The Device
Berend breathes in the stale, dusty air, ignoring the pervasive scent of decay. His neck aches. He’s a big man, and a proficient fighter; there’s never been an occasion when someone has managed to get their hands around his throat, but he is certain that’s what he felt in that blasted room. If he recalls it, he can still feel the individual fingers squeezing, pressing into his windpipe. He hopes he’ll never have to experience that again.
There is his pistol, his trusty friend through more fights than he can count, lying in the dust on the parlor floor. Berend doesn’t want to leave it behind, for its sentimental value and the fear of what new absurdities might lie upstairs.
That means he must reenter the parlor.
“Shall we move on, then?” Lucian asks, gathering up his case and his satchel.
Berend gestures to the pistol with his lantern. “Not yet.”
“I see.” Lucian raises his own light and taps at his chin with his pen. “I’d be interested to know if the phenomenon occurs when entering the room for a second time.”
Berend is decidedly uninterested. “Is the spirit in there?” he asks.
“Hard to say. I’ve noticed an increase in the magical energy here, but it’s not enough that I think this room is the source. We’ll have to keep looking.”
Not for the first time, Berend thinks Lucian is talking nonsense, and he’s starting to doubt that the Warder device actually works. The case hasn’t been opened yet—maybe it doesn’t even exist.
It’s five paces across the dirty floor to his pistol, and five paces back. He tells himself he can make it.
He starts feeling the pressure around his neck again three steps in. Though he knows what to expect, and that safety is only a short distance behind him, fear still grips him like ice in his belly at the first touch of the invisible hands. He feels very small and vulnerable, not a state of mind he’s accustomed to, and the ceiling seems to stretch away, the dark, filthy room looming over him.
Bending down to pick up the pistol makes the ragged furniture swim around him. Berend stands up again and turns. The door frames Lucian, who is looking on with interest, and along with the ache in his chest telling him to breathe, now comes a sudden flare of anger that the man is just standing there and not helping.
With deliberate effort, Berend gets ahold of himself and crosses the short distance to the hallway. Once more, the unseen grip releases, and he holsters the gun and takes several gasping breaths.
“Upstairs,” he says hoarsely, as soon as he is able. “Let’s get this over with.”
Lucian nods.
The stairs are coated in dust, and Berend’s boots slip as he climbs. He doesn’t dare touch the handrail. Every step creaks, the sound amplified by the high ceiling and narrow walls. The boards are softening with rot.
It’s not a long climb, and soon the staircase opens into a hallway ringed with doors. More portraits in crumbling frames punctuate the space between each door, and when Berend raises the lantern, empty holes stare back from where the painted eyes should have been.
“Look at this,” says Lucian.
Berend turns. On the right side of the stairs hangs a portrait of what he assumes is the Belisia family. Lord Belisia is a stern figure in his mid-forties; his wife is somewhat younger, holding a baby in a ruffled gown. A boy of twelve of thirteen, his hair slicked down and his clothing stiffly starched, stands on his father’s other side. Beside him is a rotten black stain nearly as large as he. All the eyes, even the infant’s, have been gouged out.
“It seems our spirit has some particular ire for the younger son,” Lucian says, nodding at the mark.
Berend recalls the scratch under Hybrook’s name in the family tree. “I wonder why.”
“Not sure,” Lucian says brightly. “I’ve never met the young man, myself. Where to?”
The next door beside the family portrait leads to a bedroom. The lack of clothing in the wardrobe indicates that it was meant for guests. It’s as neglected and decayed as the rest of the house, but no ghostly presence so much as stirs the dust. Berend swallows in anticipation of another invisible attack, but none comes.
Lucian squints at the device in his hand and shakes his head. No ghosts here.
To the right of the guest bedroom is a bathroom, the once magnificent tiles covered in grime. A claw-footed tub, of the sort Berend fantasizes about while on patrol during the winter, stands against the back wall. Some kind of unidentifiable black sludge sits two inches thick on the bottom. The room is quiet but for the scratching of Lucian’s pen as he takes yet more notes.
Something moves in Berend’s peripheral vision. He raises an arm, expecting another flung object, and keeps it there as he turns around. Nothing flies through the air at his head. He lowers his arm and lifts the lantern.
Strange. The light does not reflect from the tarnished mirror. Instead, there is the dim image of a dark-haired man, standing over the tub, scrubbing mud from his hands and arms.
Berend looks back at the room. The man isn’t there.
He walks closer to the mirror, angling himself so he can still see the tub and the apparition of the man. It’s hard to tell, with how filthy the surface is, but he’s certain the figure has the sharp features shared by all the family portraits—and he isn’t Herard, the only Belisia whom Berend has met, though he’s close to the same age.
Is this Hybrook? The only likeness of the Belisias’ younger son has been removed from the painting outside, but it would make sense. But what is he doing? A nobleman rarely has the occasion to get so dirty.
Lucian is drawing again, his pen moving in quick, imprecise strokes across a page of his journal. He’s balanced the lantern precariously on the top of his large case, keeping it secure with one hand while he holds the book open with the same elbow.
No wonder he wanted protection, Berend says to himself. Lucian is completely unaware of everything but the mirror and his drawing.
When Lucian glances up at last, Berend urges him onward with a nod.
The next door opens into the master suite. A damp, rotten smell hangs in the air, and the walls are black with mold. Berend pulls a handkerchief from his pocket and holds it over his nose and mouth.
With the rot covering the wallpaper, the darkness is oppressive. It swallows the lantern light and reflects nothing back. Faint outlines of furniture—a pair of armchairs, a small writing desk and a chair, and a canopied bed—stand in the gloom.
Something’s wrong with the bed. The shape isn’t properly rectangular. Berend takes another step inside, feeling the carpet squish wetly under his boots. He holds the lantern higher and does not look down at his feet.
The canopy still stands, ragged and decayed as it is, but the bed beneath it has been rent in two, straight down the middle from head to foot. It tips outward, the two halves leaning against the posts. Feathers and bits of cloth litter the floor.
“Fascinating,” Lucian says again, his voice muffled. He’s trying to take notes while holding his light and also covering his face.
Berend can’t help but shake his head.
“I think we’re getting closer,” says Lucian.
Berend shuts the door behind them as they go back into the hallway, and he takes the handkerchief from his mouth. He reaches for his pistol again, but he thinks better of it—the house is hostile, yes, but other than the parlor downstairs, it seems not to be directed at himself.
He would like to finish this before he gets in its way again.
He’s expecting something terrible behind the next door, but the soft blue walls are clear of mold. It’s dusty, and the windows are clouded with grime, but the ghost has no particular ire for the young girl who lives in this room. Berend steps inside and takes one look around, turning back toward the hall.
There is a shelf stacked with an impressive collection of porcelain dolls, dressed in frilled gowns in colors still bright despite the dust. Their heads have each been rotated around to face the wall, their sculpted hairstyles facing outward. On the bed lie a pair of smaller dolls, wearing gowns much like the infant Adella had been wearing in the family portrait. On the pillow, a hand’s-breadth away, the dolls’ round-cheeked heads lie as though they have been tossed aside.
Berend waits, a nervous shiver troubling his spine, as Lucian takes his readings. He can’t tear his eyes from the dolls. As a man with no children—that he’s aware of, anyway, and he’s been reasonably careful—he hasn’t had much occasion to be around such toys, and he finds them unsettling. The blank painted eyes of the babies stare at him from the bed. The others, with their backwards faces, do not make him feel any better.
Finally, Lucian is done. He makes a few more notes in his book and readjusts his bags. Berend leaves Adella’s room none too quickly.
The next room is a man’s, based on the clothing in the wardrobe. The waistcoats and trousers are covered in dust, and the hems are ragged from moths, but nothing is out of place.
“Last door,” Berend says, once he and Lucian are back in the hall. They’ve made a full circle of the upper floor.
Lucian takes out his watch-face device and looks at it under the light. “The energy is strongest in there, I think. If I had to guess, this will be Master Hybrook’s room.”
“You think the spirit has done something in there,” says Berend. It isn’t a question.
“It almost certainly has.” Lucian is actually grinning. His thin face is skull-like in the dim light. “Let’s take a look.”
Berend opens the door.
He is met with utter blackness, and a wave of almost tangible putrefaction. He coughs, reeling backward, and collides with Lucian’s cube-shaped case. Lucian makes a surprised noise.
Berend collects himself and returns the handkerchief to his face. He lifts his lantern, but the light barely penetrates the dark beyond the threshold.
I’m going to have to go in there, aren’t I?
He enters the room. Debris crackles under his boots, and dampness clings stickily to his skin. He can’t distinguish the shapes of furniture, and he soon realizes why: everything in this room has been utterly destroyed. Under his feet are feathers from the mattress, splinters of wood, and shreds of fabric. The glint of a button suggests that even the clothing has been torn apart beyond recognition. Slick, dark mold coats the walls and the ceiling, and veins of it creep down to the floor. In the shaky light from the two lanterns, the room seemed to expand and contract in a labored, sickly rhythm. Berend covers his face again, for the smell if nothing else.
There are handprints in the rot on the walls; bright patches where the subdued floral pattern of the wallpaper is as clean and colorful as the day it was pasted up. Some of them are large, square-palmed and long-fingered, close to the size of Berend’s hands. Others are smaller, more delicate.
The array of them seems random. They stretch around the room, from below waist height to just under eye level, singly and in pairs and clusters.
What are you trying to tell me, spirit?
Berend shakes his head at the thought. He’s talking to a ghost. He may be losing his mind in this house.
He holds the light up and tries to imagine his own hands in these positions against the wall, and someone of smaller stature—a woman, most likely—matching the other set.
Many of the images this mental exercise conjures are pleasant; or they would be, were Berend not standing in a rotting room in a crumbling house. Others are less so.
Something pale amidst the detritus catches his eye. He walks to the center of the room, trying not to think about what it will take to clean the stuff off his boots tomorrow, and worrying that every breath is the last one before another pair of unseen hands clenches around his neck.
After ten steps—he’s counted, just in case—he’s arrived at the only intact object left in the room. It’s a rose, half-bloomed, a perfect stark white that must have taken years of cultivation to achieve. He holds his breath and picks it up carefully, mindful of the wicked, curved thorns.
The rose crumbles into dust. Left behind are two scraps of pitted, twisted metal, formed into rings. Were they not so jagged, they might have fit the fingers of a man and a small woman.
Berend drops the rings, brushes the dust from his hand, and returns his handkerchief to his face. With a gesture from the lantern, he signals to Lucian to return to the hall, and shuts the door behind them.
“It seems,” Berend begins, “that the younger brother had a paramour, someone of a lower class. She might have been someone employed here, or in a nearby village—”
“That might explain the decay,” interjects Lucian. “Perhaps a maidservant is shirking her duties, shall we say, in her posthumous unhappiness.”
That makes as much sense as anything. Berend recalls the specter in the stable, the young woman with an apron over a disheveled skirt, trying to put herself back in order as she ran out onto the grounds. “I believe that he got her with child. She expected him to do the honorable thing and marry her. I think he may have murdered her instead.”
Lucian nods, turning the pages of his journal with a contemplative hum. “I think you’re right. It’s quite the accusation, and against someone of the Belisia name, but that is not why we’re here, is it?” He closes the book. “It would be a fair shot to use the device in that room, but it does take some time, and I’d rather not risk breathing in there, if it’s all the same to you. If we could find the body, that might be better.”
Berend realizes he knows where the poor girl lies. He saw Hybrook in the mirror, washing dirt from his arms in the tub, and there is one garden bed outside that has begun to wither from its roots being disturbed.
He leads Lucian downstairs and out through the kitchen door. Just outside are the fading, crumpling rose bushes. Fetching the shovel from the relatively untouched tool shed, he sets about digging. A short distance away, the reanimated bodies groan in wordless rage and shake the mausoleum door.
The earth is soft and loosely packed, and as expected, the roots have already been torn up. About four feet down, he finds a filthy cotton dress and the blackened, worm-ridden flesh of a young woman.
If she has any injuries, Berend can’t tell—the bloom of youth has left her in the weeks she has been under the ground, and her skin has discolored and fallen inward. It would take one of the furtive anatomists of the university to assess the damage to the body.
“Here she is,” he says. “Do you need her out there, or…?”
“No, no, there is fine,” Lucian replies. He shrugs out of the straps of his case and satchel, setting his burdens down. The latches on his case snap open, and the box opens down the middle.
Inside is what looks like a large lantern, as tall as the length of Berend’s arm from elbow to fingertip. It’s crafted of a dull, coppery metal, with a window on one side covered by a thick glass lens. A pair of wire coils stand at the top, the sides are set with interlocking gears, and a hand crank and a small lever protrude from the back. Lucian removes the device from the case and sets it on the pile of earth beside the grave.
He turns the crank, and the thing hums to life. The gears turn, sending sparks up the coils and into the air. Soon, the lens lights up with a pale blue glow that grows brighter and brighter, casting a beam to the other side of the disturbed garden bed.
As Berend watches, the faint shape of a human figure appears in the light. It flickers and disappears, only to return more clearly: a young woman, her dress tattered and her long, dark hair loose and wild, kneels in the dirt where the light falls. She wails, tearing at her hair, but makes no sound.
He has heard of Sentinels speaking to the murdered, calling them forth as witnesses. He wishes, uselessly, that Herard had not made keeping the church of Ondir out of this affair a term of the contract. Berend has never once reneged on a professional agreement, and he isn’t about to start now.
The image brightens and clarifies. Lucian is sweating over the crank, barely looking up.
Berend can see the tears on the girl’s face and the frayed hems of her clothing. Maybe she is present enough to answer a question.
“Who did this to you?” he asks.
She opens her mouth, but there is still no sound but the raspy moans of the Belisias’ dead ancestors and the whir of the gears on Lucian’s device.
Berend tries again. “Was it Hybrook? Hybrook Belisia?”
The girl turns to him. He can see her face now, and make out the shapes of her words, though she still has no voice: He killed me and my baby. He promised, he promised, and he killed me.
Lucian lets go of the crank and throws the lever. The apparition screams audibly, a piercing shriek that echoes against the empty house and out into the distant fields.
Then she is gone, and all is silent.
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