Page 2 of A Serpent in the Garden

I shrugged a shoulder, huddled deeper into my cloak. “Can’t miss what you never had.”

“Maybe you could have, had you tried.”

Trying would never have been an option. Often I feel as though I’m already spoken for. At the very least I am never, ever alone. William had tried, once, to kiss me. I almost, almost leaned in to meet him halfway, but then I felt that familiar rustling in the dark room of my mind and I’d lurched back with an apologetic stammer and dashed off. Ages had passed before William was capable of looking at me without a flush of humiliation. It’s not you, I’d wanted to tell him. I wanted that kiss, but how could I, when—

It would be nice, It said, if you’d stop blaming me for the least little thing.

But I wasn’t blaming It, not entirely. I had accepted my lot back when I was fourteen, and I’d had nearly six years to get used to it.

Mold festered along the inside walls of the manor, warping the usual white of the stones. Turning it gray. When my mother and I turned up on Lord Fletcher’s doorstep eight years ago, broke and begging, it hadn’t been palatial, and it’s only gotten worse. Half of it is gutted, nothing more than empty rooms, naked blanched stones with inky veins. The rest houses the servants and Lord Fletcher himself. He doesn’t have family anymore, not since something convinced his daughter to open the back door late one night and head off toward the wood.

The hallways were dim, cold with damp, the clammy walls glimmering in the candlelight. Livvy and I sidestepped buckets of water set out to catch rain. Our practiced hops around the obstacles were almost like a children’s game. We dodged networks of lacy cobwebs, flattening ourselves against the walls when someone unexpectedly headed our way.

A puddle of merry orange-yellow light trembled across the flagged floors, growing bigger and brighter the nearer we got to the kitchens. The room was alive with voices and the clatter of pots when Livvy and I made it inside.

“No disturbances in the night?” Mary was asking Lord Fletcher over the dough she kneaded, a heat haze shimmering around her sweaty face.

His profile looked grim, but that was nothing new. “None reported,” he said over the rim of his teacup. And when Mary flicked us a disinterested glance, he tossed a look over his shoulder and added, “Oh, hello girls.”

We murmured our greetings and took up our usual posts, Livvy at the sink and me beside Mary, who wordlessly passed me a lump of dough.

“The fogs worsen every day.” Mary’s voice was careful, void of emotion. “Hard to believe it won’t affect the harvest.”

Lord Fletcher heaved a weary sigh. I’d never known a time when he wasn’t exhausted. The lord of our village was perhaps forty but looked ten years older, his hair a gleam of gray at his temples, thinning into wispy white. His flesh drooped like sallow puddled wax. It was somehow comforting that even the richest of us weren’t immune.

He placed his teacup in the sink, made a good attempt at a smile. “The farmers aren’t optimistic, but the stores should hold for a while.”

Mary’s gaze dropped down to her work. “I’ll send up breakfast shortly.”

“See that the leftovers find their way to the children.” Lord Fletcher caught my eye on his way out of the kitchen. “You’ll take care of that?”

“Of course,” I called back, but he was already gone.

The village is a perpetual wash of gray. Clammy gray stone, gray dirt streets, gray faces, clothes which start life as different colors but wind up gray soon enough. I can’t remember the last time I saw anyone who looked well-rested. At night, when things start calling from the wood and the fogs are thickest, you can’t even see out a window. Nobody is allowed out after dark. We hang crucifixes at every window and every entry point of our cottages, just in case. Small children are made to seal their ears with wax. They’re more suggestible, vulnerable. Adults stuff scraps of linen in their ears if they run out of wax and try to ignore whatever filters through, white-knuckling it through dawn.

You’re wondering why we don’t all just move. Nothing bars us in this village, but who among us has the coin to leave? Lord Fletcher can hardly afford to patch the cracks in his crumbling manor. He and Father Hull hadn’t collected tithes in years. The wood borders Hell and is thought to be dense, though nobody who’s set foot in it has ever made it back out. It stretches from the back of Monde’s End to an abandoned holdfast a near two-week journey away, hemming in the borders of humanity. In daylight it’s as any other wood would be. Only by night does it come alive.

Shrieky little things, It said with a bite of distaste as I passed out the remnants of breakfast. A mob of children bobbed around me outside the ivy-choked walls of Lord Fletcher’s manor. Is there a reason they’re always so sticky?

I’m sure they do it just to bother you. I smiled at the girl before me.

“Will you be at church later, Des?” she asked. I caught a flash of pink tongue through the gap in her teeth.

“I have to work.” I closed her fingers around the last biscuit from my basket. “But I’m sure I’ll see you tomorrow.”

The children tore off into the fog once I was breadless, their tattered little shoes pounding every which way through the streets.

I can’t even remember the last time I’d set foot in a church.

You’re not missing much, It said, coiling around the thought like smoke.

I know.

I supposed that had come out with more bite than I had intended, because It laughed. Your God might smite you if you’re not careful. If It had a face, I felt sure it would be smiling.

He’s not my God.

Take a look at this cesspool you live in. It subtly directed my eyes toward the churned mud of the lane, the dismal gray cottages lining it, the fogs hovering over it all like toxic gas. You live beside Hell and you don’t believe in Him?