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“I brought you this,” he said. He held out a small dark-green glass bottle. It had a cork stopper. “Drink it with some water. It might help.”
“Might?” I asked as I took it from him.
“I’m not entirely sure what’s wrong with you. I’ve never treated anyone in your particular situation,” he confessed.
“Harrow’s never rejected a master?”
“That’s not entirely true,” Eli said. He folded his hands behind his back, leaning forward with the air of a lecturing professor. “In 1934, during the year before his Investiture, Lewis Vaughan attempted to make some rather radical renovations to the house. One morning, he was discovered dead in the foyer. He had apparently starved to death, though he had eaten well the night before. There was a note in his pocket. It said, ‘I cannot get out. There is no way out. It is endless.’ ”
“That’s dark,” I said, gaping.
Eli shrugged a shoulder. “Or it’s nonsense. In any case, his brother succeeded him and had an uneventful Investiture.”
“Otherwise, it’s been unbroken? The eldest son inherits?” I asked.
“A son, at least. Not always the eldest. Leopold was younger than me, after all.”
My brow furrowed. “Then why...?”
“I’m what they used to call a confirmed bachelor, dear,” Eli said, his lips twisting in a smile. “I was never going to produce the requisite offspring.”
Eli was gay? Then Bryony was wrong—he and Iris wouldn’t be having an affair.
“Let me help you back to bed,” Eli suggested, and I was forced to admit that I needed it. He held my arm and elbow and supported me over to the bed, then pulled the cover back over me. “For what it’s worth, dear, I’m rooting for you. This place could use a shake-up.”
Dark thoughts swirled through my mind. I drank the little bottle he’d given me. It tasted foul, but I didn’t care anymore. I sank down into oblivion. Not sleep, but a space in which time fractured and came apart, the passage of seconds not mattering anymore. It knit itself back together hours later with someone knocking on my door. I sat up with difficulty, and I must have told them to come in because the door opened and Desmond peeked in.
“Hey,” he said. “How are you feeling?”
“Less dead than a little while ago,” I told him. Now I felt disconnected more than in pain, like my nerves had burned out. “I was supposed to go see Bryony.”
“She was here a little while ago. I told her you’re sick. She sent you this, said it’s a new healing charm.” He handed me a cloth bundle. I pressed it to my nose. It smelled of roses. He looked away tactfully and cleared his throat. “Anyway, I translated one of the longest entries. It’s... a lot. But you need to see it.”
He handed me a sheet of paper. I looked down at it, but the words swam before my eyes. “You’ll have to read it for me,” I said, passing it back.
He looked worried but nodded. “Okay. Um, this is after the one about the operation. They actually did it. He says, ‘I am almost envious of you, Mary.’ ” His voice continued, but I closed my eyes, and another voice overtook his, as if I could hear Nicholas Vaughan himself.
You have looked upon the face of a god. How gladly I would have stood in your place! But the cost to science would be too great were I unable to continue my studies.
All went as planned. Annalise and I made the markings among the stones. Dr.Raymond led Mary to the site, stumbling and dull eyed. There was no fear nor any sort of intelligence in those black eyes. Her head had been shaved; stitches marked the place where Dr.Raymond had cut through her scalp and bone.
She stood placidly, her face pale and bloodless, and we began. It was Annalise’s task to guide Mary’s docile spirit into the vast dark, that deepness in which dwells the great god. Annalise proclaimed it done, and we waited for interminable minutes, an excruciating period of stillness.
Suddenly, as we watched, we heard a long-drawn sigh, and suddenly did the color that had vanished return to Mary’s cheeks, and suddenly her eyes opened. I quailed before them. They shone with an awful light, looking far away, and a great wonder fell upon her face, and her hands stretched out as if to touch what was invisible; but in an instant the wonder faded, and gave place to the most awful terror. The muscles of her face were hideously convulsed, she shook from head to foot; the soul seemed to be struggling and shuddering within the house of flesh. It was a horrible sight, and I rushed forward as she fell shrieking to the ground.
There I held her as she lay limply, rolling her head from side to side and grinning vacantly. “What did you see?” I demanded. But of course, Mary did not speak, only laughed and laughed, and after a very long time, fell silent.
“Helen?” Desmond asked. I realized he’d stopped talking a while ago.
“Mary saw the god,” I said. “And what, she went mad?”
“It sounds that way. In the next entry... God, Helen, this stuff is messed up,” Desmond said. “I knew the history of our family wasn’t sunshine and roses, but the things they did... She was pregnant. I’m guessing the baby was Vaughan’s or Raymond’s.”
“Vaughan’s,” I said immediately. He didn’t contradict me.
“I mean, that’s what makes sense. But what he writes in the journal is that looking at a god is what got her knocked up.”
“We are the child of the vast dark. That’s what the figmentsaid,” I said. I pressed my fingers to my cheekbones, trying to relieve the agonizing tension there. The bone gave with the sponginess of old, wet wood. I flinched, pulling my hands away. Tentatively, I pushed against that spot again, but there was no give. Just skin and bone and sinuses that felt like they were being drilled into.
