Each nude body hangs in a sort of harness, straps passing around their upper chests and over their shoulders. Some of the corpses are pale, others tawny or brown. Each one bears a bite mark.
The bite on the body nearest me appears to be from human teeth, while the mark on the next corpse has a wider curvature, with narrower punctures.
One of the bitten bodies is still bleeding, dripping from a wound that must have been inflicted by enormous, long, jaws.The victim’s blood slicks the floor like a dark, wet mirror, reflecting the glow of my lamp.
My hand goes to my mouth and clamps there to ensure that my screams don’t escape, although I don’t think anyone would hear me even if I did shriek.
Beresford killed these people, or he’s protecting the thing that did. The size and placement of the largest bites reminds me of the monstrous two-headed wolf in Wormsloe. Could it have bitten these people? Is it connected to Beresford somehow?
But if the wolf bit these victims, why didn’t it eat them? It’s starving. It would have gobbled them up. And why don’t all the bodies have the same marks?
I peer more closely at the body that’s dripping onto the floor. I don’t recognize the man. As far as I can tell, he isn’t breathing. Cautiously I reach out and touch his arm. It’s cold, but not as cold as I expected.
As I look around the room, I notice that none of the bodies have decayed. Some of the bites look fresher than others, but there’s no rot, no stiffening of the limbs, no bloating. They’re dead, and yet they appear to have been preserved somehow.
I examine the next corpse, an old man with shriveled genitals and sagging skin. There’s soil under his nails and dirt staining his fingers.
He was a gardener.
In the back of my mind I hear Beresford’s voice, irritably saying, “Everyone is curious about everything. Where I came from, where I lived before this, why I bought the house, where I got my money, where the gardener went, when can they visit my estate again, why do I hold parties on the grounds but never in my house—”
Where the gardener went.
What if this is the gardener who designed and maintained the greenhouse on the estate? But then, why is he here? And whydoes Beresford act as if he has been caring for those plants for decades?
The old gardener’s eyes are fixed and empty, just like the eyes of the other bodies. I move past two more people, and then I stop short, a horrible weakness flooding my body as I stare into the face of the next carcass.
It’s Grandmother Riquet.
I would recognize her wizened face and bristly chin anywhere. I know her hands, swollen at the joints. The nails are ragged, the body emaciated. She’s naked like the others, her flat breasts hanging down to her waist. Both her thighs and her lower belly bear the marks of giant teeth. The wounds are old and black. They stopped bleeding a long time ago.
“Fuck,” I whisper. Tears well up in my eyes, and I dash them away with my free hand. I’m shaking so hard I can barely hold up the lamp.
My first impulse is to cut her down somehow. But then I glance to the left, and my stomach drops again.
Herron, with huge fang wounds across his midsection. His mouth sags open, and his chin is crusted with drool.
Grandmother and Herron are here. Which means I have to keep going. I need to look into the faces of each person in this room and see if I recognize them.
Most of them are strangers to me, though a few look vaguely familiar, like perhaps I saw them in a shop or at the market. A little farther on, I encounter Quinn Yameson, a friend of Essienne’s who used to play the harpsichord or the fiddle in the village square on holidays. Mama once confessed to me that she thought he might be some sort of professional thief and pickpocket as well as a musician. Maybe he tried to rob Beresford.
I push my way past two more people I don’t recognize. At the back of the room, near the wall, hangs a large figure, taller and broader than any of the others.
Even as I raise my lamp, I recognize the defined stomach muscles, the big pectorals, and the large hands. When I look at his face, I let out a screaming sob.
Because it’s my fucking husband. It’s Beresford.
His right shoulder has been torn open, and the wound is clotted with old, black blood. His hair and beard are brown, not blue. But it’s him, right down to the placement of the tiny mole below his left collarbone.
This is not a resemblance, not a twin. It’shim. Hanging from the ceiling of the secret room in his own mansion.
I scream again and sit down hard on the floor. My shaking fingers can’t hold the lamp anymore. I manage to set it aside.
“Beresford,” I rasp. “Beresford.”
The man in the harness is Theron Beresford. But Beresford rode away this morning on a beautiful horse, with his greatcoat flapping in the autumn wind. Anne and I roamed the house all day. If he had returned, we would have seen him. No one had the time or the opportunity to drag him in here and hang him from this ceiling—not without being seen.
That leaves only one explanation, which isn’t an explanation at all, really.
