There were no apparent gashes across her face or hands that they could see, only the smudged markings of strange symbols—crossed and angular—drawn in ash over her brow and down her throat, along each of her long fingers, the tops of her feet. On her lips, though, the markings changed from the gray smudge of ash to the red-brown of blood. The shapes were similarly angular, a bizarre alphabet, but these were unique. And they’d been more hastily drawn, scrawled ragged over her mouth like cuts.
“Look at these,” Cordelia said, pointing her to aunt’s mouth. “Why are they the only ones like this?”
Eustace shook her head. “Is that blood?”
“I think so,” her sister confirmed with a nod. “Must have come from the birds.”
Augusta was intact, at least. But Cordelia could not say the same for the doves. Over her aunt’s heart, a pair of wings had been crossed, atop which sat something dark and small. Cordelia reached to pick it up and shrunk away as soon as her fingers made contact. “It’s an organ of some kind,” she said, revolted.
“The heart,” her sister told her.
In the jugular notch between her aunt’s clavicles, the head of the dove had been placed, torn from its body. And emerging from the white tangles of her hair, Cordelia could see two other doves, both dead, nestling on each of her shoulders. At her feet were the intestines and other organs, things Cordelia didn’t recognize. Starkly white feathers were scattered along the sides of her aunt’s body, striking against the dark fabric.
Eustace looked a little green. “Why the birds? And what do all these symbols mean?”
Cordelia shook her head. “It seems like something from another time.”
She traced the symbols down her aunt’s neck with a finger, all the way to her chest, where she could see three branches just emerging from the hem of her dress. She tugged the fabric and feathers back to reveal more and sucked in a breath. “Eustace! Look!”
There, on their aunt’s chest, the markings ended in a final sigil, aYwith three lines, like a leafless tree.
“Just like Mom’s,” Eustace whispered. “And in the same place.”
Cordelia pulled her shaking hand away.
“Maybe Mr. Togers knows what it means?” her sister suggested.
“If he does, he’s not telling,” Cordelia whispered. “You saw him today. His loyalties are to her, not to us.”
Eustace sighed and rubbed at the bridge of her nose. “Well, at least we know she wasn’t desecrated like mom. He just gave her a weird makeover.”
Cordelia wasn’t sure what she’d expected to find when she opened that lid, but this wasn’t it. Was the aging attorney carving pentagrams into her aunt’s chest? Shaving off bits as someone had done to their mother? It seemed farcical now, the image of an elderly, educated man poised over their aunt’s corpse with a knife, enacting some necrophiliac perversion. She had to remind herself that she was here because of what she’d witnessed when they’d barged in. She glanced again at her aunt’s face, the rash of lines drawn over it, remarkably similar to the levitating image of their young grandmother. It may not have been what she feared, but it was still frustratingly inexplicable.
She sagged against the wall, letting her eyes skip around the crypt. “Do you think they’re all here? The people in the portraits and the photographs?”
“You mean, our family?” Eustace clarified. She looked around too. “Yeah. I think they’re probably all in here. All but Mom.”
Cordelia flinched. It suddenly bothered her, the notion of their mother being elsewhere.Displaced.
“It was her choice,” Eustace said, reading her mind. “We could have brought her here if she’d only told us. She didn’t want to come back.”
Not even in death,Cordelia thought, a shiver running through her. Wordlessly, she closed the lid to her aunt’s casket, trying to commit some of the symbols to memory. She laid the pall gently overtop. “What do you think it means?Silens in vita, in morte vocalis?”
“I don’t know,” Eustace told her. “But I’ll find out. Now, how do we get her back in? Think your spatula will help?”
Cordelia narrowed her eyes, but she was secretly glad to hear her sister’s sarcasm. It was the only predictable thing in this whole damn place. She dragged the casket back just a bit and began stacking stones up to the opening like a staircase. Too many years staging the homes she listed had taught her a thing or two about moving heavy objects.
“Help me get it up onto the first one,” she said, and together they lifted the head of the casket, angling it against the stone. Moving around back, Cordelia pushed as they slid it toward the opening, and then lifted to push it inside. They stacked the stones back in their places, but with no mortar, they didn’t fit quite as well as before.
“We’ll have to get a new stonemason,” Eustace said.
“A discreet one,” Cordelia agreed as she bent to retrieve the bone knife and slide it back into its hiding spot.
Eustace moved toward the doors. “Time to let the dead lie.”
But Cordelia only made it a few steps. She could feel the hum beginning to run through the stones beneath her feet, like bees in an underground hive. The crypt was waking up. “Do you hear that?”
“Hear what?” Eustace asked.
