“Are you paying attention?” Chaswick demanded. “Breakfast’s at seven, supper’s at noon, and dinner’s at seven. We don’t have tea or any of that Tatterlane nonsense here. Bath day is Sunday, wash day is Monday, and if you’d like to occupy yourself, I suggest the library on the second floor, as it contains a number of volumes that will ensure the moral betterment of a young person such as yourself.”
“Do you have any picture books?” Lindsome asked.
Chaswick frowned. “I suppose you could borrow one of your great-uncle’s illustrated medical atlases. Perhaps Porphyry’s Intestinal Arrangements of the Dispeptic or Gharison’s Common Melancholia in the Spleen of the Breeding Female”
Lindsome looked down at her shoes. “Never mind.”
“You may also explore the grounds,” Chaswick continued. “But don’t cross paths with the gardener. Understand? If you ever hear the gardener working, turn around and go back at once.
“And mind the vivifieds. Doctor Dandridge is a brilliant, highly prolific man, and you’ll see a great many examples of his work roaming throughout the area, many of which do not have souls consanguineous to their bodies. However, none of the vivifieds that Doctor Dandridge and I have created for practical purposes is chimeric, so you may safely pat the house cats and the horses in the stables. If you’d like to go for a ride …”
Something colorful moved at the edge of Lindsome’s vision. Surprised at something so bright in so dreary a place, she stopped and backtracked. She peered around a corner, down a short hall sandwiched between a pair of much grander rooms.
The door at the end of the hall stood ajar. A handsbreadth of room beckoned, sunny yellow and smelling of lavender. A bookcase stood partially in view, crammed with spinning tops, painted wooden blocks, tin soldiers, stuffed animals, rattles, little blankets, papers cleverly folded into birds …
Lindsome stepped forward.
A woman exited the room. Her movements were quick, though she was old and excessively thin, with dark circles about her despairing eyes. She grasped the doorknob with bloodless talons, pulling it shut and locking it with a tiny iron key.
She turned and saw Lindsome.
Her transformation into rage was instantaneous. “What are you doing?” the woman bellowed, baring her long, gray teeth. “Get out of this hall! Get away from here!”
Lindsome fled to Chaswick.
“What’s this?” said Chaswick, turning. “What! Have you not been following me?”
“There was a woman!” Lindsome said, dropping her things. “A thin woman!”
Chaswick grabbed Lindsome’s wrist again. He bent over and pulled her close — lifted her, even, until she was nearly on her tiptoes and squirming with discomfort and alarm.
“That’s Emlee, the housekeeper. Mind her too.” Chaswick narrowed his eyes. “And that little hallway between the study and the card room? Definitely, absolutely off limits.”
Chaswick deposited Lindsome in front of a room on the second floor. As soon as he had withdrawn down the grand staircase, Lindsome set her things inside and made a survey of the rest of the level. The aforementioned library was spacious and well stocked but poorly kept, with uneven layers of dust and book bindings faded by sun. Many volumes had been reshelved unevenly, incorrectly, or even upside-down, if at all.
Most of the other rooms were unused, their furniture wholly absent or in deep slumber beneath moth-eaten sheets. Two of the rooms were locked, or perhaps even rusted shut, including one next to what she assumed were her great-uncle’s personal quarters, since they were the largest and, she could only surmise, at one time, the grandest. Now, like all else in Apsis House, their colors and details had darkened with soot and neglect, and Lindsome wondered how, if Dr. Dandridge were so brilliant, he could fail to control such misery and decay.
While exploring the first floor more thoroughly, she came across a squat, surly man in overalls who was pasting paper over a broken window in the Piano Room. He introduced himself as Thomlin, the Housemaster. Lindsome politely asked how did he do. Thomlin said he did fine, as long as he took his medicine and, as an illustration produced a silver flask, from which he took a hearty pull.
“May I ask you something, Mister Thomlin? What’s at the end of the little hallway? In the yellow room?”
The house’m scowled as he lifted his paste brush from the bucket and slapped it desultorily over the glass. “Nothin’,” he said. “Nothin’ that a good girl should stick’er nose in. How a man wants to grieve, that’s his business. No, no, I’ve said too much already.” Juggling flask and brush, he took another medicinal dose. “I know everything that happens and ever did happen in these walls, you understand, inside and out. Wish I didn’t, but I do. Housemaster, that’s me. All these poor bastards — oops, pardon my language, young miss — I mean all these poor folks walk around in a fog a’ their own problems, but a Housemaster sees everything as The Ghost sees it: absolute and clear as finest crystal, as not a soul else can ever understand. But good men tell no tales anyway. An’ a gooder man you won’t find either side of this whole blasphemous Long Hill heap. Why don’t you go play outside? But don’t never interrupt the gardener. Hear?”
Lindsome did not want to explore the grounds, but she told herself, I must be brave, because I am a young lady, and went outside with her head held high. Nonetheless, she did not get far. The weeds and brambles of the neglected lawn had long since matured into an impenetrable thicket, and Lindsome could barely see the rooftops of the nearby outbuildings above the wild creepers, dying leaves, needle-thin thorns, and drab, stenchful flowers. The late autumnal blossoms stank of carrion and sulfur, mingled with the ghastly sickly sweetness of mothballs. Lindsome pulled one sleeve over her hand and held it to her wrinkled nose as she picked her way along a downward-sloping animal trail that ran near the main house, the closest navigational relief in this unrelenting jungle, but she could get no corresponding relief from the smell.
She rounded a barberry bush. A little scream squeezed from behind her hand.
The stench wasn’t the flowers. It was vivifieds.
In her path, blocking it completely, stood a white billy goat. He did not breathe or move. His peculiar, tipped-over eyes were motionless, his sideways pupils like twin cracks to the Abyss.
His belly had burst, and flies looped around his gaping bowels in humming droves.
Heart pounding, Lindsome backed away. The goat did nothing. Its gaze remained fixed at some point beyond her shoulder. As she watched, bits of its flesh grew misty, then resolidified. It’s all right, Lindsome told herself. It’s just an old vivified, rotten enough for the soul to start coming loose. It’s so old it doesn’t know what it is or how to act. See? It’s staying right there.
Push past it. It will never notice.
Lindsome shuddered. But she was a young lady, and young ladies were always calm and regal and never afraid.
So Lindsome lifted the hem of her dress, as if preparing to step through a mud puddle, and inched her way toward and around the burst-open creature.
Its foul-smelling fur, tacky with ichor, brushed the whiteness of her garment. Lindsome closed her eyes and bit her lip, enough to bring pain, and a fly buzzed greedily in her ear. I am not afraid. I am not afraid.