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

“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.

Its light flickered over yellow walls.

Lindsome’s breath stuck in her throat like a lump of ice. She could see the shelves now, the stacks of toys, the painted blocks and tops and bright pictures of animals hung above the chair-rail molding. A tiny, overlooked chair at the patio’s edge. An overlooked iron crib within.

Nobody had said the room was forbidden to approach from the outside.

Lindsome drifted across the grass. As she drew closer, she noticed something new. In the center of the room, between her and the iron crib, stood a three-legged table. Upon the table sat a bell jar. Perfectly clean, its translucence had rendered it invisible, until Lindsome saw the gaslight glance from its surface at the proper angle.

Within the bell jar, something moved.

Lindsome drew even closer. The bell jar was large, the size of a birdcage, but not so large as to dwarf the blur within. The blur’s presence, too, had been obscured from behind by the stark pattern of the crib’s bars, but it was not so translucent as the bell jar itself. The thing inside the glass was wispy. Shimmering.

Lindsome stepped onto the patio. The icy lump in her throat froze it shut.

Within the bell jar, a tiny, tiny fist solidified and pressed its ghostly knuckles against the glass.

Lindsome’s scream woke Long Hill’s last surviving raven, which took wing into the night, cawing.

Thorns tore Lindsome’s dress to tatters as she ran. “Chaswick!”

She fled toward the squares of gaslight, jumping over a fallen tree and flying up the main steps into the house. She called again, running from room to empty room, scattering dust and mice, the lamplight painting black ghosts behind crooked settees and broken chairs. “Someone help! Chaswick!”

Lindsome reached the kitchen. Cook was kneeling by the hearth, roasting a pan of cabbage-wrapped beef rolls atop the glowing coals. “Cook! Help! The yellow room! There’s a baby!”

Cook maintained her watchful crouch, not even turning. “Sst!” She put a plump finger to her lips. “Hush, child!”

“The yellow room,” cried Lindsome, gripping Cook’s elbow. “I saw it. I was outside and followed a path the gardener made. There’s a bell jar inside. It’s got a soul in it. A captured human soul. He’s keeping a—”

Cook planted her sooty hand over Lindsome’s mouth. She leaned toward her, beady eyes pinching. “I said hush, child,” Cook whispered. “Hush. That was nothing you saw. That fancy gaslight the doctor likes, it plays tricks on your eyes.”