Chapter 9
IX
Iburied six more bodies after that.
They continued bringing new people into the house, unmaking them in a leisurely, vile ritual.
On the blackest nights, I laid them in their forever beds and expanded our small cemetery.
I spread the soil over them like a rough blanket, knowing it would never keep them warm.
Their rot would make the earth fertile. Oh, the delicate crocuses that might bloom over their chests, should I live to see the spring.
Afterward, Ophelia bathed me and brushed my hair. Then I slept like those I had buried—dreamless and mercifully blank. Not even Sylvie came to me.
I watched them die. I heard them scream. I saw them cut open and consumed while still alive. And yet, somehow, my mind built a cocoon around itself, sealing away what might have broken me. I felt nothing.
Only hunger and obedience.
I stopped eating entirely and took only water. Strangely, it made me feel a little better. The expired food had likely done more harm than good. My innards pulsed with hunger, yet the shaking eased, and the vomiting ceased.
I remained weak, fragile in every joint and tendon. I had lost so much weight that I felt like a hollowed-out shell—just bones and nothing more. Yet the cuts on my body finally closed. They healed into thin, silver strips that faded with each passing night.
Later, when the headache subsided, I thought I remembered the scent of soil, stronger than usual.
Cloying. Damp. Old. I remembered her hair tangled with mud.
Or perhaps I imagined it. In this house, the mind invented its own ghosts to fill the silence.
The whispers and visions that haunted me only grew louder as I weakened.
I tried to catch their echoes while digging the graves, but the voices remained entombed within the house.
I heard them best in the third-floor bedroom; they faltered on the second, and withered completely when I was elsewhere.
Ophelia never questioned my attempt to flee and never mentioned it again, as if it had never happened. Maybe she was protecting me from Gunnar’s fury.
She no longer chained me.
And every night, she called for me.
“Agatha.”
I knew it wasn’t my name, but by then I could no longer remember what my real name had been.
It was still there, somewhere in the expanse.
I felt that if I concentrated hard enough, I could catch the opening syllable and make it mine again.
I tried shaping my mouth into different positions, searching for the one that felt right, but the word kept slipping away.
It hid behind new memories of the dark, the blood, and the death.
I would end up trying my new name. Tasting it.
Agatha.
It felt like a little black stone, smooth and cold, rolling against my teeth.
Agatha. Agatha. Agatha.
I could no longer tell when the name was in my head or when it was coming from the outside. Sometimes I heard someone’s voice through my shallow sleep, but when I opened my eyes, the room was empty.
Perhaps there had never been any whispers to begin with. Perhaps it was only the static of a dying brain, the sound of a mind unravelling.
Agatha.
The voice tore me back to my senses, stronger and louder than ever. I listened, as I always did, but it didn’t return.
I could still see remnants of sunlight, and Ophelia must have been resting. There was nothing to do but wait for her arrival.
However, I forced myself out of bed and moved unhurriedly through the house, searching for something that still carried traces of my lost life.
Whitmore had changed. Black mold bloomed like blackened veins along the peeling wallpaper, fed by the rain that leaked through the dilapidated roof.
In the corners, the boards had gone supple and spongy.
With every tentative step I took, they exhaled, turning the air swamp-thick.
Furniture stood displaced at bizarre angles.
I could only imagine it had been shifted in the night by a ghostly order.
I clicked a few switches, but the electricity was gone.
A tree must have fallen on the lines somewhere out on the property; it had happened once before. Sylvie used to see to such things.
Sylvie.
I would go days without thinking of her.
But now that a stray thought had slipped into my comatose mind, her image came alive.
I grabbed onto it, holding it tight, but it was still receding.
The life I once had was a broken mirror, sharp shards all around.
Every once in a while, I’d step on one, and it would shimmer with a distant memory that wasn’t attached to anything.
All those little fragments led me to Sylvie.
A vision of her flickered, then dimmed and slipped back into nothing.
But she still lingered in the ache where my heart should have been, as a dull pressure that never eased. I wanted to speak to her now, even to argue, to hear her voice resist mine. It did not matter what we said. To know she was alive, breathing somewhere beyond this house, would have been enough.
I wished I could recall her face. I wished I could hear her call me by my name—by my real name.
But that would never happen again.
Somewhere deeper in the house, water dripped in slow, uneven intervals.
I found candles and matches in a kitchen drawer, my fingers too clumsy to obey me.
When the flame caught, it shook, perhaps frightened by the sight it revealed.
Varying measures of stubborn blood stains led toward the bathroom where I had slit Ophelia’s throat.
I followed, not looking for anything in particular, just letting the house steer me through its history.
I moved like an old woman, one hand grazing the wall for balance. The plaster felt cold, slightly soft in places. Whitmore itself had begun to putrefy beneath its skin.
Through the open door, a foul smell of feculence, iron, and stagnant water clung to the back of my throat.
No one had been here since that night. The shower curtain lay crumpled on the floor, stiff with trapped blood.
I sat on the edge of the bathtub and turned the tap.
The water only trickled. I twisted it the other way, but the dripping never became a steady flow.
The upstairs plumbing still worked, so Ophelia and I might have been able to take our baths for a while longer.
Slowly, I made my way back to the third floor.
I wanted to return to my bedroom and wait for her to awaken, but something pulled me toward the last door in the hall, the one next to mine.
The voices grew louder. They sounded like a radio dial being spun—broken static cutting between stations, throwing out different languages before snapping away. They came from that room.
Gunnar spent so many hours here, whispering to an unknown entity.
The closer I came, the heavier the pressure grew.
But this was not the kind of opposition I’d felt with the sun.
This was a primal instinct. Fear of punishment for being caught somewhere off-limits.
Still, I needed to see what lay within. What secrets did Gunnar harbor here?
I rested my forehead against the wood, straining to hear any sign of life within.
But the voices ceased the moment I approached.
Nothing.
I pushed the door.
The room was small, with a sloped ceiling that made it feel like the house was hunching in on itself.
I assumed it was a library in its heyday.
Shelves stretched along the far wall, sporting dust indentations where books had once stood.
Instead, human skulls sat in precise rows.
They were evenly spaced, staring at me with hollow eyes and toothless grins.
They differed in size and shade. Some were bone-white, while others were discolored with age. Some were missing incisors; others were cracked and jagged. A variation of other bones lay scattered across the shelves.
I counted everything twice. Twenty-three skulls. Five other bones.
They stared, and I had the strangest sensation that they were determining my personality. An odd compulsion pulled me forward. I set the candle in the center of the room. As I moved, it threw shadows that made the skulls grimace.
I reached for one—the one with the most teeth.
Its surface was cold and uneven, gritty beneath my fingers, yet not unpleasant.
It felt satisfying to trace the orbits, the parietal bones, and the jagged stitches between them.
I wanted to shed my skin and stroke the planes of my own skull.
Perhaps such intimacy would provide me with an identity.
“Hey there,” I whispered. My own voice sounded foreign in the hush.
It responded with a sad grin. At first, I thought touching the bone would be frightening, but it wasn't. There was something almost soothing in the contact, like a memory surfacing from childhood, one where the sun always shone, and your grandparents were alive.
In that memory, the light didn't make my throat spasm or my insides shudder.
It felt like the end of a school year, when a whole summer stretched ahead, far from everything that made you unhappy.
I lost myself in the sensation, tracing the outline of the nasal ridge and thin sutures. Each touch put me on high alert, as though the skull could somehow recoil.
I intuited his name was étienne, the beautiful son of silk weavers in a sunlit French town. étienne had loved spending time with another boy from his village, one with soft golden curls.
Matthieu, the name pinballed through my thoughts.
étienne had traced those curls when they lay together in the grass fields beyond the village, alone and safe, unafraid of being discovered. He had cried his heart out when Matthieu died of tuberculosis, convinced he would never love again.
But then, he did. The vision of Gunnar moving toward étienne displaced Matthieu as a mirage, delicate colors dissolving into nothing, and then, the real Gunnar stepped in. He pried the skull from my hands.
I stared at him, tense, every muscle braced for violence—for the clean slice of a neck, for fingers ripping out my heart. I knew he was capable.
But he didn’t lunge. Instead, he knelt, setting his candle beside mine.
There was more than caution in his movements. There was gentleness. Love, even. He held the skull, and I saw his eyes—those dead, endless eyes—ease for the first time. Then, reverently, he returned it to the shelf and turned to me.
He caught my elbow in a grip of iron and jolted me upright.
I held his gaze until the world beyond his pupils dissolved into infinite space.
Unlike Ophelia, whose earthy scent was faint and haunting, Gunnar held the rich aroma of warzone dirt.
It was as if the soil itself clung to him in a desperate need to be noticed.
I had intruded into his space, and I knew, with some deep, unspoken understanding, that this mattered to him. This room was his sanctuary, the shelves sacred, the skulls relics.
Finally, he broke eye contact, letting his gaze drift across the skeletal remains, lingering, then returning to me.
“I’ve lived a long life, Agatha,” he said, and it was only now that I detected the faintest trace of an accent.
“I’ve had many companions. Flesh fades, but they persist—bones, souls, all of them still mine.”
The skulls seemed to lean toward him in silent oath, burning with something between devotion and accusation.
He kept the bones of his lovers. He didn’t let them go, not even in death. I had the strangest suspicion that we walked a similar path in this sense. There had been someone I refused to let go of when they were begging to be freed.
We were both collectors of the departed. We were the stagnant weight that kept our loved ones from the sky, pinning them to the detritus of our own needs.
From somewhere in the deepest recesses of the house, a shrill voice summoned me.
“Agatha!”
Gunnar let go of my arm but remained as still as the rows of skulls, watching as I turned to leave the room.
Ophelia waited. She needed me.
“There you are, Agatha!” Ophelia materialised at the top of the stairs. “Help me with the bath.”
We slipped into the tub together, the water broken by shards of candlelight.
She moved closer, her fingers brushing my ribs. She pressed her nose to my neck and then buried her face in my hair, sniffing like an animal. I froze—then melted into the sensation.
When she pulled away, a deep ache remained where her touch had been. I almost moved to follow her by some reflexive instinct.
“Were you with Gunnar?” she asked, suddenly serious.
I looked at her, and I knew that she knew. I did not lie, but nor did I confirm.
The corners of her mouth twitched as she measured me with calculating eyes. Then she looked up at the shadows stretching on the ceiling.
“It’s so silly, carrying all those bones around. I wish he’d just leave them behind.” There was jealousy in her tone. Was it because I had been allowed to see the skulls and live? Or because Gunnar favoured them over her?
Her fingers returned beneath the water, and I leaned into her without thinking.
Her hands traced along my neck, and my shoulders, and lower, then paused. Her touch pressed and lingered, contemplative, as though she wanted to know whether the bone beneath my skin was still mine or if I would soon become one of Gunnar’s keepsakes.