Prologue
For as long as she could remember, the girl had been enthralled by the abandoned mansion.
And now, finally, she was big enough. Climbing the thick ivy as she would a ladder, she made it to the top of the high garden wall.
“Give me your hand,” she said, reaching back down to help her brother.
He hesitated. Overhead, the branches of a vast cypress tree swayed and shook, despite the stillness of the day. From its widespread arms hung lichen like silvery-green crepe paper streamers left out in the rain after a party.
“Dooble schafts this,” she said, meaning “You can do it.”
His eyes lit up. He loved it when she spoke to him in the language they had invented, just the two of them. The boy looked over his shoulder nervously before swallowing his fear and starting to climb.
The children landed with a crash in overgrown oleander hedges on the other side of the garden wall. Brushingthemselves off, the girl spied a life-size stone angel kneeling at the base of the tree. Its graceful wings were furred with moss; elbows resting on its thighs, it cupped its face in its hands.
It gazed down at the ground, mournfully.
The girl stared at it for a long moment. Was it her imagination, or did the angel almost seem to…breathe?
“That’s creepy,” the boy said.
“It’s just old,” said the girl with a shrug. “C’mon, let’s find a way in.”
Built of adobe brick, like all the oldest buildings in Monterey, the Perles Mansion had survived more than a century and a half due to a good roof, temperate weather, and…something else. Something less obvious. Nanny had sternly warned them away from exploring the building, insisting its very walls were suffused with evil. The adobe mud had been dredged from a cursed burrow, Nanny whispered, and the bricks laid in place by artisans forced to labor for the wealthy and ruthless Perles family.
“How do you know?” the girl had asked.
“It’s what the old wise women say,” Nanny had replied. “They say that only if the workers sing as they make the bricks will the home be a happy one.”
“And no one sang while building the Perles Mansion?” the girl had asked.
Nanny shook her head, a faraway look in her dark eyes. “They cried.”
The girl liked Nanny, but she was not about to heed her advice. Now that she had made it into the garden, she was determined to find her way into the mansion itself.
All the doors and windows were locked. But then the late-afternoon sun glinted off a piece of glass, and the girldiscovered a grimy basement windowpane covered in ivy. With a surge of triumph, she lifted the green shroud to reveal a slender access point. Big enough for a child to slip through, she decided.
Just big enough.
The boy protested again, but after a moment, he followed her in.
The large, shadowy basement looked like a set from an old movie. Grimy vials and beakers and coiled copper piping were piled atop every surface. Large jars held various bits and pieces floating in a clear liquid—a fetal pig, a snake, something that looked suspiciously like a human finger. Spiderwebs festooned the dirt-caked bottles lining the shallow shelves that covered one wall; a massive stone mortar and pestle stood in the very center of the room. The floor was only partially paved in stone, with hard-packed dirt around the edges. The sepulchral air smelled of mildew, rodents, and stillness.
Neither child said a word as they poked around. Silence felt more natural, as if the laboratory were a cross between a crypt and a library.
The girl was intrigued, yet repelled. She had read Mary Shelley’sFrankensteinlast year in her Literature for Gifted Readers class. She understood that laboratories like these were the realm of dangerous men, men who sought to use science to challenge the rules of the natural world. Men who imagined themselves to be Prometheus, bringing knowledge to the world at any cost.
“Look what I found,” whispered the boy as he held up a fat, ancient-looking journal that had been lying atop a workbench, its yellowed pages so old they were crumbling at the edges. As he flipped through it, a dried leaf fell from between its pages, fluttering down to the counter.
“It’s a journal,” he said, again in their secret language. “Look, the mad scientist took lab notes, just like we’re supposed to do in science class. And it’s written in some weird hodgepodge language, sort of like ours.”
The girl peered over his shoulder.
The slanted, faded script was hard to read, but she could make out a few words. Some were in English, Spanish, or Latin, while others were in a language she did not recognize. The “mad scientist” had filled page after page with what appeared to be recipes and lab notes, accompanied by elaborate sketches of human anatomy.
“He was a good artist,” said the boy. “Like you. I really like that monster you did last week in church. Mom sure was mad, though.”
“Sure was.”
