“All right. I’ll bite. Spell it out for me in easy words. What happened to kick this off?”
“Remember the woman who asked us why we were crying?”
“Sure. Because I wasn’t.”
Abigail opened the file for Karianna Rose and the Yellow Ward incident file side by side on the desk. In Karianna’s file, she turned to a report from early 608 AR detailing her transfer to a different unit within the institution. She checked the information again.
“Three weeks spent in the east wing of the facility for intensive treatment. Guess how many incidents occurred in the Yellow Ward during that period?”
“I’m tired. Don’t make me guess.”
“None. In fact, this is the only incident-free span in 608 AR.”
“Coincidence. Can we get some shuteye now? It’s late. Your mind is clinging to strands.”
“I don’t think so. There’s a similar gap in 610 AR, during another time she was moved.”
“Abigail, we found the grymkin. We killed it. Now you’re trying to say—what, that some woman who had the unfortunate experience of watching her children die is the real culprit? How? It doesn’t make sense.”
“That’s just it,” Abigail said. She stood and began to pace the room. “Everything we found was connected to trapperkin. But trapperkin can’t be responsible for all the incidents listed in these reports.”
“What’s your explanation, then?”
“When we first arrived, I was convinced we were dealing with a haunting, that some malevolent spirit had been bound to the ward. I was wrong about there being a ghost, but I’m not certain I was wrong about a haunting. Spirits aren’t the only unnatural threats that linger. If we consider grymkin in general, more of these incidents can be explained. There are other kinds, some far worse than trapperkin. So, let’s say grymkin were being drawn here. I don’t think it was the Yellow Ward that attracted them.”
She reached into her satchel and retrieved the stone figure carved in the likeness of a woman. She held it up between the two of them, turning it this way and that as she examined the details.
“The figures on Boden’s window sill represent grymkin,” Abigail said. “I’m sure of it. The only figure on that sill that was different from the rest is this. A young woman with a monster in a basket. It even looks like her. Look at the face. The hair.”
“Well you aren’t wrong,” Kincaid said. He was frowning deeply and rubbing one calloused hand over his chin.
“I think they’re attracted to her. I don’t know why, and I don’t know how, but they are. I think they’ve been drawn to her ever since she got here and likely even before that.”
“The next time you get a weird feeling about a case, remind me to stay behind.” Kincaid sat on the edge of the bed and clasped his hands together. “Well, what do we do now?”
“First thing in the morning, we’ll send a letter to Blackwell Hall requesting additional support. We need to look into Karianna, and we have to be very cautious in doing so. I want to examine the incident reports from sections of the facility where Karianna spent time while she was away from the Yellow Ward since there should be—”
Somewhere above them, a crash sounded that would rival a steamjack plowing through a concrete wall. A short silence followed, and then a steady cacophony of screams began to build into a frenzy. Two floors above their heads, something terrifying was happening in the Yellow Ward.
• • •
THEY TOOK THE STAIRS TWO AT A TIME as the screams carried down to them. Already the staff congregated on the landings of the stairwell, their necks craned upward at the alarming sounds, though none of them made any move to see what was happening. They had spent years hearing about the acts of violence carried out on the third floor of the west wing, but nothing they had seen or heard could have prepared them for whatever was going on. Abigail and Kincaid shouldered past them, their footfalls the only ones echoing in the cramped space. Although Abigail once again clutched her pistol—openly and without fear of it being confiscated—she had no idea what she planned to do with it once they reached the Yellow Ward.
The momentum that carried them up the stairs was stolen the instant they reached the third floor and caught sight of the ward entrance. The reinforced windows of the double doors were alight with chaotic flashes of white light so brilliant Abigail shielded her eyes with her hand. From the other side of the door, the screams seemed to grow louder still. Abigail could not imagine what would make a person cry out like that. She tugged the door handles, only to find the ward locked. Kincaid fumbled out the borrowed keyring, dropped and retrieved it, and then slid the appropriate key home.
Everything stopped the moment he slid the key in. The screaming voices fell abruptly silent, the flashing light ceased, and a stillness filled the stairwell. Abigail felt a chill as she and Kincaid exchange worried looks, his hand still gripping the key and hers clutching one door handle. The silence was oppressive. It took a moment for her to realize she was holding her breath. She peered through the windows. Inside the Yellow Ward, all of the gas lanterns affixed to the walls had gone dark. Only the faint moonlight seeping in through the cell windows served to illuminate the ward, cast in thin strips on the floor as it filtered through the barred cell doors. Her palm was slick on the grip of her pistol, and the silence did nothing to alleviate her anxiety.
Kincaid gave the key a turn and opened the door.
The first thing Abigail noticed upon stepping inside the Yellow Ward was the smell. The aroma was somehow earthy, like loose soil after a hard rain or the slow decay of dead leaves cast from their branches. Her mind conjured a memory of crawling inside a hollow log as a child during a game of hide-and-seek, only to discover it filled with wriggling insects that had invaded her clothing and wormed through her hair. The very thought made her itch.
“Empty,” Kincaid said after looking in the barred windows of the first few cells. “They’re gone. All of them.”
Halfway down the ward, the door to one of the cells had been blown free of its hinges and rested against the opposite wall, its steel frame warped and buckled from some tremendous impact. The force required for such a blow had to be well beyond the strength of a trapperkin. The contents of a dozen books on supernatural entities came unbidden into her mind, offering up the most nightmarish possibilities imaginable.
“That must have been the crash we heard,” Abigail said, nodding in the direction of the battered door.
“A safe bet,” Kincaid said. “Wish I had that carbine.”
“You weren’t very good with it,” she said as they moved.
The sound of singing carried to them from the cell with the missing door, a soft song sung so low Abigail couldn’t make out the words. Though the possibility of what waited in the cell filled her with dread, she advanced as though pulled by the sweetness of the tune.
Inside the cell stood Karianna Rose, as Abigail knew she would. Karianna did not appear as she had before. Instead of her hospital gown, she wore a heavily patched dress. A top hat sat crooked upon her brow, a flower brooch pinned to one side. She held one arm outstretched, and perched upon her wrist was a large raven. The bird glared at the young woman with its glassy eyes, tilting its head this way and that. The singing stopped.
“Where are they?” Abigail asked. “The other patients. What have you done with them?”
“There is a place where we will go,” Karianna said. She offered a genuine smile. Though Abigail couldn’t be sure, she thought the hem of Karianna’s dress twitched as though some other creature moved beneath its folds.
“It was you,” Abigail said. “All this time, it was you. There is something about you the grymkin like, something that’s drawn them here.”
Abigail waited for Karianna to respond, to utter another one of her nonsense nursery rhymes, but no words came. Karianna simply continued to smile, beaming brightly at the two of them as if they were old friends she’d invited over for tea on a hot summer day. Abigail wondered if Karianna
saw the Yellow Ward at all, or if her mind had transformed the drab walls and barred doors into someplace altogether different. She recalled Howlett’s description of the deranged minds in the Yellow Ward, and how they may not see the same world others did.
“We should go,” Kincaid said. He gave Abigail’s shoulder a squeeze. “Whatever this is, we aren’t prepared for it.”
“Where are the patients?” Abigail asked again, shrugging off Kincaid’s hand. “Tell me.”
Again there was movement beneath Karianna’s dress, and this time Abigail caught sight of a pinkish foot no larger than a child’s, each of its three toes tipped with miniscule claws. With another twitch of fabric the foot was gone, and she could hear muffled snickering.
Abigail took a tentative step back, her gaze drifting to corners where shadows collected. There was movement there, too, subtle shifts in the darkness that told of unknown things crawling along the walls and ceiling, inching ever closer. The Yellow Ward may have fallen silent, but they were not alone.
“Don’t cry,” Karianna said.
A section of the floor flew upward on invisible hinges, and from it came a sudden chorus of screams. A trapperkin hauled itself from the hole, but before it could so much as snarl, Abigail leveled her pistol and fired at point-blank range. The trapperkin’s head disintegrated in a gout of black gore, and the headless corpse fell back through the doorway.
Other doors flew open—in the walls, in the floor—and through them came a host of trapperkin, their claws dipped in the blood of fresh victims. A kidnapping of trapperkin, a portion of Abigail’s fracturing mind whispered to her. Throughout the ward, shadows expelled the small, pinkish forms of gremlins, which scrambled about erratically, and the shadows themselves, vast and sweeping, followed after with a life of their own, swallowing what little light occupied the space.
“Run!” Kincaid shouted.
Together they sprinted toward the exit, Abigail reloading her pistol on the move and putting a hole in a gremlin’s chest as the impish creature skittered before her. Though she dared not take her gaze off of the exit, She couldn’t help but notice the mammoth shapes that swelled within the shadows and seemed to reach for them as they fled.
A gas lantern exploded to shower them with glass and heat. Gouts of flame enveloped their path. A second lantern exploded, then a third and a fourth, each blast seemingly timed to intercept them in their flight. Walls cracked, the ceiling buckled, and more doors continued to open on any available surface, each freeing gaunt trapperkin.
Another cell door burst from its frame and struck Kincaid sharply, crushing against his body and pinning him beneath the weight of its steel.
“John!” Abigail yelled.
She snapped off another shot and bent down to inspect the mangled door, already calculating the leverage she would need to free Kincaid from its bulk.
“Hang on,” she said, reloading. “Let me think.”
“Not an option,” he gasped. “No thinking! Hurry!”
Panic rose in Abigail’s throat as dozens of terrors both seen and unseen closed in upon them. She fumbled in her satchel and withdrew another alchemical agent, one she knew to be slippery.
“Okay, push on three!” She splashed as much of the liquid against where the door pressed down on him as she could. She then positioned herself on the floor beside Kincaid, counted, and together they heaved with everything they had. Their muscles strained. Then Kincaid slipped free, the door falling heavily to the floor behind him. A steady stream of blood flowed from his forehead where his stitches had reopened, and as he tried to stand, he clutched at his ribs and slipped on the spilled liquid, forcing her to catch his arm. His face was a grimace of pain.
Abigail handed him her pistol, hooked her arms beneath his, and dragged him toward the stairwell. She struggled beneath his shared weight, and when the army of nightmares closed in, she pulled all the harder. She wasn’t going to abandon him.
The remaining gas lanterns burst into showers of flames and glass, adding to the inferno that engulfed the Yellow Ward. Thick smoke pressed in from every side. The heat of the fires licked at Abigail’s skin and threatened to bake her within her overcoat. Another door opened in the floor a few feet away, and Kincaid shot its owner dead as it emerged.
“We’re trapped!” he yelled. A fit of coughing seized him.
“Hang on! I have an idea.”
Abigail rolled aside the dead trapperkin and proceeded to drag Kincaid through the open door and into the sloping tunnel beyond. Once they were through, she slammed it shut the door behind them. She groped for a latch but found none; she could only hope the smoke filling the Yellow Ward had masked their escape enough to give them a head start.
Kincaid managed to gain his feet, and with one arm around Abigail’s shoulders, the two of them hobbled the length of the tunnel as quickly as they could manage. It was impossible to tell if they were in the same lair as before—something about the smell and temperature of the air felt different. Fortunately, this tunnel also had enough luminescent growths covering the floor and walls for them to navigate by.
Heaps of possessions loomed in their path. Abigail didn’t spare the collected objects much attention as they hurried past, but she couldn’t help noticing nearly all of the items were the stolen possessions of children. Wooden swords, clothing, a child-sized bed with broken slats, aging sweets still preserved in their wrappers. This supported the depiction of trapperkin from the folktales she had read as the creatures preying almost exclusively on the very young. But there was no time to dwell on such details.
Behind them, the door to the lair flew open, and the snarls and mad gibbering of their pursuers reverberated from the tunnel walls. The faint crackle of the blaze enveloping the Yellow Ward was also audible.
“We need another door,” Abigail said as they emptied from the tunnel into a larger cavern. “Preferably one that doesn’t dump us in a lake or some other horrible place.”
This lair was considerably smaller than the one they’d first visited, and it took but a second to spot another tunnel cut into the rock opposite them. Then they were off, Abigail forcing Kincaid into an awkward jog despite his groans. Here the piles of stolen treasures towered higher, no longer confined by the low ceiling of the tunnel, and their great heights helped conceal the pair from the parade of creatures that flooded in behind them. She could hear the grymkin scaling mounds of toys and shoes and trinkets. She could also hear the crackle and pop of the fire, growing louder by the second. She felt heat on her back.
“Come on,” Abigail said, trying to sound encouraging. “Just a bit farther.”
They broke from the burning maze and into the tunnel they’d spied, Kincaid wheezing and leaning heavily on Abigail as she tried to keep him upright and moving. Something behind them burst from the heat—everywhere, the frustrated cries of grymkin echoed off the walls and followed them up the winding tunnel. Ahead was the faint outline of a door.
Abigail hit the door at a run, butting it open with her shoulder and stumbling into cool air and dew-kissed grass. Kincaid collapsed beside her, heaving from exertion. They were greeted by the sound of birds, and above them a crisscrossing of branches partially obscured the night sky.
The door had been made into the side of a small hill, and a steady trickle of smoke now poured from its opening. With the last of her strength, Abigail kicked the door closed and collapsed onto her back, her feet firmly planted against what now resembled nothing more than a patch of grass. Something beyond threw itself against the concealed door once, twice, and then stopped, possibly consumed by flames. The world grew still and silent.
“Well, we made it,” Abigail panted.
“Against the odds, even,” Kincaid said. “Nice thinking.”
“Brains over brawn and all that.”
“There was a bit of brawn involved,” Kincaid said. He started to laugh and promptly stopped, wincing as he clutched his ribs. “I have an idea: let’s never do that again.”
• • •
ABIGAIL SAT IN THE STUDY of her private residence at Blackwell Hall, cross-referencing the contents of her notebook with other sources. Stacks of books stood atop her desk, each with passages marked for ease of reference, some of them with notes penciled in the margins. The hour was late, and a light Ceryl rain fell against the windows.
On the subject of trapperkin, Abigail had a relative wealth of information, though most of it was anecdotal at best. It was the rhyme Karianna had recited along with the brand on Nicholas Boden’s arm that interested her most, and these subjects had proven elusive. It seemed as though she had been through Blackwell Hall’s entire library twice without much to show for it. She had finally turned to more unusual tomes borrowed from the private collections of her colleagues.
She pinched the bridge of her nose and closed her eyes against the strain that hours of reading had brought on. So often, the texts she borrowed were filled with more of the same, and at times she found herself drifting, rereading the same paragraphs numerous times before she could grasp a meaning that ultimately held no relation to the mysteries she wished to solve.
It had been a month since the west wing of the Ramarck Royal Special Health Institution had gone up in a blaze of fire. They had apparently brought the inferno under control before it consumed most of the facility, though the damage had been substantial and would take time to repair. There was no news regarding the disappearances of the patients from the Yellow Ward, though she took some small comfort knowing Boden had made it and was safe in the infirmary. What remained of the wing had been thoroughly searched on multiple occasions, but not a single body had been recovered. The institution had released a public statement declaring the missing patients to be at large, having escaped during the chaos of the fire. No mention was made of an infestation of grymkin or other horrors. Already the institution’s west wing was being prepped for reconstruction.
She closed the book she had been trying to read and set it aside before reaching for the text she had spent the most time studying since the incident in Ramarck. It was a collection of folktales and children’s rhymes, and thus far it was the only book she had found that contained the full text of Karianna’s rhyme.
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