Chaswick, laughing, looked to Lindsome, her eyes saucer-wide. “Oh, come now,” he said. “Surely you see the humor.”
Dr. Dandridge wiped his eyes. The beetle, tracking tiny spots of stew, crawled off across the tablecloth at speed. “A beetle! Oh, mercy. Mercy me. Excuse us — that’s not a joke for a young lady at all. Forgive me, child — we’ve grown uncivilized out here, isolated as we are. A Clatham Stitch upon my stew, as if to vivify it! And then came a beetle—”
Lindsome couldn’t take it anymore. She stood. “May I be excused?”
“Already?” said Chaswick, still chuckling. “No more questions for your great-uncle, demonstrating your very thorough interest in and understanding of his work?”
Lindsome colored beneath the increasing heat of her discomfort. This remark, on top of all else, was too much. “Oh, I understand a great deal. I understand that you can stitch a soul to an embalmed deathhusk instead of an unpreserved one—”
Chaswick stopped laughing immediately.
“—even though everybody knows that’s impossible,” said Lindsome.
Chaswick’s eyes tightened in suspicion. Dr. Dandridge, unaware of the ferocity between their interlocked stares, sat as erect as his ancient bones would permit. “Why, that’s right! That’s absolutely right! You must have understood the implications of Bainbridge’s supplemental index in her report last spring!”
“Yes,” said Chaswick coldly. “She must have.”
Lindsome colored further and looked away. She focused on her great-uncle, who, in his excitement, had picked up the aetherhook once again and was attempting to cut a bit of potato with it. “Your mama was right to send you here. I never imagined — a blossoming, fine young scientific mind in the family! Why, the conversations we can have, you and I! Great Apocrypha, I’m doing it again, aren’t I?” The old man put the aetherhook, with no further comment or explanation, tip-down in his water glass. “We shall have a chat in my study after dinner. Truth be told, you arrived at the perfect time. Chaswick and I are at the cusp of an astounding attempt, a true milestone in—”
Chaswick arose sharply from his chair. “A moment, Doctor! I need a word with your niece first.” He rounded the table and grabbed Lindsome’s arm before anyone could protest. “She’ll await you in your study. Excuse us.”
Chaswick dragged her toward the small, forbidden hallway, but rather than entering the door at the end into the mysterious yellow room, he dragged Lindsome into one of the rooms that flanked the corridor. Lind-some did not have an opportunity to observe the interior, for Chaswick slammed the door behind them.
“What have you seen?”
A match flared to life with a pop and Lindsome shielded her eyes. Chaswick lit a single candle, tossed the match aside, and lifted the candle to chest level. Its flicker turned his expression eerie and demonic. “I said, what have you seen?”
“Nothing!” Lindsome kept her free hand over her eyes, pretending the shock of the light hurt worse than it did, so that Chaswick could not see the lie upon her face.
“Listen to me, you little brat,” Chaswick hissed. “You might think you can breeze in here and destroy everything I’ve built with a bit of flattery and deception, but I have news for you. You and the rest of your shallow, showy, flighty, backstabbing kindred? You abandoned this brilliant man long ago, thinking his work would come to nothing, and that these beautiful grounds and marvels of creation weren’t worth the rocks the building crew dug from the soil, but with The Ghost as my witness, I swear that I am not allowing your pampered, money-grubbing hands to trick me out of my inheritance. Do you understand me? I love this man. I love his work. I love what he stands for. Apsis House will remain willed to me. And if I so much as see you bat your wicked little eyes in the doctor’s direction, I will ensure that you are not in my way.
“Do I make myself clear?”
Lindsome lowered her hand. It was trembling. Every part of her was. “You think I’m — are you saying—?”
The vise of Chaswick’s hand, honed over long hours of tension around a Stitchman’s instruments, crushed her wrist in its grip. “Do I make myself clear?”
Lindsome squirmed, now in genuine pain. “Let me go! I don’t even want your ruined old house!”
“What did you see?”
“Stop it!”
“Tell me what you’ve seen!”
“Yes,” announced Dr. Dandridge, and in half a second, Chaswick had released Lindsome and stepped back, and the old man entered the room, a blazing candelabrum in hand. “Yes, stitching a soul to an embalmed, or even mummified, deathhusk would be a tremendous feat. Just imagine how long something like that could last. Ages, maybe. And ages more….” His expression turned distant and calculating. “Just imagine. A soul you never wanted to lose? Why, you could keep it here forever….”
Chaswick straightened. He smiled at Lindsome, a poisonous thing that Dr. Dandridge, lost in daydreams, did not see. “Good night, Doctor. And goodnight, Lindsome. Mind whose house you’re in.”
Surviving the fervid conversation of her great-uncle was one thing, but after just five days, Lindsome wasn’t sure how long she could survive the mysteries of his house. Chimeric with secrets, every joint and blackened picture was near bursting with the souls of untold stories. Lindsome was amazed that the whole great edifice did not lurch into motion, pulling up its deep roots and walls to run somewhere that wasn’t bathed in madness and the footsteps of the dead. She searched the place over for answers, but the chambers yielded no clues, and any living thing who might supply them remained stitched to secrets of their own.
The only person she hadn’t spoken with yet was the gardener.
Lindsome finally set off one evening to find him, under a gash of orange-red that hung over the bare trees to the west. She left the loop trail around the house. Bowers of bramble, vines of Heart-Be-Still, and immature Honeylocusts rife with spines surrounded her. A chorus of splintering twigs whispered beyond as unseen vivifieds moved on ill-fitted instinct.
“Hello? Mister Gardener?”
Only the twigs, whispering.
Lindsome slipped her right hand into her pocket, grasping what lay within. A grade-2 aetherblade, capped tight. She’d found it on the desk in Uncle Albion’s study one afternoon. Lindsome couldn’t say why she’d taken it. An aetherblade was only useful, after all, if one wanted to cut spirit-stitches and knew where those stitches lay, and Lindsome had neither expertise nor aetherglass to make solid the invisible threads. It would have done her just as much good to pocket one of Cook’s paring knives, which is to say, not much good at all.
“Hello?”
Beneath the constant stink of corpses came something sweet. At first, Lindsome thought it was a freshly vivified, exuding the cloyingly sweet fragrance of the finishing chemicals. But it was too gentle and mild.
A dark thing, soft as a moth, fluttered onto her cheek.
A rose petal.
“Mister Gardener? Are you growing—”
A savagely cleared vista opened before her, twisting back toward the house, now a looming shadow against the dimming sky. The murdered plants waited in neat piles, rootballs wet and dark. Lindsome squeezed her stolen aetherblade tighter in relief. The things were newly pulled. He’d be resting at the end of this trail, close to the house, preparing to come in for the evening.
But he wasn’t.
At the end of the vista, Lindsome halted in surprise. It was as if the gardener had known that Lindsome would come this way and had wanted to present her with a beautiful view, for in front of her lay another clearing, but this one was old and well maintained. Its floor held a fine carpet of grass, dormant and littered with leaves. The grass stretched up to the house itself and terminated at the edge of a patio. The double doors leading out were twin mosaics of diamond-shaped panes. Through them, Lindsome could see sheer curtains drawn back on the other side. Within the room, a gaslamp burned.