What a horrifying thought.
It clings like cobwebs, and she shivers, pushing it away as she turns down a corridor she knows: the portrait hall. But there are no paintings here, no frames. The walls are empty, the paper not peeling but shredded, as if by fingernails. The door at the end hangs open, and there on the floor, she sees the grand piano slumped and broken. As if its legs gave way and sent the whole thing crashing down. As if it lay there for a hundred years, until the lid warped and the keys fell out like teeth.
Her feet carry her forward, and she kneels to rest her good hand on the broken instrument. A strange thought, then, of the mouse and the flowers, and she presses her palm flat to the piano’s side as if her touch alone can bring it back.
She waits—for what? For the prickle, the chill, for the piano to rise and put itself back together, but it doesn’t, and she feels only foolish, her hand slipping away. A shadow twitches, and Olivia’s head jerks up.
A ghoul stands at the bay window, facing the garden, the wall. A swatch has been torn out of him, a ribbon erasing one shoulder and part of his chest, but silver light traces what is left, and when he turns his head, her heart lurches. She knows his face. Saw it in the portrait hall at Gallant, the very first picture. Alexander Prior.
He looks at her, and there is such fury in his eyes that she recoils, backing out of the room, into the hall.
And then she hears it.
Not voices or music, but movement. Ghouls make no sound when they move, but humans do. They make a lot of noise, simply being. They breathe, and they walk, and they touch, and all of it creates noise, the kind you hardly notice over the louder, ringing sounds like laughter and speech.
When she cranes to listen, she hears a rhythm, the tap and slide of bodies moving through space, the hush of it like wind through trees.
Olivia follows the sound down one hall and up another, until she reaches the double doors that lead into the ballroom. The one she spun across in the other house, bare feet whispering on inlaid wood.
These doors hang open, a crescent of silver spilling into the hall, and when she peers around the corner she sees—
Dancers.
Two dozen of them, twirling around the room, and the first thing she realizes is that they are not ghouls. They are not threadbare and broken, are not missing pieces, not caught between the shadow and the light.
They are people. In the low silver light, they look as though they’ve been drawn in shades of gray. Their clothes. Their skin. Their hair. Everything painted in the same colorless palette, and yet, they are lovely. As she watches, they pair off and turn, break apart and pair again, moving through the motions of the dance, and the whole time, they move in silence.
The men’s shoes and the women’s skirts murmur across the wooden floor, the rustle of bodies moving through space, but there is no music pouring through the hall, no soft chatter between partners, just the eerie whisper of the dance.
The first real sound she hears is the steady rap of a finger on wood. A hand keeping time. Olivia follows the tap-tap-tap past the dancers to the front of the room, where a man sits in a high-backed chair.
A man, and not a man.
He is not a ghoul, but he looks nothing like the dancers, either. Where they are the gray of pencil sketches, he is drawn in ink. Dressed in a high-collared coat, his hair the black of wet soil, his skin the off-white of ashes gone cold, and his eyes—
His eyes.
His eyes are the flat and milky white of Death.
Chapter Eighteen
Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap.
I went beyond the wall.
Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap.
And I met Death.
Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap.
He raps one finger as the dancers dip and twirl, their dizzy circle so like the sculpture in the study, the single push that sent it spinning.
The man who is not a man looks somehow ancient but not old. His skin is not creased, yet here and there it peels away, the polished bone beneath showing through like stone under thinning ivy. And that is how she sees that there are pieces of him missing—not lost to shadow, like the ghouls, but carved away.
The joint of one finger. The edge of one cheek. A collarbone splintered at the neck of his shirt. The skin has been flayed back around each injury, and yet, he does not seem to be in pain.
Just . . . bored.
A twitch of movement on the platform, and Olivia tears her gaze from the stranger in the high-backed chair and sees that he is not alone.
Three figures stand about him, as gray as the dancers, but rendered darker, a draftsman’s hand pressed harder to the page, and dressed not like revelers but knights, a suit of armor shared between them.
The first is built like a brick, sturdy and stout, a steel pauldron bound across his shoulder.
The second is built like a whisper, willow thin, a plate of metal on their chest.
The third is built like a wolf, short and strong, a gauntlet gleaming on her hand.
They range around the high-backed chair, the stout one grim-faced behind the throne, the thin one just beside it, the short one on her haunches against the wall. And even though they are fully there, even though they have garments and faces, they remind her of nothing so much as shadows cast at different times of day.
They watch the dance without watching, the faraway look of the weary and the tired and the unimpressed as their master taps, keeping time with a music only he can hear.
And then, with a sudden jerk, he rises.
Unfolds from his chair and steps down among the dancers. They part and twirl, and as he moves between them, one by one, they die. It is not a human death—there is no blood, no scream. They simply crumble, like petals dropping from long dead flowers, bodies breaking into ash as they hit the floor.
The master of the house does not seem to notice.
Does not seem to care.
His dead-white eyes only watch as they fall to every side, collapsing in a silent, terrible tide, until there is only one dancer left. Her partner has just crumbled, and she looks down at the dust covering her dress and blinks, as if waking from a spell. She sees the ruins of the ball, the creature moving toward her, and her face, which had until now been a mask of calm, begins to break into confusion, into fear. Her mouth opens in a silent gasp, a plea. He reaches for her hand, and she shuffles back, but it is not enough. He catches her wrist and draws her close.
“Now, now,” he says, and his voice isn’t loud, but there is nothing for it to overcome, and so it carries like a crack of thunder through the hollow room. “I would never hurt you.”
The dancer doesn’t believe him, not at first. But then the master sweeps her back into the motions of the dance, the two of them turning in elegant circles through the ashes of the fallen, and with each step, she relaxes a little more into her role, letting him lead, until the fear ebbs from her face, the steady calm resumes.
And then he stops dancing and lifts her chin and says, “See?”
And she is just beginning to smile when he says, “Enough,” and the word is as swift and violent as a breath on a candle, snuffing it out.
The dancer crumbles against him, her body sagging into ash, and he sighs.
“Honestly,” he says, brushing the dust from his front, as if annoyed that it might stain. A pale white fragment shines on the wooden floor where the dancer stood, and at first Olivia thinks it is a slip of paper or a seed. But then it rises and tucks itself against the tear along his jaw, and she realizes it was a shard of bone.