I doubted the cat had a single flea, though I was not about to argue with my cousin, looming over my chair as he was, enjoying the advantage my seated position gave him over me.

  "I think you should go back to your room, Dorothea. I don't think anyone wants you down here. This part of the house is for the family."

  I would not be cowed. I told myself this, even as the first hiss of a whisper sounded in my head. I looked at him, at the sneer of his upper lip, this boy who had hit the cat before, kicked it out of his way when he thought no one would see, singed the ends of its whiskers with a match while the glory of power over a smaller creature surged through him. I saw all of it, all of his pranks, the susurration of voices in my head telling me everything, a steady trickle of words tumbling with the cadence of water over rocks already worn smooth.

  Madeleine stood several paces behind him, hands buried in the front of her skirts while she watched the confrontation, a mixture of avarice and fear on her pretty, upturned features. She would go along with him, I knew. Or else suffer his ire being turned on her. Better to acquiesce, to urge him towards others than become a victim herself.

  "You should go," I said, letting my gaze return to the book. "Your mother will not like to learn you've been speaking to me."

  He leaned in, his breath moist and hot against the side of my face. He smelled a little, the odour of a child's sweat, not strong enough to stink but still unpleasant all the same. "That's because you're a murderer," he said. Not a whisper, though his proximity made the words blast into my ear.

  The dam broke. A flood of voices, a buzzing in my head, all of them clamouring for attention at once, a few words clear enough for me to hear amid the chaos that had overtaken my thoughts. I struck out quickly, the book falling to the floor as I hit him with the back of my hand, the bone at the side of my wrist cutting hard across the bridge of his nose. The pain shuddered along the length of my arm, but he staggered back, shouting out words I imagined he'd learned from the other boys he knew. He looked at me with his hands over his face, clutching his nose, blood seeping out between his soft, pale fingers.

  I had thought he would curse at me, or lunge at me, but his manner of attack was worse than either of those.

  "Mama!" The cry went up, his voice loud and yet muffled by the hands half-covering his face. "Mama!" This one a whine more than anything, high-pitched and plaintive and unlike the voice he'd used with me only a moment before.

  He ran, then, shoulders hunched forward as he bolted out the door. Madeleine hovered behind, mouth agape as she looked at me, and I could not tell if she was pleased with what I had done or even more frightened of me because of it.

  I could return to my room. The thought occurred to me, but I dismissed it as quickly. They would find me there as well, and the thought of whatever confrontation I was about to endure happening in a more out of the way portion of the house did not appeal to me. And so I closed the book, and I returned it to its place on the shelf, and I waited.

  A minute, perhaps. Maybe two, and I heard footsteps carrying them back to me. Both of my cousins again, and now with Aunt Debney leading the proverbial charge, her shoes striking the floor with considerable vigor, as if she had somehow gained in weight and stature since I last saw her the day before.

  She swept into the room, voluminous skirts brushing against the sides of the doorframe, the lace of her collar flapped back with the amount of haste used to cross from one side of the house to the other. Not a word was spoken. I had expected a scolding, anything, yet instead she grabbed tight onto my arm—the first she had touched me since my arrival at the house—and dragged me out of the room, down the corridor, up up up the stairs, until we were outside the door to my own room and she pushed me forcefully inside.

  I looked behind me then. Matthew stood behind her, back against the wall. He must have rushed to keep up with her, to watch my punishment play out before his eyes. He had not even paused to fetch a handkerchief, the lower half of his face still streaked with blood and all manner of effluence. But he smiled, cracking the tracks of blood and snot that had already begun to dry on his cheeks and chin.

  "You'll stay here," Aunt Debney said, her voice low, quivering with anger and fright. "Your uncle will deal with you when he returns." She did not slam the door. No, she was more gentle than that. A click, soon followed by another as she slid in a key and locked me inside.

  ***

  That night, the dreams began again. If I were to write about them now, to relay every specific action and elaborate on the details, I could not do a sufficient job of it. There was darkness, great tendrils of it that slipped into the room through every crack and crevice, slithering across the floor like oil. And then they ventured closer, up onto the bed, over my skin, invading my mouth, my nostrils, my eyes until it was inside of me, throughout me, pulsing along with my blood.

  I woke to find my head buried beneath the pillow, the blankets strewn from the bed. Beneath me, the edges of the mattress smelled of char, and I brought my fingers up to my eyes, skin blackened with ash from the ruined linens. But there was no fire in the grate and my last stub of candle had burned out the evening before.

  There were no signs of burning around the bed, no streaks of smoke or ash, and even my nightdress was clean but for where it had picked up stains from the mattress. I pulled all of the linens away and piled them near the door—a door that was still locked, preventing any escape I might have wished to make. The mattress itself bore a split in it, a tear that looked as if someone had slashed it open with a knife, the blade singeing as it went. I ran my finger along its edge, the realization dawning that it ran beneath where my head and neck tended to rest while I slept.

  The ticking reeked of smoke and burning, but I doubted I would be given a new bed to sleep in. I glanced at the bedclothes, wondering if even those would be replaced for me before the next evening arrived. But it was early yet. The grey light from the small window told me that the family would still be sleeping, only the servants awake and moving around the house to light fires and prepare the kitchen for breakfast. I wiped the blackness from my hands onto my nightdress and took a gown out of the wardrobe, the same one I'd worn the previous day. As I pulled the dress over my head, a scream sounded from below me, perhaps all the way on the ground floor, though I could not tell for certain. And so I stood, my arms in an awkward pose above me, the skirt slipping over my head as my fingers lost their grip on the heavy fabric.

  There was no second scream, no marching of footsteps from anywhere else in the house to punctuate the cry or lend it a frame of reality. I blinked and began to question if I'd even heard it at all. Had the voices in my head discovered a way to make themselves heard beyond the confines of my skull, to echo through the very walls that housed me?

  I finished dressing quickly, contorting to fasten buttons and tie the sash into a simple bow at the small of my back. I waited for someone to open my door, to bring breakfast or lay a fresh fire or even to bring a pitcher of water, one not coated with a thin film of soot and dust. But there was nothing. I returned to my bed, stripped of everything as it was, and sat, my feet dangling above the floor.

  They came for me some hours later, in the afternoon perhaps, judging by the scant amount of light let in through my upper window. Or Mrs. Prim fetched me, if I am to be more accurate. She unlocked the door and stepped inside. Only that single step across the threshold, face contorting at the sight of my bed, of the ruined linens bunched into a pile beside the door.

  "You," she said, and beckoned me over with a brief, sharp gesture. "Now."

  She made no move to touch me, in fact recoiling an inch or so as I approached. She turned and stalked down the hall, glancing over her shoulder once to ensure I followed her.

  I saw no one moving about the house, no sign of my aunt and uncle or even my cousins, who I had expected to lurk in the shadows in hopes of witnessing the issue of another punishment on my head. Mrs. Prim's footsteps echoed around us, drowning out even my own as I tagged along in her wake.

  We kept to the rear of the house, favouring the narrow staircases and corridors the servants tended to use, until we arrived in the kitchen. I thought she would leave me there, perhaps see that a bit of food was portioned out to me as it had been a full day since I'd been given anything to eat, but onward we went, through the rear entrance and into the narrow strip of yard behind the house, boasting a few small, stone outbuildings and a tidy kitchen garden left fallow for the season. Down a stone path sporting a few sprigs of dying lavender growing up between the slabs, and Mrs. Prim halted on the other side of a storage shed.

  I held back. The corner of the shed hid something from my view, something I had no desire to see. I thought of the dream that had plagued me during the night, the tendrils of shadow slipping through every crevice, writhing their way towards me, burning, burning, burning as they went. My hand moved at my side, my fingers twitching as I fought to keep them from scrabbling at the collar of my dress, wanting nothing more than to tear at the fabric there and gouge at the smooth, pale skin hiding beneath.

  When I showed no intention of moving forward, Mrs. Prim grabbed at my sleeve and dragged me around to where she stood. Her fingers pinched hard on my arm, her nails digging deep enough I thought she might have drawn blood. Around to the other side of the shed, and there lay a mangled thing, small and stiff and soaked in something darker than blood, though the smell that invaded my nostrils possessed the same acrid odour.

  "You've the devil in you," Mrs. Prim spoke, her voice grinding out from the back of her throat.

  I stared down at the creature on the ground until its form finally became familiar to me. A bit of orange fur visible on its flanks, white whiskers fanning out from its ears. The quiet cat that had been my companion in the study yesterday, now twisted unnaturally, its throat torn open and blood—dried at the edges, still wet nearest to the wound—matting its fur.

  "Your door was locked. I checked it myself. And one of the maids comes out this morning to find this. Stretched across the back doorstep."

  She took a breath between each brief sentence, as if her fury would not allow her to speak more than a handful of words without pausing.

  "You've brought death into this house." She stepped forward, gripped my chin between her fingers as she tried to force my eyes to meet hers. But I could not look away from the animal, from its front claws, cracked and stained with the same blood that had issued from its throat, its very flesh and fur coating its paws. "You killed your family. Every one of them. And now you've come to murder us as well."

  Finally, I looked at her. She appeared older, out in the full light of day. Shadows curved beneath her grey eyes, exaggerating skin that sagged in small pouches beneath her lower eyelids. I glanced down at the hand that had held my face, fingers papered in dry skin, veins thick and dark just beneath the surface. She pulled her hand away then, a hand that curled inwards, nails biting at the flesh of her palm until I thought I saw the shadow of blood on her skin a moment before she stepped back from me entirely.

  "Back inside," she said, nodding me towards the house again. "If I could see you out on the street, far away from here... or dead and gone, naught but a stone marking your grave, I would. And if I could, I'd see it done myself."

  A flicker in her eyes. A blink, and for a second I thought I saw the blackness of her pupils expand, overtaking all the color there, threatening to spread across the white like a slick of oil across a puddle. But another blink and it disappeared. A trick of my own mind, I told myself. Hungry and tired as I was, no doubt I could not trust my own senses, not when so much of my energy was already being spent keeping my own grief and anger at bay.

  Mrs. Prim chivvied me back towards the house, never touching me, but herding me onwards, almost wavering behind me in a way that made me think she would take to nipping at my heels should I dawdle. Again, we passed no one in the house, and there was not even the distant step of a servant making her furtive morning rounds of checking fires and sweeping corridors. In my room, the bed linens still lay in their pile beside the door, my bed bare. The mattress bore the same scorch marks I had found, impressing them into reality, something else I could not disregard as a facet of a beleaguered mind.

  No words, then. The door clicked shut behind me, the parts of the lock slipping into place. My stomach roiled at the charred odour that lingered in the room, and I realized I'd been offered no food, nothing fresh to drink. I possessed no manner of calling for a servant, for a member of the family. Even the window above my bed was too high, perhaps even too small to allow me access to the world beyond the walls of this house.

  For a moment, I entertained the thought that I would die here. There would be no one to stumble upon my corpse for days, perhaps even weeks or months. The only thing to draw attention to my demise would be the smell of my corpse, rotting and shrinking down to a stain and a diorama of bones laid out on the already ruined bed.

  A fitting end, perhaps, to my family line. The soil on the graves of my parents still mounded high, dark and unladen with the growth of grass and weeds that will send down their roots to invade the coffins below. And I will be forgotten as well. A brief flash of scandal, my name disappearing from the lips of those who barely knew me before my skull has turned to dust and broken teeth. But I pushed away such macabre thoughts, only to have the weight of my parents' passing threaten to assail me. And so I squeezed my eyes shut, as if such a simple action could eradicate that particular darkness from my mind.

  The voices, then, find it such an easy task to slip in, to lull me away from thoughts of death and the dying. Instead, they whisper to me of the souls still residing on the floors below me, the beating of their hearts, the thrum of sin that accompanies every pulse of blood through their veins. And I dwell on that for a time, and I am nearly afraid to confess that it brings me some peace.

  ***

  They did not unlock the door for two days.

  It was neither my aunt nor my uncle, not even Mrs. Prim as I had expected when I first heard the footsteps approach my room. Instead, it was the housekeeper, whose name I still had yet to learn, only because no one had bothered to tell me and I had feared a clout on the ear should I have taken the trouble to ask. She brought no food with her, which was the first thing I noticed. My stomach had ceased rumbling the night before, and I had been without water for two nights and a day. She said nothing at first, and gave no attention to the state of my room—the unwashed linens, the dress I'd worn for three days straight, the cold ashes left to flatten and grow damp in the fireplace. "Now," was the only word she spoke, and that one scratching at the back of her throat, as if she had not opened her mouth for as long as I'd been locked in the attic room.

  I slipped off the edge of the bed, my head thick while my limbs seemed to float no matter how much effort I put towards keeping them anchored on the floor. It was near midday, I believed, the light in my room as bright as the window would allow, but the corridor I stepped into was dark, illuminated only by the glow spilling out from my room. I glanced towards the light fixtures, but there was nothing to aid our journey through the dimmer halls and down to the first floor.

  The entire house was cold, only slightly warmer than my room had been. I sniffed, seeking out evidence of any fires or candles or gaslight to heat the air, but a chill permeated everything. Even the walls I brushed against as cold as if they'd given up on knowing warmth again.

  The housekeeper led me to the drawing room, left me standing just inside the door before she shuffled off, head down and heels scuffing on the floor. Before me, an audience was assembled: My Aunt and Uncle Debney, along with Mrs. Prim stood in front of the fireplace, one that lacked a fire despite the rain that lashed against the windows. Madeleine and Matthew shared a sofa, both of them still small enough that their feet didn't reach the floor. They sat with their hands clasped in their laps, their eyes dark and unblinking as they surveyed me.

  Mrs. Prim stepped forward. There was little light in the room, the drapes drawn closed, and without a single lamp burning, the grey of her gown took on an even more shadowed hue. I blinked at her, not trusting my eyesight or the threads of ink that seemed to spread through her eyes and into the skin surrounding them. I looked at her hands, at her fingers—flexing and curling inwards, over and again—the skin stretched across them like paper about to collapse into dust, her veins bulging, the ends of her knuckles white and shining beneath the surface.

  I reared back in case she might touch me, but she stopped several paces away. "Dorothea," she said. The first time I'd heard my name from her lips. I glanced at my aunt, my uncle, hoping for something in their faces to give me hope, yet their expressions mirrored Mrs. Prim's, their brows clear, eyes flat black and unblinking.

  "Dorothea," she said again. It repeated itself in my head, those four syllables, until it became an echo of every thought I'd entertained while I'd been sequestered in my room. Her accent… There was something different than before, a lilting I'd not heard in her voice when I'd first arrived at the house.

  "Dorothea." A mimicry, it was, of the whispers in my head, the ones that lulled me to sleep and provided a constant audience for my dreams. She reached out to touch me then, fingers outstretched and steady. I slapped her hand away, but her lips only thinned a little, her head tilting to one side as she regarded me. Behind her, I saw the heads of my aunt and uncle, my cousins, tilt an inch in the same direction. All of them, their eyes without colour but for the sinuous shadows writhing now beneath their skin.

  And so I ran.

  I spun around, nearly losing my footing on the edge of the rug as I raced for the door. Locked, of course. Bolted in a way my weakened fingers and sluggish mind could not manage to undo. I kicked at it, butted my shoulder against it, pounded the side of my fist on the colored panes of lead-lined glass that would not help me should I have managed to shatter them. I turned and hurried off in the other direction, towards the kitchen and the rear of the house anything—anything!—that would support me in my attempt to escape. There would be a servant, I thought, some subservient creature who would help me, would unlock a door, lead me to freedom.