“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. Lindsome 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 good night, 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. 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 pressed its 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 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 put its fist 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. “Marilda died in childbirth, and the doctor chose his 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 of 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 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.
The Year's Best Dark Fantasy & Horror, 2014 Edition Page 12