat light in the empty room, the balcony doors standing open wide and tiny drifts of snow reaching almost to the bed. They found her hanging from the balustrade, noose from curtain cord tiebacks, snow in her tangled black hair, crimson icicles from the sliced flesh of her toes and heels. And her eyes open wide and staring sightless toward the Storm King.

‘They’re my dreams,’ he says, whispers loud, and she says ‘They’re lies,’ and he keeps his eyes on the last colourless smudges of afternoon and says low, mumbled so she won’t hear, ‘Then they’re my lies.’

This time, this dog-eared incarnation of the climb up Storm King and he’s alone, except for the thunder and lightning and rain like wet needles against exposed skin, wind that would take him in its cold fist and fling him, broken, back down to the rocks below, to the impatient, waiting river. No sign anymore of the trail he’s followed from the road, faintest path for deer or whatever else might come this way and now even that’s gone. He can see in the white spaces after the thunder, flashpowder snapshots of the mountain, trees bending and the hulk of Breakneck across the river, Storm King’s twin. Jealous Siamese thing severed by the acid Hudson, and he thinks No, somewhere deep they’re still connected, still bound safe by their granite vinculum below the water’s slash and silt.

Thunder that sounds like angels burning and he slips, catches himself, numb hands into the roots of something small that writhes, woodsy revulsion at his touch, and he’s shivering now, the mud and wet straight through his clothes. He lies so still, waiting, to fall, to drown in the gurgling runoff, until the thunder says it’s time to get moving again and he opens his eyes. And he’s standing at the summit, little clearing and the tall stone at its heart like a stake to hold the world in place. Grey megalith like things he’s seen in England or Denmark or France and in the crackling brief electric flash he can see the marks made in the stone, marks smoothed almost away by time and frost and a hundred thousand storms before. Forgotten characters traced in clean rivulets like emphasis. He would turn and run, from the place and the moment, If you had it to do over again, If you could take it back, but the roots have twisted about his wrists, greenstick pythons and for all his clever, distracting variations, there’s only this one way it can go.

She steps out of the place where the stone is, brilliant moment, thinnest sliver of an instant caught and held in forked lightning teeth; the rain that beads, rolls off her feathers, each exquisite, roughgem drop and the strange angles of her arms and legs, too many joints. The head that turns on its elegant neck and the eyes that find him, sharp face and molten eyes that will never let him go.

‘Nothing from the Pterodactyle, I shouldn’t think,’ says Professor Osborn, standing somewhere behind him, ‘though the cranium is oddly reminiscent of the Dimorphodon, isn’t it?’ and Silas Desvernine bows his head, stares down at the soggy darkness where his feet must be and waits for the leather and satin rustle of her wings, gentle loversound through the storm. The rain catches his tears and washes them away with everything else.

The funeral over and the servants busy downstairs when Silas opened the doors of his gallery; viewed the damage she’d done for the first time, knew it was mostly broken glass and little that couldn’t be put right again, but the sight hurt his chest, hurt his eyes. Heart already so broken and eyes already so raw but new pain anyway. No bottom to this pain, and he bent over and picked up his dodo, retrieved it from a bed of diamond shards and Silas brushed the glass from its dusty beak and rump feathers. Set it back on the high shelf between passenger pigeons and three Carolina parakeets. Another step closer to her cage, the drapes still pulled open, and his shoes crunched. Her, crouched in the shadows, wings wrapped tight about her like a cocoon, living shield against him, and he said, ‘What did you do to her, Tisiphone?’ And surprised at how calm his voice could be, how empty of everything locked inside him and clawing to get out.

The wings shivered, cringed and folded back; ‘That’s not my name,’ she said.

‘What did you do to her, Megaera?’

‘Shut up,’ words spit at the wall where her face was still hidden, at him, ‘You know that I’m not one of the three, you’ve known that all along.’

‘She couldn’t have hurt you, even if she’d wanted to,’ he said, hearing her words but as close as he would ever come to being able to ignore them: her weak, and his grief too wide to cross even for her voice. ‘Did you think she could hurt you?’ he said.

‘No,’ and shaking her head now, forehead bang and smack against brick and he could see the sticky, black smear she left on the wall.

‘Then you did it to get back at me. Is that it? You thought to hurt me by hurting her.’

‘No,’ she said and that was the only time he ever saw her cry, if it was crying, the dim phosphorescence leaking from the corners of her eyes. ‘No, no...’

‘But you know she’s dead, don’t you?’ and ‘Yes,’ she said, small yes too quick and it made him want to wring her white throat, lock his strong hands around her neck and twist until he was rewarded with the pop and cartilage grind of ruined vertebrae. Squeeze until her tongue hung useless from her lipless mouth.

‘She never hurt anyone, Alecto,’ he hissed and she turned around, snake-sudden movement and he took a step away from the bars despite himself.

‘I asked her to help me,’ and she was screaming now, perfect, crystal teeth bared. ‘I asked her to free me,’ and her hurt and fury swept over him, blast furnace heat rushing away from her, and faint smell of nutmeg and decay left in the air around his head.

‘I asked her to unlock the fucking cage, Silas!’ and the wings slipped from off her back and lay bloody and very still on the unclean metal and hay-strewn floor of the cage.

In the simplest sense, these things, at least, are true: that during the last week of June 1916, Silas Desvernine hired workmen from Haverstraw to excavate a large stone from a spot near the summit of Storm King, and that during this excavation several men died or fell seriously ill, each under circumstances that only seemed unusual if considered in connection with one another. When the foreman resigned (monkeyed little Scotsman with a face like ripe cranberries), Silas hired a second crew and in July the stone was carried down and away from the mountain, ingenious block-and-tackle of his own design, then horse and wagon, and finally, barge, the short distance upriver to Pollepel Island. Moneys were paid to a Mr Harriman of the Palisades Interstate Park Commission, well enough known for his discretion in such matters, and no questions were asked.

And also, that archaeologists and anthropologists, linguists and cryptographers were allowed brief viewings of the artefact over the next year and only the sketchiest, conflicting conclusions regarding the glyphs on the stone were drawn: that they might have been made by Vikings, or Phoenicians, or Minoans, or Atlanteans; that they might be something like Sanskrit, or perhaps the tracks of prehistoric sea worms, or have been etched by Silas Desvernine himself. The suggestion by a geologist of no particular note, that the stone itself, oily black shale with cream flecks of calcite, was not even native to the region, was summarily ignored by everyone but Silas. Who ignored nothing.

One passing footnote mention of ‘the Butterhill Stone’ in a monograph on Mahican pottery and by 1918 it was forgotten by the busy, forgetful world of men and words beyond the safeguarding walls of Silas’ Castle.

‘Wake up,’ she says. ‘You must wake up,’ and he does, gummy blink, unfocused, and the room’s dark except for the light of brass lamps with stained glass shades like willows and dragon-flies and drooping, purple wisteria.

‘You’re dying, Silas,’ and he squints towards the great cage, cage that could hold lions or leopards and she looks so terribly small in there. Deceptive contrast of iron and white, white skin, and she says, ‘Before the sun rises again. ’

Big sigh rattle from his bony chest and ‘No,’ looking about the desk for his spectacles. ‘No, not yet,’ but she says ‘You’re an old man, Silas, and old men die, eventually. All of them.’

‘Not yet,’ and there they are, his bifocals perched on a thick book about African beetles, ‘there’s a new war, new ships that have to be built,’ and he slips them on, frame wire bent and straightened and bent again so they won’t sit quite right on his face any longer. Walking cane within reach, but he doesn’t stand, waits for the murky room to become solid again.

‘Let me go now,’ she says, as if she hasn’t said it a thousand thousand times before, as if it were a new idea, never occurred to her before and he laughs. Froggy little strangled sound more like a burp. ‘You’re trying to trick me,’ he says, grins his false-toothed grin at her and one crooked finger pointed so there can be no doubt. ‘You’re not a sibyl,’ and it takes him five minutes to remember where he’s put his pocket watch.

‘I can hear your tired old heart and it’s winding down, like your watch,’ and there it is, in his vest pocket; 4:19, but the hour hand and minute hand and splinter second hand still as ice. He forgets to wind it a lot these days, and how much time has he lost, dozing at his desk? Stiff neck crane and he can see stars through the high windows.

‘You can’t leave me here, Silas.’

‘Haven’t I told you that I won’t?’ still watching the stars, dim glimpse of Canes Venatici or part of the Little Bear, and the anger in his voice surprising him. ‘Haven’t I said that? That I’ll let you go before I die?’

‘You’re a liar, Silas Desvernine. You’ll leave me here with all these other things that you’ve stolen,’ and he notices that her eyes have settled on the tall glass case near her cage, four tall panes and the supporting metal rods inside, the shrivelled, leathery things wired there. The dead feathers that have come loose and lie scattered like October leaves at the bottom of the case.

‘You would have destroyed them if I hadn’t put them there,’ he mumbles, ‘Don’t tell me that’s not the truth,’ turning away, anything now to occupy his attention, and it was true, that part. That she’d tried to eat them after they’d fallen off, Jesus Christ, tried to eat them, before he took them away from her, still warm and oozing blood from their ragged stumps.

‘Please,’ she whispers, softest, snowflake excuse for sound, and ‘Please, Silas,’ as he opens a book, yellowbrown paper to crackle loud between his fingers, and adjusts his bent spectacles.

‘I keep my promises,’ grumbled, and he turns a dry page.