Nate was in the middle of falling to his knees when Kerri grabbed his arm and headed for the exit.
“Upstairs! We need to find a window!”
The darkness was somehow comforting, Kerri thought; it didn’t allow them to process that they were inside Debo?n Mansion, where reminders of a terrifying night lay in wait to trigger bad memories. She focused on keeping those at bay while finding the stairs, kicking a door open, and discovering a hint of natural light, the first in what felt like the duration of the Dark Ages. She didn’t pause and led the way up the main stairs, U-turning onto the second floor, focusing on Andy’s and Nate’s footsteps right behind her as they sped on autopilot along the second-floor hallway—blocking out the furniture and blurry wallpaper and watchful paintings that stared at them, murmuring, What’s the hurry, kids?—up to the final twelve steps to the door to the attic, and right up until the moment her hand wrenched that ultimate doorknob, she could claim that she had not, in thirteen years, touched Debo?n Mansion.
The boisterous, uncensored daylight in the attic surprised them all. Kerri ran to one of the big round windows, opened it, pulled out the flare gun from her backpack, and fired a round outside.
—
The old, narcissist firs around the mirror waters of Sleepy Lake heard a soft bang, saw the trail of smoke rising from the house and then a bright, painfully off-palette strontium-red burst of sparks.
—
Kerri slid down the wall, her legs finally taking the grandstand of her brain’s congress and planning a lengthy filibuster to protest the barbaric conditions they’d suffered for the last six hours.
A soothing breeze from the lake caressed her face. Her fingers scratched the floorboards, dirty with dust and leaves and twigs from outside—healthy, sunlit dirt.
“Catch your breath. We’ll climb out in a few minutes.”
“We don’t have a boat,” Andy complained, sitting or falling down next to her. “Are you planning for us to swim back?”
“Let’s take five. Nate?”
Nate was standing at center stage, taking in the scene. Daylight, and a silence of a good kind, made of mountains and insects, filled the attic.
He waited for his skin to react. It didn’t. Sun-riding dust motes floated around him, dodging his movements, outlining the bookshelves and the workbench, sculpting the books and the myriad bottles and jars and flasks in the laboratory. Everything as innocuous as wood and clay and glass.
The place didn’t feel haunted, or ominous, or spooky. Not after the mines, not after the bowels of the earth. It looked diaphanous in comparison.
He could have attributed this change of perception to rediscovery shrinkage. But something else, some elusive aesthetic tinge, kept this abandoned alchemy lab from uncanniness.
And then he realized: the attic didn’t feel abandoned at all.
Tim, who had inspected the room upon arrival as though he felt he had fallen unforgivably behind in his sniffing duties, was now standing by the door they’d closed behind them, staring up, his right front paw raised like a private detective’s pipe-holding hand.
Nate approached the workbench, floorboards acknowledging his weight, and checked a dust-covered open book on the table.
“Nate,” Andy said, “if you read aloud a single word, I swear to you I will staple your lips shut.”
“Doesn’t this room feel…oddly fresh to you?” he asked.
A breeze whistled audibly this time, carrying the smell of fir wood and a gentle marimba cue.
“What’s that?” Andy wondered.
Kerri opened her eyes. Workbench, books, vases. Then she pointed her flashlight at the ceiling.
“Oh, God.”
Birdcages. Every size, every metal—dozens of birdcages hanging from the high roof beams.
Andy didn’t have to see all the birds. She spotted the first skeletal wing poking out from one of the cages and extrapolated. Kerri looked back at the floorboards and saw what she’d first mistaken for twigs were bird bones.
Her eyes and Andy’s turned at laser speed toward the cage they had been carrying all this way.
The canary tweeted once, resentfully, perched on its bar and licking its wounds.
“It’s fine,” Andy puffed.
Tim barked at the door.
“Were those cages up there the last time?” Kerri asked.
“I don’t know,” Nate said, without looking. The open book on the workbench had caught his attention. It was a large, rigid volume whose pages had the colors, and possibly texture, of very thin slices of human bone.
“Nate, I warn you—” Andy began.
“I can’t read it,” he cut her off. “No one can. Except for the side notes. Debo?n’s translation.”
Tim insisted once more, adding some growls for the door.
“Last time, this was the book on the lectern.” He examined the floor: traces of red chalk pieced together the memory of a drawing on the boards, extending beneath the workbench and his feet. “Here it is, see? This is the circle. I was standing right here! And listen to this.”
“Nate…”
“Tim!”
“It’s okay, listen,” he said, reading: “?‘Thus the Avatar shall exist only within the Circle of Light, and shall try to pour into a living Vessel, for only in a Vessel can it exist beyond the Circle, and shall only be revealed under the Spell of Zur…’?”
“Tim, what’s up?”
Andy coerced her mortified legs to stand up, cocked the shotgun, and cautiously approached the door.
“?‘…but each transference shall cost the Avatar dearly, for once it stains one Vessel it can never pour itself out completely, and every Vessel shall remain polluted after the Avatar reaches its Source.’?”
Tim shut up as Andy yanked the door open and held the gun at the threshold.
No one. Still, Tim kept barking at the empty corridor.
“Uh. Andy…” Kerri called from her corner.
She noticed it a second later. A single sheet of paper hung taped on the outside of the open door, fluttering in the breeze. Albeit missing the envelope, the handwriting on the note was familiar.
And it simply read “GOOD-BYE.”
There was uncertainty about which event happened next.
The first of the two disputing occurrences was the canary fluttering in its cage.
The second was the gentle clatter of some lids on their pots in the laboratory, followed by the jingling of glassware and the drumming of books, the marimbaing of brass and copper and iron birdcages, and then the deep, grave, intestinal grumble of Debo?n Isle shrugging a murder of crows off its trees.
“We’re leaving!” Andy announced.
Nate barely had time to grab the grimoire before the girls took him along with the birdcage and their bags and blundered down the last flight of stairs into the hallway. Books were lemminging off the shelves, portraits and furniture shuddering at the fury of the house stirring itself awake.