A Mischief in the Woodwork

CHAPTER 28

Manor Scars

I developed a hunger for touching things, for learning about my surroundings. I felt like somewhat of a child, sometimes, rediscovering the world through touch with such awe, but these textures ran deeper than pleasuring my curious fingertips. The textures I was dealing with now were complex beasties, full of history and sentiment and components too small to be read by the naked eye.

I read Lady Sebastian's diary over again, and this time I lived the events through her. With each page, I felt as if I were there. I saw the things she described firsthand.

I began to learn things about Manor Dorn. I saw where it was keeping Mr. and Mrs. Dorn – there was a room, hidden from us, behind a wall in the upstairs. Inaccessible, a room built into the house's soul, rather than any physical region.

There were other rooms, too, that we couldn't get to. The house itself was only the physical reinforcement that had been built for our benefit, boards tacked onto the spirit of the place, a solid extension of something deeper. The space had always been destined to be a fortress, had spent many years preparing itself for the vigil – and, in the end, had overcompensated, made itself ready for more roots than were staked into it. The overcompensation still existed, in spirit – a proud conjuring of what could have been, refusing to become wasted potential entirely, lingering on in the neglected, willful emptiness.

Was it unsettling, discovering these details, this unknown and yet unmeasured sentience around us? To some extent, it had to be. But I was always so out of touch with emotion while immersed in the things that I saw; it was difficult to separate myself from the acute sense of fascination that seemed to dwarf all else.

Sometimes, of course, the disturbance was more direct. Such was the case with what I gleaned from the growing patches of termite damage that graced the house these days. It had stricken me as unusual before, and this time, upon inspection, I dredged up the secrets that it was keeping.

What I learned was nothing desirable. Hadn't I seen termites only one place, in all of my time spent in the various regions of decay? They had thrived in the Ravine, spewed from one Ambassador for the Angel of Death's smoking utensil.

She had been here.

Try as I might to feel the extent of her sentiment in and for this place, I could glean nothing more from the damage than that she had come, and made her mark on this place to pave the way for her master. Death was coming here, for someone.

When Victoria fell ill, I assumed it would be for her. She had caught Lesleah's fever, and I stood by and watched as she was tended to, keeping it to myself that I knew – thought I knew – she was going to die. She pulled through, however – and when she did, she sported a scar akin to what I had developed by the end of my own past fever of the same nature. I saw the mark as Letta dressed her, and my fingers twitched. There was no discreet way to come into contact with the scar, for testing, but I could not suppress the urge. What manner of symbol was this?

Experimentally, I went to my newfound mirror, unlacing my bodice to check my own scar, just to make sure. As I thought: nearly identical. But mine, of course, was dead to me. No answers keen on addressing my fingertips.

It was not the most pressing of the two scar-inspired mysteries haunting Manor Dorn, however, and I quickly returned to the first. If not Victoria, then who? There was a new patch of decay in the doorframe of the kitchen. She had been here again. Abandoning dinner preparations to put my fingers to the damage, I was not prepared for the vision that found me this time. As soon as my fingers touched the wood, she became visible to me.

The Ambassador – still in the house.

She smiled at me, where she stood ready for departure by the door. As my focus steadied on her, the termites I thought I saw swarming about in the folds of her luxurious golden gown scuttled into the shadows of the fabric, perhaps imagined altogether.

“Who–” I began. But she was gone.

Presently, Tanen fell ill.