The Best Horror of the Year. Volume 6

THE SOUL IN THE BELL JAR K. J. Kabza

Ten lonely miles from the shores of the Gneiss Sea, where the low town of Hume rots beneath the mist, runs a half-wild road without a name. Flanked by brambles and the black, it turns through wolf-thick hollows, watched by yellow eyes that glitter with hunger and the moon. The wolves, of course, are nothing, and no cutthroat highwayman ever waited beneath the shadows of those oaks. There are far worse things that shamble in the dark. This is the road that skirts Long Hill.

So the coachman declared, and so Lindsome Glass already knew. She also knew whose fault the shambling things were, and where their nursery lay: in the great, moaning house at Long Hill’s apex.

She knew anxiety and sorrow, for having to approach it.

“Can’t imagine what business a nice young miss like you has with the Stitchman,” said the coachman.

Lindsome knew he was fishing for gossip. She did not reply.

“A pretty young miss like you?” pressed the coachman. Their vehicle was a simple horse trap, and there was nowhere to sit that was away from his dirty trousers and wine-stained smile. “You can’t be, what, more than eleven? Twelve? Only them scienticians go up there. Unless you’s a new Help, is that it? The ol’ Stitchman could use a new pair of hands, says me. That big ol’ house, rottin’ up in the weeds with hardly nobody to tend to it none.” He laughed. “Course, it’s no wonder. You couldn’t get Help up there for all the gold in Yorken.” He eyed her sideways. “So what’s he have on you?”

The road wound upward, the branches overhead thinned, and the stones beneath the wheels took on the dreary glow of an overcast sky. November in Tattenlane meant sunshine, but Lindsome was not in Tat-tenlane anymore.

“Eh?” the coachman pressed.

Lindsome turned her pale face away. She fought against the quiver in her jaw. “Mama and Papa have gone on a trip around the world. They didn’t say for how long, but I’m to stay here until they return. The Stitchman is my great-uncle.”

Startled into silence, the coachman looked away.

The nameless road flattened, and the mad, untamed lawn of Apsis House sprawled into view. It clawed to the horizons, large as night, lonely as the world.

When Lindsome alighted with her single hat box and carpetbag, there was only one sour-mouthed, middle-aged man to meet her. He was tall and stooped, with shoulders too square and a neck too short, giving him an altogether looming air of menace. “Took your time, didn’t you?”

Behind Lindsome, the coachman was already retreating down Long Hill. “I–I’m sorry. The roads were—”

“Where are your manners?” the sour-mouthed man demanded. “Introduce yourself.”

Lindsome bit her lip. The quiver in her jaw threatened to return. I must not cry, she told herself. I am a young lady. Lindsome gripped the hem of her white dress and dropped into a graceful curtsey. “I … beg your pardon, sir. My name is Lindsome Glass. How do you do? Our meeting is well.”

“S’well,” the man replied shortly. “That’s better. Now take your things and come inside. Ghost knows where that lack-about Thomlin is. Doctor Dandridge is on the cusp of a singular work, one of the greatest in his career, and he and I have far more valuable things to do with our time than coddle you in welcome.”

Lindsome nearly had to run to keep up with the man’s long, loping strides. “The house has three main floors, one attic, and two basements,” he said, leading her past a half-collapsed carriage house. “Attic is dangerous and off-limits. Third floor is Help’s quarters and off-limits. Basements are the laboratories, so they are definitely off limits, especially to careless little children.”

The man pushed through a back door that cried on rust-thick hinges. Lindsome followed. The interior had a damp, close smell of things forgotten in the rain, and the air was clammy and chill. A small, useless fire guttered in a distant grate. Pots and pans, dingy with age and wear, hung from beams like gutted animals. Lindsome set down her hatbox and touched a bunch of drying sage. It crumbled like a desiccated spiderweb.

The man grabbed her wrist. “And don’t. Touch. Anything.”

Lindsome fearfully withdrew her hand. “Yes, sir.”

A middle-aged woman, generous in girth but mousy in the face, hobbled out from a pantry, wiping her hands on her flour-smeared apron. “Good afternoon, Mister Chaswick, sir.” She turned to Lindsome. Her smile was kind. “Is this the young miss? Oh, so pale, with such lovely dark hair. You’ll be a heartbreaker someday, won’t you? What’s your name?”

“This is Lindsome Glass,” said Chaswick. “Mind you watch her.”

“Yes, Mister Chaswick.”

“Don’t trouble to see her up. I’ll do it.”

“Thank you, Mister Chaswick.”

“Don’t thank me. With your knees it takes you a century to get up the bloody staircase.”

Chaswick led Lindsome deeper into the house, under moldering lintels, through crooked doorways, past water-damaged wainscoting and rooms hung with peeling wallpaper. The carcasses of upturned insects lay in corners, legs folded neatly in rictus. Paintings lined the soot-blackened walls, and Lindsome thought that perhaps they had portrayed beautiful scenes, once, but now most were so caked with filth that it was hard to divine their subjects. Here, a lake? There, a table of hunting bounty? Many were portraits with tarnished nameplates. Any names still legible meant nothing. Who was Marilda Dandridge, anyway?

“Are you paying attention?” Chaswick demanded. “Breakfast’s at seven, supper’s at noon, and dinner’s at seven. We don’t have tea or any of that Tatterlane nonsense here. Bath day is Sunday, wash day is Monday, and if you’d like to occupy yourself, I suggest the library on the second floor, as it contains a number of volumes that will ensure the moral betterment of a young person such as yourself.”

“Do you have any picture books?” Lindsome asked.

Chaswick frowned. “I suppose you could borrow one of your great-uncle’s illustrated medical atlases. Perhaps Porphyry’s Intestinal Arrangements of the Dispeptic or Gharison’s Common Melancholia in the Spleen of the Breeding Female”

Lindsome looked down at her shoes. “Never mind.”

“You may also explore the grounds,” Chaswick continued. “But don’t cross paths with the gardener. Understand? If you ever hear the gardener working, turn around and go back at once.

“And mind the vivifieds. Doctor Dandridge is a brilliant, highly prolific man, and you’ll see a great many examples of his work roaming throughout the area, many of which do not have souls consanguineous to their bodies. However, none of the vivifieds that Doctor Dandridge and I have created for practical purposes is chimeric, so you may safely pat the house cats and the horses in the stables. If you’d like to go for a ride …”

Something colorful moved at the edge of Lindsome’s vision. Surprised at something so bright in so dreary a place, she stopped and backtracked. She peered around a corner, down a short hall sandwiched between a pair of much grander rooms.

The door at the end of the hall stood ajar. A handsbreadth of room beckoned, sunny yellow and smelling of lavender. A bookcase stood partially in view, crammed with spinning tops, painted wooden blocks, tin soldiers, stuffed animals, rattles, little blankets, papers cleverly folded into birds …

Lindsome stepped forward.

A woman exited the room. Her movements were quick, though she was old and excessively thin, with dark circles about her despairing eyes. She grasped the doorknob with bloodless talons, pulling it shut and locking it with a tiny iron key.

She turned and saw Lindsome.

Her transformation into rage was instantaneous. “What are you doing?” the woman bellowed, baring her long, gray teeth. “Get out of this hall! Get away from here!”

Lindsome fled to Chaswick.

“What’s this?” said Chaswick, turning. “What! Have you not been following me?”

“There was a woman!” Lindsome said, dropping her things. “A thin woman!”

Chaswick grabbed Lindsome’s wrist again. He bent over and pulled her close — lifted her, even, until she was nearly on her tiptoes and squirming with discomfort and alarm.

“That’s Emlee, the housekeeper. Mind her too.” Chaswick narrowed his eyes. “And that little hallway between the study and the card room? Definitely, absolutely off limits.”

Chaswick deposited Lindsome in front of a room on the second floor. As soon as he had withdrawn down the grand staircase, Lindsome set her things inside and made a survey of the rest of the level. The aforementioned library was spacious and well stocked but poorly kept, with uneven layers of dust and book bindings faded by sun. Many volumes had been reshelved unevenly, incorrectly, or even upside-down, if at all.

Most of the other rooms were unused, their furniture wholly absent or in deep slumber beneath moth-eaten sheets. Two of the rooms were locked, or perhaps even rusted shut, including one next to what she assumed were her great-uncle’s personal quarters, since they were the largest and, she could only surmise, at one time, the grandest. Now, like all else in Apsis House, their colors and details had darkened with soot and neglect, and Lindsome wondered how, if Dr. Dandridge were so brilliant, he could fail to control such misery and decay.

While exploring the first floor more thoroughly, she came across a squat, surly man in overalls who was pasting paper over a broken window in the Piano Room. He introduced himself as Thomlin, the Housemaster. Lindsome politely asked how did he do. Thomlin said he did fine, as long as he took his medicine and, as an illustration produced a silver flask, from which he took a hearty pull.

“May I ask you something, Mister Thomlin? What’s at the end of the little hallway? In the yellow room?”

The house’m scowled as he lifted his paste brush from the bucket and slapped it desultorily over the glass. “Nothin’,” he said. “Nothin’ that a good girl should stick’er nose in. How a man wants to grieve, that’s his business. No, no, I’ve said too much already.” Juggling flask and brush, he took another medicinal dose. “I know everything that happens and ever did happen in these walls, you understand, inside and out. Wish I didn’t, but I do. Housemaster, that’s me. All these poor bastards — oops, pardon my language, young miss — I mean all these poor folks walk around in a fog a’ their own problems, but a Housemaster sees everything as The Ghost sees it: absolute and clear as finest crystal, as not a soul else can ever understand. But good men tell no tales anyway. An’ a gooder man you won’t find either side of this whole blasphemous Long Hill heap. Why don’t you go play outside? But don’t never interrupt the gardener. Hear?”

Lindsome did not want to explore the grounds, but she told herself, I must be brave, because I am a young lady, and went outside with her head held high. Nonetheless, she did not get far. The weeds and brambles of the neglected lawn had long since matured into an impenetrable thicket, and Lindsome could barely see the rooftops of the nearby outbuildings above the wild creepers, dying leaves, needle-thin thorns, and drab, stenchful flowers. The late autumnal blossoms stank of carrion and sulfur, mingled with the ghastly sickly sweetness of mothballs. Lindsome pulled one sleeve over her hand and held it to her wrinkled nose as she picked her way along a downward-sloping animal trail that ran near the main house, the closest navigational relief in this unrelenting jungle, but she could get no corresponding relief from the smell.

She rounded a barberry bush. A little scream squeezed from behind her hand.

The stench wasn’t the flowers. It was vivifieds.

In her path, blocking it completely, stood a white billy goat. He did not breathe or move. His peculiar, tipped-over eyes were motionless, his sideways pupils like twin cracks to the Abyss.

His belly had burst, and flies looped around his gaping bowels in humming droves.

Heart pounding, Lindsome backed away. The goat did nothing. Its gaze remained fixed at some point beyond her shoulder. As she watched, bits of its flesh grew misty, then resolidified. It’s all right, Lindsome told herself. It’s just an old vivified, rotten enough for the soul to start coming loose. It’s so old it doesn’t know what it is or how to act. See? It’s staying right there.

Push past it. It will never notice.

Lindsome shuddered. But she was a young lady, and young ladies were always calm and regal and never afraid.

So Lindsome lifted the hem of her dress, as if preparing to step through a mud puddle, and inched her way toward and around the burst-open creature.

Its foul-smelling fur, tacky with ichor, brushed the whiteness of her garment. Lindsome closed her eyes and bit her lip, enough to bring pain, and a fly buzzed greedily in her ear. I am not afraid. I am not afraid.

She passed the goat.

At the first possible moment, she dropped her hem and sprinted down the path. The thicket thinned out into a place where the trail wasn’t as clear, but she kept going, crashing through brittle twigs and dead undergrowth, prompting vivified birds to take wing. The corpses were poor fliers, dropping as swiftly as they’d risen. One splatted onto a boulder at the edge of the path, hard enough for the stitched-on soul to be shaken loose entirely in a shimmer of mist; the physical shell, without anything to vivify it, shrank in volume like a dried-up fruit.

The faint trail turned abruptly into a long, empty clearing that stretched back toward the house. The vista had been created with brisk violence: every stubborn plant, whether still verdant or dormant for the season, had been uprooted and lay in careless, half-dried piles, revealing tough, rocky soil. A second path connecting to this space had been widened and its vegetation thoroughly trampled. Lindsome silently blessed the unseen gardener’s vigorous but futile work ethic and, slowing to a breathless, nervous walk, crossed the clearing. Despite the portending stink, there were no vivifieds in sight.

But as the path resumed, the stench grew stronger yet. Rot and cloying sweetness clogged Lindsome’s nose so badly that her eyes watered and she breathed through her mouth. Young ladies remained calm and regal, Lindsome supposed, but they were also not stupid. Perhaps it was time to turn back.

The path ended at a set of heavy double doors.

To be truthful, a number of paths ended at these doors, with at least four distinct trails converging at the edges of the small, filth-caked patio. Lindsome imagined that her great-uncle, along with the unpleasant Chaswick, exited from these doors when making expeditions into the haunted thicket for the few live specimens that must remain. Do they only catch the old and injured, she wondered, or do they murder creatures in their prime, only to sew their souls right back on again?

Lindsome tried the doors. They opened with ease.

The revealed space was not some dingy mudroom or rear hall, as Lind-some had expected, but a room so wide, it could have served as a stable were it not for its low ceiling and unfinished back. Instead of meeting a rear wall, the flagstone floor disintegrated into irregular fragments and piled up onto a slope of earth.

Three long tables ran down the center of the room to Lindsome’s right, the final one disappearing into the total blackness of the room’s far end. The tables were stone, their surfaces carved with deep grooves that terminated at the edges, above stained and waiting buckets.

Melted candles spattered the tables’ surfaces. There were no windows.

The stench of the place flowed outward like an icy draft. Lindsome left a door open behind her, held her nose, and took a step inside. Even when breathing through her mouth, the vivified odor was a soup of putrification that clotted at the back of her throat, thick enough to drip into her belly. The sensation was unendurable. Surely that was a stone staircase leading up over the unfinished back wall, into less offensive parts of the house?

Three steps toward the staircase, Lindsome made the mistake of glancing behind her.

The entire front wall, lined floor to ceiling with cages and bars, bore an unliving library of vivifieds, every creature too large for its pen. Stoats stood shoulder-to-shoulder with badgers and owls, and serpents had no room to uncurl in their tiny cubes. Rabbit fur comingled with hawk feathers. Paws tapped and noses twitched and bodies lurched gently from side to side, but that great wall of shifting corpses, scales and hide and stripes, made no sound. Each rotting throat was silent.

Three hundred pairs of eyes watched Lindsome, flashing yellow and green, white and red. She fell into a table, hitting her shoulder against the stone.

Get up. Run away. She daren’t breathe. You silly fool. The ground was sloping outside. Remember? This is a basement.

You cannot be here.

A door squealed open. A trickle of light dribbled down the steps. Lindsome dove away from the table and behind the staircase’s concealing bulk.

The door at the top opened fully. Candlelight flowed down the steps now, making hundreds of vivified eyes sparkle. “The sea lion, I think,” said a voice. It was papery and thin, like a flake of ash that would crumble at the barest touch. “At the far end.”

“Really, Albion,” said Chaswick, stepping down onto the flagstones. He held high a five-branched candelabrum, his shadow stretching behind him. “We’re overpreparing, don’t you think?”

“Oh no, not hardly.” An old, old man shuffled in Chaswick’s wake. His head, wreathed in a wispy halo of white and framed by sizeable ears, seemed bowed under the weight of constant thought across many decades. His knobby fingers would not stop undulating, like twin spiders in a restless sleep. “One last test, before Thursday. I’m certain that a Kell Stitch at the brain stem, instead of a Raymund, will surprise us.”

Chaswick’s back heaved in a sigh. “I maintain that the original protocol would have sufficed. The first time around—”

“I was lucky,” interrupted the man. “Very, very lucky. That ghastly knot was nothing but shaking hands and fortunate bungling. And besides—” He sighed, too, but instead of deflating, the exhalation appeared to lift him up. “Think of the advances, Chaswick. The discoveries I’ve made since then. How all these newer elements might work in concert — well. We cannot be too careful. I don’t have to tell you what’s at stake.”

The two men moved into the blackness of the room’s far end. The candelabrum revealed that the distant third of the wall was hidden behind a heavy black curtain.

“Of course, Doctor Dandridge,” said Chaswick.

“The sea lion,” Dr. Dandridge repeated.

Chaswick passed the candelabrum to his superior. When he turned to grip the curtain, Lindsome noticed what he was wearing.

Waders?

The curtain hissed partway aside upon its track. The candlelight fell upon tanks, tanks and tanks and tanks, each filled with an evil, yellow ing liquid. Each held a shrunken animal corpse, embalmed and barely recognizable. The lowest third of the wall was but a single tank, stretching back behind the half-closed curtain.

A great, bloated shadow rolled within.

Lindsome shivered. She had never seen the dead creature’s likeness. It must have been a specimen from the continent to the east, but whatever it was, it was not what they wanted, because Chaswick knelt by a tank on the second shelf, obscuring the monstrosity. He fitted a length of rubber hose to a stopcock at the bottom of his chosen tank, then ran the hose along the floor and out the open door. “Door’s blown loose again. That useless Thomlin — I’ve asked him to fix the latch thrice this week. I swear to Ghost, I’d stick him in one of the tanks myself if he weren’t a man and would leave behind anything more useful than ghostgrease.”

Chaswick returned and opened the stopcock. The end of the hose, limp over the edge of the patio, dribbled its foul load into the weeds. The large corpse within the tank settled to the bottom as it drained, a limp, matted mess. Chaswick did something to the glass to make it open outward, like the door to an oven.

He gathered the dead thing to his chest and stood. Ichor ran in rivulets down his waders. “I don’t mean to rush you, but—”

“Of course.” Candelabrum in tow, Dr. Dandridge shuffled back to the stairs. “I’ll do my best to hurry.”

They ascended the steps, pulling the light with them and the squealing door shut.

Lindsome fled outside. After that chamber of horrors, the sticking burdock, Raven’s Kiss, and cruel thorns of the sunlit world were the hallmarks of Paradise.

At seven o’clock, some unseen, stentorian timepiece tolled the hour. Lindsome, who had elected to spend the rest of the afternoon in the library in a fort constructed from the oldest, fattest, dullest (and surely therefore safest) books she could find, reluctantly emerged to search for the dining room.

The murmur of voices and clink of silverware guided her steps into a room on the first floor nearly large enough to be a proper banquet hall. Only the far end of the long table, near the wall abutting the kitchen, was occupied. A fire on the wall’s hearth cast the head of the table in shadow while illuminating Chaswick’s disdain.

“You are late,” Chaswick said. “Don’t you know what they say about first impressions?”

Lindsome slunk across the floor. “I’m sorry, Mister Chaswick.”

From the shadows of a wingback chair, the master of the house leaned forward. “No matter,” said Dr. Dandridge. “Good evening. I am Professor Albion Edgarton Dandridge. Our meeting is well. Please pardon me for not arising; I’m an old man, and my bones grow reluctant, even at the welcome sight of a face so fresh and kind as yours.”

Lindsome had not expected this. “I … thank you, sir.”

“Uncle Albion will do. Come, sit, sit.”

Opposite Chaswick, Lindsome pulled out her own massive chair with some difficulty, working it over the threadbare carpet in small scoots. “Thank you, sir. Our meeting is well.”

Chaswick snorted. “Mind her, Doctor. She’s got a streak in her.”

“Oh, I don’t doubt it. Comes from my side.” The old man smiled at her. His teeth were surprisingly intact. “Are you making yourself at home, my dear?”

Lindsome served herself a ladle full of shapeless brown stew. “Yes, sir.”

“Don’t mumble,” said Chaswick, picking debris from his teeth with his fingernails. “It’s uncouth.”

“I am delighted that you’re staying with us,” continued Dr. Dandridge. Outside of the nightmarish basement, he looked ordinary and gentle. His halo of hair, Lindsome now saw, wandered off his head into a pair of bedraggled dundrearies, and the fine wrinkles around his eyes made him look kind. His clothes were dusty and ill-fitting, tailored for a more robust man at least thirty years his junior. She could not imagine a less threatening person.

“Thank you, sir.”

“Uncle. I am dear old Uncle—” Dr. Dandridge coughed, a dry, wheezing sound and put an embroidered handkerchief to his mouth. Chaswick nudged the old man’s water glass closer. “Albion,” he managed, taking a sip from the glass. “Thank you, Chaswick.”

“Yes, Uncle.”

“And how is your papa?”

Lindsome did not want to think of him, arm in arm with Mama, strolling up the pier to the great boat and laughing, his long legs wavering under a film of tears. “He is very well, thank you.”

“Excellent, excellent. And your mama?”

“Also well.”

“Good, good.” The doctor nibbled at his stew, apparently unfazed by its utter lack of flavor. “I trust that the staff have been kind, and have answered all of your questions.”

“Well …” Lindsome started, but Chaswick shot her a dangerous look. Lindsome fell silent.

“Yes?” asked Dr. Dandridge, focused on teasing apart a gravy-smothered nodule.

“I was wondering …” dared Lindsome, but Chaswick’s face sharpened into a scowl. “… about your work.”

“Oh!” said Dr. Dandridge. His efforts on the nodule of stew redoubled. “My work. My great work! You are right to ask, young lady. It is always pleasing to hear that the youth of today have an interest in science. Young people are our future, you know.”

“I—”

“The work, of course, builds on the fundamentals of Wittard and Blacke from the ’30s, going beyond the Skin Stitch and into the essential vital nodes. But unlike Havarttgartt and his school (and here’s the key, now), we don’t hold that the heart, brain, and genitals, aka the Life Triad, are the necessary fulcrums. We hold — that is, I hold — that is, Chaswick agrees, and he’s a very smart lad—we hold that a diversified architecture of fulcrums is key to extending the ambulatory period of a vivified, and we have extensive data to back this hypothesis, to the extent where we’ve produced a curve — a Dandridge curve, I call it, if I may be so modest, ha-ha — that illustrates the correlation between the number of fulcrums and hours of ambulatory function, and clearly demonstrates that while quality of fulcrums does indeed play a role, it is not nearly so prominent as the role of quantity. Or, in layman’s terms, if you stitch a soul silly to a corpse at every major mechanical joint — ankles, knees, hips, shoulders, elbows, wrists — you’ll still get a far better outcome than you would had you used a Butterfly Stitch to the heart itself! Can you imagine?”

Lost, Lindsome stared at her plate. She could feel Chaswick’s smug gaze upon her, the awful look that grown-ups use when they want to say, Not so smart now, are you?

“And furthermore,” Dr. Dandridge went on gaily, setting down his fork and withdrawing a different utensil from his pocket with which to attack his clump of stew, “we have discovered a hitherto unknown role of the Life Triad in host plasticity, which also beautifully solves the mystery of how a very small soul, like that of a mouse, can successfully be stitched to a very large flesh mass, like that of a cow, and vice-versa. Did Chaswick explain to you about our chimeras? The dogs with souls of finches, and the blackbirds with the souls of chipmunks, and in one exceptional case, the little red fox with the soul of a prize-winning hog? Goodness, was I proud of that one!” The old man laughed.

Lindsome smiled weakly.

“It is upon the brain, you see, not the heart,” Dr. Dandrige went on, “that the configuration, amount, and type of stitches are key, because — and this is already well known in the higher animals — a great deal of soul is enfleshed in the brain. You may think of the brain as a tiny little seed that floats in the center of every skull, but not so! When an animal is alive, the brain takes up the entire skull cavity. Can you imagine? Of course, the higher the animal, the more the overall corpse shrinks at the moment of death, aka soul separation, due to the soul composing a greater percentage of the creature. This is why Humankind (with its large and complex souls) leaves no deathhusk, or corpse, at all — nothing but a film of ghostgrease. Which, incidentally, popular doggerel will tell you is absent from the deathbeds of holy people, being that they are so very above their animal natures and are 100 percent ethereal, but goodness, don’t get me started about all that ugsome rot.”

Dr. Dandridge stopped. He frowned at his plate. “Good grief. What am I doing?”

“A Clatham Stitch, looks like,” said Chaswick gently. “On your beef stew.”

“Heavens!” Dr. Dandridge put down his utensil, which Lindsome could now see was an aetherhook. He removed what looked like a monocle made of cobalt glass from a breast pocket, then peered through it at his plate. “There weren’t any souls passing by just now, were there? The leycurrents are strong here in the early winter, dear Lindsome, and sometimes the departed souls of lesser creatures will blow into the house if we have the windows open. And when that happens—”

The lump of beef quivered. Lindsome dropped her fork and clapped a hand to her mouth.

From beneath the stew crawled a beetle, looking very put out.

Dr. Dandridge and Chaswick burst into guffaws. “A beetle!” cried the old man. “A beetle in the stew! Oh, that is precious, too precious for words! Oh, how funny!”

Chaswick, laughing, looked to Lindsome, her eyes saucer-wide. “Oh, come now,” he said. “Surely you see the humor.”

Dr. Dandridge wiped his eyes. The beetle, tracking tiny spots of stew, crawled off across the tablecloth at speed. “A beetle! Oh, mercy. Mercy me. Excuse us — that’s not a joke for a young lady at all. Forgive me, child — we’ve grown uncivilized out here, isolated as we are. A Clatham Stitch upon my stew, as if to vivify it! And then came a beetle—”

Lindsome couldn’t take it anymore. She stood. “May I be excused?”

“Already?” said Chaswick, still chuckling. “No more questions for your great-uncle, demonstrating your very thorough interest in and understanding of his work?”

Lindsome colored beneath the increasing heat of her discomfort. This remark, on top of all else, was too much. “Oh, I understand a great deal. I understand that you can stitch a soul to an embalmed deathhusk instead of an unpreserved one—”

Chaswick stopped laughing immediately.

“—even though everybody knows that’s impossible,” said Lindsome.

Chaswick’s eyes tightened in suspicion. Dr. Dandridge, unaware of the ferocity between their interlocked stares, sat as erect as his ancient bones would permit. “Why, that’s right! That’s absolutely right! You must have understood the implications of Bainbridge’s supplemental index in her report last spring!”

“Yes,” said Chaswick coldly. “She must have.”

Lindsome colored further and looked away. She focused on her great-uncle, who, in his excitement, had picked up the aetherhook once again and was attempting to cut a bit of potato with it. “Your mama was right to send you here. I never imagined — a blossoming, fine young scientific mind in the family! Why, the conversations we can have, you and I! Great Apocrypha, I’m doing it again, aren’t I?” The old man put the aetherhook, with no further comment or explanation, tip-down in his water glass. “We shall have a chat in my study after dinner. Truth be told, you arrived at the perfect time. Chaswick and I are at the cusp of an astounding attempt, a true milestone in—”

Chaswick arose sharply from his chair. “A moment, Doctor! I need a word with your niece first.” He rounded the table and grabbed Lindsome’s arm before anyone could protest. “She’ll await you in your study. Excuse us.”

Chaswick dragged her toward the small, forbidden hallway, but rather than entering the door at the end into the mysterious yellow room, he dragged Lindsome into one of the rooms that flanked the corridor. Lind-some did not have an opportunity to observe the interior, for Chaswick slammed the door behind them.

“What have you seen?”

A match flared to life with a pop and Lindsome shielded her eyes. Chaswick lit a single candle, tossed the match aside, and lifted the candle to chest level. Its flicker turned his expression eerie and demonic. “I said, what have you seen?”

“Nothing!” Lindsome kept her free hand over her eyes, pretending the shock of the light hurt worse than it did, so that Chaswick could not see the lie upon her face.

“Listen to me, you little brat,” Chaswick hissed. “You might think you can breeze in here and destroy everything I’ve built with a bit of flattery and deception, but I have news for you. You and the rest of your shallow, showy, flighty, backstabbing kindred? You abandoned this brilliant man long ago, thinking his work would come to nothing, and that these beautiful grounds and marvels of creation weren’t worth the rocks the building crew dug from the soil, but with The Ghost as my witness, I swear that I am not allowing your pampered, money-grubbing hands to trick me out of my inheritance. Do you understand me? I love this man. I love his work. I love what he stands for. Apsis House will remain willed to me. And if I so much as see you bat your wicked little eyes in the doctor’s direction, I will ensure that you are not in my way.

“Do I make myself clear?”

Lindsome lowered her hand. It was trembling. Every part of her was. “You think I’m — are you saying—?”

The vise of Chaswick’s hand, honed over long hours of tension around a Stitchman’s instruments, crushed her wrist in its grip. “Do I make myself clear?”

Lindsome squirmed, now in genuine pain. “Let me go! I don’t even want your ruined old house!”

“What did you see?”

“Stop it!”

“Tell me what you’ve seen!”

“Yes,” announced Dr. Dandridge, and in half a second, Chaswick had released Lindsome and stepped back, and the old man entered the room, a blazing candelabrum in hand. “Yes, stitching a soul to an embalmed, or even mummified, deathhusk would be a tremendous feat. Just imagine how long something like that could last. Ages, maybe. And ages more….” His expression turned distant and calculating. “Just imagine. A soul you never wanted to lose? Why, you could keep it here forever….”

Chaswick straightened. He smiled at Lindsome, a poisonous thing that Dr. Dandridge, lost in daydreams, did not see. “Good night, Doctor. And goodnight, Lindsome. Mind whose house you’re in.”

Surviving the fervid conversation of her great-uncle was one thing, but after just five days, Lindsome wasn’t sure how long she could survive the mysteries of his house. Chimeric with secrets, every joint and blackened picture was near bursting with the souls of untold stories. Lindsome was amazed that the whole great edifice did not lurch into motion, pulling up its deep roots and walls to run somewhere that wasn’t bathed in madness and the footsteps of the dead. She searched the place over for answers, but the chambers yielded no clues, and any living thing who might supply them remained stitched to secrets of their own.

The only person she hadn’t spoken with yet was the gardener.

Lindsome finally set off one evening to find him, under a gash of orange-red that hung over the bare trees to the west. She left the loop trail around the house. Bowers of bramble, vines of Heart-Be-Still, and immature Honeylocusts rife with spines surrounded her. A chorus of splintering twigs whispered beyond as unseen vivifieds moved on ill-fitted instinct.

“Hello? Mister Gardener?”

Only the twigs, whispering.

Lindsome slipped her right hand into her pocket, grasping what lay within. A grade-2 aetherblade, capped tight. She’d found it on the desk in Uncle Albion’s study one afternoon. Lindsome couldn’t say why she’d taken it. An aetherblade was only useful, after all, if one wanted to cut spirit-stitches and knew where those stitches lay, and Lindsome had neither expertise nor aetherglass to make solid the invisible threads. It would have done her just as much good to pocket one of Cook’s paring knives, which is to say, not much good at all.

“Hello?”

Beneath the constant stink of corpses came something sweet. At first, Lindsome thought it was a freshly vivified, exuding the cloyingly sweet fragrance of the finishing chemicals. But it was too gentle and mild.

A dark thing, soft as a moth, fluttered onto her cheek.

A rose petal.

“Mister Gardener? Are you growing—”

A savagely cleared vista opened before her, twisting back toward the house, now a looming shadow against the dimming sky. The murdered plants waited in neat piles, rootballs wet and dark. Lindsome squeezed her stolen aetherblade tighter in relief. The things were newly pulled. He’d be resting at the end of this trail, close to the house, preparing to come in for the evening.

But he wasn’t.

At the end of the vista, Lindsome halted in surprise. It was as if the gardener had known that Lindsome would come this way and had wanted to present her with a beautiful view, for in front of her lay another clearing, but this one was old and well maintained. Its floor held a fine carpet of grass, dormant and littered with leaves. The grass stretched up to the house itself and terminated at the edge of a patio. The double doors leading out were twin mosaics of diamond-shaped panes. Through them, Lindsome could see sheer curtains drawn back on the other side. Within the room, a gaslamp burned.

Its light flickered over yellow walls.

Lindsome’s breath stuck in her throat like a lump of ice. She could see the shelves now, the stacks of toys, the painted blocks and tops and bright pictures of animals hung above the chair-rail molding. A tiny, overlooked chair at the patio’s edge. An overlooked iron crib within.

Nobody had said the room was forbidden to approach from the outside.

Lindsome drifted across the grass. As she drew closer, she noticed something new. In the center of the room, between her and the iron crib, stood a three-legged table. Upon the table sat a bell jar. Perfectly clean, its translucence had rendered it invisible, until Lindsome saw the gaslight glance from its surface at the proper angle.

Within the bell jar, something moved.

Lindsome drew even closer. The bell jar was large, the size of a birdcage, but not so large as to dwarf the blur within. The blur’s presence, too, had been obscured from behind by the stark pattern of the crib’s bars, but it was not so translucent as the bell jar itself. The thing inside the glass was wispy. Shimmering.

Lindsome stepped onto the patio. The icy lump in her throat froze it shut.

Within the bell jar, a tiny, tiny fist solidified and pressed its ghostly knuckles against the glass.

Lindsome’s scream woke Long Hill’s last surviving raven, which took wing into the night, cawing.

Thorns tore Lindsome’s dress to tatters as she ran. “Chaswick!”

She fled toward the squares of gaslight, jumping over a fallen tree and flying up the main steps into the house. She called again, running from room to empty room, scattering dust and mice, the lamplight painting black ghosts behind crooked settees and broken chairs. “Someone help! Chaswick!”

Lindsome reached the kitchen. Cook was kneeling by the hearth, roasting a pan of cabbage-wrapped beef rolls atop the glowing coals. “Cook! Help! The yellow room! There’s a baby!”

Cook maintained her watchful crouch, not even turning. “Sst!” She put a plump finger to her lips. “Hush, child!”

“The yellow room,” cried Lindsome, gripping Cook’s elbow. “I saw it. I was outside and followed a path the gardener made. There’s a bell jar inside. It’s got a soul in it. A captured human soul. He’s keeping a—”

Cook planted her sooty hand over Lindsome’s mouth. She leaned toward her, beady eyes pinching. “I said hush, child,” Cook whispered. “Hush. That was nothing you saw. That fancy gaslight the doctor likes, it plays tricks on your eyes.”

Lindsome shook her head, but Cook pressed harder. “It plays tricks.” Her expression pleaded. “Be a good girl, now. Stop telling tales. Lock your door at night. And don’t you bring the gardener into this — don’t you dare. That’s a good girl?” Her eyes pinched further. “Yes?”

Lindsome wrenched herself away and ran.

“Chaswick!” She ran to the second floor, so upset that she grew disoriented. Had she already searched this corridor? This cloister of rooms? She could smell it. Fresh vivified. No — something milder. Right behind this locked door …

A hand touched Lindsome’s shoulder. She squealed.

“Saint Ransome’s Blood, child!” Chaswick said, spinning her about. A pair of spectacles perched on his nose, gleaming in the hall’s gaslight. His other, dangling hand held a half-open book, as though it were a carcass to be trussed. “What’s all this howling?”

Lindsome threw her arms about him. “Chaswick!”

He stiffened. “Goodness. Control yourself. Come now, stop that. Did you see a mouse?”

“No,” said Lindsome, pressing her face into Chaswick’s chest. “It was—”

“How many times must I tell you not to mumble?” Chaswick asked. “Now listen. I was in the midst of a very important—”

“A BABY!” Lindsome shouted.

Chaswick grew very still.

“It was—”

Chaswick drew back, gripped Lindsome’s shoulder, and without another word marched her down the hall and through a door that had always been locked.

Lindsome glanced about. The place appeared to be Chaswick’s quarters. The room was in surprisingly good repair, clean and recently painted, but all carpets, tapestries, cushions, and wallpaper had been removed. The only furniture was a desk, chair, and narrow bed, the only thing of any comfort a mean, straw mattress. The fire in the grate helped soften the room’s hard lines, and Lindsome’s fear of this stern and jealous man melted further under her larger one. “I’m sorry, Mister Chaswick, but I was walking outside, and there was a path that took me past the yellow room, and inside I saw a bell jar. And in it was an infant’s soul. It solidified a fist and put it against the glass. I swear I’m not fibbing, Mister Chaswick. I swear by Mama’s virtue, I’m not.”

Chaswick sighed. He placed his book upon his desk. “I know you’re not.”

“You know?”

Chaswick shook his head, the flames highlighting the firm lines around his mouth. “I have said. The doctor is a brilliant man.”

“But he — but you can’t just—” Lindsome sputtered. “You can’t stop a soul from going to Heaven! It’s wrong! You’ll — The Ghost will — you’ll freeze in the Abyss! Forever and ever! The Second Ghostscroll says—”

“Don’t quote scripture at me, girl, it’s tiresome.” Chaswick withdrew a small leather case from a pocket in his trousers, removed his spectacles, and slid them inside. “The Ghost is nothing but a fairy tale for adults who never grow up. Humankind is alone in the universe, and there are no rules save for those which we agree upon ourselves. If Doctor Dandridge has the knowledge, the means, the willingness, and the bravery to experiment upon a human soul — well, then, what of it?”

Lindsome shrank back. “He’s going to — what?”

Chaswick set his mouth, the firelight carving his sternness deeper. “It’s not my place to stop him.”

Lindsome took a full step backward, barely able to speak. “You can’t mean that. He can’t. He wouldn’t.”

“In fact, I rather encourage it,” said Chaswick. “Fortune favors the bold.”

“But it’s illegal,” Lindsome stammered. “It’s sick! They’d think he’s gone mad! They’d put him away, and then they’d—”

She stopped. She stared at Chaswick.

They’d take away all of Uncle’s property.

And they’d look in Uncle’s will and give it to …

“You,” Lindsome whispered. “It’s you. You put this idea into his head.”

Chaswick sneered. “His wife, Marilda, died in childbirth, and the doctor chose his unorthodox method of grieving, well before I ever set foot on Long Hill. Not that you’d know, considering how very little your ilk cared to associate with him, after the tragedy. Ask your precious mama. She doesn’t approve of the yellow room, either.” Chaswick’s laugh was nasty. “Not that she thinks it’s anything more than an empty shrine.”

Lindsome backed toward the door. Chaswick advanced, matching her step for step. You monster. You brute. What has my poor uncle done? What awful things has he already done?

And what else is he going to do?

The door was nearly at her back. Chaswick loomed above her. “Go to bed, little girl,” he warned. “Nobody is going to listen to your foolish histrionics. Not in this house.”

Lindsome turned and fled.

She ran down the hall and into her own bedroom, where the bed sagged, the mold billowed across the ceiling like thunderheads, and the vivified mice ran back and forth, back and forth against the baseboards, without thinking, all night long.

Lindsome locked the door. Cook would be proud.

Then she lay on her bed and wept.

The night stretched like a cat, smothering future and past alike with its inky paws. Lindsome tossed in broken sleep. She dreamed of light glinting off curved glass, and something lancing through her heart. Chaswick above her, flames of gaslight for eyes, probing her beating flesh with an aetherhook. “What’s all this howling?”

Under everything, roses.

An hour before dawn, Lindsome dressed and left the house. The sky was too dark and the clouds too swollen, but she couldn’t stand this wretched place another moment. Even the stables, which held nothing but vivifieds, would be an improvement. The matted fur of dead horses is just as well for sponging away tears.

In the stables, Lindsome buried her face against the cold nose of a gelding. Did he have the same soul he’d had in life, she wondered, or did some other horse now command this body? What did it feel like, to be stitched imperfectly to a body that was not yours? She remembered the grade-2 aetherblade in the pocket of her coat. She recalled the few comprehensible bits of her great-uncle’s post-dinner lectures. Lindsome drew away from the horse, wiped her face on her sleeve, and produced the aetherblade.

The horse watched her, exhibiting no sign of feeling.

Lindsome plunged the tool behind the horse’s knee, between the physical stitches of a deep, telltale cut that could never heal. She circled the creature, straining to see in the poor light, plunging the aetherblade into every such cut she could find.

The horse’s legs buckled. It collapsed to the floor.

Its neck still functioned. The horse looked up at her, expressionless. Lindsome searched through its mane, shuddering, trying to find the final knot of stitching that would—

Set it free.

Lindsome stopped.

The horse did not react.

“Wait for me,” Lindsome said, setting down the aetherblade on the floor. “There’s something I have to do. I’ll be right back.”

The horse, unable to do anything else, waited.

But she didn’t come back.

Something was wrong with the sky, Lindsome thought, as she trotted toward the house. It was too gray and too warm after last night’s chill. There shouldn’t be thunderheads gathering now. Not so late in autumn.

And something was wrong with the vivifieds. Instead of rustling in the depths of the thicket, they lurched up and down the irregular paths in a sluggish remembrance of flight. A snake with a crushed spine lolled in a hollow. A pack of coyotes, moving in rolling prowls like house cats, moved single file in a line from the stables to the well, not even swiveling an ear as Lindsome squeezed past.

Near the main steps of the house, the burst-open billy goat had gotten ensnared in a tangle of creepers, its blackened entrails commingling with blackened vines.

Lindsome resolutely ran past it.

A dead sparrow fell from the sky and pelted her shoulder, and a frog corpse crunched beneath her foot. A hundred awful things could smear her with their putrescence — but oh, let them, because she was a lady. And ladies always did what needed doing.

There.

The gardener’s careful path to the yellow room.

She was at the final vista, now. Then the private patio. The sheer curtains were closed, but one of the patio doors was open, swinging to and fro on the fretful breeze.

In the center of the room, the three-legged table waited, but the bell jar was gone.

Lindsome slumped in gratitude. Uncle Albion had finally come to his senses. Or Chaswick had felt guilty about their talk last night, or careless Thomlin had knocked it over and broken it, even.

But then Lindsome remembered.

Today is Thursday.

Her throat made an awful squeak. She turned back and ran, up the vista and through wilderness to the ring path.

To the basement. Where ranks of monsters rotted as they stood, and the flesh of nightmares yet to be born floated in tanks, dreaming inscrutable dreams.

One of the doors to the basement stood open, too, swinging in the mounting wind. Lindsome ran inside. By now, she was panting, her back moist with sweat, her heart fighting to escape the hot prison of her chest. The foul air choked her. She bent double and gagged, falling to her knees on the icy stones.

Scores of waiting eyes watched her.

The wall of bodies began to moan, hundreds of bastard vocalizations from bastardized throats that had long ago forgotten how to speak. Pulpy flesh surged forward against bars and railings, jaws unhinging, the sound rising like the discordant sirens of an army from the Abyss.

Beneath them, Lindsome began a keening of her own, tiny and devoid of reason.

She did not know how she stepped to that far corner, where the future nightmares waited, but step she did, into a forest of burning candles. Some had toppled over onto the floor, frozen in sprays of wax. Some had melted into puddles, now aflame. The plentiful light showed all the tanks and that long, black curtain pulled fully back.

The giant tank on the bottom, as long as two men laid end to end, was drained, empty, and open.

The moaning grew. Lindsome’s keening grew into a wail, though she could not hear it, only watch as her feet pointed her around and sent her across the basement and up the stone steps.

The door at the top was already open.

Lindsome’s wail squeezed down into words, screamed loud enough to tear her throat as thorns will tear a dress. “Uncle Albion!”

Someone emitted a distant, ringing scream.

Lindsome couldn’t breathe. She stumbled through the first floor, gasping, her uncle’s name a mere whisper on her wide-open lips.

She found a door that Chaswick had forbidden, the door to the other basement-cum-laboratory. Or rather, she found the space where the door should have been. Both door and molding had been torn away.

As if the unseen gardener had entered the house, signature violence in tow.

“Uncle,” Lindsome gasped. Outside, lightning flickered, and Lindsome saw four steps down. Dark smears daubed the floorboards. Further within, the glitter of metal and broken glass.

A bloody handprint on the wall.

The scream came again, an animalistic screech of distilled and mortal terror. Lindsome backed away from the stairs. Her legs quaked too much to run now.

She walked to the grand staircase. A painful flash of lightning illuminated the entire house — the puddles of ichor through which Lindsome trod, the monstrous gouges in the wood and wallpaper on either side of her, the gaslamps torn from their mounts.

The mental image of a tiny fist, its knuckles bumping the inside of a tank as long as two men laid end to end.

Lindsome found Chaswick on the staircase. He had ended up like the billy goat outside, his stomach torn open, his entrails tangled in the shattered spindles of the banister.

“Linds …” One of his hands, slimy and bright, pawed at the banister.

She stared at him.

“Up …” Chaswick whispered. “Up …” His head twitched in the direction of the second floor. “If you … love … then up …”

Lindsome’s head nodded. “Yes, Mister Chaswick,” her mouth said.

His gaze clouded. The room flickered, as if under a second touch of lightning, and the pools of blood below him flashed into a sizzle.

Lindsome blinked, and Chaswick was gone. In his place, a pile of clothing lay tossed against the spindles, commingled with heavy black ghostgrease.

Somehow, Lindsome was running.

Sprinting, even. Up the stairs. “Uncle Albion!” she cried, and realized that she could speak again, too. Yet again, Lindsome heard that scream, that inhuman terror.

“Albion!” someone else called. Emlee, the gaunt old housekeeper. Third floor. The devastation continued up the staircase.

“Get out!” Her uncle. Alive. “Go!”

“No — not when she’s—” A crash.

“Run, damn your miserable old hide! If ever you loved me as I loved you, Albion, then run!”

And that scream. That Ghost-forsaken scream.

Lindsome ran, up and up and out, tripping over shredded carpet, torn-down paintings, shattered vases and urns. From around a corner came a ghastly crunch, then booms and bangs, the sound of something mighty hurtling down a staircase.

“No, Marilda! Stop!”

Lindsome rounded the corner. The servants’ staircase lay before her, walls half-ripped asunder, ichor on the steps.

Lindsome took them one flight down. At the bottom lay the housekeeper’s clothes, black with ghostgrease.

“Uncle!” Lindsome wailed. “Uncle, where are you? We have to hide!”

His bedroom. Outside in the hall. Uncle Albion’s door was open.

So was the door next to his, the one that had looked rusted shut.

The stench inside was unspeakable. Lindsome fell to the carpet and vomited, despite her empty stomach, hard enough for bile to dribble over her lips. Vivified. An ark of freshly vivified. They had to be stacked to the ceiling, packed like earth in a grave.

But when she looked up, all she saw were briars.

Roses. Thousands upon thousands of roses. Fresh, dried, rotting, trampled, entire bushes of them, as though a giant had uprooted them and brought them in here.

They were woven into a gigantic nest.

In the center sat Thomlin. His eyes were rolled up, showing nothing but white. He grasped his knees to his chest and rocked, like all those windblown, yawning doors, moaning like that wall of rotting flesh. A frothy river of drool dribbled down his chin.

Lindsome did not speak to him. It was clear that Thomlin would never speak again.

The siren song of that inhuman scream rang out, and Lindsome ran out into the hall. She called her uncle’s name, shouted it, even, but received no answer.

She ran into his room, searching. The knobs of a rope ladder lay bolted into his windowsill.

“Uncle!” Lindsome peered over the sill. The ladder still wobbled from a recent descent, trailing down into a tight copse of saplings. Lindsome scrambled down. “Uncle Albion! Wait!”

Lightning cut her shadow from the air. The boom that answered split the sky, a rolling bang that made Lindsome squeal and cover her ears. In seconds, its echoes vanished under static, the sound of a million gallons pouring down. Lindsome was immediately soaked. The tatters of her dress slapped at her legs as she ran, and so heavy was the downpour, Lindsome couldn’t see.

The path became slick. Lindsome slipped and went sprawling, face-first, and a fallen branch tore a gash in her arm. Lindsome screamed and rolled aside, curling around her wound, blinded by rain and tears.

Get up.

The thing will get you. Get up!

Weeping, squeezing her arm, Lindsome struggled to her feet. She stumbled along a trough of mud. She ripped off a strip of her soaked dress and tried to tie it around her wound to protect it.

A vivified hunting dog lumbered past, Cook’s sodden apron hanging from its jaws.

The sky lit up again, illuminating a great gash in the thicket. Uprooted plants, unearthed rocks, and crushed branches paved the way. How dare anyone keep working in the shadow of such horrors? Lindsome yelled for her uncle, for the gardener, for someone and anyone as she stumbled down that fresh avenue, arm throbbing and poorly tied scrap of dress soaking through with red.

No creature hindered her. The fleeing vivifieds had disappeared.

Instead came roses. Thicker and thicker still, the tangled walls burst with roses, like puddles of gore on a battlefield. She moved in a forest of them, boughs bending to enclose the path overhead, their stink so strong not even the downpour could erase it. It was black beneath the boughs, black and dripping. Torn-off petals dribbled down between the branches, sticking to her hair, her hands, her face.

The tunnel turned and opened.

Not even the looming branches of this deadly forest could cover a space so large. The clearing was a pit of trampled thorns and bowed-in walls, canes of briars thrashing in the gusts, petals smeared everywhere like a violent snowfall. It stank of roses and death, water and undeath, and though naked sky arced above this grove of wreckage, the light was not strong enough for Lindsome to understand the pair of shapes that waited at the far end.

But then the lightning came.

Its brilliance bore down, and Lindsome understood even less, though what she saw burned itself into her vision with the force of a dying sun. One was large, impossibly large. An alien mountain of fur and rot, waiting on trunk-thick limbs, bearing eyes that knew — even if the throat could not speak, even if those ghastly hands could not move with the mastery and grace that memory still begged for.

And one was small. A baby of that species. The size of two men, laid end to end.

Lindsome did not know that she kept screaming. There was only feeling, a single feeling of eclipsing terror so hot she felt her own soul struggling to tear free. The pain in her arm disappeared. She felt neither cold nor wet. Only this searing moment, as the small one rolled in its nest of thorns and flailed, as though its soul had never learned to walk.

The mountain of rot took a step forward, until it towered protectively over the wriggling thing below.

It reached out a hand toward Lindsome.

The eclipse reached totality. Lindsome went down, her heartbeat a ringing roar.

“Miss?”

Something struck the front of her thighs with brisk force. Lindsome grunted.

“Miss?”

“Leave her. She’s a woodcutter’s child, innit? Girl a’ the woods?”

“In woods like these? Not on yer hat. An’ look at her bleedin’ arm, ye piece-wit. That’s no small hurt. Miss?”

Lindsome opened her eyes. She was lying on her side in the sodden leaves, at the edge of a nameless road. The earth smelled good, of dirt and wind and water, and the branches of the bare trees overhead swayed and knocked in the bleak sunshine.

Two men stood over her, one holding the reins of a pair of horses. The other held a staff, with which he rapped Lindsome’s thighs again.

Lindsome’s eyes went to the horses. They were the horses of poor men, witless, subpar animals bought for cheap with zero cost of upkeep: vivifieds.

Lindsome began to cry.

One of the men mounted, and the other placed Lindsome at his comrade’s back. She clung to his coat and sobbed as they rode out of the deserted wood.

They asked her questions, but Lindsome did not answer. They rode to the low town of Hume and deposited her on the steps of the orphanage, where kinder, cleaner, better-dressed men and women asked her the same things, but Lindsome only wept. She did not protest when they steered her inside, bathed her, tended her arm, dressed her in worn but clean things, and gave her a bowl of oatmeal and honey. She hardly ate half before falling dead asleep at the table and barely noticed when a pair of strong, gentle arms lifted her up and placed her upon a cot.

The streets of Hume were buried in the snow of the new year before Lindsome spoke a single word.

She had to tell them something. So Lindsome, in the course of explaining who she was and that she did in fact have living parents who might someday appear to fetch her, decided to say that the household of her Great-Uncle Albion had succumbed to a foolish but gruesome accident. He had planned to perform a stitching experiment on a pack of wolves that were not yet dead, Lindsome claimed, and the rest of the household, making heated bets on whether this holy grail of vivology was in fact possible to obtain, had gathered in the laboratory to watch. Lindsome had been spared from the ensuing tragedy because she did not care about the bet and had been playing outside, alone. The constable’s men, who went to Apsis House to investigate as soon as the spring thaw came, found evidence to corroborate her story. The interior of Apsis House was torn apart, as if indeed by a pack of infuriated wolves, and not a trace of anyone living — including the great Professor Albion Edgarton Dandridge himself — could be found.

The spring after that, Lindsome’s parents returned, refreshed from travel but baffled and scornful of the personal and legal complications that had evolved in their absence. At the conclusion of the affair, the judge gave them the property deed to Apsis House. They wanted to know what on Earth they were supposed do with such a terribly located, wolf-infested wreck, and told Lindsome that she would have it, when she came of age.

The day she did, Lindsome attempted to sell it, but nobody could be persuaded to buy. She couldn’t even give it away. The deed finally sat unused in a drawer in her dressing table, in a far-away city in her far-away grown-up life, next to the tin of cosmetic power she used to cover up a long, ugly scar upon her arm. Her husband, to whom she never told the entire truth, agreed that the property was probably worthless, and never suggested that they visit Long Hill or take any action regarding Apsis House’s restoration. Nor did their three daughters, once they were grown enough to be told the family legends about mad Uncle Albion, and old enough to understand that some things are best left where they fall.

And besides — now that Lindsome knew what it was to have and love a child, she couldn’t bear to interrupt what might still move up there, within that blooming forest of thorns. If they were both intact, still, the least Lindsome could do was give them their peace; and if they were not, Lindsome could not bear the thought of finding one of them alone, endlessly screaming that desperate, lonely scream, until however long it took for Albion’s sturdy handiwork to unravel.

As Chaswick had said, Uncle Albion was a brilliant man.

It could take a very long time.