Ellen Datlow - The Best Horror of the Year. Volume 6

Lindsome knew he was fishing for gossip. She did not reply.

“A pretty young miss like you?” pressed the coachman. Their vehicle was a simple horse trap, and there was nowhere to sit that was away from his dirty trousers and wine-stained smile. “You can’t be, what, more than eleven? Twelve? Only them scienticians go up there. Unless you’s a new Help, is that it? The ol’ Stitchman could use a new pair of hands, says me. That big ol’ house, rottin’ up in the weeds with hardly nobody to tend to it none.” He laughed. “Course, it’s no wonder. You couldn’t get Help up there for all the gold in Yorken.” He eyed her sideways. “So what’s he have on you?”

The road wound upward, the branches overhead thinned, and the stones beneath the wheels took on the dreary glow of an overcast sky. November in Tattenlane meant sunshine, but Lindsome was not in Tat-tenlane anymore.

“Eh?” the coachman pressed.

Lindsome turned her pale face away. She fought against the quiver in her jaw. “Mama and Papa have gone on a trip around the world. They didn’t say for how long, but I’m to stay here until they return. The Stitchman is my great-uncle.”

Startled into silence, the coachman looked away.

The nameless road flattened, and the mad, untamed lawn of Apsis House sprawled into view. It clawed to the horizons, large as night, lonely as the world.

When Lindsome alighted with her single hat box and carpetbag, there was only one sour-mouthed, middle-aged man to meet her. He was tall and stooped, with shoulders too square and a neck too short, giving him an altogether looming air of menace. “Took your time, didn’t you?”

Behind Lindsome, the coachman was already retreating down Long Hill. “I–I’m sorry. The roads were—”

“Where are your manners?” the sour-mouthed man demanded. “Introduce yourself.”

Lindsome bit her lip. The quiver in her jaw threatened to return. I must not cry , she told herself. I am a young lady . Lindsome gripped the hem of her white dress and dropped into a graceful curtsey. “I … beg your pardon, sir. My name is Lindsome Glass. How do you do? Our meeting is well.”

“S’well,” the man replied shortly. “That’s better. Now take your things and come inside. Ghost knows where that lack-about Thomlin is. Doctor Dandridge is on the cusp of a singular work, one of the greatest in his career, and he and I have far more valuable things to do with our time than coddle you in welcome.”

Lindsome nearly had to run to keep up with the man’s long, loping strides. “The house has three main floors, one attic, and two basements,” he said, leading her past a half-collapsed carriage house. “Attic is dangerous and off-limits. Third floor is Help’s quarters and off-limits. Basements are the laboratories, so they are definitely off limits, especially to careless little children.”

The man pushed through a back door that cried on rust-thick hinges. Lindsome followed. The interior had a damp, close smell of things forgotten in the rain, and the air was clammy and chill. A small, useless fire guttered in a distant grate. Pots and pans, dingy with age and wear, hung from beams like gutted animals. Lindsome set down her hatbox and touched a bunch of drying sage. It crumbled like a desiccated spiderweb.

The man grabbed her wrist. “And don’t. Touch. Anything.”

Lindsome fearfully withdrew her hand. “Yes, sir.”

A middle-aged woman, generous in girth but mousy in the face, hobbled out from a pantry, wiping her hands on her flour-smeared apron. “Good afternoon, Mister Chaswick, sir.” She turned to Lindsome. Her smile was kind. “Is this the young miss? Oh, so pale, with such lovely dark hair. You’ll be a heartbreaker someday, won’t you? What’s your name?”

“This is Lindsome Glass,” said Chaswick. “Mind you watch her.”

“Yes, Mister Chaswick.”

“Don’t trouble to see her up. I’ll do it.”

“Thank you, Mister Chaswick.”

“Don’t thank me. With your knees it takes you a century to get up the bloody staircase.”

Chaswick led Lindsome deeper into the house, under moldering lintels, through crooked doorways, past water-damaged wainscoting and rooms hung with peeling wallpaper. The carcasses of upturned insects lay in corners, legs folded neatly in rictus. Paintings lined the soot-blackened walls, and Lindsome thought that perhaps they had portrayed beautiful scenes, once, but now most were so caked with filth that it was hard to divine their subjects. Here, a lake? There, a table of hunting bounty? Many were portraits with tarnished nameplates. Any names still legible meant nothing. Who was Marilda Dandridge, anyway?

“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.”