Gallant(37)

The tallest shadow found me in the hall.

The shadow was her father. He wanted to help—he showed her mother the way out. Perhaps someone will come to help her too.

Perhaps—but she is not about to stand around and wait for it.

Her bare feet find their way across the floor.

Olivia Prior has never been a quiet girl. She has always made a point of making noise, everywhere she goes, in part to remind people that just because she cannot speak, does not mean that she is silent, and in part because she simply likes the weight of sound, likes the way it takes up space.

But now, as she pads barefoot through the house that is not Gallant, she makes herself quiet, silent, small. Folds in all her edges and holds her breath as she makes her way down the hall to the front foyer, the twisting circles inlaid in the floor.

She looks up, searching the grand stairs for the light she saw from the garden, but there’s no source. Instead, that faint glow seems to come from everywhere, not lantern bright, more like moonlight. As if someone took the roof away and hung the pale white sphere right overhead.

It is just enough to see by, but not enough to see well. And yet, even in the dark, one thing is clear.

This house is falling down. Not fading quietly, like Gallant, slipping slowly with neglect. No, this house is crumbling around her.

The small cracks she saw on the other side, the peeling paper and the ceiling damp, here those things are magnified. Floorboards are broken. A fault line runs up a wall, deep enough to fit her fingers in. In the sitting room, the stone around the hearth has splintered, pieces of rock and mortar piled on the floor. The whole house feels as if it’s collapsing in slow motion. As if one wrong step or nudge might bring the whole thing down.

And the sight of it is not frightening, but sad.

She can’t shake the feeling she’s been here before, which in a sense, she has. But it is not just the warped reflection of the other house that has her so unnerved. It is the taste, perhaps, or the smell, or some unquantifiable thing, a sense memory, something inside her saying yes, saying here, saying home.

What a horrifying thought.

It clings like cobwebs, and she shivers, pushing it away as she turns down a corridor she knows: the portrait hall. But there are no paintings here, no frames. The walls are empty, the paper not peeling but shredded, as if by fingernails. The door at the end hangs open, and there on the floor, she sees the grand piano slumped and broken. As if its legs gave way and sent the whole thing crashing down. As if it lay there for a hundred years, until the lid warped and the keys fell out like teeth.

Her feet carry her forward, and she kneels to rest her good hand on the broken instrument. A strange thought, then, of the mouse and the flowers, and she presses her palm flat to the piano’s side as if her touch alone can bring it back.

She waits—for what? For the prickle, the chill, for the piano to rise and put itself back together, but it doesn’t, and she feels only foolish, her hand slipping away. A shadow twitches, and Olivia’s head jerks up.

A ghoul stands at the bay window, facing the garden, the wall. A swatch has been torn out of him, a ribbon erasing one shoulder and part of his chest, but silver light traces what is left, and when he turns his head, her heart lurches. She knows his face. Saw it in the portrait hall at Gallant, the very first picture. Alexander Prior.

He looks at her, and there is such fury in his eyes that she recoils, backing out of the room, into the hall.

And then she hears it.

Not voices or music, but movement. Ghouls make no sound when they move, but humans do. They make a lot of noise, simply being. They breathe, and they walk, and they touch, and all of it creates noise, the kind you hardly notice over the louder, ringing sounds like laughter and speech.

When she cranes to listen, she hears a rhythm, the tap and slide of bodies moving through space, the hush of it like wind through trees.

Olivia follows the sound down one hall and up another, until she reaches the double doors that lead into the ballroom. The one she spun across in the other house, bare feet whispering on inlaid wood.

These doors hang open, a crescent of silver spilling into the hall, and when she peers around the corner she sees—

Dancers.

Two dozen of them, twirling around the room, and the first thing she realizes is that they are not ghouls. They are not threadbare and broken, are not missing pieces, not caught between the shadow and the light.

They are people. In the low silver light, they look as though they’ve been drawn in shades of gray. Their clothes. Their skin. Their hair. Everything painted in the same colorless palette, and yet, they are lovely. As she watches, they pair off and turn, break apart and pair again, moving through the motions of the dance, and the whole time, they move in silence.

The men’s shoes and the women’s skirts murmur across the wooden floor, the rustle of bodies moving through space, but there is no music pouring through the hall, no soft chatter between partners, just the eerie whisper of the dance.

The first real sound she hears is the steady rap of a finger on wood. A hand keeping time. Olivia follows the tap-tap-tap past the dancers to the front of the room, where a man sits in a high-backed chair.

A man, and not a man.

He is not a ghoul, but he looks nothing like the dancers, either. Where they are the gray of pencil sketches, he is drawn in ink. Dressed in a high-collared coat, his hair the black of wet soil, his skin the off-white of ashes gone cold, and his eyes—