She passed the goat.
At the first possible moment, she dropped her hem and sprinted down the path. The thicket thinned out into a place where the trail wasn’t as clear, but she kept going, crashing through brittle twigs and dead undergrowth, prompting vivified birds to take wing. The corpses were poor fliers, dropping as swiftly as they’d risen. One splatted onto a boulder at the edge of the path, hard enough for the stitched-on soul to be shaken loose entirely in a shimmer of mist; the physical shell, without anything to vivify it, shrank in volume like a dried-up fruit.
The faint trail turned abruptly into a long, empty clearing that stretched back toward the house. The vista had been created with brisk violence: every stubborn plant, whether still verdant or dormant for the season, had been uprooted and lay in careless, half-dried piles, revealing tough, rocky soil. A second path connecting to this space had been widened and its vegetation thoroughly trampled. Lindsome silently blessed the unseen gardener’s vigorous but futile work ethic and, slowing to a breathless, nervous walk, crossed the clearing. Despite the portending stink, there were no vivifieds in sight.
But as the path resumed, the stench grew stronger yet. Rot and cloying sweetness clogged Lindsome’s nose so badly that her eyes watered and she breathed through her mouth. Young ladies remained calm and regal, Lindsome supposed, but they were also not stupid. Perhaps it was time to turn back.
The path ended at a set of heavy double doors.
To be truthful, a number of paths ended at these doors, with at least four distinct trails converging at the edges of the small, filth-caked patio. Lindsome imagined that her great-uncle, along with the unpleasant Chaswick, exited from these doors when making expeditions into the haunted thicket for the few live specimens that must remain. Do they only catch the old and injured, she wondered, or do they murder creatures in their prime, only to sew their souls right back on again?
Lindsome tried the doors. They opened with ease.
The revealed space was not some dingy mudroom or rear hall, as Lind-some had expected, but a room so wide, it could have served as a stable were it not for its low ceiling and unfinished back. Instead of meeting a rear wall, the flagstone floor disintegrated into irregular fragments and piled up onto a slope of earth.
Three long tables ran down the center of the room to Lindsome’s right, the final one disappearing into the total blackness of the room’s far end. The tables were stone, their surfaces carved with deep grooves that terminated at the edges, above stained and waiting buckets.
Melted candles spattered the tables’ surfaces. There were no windows.
The stench of the place flowed outward like an icy draft. Lindsome left a door open behind her, held her nose, and took a step inside. Even when breathing through her mouth, the vivified odor was a soup of putrification that clotted at the back of her throat, thick enough to drip into her belly. The sensation was unendurable. Surely that was a stone staircase leading up over the unfinished back wall, into less offensive parts of the house?
Three steps toward the staircase, Lindsome made the mistake of glancing behind her.
The entire front wall, lined floor to ceiling with cages and bars, bore an unliving library of vivifieds, every creature too large for its pen. Stoats stood shoulder-to-shoulder with badgers and owls, and serpents had no room to uncurl in their tiny cubes. Rabbit fur comingled with hawk feathers. Paws tapped and noses twitched and bodies lurched gently from side to side, but that great wall of shifting corpses, scales and hide and stripes, made no sound. Each rotting throat was silent.
Three hundred pairs of eyes watched Lindsome, flashing yellow and green, white and red. She fell into a table, hitting her shoulder against the stone.
Get up. Run away. She daren’t breathe. You silly fool. The ground was sloping outside. Remember? This is a basement.
You cannot be here.
A door squealed open. A trickle of light dribbled down the steps. Lindsome dove away from the table and behind the staircase’s concealing bulk.
The door at the top opened fully. Candlelight flowed down the steps now, making hundreds of vivified eyes sparkle. “The sea lion, I think,” said a voice. It was papery and thin, like a flake of ash that would crumble at the barest touch. “At the far end.”
“Really, Albion,” said Chaswick, stepping down onto the flagstones. He held high a five-branched candelabrum, his shadow stretching behind him. “We’re overpreparing, don’t you think?”
“Oh no, not hardly.” An old, old man shuffled in Chaswick’s wake. His head, wreathed in a wispy halo of white and framed by sizeable ears, seemed bowed under the weight of constant thought across many decades. His knobby fingers would not stop undulating, like twin spiders in a restless sleep. “One last test, before Thursday. I’m certain that a Kell Stitch at the brain stem, instead of a Raymund, will surprise us.”
Chaswick’s back heaved in a sigh. “I maintain that the original protocol would have sufficed. The first time around—”
“I was lucky,” interrupted the man. “Very, very lucky. That ghastly knot was nothing but shaking hands and fortunate bungling. And besides—” He sighed, too, but instead of deflating, the exhalation appeared to lift him up. “Think of the advances, Chaswick. The discoveries I’ve made since then. How all these newer elements might work in concert — well. We cannot be too careful. I don’t have to tell you what’s at stake.”
The two men moved into the blackness of the room’s far end. The candelabrum revealed that the distant third of the wall was hidden behind a heavy black curtain.
“Of course, Doctor Dandridge,” said Chaswick.
“The sea lion,” Dr. Dandridge repeated.
Chaswick passed the candelabrum to his superior. When he turned to grip the curtain, Lindsome noticed what he was wearing.
Waders?
The curtain hissed partway aside upon its track. The candlelight fell upon tanks, tanks and tanks and tanks, each filled with an evil, yellow ing liquid. Each held a shrunken animal corpse, embalmed and barely recognizable. The lowest third of the wall was but a single tank, stretching back behind the half-closed curtain.
A great, bloated shadow rolled within.
Lindsome shivered. She had never seen the dead creature’s likeness. It must have been a specimen from the continent to the east, but whatever it was, it was not what they wanted, because Chaswick knelt by a tank on the second shelf, obscuring the monstrosity. He fitted a length of rubber hose to a stopcock at the bottom of his chosen tank, then ran the hose along the floor and out the open door. “Door’s blown loose again. That useless Thomlin — I’ve asked him to fix the latch thrice this week. I swear to Ghost, I’d stick him in one of the tanks myself if he weren’t a man and would leave behind anything more useful than ghostgrease.”
Chaswick returned and opened the stopcock. The end of the hose, limp over the edge of the patio, dribbled its foul load into the weeds. The large corpse within the tank settled to the bottom as it drained, a limp, matted mess. Chaswick did something to the glass to make it open outward, like the door to an oven.
He gathered the dead thing to his chest and stood. Ichor ran in rivulets down his waders. “I don’t mean to rush you, but—”
“Of course.” Candelabrum in tow, Dr. Dandridge shuffled back to the stairs. “I’ll do my best to hurry.”
They ascended the steps, pulling the light with them and the squealing door shut.
Lindsome fled outside. After that chamber of horrors, the sticking burdock, Raven’s Kiss, and cruel thorns of the sunlit world were the hallmarks of Paradise.