Episode Nine

Things were coming apart. The thought wound its way through Rose’s mind, a flexing, thorn-studded vine of panic. She had staked everything on the success of her book, on her study of the extraordinary culture hidden among the isolated hollows and ridges of Blackfern County. The weird mythos of the Johns Woods, and her family’s connection to it, had seemed like a gift when securing her research grant. St. John’s Port University had welcomed her as a visiting scholar and opened its libraries and resources to her. If she were being honest, she had viewed every open door as just payment for old wrongs never healed. She had taken for granted the support—even the enthusiasm—of the community here. She had been mistaken; a fact now being made clear to her by the oldest resident of Wickeford Mills.

“It’s time to stop your nonsense, Rose Dark.” Berthe spoke with absolute authority, and Rose did not miss the omission of Mallory from her name. The old woman who from a distance had seemed frail and timid now crackled with an uncanny power. “You came home with something mighty close to greed in your heart, and maybe with a good pinch of contempt, too. Like an outsider, you came looking for ways this place could serve you, digging around in things you don’t understand. You weren’t taught right, but I’m going to give you a lesson now.”

Rose reached for the blazing indignation such words, from any other, would have kindled and found only frightened shame in its place. Her hard shell of pride and anger had cracked since she’d returned. Azimuth House, forbidden by her parents during her childhood, had been her first visit, and though she had left it in a fit of pique, the damage had been done. Her bones had recognized home and ached to return, to fit the place made for them. Her time in the library vault and Franny’s gentle admonition had scraped away yet another layer of the world outside Blackfern County.

“I never meant—”

Berthe held up a hand. “Time’s past for ‘never meant to’. Right now, you’ll listen. Do you know of the founding of Wickeford Mills?”

“Abram Johns founded the village in 1728.”

“He did. But that was the second founding. Old Abram built the village on the ashes of the first, burned decades before. There were three families founded that first village. One was the Johnses. They’d lived in these hills for a heap of time, and back then they was near feral, living cheek by jowl with the spirits of the place.

“Another family was the Darks, come here with their own strange ways, looking for a thin spot. You understand me? The Johns Woods is riddled with them places like a cheese with holes, so they found one and they built Azimuth House.

“The Loves followed them. They was nothing but thieves and false-faces, and the Johns folk could see it. But the Loves was hangers-on of the Darks, like a kind of parasite. Don’t know what spell they cast—it’s said they was fair of form and speech—I guess they must have been.” Berthe’s eyes narrowed when Rose started as though pricked with a pin, and the old woman nodded. “You know the name. Same as that professor man of yours. Can’t say if he’s any kin to that old family; weren’t many of ‘em left after the fire and I don’t guess he’s from around here anyways, so it would be a mighty coincidence. Still, he’s here, ain’t he? Cozied up to a Dark like a tick on a hound. And things is getting bad in the Mills, like a perfect storm will kick up a tornado.”

Rose felt the tilting whirl of a history she’d thought she’d known being reshaped; expanded into the darkness from which it had emerged, faces wild and haunted illuminated as though by lightning. Three families, one named Love. Her mind conjured Tommy, handsome and easy.

For months now, he had been the only soul supportive of her work, always urging her on. Yet lately, she had sensed a hollowness in his interest. It had become noticeable after her failure to secure him an invitation to visit Azimuth House. She had taken his curiosity about her family’s inn for granted, just another sign of his attentiveness. Rose had accepted his ardor without question, had leaned on it in her bitter loneliness. His sudden coolness had been peculiar, even hurtful.

She shook her head. Tommy had his own project to absorb him. He’d only been awaiting the delivery of a research specimen. His preoccupation was natural. As for his name, it was common enough. It was, as Berthe had admitted, a coincidence. Nowhere in her research had Rose come across anything like the history of which Berthe spoke. Perhaps the stories were less history and more legend.

Berthe’s sharp eyes read the thought in Rose’s changing expression. “You won’t have found any of this in the library vault. The old, old histories are at Azimuth House. Your great-gran would be pleased to show them to you. But you must throw over the idea of any book.”

“I can’t just give it up.” Rose shook her curls. “This book is my purpose. My key to success in my field. I’ve accepted grant money …”

“Girl, your purpose was born with you; another thing you’d learn if you went home to Azimuth House and your family. Purpose beyond anything the outside world can offer you.”

Rose’s pained expression became stony. “My brother was born with me. My family kicked him out, just like Mama said they would.”

“That’s a tale for another day. I’ve said my piece. Now, there’s a good chicken stew in the pot and fresh-baked bread. Put that cat down and come inside. I can hear your stomach growling.”

The night came down like a drifting feather, soft and plush. Bats flickered over the darkening and were absorbed into it. Rose, tasked with setting out the butter and utensils on the small round table, paused in the act to watch from the window as the day winked out. The view of the twilit garden vanished to be replaced by her own pale reflection in the black panes. The grey cat twined about her ankles before retiring to a braided mat beside the empty brick mouth of the fireplace.

“Fall’s comin’. Tomorrow we’ll bid September good morning.”

Berthe, at the broad cookstove, ladled up two deep bowls of stew and set to slicing an enormous round loaf into thick wedges that she piled in a waiting basket.

“Here, take these to the table. I got to get a kettle of water going for tea.”

Rose did as she was asked and sat in one of the age-blackened Windsor chairs to taste her stew. She was ravenous and the stew was thick and savory. She watched as Berthe set the enormous kettle on the hot stove plate and bustled about pinching herbs from her windowsill pots. These went into a fat-bellied teapot adorned with a dizzying motif of birds and blackberries that seemed to shift and rustle in the muzzy light cast by the oil lamps. The night pressed against the cabin like a vast black cat. Rose thought she could almost hear it purr; its contentment flowed around and through her as she reached for bread and butter. Berthe joined her at the table.

“You’re hungry.”

Rose blushed and set down her spoon. “I haven’t eaten since my morning bagel and coffee.”

“That ain’t my meaning, though it’s a fine thing to see a good appetite at supper.” Berthe tore a bite of bread from one of the hunks in the basket and dropped it into her bowl to grow soft. “You’re hungry for things lost when you left the county. Hungry for meaning you were denied. You don’t even know how to feed yourself, child. You been pecking and nipping at things that only make you sick. How long is it you been gone?”

Once again, Rose reached for anger that had evaporated. A lassitude swept over her, equal parts weariness and an unaccountable sense of having sailed from storm to safe harbor.

“Almost seventeen years. I left when I was sixteen. When they sent Dash away. My parents were dead by then or it would never have happened. I went to my father’s family, my grandparents, in Boston.”

“You know why your brother was sent away?”

Rose shrugged. “Mama said they would if they could. She said they always send the boys away, but she prevented it. Until the accident. Then there was no one to stop them.”

“You seen him since?”

“No. He would never allow me to visit him.” A tear trembled on Rose’s lashes but did not fall. “We talk on the phone, send letters. I see him in my dreams.”

Berthe ate a thoughtful spoonful of her stew. “Tell me about this Dr. Love you been swooning over.”

The abrupt change of topic and the old woman’s fastidious scowl surprised Rose into laughter.

“I wouldn’t say I’ve been swooning. Tommy’s thoughtful. Good-looking. He’s built a wonderful career for himself. I like spending time with him.”

“Says what you like to hear, does he? Smooths the rest away in bed.” Berthe gave her own bark of laughter at Rose’s astonished expression. “I wasn’t born old. Seen my share of slippery charmers. You’d be surprised.” Her grin faded and she leaned forward. “You be careful with that one. He’s hungry, too, and charm don’t hide it. Leave him be, like you would any poisonous thing.”

Spoons scraped bowls. Hands patted full bellies. Berthe stood and began clearing the supper things, stacking them in the deep soapstone sink and drawing up water with the hand pump. Rose looked around in bleary bemusement. It seemed they’d been talking for hours, but the big iron kettle on the cookstove was just building up to whistle as Berthe lifted it and poured the boiling water over the herbs in the teapot. A bright, sweet fragrance filled the kitchen, and something earthier beneath it.

“Let me help with the dishes,” Rose said, preparing to rise from her comfortable chair.

Berthe flapped a hand at her. “Supper needs time to settle. These dishes will get done in a tick.” She turned from the scarred oak counter with a tea tray in her hands laden with the steaming pot, a pair of thick mugs, deep reddish honey in a glass jar, and a dish of blueberry scones. She carried it to the table as if it weighed nothing and waved a hand over it. “Scones is from Ma’s, honey’s from Azimuth House. You ever tasted it?” When Rose shook her head, Berthe’s lips twitched in an enigmatic smile. “High time you did, then.”

Rose accepted an aromatic mug of tea. “And you grew the herbs. I smell lemon balm and peppermint. Ginger? What else?”

“Just a lick of magic.” Berthe sat and watched Rose add honey to her cup and sip. “You drink that all down now. It’s good for what ails you.”

Episode Nine

Episode Eight

Rose Mallory-Dark sat in her car in the gathering evening at the side of Elder Camp Road. The Wicke brawled by at the foot of the forested embankment beside her. Half a dozen white-painted posts roped together with rusted cable staggered in a drunken line at the lip of the graveled pull-off, glowing like ghosts from a kids’ Halloween pageant. At the edge of the pull-off, the long throat of a covered bridge stretched across the river to Half Mile Island. Half Mile lay curled into a ragged crescent of wilderness, soft and open on its hidden downstream edge where black willow, buttonbush, and elderberry clawed upward from the stone and silt of a narrow beach. From Rose’s vantage point, she had a view of the island’s treacherous end—a dour granite cliff face that jutted into the onrushing Wicke like the iron prow of a battleship, kicking up a white crash of surf. Its dark crown of hemlock and oak tossed against the reddening sunset.

Somewhere over there, Berthe Johns lived alone in a rough cabin. Rose had spoken with several villagers about the old woman and had received a mixed bag of information and gossip. Donna Greenbrier at the Millstone Café insisted that Berthe was an introverted homesteader who conjured prizewinning delicacies from the fruits of her ample gardens. “And her hens are just the layingest birds ever, eggs with glorious deep yolks and beautiful shells. I don’t know how I could serve breakfast here without them on the plates.”

Over a cup of the Millstone’s dark roast, George Peach had told Rose that Berthe was a witch. “My sister’s Connie Peach, runs the bakery and Ma’s Kitchen, and she says Bertie’s a good ‘un. Don’t do no hexes or the like. But I wouldn’t cross her noways. Can’t never be sure about a witch. Still, that old woman makes a mean chow-chow, I aim to tell you.”

Yet another woman, who had overheard the conversation with George, had turned in her chair and tapped Rose on the shoulder. “Honey, you be careful if you’re lucky enough to get talking with Berthe Johns. She’s got roots go back to the founders and beyond, and she’s a strange one. She’s no witch,” here the woman had cast a stern eye on George, “but she has a power. She’s to be respected.”

Rose glanced at the notebook she’d brought with her from the Wickeford Mills library. A white label on its cover read Tales of the Johns Woods: The Folklore and History of Blackfern County, Notes, and it lay on her passenger seat like a coiled rattlesnake, sending out waves of dangerous energy Rose was loathe to acknowledge. She didn’t believe for a minute that publishing the extraordinary folktales of the region would work some dire spell releasing haunts and monsters. Or, she hadn’t. The whispered cautions of those who had shared stories with her, the stern pleas of her family, and the appalled refusals of those who would not speak with her, had eroded that confidence with the inevitable power of the Wicke on stone. Never had she anticipated such resistance to her project. Her initial enthusiasm had been smoothed and worn to a dogged determination to finish and be done, and there were fissures showing even in that. Fine fractures filled with doubt.

Earlier in the day, she had gone to the library to trawl the fragile histories Frances Phoenix kept locked in a cavernous annex known as ‘the vault’. More than documents and photographs languished there. Strange artifacts filled some of the glass cases, their neatly lettered placards prim and cryptic. Rose had touched some of them, held them in her hands at Franny’s urging and felt their subtle vibrations. She told herself she didn’t believe in such things. She was a professional, unearthing the wisdom submerged in folktale and myth, unlocking the puzzles of metaphor. Yet the items in the vault, be they banal or otherworldly, bypassed her intellect and reached deeper for a belief Rose denied. She had picked up a little articulated mannikin of fired local clay and stared into its wide, obsidian eyes, holding it almost at arm’s length. It neither looked nor felt like a child’s doll, its expression avid and knowing. Homunculus, her deep mind whispered. Familiar.

She became aware of the librarian watching her, observing with interest the tattoos on her hands, and she returned the figure to its shelf. “These things are fascinating, Franny. I don’t think you understand what you have here in terms of undocumented folklore. It’s completely unique.” She turned to face the older woman. “I’m sure you know the idea of my book hasn’t been welcomed. Why are you allowing me access to all of this?”

Frances shrugged and waved a hand at the artifacts. “I know precisely what I have here, Rose. It’s you who don’t understand. I hope the contents of this room can partly remedy that. This history is yours, too, and never mind how long you’ve been gone. Never mind how the outside world has worked to erase those ties. Your book … I’d welcome it as an addition here.”

“But you don’t want to see it published, do you? I thought I’d found an ally in you, Franny.”

Frances glided from the vault, tossing a reply over her shoulder. “Come see me when you’re through.”

Nothing in the vault was permitted to be removed, nor were electronic devices or cameras allowed. Rose had spent several hours in the dim coolness of the room, hunched over her notebook at the central table, scratching laborious notes with a pen like a scribe of old. She had worked until her grumbling stomach had driven her, blinking and yawning, to the front desk where Franny sat reading. The library was empty. Outside the many-paned windows, the sun had mellowed into the horizon, and a thread of chill spiciness had slunk up from the river and through the screen door. September was woven into that thread, and the promise of autumn to come.

“I’m sorry to keep you, Fran,” Rose said, glancing at her watch. Suppertime had come and gone. “You should have kicked me out.”

Franny put down her book and stood. “You’re no trouble. I have an invitation for you. Berthe Johns would like to talk with you.”

Rose’s eyebrows climbed. “Seriously? She’s been top of my list of people to interview, but I haven’t known quite how to approach her. She almost never leaves Half Mile, and just showing up at her door didn’t seem like an auspicious introduction.” Rose drummed her fingers on the library desk, her brow furrowed. “She really wants to meet with me? The things she could tell me! She’s got to be a hundred years old.”

“Nearly.” Franny chuckled. “No introduction is necessary. She bounced you on her knee when you were in diapers. I’m to send you out to see her.”

“When?”

“No better time than the present. Bertie’s always home and keeps cat’s hours. You can’t drive onto the island, but there’s a pull-off by the bridge, Half Mile Number One. You’ll have to walk from there. Once you cross, it’s not far to her cabin. She’ll be expecting you.”

And here Rose was, feeling as though she’d been summoned by some fierce fairy queen. She slipped the notebook into her backpack, opened her door, and stepped into the cool, damp air. After the heat of the day, it called up gooseflesh on her bare arms. It inhabited her lungs with lively intent, river zesty and sweet with the vanilla fragrance of blooming Joe Pye weed. The ghostly call of a screech owl shivered over her like a welcome as she walked to the bridge’s entrance, and the descending sun made a sudden lurch lower behind the ridges. Shadow bloomed. The interior of the bridge was a miniature night, and something waited for her there.

A lean grey cat sat at dozy attention just within the bridge’s maw. At the scuff of her shoe, it opened lambent eyes, stood and stretched, then turned to amble toward the dimming light at the opposite end of the bridge. Rose faltered in surprise, and the cat stopped to look back at her.

“Kitty, kitty, kitty …” Rose called, but the cat only sat again and stared at her with bored indifference. When she moved forward, the animal stood and trotted on ahead, its tail high and waving like banner. A guide then, she thought, her amusement turning chilly as the cat continued with purpose across the bridge and then along a dusky path, neither looking back nor increasing its pace.

Rose followed the cat, the trees and hulking laurels reducing the trail to a tunnel. Along the way, she lost all sense of time or place. When the trail opened into a tidy clearing replete with garden beds and hen house, she blinked in shock. Gnarled fruit trees and bushes stood guard at one side of the garden patch and splintery wooden trellises made periodic archways thick with vines on the way to the humble shack that glowed with lamplight. The cat sauntered up the middle of the path and onto the porch where Berthe Johns sat in a rocking chair. Rose stopped on the flagstones before the steps and gazed up at old woman, speechless and empty of thought as a newborn.

“Well, Rosie girl, it’s been long since I seen you. You’re a welcome sight. Come on up and sit a spell.”

A cool breeze set the chains on the porch swing to creaking, and Rose climbed toward the sound like one returning home. She sat on the quilt-covered swing and stroked the grey cat when it leaped to her lap. Her mind remained stubbornly empty of words, all the questions she had meant to ask blown away like a palmful of dust. It occurred to her with sudden clarity that she had come to listen.

Episode Eight

Episode Seven

Episode Nine

Jory Carter had gone missing. Every year brought the disappearance of a hiker or camper from outside the county. or the occasional drowning of a careless kayaker. The villagers of Wickeford Mills would shake their heads in exasperated sympathy. A certain percentage of such incidents was to be expected. Try as they might to keep a watchful eye on these adventurers, the Johns Woods presented a vast and labyrinthian shadow realm riddled with dangers. It was impossible to guard against all of them. It was a rare thing, though, for a local born and bred to vanish as Jory had. It hadn’t happened in a dog’s age.

“He went out a-fishin’ on Saturday afternoon. When he wasn’t home by suppertime, his dad went looking. Stayed out well into the dark hours, making his wife half crazy for fear she’d lost them both. Yesterday, Poke Ridenour got a group of men together and took his hounds out. They found Jory’s rod and gear hung up in a snag, miles from where he was supposed to be fishing, but not a scrap nor hair of Jory.”

Enid Berrybright twisted her hands together in her lap, hands bereft of their usual calm knitting, their quick dexterity fallen into confusion. A murmur passed among the members of the Historic Society. The disappearance of Enid’s great-grandson had called them together weeks before their usual mid-September reconvening in the cozy basement of the little Wickeford Mills library.

Henry Finchwhistle put his big, gnarled hand on Enid’s shoulder and squeezed. “Jory’s a smart boy and a strong swimmer. He knows the Wicke up and down, bank to bank. He wouldn’t have drowned,” he said.

Henry, who had answered to the affectionate sobriquet “Doc” for so many decades he near forgot his rightful name, had delivered the boy. Jory had been the last baby Doc had caught before turning his clinic over to his own grandson and namesake, a young physician who was just plain Hank to his patients and family alike. It was almost inconceivable to Doc that young Jory, quick and lively in the water as a rainbow trout in springtime, would have drowned.

But he couldn’t be certain, no sir. Because down to the post office a few days ago, he’d run into Poke and heard all about how the big man had driven Bertie Johns out to Azimuth House to wish Anna Dark good journey. He’d heard how the two old women had been cooped up together for hours jawing away about who knew what.

Damned late when I got Miss Bertie home, drunk as a wheelbarrow if you ask me, but holdin’ her liquor like a champ. Never give a hint what her and Miss Anna had been chewing over, Poke had told him. Doc, who had been out to Bertie’s shack not an hour before to give her the cursory looking over which was all she’d allow by way of an annual checkup, thought he might have an idea what some of the conversation between the two ladies had encompassed. He was just about to say so when he heard a familiar clatter of hooves and the tinkling of tiny bells.

The sound drew Moira McCreary from her rocker near the cold woodstove where she had been brooding in gloomy silence. Her good eye brightened with sudden animation, and she hobbled to the rear door to peer out the window, her cane thumping across the colorful rug Enid had braided more than a decade before.

“Bertie’s here,” she called back to them. “She’s got that bird with her, what’s-she-call-it … Fergus. There’ll be news.”

Berthe sat for a moment in the pony cart watching Pearl swish her creamy tail. Reluctance rose within her with the black disregard of flood water, sweeping away everything but her desire for the solitude and peace of her little shack. She thought of her hens, their soft clucks and trills as they foraged. She thought of her hives at the end of the garden and the drowsy purr of the bees in the blossoms. They weren’t the fey bees of Azimuth House, just ordinary striped toilers. The honey was sweet all the same, tasting of Dame’s rocket and wild bergamot, rose and foxglove. There were grapes to press and vegetables to harvest. There was bread to bake, savory with cheese and herbs. There were even folks who came wanting simple spells and workings, always good for cash or barter.

Berthe sighed. She was old, older by a decade or more than most of the ancients gathered in the library. It was a hard thing to be rousted from her haven in such times, harder than it had ever been in her youth. She had avoided it as long as she dared, and now one of their own had lost a child. It was time to act. She stroked the rough silk feathers of the raven perched beside her, mulling over what it had shown her in the past few days. There were dark things afoot. Some she understood as square within her bailiwick, though the understanding was repellant. Others, things that had to do with the folks at Azimuth House, were murkier and extended outside her authority. But the two paths crossed, didn’t they? And where they crossed, Berthe would have to follow in some fashion. Fergus rubbed his heavy beak against her fingers and fluffed his neck ruff.

“You coming in or are you gonna sit out there dreaming all morning?” Moira had stuck her head out into the muggy heat to squawk at her.

Berthe climbed down from the cart and paused to let Fergus hop onto her shoulder. He was a damn big bird, she mused, but not too heavy for an old woman. She made her way to the door and pulled it from Moira’s hand as her cousin turned back toward their meeting room with a grimace.

“Don’t bring that old crow in here, Bertie. He’ll shit on the rug.”

“He’s a raven, Moira, and he’s got a gentleman’s manners.” Berthe stopped Moira before they reached the archway and dropped her voice to a whisper. “How’s Enid?”

Moira shook her head, her lips pursed and her milky eye squinted almost shut.

Fergus strutted up and down the old oak library table, pausing to gaze into the eyes of each of the Historic Society members. Doc fished in his breast pocket for the little cellophane envelope of boiled peanuts he’d picked up at the bar of the Lakeview Inn and offered one to the raven. Fergus took it with gentle dignity and moved on, his claws ticking against the wood.

Berthe waved a hand at the bird. “He’s been out twice, having a look about for me. The second time, he brought me news of a nasty thing, a killing maybe. It’s not always easy to decipher what he’s seen, but he don’t bring back news with no meaning. That came from across the river, and I hope it won’t come back to roost in the Mills, but I ain’t confident.”

“There’s always something evil going on in the Big Town, cousin. It’s none of our affair. We’ve got a heap more worry right here.”

Berthe leaned forward. “You’ve said a mouthful there, Moira. That’s our order of business right now. We’ve got a willow walkin’.”

Gasps of indrawn breath and a low wail from Enid met her announcement. Doc crossed his arms over his chest and shook his head.

“I’m sorry, Bertie. I can’t accept that.” He snorted. “Fairy stories! Trees don’t just get up and wander the countryside.” He glanced at the others but found only stony belief in their expressions. “I’m a man of science. Have any of you ever seen such a preposterous thing? I didn’t think so.”

“Our Jory …” Enid pressed her hands over her face. “Tell me your bird knows where he is, Bertie.”

“Enid, I’m going to excuse you from this task. You have enough to do just being with your family right now. Will you go upstairs and ask Franny to come down? She’ll let you watch the desk for a bit.”

Enid blanched, but a hectic red spot glowed on each cheek. “Franny’s not old enough to be a Society member.”

“She’s all right. She’s helped us before. Now go on. And Enid? I’m just as sorry as I can be.”

The librarian joined them as they sat in the grip of Berthe’s news. Frances Phoenix wasn’t even out of her sixties, but she had an uncanny knack for research. Maybe more than that, Moira thought, but only Bertie would know. Bertie knew too much by far in Moira’s opinion. And sat on more of it than was prudent. With only six years between them and the same blood running in their veins, Moira felt the prickle of envy so familiar to her when it came to the Society’s hierarchy. It goosed her into snapping, making her sound like bitch, but she couldn’t help herself.

“How long have you known about this, Bertie? Maybe if you’d got yourself to meetings this summer and shared like you should have, Jory wouldn’t be missing now.”

“Moira!” Doc, who had stood to pull out a chair for Frances, barked. “This isn’t Bertie’s fault.”

Berthe flapped a hand at them. “It ain’t my fault that old sorrow is walkin’. Not sure where to lay the blame for that. But I’ll take my share for not wanting to pick up the gauntlet.” She bent her gaze on Moira. “You know Jory ain’t missing, cousin. She got him, that old water witch. Enid knows, too, but I’d rather not say it out plain in front of her. I took the proof Fergus brought me to Annie Dark, but there ain’t much she can do. She’s got her own troubles, dyin’ be the least of them.”

“Why’d you go to Ms. Dark, Bertie?” Doc had resumed his seat and folded his hands before him.

Moira found she was not yet in control of her tongue. “It was on account of that flibbertigibbet Rose, wasn’t it? I told you all she’d bring trouble on us, scratching things up and fixing to show them to the world. You went to Anna about it.”

“I did. And found only more trouble brewing for my efforts. Let’s set ourselves to the problem at hand.” She turned to Doc. “There’s more than one way for that creature to walk among us. What magic it has, I couldn’t say. But we need to figure it out right quick.”

“I’ll start searching through the old histories in the vault,” Frances said. “I seem to recall something there that might be of use. Bertie, I think you should talk with Rose Dark. She’ll be in today to look at the histories herself. She’s a nice young woman. I’m sure I could set up a meeting between the two of you.”

Berthe stood and bent an arm for Fergus to perch on. “Send her out to Half Mile, Franny. Soonest begun, soonest done.”

Episode Seven

Episode Nine

Episode Six

Episode Eight

Noel Stewart was a timid boy. Skinny, all knobs of bone and faintly lavender hollows. A delicate, narrow house out of which he stared with wide, startled eyes. Naturally, he chose to wait timidly by the door to Love’s Gallery of Flesh rather than accompany Tommy into the locked back room where the darkness seethed with anticipation.

“Your friend is … ephemeral,” said Miss Love as she closed the door behind them and shot the bolt, allowing Tommy to steep in empty night that seemed to have no bounds, her hand gripping his shoulder. “This exhibit is not for the likes of him, young Ian Thomas. This exhibit is for those who would be eternal.”

Eternity, when she activated the subtle lights that pricked holes in the black, was represented by three inked skins that looked as though they could, at any minute, walk about. Rather than hanging from display forms, two of these specimens lounged at their ease on tufted chaises—women with their legs crossed at their slender ankles, their arms draped across the velvet cushions. Tommy felt as though he and Miss Love had interrupted their conversation. He felt as though they looked at him with cruel curiosity. The third specimen, a tall male figure, stood upright (Tommy could not see how this was accomplished) behind one of the others, his tattooed fingers resting on her shoulders.

“How are they so lifelike?” Tommy’s voice was a whisper built of terror and awe.

“Because they live, child. They are shadow concubines of a great Prince, and one day they will return to him.” Miss Love crossed to one of the reclining women and touched her face. A ripple undulated over the skin, and the woman tilted her head an infinitesimal degree to look up at her keeper. “Alas, not until I allow it.”

Tommy moved closer, almost close enough to touch the creature, for it was a creature of some sort and not a mere flayed skin. He saw he had been wrong about the tattoos; they weren’t ink at all, and they slipped and crawled over the flesh in stygian abstractions. Living shadow.

He licked his lips with a dry tongue. “What land does the great Prince rule?”

“If it has a name, I do not know it.” Miss Love shrugged. “Perhaps it is Hell.”

Tommy left the Gallery of Flesh with his mind on fire. He had seen his future, grander than any vista he’d imagined, more demanding of his devotion. He knew he wasn’t ready yet to take up his work, but Miss Love had given him a simple dissecting kit as a parting gift: scalpel, anatomist’s scissors, forceps. He could not contain the desire to try his hand, to make a beginning. He slung an arm about his companion’s shoulders as they walked along the empty street. The older boys had abandoned them, tired of waiting.

“Just as well, Noel. They’re assholes, anyway. I’ve got some biscuits and a flask of tea in my pack. We can have a nosh before the walk to the bus stop. There’s a good spot.”

He pointed toward a decrepit barn of block and timber set well back from the street in the high weeds. The neighboring house had sagged inward, its roof swallowed by rot and neglect. There was no one near. No one to hear Noel scream.

With Cheryl stowed safely in the basement freezer, Tommy drove with brooding deliberation onto the university campus and wended his way through the woodsy lanes to Kinsey Hall. It was Sunday, a day he usually cherished as a quiet prep day for the upcoming week, but the unwelcome presence of the dead girl in his house had robbed him of his solitary peace. Cheryl’s body might be hidden away for the moment, but her spirit seemed to ride beside him in the little two-seater, smug and pleased to have caught him in her web.

Don’t be ridiculous, he scolded himself, his eyes slewing toward the empty passenger seat. One task at a time, Tommy. Compartmentalize! He pulled in a deep breath and exhaled slowly, attempting to shove aside the puzzle of his unexpected victim and refocus his attention on preparing labs and quizzes. Cheryl was mere refuse now, and there were always ways to dispose of refuse. In his mind’s eye, Tommy saw the dark flock of feasting crows in the field across from his front door.

He pulled into the Kinsey Hall lot. The place was deserted. Inside, the Hall was dim and echoing, and the light-sensitive sconces glowed along the walls. The building seemed to sigh around him, stirring in its stony, alien dreams. He was not a man to become unsettled by such things, but lately—on more than one empty Sunday—he had stopped to listen with something approaching dread for footfalls other than his own. They would be soft, padding footfalls; the gentle slap of bare feet on the old linoleum. Tommy smiled at his wild imaginings. The dead here were at his service and held no terrors for him.

He walked briskly past the stairwell to the morgue, past the study labs, to his office door, and pulled his key from his pocket. As he turned the key in the lock, he thought he did hear a sound, a stealthy, muffled sound that seemed to come from the lab next door. He froze, listening with suspended breath. Yes, there was the faintest tinkle of glass, or perhaps of metal instruments jostling against one another. He stared down the corridor toward the lab door. It was shut and no light seeped from beneath it. The rooms were supposed to be locked when the Hall was closed. Tommy withdrew the key from his own locked door and walked on silent feet to the lab.

Standing before the door, he heard nothing. He tried the doorknob. It turned easily in his hand, and the door swung open on deep gloom. The shades had been drawn at the broad windows. He stared in at the bulk of the tables with their study carrels and the row of skeletons hanging on their wheeled trees at the back of the room. His hand crept toward the light switch but halted before he touched it. Something else stood in the half-dark near the skeletons, something pale and wraithlike. Tommy’s thoughts flew to the cadavers shelved in neat rows beneath him. With a convulsive twitch, his fingers flipped the switch, and pure fluorescent fire ignited the gloom.

“Bloody hell,” he said, his breath gusting out on a shaky laugh. “Evie, what are you doing here in the dark?”

Evangeline, clad in her dove-grey dissection scrubs, stood on tiptoe next to Harry, the oldest skeleton and one of only two that were real bones. She rested one hand on Harry’s sternum, the other on his shoulder, leaning close to the skeleton as though whispering secrets in the ear of a lover. Evie’s hair, usually tucked into a neat twist, streamed loose over her shoulders in snarled, dirty whips. In the harsh light, it took on a greenish caste.

“I’ve been waiting for you, Tommy.” She turned her gaze on him, and he felt a chill run through him. Something was wrong with her voice, as though another whispered in tandem with it. “Your research specimen has arrived. Come downstairs.”

Evie turned away from the skeleton and glided toward Tommy. He saw that she was barefoot. A smell attended her—damp earth and vegetation, water and stone, a thread of … rot. He fought the urge to flee from her. She passed by him without another word or glance and padded down the corridor toward the morgue stairwell.

Tommy took a step after her but found he was not equal to the task of following his young assistant into the waiting silence of the morgue. Instead, he crossed to the skeleton. He ran his fingers over the ribs and long bones and scrutinized the fine mechanics of the hands without finding anything amiss. His thudding heart calmed.

“Well, old thing, I guess she did you no harm,” he said, reaching out to pat Harry’s determined jaw.

He saw it then. Two long, even grooves carve into the mandible. He put a trembling finger on them and traced them, thinking about their shape and about Evie on tiptoe, whispering to Harry. Only she hadn’t been whispering at all. The grooves, he realized, were teeth marks.

Tommy was separating from reality. Something magical was happening, something immense. He’d been pushing toward it for years, never harder than this last year at St. John’s Port. He’d found the nexus of all his past struggles and his stupendous future in the Johns Woods at a place called Azimuth House. Now, despite some temporary disappointments, despite the vulgar intrusion of Cheryl Moran, a sign had been sent. A far-away eye had opened and Tommy had been seen. Seen and acknowledged. He dropped his chin toward his chest and floated on the roused sea of his thoughts.

Evie had a crush on him. Of course he had seen it. He had even played on it a bit in order to shift tiresome work onto her willing shoulders, but he’d had no interest in Ms. Peach. Even if he had been tempted, she was too close to him to consider. But now … he traced the grooves on Harry’s mandible once again. She’d been sent to help him, and he’d been too dull to understand the literal nature of the message. Evie was his assistant.

Tommy turned on his heel and strode from the room, down the corridor, and into the stairwell. The wall sconces illuminated the way by making a soft tunnel through the mass of shadow that dwelled in the descent. He heard the scuff of his shoes on the stairs, noted the cold smoothness of the handrail, yet he felt as though he were sinking into deep water, his body dropping through fathoms without check or control.

He’d done some diving on wrecks when he was in his twenties. The green glow from the morgue reminded him of his dive lamp in that underwater blear. He had always been nervous on those dives, fearing to find a shark in the blasted hulls, or some dead thing bobbing like a child’s balloon, and fear was a goad, a spice. Everything it accompanied had more zest, and he had sought fearsome things for the complicated ways they scarred him. Scars as close as he could come to the mind-shattering tattoos he’d been shown in his long-ago youth.

Now, as he stepped into the morgue, he felt the scourge of fear licking over his body. Evie leaned close over the skinny, nude cadaver of a teenaged boy. She crooned and stroked the boy’s face in a parody of maternal tenderness. This could not be the special research specimen he had requested. The corpse was wet and bluish. Water trickled from its hair and pooled on the floor. As he watched, Evie bent and inhaled the smell of the body, a deep, luxuriating sniff that stunned and revolted Tommy. Her whips of dirty hair stroked the boy’s bare chest, and her fingers walked idly over his distended stomach.

“What is this, Evie?”

Tommy’s voice was flat and wary. He experienced the need for caution as the internal whispering of his twelve-year-old self. Don’t let her know she scares you. Don’t let her touch you. The boy he had been spoke with low urgency.

Evie stood from her crouch over the body. She gave the dead boy’s head a casual bat, like a bored housecat with an uninteresting toy, and water dribbled from his blue-lipped mouth as his head flopped to the side.

“Just a boy. He was fishing where he shouldn’t be.” She turned her gaze on Tommy. “You understand that don’t you? Yes. I know you do.”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

In a fluid rippling of light and shadow, Evie rounded the gurney to stand before him. The wild river smell of her, with its undernote of rot, made him light-headed. Don’t let her touch you! Young, interior Tommy hissed this in alarm, but his grown self was locked in a paralysis of terror and ecstasy. He was in the presence of the numinous.

“Why pretend?” Evie’s fingers reached out to touch his jaw. The touch was electrifying. “I will help you, and you will pay for my help.” She turned toward the dead boy on the gurney. “I suppose you cannot keep him. A pity. I will take him with me. Tonight, we will rid you of that other inconvenient fisher.”

Tommy swallowed air. This wasn’t really Evie. Despite the way it looked, there was nothing of Evie in the thing before him.

“What are you?”

Evie’s fingers leapt into his mouth and anchored behind his teeth. He gagged and tried to take a step back, but she had hooked him by the jaw as firmly as a river trout. He had no doubt she could remove half of his face with a twitch of her wrist.

“I am your assistant, Dr. Love,” she said, punctuating the assertion with a girlish giggle. “I will return when the sun sets.”

With that, she released him and strode to the gurney. She lifted the corpse with ease and draped it over her shoulder. A great belch of stinking water erupted from the boy’s mouth and cascaded to the tiles. Evie carried him past Tommy like a bundle of laundry, down the corridor to the freight elevator, and then she and her ghastly prize ascended toward the morning’s tentative sunlight.

Episode Six

Episode Eight

Episode Five

He was twelve years old when he saw the skins, hidden away in a scabrous house along a twisting village lane. The house was one of several decrepit or abandoned buildings in a forgotten neighborhood and presented a dark, blank-eyed visage to the street. A rusted gate with incongruently silent hinges opened onto a wet gravel path that led from the front walk to the rear of the structure. There, stone steps descended to a basement. The solid slab of the door opened onto a gloomy vestibule where a hand-lettered sign announced Love’s Gallery of Flesh, Free to View. Past the vestibule was a long, white-paneled room, its offerings illuminated by discreet pin spots.

Full human skins had been flayed, stretched, and draped over wooden forms, and varying swaths of flesh had been cut from whole material and framed, all of them elaborately tattooed with artwork the likes of which Tommy had never seen. Artwork akin to a diabolic language, spells without words, thick and crawling and terrible in their beauty. The skins seemed to glow and pulse under the soft lights, to emit a numinous quality as though they still housed the essences of their former masters, and the ink upon them was dark as abyssal depths. The exhibit was tasteful and professional in its display—even prosaic—and thus, the shock of its ghastliness was thrown fully upon the viewer.

Tommy, crowding into the cold, barrel-ceilinged room with four of his schoolmates, felt an alarming throb of desire at the sight of the skins. The quiet shuffling of the few curiosity seekers around him faded from his notice.

“Hey, Love! What d’ya think of this, hey?” Robert Gaffney, two years older and full of swagger, slung an arm around Tommy’s neck. “Told you it would be worth ditching class. You ought to ask the old lady what owns these if she’s kin.”

Morrisey and Jeffers, Gaffney’s constant shadows, hooted with laughter and shoved their way past the whispering patrons to peer at something in a squat glass display case on a round table.

“Jesus, Rob, look at this!”

Morrisey’s hoarse, cracking voice whipped out of the small knot of onlookers, drawing stares of disapproval. A woman in a camel-colored coat turned her face to her companion’s shoulder, and the man stroked her back and murmured something into her hair.

“I seen it all before,” Gaffney drawled in a bored voice. “I’m going out for a fag. Let Love get an eyeful. It’s his Gran runs the place.”

The older boy flicked Tommy hard on the ear as he passed him on his way out, the sort of violent affection Morrisey and Jeffers clowned and capered to earn. Tommy did nothing to cultivate such regard, and yet Gaffney seemed determined to draw him into his circle. Giving his ear an absent-minded rub, Tommy stepped forward through the gap the other two had opened for him. He looked down into the heavy glass case, dimly aware that Noel Stewart, the fifth boy in their group, stood close to his elbow. Stewart was Tommy’s age, a pale, slender boy with a woeful face and the viscid voice of a drowning victim.

“Maybe we should go, Tommy,” Stewart said. “This place gives me the creeps all over.”

Jeffers, a hard-eyed ox who had been kept back a grade and claimed the dubious honor of being the eldest in the group, leaned on Noel’s shoulder and rasped, “Don’t be a nancy, Stewart.”

Tommy paid them no heed. His gaze was riveted on the tattooed specimens in the lit case. Three faces, two male and one female, lay draped over wooden, hemispherical forms. The faces had been sliced from their scalps at the hairlines, the cuts running down and under their jaws and the skins peeled from their skulls like masks. The noses and lips had been plumped with small, sawdust-stuffed cushions so as not to allow their collapse to mar the gorgeous inkwork. The curled eyelids drooped over emptiness, slim lines of darkness just visible beneath their false lashes. The edges of the preserved faces tapered and frilled. Tommy reached out and pressed his fingertips against the glass. The desire to touch the faces, to trace the black whorls and patterns, to feel the texture of the preserved skin, robbed him of the ability to speak.

Stewart plucked at his sleeve. “Tommy, the lady’s coming. Let’s go.”

Tommy raised his eyes; his gaze seemed to float upward with the heavy effort of dream. The gawkers had dispersed from around the display case, and the room was nearly empty. Confused, he met the bewildered stare of the woman in the camel-colored coat. She clung to the arm of her escort, limp and suffering. Tommy could see that she hated the exhibit, that it sickened her, and yet she stayed as her man satisfied his macabre curiosity. The man stroked her hand in the crook of his elbow, then wound his arm about her with possessive force, squeezing her ass. His gaze never left the faces in the display case.

“Not her,” Stewart was whispering, now stepping back and tugging on Tommy’s arm. “Her!”

An elderly woman in a silk blouse and a dark suit of masculine cut strode toward them. Morrisey and Jeffers slunk away, and Stewart froze by Tommy’s side.

“Gentlemen,” the woman said, one eyebrow arching, “I hope you are enjoying the exhibit.”

She waited while Stewart stammered out a “yes, ma’am”, then turned her attention to Tommy. “And you, young man? Have you seen what you came here to see?”

Tommy gave the display case a gentle tap with his fingernail. “Why are these the only faces in the exhibit?”

The woman regarded him with the impassive eyes of a forest creature, a measured regard as though sizing him up for a meal. He felt seen in a way he had never experienced, an uncomfortable sensation laden with danger. He wanted to flee the exhibit room, but the skins all about him compelled him to stand firm.

“What is your name?” the woman asked.

Stewart’s hand still lay on Tommy’s arm, hot and sweaty. Tommy shrugged it off.

“Ian Thomas Love, ma’am. That’s why we came, because of my name.” He glanced around at the tattooed skins. “These things are…exquisite.”

“Exquisite,” she echoed. “Not an inappropriate choice of word. You say your name is Love? An amusing coincidence, that.”

The tone of her voice told Tommy that coincidence had played no part in his presence there. She leaned down in a sudden lunge, like a striking snake, and her eyes burned into Tommy’s. He caught his breath, and Stewart let out a little yelp.

“Yes, Mr. Love, I think your name is worth the price of admission to a very special exhibit. Would you like to see it?”

“Yes, please,” he said.

August, St. John’s Port

Crows. Their bluster and raucous mirth rang against the storm-washed morning like a ladle against an empty iron pot. Dr. Ian Thomas Love stood in his open doorway, the steam from his first cup of coffee fogging his glasses as he watched the dark flock in the field across the lane. They were like impish shadows, the crows, hopping and flapping in corvine glee that brought a reluctant smile to his lips. Their playfulness was charming, and yet something was no doubt dead over there. Tommy’s eyes rose to the lintel above his head. Up there, in his blue and grey bedroom, Cheryl Moran lay naked in a froth of snowy sheets. Her death had left no imperfection upon them, but this next part … well, he would have to move her to the bath. Sighing, Tommy stepped back into the dawn gloom of the house and closed the door.

Cheryl had not been one of his students. Over the summer, she had cleaned his house and those of a few other single professors who lived on College Row. As he climbed the stairs toward her, Tommy shrugged against the tight, restless energy of frustration. Cheryl had been a thorny problem when alive, and she refused to give up the position in death. He reached the foot of the bed and stood staring down at the bluish-pale tumble of her, and at the fan of her dirty-blonde hair across his pillows. She was much more attractive this way than he had ever thought her before, and he surmised that it had something to do with her blessed silence.

His gaze crawled over her, and he shuddered at the memory of their sloppy coupling. Cheryl, with her shopworn, common prettiness and her foul mouth, had been neither an appealing partner nor a planned one. He sniffed the air with delicacy and grimaced. Even now, he detected the harsh phantom of cigarette smoke about her. Smoking was a filthy habit, and in the end had led to her demise, if not in the way the Surgeon General’s warnings were meant. He thought of her blunt-fingered, nail-bitten hand waving a crooked cigarette about, poisoning the air.

“Miss Moran,” he had said the first time, “I must ask you not to smoke in my home. You’ve all outdoors if you must indulge.”

This had earned him a sullen look, but she had crushed the end of the offensive thing in the sink and said, “Sure, Doc. Kinda weird you don’t smoke, y’know. Being around them dead bodies and all, seems like it would mask the smell of the … pickling shit they put them in.”

Tommy felt a brief alarm at her words before understanding she referred to his anatomy subjects, then an inward twitch of revulsion for the crude ignorance of the woman.

“It is formaldehyde, Miss Moran, not ‘pickling shit’, and one grows accustomed to the smell of it. The labs are quite well ventilated, at any rate.”

She shrugged and turned away to swab the kitchen counters. “Whatever. If you can get used to that, you could probably get used to cigarette smoke easy enough’s all I’m saying.”

She leaned forward over the slick granite, her ass waggling in its scant covering of denim cutoffs, and he saw the tattoo on her inner thigh. A simple smiley face in black ink, looking as though drawn by a child, its eyes oblongs of darkness that seemed fixed on his own.

“And you can call me Cheryl, ok? Miss Moran sounds like I’m your first-grade teacher or something.” She snorted an unladylike laugh and looked at him over her shoulder. “That’s pretty funny, me being your teacher.”

“Pure gas,” he murmured, moving away from her toward his study. “I won’t need you tomorrow, Cheryl.”

In the sacred space of his study, where Cheryl was forbidden to go, he sat with his elbows on the armrests of a deep club chair and his long fingers steepled before his eyes, thinking about the smiley face tattoo. An inferior specimen, to be sure, but there was something alluring about it all the same. He fancied something savage in it, a predatory lie in the curving knife slash of its smile. Its flat, sharklike eyes had held no warmth. He liked it and felt it suited Cheryl quite well. It was an unexpected amuse-bouche during a lean, hungry time. He had resolved to pay more attention to his housekeeper.

Tommy set his coffee mug on the bedside table and shed his bathrobe.

“Well, love, shall we,” he asked the dead woman.

Bending over her, he rolled her against him and got his arms under her. The sensation of her bare chilly flesh against his own neither repulsed nor excited him. She was a mere collection of parts now. Parts that would need disposal after some minor scavenging. He lifted her with tenderness and carried her to the bath where he stretched her out straight and true in the immense claw footed tub and knelt beside her. The bath was cold, the tiles under his knees like glossy lozenges of ice. He didn’t mind, was used to working in brisk environments, and he hummed tunelessly as he plotted out the morning’s labor.

Cheryl’s eyes were wide and fixed, their mild blue clouded, and the whites marred by purple freckles of petechiae. Tommy grasped her chin and peered at her critically. Her tongue was just visible, pressing outward between her small, nicotine-stained teeth. He rolled her head from side to side in a gentle arc. She had passed the stage of primary flaccidity while he slept. Rigor had begun to set in her facial muscles. He patted her arm.

“I’ll be right back, my dear. We’ll have you sorted in no time.” His gaze dropped down her body until it rested on the smiley face tattoo. “We won’t let your artwork go to ruin.” He ran a forefinger over the ink before standing and returning to the bedroom for his kit.

Elegance of execution was neither always possible nor necessary, and Cheryl had been an impromptu interlude. The woman had been an inveterate snoop, a poor pairing with her braying mouth that he suspected had never known a secret it could withhold. As he laid out his instruments, he mused on how he had acquired his erstwhile housekeeper. It had been his student assistant, a lovely girl with the evocative name of Evangeline Peach, who had suggested he hire Cheryl.

“She lives down on Canal Street, right here in town,” Evie had said. “She’s always looking for work. She already cleans for Dr. Riggs and Mr. Avery.”

Tommy had, on occasion, seen Avery drifting about on campus with his pale gaggle of poetry students, mostly young women whose wardrobes consisted of melancholy and angst. He knew Riggs well, though. The historian had been a fount of information about St. John’s Port, the university, and Tommy’s pet interest—the quaint village of Wickeford Mills across the river.

“If you spend any time over there, you’ll see it’s a very different vibe from the Port,” Riggs had told him, laughing. “Your little assistant is from there. So is this Moran woman, although Cheryl’s been here in town for years. Looking for a rich sugar daddy if you ask me, and willing to invest in the hunt, if you know what I mean.” Riggs had made an indecent gesture with his hips and laughed again. “She cleans my house. Not too thoroughly, but it’s ok. She bartends over at the Ivory Hound, and I’ve seen her pulling taps at the Pandemonium across the river, too. Rougher crowd there, but Cheryl’s no shrinking violet.”

No, Tommy thought, definitely not a shrinking violet. He excised the smiley face tattoo from Cheryl’s thigh with care and set it aside. After some sure scalpel cuts to expose the joint capsules of her shoulders and hips, he made use of an oscillating bone saw to free the limbs from her torso, rinsing the blood away as he worked. The saw was a crude tool, but Tommy had other tasks on his calendar, and Cheryl was not a teaching specimen. Still, he was patient and methodical in his work, almost meditative. She had not been a large woman, and he did not feel the need to remove her head. The limbs fit nicely into two large trash bags, which he secured with duct tape. The torso he folded into the ground sheet from his camping gear.

Tommy surveyed the bathroom. The mess in the bathtub was minimal thanks to the shower curtain and the steady flow of water from the handheld shower attachment. The floor remained pristine, and he had sacrificed only one bath towel. A scrabbling at the window interrupted his perusal of the room, and his head jerked toward it. A large crow flapped on the brick sill, its dark stare marking him before it lifted into the air and was gone.

The evening before, Tommy had come home to find Cheryl sitting at the kitchen table, flipping through trashy gossip magazines. The house was aromatic with Italian seasonings.

“I’m on my break,” she said, preempting his question. “Besides, there’s nothing left to do but run the sweeper. Dinner’s in the oven. I made lasagna.”

He had raised his eyebrows in suspicious surprise. “You’ve never cooked for me before. It isn’t part of your duties, after all.”

“Just thought it’d be nice.” She rose, giving her short skirt a downward tug, and sashayed to the oven, bending forward suggestively to peer in the window at her creation. “I don’t have to bartend tonight. Maybe we could eat together.”

She gave him a sidelong glance full of crafty knowing, and he sighed. He recognized the preamble to a shakedown when he saw it, though the time or two it had happened to him it had not come with such a crude attempt at seduction. What had she found? The basement was locked, so it could not have been the small, dark room where he kept his collection.

“Excuse me for a moment,” he said. “I just want to put my briefcase in my study.”

It was there he became certain. The ghost of cigarette smoke told him nosy Cheryl had gone where she was forbidden to go, but it was the drop of ash near his filing cabinet that sealed her fate. Scratches on the lock spoke of illicit entry. He took his key from his pocket and opened the top drawer. His photos, in what he considered his Options File, were disordered. The candid shots featured several tattooed female students from departments other than his own, the subjects circled in red and obviously unaware of the camera. Cheryl would have recognized several of the girls from the Hound, where the student body often congregated. He closed the drawer softly.

Back in the kitchen, Cheryl had removed the lasagna from the oven and set it on a large trivet.

“I set the table in the dining room,” she said, sullen defiance warring in her voice with a theatrical purr. “It’s nicer than eating in here.”

“Indeed. Shall I open a bottle of wine?”

Cheryl had proven to be practical as a blackmailer.

“Look, Doc, I really don’t give a shit about your pervy fantasies. If you get a boner for some of those sweet, young college bitches, good for you. But I know some guys at the cop shop who’d be more interested than me.” She had leaned across her plate toward Tommy, wine rolling like a stormy sea in the glass she pointed at him. “Probably your boss at the school would have opinions about it, too. Lucky for you, I need my rent taken care of every month. Maybe a nicer apartment, come to think of it. Canal Street’s a pit.”

If Tommy were the type to be blackmailed, he would have thought himself lightly dealt with. He was not the type, alas for poor Cheryl, but he found her confidence amusing and spent some time allowing her to threaten and flirt by turns. She had been giddy with triumph. She also had been an enthusiastic drinker, though impervious to unconsciousness. In the end, he had to help her slide bonelessly up his stairs and out of her clothes.

It was nearly midnight, and not the culmination to the evening for which he had hoped, but her stubborn resilience had left him no choice. He had learned long ago to take his pleasures when they presented themselves, however dubious they might be. Drunk and sated, she hadn’t even fought him when he broke her neck.

Episode Five

Episode 4

Episode Six

Evangeline unpacked the picnic basket in the dappled shade by the river, smoothing the linen of the tablecloth over a velvet cushion of moss. There were chicken salad sandwiches from Ma’s Kitchen and chunks of spiked watermelon. She’d bought a bottle of Prosecco to serve in plastic champagne flutes. Craig liked his booze, but she wanted their date to have some refinement, some romance. She thought of Paris, or Venice, or Amsterdam—places she meant to see for herself someday, maybe even on the arm of Dr. Love … she shook her head. That was a dream for another day. Today, she had this secluded spot by the Wicke and Craig Peters. It would have to serve.

“Goddamn, it’s hot.” Peters emerged from the woods where he had gone to take a piss, slapping at the air in front of his face. “Don’t know why you wanted to hike all the way out here to sit by the buggy river. We could have gone to Mac’s in town where there’s air conditioning.”

Evie clenched her teeth and looked out over the Wicke. It could be wild and dangerous, but it was peaceful here, stretched flat and deep, chuckling through the maze of smooth rocks and pebbles of a beach area prized by fisherman. The only bugs she saw were dragonflies, glittering darts of color over the quiet shimmer of the water. It was a thousand times better than Mac’s, where Craig would only drink himself into surly dopiness and spend all his limited attention on the big screen tv.

“Come have some wine. You’ll be cool in no time.” She patted the cloth. “Are you hungry?”

Peters dropped down beside her and propped himself on his elbow. He picked up a sandwich and examined it with wary eyes. Evie rushed to fill the ominous pause.

“It’s all homemade. The bread was baked fresh this morning, from my gram’s kitchen.” She poured a flute of wine for each of them and held hers up expectantly.

Peters shrugged and tapped her glass with his before swilling its contents. He took an enormous bite from his sandwich and his expression lost some of its irritability as he chewed.

“Pretty good. Give me another shot of that wine. What’s in here?” He plucked away the napkin covering the bowl of watermelon, and the scent of coconut rum rose in the still, afternoon heat. “Now that’s what I’m talking about.”

He picked up a fork and speared a few chunks, the rum teasing a smile from him. Evie smiled back, relieved to have thought of spiking the melon. She smoothed the skirt of her new sun dress and hoped for a compliment that didn’t come. They ate in silence, Peters focused on the watermelon and guzzling most of the Prosecco. Evie emptied her second glass, feeling like a child swallowing medicine. She wasn’t fond of the taste, and the little she’d had was buzzing in her head like a hive of bees. August’s heavy hands weighed on her. She plucked at the thin fabric of her dress and glanced at the water, but she wouldn’t swim here. Peters seemed to hear her thoughts.

“Wanna go skinny-dipping?” He swatted at the hem of her dress. “Get out of that thing and make like a mermaid?”

Evie repacked the remains of their picnic, shaking her head. “We can’t swim here. Too close to the willows.”

She pointed downstream. A few hundred feet from them, four ancient willows trailed their braids in the water. The largest of them had waded out from the bank to form a water-filled cavern of serpentine roots thicker than a man’s torso, its whips of slender leaves falling like a drape before it, tickling the river with a sly tactile intent.

Peters peered at the trees and shrugged. “What about them?”

Evie bowed her head, ashamed of the old fairy tales she’d heard since she was a child. She didn’t believe them. Did she? One thing was certain—she wasn’t going to tell Craig Peters that willows in the Johns Woods could drown and consume an unwary person.

“Big snapping turtles live in the banks around them,” she said, proud of her plausible fib. “You don’t want your dangly bits attracting one of them, do you?”

Peters guffawed and shoved the picnic basket aside. He reached for Evie and pulled her down beside him, untying the straps of her dress and exposing her breasts.

“I have a better idea about what to do with my dangly bits,” he growled, fastening his mouth around a nipple.

His fingers undid the buttons of the dress as he ground his erection against her. His teeth nipped at her, and Evie yelped and pushed his mouth away as her sun dress fell open around her like a parting veil. Peters stroked her golden skin and rolled atop her, crushing the air from her lungs. Evie’s thoughts turned to meaningless static. She became still and passive, feeling an undercurrent of something she thought might be anger, a dark thread of disappointment and disgust.

“That’s it, baby,” He breathed rum into her nostrils as he unzipped and fumbled the hot core of himself into her. “Nice and quiet.”

He took his pleasure with rough abandon, his fist wound in her pale hair. He forced his tongue into her mouth, and Evie gave up the need for air as he thrust and groaned. When he had finished, he rolled to his feet and stuffed himself back into his pants, looking down at her with a shark’s grin.

“I’m gonna have a quick smoke. Be back in a minute.”

He strode away over the rocky spit, pulling his lighter from his jeans pocket and shaking a cigarette from his pack of Luckies. Evie sat up and put her dress back together, her gaze falling on the picnic basket, the empty Prosecco bottle rolled against its side. Romantic. She looked out at Peters, smoking and spitting into the river, and her stomach turned over with deadening finality. No, this would not serve. She slipped into her slim white sneakers and walked toward him, all the words she hadn’t been able to speak for the past few months boiling on her tongue.

Evie had never been through a breakup before, if that’s what you could call the hurtful, ugly scene she set in motion.

“I wanted this picnic to be special, Craig. I went to a lot of trouble to make it special, and you acted like a Neanderthal, as usual.” She had marched up to Peters and blurted out the first thought in her head, blinking away angry tears. “I’m your girlfriend, not some sex doll with no feelings.”

Peters turned toward her with an astonished expression. “What the hell are you talking about? Look, Evie, we’re not engaged or anything. We’re just having some fun. Don’t tell me you don’t have fun with me. You know you like it.” He reached out and stroked her breast, the cigarette fuming at the side of his mouth.

Outraged, Evie shoved his hand away with a cry of disgust, and he staggered back a step in surprise. The lungful of smoke he’d inhaled caught in his chest, turning to a series of violent coughs. The cigarette fell to the wet pebbles with a hiss. Peters’ face twisted into a furious mask.

“Bitch,” he snarled, slapping Evie across the face.

The backs of his knuckles split her lip. A single ruby drop splashed into the water, drawn out by the current into the finest floss, distilled into a piquant essence that swirled away under the nearby willows. The slick, uneven stones of the spit slithered under Evie’s flats and she fell without grace, striking her head on one of them. More blood washed into the Wicke, and the willows tossed in their sleep, the whisper of their tresses abrading the air.

Groggy, Evie sat up on the stones, her hand to her head pressing the tender spot and coming away red. Once again, Peters had emptied her mind with his presence. She listened to a sound like a breeze through the willows, a sound like a chorus whispering her name. Peters stooped over her, his expression alarmed.

“Jesus, Evie. I didn’t mean … can you stand up? It doesn’t look too bad …”

He reached for her, but she slapped at his hands, the dark thread of her rage blooming around her like an aura. “Don’t touch me. I don’t need your help.”

Peters straightened, his nostrils flaring. “If that’s how you want it. Should have never got involved with one of you crazy Wicked Millers.”

He stomped across the spit to the fisherman’s trail and disappeared along it. Evie took stock of her bruises and scrapes. Her scalp injury, messy at it was, didn’t seem serious. She felt like she’d fallen onto a bag of doorknobs, but nothing seemed broken. Peters’ parting shot rankled. The townsfolk of St. John’s Port had long referred to the neighboring village as Wicked Mills, a backward place where old, heathenish beliefs still held sway. Now Evie knew, finally, how Peters felt about her.

She climbed to her feet, her pretty sundress hanging about her like a wet sheet and the umbral blot of her anger stuck to her flesh like char. Her head swam, hair sticky with blood. Her lip felt puffy and she tasted iron. With a humorless giggle, she wondered if this was what 028 had tasted when she fed him the coin that would pay his way in the land of the dead. Of course, Charles was dead. He hadn’t tasted anything. She was almost a college graduate. She must be careful not to conflate superstition and truth. She looked back toward the picnic basket on the bank, and then out over the river. She was already wet; she might as well rinse the blood and silt from herself. The water was shallow and warm at the end of the spit, near the willows, and Evie picked her way across the stones in willful defiance of superstition.

She staggered into the green-gold gyre of the willow’s braids, kicking through the ankle-deep water. One hand leaned upon the strong, ropy roots that curled along the bank like dragon’s tails. The sun had struck white sparks from the hide of the river, and her eyes had been dazzled from the glare. In the sudden, whirling dimness she didn’t see the willow’s trap.

Between the crouching tree’s bony knees, the pebbled river bottom fell away into darkness. A deep pit opened there, extending back into the dense clay of the embankment. There, the river belonged to the willows, and a fierce eddy spun against the current like a hungry mouth, gobbling anything that fell within its power.

Evie’s foot slithered against the soft edge of the pit, and she plunged down into cold nothingess. The hungry eddy seized her, and though she reached up once and clutched wildly at the willow’s mad locks, her leg was already caught to the knee in the tangled web beneath the riverbank. With a satisfied gulp, the river swallowed her, and the willow tucked her deep in its watery cave.

Evie was cached like a treasure at the heart of the willow’s foundation, slender roots questing over her features, sipping at her blood, sliding into her brain. Far above, a breeze began to build. The willow tossed with its sisters in the rising wind, lashing at the air. A keening rose among them as the storm-wind ran through their tresses. The keening became a voice.

“Evangeline”, it called, trying itself on the strange syllables.

While Evie’s body was held tight against the willow’s heart, something very like it rose from the river between the old water witch’s knees. Something with golden skin climbed onto the bank and stood looking along the shady trail toward the university campus. Something with long, pale hair began to walk in that direction.

Episode Four

Episode Six

Episode Three

Episode Five

The inn sprawled at the terminus of the Old Road, the broad shaley sweep of its drive encircling a thicket of white birch and rhododendron. Now that the thunderstorm had passed and the dark had drawn down, the inn’s lighted windows and the thousands of drifting lanterns of late-season fireflies cast a spell of homey welcome. A sign swung gently from a signpost, ghostly as the mist that had begun to uncurl from deep beds of fern and boulder. It read AZIMUTH HOUSE, with the inn’s black honeybee emblem beneath.

“It’s been a spell since I’ve been here,” Berthe said as Poke turned the big, white pickup into the drive and rolled up to the front door. “Didn’t think I’d be back in the flesh.”

Poke cast a shy look at Berthe, who had closed her eyes and folded her hands on her lap. The old wildcat had a hard meeting ahead of her, saying goodbye to her lifelong friend, and he felt a stir of sympathy that was too delicate a thing for the likes of him to voice. Strange, he didn’t feel the same sorrow for Anna Dark who would have to do the dying. The Dark women had a way with death and knew that veiled landscape well.

He remembered how, as a strapping lad of fourteen, he had helped deliver villagers who had passed on, driving them back the Old Road in his pap’s wagon. The road had been easier then, still traveled often. In fact, that’s what the Dark sisters called the dead ones. Travelers. He’d seen with his own eyes the black coach and the team of spirited, night-colored horses stabled behind the old inn.

“That there coach’s bound for the far lands on the other side,” Pap had said, clapping him on the shoulder. “Bound for crossing right out of this world.” He had shaken his head and spit tobacco juice; mannerisms Poke had inherited. “Don’t know how those women manage it. The Old Road ends just over there, but that coach goes somewhere. You watch yourself around them horses, boy. They’ll take a bite right out of you.”

Folks still crossed by way of Azimuth House, but Poke guessed some of the young ones had other ideas. Big town ideas that didn’t fit them and never would. Like his buddy George Peach’s great-niece. Evie just had to go to that big college school where the townsfolk looked down their noses at her, wouldn’t hear sense when George tried to tell her. The world was changing, but some things were best staying as they were. If you were from the Mills, you kept to your side of the river, and the Johns Woods was your university. Didn’t need no fancy campus or clutch of professors to tell you what’s what.

“Corrupting the young folk, by damn,” Poke blurted, giving the key in the ignition a vicious twist.

The rumble of the truck ceased and in the sudden silence Poke thought he could almost hear Miss Bertie’s eyes snap open. She turned her gaze on him as the door of the inn opened to spill light like melted butter over the flagstone walkway.

“Arthur, help me down from here and never mind your woolgathering.”

“Yes, ma’am,” he said, and rolled out to stalk stiffly around to the passenger door.

He no sooner lifted Miss Bertie to the ground than she was surrounded in a flurry of hugging, cooing Dark females who exclaimed over how good it was to see her and whisked her away into the inn. Shrugging, he plodded after them, hoping for a bite of late supper and a frosty beer.

Anna Dark sat in the small library beneath the great staircase, surrounded by her personal collection of poetry and the ancient, musty tomes of the Dark family history; a history inextricable from that of Azimuth House itself. For generations, the chatelaines of the inn had used the little hidden room as their private office, and Anna drew its familiar shadows around herself like a comforting shawl. It would not be long before she handed over the keys and the many secrets of this place to her eldest granddaughter. It would not be long before she stepped into the black coach and traveled the Old Road.

She sighed. There was no pain. She felt no fear, only the frustration of time running short with many things still to be done. They would be done by another. It was the way. And yet, she feared to leave some things unaddressed; she could not see clearly through the murk of her impending death, but she knew grim days threatened. An evil had come among them, though she knew not how or when it would strike.

The door opened and Berthe Johns stood upon the threshold, wrapped in her black rain poncho and looking like a scrawny, weather-tousled crow. Anna laughed and clapped her hands, delighted.

“Berthe! You’ve come. I was beginning to think you’d let me go without a fare-thee-well. Come sit and have a gab.”

Berthe shrugged out of the poncho and moved to sit across the tea table from Anna.

“It’s good to see you, Annie,” she said. “Are you feeling poorly?”

When Anna shook her head, still smiling, Berthe forged on.

“I’m glad to visit you, old friend, but this ain’t a social call. There’s stirrings in the woods. I been feeling them for months, but we have a problem now.”

She drew the willow twig from her apron pocket and dropped it on the empty tea tray where it lay between them like a scorpion. Anna’s smile melted away and she reached out a forefinger to touch the twig. Berthe watched her friend’s face, seeing the confirmation of what she had suspected.

“Word in the village is that one of yours has been stirring everything up, digging up the old tales. Rose, that one that left when her brother had to go off with the other boys. They’re twins, ain’t they? And now she’s back kickin’ up dickens with some nonsense about writing a book.” Berthe held up a hand to forestall whatever Anna had been about to say. “Oh, I know a fair bit about it. The Mills has always been a hive of gossipers. It don’t take no genius to know what might happen if a Dark gets to meddling with old things better left alone, especially when that one is a twin.”

Anna leaned back in her chair and closed her eyes. “We don’t live in a vacuum, Bertie. The village lives off the trade of outdoor enthusiasts from all over, and I’m sure those visitors hear the stories and take them home. A book will do us no harm.”

“Well, it won’t do no good, neither,” Berthe cried, pointing at the willow twig. “I think we can see that. Them stories is history, Annie, dark and deep. They ain’t for entertaining; they’re instructional.” She leaned forward and tapped the tabletop with her finger for emphasis. “You got to try to make Rose see right, Annie, before history becomes the present. That old willow is waking up in a world that isn’t ready for her. Who’s to check her? A handful of old farts what can barely see to their own care?”

Anna gave a shrug of frustration and turned to open a cabinet in the bookshelf behind her. From its depths she pulled two cordial glasses and a green bottle topped by a silver-spouted stopper. The glasses chimed and the bottle trembled in her hands as she set them on the table.

“You’d best pour for us, Bertie. It would be a shame to spill that good mead.” Her fingers brushed the image of the black bee on the label.

Berthe’s thin lips twisted into a mischievous smile that, for a moment, erased the long years from her face.

“Been many a day since we got schnockered together, Annie. I daresay it won’t take more than a nip or two of that honey fire. Ain’t you afraid for your dignity?”

For reply, Anna pushed the bottle closer to Berthe. “Pour, you wild old soul.”

Both women gave in to crows of laughter, and Berthe lifted and tipped the bottle. The tension that had built in the room escaped like air released from a balloon as the garnet-colored brew filled the dainty glasses. Anna lifted hers in salute, and they each sipped.

“That there’s life and death in one mouthful,” Berthe said, smacking her lips and settling back to let the raw heat of the vintage roll through her. “Now, Annie, it grieves me to bring this to you when you’ve got … other things pressing you. Maybe it’s better if Naomi sees to it since she’ll be driving this rig when the time comes.”

Naomi Dark, Anna’s eldest granddaughter, had been preparing all her life to run Azimuth House. She was a capable woman, and Berthe had all the confidence in the world that she would fill the role with grit and compassion. Maybe a tad more thought to the living than the dying, too, being as she was so much younger. Berthe cast no judgement on Anna who, standing on the threshold as she was, couldn’t be blamed for looking only into the shadowed lands beyond. Anyway, the Darks were always looking yonder; it was their way. But there was a heap of warm-bodied concern to look after in the Mills, and Berthe felt her bond with the land itself pacing her bones.

Anna shook her head. “No, it’s on my watch. Bertie, I have spoken with Rose. She’s just as willful as her mother was and she’s steeped in the patronizing modernity of her Mallory kin. But there’s something that troubles me more than one stubborn girl writing a book that shouldn’t be written. Something rotten.

“There’s a man. He’s come by twice. The first time, he asked if he could tour the inn and we turned him away. The second time, he asked to speak with me. We refused him again.” She shook her head. “I can only say he brought the scent of danger with him, something hidden and ugly, like a thirsty blade. Do you understand me?”

Berthe, her expression sharp and serious, nodded.

“Rose came to me next, asking me to meet with him, and I found out who he is. A beau of hers from the University, a Dr. Love. He’s got a powerful curiosity about us that I don’t mean to indulge. I told her to be careful of him, to distance herself from his influence. We argued and she hasn’t been back since. She’s sulking in some cottage on Teaberry Hollow Road.”

Berthe grew still. His name is Ian Thomas Love, she recalled Donna Greenbrier chattering at her. I think he’s sweet on Miss Rose. She recalled, too, the chilly feeling of premonition the name had inspired—a feeling she had brushed off as she had so many worrisome tickles throughout the spring and summer. She tossed back the remainder of the mead in her glass and reached for the bottle, refilling both her drink and Anna’s.

“Well, I’m an old fool, Annie. Getting older every day and most likely too old to see to things as I should. Even that donkey Arthur Ridenour had the sense to get his hair up about the professor. I’ll set some eyes on Dr. Love, soon as tomorrow’s sun peeps out, don’t you worry on that count. I know you got thoughts about all this. Let’s hear ‘em.”

The women talked long into the evening, sometimes cackling in great peals of mirth and sometimes putting their heads together in somber murmurings. The mead emptied from the bottle, and when the mantel clock struck eleven, Berthe reached across the table and took Anna’s hands in hers. She turned them and stroked them before lifting them to her lips. Tears shimmered in Berthe’s eyes but did not fall.

“I’ll say my fare-thee-well now, Annie. Won’t see you again on this side. Who knows but I might not make it across first. We’re damned old, girl. I’ll keep a watch, long as I got eyes to see. I’ll do what I can.”

Anna patted her friend’s hands. “I know you will, Bertie. The old Johns blood runs strong in your veins, born of these woods. Before I go, I’ll set a watch on the Old Road. Somehow, we’ll get the balance back.”

Berthe stood and slipped into her black poncho. “I’ll wager a peck of trouble is coming. Ain’t nothing easy in this life, Annie—well, I don’t need to tell you that. Cheers for the hooch, old girl. Now I got to go find that lummox that drove me here.”

She opened the low door and left her oldest friend smiling in the candlelit library, as bittersweet a leave-taking as she’d ever experienced.

Episode Three

Episode Five

Episode 2

August, St. John’s Port University

The cadaver roster in hand, Evangeline Peach made her way down the cool, dim stairwell to the morgue and dissection labs. The light in the stairwell was greenish, with an underwater murkiness that she found soothing. As she descended, the quiet grew profound as a cathedral hush, and Evie thought of herself as an acolyte in the house of the dead. Below, the working cadavers rested in their plastic sheets in the coolers, seeming to her to express a mild, almost absent-minded, interest in the comings and goings of the students. She found this hospitable and even affectionate.

Sometimes a cadaver came to them that evinced, in her singular perception, a less detached attentiveness. Male Donor 028 was one of these. She had come at dawn, offering up her day free from classes so Professor Love would see her dedication, to release 028 and see him on his way to Dabney’s crematorium. She shivered as she approached the morgue, imagining that 028, whom she thought of as Charles, listened with sour satisfaction to the echoing click of her heels on the chilly tiles.

St. John’s anatomy students called all the cadavers Preceptor and held a solemn ceremony of honor when each body was retired from service. A senior would appoint a small organizing committee from among the classes and arrange with the art department for the printing of invitations.

Evie could have taken responsibility for 028. She could have overseen the midnight prayers and supper by candlelight in the morgue, but she had not. 028 had instructed them through fifty-two rigorous dissections, yet no one had called for the farewell ceremony for him. He had not been a friendly Preceptor.

Dr. Love, to whom she had been assigned as an assistant through the student work program, seemed bemused by the rich superstitious traditions of the anatomy classes. He did not disallow their practice, content to observe his students’ odd reverence.

“What is it that compels students to name a specimen, Evie,” he’d asked when he found that she referred to 028 as Charles. “Do you think it cares what you call it?”

She had blushed and stammered. “I guess it just makes the dissections seem less brutal.”

“Anatomy is a brutal science. We peel back the curtain of the flesh, and we muck about up to our elbows in the guts. There is no room for sentimentality about it, only for precision and attentiveness.” His gaze had felt like a burning lash. “I urge you to embrace that perspective, my girl. You’re too talented a student to indulge in soft-headed fancies, but you must do as you please.”

She had murmured a weak assent to his back as he strode away down the corridor to his office. She would have assented to anything he had said, no matter how preposterous. He had called her ‘my girl’, and nothing else mattered.

Evie opened the door to the morgue, triggering the glowworm radiance of the utility lights that ran along the baseboard of the room. The tiled floor, with its complicated green and white mosaic pattern and its heavy iron drains, swam into romantic soft focus. She stepped inside, her eyes on the wall of cooler drawers, and felt about for the light switch for the overheads.

Icy fingers touched her own in a fleeting caress. She did not pull her hand away. Instead, she closed her eyes and counted to ten. The dead fingers slithered on her wrist, feeling for the heat of her pulse, and then were gone like dissipating fog. She flipped the switch and flooded the room with the clean glare of fluorescent light. She had not stepped forward for 028, and now it was too late. The funeral home’s understated van would arrive in a few minutes at the rear doors. She was glad the one she called Charles would soon be fed to the fire.

The drawer housing 028 rolled out with silent ease. Its occupant had been tucked into a body bag with handles along its sides, ready for transport. Evie hesitated, her fingers hovering over the zipper.

Girl…

The voice, a whisper that could have been the whir of the room’s fan but wasn’t, drew out thin and was lost in a gargling gasp. A rustle from inside the bag, equally faint and open to interpretation, decided Evie. She grasped the zipper and pulled, exposing the leering jaws of 028.

“Preceptor 028,” she said, her voice cracking, “Charles. You have been retired. Thank you for your instruction.”

She pulled a dime-sized iron wafer from her lab coat pocket and offered it to the toothy rictus, her shaking hand tapping the metal against the yellowed enamel. What would she do if he refused it; refused to move on? Would he remain in the morgue, animating cadavers and frightening students? She pushed the iron against his teeth with more insistence.

The wall clock ticked through three endless seconds, and then 028’s jaw creaked open just enough to accept the iron coin. Like feeding a parking meter, she thrust it inside and stepped back, but whatever prankish spirit had hovered about the cadaver had gone. Evie patted perspiration from her forehead with a white sleeve, jumping just a little when the buzzer at the rear door announced the men from Dabney’s. She zipped up 028’s bag with brisk efficiency and went to let them in, checking that she had the transfer form uppermost on her clipboard.

As the trim, grey van trundled away, Evie turned and looked up at the windows of Kinsey Hall. It was known on campus as The Keep because of its great round tower that housed at its base the Victorian-era anatomy theatre, still used for lectures and presentations. Her gaze traveled across the dark sandstone blocks of the building to the corner windows of the second floor above the morgue. Dr. Love’s office. She wondered if he was there, behind the Venetian blinds, perhaps looking down on her. She bent her head and hugged the clipboard to her chest as she hurried under the black awning above the morgue’s back entrance. She scurried across the lobby to the waiting freight elevator, her heart aflame, and stabbed the button that would take her down to the early-morning peace of the morgue.

Instead of peace, she found Craig Peters waiting for her, trim and aggressive in his St. John’s Port police uniform. He lounged against the battleship of a desk in the corner, impatience stamped into his sulky pout. The mirrored lenses of the sunglasses he seemed never to remove captured the glare of the overhead lights in white, blazing lozenges.

“About damn time. One of the brainiacs upstairs said you were down here.” His lips crawled upward in an ill-humored smile. He nodded toward the door of 028’s former resting place. It had been left slightly ajar. “Let one of ‘em out, I see.”

Evie crossed to the drawer and closed it, her mind gone blank with confused emotions. Craig had that effect on her. When she turned to address him, she found him close behind her. She took a step backward and felt the cold metal of the cooler door bite between her shoulders. Her breath huffed out in a startled squeak, and Peters pressed against her, his hands on either side of her head. He leaned in until his lips tickled hers.

“Starting my shift soon. Thought to myself, what do I want more—coffee and a Danish, or a piece of this …”

His right hand drifted down, over her breast and hip, to the hem of her skirt. He tugged it upward, fingers crawling.

“Not here, Craig,” she whispered. Her mind, empty as outer space, could conjure no authority for her voice. The clipboard clattered to the floor.

“Yeah, here. Take you five minutes.” Peters fastened his mouth on hers, nipping at her bottom lip. She felt it bloom, plump and tender, under the assault. He stepped back to undo his zipper. “C’mon now, Evie.”

She knelt next to the clipboard, the tiles like shattered ice beneath her knees. He’s my boyfriend, my town cop boyfriend, she thought—but she was never sure about that and the sense of achievement the thought often brought her wouldn’t come. She wasn’t sure how Craig felt about her, or if he felt anything at all more noble than lust. Every time she was with him, her mind was a silent void that offered up her body like a sacrifice. It wasn’t without its pleasures, demeaning as they often were, but she felt only the rattle of withered romantic hope in her heart. They were supposed to have a picnic by the Wicke tomorrow. She’d chosen the spot for its seclusion and beauty. Maybe romance could still bloom. She listened now to his panting above her, the creak of his gun in its holster close by her ear, and satisfaction came from a different avenue of thought. Dr. Love … Tommy …

When Peters left, Evie brushed her teeth in the ladies’ room and reapplied her lip gloss. In the mirror, her face was as pale and expressionless as a cadaver’s. Dreamy and perfect in its serenity. She fluffed the hair her boyfriend had clutched in his fists and wondered what 028—Charles—would have thought about Craig’s visit. The corner of her mouth lifted in dark amusement. Nothing kindly, she was sure.

“You’ll graduate this fall, Miss Slutty,” she whispered to her reflection. “You’ll have a real college degree and a way out of poky Blackfern County.”

The Evie in the mirror leaned a few inches closer, her cheeks flushed, her gaze fierce. “What about your precious professor? You’ll miss your chance. That Dark bitch will have him for sure if you leave.”

“There’s plenty of time between now and graduation.” Evie turned away from her savage reflection with a shiver and floated toward the door. “Anything can happen … Tommy thinks I’m talented. He called me his girl.”

In the Kinsey Hall lot, her battered Volkswagen remained the only car. Dr. Love’s sexy little roadster was not there, and the Hall’s anatomy wing felt suddenly immense and empty enough to make her stomach drop. The sun had ignited a pink and lemon ribbon behind the treetops, but there was rain in the bellies of the clouds crowding in from the west. Evie pointed her car toward the town below the University and wound her way down the hill. She passed Dabney’s Funeral Home without the slightest thought for 028 being reduced to ash in its basement. She turned onto the iron truss bridge that took her across the Wicke and home to Wickeford Mills.

The Peach family bakery had, over the years, swallowed its neighbors until it extended to the corner of Market and Second Street, where it terminated in the small eatery called Ma’s Kitchen. Evie found her grandmother there, slinging eggs and sausages, her ancient waffle irons smoking with their jaws fastened around toasted pillows of Ma’s secret batter. Not even the Millstone Café out on Elder Camp Road could compete with that melt-in-your-mouth goodness, and Evie felt a stir of pride. She squashed it with a scowl, slouching forward to be gathered in Ma’s soft-but-mighty embrace when the woman spotted her in the kitchen doorway.

“Evangeline, up so early! Girl, I thought you had no classes today.” Ma turned to stack waffles and plate breakfasts.

Evie sat on a tall stool by the ovens and smoothed her skirt. Confused emotion roiled in her brain once again, but this time it was a messy tangle of love and claustrophobia. She belonged here, in this village and in this bakery, in a way she knew would be envied by many. Why did she feel like a trapped animal, ready to gnaw off her own foot to escape? She sighed. There was more to life than bread and pastries. More than the same people with the same dull interests, day after day. She’d already found it to be true among her classmates.

“I had to go take care of something at school, but I have the rest of the day free.” She pointed to the aromatic pot puffing and burbling beside a double stack of thick-lipped white mugs. “Can I have some coffee?”

Ma patted her cheek. “You take these plates out to Ronnie and Cyril before they start chewing up the napkins, and I’ll make you a whole breakfast. You’re gettin’ skinny.” Ma gave her a gentle pinch, then turned to bellow toward the rear screen door. “Harriet, you’ve lipped enough of that cigarette. We’ve got orders up.”

Evie picked up the plates with practiced skill, snatched the coffee pot from its warmer, and waded into the happy roar of conversation and laughter that was the morning service at Ma’s.

“Little Evie,” old Cyril Hornbloom rumbled, slapping the table. “Not at the big school today?”

Evie set the breakfasts in front of the stocky mechanic and his son, feeling as though she were hovering above her body. “No sir, not today.”

Outside the big plate glass window, she saw witchy Berthe Johns turn her pony cart onto narrow Second Street, headed for the rear lot of Ma’s. Weird old crone, Evie thought while a wild yearning to run to the ancient woman, as she had when a child, shivered through her.

Episode 2

Episode One

Episode Three

Berthe had little enough to do with folk, keeping herself mostly to herself for all her long life in the three-room shack on the river island the village called Half Mile. Yet even she could not avoid hearing gossip when she made her weekly trip to market with her eggs and pickled wares.

Only last week, on a hot and stifling Friday morning, she had hitched sweet old Pearl to the pony cart and driven into the Mills with five dozen good brown eggs and sixteen pints of chow-chow. Her only thought had been to turn an honest dollar and get back to take in her bedsheets from the clothesline before a thundershower.

Her first stop had been the Millstone Café, where Donna Greenbrier was sure to pay handsomely for half of the blue-ribbon relish and all the eggs. Berthe had guided Pearl into the shade of the great oak near the door of the converted mill and hopped down from the cart, light and spry as one of her birds. As she turned to lift down the crate of goods, she had been accosted by that aging ox, Poke Ridenour, a personality she tried mightily to avoid on her trips to town.

“Here, old woman,” he had bellowed, “let me get that for you.”

He reached over her and plucked the heavy crate from her hands with ease.

“I ain’t deaf,” she said, pronouncing it deef. “And I don’t need your help, neither, Arthur Ridenour.”

She detested nicknames, and Poke was surely the worst she’d heard. Poke hee-hawed as though she’d flirted with him, and swinging on his heel, strode toward the café door.

“No problem at all, Miss Bertie. Why, this here crate is bigger than you and twice as heavy.”

The Millstone was Wickeford Mills’ answer to fine dining, a place to bring a date or a spouse on an anniversary and be assured of a quiet table and a flickering candle. It boasted a rustic romanticism with its smooth plank floors and exposed beams, the age-blackened water wheel on view beyond the riverside windows. The smell of the mammoth fireplace, old smoke and older stone, haunted the dining room year-round, enlivened during the cold months by the clean tang of live flame.

Wide mill-sawn planks formed a lacquered L-shaped counter that served breakfast and coffee to the morning stool-perchers and wine in the evenings, mostly to groups of village women looking for an excuse to put on some lipstick. Berthe, on her way home from Historical Society meetings, had seen them marching into the café from the graveled parking lot—chattering book clubbers and recipe swappers; Millicent Gunn from the post office and her knitting pals; even the ladies from Azimuth House now and then.

Mornings were for the old-timers like Poke and his cronies George Peach and Denny Clovegood. They came for the big country breakfasts and to chew over the village news like the gossiping old women they really were. She could see George and Denny, over in the corner behind the big chimney at the table they thought of as theirs, slurping coffee and smacking their lips, waiting for Poke. Berthe indulged in a soft tsk and averted her gaze. She was sure, on such a beautiful morning, there was some use to which all that sagging muscle could be applied besides holding down chairs in the Millstone.

She stepped up beside Poke who set her crate of wares on the counter and banged the bell for Donna, as if the one that had jangled above the door upon his entrance were not enough. Affecting to peer around the wall of wine bottles toward the kitchen, he said, “You know about the troubles the Darks is having, don’t you Miss Bertie?”

He kept his nose pointed toward the kitchen, but his eyes slid sideways to watch her reaction. Berthe did not look at him, but the thin line of her mouth tightened. He tried again, keeping his voice conspiratorially low.

“I don’t mean old Miss Anna getting ready to pass. A ‘course you knew that. I mean that young Rose, Giselle’s girl, coming home and stirring up a ruckus. Wanting to hear all the old stories and put ‘em down in some book she’s writing. You must’ve heard about it at the Historic Society meeting. Them geezers is all in a lather about it, beggin’ your pardon.”

The old woman’s head turned until her bird-bright gaze caught at the blue glitter of Poke’s eyes.

“Gossip is especially unbecoming in a man, Arthur.”

Donna sang out a be-right-with-you from the kitchen. Poke turned toward Berthe.

“Well, I ain’t trying to gossip, Miss Bertie. That girl’s raking things around like she don’t know no better. She’s roped some professor from the university into it, and he’s meddling around where he don’t belong. Right snooty old clam he is, too. I’ve half a mind to teach him some manners.”

“You jackass.”

Despite her disinclination for Poke’s company, Berthe felt a tremor of fear for the man. He would be forever poking under rocks and into dim corners, looking for dragons to slay. His nickname was well-earned.

“You’ll keep your snout out of that trough if you know what’s good for you. Now go eat your breakfast with those other two asses before they stretch their ears any longer.”

Undaunted, Poke grinned down at her and tipped her a saucy wink. “Yes, ma’am.”

Berthe, watching the big man stroll toward his buddies, noted the little hitch in his step. She always thought of him as a giant boy—and with his reckless nature he did not disabuse her of this illusion—but he was growing old. The realization startled her. Time flowed around her like the Wicke around a stubborn boulder, making few changes that troubled her in her island fastness.

She had found it easy to pay no mind to the march of the years, her internal calendar marked only by the turn of the seasons, what was ready to harvest, or what task needed done. She was nearly a century old, though she seldom considered her age. It was inevitable that in such a span of time she would bid farewell to friends and watch the face of the village change, but this year was different.

The past spring had brought with it a resurgence of more than sap and leaf. That prodigal girl, Rose Dark, had returned to the Mills bright and shiny with urban polish and fancy degrees. She’d got herself a university job across the river, but it was here among her people she’d settled. Well, that’s all right, Berthe had thought, but the girl had a reason well beyond indulging in the comfort of kin. Poke hadn’t been wrong about it throwing into a flap the group of elders the villagers called the Historical Society. Berthe ruminated on the last gathering in June.

Moira McCreary, ringing the little silver bell that called their meetings to order, had fixed them with the uncanny gaze of her one milky eye, and pronounced, “Something’s a-stir in the woods, and I say it’s that Rose Dark’s doing.”

“According to you, Moira, something’s always a-stir. You’re the darndest doom-monger in Blackfern County.”

That had been Henry Finchwhistle, his deep drawl thick with amusement. The other members of the Society had chuckled and nodded, but Berthe had rapped the table with her knuckles, commanding silence. The oldest of the old, her interest gave any topic weight.

“I’ve felt it, too. An eye opening that ought to be sleeping.” She had looked around the circle, watching the laughter fade from their faces. Turning to Moira, she had said, “Rose has been away a long time, cousin. It’s good to have the child come home. I know her folk feel that way. What makes you think she’s got anything to do with it?”

Moira’s opalescent eye had rested upon Berthe. “Mebbe you ain’t in town enough to know, Bertie, but that girl’s been digging and questioning ever since she got here. She’s been putting down the old stories in a book she says she’s writing. Calls it folklore and is fixing to show it to the world. She’s been traipsing through the woods with a camera. She’s been interviewing folks as should know better than to cast attention on such things.” Moira shook her head. “She’s no child, Bertie. She’s a woman grown, strong willed like she’s always been. She’s been gone too long and forgot how it is here.”

Enid Berrybright raised her eyes from her knitting, the soft evening light winking from her spectacles. “Her parents aren’t alive to counsel her. Who knows what she’s been taught? But she’s a Dark, never mind that bit of Mallory her mother married, and a twin to boot. You know what that means.”

Berthe did know what it meant. She recalled the trouble with Giselle’s twins, a boy and a girl, a pairing destined for grief. There had been dark days before the boy, Dashiell, had been sent away. His sister had left shortly after, run off to the Mallory grandparents in Boston, and that had been an end to it. The Dark women had closed ranks around their loss.

Now Rose was home and causing trouble once again it seemed. Berthe had ignored it—for the sake of her old friend Anna Dark, the girl’s great-grandmother – but mostly because she wanted only to go on as she always had. Midsummer had slipped into the fierce heat of July, and Berthe had left her island as little as possible. She had avoided the Society meetings and paid no heed to their phone calls. When Henry had come by her shack, she thanked him for his concern and turned him right around. The disturbing tremor in the air had not gone away, but it had quieted—and then a note had come to her with a great amber jar of honey.

Anna Dark, as old as she and the matriarch of Azimuth House, would travel the Old Road soon. The stewardship of the forest inn would pass to her eldest granddaughter. Anna’s scrawl still bore the firm lines of a strong temperament. The note had read, “Come soon, old friend, for I shall cross before the last leaves fall.”

The quiver in the air had grown stronger, a thrum of awareness, and still Berthe cleaved to her solitary ways. The days had slipped into weeks, and she had not gone to the waystation for the dead where her childhood friend awaited passage in the black coach. As that guardianship waned, Berthe was forced to ponder what had come knocking on forgotten doors, and whether she could do anything now to bar its entrance. An unaccustomed sense of urgency had surged through her veins.

“Poke’s wrong about Rose.”

Donna Greenbrier materialized from behind the wine racks where she had been eavesdropping. “She isn’t doing any harm. That’s her in the back by the windows.” She pointed to a delicate, dark-haired woman who peered with intense concentration at a laptop on the table before her. A coffee cup and a half-eaten muffin had been pushed to the side to make room for a sheaf of dog-eared papers.

“Most mornings, she comes in to work at that table. Says it’s lonely at her cottage. I know some of the older folks are upset, but she’s just recording old fairy stories we all heard growing up. Rose says there isn’t anything else like them, and I guess she’s an expert. Her book could put Wickeford Mills on the map. Times are different now, you know.”

Before Berthe could comment on this meaningless assertion, Donna raced on.

“And that professor friend of hers, oh! He’s a fine-looking man. Real nice, too. He comes in sometimes and just brightens the place right up. Last time, I gave him a free muffin with his coffee, and he kissed my hand!”

Berthe was astonished to see a blush steal across Donna’s face, accompanied by a girlish giggle. “He has an accent like Sherlock Holmes. Have you met him?”

“No,” Berthe snapped, exasperated by both her fretful thoughts and Donna’s hormonal silliness.

She had to get on to Ma’s Kitchen with the rest of the chow-chow, and she had no time to waste listening to the café owner moon over the newest thing in pants to visit the village. She wished for the isolated peace of her garden, irritated as thoughts of the shady entrance to the Old Road superimposed themselves with nagging insistence.

“Going to have to ask seventy dollars today. I’ve got elderberries coming on. There’ll be jelly for you soon, and syrup if you want it.”

Donna flashed a mouthful of snowy porcelain veneers.

“I sure would.” She punched open her cash register drawer and counted the bills onto the counter. “You know, Miss Berthe, I’m happy to see a nice, university gentleman around here.”

Berthe snorted. “Why should he be coming over here? Town folk stay in the town.”

“He says our village is quaint. He’s got genuine charm and sophistication, and I think he’s sweet on Miss Rose.” Donna said this with a touch of wistful jealousy. “He’s not like the rest of them over there.”

“Give him time.” Berthe gathered up her cash and stuffed it into the little patchwork pouch slung across her body. A shiver of premonition walked over her like a cool, damp ghost. “What’s this Galahad’s name?”

“It’s Ian Thomas Love. Isn’t that distinguished? But he likes to be called Tommy. He’s been dropping in fairly regular since May. He likes my apple crumble.”

A disturbance in the leaves of the nearest maple brought Berthe’s attention back to the bridge beneath her feet, and she peered out of the dimness into the hard sunlight. A soft, hollow croak answered the notes she had sent out on the breeze. She shuffled her boots a little bit closer to the entrance of the bridge.

“Come on down. Got something for you.”

A bit of shadow detached itself from the tree’s canopy. With a sound like the rustle of a taffeta skirt, a raven floated to the ground before her. It turned its head and regarded her with a lively eye, fluffing out its neck ruff. Berthe reached into another pocket and drew out a limp mouse by its tail.

“For your trouble,” she said, dropping the plump corpse in front of the bird. “Go on and eat.”

The raven strutted up to the mouse and stabbed at it with its heavy beak. In two gulps, the offering disappeared. In the distance, where the blue sky was just beginning to tarnish into gunmetal, thunder turned in its sleep. The raven looked up at Berthe and this time she thought she could detect in its gaze a business-like practicality. It was ready to deal.

“Lend me your eyes,” she said.

After a brief whispered directive, the bird leaped into the air and sailed away upriver, passing over the university and the high end of the hilly town of St. John’s Port before banking back over the deeps of the Johns Woods. Berthe trudged back to her shack, where the storm breeze waltzed in the windchimes. It’s coming, she thought, and realized it wasn’t the storm that worried her. If it ain’t already here. Shoulda paid more attention when I got the first tickle. She sat in the rocking chair on her little porch and waited for the raven to bring news.

The bird returned with the last light, bloodied and bedraggled. The rain had begun, pelting the tin roof, and Berthe went out to collect the raven from the clematis-covered porch rail where it had flopped in weary relief. Back in her cozy kitchen, it dropped a willow twig into Berthe’s outstretched hand.

She felt over the bird’s light frame and found nothing broken. She patted it dry with a warm towel and offered it a handful of unsalted peanuts. The raven purred to itself, and Berthe held up the willow twig to the dim lamplight. Burgundy veins, fine as hair, lay dark within the long green leaves. Burgundy suffused the twig and oozed from the torn end, a stain of malignant vitality. Berthe knew of only four trees in all the Johns Woods like the one from which this twig had come. She rubbed the bloody sap between her fingers.

“This is some bad news, bird,” she said. “I don’t reckon you’re having a joke on me. Is she walking?”

The raven tilted one dark eye toward her, clear and steady. An eye that could stare down the devil himself. Berthe sighed and addressed herself to the hateful implement hanging on her wall; an old, hardwired telephone. It was rare she used it, and she thought it was just another sign of things going wrong that on this occasion she would have to call that rascally Poke Ridenour. It rang eight times before he answered.

“Arthur, get out here and give me a ride to Azimuth House,’” she barked into the receiver. “It’s high time I paid my respects to Anna Dark.”

Episode One

Episode Three

Episode Two

Once there was a stand of weeping willow trees along the edge of a river, and those trees were aware and alive in a way their kin beside the farm ponds were not. The oldest among them was a stooped and gnarled harridan, with her thick green hair hanging over her face and drooping in the water.

She squatted at the very lip of the river, her knees knobbed with bending, her long grey roots fastened deep into the bank and flowing under the ground behind her like the terrible subterranean train of a queen’s robe. Beneath her, in the deepest shadow of her bent body, was a cellar – the door of which was hidden by the black pool the river formed there – and in the cellar were the bones of those she had drowned.

The willow and her sisters were water witches, with power over the river that flowed beneath their snaky whips and over the creatures that lived in the water. Long ago, they had been beautiful maidens, traveling the river on colorful barges fluttering with streamers, candlelit at night.

But they had been cruel and wicked. Using their beauty as a snare, they robbed and murdered the young men of the countryside, until they chanced upon the innocent son of Wise Mother Johns and made him a victim of their charms.

When they had accomplished the evil deed, the young man’s blood was taken up by the roots of the forest trees, who cried out that the river maidens had killed a Prince of Witches. The maidens grew frightened, the more so when they heard the thunder of Mother Johns’s approaching footfalls.

Trees cracked and boulders shattered. Leaves were stripped from the branches in the gale of the forest witch’s wrath and grief. The river itself stood up in its bed like the waves of a storm-ridden sea, dashing the gay barges to bits. The maidens could not escape, and Mother Johns appeared before them, a towering giantess built of the forest itself.

Though they begged and wept, though they tore their breasts and hair, the maidens could not move Mother Johns to mercy. She cursed them, compelling them to stand always at the side of the river where they cowered, and where they had spilled the blood of her only son. They were turned to willows on the instant, their long lithe limbs fusing to the earth, their hair falling about them in mad green tangles.

And yet, the willow sisters had some magic of their own. They became fisherwomen, trawling the shallows for unwary creatures, and, best of all, for unlucky river travelers.

They set their snares and caught children sailing paper boats, lovers trysting, women bathing, men fishing. They perfected their murderous arts, and after many years, they learned how to walk again. But that, my dears, is another story.

--from Tales of the Johns Woods, compiled by Rose Mallory-Dark

August, Half Mile Island, Wickeford Mills

Berthe Johns stood in the shadowed mouth of the covered bridge known to the Wickeford Mills Municipal Association as Half Mile Number Two, or sometimes plain Number Two. Her toes in her battered army surplus boots (ten dollars at Shepphard’s annual sidewalk clearance sale) just touched the line of sunlight beyond which lay the woodsy trail to the St. John’s Port University campus.

Berthe would go no further on this side of the Wicke, nor was it necessary. The August breeze told her sorrow was afoot. The river spoke, too, coming out of the deep woods where there was plenty of sorrow to stir if it had a mind to. If she looked down into the Wicke’s lazy, late-summer flow, she could read a shadowy ribbon unwinding in its currents like dark script.

She lifted her thin, beaky nose and took a good sniff of the muggy air. Yep, something black and pungent with grief was on the move. Some folks might have called it evil, but Berthe had no use for such biblical distinctions. A hard time was coming, something she’d seen signs of in the village and in the forest since the spring, though she had hoped the situation would right itself. Now she smelled it, riding along on the summer air like a bad perfume, and she needed to see.

Reaching a bony hand into the apron pocket of her dress, she drew forth a small instrument, sinuously carved of alder wood worn smooth by the caresses of three generations. It was a bird flute, pierced along its curling and twisting length with a complicated pattern of holes of varying sizes. With it, Berthe could summon representatives of several species. Over long years, she had worked out the notes for a few more than her mother, or even her grandmother, had known.

Now, she raised it to her lips, covered all but two of the larger apertures, and blew two croaking notes. She settled in to wait, her eyes on the blue avenue of sky she could see from the bridge, winding away through the woods. The trees tossed in the humid breeze, their leaves rolling to show their bellies. Storm was coming, blue sky or not, and Berthe chuckled without humor at the perfect analogy for the current climate in the village.

The breeze stirred the hem of her dress where it hung a few inches above the tops of her boots, and she thought she felt a chill thread in it against her skinny legs despite the afternoon heat. Her eyes hooded and dreaming, Berthe ruminated on the stirring of dark ripples in the placid water of village life.

Episode Two

This piece is part of “Day of the ___ Writer” an open collab on the daily experiences behind our writing. You’re welcome to join by posting about your day on your pub. Check out our growing mosaic of many lives.

Many thanks to for the opportunity to share a bit about the behind-the-scenes. I’ve been reading these, and they are pure gold. I feel like everyone I know has been invited, so if you are reading this, consider yourself tapped on the shoulder. Tell us your story…

I was born with a story in my mouth. A dark story like a stone, a spell or a curse, and I screamed it at first before the stone broke open one day and released the unfurling tendrils of a place of phantoms. A well-spring of story drilled inward to fill me in all the hollow places life would create. I carried this burgeoning place within me, dipping into the shadowed waters and drinking the terror I found—the luscious, tongue-rolling shiver-sip. I steeped myself in it and began to build in that wild interior. I called the place the Palace of Night.

There are many rooms in the Palace, some I’ve only glanced into from the doorways. It is a hybrid place, part medieval pile and part Baba Yaga’s hut on chicken feet. It has no end and yet can be small enough to tuck in a pack should I need to move. I’ve moved a lot, always erecting the Palace (imposing or witchy by turns) where my roots touch ground. Folding it up like a tent when the next move comes.

Today, it stands in a rural village, next to an old and disused cemetery. Half of each week, I wander its corridors or shrouded forests. I comb tales from the spiderwebs. Some days, I am the spider—weaving, gliding in human form through the workrooms and cellars, my eight stiletto-tipped legs drawn tight about my ribs like a corset. Possessed by stories that slip into my skin and move me in a dark delirium from word to word.

In winter, the haunting begins in the grey morning after coffee. In summer, the garden claims me in the early hours, and the ghosts (demons?) must wait for the heat of the day to drive me indoors lest my pale skin combust. The Palace welcomes me. I am both servant and Queen.

Let’s peek into the Palace archives…here is a simple fairytale for you, a retelling of Rapunzel.

https://lizzimmers.substack.com/p/the-rope

Episode 4

He sees the darksome draperies of the wind. They wind through the trees, lifted and filled like sails of silk. And then she is with him. The airy currents subside, folding about her form in a clinging sheath of starless night. The afternoon sun dims in humble adoration. An ancient perfume drifts across the park, freighted with an invitation both alluring and fearful. Drifts to him and surrounds him; her eyes seek to mesmerize him. Her hungry lips form a burning word. Lover …

JD fumbled in the pocket of his jeans for the stone scarab he’d lifted from the mummy case in Warburton’s gallery. He couldn’t filch and carry most things in his ghostly state, but these old Egyptian gimcracks seemed to give him no trouble. He held the scarab out before him, hoping it would do its protective job. He knew no spells or fancy words and committed himself to the straightforward.

“Stop! Wait. Let’s make a deal.”

Meheryt eyed the scarab but did not seem to fear it. Still, she did not approach any closer.

Deal? What deal, infant? Already you are mine.

“No … I mean, I can offer something better. Two souls instead of one. And revenge.”

He hoped he spoke the truth. This plan had made sense when he came up with it, a way to keep Nick and Tess safe. Now it felt like a thin tissue of assumptions that might disintegrate before his eyes.

Vengeance? Speak more.

JD lowered the scarab but kept it tight in his fist. “The old guy that brought the jar back from Egypt. His name’s Warburton. He said there was someone else stuck in there with you. Some priest named Sab. And then there’s that monster thing, Ammut.”

JD shivered, remembering how the professor had set the jar on the kitchen table before him with a sly smile before excusing himself to find a box for its safe transport. ‘You must not break the seal’, he had said. Then, in another voice altogether, ‘Ancient treasure comes with ancient surprises.’ JD, alone with the jar, had picked it up and given it a little shake. It had weight. Something inside had clinked and shifted, the unmistakable sound of coins. It could have been gold, but when he twisted the lid from the jar, he found only a handful of everyday pocket change. A trick. He had been staring at the quarters and nickels in furious disbelief when the world had erupted.

He shook off the frightful memory. “I think that’s what trapped you in there in the first place, that monster-thing. But now that you’re free, you could, you know … kick its ass. You could have both of those old-timey spirits.”

Meheryt’s face, unaccustomed to forming human expressions, looked both pinched and blank for a moment. Then a wide grin exposed an array of sharp teeth. She laughed.

You purchase your freedom with a name, infant.

Her eyes flashed, and her hair billowed up on the scented wind that swept her draperies.

Sab, mad priest of Per-Wesir en-Duat, practitioner of heka. He dared bind Meheryt of the desert. By the power of his name, I will sup upon his ka.

The angry atmosphere calmed again. Meheryt studied JD with lively interest.

Ammut is false. There is only Sab and his magic. It is a sufficient exchange. How would you deliver him to me, young lover?

JD swallowed his terror. “The jar is here, somewhere, in one of the trees. I hid it, but now I can’t find it. That crazy priest wants it back pretty bad. My friends will take it to him. Well, to Warburton, anyway. I thought … have you ever heard of the Trojan horse?”

Meheryt’s expression grew crafty and cruel.

I know the tale. You think to conceal me in the jar. Thus, I shall pass within the enemy’s gates. It is good. Behold.

Another blood-curdling smile flickered across Meheryt’s face. A great cracking rent the still air. A nearby tree opened like a long-unused door, and the perfume jar rolled out onto the frosty grass. It continued rolling until it reached Meheryt’s feet where it stopped and spat forth its stopper. The dark within it seemed to flex and shimmer. Faint sounds of chanting and music—drums, sistra, flutes—rose from it. The demon inhaled the sharp, chill fragrance of the night desert. Her arms rose as she performed a sinuous dance to the faraway music, and she slipped into the jar like a silken ribbon. Her intense gaze lingered on JD, and then she was gone. The jar fell silent. JD dropped to his knees and set the stopper in place with shaking hands.

Voices broke the silence of the park, the speakers still unseen as they made their way along the path. Nick and Tess had arrived. JD heard them conversing as they drew nearer to the river.

“JD said he chucked it in one of the trees close to the river.” That was Tess, excited for the hunt.

Nick spoke with more caution. “What about the succubus? Meheryt? Maybe she wants the thing, too. She could be lurking around here somewhere.”

Tess stopped. “We should probably stop calling Meheryt a succubus. She’s more, some kind of liminal entity with an appetite for life force, maybe elemental in nature. JD said she had been trapped in the jar by some kind of spell.”

“Speak of the devil.” Nick pointed to the tree line where the flickering phantom of the lanky youth stood with the perfume jar at his feet.

Warburton’s house was empty. A bedroom window yawned above a brick expanse covered in leafless Virginia creeper, much of the clinging vine torn and hanging in limp swags.

“Looks like Warburton found an escape.” Nick pulled his head back inside. “Apparently, he got to the ground in one piece, but now we’ve got a creature from the Egyptian land of the dead running loose. Ideas?”

Tess stepped to the window and stared down at a crushed boxwood hedge. “Poor Simon. We can use the compass to locate him but exorcising Ammut is going to be hard on him. We have to find Meheryt, too. Every entity must go back into that jar.”

She sighed and moved to dump the contents of her backpack on the bed. She set aside the witch compass and began to hunt through a small assortment of baubles. Faience scarabs and feathers carved of faux ivory strung on leather cord, an amulet bag embroidered with the Eye of Horus, and brass cobra armlets jostled and rang against one another on the duvet. Tess poked through the trove with heavy concentration before turning to Nick.

“I took this stuff from the little gift shop at the gallery today. Here, put these on.” She held out scarab and feather necklaces and a cobra armlet.

“You stole all this junk?” Nick took the proffered jewelry and slipped it on. “Somehow, I don’t feel any safer.”

Tess adorned herself with similar finery. She held up the brightly glazed scarab. “This is a good all-purpose ward against evil. The feather of Ma’at aligns us with truth. The cobra protects against physical harm as well as spiritual threats. And I didn’t steal them; I commandeered them for defense. Now, let’s get out of here and track Simon down before all hell breaks loose … so to speak.”

The arrow of the compass pointed with shuddering constancy as they drove along a familiar route. In grim silence, they passed a sign that read, Welcome to Arborville, population 5,012. Tess stowed the device in her pack and turned to Nick.

“Let’s go home. I think we have company,” she said.

The green Victorian, alone in its quiet cul-de-sac, seemed to have withdrawn into its overgrown garden. Nick parked beside Tess’s Jeep on the concrete apron in front of the carriage house and looked up at the grand old lady. Instead of a beauty relaxed in her timeworn opulence, he now saw a crouching spider that swiveled its many stained-glass eyes toward the tremor they had made in its web. He rubbed at the fine hairs that stood on the back of his neck.

“Ah, shit. He’s in there isn’t he?” When Tess only nodded, he killed the engine and undid his seat belt. “Well, let’s go get him. I hope you know what to do.”

“Have I ever got you killed yet? Just keep the jar in hand and open it when I tell you.”

They climbed the stairs to the porch and found the front door ajar. They stood on the welcome mat like bible salesmen and peered into the vestibule. Nick held the jar against his chest, the gift shop charms clinking against the cat on the stopper. Tess pushed the door wide and stepped onto the tile in the entry.

“Simon,” she called. “Ammut? We have the portal.”

A voice hissed from the dim interior. “Come to the library, witch.”

There, in a chair beside the giant globe in its stand, sat Ammut. Hunched and shivering, the entity gazed at them with its mismatched eyes, one bloodshot and shocked, the other reptilian.

“This body is weak. It will not hold me.” The voice rasped and gurgled. “Give me the portal and let me return to my kingdom.”

Nick held up the jar. “This old thing? You can have it if you return Simon to us whole and healthy. Those were your own terms.”

Ammut lurched to its feet, growling and sending forth a shower of spittle. “You dare? I will have your hearts for my supper.”

Tess stepped forward and held aloft a plaster figurine of Ammit, the Devourer who sits at the elbow of Anubis, waiting as the god weighs the hearts of the deceased. Nick did not know where she had gotten the thing, but presumed it was another of the liberated items from the gift shop. Tess showed it to Ammut before casting it to the floor where it cracked in half.

“Ammut is nothing and less than nothing,” she said, contempt dripping from her words. She stepped on the broken figurine and crushed it to dust beneath her boot. “I reject all belief in Ammut and call on Sab to come forth from the body of Simon Warburton.”

From her pocket, she drew a slender atomizer and sprayed Ammut in the face. “By the power of the river, I call you forth, Sab. By the salts of the desert, I bind you.”

The result astonished Nick. The creature shrieked and roared as though it had been set afire. It flailed at the air in blind agony; the globe was cast from its stand and rolled to the dark fireplace. The claws vanished. The crocodilian head bubbled and shrank until Nick looked on a pale and gibbering Simon Warburton. The professor’s knees sagged and he crumpled to the carpet, leaving in his place the shivering form of a small man with a shaved head and kohl-lined eyes. The man, Sab, pulled his robes tight about him and wailed in fear and fury.

“Nick! Now!” Tess raised the atomizer in preparation for another blast of river water and herb-infused natron.

Nick wrenched his gaze from Warburton’s deathly form and pulled the stopper from the perfume jar. Night bloomed from the mouth of the jar, a great, sweeping flood of darkness simmering with intent. A heady resinous sweetness filled the library, spice and floral notes wafting and mingling with an indefinable wild moodiness that pulled at every yearning cell until every being in the room fell to their knees. The scent of desire. Meheryt, in her unseeable truth, was with them. The little priest raised his arms in supplication, crying in his ancient language, “Do not, do not.”

The demon paid no heed, but wound about Sab like an inky shroud, pouring into the man’s open mouth and filling him. Soon, Sab was no more. Meheryt touched every item in the room, tumbling books from shelves and ringing the crystals of the chandelier, before funneling back into the perfume jar like the smokiest of veils. The portal closed with a howl, leaving only a pottery relic. Nick crawled to the jar that had tumbled from his hand and rolled beneath the cocktail table. He set the stopper in place with gentle reverence and set the jar on the table.

Tess had knelt by Warburton, lifting the professor’s head onto her lap.

“Simon, can you hear me,” she asked, patting his cheeks.

His eyes fluttered open, empty of all but a strange peace. His gaze slipped sideways with slow determination until it met Tess’s.

“I’m going now,” he said, his voice a rough whisper. “I’m sorry … for the boys. For JD. Sab promised I would have my Taylor back. Lies. I fed his demon and fueled his immortality for nothing.” Warburton shivered and his eyes drifted shut. “Evil. My heart will weigh heavy.”

The professor’s breath slowed and hitched, then ceased. Tess looked up at Nick with tears in her eyes.

“We lost him, in more ways than the obvious. If you’ll seal that damn jar, I’ll call for an ambulance.”

She rose and lifted a soft tartan throw from the back of a chair and shook it out to cover Warburton. Nick stooped to straighten it over the professor’s body but whirled at the sound of throat-clearing from the shadows near the door to the room.

“Uh, guys?” The familiar voice came shakily from a familiar frame, and JD stepped forward from the gathering gloom of evening. “I think … I think …”

JD reached for the support of a chairback, but Tess was already clutching him to her and guiding him to a seat on the sofa. Nick rushed forward to help, his eyes wide. He patted JD’s shoulders.

“You’re alive,” he choked. “How? What’s happening?”

He gawped at Tess, but she had JD’s face in her hands, gazing into the young man’s bewildered eyes.

JD pulled her hands from him and held them tight. “It was Meheryt. She gave me back” He looked down at his body. “She … I don’t know … put me back together. But I’m different, somehow. I’m more. Some of Taylor Warburton is in here with me. All that’s left of him is, like, part of me now. Weird.”

Nick laughed and sat on the cocktail table beside the now-mundane perfume jar. “Weird, indeed. We want to hear all about it, JD. Every detail.”

“No problem.” JD’s stomach gurgled. “But I sure could go for a sandwich first.”

Episode 4

She woke in cold confusion amid the rumpled hillocks of musty quilts, on a high sleigh bed in a room silvered by evening light, at the top of a narrow house replete with dirty windows. Outside, the luminous depths of the woods spoke with a thousand voices –tree frogs chanting their paean to the drizzle and chill as the light trembled toward gloaming. From her position on the bed, she could see the tops of the trees, their black bones aflame with tender leaves, their verdure magnified and made radiant by the rain. She sat up, her hand to her brow, pale hair hanging over her face, and drew the topmost quilt about her shoulders.

How did I come here? Where have I been?

She stretched one bare foot over the edge of the bed and lowered it to the floor. Her toes touched the soft dusty weave of a silk carpet. Her heel pressed it. Sudden silence expanded in the room and made her ears pop, and then she heard a soft scratching outside the windows. It seemed to come from every side, a sound like claws dragged lightly over the old clapboards. She crept from the island of carpet to the window and peeked out.

Roses girt the house, strong green whips, wickedly barbed. They had clambered up the porch posts far below and surged over the roof. Their skreeks and hisses waxed and waned with the wind in an awful kind of respiration, their thorns skittering over the skin of the house. The crinkled fans of their new leaves flexed in the last light, and the hard knuckles of their buds rapped at the windows. The roses sprawled out into the overgrown garden, an impenetrable wall from which the house loomed like a shabby, besieged tower.

“Oh. Oh, no,” she whispered, her hand to her mouth. Such neglect must have gone unchecked for a very long time.

As the first stars caught fire above the forest, she turned from the window and sank down upon the bare planks of the floor. She might have sat there all night, stricken by the menace of the roses, but the cold knocked on her bones, and she shivered herself into wakefulness. She crawled to the fireplace, dragging the frayed quilt with her, and struck a match from the faded box she found there. The fire burst from the dry wood and old mouse nests collapsed on the hearth and rushed up the chimney.

In its ruddy light, she saw a tall mirror in a shadowed corner, and she climbed to her feet and rushed to find herself in the glass. But the mirror was black, obscured with paint that slopped onto the graceful pear wood frame and showed her only a distorted haze of a reflection in its smeared gloss.

Suddenly angry, she screamed at it. “Show me my face!”

The mirror made no answer, and the shudder that had disturbed the stifled air of the old house at her shout left a deeper silence in its wake. She became aware of the tidal drum of her own heart. Its thudding climbed from her chest to her ears and set the girders of her skeleton ringing until it seemed she heard two hearts instead of one. She closed her eyes to will away the frightful rhythm, and the second heartbeat revealed itself as the heavy tread of boots on the stairs outside her room. She was not alone.

The footsteps reached the top of the stairs and stopped. She pressed her ear to the peeling paint of the bedroom door and held her breath to listen. For a long moment there was silence, and then she heard a soft moan. A voice whispered. She pressed her whole body to the door to catch the sound.

“Please,” it said. Something dragged along the hallway carpet, and the voice muttered low and unintelligible before repeating itself. “Please.”

She stepped back from the door and cast an anxious gaze about the room. A tarnished candlestick stood on the mantle, a mouse-eaten nub of taper protruding from it, barely big enough to hold the wick. She crept to it and held it to the fire. It smoked and gasped, but caught the flame, and she went back to the door and turned the knob. She thrust the meager light ahead of her into the black of the hallway. Nothing stirred. She ventured out.

The hall formed a high gallery. The oak banister, gap-toothed and unreliable, wandered beside a ragged length of carpet to the stairway that staggered down the wall. A shape leaned against the rail near the top stair, and at the sight of it, she nearly retreated behind her door. When it did not move or speak, she tiptoed toward it, her candle held high. Finally, the weak nimbus fell full upon it, and she stifled a shriek.

The shape was a man, but not like any she had seen before. He appeared young, and yet his face was lined and grooved with weariness and pain. He was pale as wax, and she thought he might be a macabre waxwork until he drew a shallow, trembling breath. His eyes fluttered open and fixed on her.

“Ah, you heard me,” he said, his voice like the memory of sound. “It is far past time.”

“I don’t understand.” She disliked having to speak to him. A wave of fatigue passed over her, and she glanced back at her door.

His hand rose from the oaken rail, so slowly it was like the dream of motion, and pulled aside the torn fabric of his shirt. She gave a raspy little scream when she saw the clockwork heart set in his chest. The gears turned with the lethargy of nightmare, stuttering in their smooth action with effortful whirrs and clicks. A slot in the middle of the fine gold mechanism pulsed scarlet and dark, as though some furnace within it flared and subsided to the working of a diabolical bellows.

“What do you want of me?” she cried.

“The key.”

She gaped at him, shaking her head in bewilderment. He took a halting step toward her, his brows drawing together like a massing thunderstorm.

“The key,” he croaked. “For pity’s sake, the key!”

He reached out and grasped her by the silken cord that hung about her neck.

“Let go, let go!” She lunged backward, pulling him after her.

The cord snapped. For an instant she saw, held aloft in his gaunt fist, a shining key. He fell to his knees before her. Her candle puffed out. Night rushed in where the light had been. She turned in terror and fled back into the bedroom where the firelight glowed and slammed the door.

CRAA-ATCH, snick, CRAA-ATCH, snick.

She leaned against the bedroom door and listened to the maddening sound of the key scraping and turning in the man’s clockwork heart. She put a hand over her own heart, imagining what it must be like to feel the springs tighten, the gears catch and bite at each other with renewed purpose. Could he hear it ticking, the way she sometimes heard hers beating? Did the sound frighten him? Her stomach rolled in a slow knot of nausea.

She floated on the lake of her memory like a woman in a boat, staring down into the murky green at an image too heavy to surface. It hung in the dimness like a body, weighty with its time in the depths but impish enough to rise anyway, just out of reach. There was something familiar about its shape. She leaned toward it, and it rolled its slack, white face up at her. The clockwork man! In a jolting instant, she knew him. Recognition brought a slick of cold sweat to her skin.

A thump from the other side of the door jarred her from her reverie. She gave a shrill cry and hopped away. The doorknob turned, but she had shot the bolt, and he couldn’t get in. She listened to him breathing.

“You can’t hide in there forever,” he said. His voice was soft, his tone reasonable. “I have the key now. I could leave.”

Was that supposed to be a threat? She wished he would leave. Her gaze slid toward the bed, with its cargo of tatty quilts. The promise of sleep that rose from that warm nest was almost overpowering.

“You know what I want,” he said. “Why not just let me have it? After all this time, why not?”

Another thump shook the door, its violence giving the lie to the quiet, cajoling voice. He was furious, and after all that had happened, she could not blame him. She remembered now, had reached down into that cloudy water and fished up the deed that bound him to her.

“Go away,” she hissed. “You have your bloody key. Take it and go. You never should have come here. I never wanted you.”

He was silent so long she thought he had gone. When he spoke again, his voice seemed close to her, right in the room.

“I want what’s mine. I’ll be back for it.”

She heard the tread of his boots on the creaking boards of the hall, on the stairs. A sound rose from below that she had thought never to hear again. The house door opened with a ghastly moan, then slammed shut. A flock of echoes rose like startled doves to the rafters of the cathedral ceiling.

She sat at the window through the night, watching the forest under its frost of moonlight, listening to the restless scrabbling of the roses. Gifts, all of them, from the young men who had come and gone from her salon and dining hall. The gardeners, long gone now, had set them in the grounds and nurtured them. How beautiful her gardens had been, and she, their only rival. She smiled as she recalled those days, dreams she inhabited in the depths of sleep.

There had been a husband once, a man of mature years, but he had gone away. And there had been a small boy, always clinging, always underfoot, who had been sent away to school. Then the young men came in their lavish carriages with their gifts of wine, jewels, and roses. She had held court and they had knelt at her feet, vying to carry her away in marriage, offering their enchanted hearts.

Hearts. The word made her think of the man with his infernal clockwork. She couldn’t think where he had gone or why, but she did not doubt his word that he would return. The fire had gone out, and the room was cold enough that her breath hung before her. She ached to lie down, to close her eyes and dream, but she was under siege. He would be back, and she would have to deal with him.

She dozed fitfully in the moonlight, holding tight to the rope of wakefulness. Fragmented dreams flitted past her heavy eyes. There was a ballroom, filled with fashionable people. The women wore magnificent gowns, slowly revolving in the arms of handsome men. She felt herself gliding along, the silken hem of her gown sweeping the gleaming marble of the floor. In the mirrored walls, she saw her beauty that drew every eye, and a warm flush of pleasure suffused her body. There was a banquet; she was the centerpiece. There was a fine carriage; every gentleman’s hand extended toward her. The lure of the dreams was strong. She pinched herself hard enough to bring tears and woke with a shudder.

As dawn melted the last of the dark, she stood and stretched. She was dismayed at the stiffness of her joints, and at the depth of her fatigue. She had woken before, she remembered, to see to the task of winding the young man’s clockwork heart. It felt like a curse to have to leave the comfortable fortress of her sleep, but the winding of the heart was her one imperative responsibility. Always, on these occasions, she had felt strong and rested, more than equal to the task. She could not recall having suffered such confusion of mind nor weariness of body.

There had never been such signs of neglect about the house, either. The man had kept it well, had greeted her each time she woke with humble gratitude, and she had been able to return to her slumber satisfied that her fragile spell would not be shattered. What had changed?

Uneasiness bloomed in her mind. She went to the mirror and touched the thick black paint that marred its elegance. Her fingers - oh, they seemed so thin – plucked at the rubbery little tags of paint that stuck up here and there. She pulled a few long ribbons of the stuff from the mirror and stepped close to observe her reflected eye in one of the slivers revealed.

What she saw wrung a shocked gasp from her, and she clawed at the paint, stripping wide flaps from the glass. At last, enough of the mirror had been uncovered to allow her to see her face. Her hands went to her cheeks but did not touch the ravaged beauty. The skin, once so taut and radiant against the fine bones, had softened and sagged. There were trembling jowls, and a terrain of fine lines about the eyes and around the lips that had thinned and lost their saucy ripeness. Her hair, that once glorious fall of pale sunlight, was white. She stared into her own wide eyes, and a keening sound rose around her. She recognized her voice, wailing in horror, as she slumped at the foot of the mirror.

She lay a long time on the floor, the chill and damp of the house claiming her from the skin inward, and the frost of despair turning her to ice from the heart outward. Her mind slowed. Her cheek pressed the cold floor. She closed her eyes and waited, but the House of Sleep would not admit her. She remained in the twilight emptiness between it and the waking world, vaguely aware of her cramped, frozen limbs and the sweep of shadows that passed over her locked eyelids as the sun crept by her windows.

As though from a great distance, she heard the biting and gnawing of carpenter’s tools on the barred door. She felt the gust of its opening and heard the clockwork man’s soft approach. Her eyes creaked open just enough to confirm that he stood over her, the scuffed toes of his boots filling her vision.

“You had to look, didn’t you?” he said. “You couldn’t leave that damn mirror alone.”

When she made no reply, he crouched by her and stroked a tendril of hair from her face.

“You’re like ice,” he said, and his tone was accusatory.

He reached under her and lifted her. He was strong again now that he had the key to wind his heart. Warmth radiated from him, and she felt herself begin to thaw. He laid her on the bed and chafed her limbs, and she snuggled into the quilts with a happy murmur. There was still magic in the old sleigh bed. Perhaps now she could enter the House of Sleep.

“No, no, no,” he barked.

He slapped her cheek lightly, and she sat up and opened her eyes in sudden fury.

“How dare you! Get away. There is nothing to keep you here now. Why don’t you go?”

He leaned toward her and spoke through gritted teeth.

“You know what I want. I’m not going without it.” He put a hand over the smartly revolving gears, the delicate tripping hammers, of his heart. “Give it back. It’s no good to you and hasn’t been for a long while if only you could remember.”

He was so changed, and he was wrong. She did remember. She recalled his eager smile each time she woke, the care he took to please her, and the sorrow in his eyes when she returned to her dreams. He spoke so roughly now, as though he believed she had stolen something from him, when the truth was that he had given it freely. She sighed and fell back against her pillows. She was too tired to argue.

“It won’t fit you now, I’m afraid,” she said. “Everything about you is different. We have both grown ugly, each in our own way.”

He had the grace to look ashamed.

“You aren’t ugly. Never that. And I … I only want to feel again. You’ll go away, as you always do, and I have grown weary of waiting for your love.”

It was true, she’d never loved him. Yet, looking at his youthful, weary face, she felt a pang. She opened a drawer of her bedside table and took out a small black box. It was made of pasteboard, much scarred from jostling among the expensive baubles and love tokens left by her admirers. She stared at it as though seeing it for the first time.

“Is that it?” His voice sounded choked.

She nodded and handed him the box. Almost fearfully, he opened it. She watched his face, saw the hope flare and ebb. He turned his gaze to hers, and his eyes were empty. Without a word, he tilted the box so she could see what lay on the yellowed tissue paper within.

“Oh …” Again, that pang. Tears started to her eyes.

A daub of shriveled red lay there. It looked very much like a dried rose that had succumbed to time. It was not a rose. It was his heart. She looked up at him, at the lost expression on his face, and felt her own heart throb for him. She opened her arms to him, and he sank against her, breast to breast, and laid his head on her shoulder. She felt the whir and click of the clockwork, and the magic that still hovered about the sleigh bed, and the bittersweet pang that might have been love, after all.

“I have something I want to give you,” she whispered.

He started back with a cry, his hands flying to his chest. The clockwork fell from him like petals from a rose. The flesh over his heart was smooth and unmarred, and a living organ beat beneath it. She smiled at the sound of it as she slipped across the threshold of the House of Sleep for the last time.

“Thank you, Mother,” he sobbed.

Episode 3

Finale

I am Ammut, spawn of Ammit.

The entity sat inside Simon Warburton’s skin and mumbled over its name as though it were a spell that bound its reality. It shifted Warburton’s bones, but there was no more room in the man shape. Trapped! Stifled inside this skin bag, inside this sack of organ slop and dying meat. More than that, trapped in this house. The flaming lines of salt and the hateful spell of the woman had seen to that. It growled, a snarl that turned to a whine. Weakness had settled over it with Meheryt’s escape. Phantoms plagued Ammut, ghosts neither seen nor feared in millennia. They gouged at it like vultures.

I am Ammut, judge-god and devourer.

“Blasphemy,” screeched the vultures, and the entity gripped its mishappen skull in its claws and groaned. Another voice, small and trembling, rose like smoke through the widening cracks of Ammut’s sovereignty.

“There is no Ammut. Remember your oath.” It was Warburton, whispering his poisonous lies from the pit in which Ammut had buried him. “Sorcerer. Murderer. Impure. Degenerate.”

Silence! I will crush you to dust, flea.

For a moment there was blessed quiet and the savory tang of fear from Warburton, but too soon a sound arose that tormented Ammut more than all the epithets the professor could hurl. It began as a soft, rasping chuckle and grew to maniacal laughter.

“You need me as trade for your precious portal.” The laughter calmed to an intermittent tittering like the scrabble of beetles over the stone of a crypt. “And how will you fare without your pet demon? We shall see, priest.”

Death was near. Ammut felt its presence and was cowed. Warburton spoke truth; without Meheryt, immortality was uncertain. The entity reached out a claw and plucked a card from among the dried rose petals on the table. Firestone and Cranwell. An address. It raised its eyes to the stairwell. There was no salt barring the windows of the second floor. This body it had borrowed was fragile, but it would not need it for long. It moved to the stairs and began to climb.

Nick read through Warburton’s journals with the avidity of a scavenger hunter. The professor had been meticulous in his entries but about a month ago they had devolved into infrequent, illegible scrawls. One stood out. ‘Call Nick and Tess’, underlined so emphatically the pen had torn the page. A week later, that call had been made, along with the unusual request that JD collect the jar. Nick sat back in his chair, his gaze riveted on Tess, seated at the round table by the bookcase in whispered conversation with an empty chair. The witch compass lay on the table in front of her. She had been so sure that JD had stolen the jar, and, as much as he wanted to deny it, he had believed it, too. He now believed that JD had been chosen as a sacrifice.

He looked down at several of the journals he had arranged on the desk before him, spanning from Warburton’s homecoming three years ago to recent months. The hazy outline of a chilling plan began to take shape as he skipped from one entry to another, highlighting random lines in neon yellow.

I broke the wax seal … the scent, seductive and dreadful … a dried lump of Taylor’s heart in the bottom of the jar, the marks of teeth clear in the withered flesh … Ammut, progeny of Ammit, a foul farce! … it speaks the formal language of the temple, a priest’s language … Meheryt of the perfumed night, devil/elemental/goddess? … I beseech, but my ka is no currency with her … an exchange may be worked, one young man for another … Edward is a dear boy …

Edward, in his melancholy, had wandered out to browse the Warburton Collection. Through the open door, Nick could see him drifting past the display case where the mummy slept, his fingers trailing along the glass. The young man stopped and gazed down on the mummy with a lost expression. No one had been closer to Warburton since his grandson’s death than the assistant. Nick stood and slipped from the office into the gallery.

“Edward, can I ask you about Dr. Warburton? You must have grown close since he returned from his last expedition. You’re about the same age as his grandson, aren’t you?”

Edward sighed and nodded. “He is a great man, you know, but Taylor’s death changed him. I attended several of his lectures before becoming his assistant. My interest was Egyptian art. He was lively, passionate in his field, and so very knowledgeable. After … well, he’s become almost reclusive. Quiet.” Edward frowned. “He can become lost in disturbing thoughts. Talking to himself, sometimes in ancient languages. There have been evenings when I could have sworn he was not alone in his study. Silly of me, I know. I did my best to watch over him, to protect his privacy. He did see a few selected students. It was rare. I always felt, after their visits, that he was frustrated with me, as though I had subjected him to unwelcome meetings.” He shrugged. “It seemed peevish, but it didn’t last. He is always kind to me.”

“Who were these students?”

“Two grad students who have since either dropped their studies or transferred, I don’t know which. I believe they were struggling and Dr. Warburton wanted to help them. There was one foreign PhD candidate who I assume returned home to finish his dissertation. It was quite rare, but I thought it a good sign that the professor took interest.”

Edward’s gaze dropped to the mummy in the display case, and Nick’s followed. On its chest, above where its heart would be, lay a scarab of green jasper. Edward pointed to it.

“Dr. Warburton told me this scarab would have been inside the bandages. It’s a funerary amulet, supposed to keep the heart quiet as it was weighed against the feather, so it wouldn’t give away the sins of the deceased. I’ve always thought it beautiful, and I liked the tale so much I had one tattooed on my chest. I even added a line from the Book of the Dead. Oh, my heart, do not bear witness against me.” Edward gave Nick a sheepish look. “It’s not an exact translation, but close enough.”

“Indeed.” A bleak understanding settled over Nick. “Could you get me the names of the students who met with Dr. Warburton?”

“Certainly. Mr. Firestone, what is happening to the professor? I should help him, but I’m afraid.”

Nick put a hand on Edward’s shoulder. “Tess and I are the help. Let us sort this out.”

He turned back toward the office to see Tess in the doorway, the compass in her hand. He left Edward ruminating over the heart scarab and joined her.

“What’s the word?”

She adjusted the strap of her backpack on her shoulder. “JD told me where he hid the jar. Let’s drop Eddie at his apartment and go collect it. Then we’d better get back to Simon’s. This is going to be a wicked cleanup.” She nodded toward Edward. “That is one lucky young man.”

“You don’t know the half of it. Come on, let’s get him home and I’ll fill you in.”

All the trees in the little park looked alike. JD had stuffed the jar into an opening like a mouth in one of them, but now he saw many openings. He thrashed his memory, but he had been moving fast the night he hid the perfume jar, clasping a hand over his savaged heart as though he could stem the tide of his life as it rushed from it. He glanced down, pulled the neck of his t-shirt forward and gazed at his smooth, bare chest. He understood that Meheryt had taken a bite of his life force rather than his flesh, what old Warburton had called his ka. Still, he’d bet his ticker would have been missing a chunk if anyone had examined it. He looked around for some familiar landmark and saw only featureless winter trees. He needed the paranormal equivalent of a bloodhound.

“Well, in for a penny, in for a pound, as my granny used to say.” He grew still and felt for the spider silk of desire that connected him to the ancient entity and tugged on it as he called into the cold. “Meheryt!”

Episode 3

Finale

Episode 2

JD slouched along the riverbank by the university, waiting for Nick and Tess. They would come here eventually, after they talked to that creepy old Warburton coot, and he would meet them. He’d been doing some heavy thinking since leaving the house last night. Thinking and laying low, hiding as only a ghost could do in plain sight of the living. He’d even attended some of the classes of his former professors to pass the time, but his new circumstance had done nothing to improve his interest. He’d never been the scholarly sort.

The river here, strewn with ponderous boulders and their attendant eddies, had caught and held his body, offering it up to the campus police with their long hooks and glaring spotlights. They had dragged him from the water like a bundle of wet laundry less than a mile from where he’d plunged in, terrified and already dying, Meheryt beating the air to turbulence above him. He had clung to his lifeless flesh as it tumbled downstream despite the disgust he felt for it, hiding within its cold, flabby sack and keeping the powerful barrier of the water between him and the demon until she had flown away in pique. He did not abandon his chilled hide until it was stretched under a sheet in the morgue. Until Tess looked down on it with her eyes swimming in unshed tears.

It was a fearsome memory, yet his fear was giving way to a tentative glow of pride. He had handled his final adventure with the kind of selfless bravery and quick intelligence he had not been certain he possessed. With distant craving, he wished for a cigarette, but before the yen could cause much discomfort, he saw Nick’s car turning into the faculty lot above him. In a blink, he had joined them, eager now to tell them where he had hidden the perfume jar. To his surprise, Warburton’s assistant emerged from the back seat. JD hung back, following at a distance as Nick, Tess, and Edward walked across the lot to the entrance of Maynard Hall and vanished inside.

“Dr. Warburton retired three years ago after the death of his grandson. The university granted him emeritus status. He keeps an office here, just at the end of the Warburton Gallery.”

Edward sorted through a ring of keys as they walked along a wide corridor of dark offices and comfortable study nooks. Tall, verdant palms potted at intervals in immense clay vessels guided them toward a dim space fronted by two towering limestone statues of Anubis brandishing his sceptre and ankh. Beyond the weathered likenesses of the god lay the silent, pin-spotted cavern of the gallery where Simon Warburton’s collection of archaeological wonders rested: cases of jewelry, combs, unguent pots, and diminutive oil lamps; gorgeous papyrus scrolls; jars, tools, figurines, weapons; statuary; sarcophagi; and one wizened mummy in dignified, linen-draped slumber in the central display.

“Nick, look at this.”

Tess stood before a large, framed scroll depicting the gatekeepers of the Underworld in the act of weighing the heart of a waiting soul against the feather of Maat. Anubis lifted the heart to the scale, but it was the figure behind him that drew their attention.

“Well, well, well,” said Nick, taking his readers from his pocket and slipping them onto his nose. He leaned close to the papyrus, examining the creature crouching behind the jackal-headed god. “That looks remarkably like our new friend Ammut, only worse, if that’s possible.”

The fine brushwork showed a chimeric beast with a crocodile’s head, the front paws of a lion, and the rear quarters of a hippo. The plaque beneath the scroll explained the scene, naming the creature Ammit and offering a chilling detail. Ammit awaits the judgement of the scale, for if the heart outweighs the feather, Anubis will cast it into her waiting jaws and deny this soul entry to the Afterlife.

Edward approached and gazed at the scroll with a frightened expression. “Is that … has Dr. Warburton turned into that thing?”

“I think it’s more layered than that.” Tess took Edward by the elbow and steered him toward the door at the end of the gallery. “I suspect the professor has been possessed, but not by Ammit herself, and we can all be grateful for that. Open Simon’s office, Eddie. If he’s left us any clues, they’ll be here.”

Edward’s tense face grew soft and boyish at the use of the nickname. He turned to the door and twisted the key in the lock. Inside, the office was stuffy, the air thick with an incense-like perfume. Stacks of books and papers, folders, and leather-bound journals stood in neat stacks on every surface, interspersed with curious artefacts and baubles.

“Jesus, it’s chaos.” Nick wound his way through the abundance to the desk.

The blotter space held only a large sheet of watercolor paper obscured by a tissue of translucent fabric. He flicked away the fabric and gazed down at the artwork, a rough approximation of painted hieroglyphs, rough sketches, and several scrawled paragraphs from Warburton’s fountain pen.

“What do you think this is? Can you read this spiky shit?” He pointed at the handwriting. Tess and Edward both moved to puzzle over it.

Edward sat in Warburton’s chair and brought his nose close to the paper. “This is Dr. Warburton’s hand, but distressed. I can barely make out one in three words.” He sat back. “The professor did not keep his office like this, either. I was here, perhaps a month ago, and all was tidy as usual.”

Tess looked around at the staggered piles. “He was searching for something. Where should we begin?”

A stack of journals on a cocktail table to her right wobbled and crashed to the carpet. One journal fell open and skidded forward from its fellows. As the three of them watched, the pages riffled as though in a breeze and began to turn. When they came to rest, Tess stepped forward and lifted the book, but her gaze was on the turmoil of shadow that had retreated into the dark folds of the drapes.

Thanks, JD,” she said. Then, turning to her companions, “Looks like the team is all here. Let’s start reading.”

Temple complex of Per-Wesir en-Duat near Abydos, August

Four years here in the high desert, and this fascinating place continues to yield more mysteries than answers. Not a village, as I at first suspected, but a complex of some cult distinct from the religious and funerary observers in nearby Abydos. The domiciles seem all to be for the use of priests and devotees of the temple. We continue to unearth more and more of it. Though not especially large in surface, it goes deep beneath the desert. The paintings and statuary here are similar to those in other Osirian temples, yet there are puzzling differences, hints of an active relationship—an intimacy with the Afterlife—that goes beyond documented mortuary rituals and ceremonial practices at other sites. Perhaps it is because the population seems to have been entirely a priesthood.

The heat is oppressive; it is not the season for digging and we are reduced to a skeleton crew. The hot desert winds force us below ground to work in the stagnant cool of secret levels only partially opened. Dark slopes of stone paving, choked in places with collapsed rubble, descend to other chambers below us, and Taylor is eager to push deeper. A young man’s passion! It makes me proud, though I must rein it in for the sake of safety.

Temple complex of Per-Wesir en-Duat near Abydos, September

Taylor and I have quarreled again. Most of our scant crew have left; only Yusuf and Rami remain. I am not well and will have to close the site until spring. My grandson spends the bulk of his time in the lower levels of the temple. I know he explores beyond our caution tape barriers, but I am powerless to stop him. He is like a man possessed, searching for some discrete artefact that he insists is down there, sleeping in the dirt and dank of the opened chambers, barely eating. “The wind speaks to me, Granddad,” he said to me when I pressed him. “She tells me where to look, what passageways to unearth.” She. I fear Taylor has contracted a fever that robs him of his reason, and yet, in the night, I smell an intoxicating perfume on the wind. I, too, feel a pull to enter the temple that I cannot explain and can barely resist.

Cairo, September

We are leaving. Oh, God! That I had closed the dig a week ago as I knew I should. The Egyptian authorities have closed it now and it will never be reopened. My grandson, the pride of my life, is dead. His embalmed body lies in a nearby mortuary awaiting our flight home in the morning. Yusuf is dead, struck down as he attempted to drag Taylor from the tiny cell in which he found his precious artefact.

Rami is in hospital, sedated to calm his raving. Two nights ago, he ran shrieking to my tent. “It is loose upon us, Doctor,” he cried, pulling me from my cot. “We must flee. The demon is loose!” I am ashamed to admit I slapped his face, but it enabled him to grasp his self-control. I made ready to go to the temple to see for myself what had happened, but Rami put his hand on my arm, shaking his head. “They are dead, Doctor. The young sir and Yusuf.” His eyes rolled white and terrified. “Do not enter the temple.”

It was all true. I radioed for help, and by sunrise we were joined by the authorities and taken first to Sohag and thence to Cairo. My bags are ready by the door of my suite; our flight is early. I shall not return to Egypt again; this life is all over. The artefact that Taylor died bringing to light is in my carry-on, a mere alabaster perfume jar. It is a lovely example of its type, but I can see nothing to warrant such obsession. I took it from his cold hands. I will keep it for his sake. There is something that rattles about inside it, perhaps a plug of resinous perfume. When I am home, I will break the seal.

Episode 2

Episode One

Episode 3

Nick shuffled through the grey morning light to the kitchen and addressed the coffeemaker. A bold French roast and a teaspoon of cocoa made up the brew of his unspoken apology to Tess. Cinnamon, too, on the tray with the coffee mugs, and a pint carton of cream. He’d smashed the little cream pitcher last night, along with the teapot. There was only a dull headache now where his anger and grief had been. He felt the subtle displacement of the air in the kitchen and greeted Tess without turning.

“Hey. Coffee’ll be ready in a minute.” He paused. “I dreamed about JD last night, about him going to Warburton’s to get the perfume jar.”

She moved to his elbow, silent as a thought, and added spoons to the tray from the silverware drawer. He stood still, watching the coffee drip, unable to meet her gaze. She reached past him and dipped her finger in the honey pot, carried it to her lips, then leaned against the counter.

“It wasn’t a dream,” she said. “JD’s been here since last night. I think he hitched a ride with me from the morgue. He’s probably trying to tell you what happened. What did he say?”

“Nothing helpful. He didn’t like Warburton’s assistant, and he and the professor ate sandwiches together.”

Nick looked at Tess. Tess looked back. They burst into laughter, and the dark miasma of the previous night’s misery wafted away.

“We’ll talk with Warburton today,” Tess said. “He knew what he had in that jar. Maybe he can shed some light on what happened to JD.” She glanced around the room. “The kid’s not here, by the way; and he’s not hanging around upstairs. Maybe the compass can help track him.”

Nick’s smile faded. “Tess, JD said something strange about Warburton. That he’s not what he seems. He said the same about the creature in the perfume jar.”

“What do you think he meant?”

“Well, I just dismissed it as JD being dramatic and trying to deflect me asking about what he did with the jar. But it’s been nagging at me all morning.”

Tess filled her coffee mug, frowning. “We’ve known Simon for years. He’s a respected expert in the field of Egyptology.”

Nick watched uneasy suspicion bloom in Tess’s eyes and was sorry to see it. He was sorry to have to add his own uneasiness to hers.

“He hasn’t been the same since Taylor died. I mean, of course he hasn’t. But, as I think back over conversations we’ve had with him since then, maybe I can see something besides grief.” He sighed. “Or maybe I’m just wigged out and jumping at shadows. We’ve never had a death in the team before.”

Tess put a hand on his arm. “JD had some theater in him, that’s true. But there’s no need for those shenanigans anymore. Let’s drive over to Simon’s. We’ll see for ourselves.”

“I’ll give him a call.” Nick reached for his phone, but Tess stopped him.

“No. Let’s just show up. If something is hinky, I don’t want Simon having a heads up that we’re coming.”

Edward Villiers sat in stunned rigidity on the front steps of Dr. Warburton’s house, unconcerned with either the cold or dustiness of the stone.

“Ms. Cranwell. Mr. Firestone. I must ask you to come again another day. Dr. Warburton is not himself.” Edward’s polite voice, correct as ever, was dull and robotic. He uttered one short yip of laughter and fell silent.

Tess sat beside the shivering man and held her hand out to him. He clutched it like a frightened child but continued to stare wordlessly into the deserted street.

“Edward, tell me what’s wrong with Dr. Warburton,” she said. Her tone had the soft cadence of someone soothing a kitten. “Is he ill?”

“He looks …,” Edward stopped and used his other hand to make circles in front of his face. “His face is … frightful. And he moves oddly.” He looked up at Nick and whispered, “He lumbers.”

Nick and Tess exchanged glances. “Hinkier and hinkier,” Nick said. “Let’s get him in the car and out of the cold.”

They settled Edward in the back seat of Nick’s sedan with a fleece blanket and a pillow.

“I’ll just shut my eyes for a few moments,” he said, curling under the warm blanket; but his eyes snapped open almost as soon as they’d closed. “Don’t go in there. It’s awful.”

“Sleep,” said Tess, passing her hand over his wild eyes.

Edward snuggled into sleep with a sigh, and Nick raised his eyebrows at Tess.

“Damn, when did you learn to do that?”

Tess pulled her backpack from the front seat and closed the door. “I learned a few useful tricks at my conference. As well as a few things about ancient Egyptian entities. It’s looking more and more like JD was right. Things aren’t what they seem. Shall we go see what we’re dealing with?”

The house was hot and dark. In the entry hall, a bowl of desiccated roses scattered petals across the tabletop. Dry currents of heat swept them to the floor where they lay like dead insects on the rug and skitter-whispered across the marble. An oppressive awareness weighed on the air, yet nothing moved but the restless rose petals. Tess put a finger to her lips and rummaged in the backpack for a quart-sized glass jar.

“What’s that,” Nick breathed.

“Natron and salt. I’m going to seal the doors and windows. Take a look around; see if you can find Simon. And be careful.”

Nick slipped into the shadows, and Tess began laying down lines of the salt mixture at each entry and windowsill, whispering as she went. Ptah seals the door, and Thoth makes it fast. As she returned from sealing the kitchen and basements doors, she heard movement at the top of the stairs. Nick emerged from the gloom of the upper hallway.

“Tess, he’s up here.” Nick raised an arm and blotted the sweat from his forehead with his sleeve. “I don’t think we’re prepared for this.”

Tess clutched the remainder of the salts in the jar to her chest for a moment. A night demon, a pest from nightmare. That’s what was supposed to be in the damned perfume jar. Not an inconsiderable adversary, but one for which they had proven traps and bindings. Nick’s attitude of shocked calm, like a man who had seen his own face beneath Death’s hood, turned her blood to ice. The house felt all wrong, too small to hold the heavy presence manifested there. Before she could fall prey to the paralysis creeping through her veins, Tess vaulted up the staircase, taking steps two at a time.

“Show me.”

In the master bedroom, Simon Warburton crouched on his heels in the far corner. Heavy drapes were drawn across windows that would look out onto the street and park, making the room dark and close. No amount of shadow could disguise the appalling change in the professor. His arms had elongated so that his hands pressed flat against the floor in front of him despite his upright squat. Heavy claws curved from the tip of each finger. His long face, always mild and horsey, was now even longer. His lips had shrunk back from the protruding jaw, showcasing sharp, conical teeth. One eye had become a chilly, reptilian globe. As Nick and Tess gaped, a nictitating eyelid slid over the green, gold-flecked orb and back again with casual disdain.

“Simon.” Tess whispered.

The creature bowed its ponderous head and clutched the carpet in its claws. Warburton’s voice, thick and rolling, struggled from its throat.

“Ammut, spawn of Ammit. Ammut that was Meheryt-Ammut.” It sighed. “Meheryt has gone.”

Nick stepped forward, restrained by Tess’s grasping at his sleeve.

“Where is Simon Warburton? What have you done with him?”

“Symun is here. He waits.” The creature pinned Nick with its crocodilian gaze. “Do you come to be judged?”

The thing stood, its savage grin widening until the points of its teeth stopped in front of Warburton’s ears. It took a few stiff-legged steps toward Nick and Tess, the floor creaking and groaning as if beneath a great weight, and held out its taloned hands in parody of a scale.

“How shall your hearts be weighed? Will they be as sweet fruits for Ammut?”

Tess pulled Nick with her as she backed out the door. “Run. Don’t break the salt line on the way out.”

They fled down the stairs and through the stifling entry hall. Behind them, a rushing as of wind knocked askew the pictures on the stairwell wall. The footsteps of a giant thundered on the stairs. They bolted through the front door, skipping over the line of salt that flickered with cold blue flame, as a storm of dried rose petals whirled up like a dust devil. Tess stopped on the steps to the street and looked back. The thing that called itself Ammut stood in the doorway behind the curtain of ghostfire. It looked down at the natron and salts, then back to Tess.

“Bring to me the portal and I will release your Symun, though his heart be weighty as stone.”

It turned and was swallowed by the shadowy interior. The door swung closed with a quiet snick.

Episode One

Episode 3

He does not float. Grappled by the river’s currents, tumbled in the arms of the river as he had tumbled in the arms of the demon, he speeds along the silted terrain where suicides have left their bones. He has become a citizen of the turbulent country of the watery dead, deep under the darting fish bellies. He is not a suicide, nor some murderer’s prey. He is a fleeing sacrifice from the altar of monstrous desire. His incorporeal heart had shuddered once as Meheryt ground it between her crocodilian teeth. Now, the river sweeps him away from she who would consume him, and he slips along its cold throat clutching his essence around him.

Tess never wore watches; there was no point. Their delicate workings twisted and ground to a halt after a few hours on her wrist. She knew it was late, though, even without the glaring numerals of the dashboard clock, which had also died from its proximity to her over the years. The grit in her eyes and the pounding surf in her head told her so. She had meant to arrive hours ago. She switched off the Jeep’s ignition and leaned back in her seat, eyes closed. It would be so easy to drift off to sleep, even with the early December cold sliding into the car with her. Sliding its wintry hands inside her leather jacket, tickling gooseflesh along her ribs.

With a jolt, Tess sat up, hugging around her what warmth was left. She glanced at the little Edwardian compass on the passenger seat beside her. Its brass filigree dial showed no directional points. Arcane sigils wrought in gold glowed like embers along its perimeter, and the quartz needle at its navel bobbed gently but remained in a neutral position. She pocketed the compass, opened her door, and stepped out onto the cracked concrete of the drive. With more weary trepidation than curiosity, she looked up at the faded green Victorian where her partner slept, then over her shoulder at the dark street. Her fingers twitched, wishing for a fistful of salt for the doorsill.

Nick had left the front door unlocked. Tess eased it shut behind her and slung her battered backpack into the darkness of the vestibule. In the front room, she removed her boots, dropping them by the newel post on her way upstairs. Silent in wool socks, she avoided the creaky spots on the winding stair as though she’d lived there all her life. She stopped on the second-floor landing and listened.

From behind a closed door to her right came the sound of Nick asleep, deep even breathing interspersed with the occasional mutter of conversation. Despite the reason for her tardiness, Tess smiled. He always talked in his sleep when he was worried, and she knew she worried him more than most people. She should have called earlier, when she knew she’d be late, but the reason wasn’t something she could deliver over the phone.

Opening the door, she crossed to the bed and looked down at Nick. He had twisted the comforter and clasped it to him like a wrestler trying to choke out an opponent. One leg, clad in grey sweatpants, pinned the quilted material firmly to the bed. His dark hair made a fan on the pillow and hung over his eye like a crow’s wing. Tess put out her hand to brush it back but stopped. Instead, she knelt beside the bed and placed her hand on his shoulder, her face close to his.

“Nick.” She breathed his name into the dream world.

The blue eye opened, sharp and focused. “Where have you been?” he said, his voice rough with sleep.

“Nick…,” she hesitated, arranging the words in her mind before opting for bluntness. “JD’s dead. I’ve been at the morgue.”

The Victorian’s kitchen was long and narrow, brick-floored and wainscoted. It had never been meant to be anything but utilitarian, but someone had tried for modernity with glass fronted cabinetry. At the end of the kitchen, a fireplace hung open its sooty mouth and yawned at Tess as she perched on a stool beside an old butcher’s block. She watched in silence as Nick put the kettle on the gas ring of the stove and pulled two mugs from a rack beside the enormous soapstone sink.

“Tea or cocoa?” He opened a drawer and rummaged through a loose jumble of utensils for spoons.

“Nick, it’s not your fault. JD got careless. He knew the risks.”

Nick turned toward her and held up the spoons, one eyebrow raised. “Tea,” he brandished one spoon, “or cocoa?” He wagged the second spoon at her.

She sighed. “Tea. I don’t suppose you have Earl Grey?”

“Of course, I do. I even have lemon.”

He swung open the door of the refrigerator and disappeared behind it. Tess scrubbed her face with both hands and swept her hair back. Nick’s stony composure since they’d listened to the messages on his phone twisted her heart. JD Connelly’s voice had transformed from hearty to terrified in the space of a few hours, five messages telling the tale of his demise with greater poignancy than had his body on the slab in the morgue.

With her finger, Tess traced the dead man’s initials across the battered maple of the butcher’s block, where they flared with dull fire among the cleaver scars. She glanced at Nick, but his attention was focused on the steeping of tea in the pot, the precise loading of the tea tray. A rich scent of bergamot rose on the air along with sharp lemon, and honey, warm and floral. She watched him relax into the simple ritual of making tea, and her hand made a languid sweep across the glimmering letters, extinguishing them.

Nick brought the tray to the butcher’s block and slumped on a second stool. He waved a hand at the tea things. “Help yourself. There aren’t any cookies. I haven’t had a chance to go to the market this week, sorry.”

Tess studied him for a long moment until he looked away with a soft curse. She straightened, reached for the teapot, and poured for them both. From the inner pocket of her jacket, she withdrew a plain silver flask and added a generous measure from it to each mug.

“Here,” she said, setting a steaming cup in front of Nick, “drink this.”

He lifted it and sniffed. “What did you put in here?”

“Bushmill’s.” She clinked his cup with her own, lifted it to her lips, and closed her eyes as she savored the rich addition of the whiskey.

“Slainte.” Nick took a deep swallow. “God, that’s the ticket.”

He stared into the depths of his cup as though divining the future. “We have to find the item JD was bringing here. The perfume jar. You’re sure it wasn’t on him? In a coat pocket?”

Tess sipped the whiskey-laced tea and never took her eyes from Nick. “He wasn’t wearing a coat. Or any shoes. He was pulled from the river near the university. I searched his hotel room and his car. The jar wasn’t in either.” She shifted on the stool, cleared her throat. “I think he hid it.”

Nick sighed. “Why would he do that? It wasn’t anything a thief would think was valuable.”

Tess set her cup down with exaggerated precision. She looked at the drawn expression on Nick’s face. She looked at the wariness in his eyes. He knew what she was going to say, and she knew she would say it anyway.

“I liked JD. He was sweet, you couldn’t help but like him. But I know he hid the jar because he was also a crooked, thieving little shit who thought he’d soak us a bit for it. He never intended to just retrieve it.” She warmed to her theme. “I think he broke the seal and opened it because he just had to see what was in there, in case it was something he could sell to a higher bidder. You know he never believed anything we told him. He thought we had some kind of black-market business in relics going. He was an opportunist, Nick. We should never have trusted him to go on his own.”

Nick stood and gathered the tea things. His face was set, lips compressed. As he turned to carry the tray to the sink, he said, “It’s late, we’re both tired. We can talk about it in the morning. Guest room’s on the left of the landing. Go to bed, Tess.”

She stood and left the room without another word. As she put her foot on the first tread of the staircase, she heard the smash of crockery against the kitchen wall.

John Dillinger Connelly had been named for the Depression Era bandit. His mom, a wild young firecracker, had been enamored with stories of the notorious gangster’s Robin Hood persona and with the romance of rebellion. JD had grown up with a name as heavy as a mantle of state in a revolving household of well-meaning but dysfunctional relatives, and while he had not become a steely-eyed gangster, he was not without his own set of shadowy skills.

The irony of his life was the way those skills had made him an asset to Nick and Tess, setting him on a path of legitimate employment. He had enjoyed having a purpose beyond hunting for a scrap to steal or a rule to twist, but in the end, it was the scoundrel inside him that had got him killed. He sat on a spoon-back chair in the corner of Tess’s bedroom with his hands on his knees watching her sling clothing from her backpack onto the bed. She was angry, probably with him, and he felt the familiar sting of remorse that had so often followed his ill-considered adventures.

Tess pulled the compass from the tangle of clothing and sat at the end of the bed with it perched on her open palm. JD leaned closer, trying to read the face of the compass. He’d seen her use it before to find objects of power, and even certain spirits. He wondered if his own presence would make its needle-like sliver of quartz wobble or spin. At his stirring, Tess looked up, her dark gaze falling on him like the heavy paw of a policeman.

“What did you do with it, JD?” she asked. “I’ll find it, you know. But maybe not before … look, you’ve really messed up this time.” She glared at him, then softened. “I’m sorry this happened to you. You can still help us. Just tell me where you hid the jar.”

A frigid shudder of fear and longing shook him. He couldn’t tell Tess what she wanted to know. Even thinking about the cursed perfume jar felt dangerous, as though the demon he’d unleashed could smell like a hound along the thread of his thoughts and find him. If that happened, he knew, Meheryt would snuff him like a candle-flame, and he would let her. Torn between terror, desire, and belated loyalty to his friends, he could only look at the floor and shake his head.

Tess growled and cast the compass aside. It bounced into the pillows, the needle wagging with the force of her anger. JD bounded from his chair with a squeak.

“Get out,” Tess said. Frost crept over the windowpanes.

JD, shoved backward by the cold, his sneakers slithering over the red silk of the antique rug, allowed himself to melt through the door. A heavy smell of oak and varnish, the rough pleated drapery of the growth rings in the wood, a hushed sound of splintering, and he stood in the hallway gaping in astonishment at Tess’s undisturbed door. He hadn’t known he could do that. Maybe being dead had its consolation prizes. He stepped forward and put a hand on the door, meaning to fade back through. A flash of blue light met his touch, and a tingle of electricity coursed through him, causing his hair to rise on his head like vapor. A warding spell. He snatched his hand away, grumbling, and went in search of Nick.

Nick understood him. Maybe it was a guy kind of thing, JD surmised. Maybe it was their distant relation, a marker in the blood that opened a line of sympathy unavailable to Tess. The Firestones were a far-flung and varied clan, notable for the scholarly hell-raisers that sometimes rose to prominence among them—or to notoriety. JD wished he’d been gifted with the name, but his mom’s one nod to propriety had been to label him with his father’s. He glided down the stairs and into the library where he found Nick stretched on the sofa, suspended in the twilight anteroom of sleep.

“I’m here, Nick,” JD said, remembering what Tess had once told him about the dead finding that twilight state in the living conducive to communication. “I’m ok, you know, considering.”

Nick stirred, and his near-dreaming mind opened. He sat up, leaving his body lying heavily on the sofa, and turned to regard JD where he huddled in the big wing chair. There was a feeling like slipping onto a warm current of air, the details of the familiar room were altered and fuzzy. The missing Egyptian perfume jar sat on a table at JD’s elbow, a glowing alabaster accusation.

“You hid the jar, didn’t you? Just like Tess said you did. What the hell, JD? We trusted you.”

JD stared at the lambent perfume jar in horror. The lean, inscrutable cat carved on its lid stared back at him, its upright posture and tall ears speaking of a vigilance that belied the calm curve of its tail. A heady vapor of lily, cinnamon, and myrrh wound, like the cat’s tail, about the squat body of the jar and expanded to fill the air between him and Nick. Egyptian night, with its sultry caress, surrounded them.

“I’m sorry,” JD stammered, his ghostly flesh craving the promise inherent in the scent. This was not the hour for lies. He fixed his gaze on his clasped hands and whispered, “Meheryt’s not what you think, Nick, no matter what happened to me. Neither is that Warburton geezer.”

Nick snorted in derision and looked away, but even in this place on the edge of dream he could feel the spell of the perfume, a ghost from when gods walked among the people. Sighing, he fixed his attention on the young man across from him.

“Tell me what happened,” he said.

JD, shuffling his sneakers on the pavement outside the stiff opulence of Dr. Simon Warburton’s townhouse, considered the wisdom of approaching the door. He knew the old man expected him, but he’d never gone alone to an acquisition. Always, Tess had accompanied him, or Nick if she were not available, but today they had entrusted him with this job.

“Dr. Warburton asked for you, JD,” Nick had told him. “He knows you’re learning about antiquities. You’re about the age his grandson was when he lost him a few years ago. It happened on his last trip to Egypt. The poor guy’s barely left his house since. You might be good for him. Besides, you’re ready to take on a little more responsibility.”

“Does Tess think so, too?”

A moment of awkward silence told JD that his readiness for responsibility might still be debated between the partners. Tess, occupied with her research, was not present to veto the decision, and JD seized the opportunity.

“I can do this, easy. Gimme the address Nick. I’ll be back with your old jar before you can miss me.”

Now, looking up at the arched window of Warburton’s house, JD felt a sudden inadequacy. He adjusted the strap of his messenger’s bag, drew in a lungful of the gloomy air, and ascended to the tall black door. He applied himself with vigor to the doorknocker, listening to the echo of his cannonade bounce about the marble entry hall inside. He had time to turn and watch a grey bale of cloud tower over the denuded park across the street before the sound of measured footfalls approached the door. It opened. JD faced the impeccable dark suit of Dr. Warburton’s assistant. The man’s crisp bow tie quivered with disdain.

“Yes? May I help you?”

“Uh, yeah. I’m here to see Dr. Warburton. To collect an item?”

JD’s throat felt dry with embarrassment, and he assumed a belligerent stance on the doorstep. His voice, uncertain and conciliatory to his own ears, he now admitted might have sounded challenging to the suit. The man’s eyebrows rose a millimeter even as the thin line of his mouth drooped in a frown of distaste.

“Indeed? Have you a card?”

“Huh?”

Bow Tie now stood squarely in the doorway, frowning like a champ. JD had a distinct impression of a storm of surprising violence gathering beneath the urbane features.

“A card,” the man repeated with icy precision. “Do you have a business card on your person?”

“Yes,” he nearly shouted, so relieved was he to produce the correct answer. “Yeah, it’s right here.”

Bow Tie perused the card JD thrust toward him. The eyebrows rose another millimeter, this time ratcheting the frown back up into a neutral slash of bad humor.

“You are from Firestone and Cranwell?”

The astonishment, though lightly played, stung. JD nodded. The man stepped back on his glossy heel, indicating the mirrored polish of the marble hall.

“Do come in. I was expecting Ms. Cranwell. It is she who last spoke with the professor.”

JD stepped inside, prepared to feel a wintrier breath in the entry hall than the one he had endured on the stoop, but the house seemed cozy despite its grandeur. A warm, tasseled carpet in muted greys and scarlets graced the floor and a wide bowl of roses blazed from a central table of some dark carved wood. Through open doorways, JD spied rich walnut wainscoting and the dancing flare of a real fire upon the coffered ceiling.

Bow Tie, the business card tweezed between his fingertips, motioned toward a burgundy chair.

“Wait here. I’ll let Dr. Warburton know you’ve come.”

Warburton reminded JD of a sleepy crocodile, benign in his dozy serenity but possessed of a nimble ruthlessness should hunger prick him. The old man stood close to the fire, leaning on a rosewood walking stick, his soft grey hair stirring in the updraft from the flames.

“Come in, my boy, come in. Have a seat and be comfortable. My old bones don’t take kindly to this cold weather. They miss the desert sun.”

He chuckled. JD advanced into the room and perched on the edge of an immense leather sofa. Warburton turned his attention to Bow Tie, who hovered at the door, a black wool coat and red cashmere scarf draped over his arm.

“Well, Edward,” Warburton chirped, “off with you, then. I won’t need you again until after the weekend.”

Edward inclined his head, turned on his heel, and marched away across the entry hall. Warburton waited until he heard the big, black door close behind his assistant before addressing JD.

“It’s a fine thing, to have some youth in the house. I don’t count Edward, who’s a bit of a dry stick. How old are you, my boy?”

JD cleared his throat. “Twenty-six, sir. Just last month.”

Warburton beamed. “Fine, fine. It’s a fine age. You put me in mind of my grandson. He was a strapping lad like yourself, full of the love of adventure.”

JD tried to arrange his face in an appropriate mask of condolence at the mention of Warburton’s grandson. The old man nodded at him, his smile withering into a pinched grimace that was probably all he could manage in the depths of his sorrow. That’s probably what it was, even though it did give his firelit face a sinister look. Even though Warburton’s placid eyes now seemed to gleam with a predatory light. Crocodile. JD repressed a shudder, as the professor raised his walking stick and pointed toward the doorway.

“Come now, I hope you’ll have a bite of luncheon with me before we get down to business. I’m curious to know what you think of all this rummaging about among old things and dead philosophies.”

The heat of the fire was like a hand that had closed with gradual malice about JD. His face felt swollen with it, his eyes turned to sandpaper. The thought of a cool, white kitchen, or even a draughty dining room, was an elixir.

“Sure,” he said. “I could do with a sandwich.”

Episode 2

The Palace of Night deals in fiction; but I recently created something I’d like to talk a bit about in the hope that I can understand it better. The thing in question is The Intuition, a story that grew and morphed into what appears to be the rough draft of a first novel. As a short-story writer, I am bemused.

What I Intended; or, How Did This Happen!?

I had two chapters of what I believed to be a long short story, or short serial. Maybe six episodes, I thought. They weren’t even consecutive chapters. I had no road built between them. What could go wrong?

I wanted to play around with two ideas. The first was to write something where the MC was so despicable that it would be impossible for readers to root for him, and yet complex and interesting enough that they would be intrigued and even somewhat concerned for his progress against their better natures. Diabolical, I know. Sorry.

The second idea was to mash together as many horror baddies as I could in some semblance of cohesion. Would they clash, cloy, or curdle the story? I wanted to find out if I had the chops to force them to work together. It was pure overkill, but it sounded like fun, and Victorian Gothic seemed the perfect vehicle for this mayhem.

This was the entirety of my planning, and much more than I usually engage in. I am a confirmed “pantser”. I don’t make outlines, I don’t write notes (ok, sometimes I jot things on random scraps of paper that I never look at again), I don’t even spend much time thinking out a logical story map. Much of the time, I don’t have what could be called a fully-formed idea.

I “hear” a character begin to speak, or I “see” a setting. I “feel” a mood. My writing manifests more like channeling spirits than using my thinking apparatus to plot out a tale. I never begin with a thought to elevating my readers’ awareness of any important topic, or with speaking to human conditions. It is safe to say I haven’t a more profound thought in my head than what I’ve just “heard”, “seen”, or “felt; and those things simply pop in at random. I can take no credit if they are successful other than whatever facility with language I may have.

Good! So, I began.

The Perversity of Characters (Here Be Spoilers)

Will Dovedale was to be my MC; violent, murderous, without remorse or empathy. In short, reprehensible enough to disgust the worst among us. I intended him to be Jack the Ripper, fleeing England and perpetrating crimes and flim-flams across Europe. Will had other ideas.

While he could not escape entirely the power of my keyboard and was forced to be an absolute blackguard, he refused the very worst of what I demanded of him. He insisted on showing me the cracks in the inhuman armor I gave him, letting the vulnerability peek through in alarming ways. He wanted his history known, and in the process, he introduced me to other horrid characters who I had no idea lurked in the shadows.

His friend from childhood, Tom Cooper, I had intended as a slimy little sidekick. A minor character with shaky morals and a hero worship of Will. Tom may have surprised me the most, for he absolutely refused this characterization. While he was a product of the rotten East End, and he did overvalue his relationship with Will, he shocked me with his sensibility. His depth and strength of character, while hidden beneath the grubby exterior of a thief and con artist, was such that I came to love him where I had planned for him only contempt.

With my two center stage characters refusing their roles to the best of their abilities, I realized my story was about to experience serious growth.

The Story Within the Story

I just wanted to write a Victorian horror romp through some of the best-known tropes, featuring some of the best-loved monsters, okay? It wasn’t supposed to be deep or cause readers any uncomfortable allegiances to wicked characters. It was supposed to be, in the end, a vampire story. As in Dracula, we would travel to the Carpathian Mountains and have a showdown.

In addition, there would be a mad-scientist doctor and his undead creation, a werewolf, the mood phantom of Jekyll and Hyde, Jack the Ripper, and the gorgeous opulence of the Orient Express. An immersive soup of Gothic goodness was to be served, and we would all have great fun.

What I learned was that the vampires (and every other monster) were secondary. The real story was Will’s and Tom’s. Vampires are always a kick. I enjoyed them and their Gothic counterparts. But the most challenging and rewarding bits of The Intuition, for me, were the flashbacks to Will’s and Tom’s lives in London’s East End. Those bits, with their terrible cast of Big Hal, Mary Dovedale, Dr. Algood, and Madeleine Crowley, sang for me.

A Novel?

I have always wanted to write a novel. I think, at heart, I am a storyteller who works best within the world of the short story or short serial. That The Intuition grew so robust so quickly has been a surprise to me. I proved to myself that I am capable of writing such a long form, and for that, I am grateful for the experience.

Every week for six months, I wrote and published a chapter. I started from scratch each time, with no notes, outline, or solid idea of where any chapter would steer me. I neither recommend nor disparage this way of working; it is just the way my brain will have it. There were hours upon hours of reading and research and map-gazing to be done because I chose a time and settings I knew very little about. Fortunately, I love that part of the work and I have some well-stocked reference shelves.

I now have a lump of raw clay, a draft, that I can dig my hands into and shape. It needs editing and rewriting, trimming and beefing up. It will take some time and effort to polish. In the meantime, it is a story in its own right and will continue to reside in the Palace library. I think it’s common for writers to feel fatigue and disgust at the end of a long work. I’ll set The Intuition aside for a while to cool, but I will return to it and begin the sculpting process. Perhaps it will be a book on a shelf one day, it is hard to say. For now, I have other projects that look interesting.

I am so very grateful to Substack for providing the incubator that has made it possible for me to share my stories. I have been continually surprised and gratified to see the following this series has had, and to read the generous, kind, and supportive comments you have all gifted me. I know something about myself as a writer that I did not know before … that I doubted before. Thank you, friends.

Navigation Page

“Come to me, my girl. Stand by me.” Elisabeta motioned Elke toward her, stroking the girl’s face with her sharp nails, letting them linger at Elke’s throat where no pulse jumped in fright at their murderous touch.

Disappointed, the strigoaica turned her hungry gaze upon the men. Will had started forward with Elke, but Tom grasped his wrist with wiry desperation. Elisabeta smiled at the motion.

“Your friend fears for your safety, William, yet you are perfectly safe here.” She threw her arms wide. “All are safe here. We gather, not for slaughter, but for rebirth. This night, I will claim all my power. No longer will I steal sips from the well; I shall possess it. Come forward and receive the key to the chapel, my knight.”

Will shook off Tom’s hand and moved to stand before Elisabeta, sinking to one knee at her murmured command as though he were to receive a queenly accolade.

“You there, Thomas. Take up your lantern and come hither. Marcu, my brave opponent, carry your lantern there.” The men shuffled to their designated posts as though they had become chessmen on a board to be moved at another’s will. They held their lanterns before them in stiff agony, sweat starting from their brows even in the cold night air.

“Now, all is pleasing to me.” Elisabeta turned to Elke, reaching out to clasp the girl’s neck. “Come, little one, a kiss between sisters.”

She drew Elke to her until their lips touched in tender caress, but Elisabeta pressed a deeper exploration, her serpent’s tongue thrusting past Elke’s lips and teeth. With a wheezing inhalation from lungs long unused, she drew forth the deathly vapor. The girl struggled in her grasp, the two wrestling against one another and the vapor billowing between them, until Elke repelled her with a mighty shove.

The vapor, an angry cloud that lashed against the fat plush of the falling snow, retreated to Elke’s lungs, staggering her. Her gaze flickered over Will, who knelt in taut abeyance, and the fear and rage in her expression smoothed to satisfaction. Willsome. He had kept to their agreement. If they were to seize the opportunity presented them by Mary Dovedale, Elisabeta must remain confident in her command of them.

With a victorious cry, Elisabeta savored the bit of vapor she had stolen, shuddering as it wound its way through her veins.

“Peace, sister. No harm has come to you.” She smoothed her skirts over her taut belly. “I have encountered lost souls in my travels but never have I fed upon them. It is … a potent delicacy. It will make this one powerful.”

She rested her hand upon Will’s head for a moment. “Behold, the key,” she intoned, and opened a vein in her wrist with a wicked thumb nail. Blood, thick and smoky, sprang forth like black sap. She held it before him. “A sip only, my champion. Drink.”

Will, waiting like a tightly coiled spring for this moment, grasped the proffered arm with all his strength and fastened his mouth over the wound, drawing in deep mouthfuls of the bitter fluid. He clung to his fount like a hungry babe at the breast, surprise his only weapon. Elisabeta cried out in shock, skipping back from him and dragging him on his knees a few steps before she wrested her arm from him with a snarl.

“Greedy boy,” she growled, a laugh half anger and half delight rolling from her. “What a devil you will make. Does it lick at you with Hell’s tongue?”

Will had collapsed to his hands and knees, voicing a roar of torment and shaking his head. The ancient blood, laced through with Death’s own breath, rolled through him like cold fire. The eye of the intuition opened wide and wild, gazing about without focus at a host of shadows and monsters. He burned in icy flame, something moving within him like a dark fetus, stretching out its limbs to fill his skin, pressing against the bones of his face and skull. ‘A rebirth,’ Elisabeta had predicted … how right she was, and yet how ignorant of the full meaning of her words. He fell onto his side, his natural eyes gone blind in the sudden flash of vision that rushed upon him. His voice abandoned him. Silent and tortured, he curled into himself and clung to the instructions his mother had whispered in his ear. He had completed the first of them.

When the demon offers you the cup, drink deep.

The agonizing flames receded, leaving him numb and helpless. His head was pillowed on something hard swathed in silk and velvet. A lap. He turned his useless eyes upward, but it was the inner eye that saw, in minutest detail and limned in gold fire like an icon, the face of Elisabeta looking down on him.

“Billy! Leave off him, you bitch!” Tom’s voice clawed at the edge of the vision, widening it until he saw them all.

Tom strained against the spell that held him, dropping his lantern and managing a staggering step forward. Elke went to him and held him against her, whispering in his ear until he slackened in weeping. Marcu, his eyes bulging in horror, began to mutter in his native tongue. Will recognized it as a prayer. He could see the radiance of it rising from Marcu.

Elisabeta pointed toward the ruins, and his gaze followed. The broken stones and crumbled wall were gone. In their place stood a tiny church of stone and timber. No snow fell there, where a summer afternoon seemed to slumber. Moss grew in patches on the chapel’s steep roof, and its squat tower housed a small bronze bell.

“Go now, William. The holy man waits inside to meet you in contest. Bring me my heart.”

Will rose and made his way to the chapel door. Behind him, Marcu’s prayer stretched out iridescent fingers tipped with flame. Elisabeta sprang up in fury.

“Silence,” she commanded, and slashed the air with her hand.

Marcu strangled on his chant and crumpled to the ground. The sweet radiance dissipated. Tom and Elke hurried to the fallen man, careful to mark a wide radius around the strigoaica. Elisabeta paid them no heed. She had returned her attention to the chapel only she and Will could see.

“Borja, are you killed,” Tom cried, pulling the unconscious man to a seated position and patting his face. He put his ear to the drooping moustache. “He breathes. Knocked clean out, he is. Here, hold onto him. I’ve got to help Billy.”

Elke grasped Marcu and pulled him into her lap but caught Tom by his sleeve. “No, Tom. Will must master this task alone. You can’t imagine what stakes he plays for. Anyway, it is too late for your help. Look.”

Tom looked and was in time to watch Will vanish as he stepped across the threshold of the chapel ruins. He sat down hard in the snow, swallowing a lump of loss that tasted of tears. “Crikey! Where’d he go?”

Grigore flowed upon the black breeze, a darker banner in the streaming shades of night, and below him the skeletal beauty of the trees stood out as filigree against the snow. He dipped lower. Trails slipped in calligraphic loops and dashes among the trees, some wide enough for the voievod to sweep along them as a hunting owl might, some slender as the throats of keyholes that drew him out like a thread. He reveled in it all, even the painless clutching of brambles as he careened through trackless wilderness, joyful in his power and freedom. To have cast aside his weak humanity, to have accepted the strange and fearsome changes that had come upon him, to acknowledge—as Dr. Falke had described—his godlike abilities, had opened the world to him. He would grasp it with both strong hands.

Yet, the intoxicating elixir of Falke’s blood and Grigore’s subsequent wild waltz with the night, as pleasurable as they were, could not be allowed to turn him from his first grave purpose. The woman who called herself Doamna, Elisabeta who would be queen, must be purged from his lands. He, Grigore Corbinescu, was voievod—now and for always. He quieted his rushing flight and began to smell along the currents of air for the scent of devilry. He was not long in detecting it, and hurtled toward the place, a warlord simmering for battle.

The chapel was a dim pool of shadow in the quiet of the forest. Sunlight filtered in shifting dapples through the thick trees and ghosted in pale, dusty bars through the slats of the shutters that covered the building’s narrow windows. Above the stone altar, the open hatch of the bell tower let down a phantasmal shower of light upon a golden casket, striking dull glints from the gems that ornamented it.

A man materialized from the darkness behind the altar, leaning on an oaken staff inlaid along its length with silver crosses. His hair and beard were long, his robe coarse and without ornament save for a knotted rope about his waist from which swung a rude wooden cross, but he was neat and clean. His dark eyes, beneath bushy brows, were mild rather than mad. Here was no crazed hermit living among vermin. The man stopped before the altar and looked at Will hulking in the door. No fear or dread marred his calm expression.

“You have come for her heart.” He shook his head sadly. “I cannot let you have it. I tremble to think of what she would be capable should she have the heart back again. She has traveled in realms formidable and studied in academies unthinkable. She has found no suffering dreadful enough to block her pursuits. Yet even in her might, she cannot pass this threshold. The thing is safe here if you will leave it.”

The man spoke in his own language, and that removed by four centuries from the modern speech of his countrymen, but Will understood him. He understood, too that the holy man spoke nothing but the truth. He felt the flex and might of the thing that waited to be born in the creaking of his sinews. This priest could be no barrier to him. An owl rustled softly on a high rafter and looked down on them. Will remembered the second dictate of his mother’s counsel.

You must not kill the holy man. You are his charge.

“I have a safer place for the heart,” he said. “And a need as great as any Elisabeta can have. Give it to me, for I mean to take it.” Something like a plea crept into his voice, and he added, “I would not harm you.”

Outside, a great cry arose like a keening wind from the darkness of another age. “Bring me my heart!”

Will was lashed with a burning itch across his skin as though it had been scored by a thousand white-hot blades. The thing inside him stretched and opened its eyes, peering out through the occluded windows of Will’s own eyes, sharpening the dimmed arctic grey there to scintillating chips of ice. Somehow, their acuity had become wed to the othersight of the intuition, and Will saw through oculi that perceived beyond the living world and even some distance into the future, though it folded upon itself in layers of the possible. The owl leapt from the rafter and glided to the altar. Before him, the hermit swung the stout walking stick across his body.

“I have defended it many times,” he said, turning the staff in his sinewy hands. “She has come with one champion after another, but I have not seen any like you, my son. Perhaps my time here is at an end. Then again, you are dying—no, metamorphosing.” He stopped turning the staff and tapped its foot upon the stones, consternation in his voice. “I see the mark upon your head. You are damned.”

Will hung his head. It buzzed like a hive. He felt a fever take him, and the sloughing of his muscles as they loosened on bones that yearned to alter their architecture.

“The heart, for the love of your god, old man. Time grows short.” Will’s words sounded in his own ears like garbled growls and yips, but the priest responded with sudden speed.

Placing the staff on the altar beside the casket, he darted forward and caught Will as his legs gave way. With a shoulder beneath Will’s arm, the priest helped him to the altar, bearing Will’s weight as though it were of no consequence.

“Lean upon the stone, my son. You are afire with some dread change.”

Will slumped upon the altar, pressing his burning face against the cool touch of the stone. He was weak and sick, yet he felt a prodigious power building within him, seeking outlet. He reached out and touched the casket, and the priest did not stop him. The man only watched with his mild eyes in which Will now could discern something more than shrewdness. Wisdom.

“Give me the heart,” Will said in his new, bestial language. He made no move to take it, though he felt sure he could. “The heart … she will never have it.”

Without, the wailing wind of a voice rose again around the chapel, buffeting the shutters. “Bring me my heart!”

Grigore saw the horses gathered together at the edge of the glade, the men and a woman crouched in a knot by a guttering lantern. And in the center of the glade, Elisabeta, pacing and calling out for her heart. Had she gone mad? She marched with frenetic energy before the rubble of what he supposed to have been a chapel. She lashed the air with furious claws and gnashed her teeth. He alighted on a thick beech bough and watched her, his rage at her challenge to his dominion here growing ever greater. She would strip from him every birthright and subjugate him in the pitiful role of consort. No better than her slave! He would end her this night, and then on to the wretched monarch who had not deigned even to hear his petition for autonomy. No challenger would be left standing …

“My son, kneel and receive.” The priest helped Will to his knees. “I take from you the weight of damnation, but I deliver you into the service of others lost and hopeless. Do you accept?”

Will, his throat squeezing and convulsing, could only nod. The priest began his supplication, reaching out to brush his fingers against Will’s forehead. The touch was a tingling balm in the midst of the fever that consumed him. The priest opened the golden casket and lifted out the quivering, scarlet lump of Elisabeta’s heart. It was as fresh as though it had been cut from her chest only the moment before, and it contracted and expanded in the man’s palm.

“Eat and grow strong.”

The priest lowered the heart into Will’s shaking hands, and Will contemplated it for only a moment before lifting it to his mouth. He bit into the red flesh as though it were an apple. The wolf burst forth in a splitting of skin and a cracking of bones. It gazed at the priest with wintry eyes then bent its head and snatched up the remaining mass of heartmeat from the stones and swallowed it whole.

In the cold night centuries from them, Elisabeta shrieked as though set aflame in the dawn sun and fell to her knees, her hands clasped over her empty breast.

“William,” she wailed, crawling blindly forward. “Traitor!”

Her hand touched the chapel’s foundation, and she snatched it back with a hiss, withered and black. She scuttled backward to collide with the tall boots of Grigore Corbinescu.

“Doamna,” he said, his lip curling.

He grasped her by the hair and dragged her up against the length of him, plunging his teeth into her throat. In gluttonous triumph, he filled himself with her blood until, nearly swooning, he dropped her to the bespattered snow.

“I rule now,” he shouted at the night. “I rule everything I see.”

His jubilation was cut short by the emergence from his chest of a pointed stake, a cross of silver inlay glinting through the gore. He clutched it in disbelieving hands and spun drunkenly to face his assailant. It was the little Englishman, his thin face twisted in sorrow and hatred.

“Rule from Hell,” Tom spat, and swung the sharp blade of Marcu’s axe. It caught the voievod in the throat and sent a great gout of blood arcing over the churned earth. Grigore’s lips moved soundlessly, and his eyes blinked in astonishment, before he fell in a heap atop the corpse of Elisabeta.

Tom, his eyes streaming, made his way back to Marcu who climbed groggily to his feet. He leaned on Tom.

“I am sorry for the loss of your friend. Though, I do not know what happened?”

“Nor me, either,” Tom said. His voice caught on his words. “Billy was just … gone. I can’t believe it yet. And the girlie, too. Look.”

He probed with his foot at an empty pair of boots set neatly side by side beneath the tree they’d cowered near.

Marcu crossed himself. “They say the dead go barefoot.”

“I won’t argue it with you. What do we do with that lot?” He nodded toward the bodies that lay like lovers in the snow, blood a seal between them. He did not notice the steadily diminishing pool of it, nor observe the flutter of Elisabeta’s lashes.

“Leave them for the sun, my friend. Let us be gone from this place.”

“I ain’t got nowhere to go, Borja. Billy was all my family and home.” Tom passed a hand roughly over his eyes. “I may as well lay down with them devils.”

Marcu clapped Tom on the shoulder and squeezed with the tender pressure of a consoling brother. “We have each paid dearly, eh? Come to my home. My sister will feed us. We will warm ourselves at the fire. We will make a new family if we can, for who else can understand our losses. Yes?”

The Afterstory

“It is beautiful,” Elke breathed, looking down from the mountain pass to the green and wooded valley below. A river ran there, placid and clear, and birds flew among the trees in a cloud of song.

Will agreed. It had been a long and harrowing trek from the snowy meadow where Elke met him to this alpine vantage where pink and white blossoms spangled the grasses. There had been dangers. Hungry creatures had come drooling. He had no doubt that they would meet more, even in such a beautiful land. There would be others, too, such as they were. Lost ones wandering, searching for the way home, in need of protection. Will shook his thick fur with impatience, his lip lifting over a long tooth. He did not feel like a lost wanderer, and he certainly was nobody’s meat.

He looked at Elke. He would keep her safe and the others, too. He had the heart for it.

Navigation Page

Navigation Page

Sunset was still a consideration when the camp erupted in chaos. Men shrieked and blundered among the tents, searching for weapons or hiding places. Horses danced and screamed, pulling at their picket lines, shaking off the hands of their grooms and knocking the boys to the ground. The cookfire, mumbling over its hot coals and charred logs, took fright and leaped high into the dim air. Blood painted the snow in hot, sprawling splashes.

“What the devil is afoot?” Will burst from the tent where he and Tom had been making ready for their night expedition. He grabbed a white-faced young man by the arm as the boy was sprinting by and shouted into his ear.

The boy clutched at him as though Will represented unlooked for safety. “The Doamna,” he babbled. “The Doamna is angry! She kills the men!”

Tom stuck his head from the tent. “What’s he howling about?’

“Elisabeta has returned early.” Will thrust the shaking boy at Tom. “Here, pour a tot of brandy into him. I’m going to see what mayhem ensues.”

Marcu ran by, and Will ran after him. At the edge of the camp, just past the line of horses, the snow was a crimson slush in the firelight. Two men lay dead in the broad spray of blood, one with his throat torn out and one whose head had been removed with the deftness exhibited by a child popping the blossom from a dandelion. The head lay near the cookfire, the man’s face a mask of terror that beseeched the dying sun for succor.

Marcu fell to his knees beside his murdered friends. Will strode to him, looking down on the carnage and then toward the huddle of tents where an ominous stillness had settled. The smoke of the cookfire billowed outward in a titanic white fist, obscuring his view. A figure appeared in its midst, and Will reached down and grasped Marcu by the fur collar of his coat.

“Get on your feet, priest. You’ll want to die standing, if it comes to that.”

The figure emerged from the cloud of smoke and paced toward them with the lithe menace of a cat. Elisabeta, her face and hands streaked with blood, her dark hair a storm that lashed in turbulent waves, her beauty a vital and terrible essence that struck them mute. From one hand dangled the head of a third man, her fingers wound in his wild locks. This she tossed with casual indifference at Marcu’s feet where it rolled against his boots as though begging pardon.

“There lie the men who would have killed me in my sleep,” she said. “I do not forget they acted at your behest, young one, but you and I are enemies divided by a thing greater than either of us. It is an honest enmity. I will not suffer sneaking traitors, as you see. If you would challenge me, you have but to speak.”

Marcu, unable to muster a word in the face of such eloquent savagery, bowed his head in tears. Elisabeta shifted her gaze to Will.

“William. Ready your horses.” She glanced at the darkening sky, observing the final closure of day’s door. “You will ride within the hour. Watch for me to guide you.”

She clapped her red hands together; thunder rolled in its sleep. The air about her quivered as she sprang toward the trees, lengthening into the smoky form of a black wolf. She raced into the forest, and the night swallowed her.

Will released his bottled breath. “You heard the lady, Borja. Get the horses saddled. I’ll collect Tom and meet you directly.”

Marcu stayed him with a trembling hand on his sleeve. “I do not expect to return. If you live, sir, will you lend your aid to our voievod? He will need a strong right hand.”

“I think you know as well as I that should Elisabeta regain her heart, it is all over for Corbinescu as a living man. He will be as she is. The only aid I might offer him is a clean death.” He thumped Marcu on the shoulder. “Come, let us concern ourselves with keeping our own hearts beating. I, for one, have still some hope of defeating this creature.”

The track through the forest was narrow, hemmed on both sides by tall thickets of wild rose and bramble. The slender pillars of rowan and sycamore saplings contributed to an impression of riding single file along some fey temple aisle, and all was frosted and glistening in the thin moonlight. Elisabeta ran before them, leaving them to follow her prints by lantern-glow, pausing at intervals to look back at them, her long, hot tongue lolling in a wolfish grin.

Will sank into himself, rocking in his saddle, unmindful of either the cold or the haunting beauty around him. Following him, Elke rode astride and dressed as a man, her long, pale hair wound about her head in a thick braid. He had not anticipated her accompanying them, but when she had led her horse forward as the group prepared to leave camp, he had known it must be so. This night would see the end of his bloody, brutal headlong flight through the world. In one way or another, he would rest. His mother had made it clear; Elke or Hell were his choices.

‘There are lost souls here. Souls that have dropped the thread of their journey, or had it severed, and wander in fear. Did you think death an easy road? The way is not always smooth. Many times, the lost ones are consumed by ravenous forces that roam these lands seeking them. It is the worst fate, to come to nothingness. Elke may slip the leash on which her doctor holds her, but to go forth here with no guide or mapped road … there is worse than death, my son. If you would avoid the pit that slavers for you, there is a role for you here, and I will tell you how to claim it.’

He would not turn to look at Elke. They had said all that could be said to one another; had made all the plans that could be made. He spared a cold-bladed thought for Falke, the man who had at once ruined Elke and ensnared her, only to cast her aside when presented with a better candidate for his dark experiments. Will’s one regret was leaving the doctor alive to commit further folly. Perhaps Falke would overreach himself. Perhaps he would tumble himself headfirst into the Hell that Will proposed to escape. Will’s mouth twisted in a bitter sneer.

Tom rode at the rear of the line, cursing softly and beating his cold, mittened hands against his thighs. The gravity of their grim errand had silenced even Tom’s jaunty banter. There had been no point in commanding him to stay behind. Where Will went, Tom would go, even to his doom. It was a puzzle to Will how such a feeling could be constructed from such a partnership. He discounted their rough childhood years when they had been thrown together in the bid for survival. Later, when he had been master of his own fate and Tom his own master, still the man had stayed always by him. Tom had carried for him all the outrage, fear, and sadness Will had refused to entertain.

Tom had acted time and again to turn the drowning tide from them with his quick wit and a brash swagger he had little hope of defending. Will tightened his fist on the reins, feeling the might of it. These fists had backed every rude caper Tom had enacted, yet such was Tom Cooper’s coarse charm they had been called upon but little for such purpose. Will, on his own, had made all the opportunity for their violence that was needed. He supposed this was what was meant by friendship and felt a slight twinge of conscience for the times innumerable he had contemplated snuffing Tom’s light. He was sorry the man had seen fit to accompany them, for he could guarantee him no safety from the elemental force of Elisabeta.

“There it is.” The cry from Marcu, who rode lead, shattered Will’s ruminations. “The chapel lies before us.”

The party spurred forward as the track opened into a small glade. Will rode alongside Marcu and followed the man’s pointing finger to a snow-covered mound of vines and rubble. Part of a wall, no more than waist-high, formed a stony corner on what he supposed would be an ancient foundation should they dig for it. Tom rode up, scowling.

“What’s your game, Borja,” he asked. “Having us on, are you? If that pile o’rocks is a chapel, I’ll eat me saddle.” He turned to Will. “Rode all the way out here, half killed with hypothermy, for a peek at some moldy stones. I say we pack in this adventure, Billy, and get back to civilization.”

“Do not be hasty.” Elisabeta materialized at edge of the forest and glided to the broken remains of the chapel. “Here stands the sanctuary where lies my heart. Here dwells the holy man who guards it. William, you may see it as I see it. Only look.”

She gazed at the party with flashing, obsidian eyes. “Such a fine retinue. I am honored that you attend my coronation. Such strong, full-blooded young men.” She smiled, but her puzzled attention fixed on Elke. “And a fair young lady. I am surprised to see you here, my pet.. Nevertheless, I welcome you. Now let us begin.”

Prince Grigore regarded his visitor through heavy-lidded eyes. The doctor was a fine-looking man, young and strong. His vitality drew a sigh from the prince. There was something familiar about it. Something familiar about the way Falke sat upright and alert, ready to converse and equally ready to act. It reminded Grigore of … himself. What was foreign was the feverish look of hunger in the doctor’s eyes—a desperate impatience that Grigore had never exhibited. At least, not before his illness. A suspicion spun in his brain, and with it, an idea both audacious and deadly.

“My good doctor, how pleasant it is to see you. I trust you found no difficulty in coming to me?”

The prince knew there had been no trouble, for Marcu had gone away with the infernal creature that threatened his house. Thoughts of Elisabeta sent a violent shudder over his form, and he drew his hands in tight fists to his chest with a hissing exhalation. Falke sat forward on his stool, his burning eyes fixed on Grigore’s gaunt face.

“Are you well, sir? Is there anything I can do for you?”

Grigore laughed. “I am weak, Doctor. I feel my body dying. However, there is something you can do for me. This cover … “ He plucked feebly at the heavy gold altar cloth that draped him neck to feet. “It stifles me, it is so weighty. Perhaps you would remove it from me?”

“Yes, I can see that it is a hateful burden.” Falke made a face as though the cloth emitted a bad smell. He made no move to touch it. “Will you not suffer from the cold if I take it away?”

Grigore’s eyes narrowed. So, it was to be a game of chess. “I no longer feel the cold. Marcu is overly solicitous. Something of a fussy grandmother, really. Tell me, what did you want with the syringe of blood you drew from me? You acquired it at great risk. I hope it answered your hopes.”

Falke chuckled. “I think you know, Prince Grigore, that it was not blood I got. How much of your condition do you grasp, I wonder? In answer to your question, the substance has indeed been a source of great assistance in my studies. It has, in fact, been a key to doors most stubbornly bolted against me. That is why I was so eager to talk with you.”

The prince sank back against his pillows. He was weak as a kitten and bound most cruelly by the sacred altar cloth. Fury whirled like a dervish within him, but he only hung a mild smile on his wasted face and allowed his purple eyelids to flutter closed.

“Tell me of your studies. I am most interested. By the way, what did you do with the substance in the syringe?”

He opened his eyes to find Falke standing directly over him. A shock of fear-tinged surprise gave way to a gnawing desire to sink his teeth into the artery he could see pulsing in the doctor’s throat. Falke held up an empty syringe.

“I observed it and made calculations beyond any I had ever imagined before. And then, I injected it into my own veins. I need not tell you of the awful ecstasy I experienced. For the entirety of one night, I was as a god in the forest. I crossed at will into the lands of death and returned as easily. I require more, I’m afraid. This will not hurt you.”

“Wait. I have a proposition for you that will make the results of a paltry syringe appear as nothing. As you see, I am a prisoner here. In return for my freedom, I will knock down for you every door in this world or the next. Are you bold enough to find your every question answered, Doctor?”

Falke lowered the syringe. The moment stretched. Grigore clung to the slippery rope of his self-possession, as hopeful as any gambler.

“You promise I will understand? That death will yield her secrets to me?”

At the prince’s solemn nod, Falke slipped the syringe into his coat pocket and grasped the edge of the altar cloth.

“Show me then,” he cried, and tore the heavy cloth from the skeletal form beneath it, flinging it from him with distaste.

Grigore moved with the speed of a sudden wind. He clutched Falke to himself, pulling the doctor’s head back by the hair. If he looked frail and emaciated, his strength was that of five men, and Falke found he could not move as the prince breathed a foul breath over him, slobbering and panting. Grigore pressed his nose to Falke’s throat and drew it from collar bone to jaw with the ecstasy of a lover.

“I will keep my promise,” he murmured against Falke’s skin. “I will show you Death.”

The teeth were sharper than the icy air, yet heavy and brutal with the savagery of a beast. Falke cried out as they pierced him, as he struggled without effect in the crushing grasp of the strigoi. Grigore moaned against him, sucking and drooling, his tongue like a rasp against the wound. Falke felt the chilling, euphoric siphoning of his essence; heard the thundering protest of his heart as its chambers emptied. He arched against the prince, his fingers clutching at him, gasping and drowning in darkness, shuddering in inescapable communion with death. And then he was limp, his last shallow breaths pressed into the gold altar cloth that Grigore ground underfoot as he left the wagon and took to the night sky.

Navigation Page