The Stranger in the Attic
Written by Scott Winter
Illustrations by Javiera Paz Diaz
The Convent of Saint July was a place of forgetting. For a hundred years it had been a sanctuary for outcasts, somewhere to hide away society’s indiscretions. Embarrassing royal bastards. Problematic political enemies. Awkward individuals whose ideas were too troublesome for society’s acceptable norms.
The courtyard was quiet apart from the scrape-scrape of a lazy shovel at work.
For the third time in recent months, Rose found herself clearing out ruined crops from the courtyard’s soil, crops turned to sludge due to a malady in the soil. She huffed as she hauled another shovelful of muck into the wheelbarrow, then paused to wipe sweat from her brow.
She was alone, but shadows around corners, phantoms through glass, reminded her that there were at least a handful of others left at the convent.
Above her, through the ragged stained-glass windows to the Superior’s chambers, a lone candlelight ignited. A tall serpentine shadow: the Superior herself. The two stood frozen, trapped between a clock’s tick tock, looking at each other, before the Superior slipped away.
The stench of rot from the wheelbarrow made Rose retch and she almost choked on bile in the chequered cloth mask.
She steadied herself against the old oak, long withered and dead. She often sat against its wide trunk, looking into the maze of branches trying to decipher meaning to… to… she let her thoughts vanish into fog. Rose searched her pockets for a glass vial, dabbed a scent on her mask. Peony.
She heaved and dragged the wheelbarrow through the mud, out of the courtyard and under a narrow archway by one of the convent gates. The outer walls stood tall, crooked, jagged, seeming as if they might fall any moment. Rose felt a sense of vertigo as she approached them. The gate within the archway was locked tight, a heavy chain wrapped around ageing metal bars.
Rose left the wheelbarrow behind, and drifted through the courtyard and inside one of the main hallways. She removed her muddy garments and boots and dumped them in a nearby wicker basket. As she returned to her rooms to change, the halls around Rose felt labyrinthine. Even after more than a year as one of the convent residents, she took two wrong turns, passing empty chambers, silent bedrooms, a library with empty shelves. As she passed Edith’s room, Rose placed a hand on the door, considering whether to try to engage her in conversation. But Edith… well, Edith.
A soft song drifted from Edith’s room, something Rose had heard before. ‘We are but spirits carried aloft by golden flames to the other-places beyond the mind’s eye…’
They were so few now. Rose. Edith. Lilah. The Superior. The others: sickness then death, or just vanished, over the gates, or through gaps in the walls.
Rose would sometimes not see the others for days. She’d come to prefer it that way. A lonely life.
* * *
Rose tried to compose her appearance in the dirt-streaked mirror of the dining room cabinet. She’d hacked at her short, dark hair with a pair of scissors, and nothing would sit flat. As she studied herself, she adjusted her blouse, attempted to even the layers around her shoulders. Rose’s eyes were reminiscent of a corpse. Like Claudine’s eyes, who she’d buried only last week
She waited in the dining room for over an hour before Edith shuffled in and sat opposite her. She smirked at Rose before dropping her gaze to the table.
Several candles were pooled at the centre of the table. Red wax dribbled onto the woodwork. Cutlery was haphazardly strewn over the table, as if someone haven once attempted to set for a meal, but abandoned half-way through. Rose picked out the dirt from underneath her fingernails with an old bone-handled knife. Edith opened her mouth several times as if to speak to Rose, yet said nothing.
Rose risked an upwards glance. Edith looked small, shrunken, gaunt. Her eyes had a yellow hue to them. The Superior’s gelding had taken effect. The small mousey-haired girl hardly looked the same person who’d welcomed Rose on her first day to the convent.
Distant sounds. Creaking doors echoing elsewhere, louder, closer each time. The sound of jingling glass on a rattling trolley.
The Superior entered the room carrying bowls of cooling porridge. The shadows of the cowl she wore fell about the flaking skin around her face. The Superior’s lips were a bright natural red. Those same red lips formed crudely into a smile. She stooped to place the tray on the table before rising to full height with a click of cartilage. Rose noticed the strong perfume the Superior had applied. Under jasmine and rosemary was some other scent that Rose wrinkled her nose at, something she couldn’t identify.
‘Sisters,’ the Superior said in her ragged rasp.
The Superior wheeled her trolley from the kitchen, bottles rattling, swishing varied hued contents about. She drew forth a glass phial containing liquid the colour of midnight, and carefully measured two drops into each bowl.
‘Eat up, my sisters.’ The Superior placed one hand softly on Edith’s shoulder.
For a moment, Edith looked at Rose and chewed her lip, but each of them did as they were told.
‘Rose,’ the Superior said, standing just behind Rose, and planting a bony hand on her shoulder. ‘When you have a moment, take Lilah her food. She’ll not be joining us this morning. She’s still adjusting to some of her medicine.’
* * *
The hallways of the convent held an oppressive silence. The walls and ceiling closed in on Rose as she walked. She’d never felt comfortable at Saint July, but she’d not felt right beyond its walls either.
Rose placed the tray down with a clatter before Lilah’s door. She knocked softly, then more insistent after there was no answer. Rose stepped closer to the door and pressed her ear against it. There was a low moan from the other side.
She found Lilah draped in darkness, only a grim sliver of light coming through the high window. The other sister lay in her bed with sheets clutched tightly under her chin, and she stared up at the ceiling, face contorted in concentration as if something were in the shadows above.
‘Something to eat,’ said Rose as she pushed the tray across the floor with one foot. ‘The Superior insists.’
At the mention of the Superior, Lilah sobbed. But she then swung herself upwards on the bed and, without a word, gathered the tray.
As the door closed, all Rose could see was Lilah’s yellow-rimmed eyes glaring back at her.
* * *
At least once a week, the Superior gathered the convent sisters in the grand hall to issue tasks. Tend the gardens. Bake the bread. Wash the threadbare linen. Sweep the crumbling halls. Scrub the mould-ridden latrine. And on it went. Gardening had become something Rose had settled into. She was mostly a natural hand at the work, except these last months where it felt like she couldn’t keep anything alive for long. Rose couldn’t remember when she’d last seen birds nesting in the trees around the convent.
Being busy suited Rose. She rarely saw others, was rarely forced into awkward conversation. If she were industrious, this kept Rose away from thoughts about what brought her to the convent, to dwell on her… she exhaled sharply, dug fingernails into her side with one hand, placed the other on the knife tucked under her clothes, a comforting shape under cloth.
Before they’d fallen to ill-health themselves, before they’d moved on, some of the convent sisters said the Ashen Plague had brought a malady to Valrona, its people, the soil – everything. The children, all gone. But at Saint July, they’d only heard snatches of events beyond the walls. Rumours from lives before the convent. Or word passed down from the Superior herself.
It was noon before the Superior rang the bell to call for her audience.
The Superior descended the stairs of the main hall to address them, moving slowly, considering each step, and hovered mid-way down the stairs, waiting for the sisters to fix attention upon her. There, she towered over the three sisters, holding up a lantern in one hand, its orange light dancing.
‘Sisters,’ the Superior said. ‘We have men arriving today from Zeigburg ahead of the sabbath. They will be spending some days here while they work, to better prepare us for the seasons ahead. When they are here, you will stay in your rooms and only leave at night to attend to your allocated tasks.’
And with that the Superior began issuing instructions. Rose felt a pang of excitement for a brief moment at the thought of outsiders arriving, at anything outside her daily labour. But this was also mixed with trepidation – what would strangers bring with them from the outside world?
She went to speak, but the Superior turned and looked at her, and so Rose held her tongue.
As Rose began to leave to attend to her chores, the Superior caught her arm and gripped tightly. ‘Sister,’ she said. ‘Rose.’
Rose looked into those icy, dagger-eyes until Lilah and Edith dispersed. ‘You, especially. Keep to yourself these next evenings. Busy yourself in the cellars. Supplies will arrive soon to… to help all of us through these hard times.’
The Superior shook Rose sharply. ‘Do I make myself clear?’
Rose stared at the flakes of skin dotting the bottom of the Superior’s cowl. She inclined her face away from the fetid breath, so foul that the Superior’s sickly herbal perfume could not hide.
‘Yes, Superior.’
Rose watched from the parapet as the workmen travelled towards the convent. There were several wagons, more than usual for trade between Zeigburg and the convent. One wagon was completely enclosed and secured by a metal door.
Several younger lads began to chase one another around and Rose heard the occasional chuckle across the misty afternoon. A hulk of a man stepped down from the lead wagon and gave them a stern telling off. He swung a meaty arm and cuffed one of the lads across the face. The youth staggered, clutched his nose, then fell into line behind the wagons with the others.
Before Rose had come to the convent – as she’d considered seclusion – she stopped in Zeigburg. It had not been safe there. The town choked with sickness. Idle violence from out-of-work miners. People fighting each other for scraps of food. Dead, injured, and the sick left in the streets.
And then the press-gangs, drafting anyone healthy enough into the Queen’s army, to put them to some use. To fight threats to the Crown. Or to put to work on the farms around Zeigburg, farms languishing since the plague.
After her visits to Zeigburg, the Superior fed the sisters news and rumours as if she were some secret keeper of knowledge. She often mentioned that agents of Queen Anastasia had enlisted her – the Superior of Saint July – to help with growing tempers in the realm. She told the sisters repeatedly how important they all were in helping with her great work to ‘fortify the spiritual purity of Valrona’.
* * *
Over the next few days, the workmen erected greenhouses throughout the grounds of the convent. More than a dozen new constructions. Each night, Rose inspected their progress, and each night she dwelled on how she might better use them to grow crops for the convent. The crops that would help struggling Zeigburg.
The Superior locked the sisters away in cold, drab rooms in the daytime. From her room, Rose heard muffled conversations, snatches of words. The large man she’d seen striking the younger workers spoke with the Superior now and again – his voice a rumble of thunder. He did not abide idleness among the men.
At night, the men camped outside the convent walls. Rose heard their laughter, sometimes a fight breaking out among them, often ending with nervous laughter. Always ending with a rebuke from the large man.
* * *
Rose was undertaking the night’s cleaning in the cellar when, through one of the window-slits, came the whine of a door opening somewhere. She pulled herself up onto some descript bookshelves to listen, tearing her blouse on old nails.
Murmured voices crept down from above. ‘The delivery Krandus Moore spoke of is here.’ The deep-voiced man.
‘Ah.’ The Superior seemed to sigh with pleasure. ‘You do know how to surprise me.’
There was sharp laughter, or maybe a scoff.
‘Mister Tanner,’ said the Superior. ‘I’ve seen how things are in Zeigburg, but you’ve been out there. How fares Valrona?’
‘We lost a couple of the lads on our way out of the city,’ said Tanner. ‘Some Old Faith cult or something. It’s not getting any better, that’s for sure.’
‘Am I to be expecting more guests transferred via our mutual friend? Without the Queen in residence, Krandus’s orders have become more peculiar.’
‘Not for some time. He’s busy scouring the capital of the immoral,’ said Tanner. ‘Now, how shall we arrange the transition?’
The Superior said, ‘Side gate. Bring him up to my chambers first. I shall see to his needs before accommodating him upstairs.’
‘Very good, ma’am.’
‘Please, Tanner. We’re more familiar than that.’
The last Rose heard were Tanner’s heavy footfalls before the Superior retreated inside.
* * *
The delivery that Tanner spoke of came in the middle of the night. The workmen couldn’t use the bell at the gates: it was broken, half-buried by mud. Rose hid herself by the greenhouses as the Superior emerged into the courtyard, towards the western gate.
She followed, keeping to the darkness so prevalent throughout the convent. Under a tangle of hanging vines, Rose cramped herself behind a stack of barrels to watch the exchange. Several large smoky-brown cockroaches scuttled over the gnarling wood.
Rose thought she saw the Superior smile at Tanner, if it could be called a smile.
It was known that the Superior had special guests visit her occasionally. Some whispered that the Superior indulged in the vices she forbade others from. Vices that many of them had escaped from before coming to the convent. The Superior discouraged talk about her. Those caught were made to pray before the chapel altar until they collapsed from exhaustion.
Tanner pushed a hunched figure towards the gate. The Superior fumbled with heavy iron keys to open the lock keeping the chains around the gates clasped shut.
Rose couldn’t make out the figure’s face, but she heard him groan. The man’s hands were bound.
The odd group moved slowly from the gate and into the convent grounds: the waddle of Tanner, the slink of the Superior, the stumble of the bound man.
Rose heard a snatch of conversation as they moved out of sight. ‘When you see that deviant next,’ said the Superior, ‘inform Krandus that my work continues, but I have the resources discussed.’
Rose squeezed herself from the barrels and stepped into the courtyard. Moments later, the Superior appeared like some murky apparition in the high window and paused as if she saw something below.
Rose held her breath for a heartbeat, but the Superior shifted away and out of sight.
* * *
During the evenings as she worked in the greenhouses, Rose began noticing a dim light in the convent attic. And always above the attic, the solitary rope of the belltower cast angrily about by the wind. The bell was long gone, taken by the Queen’s agents during some past visitation.
Sometimes she thought she heard singing from above. Old nursery rhymes. Once, she heard a traditional Valronan folk song.
When the Superior was away from the Convent on business, Rose tried to find this guest. The doors to the attic were always locked. Through the thick doors, she heard sobbing and laughter.
One evening, the Superior caught Rose humming the song she’d heard. ‘Sister,’ was all the Superior said, one long, blistered and scaled finger held up to her lips.
* * *
Half-stupefied from one of the Superior’s medicines – was it the blue tonight? the liquid amber? – some object near her door drew Rose’s attention. She slipped from her bed in a daze and moved on hands and knees across the floor. The light from the penny-shaped moon beyond her windows revealed the object as a piece of yellowing paper, ripped from some old book.
Rose was once fond of reading. The notary she’d worked for had an extensive collection she’d read in snatches. But the convent had so few books. Or at least few that the Superior allowed out of her chambers.
On one side of the paper was writing Rose couldn’t make out, a dense scrawl. On the other side, a charcoal sketch. The skeletal oak from the courtyard, a figure seated below its branches and looking up at the sky, as Rose had done herself so often before. The stained-glass window to the Superior’s room featured behind twisted branches.
She sat on the bed, pulled herself tight, one hand reaching under her pillow to the cold comfort of the knife.
* * *
The third piece of paper Rose found under her door was a sketch of the Superior, her features stretched out of proportion. It reminded Rose of the Chalk Lady, some folktale her mother once told her of a nightmarish hag who lived in sycamore forests and stole into Valrona at midnight and ate menfolk as they slept in their beds. Wives and children awakened to find the remains of husbands, fathers, scattered throughout their home.
There was a loose stone in one corner of her room. Rose wobbled it off the floor and placed the sketch with the others the prisoner had gifted her. She studied the other two sketches. The one of herself beneath the oak, the other a crude sketch of Edith, head down in prayer in the dark chapel.
Rose wondered at the lights in the attic. At the singing, a soft voice. Of the prisoner’s confinement and loneliness, and if it were worse than her own.
* * *
Rose slumped at the table and scooped the cooling stew into her mouth. The other sisters seated around looked as exhausted and grimy as herself.
The Superior laid a loaf of bread on the table before the three sisters. She used a particularly familiar knife to cut a slice of the bread while looking directly at Rose. ‘Fresh this morning from Zeigburg,’ was all she said.
Rose murmured, ‘Thank you’ but did not meet the Superior’s eyes.
The Superior tapped one of the bottles on her trolley with one fingernail. She cleared her throat, but still that same rasp as always. ‘Edith has some reflection to perform due to the… vile drawing I found in her room.’
Rose looked up sharply. Edith closed her eyes, already tired, already weary.
‘If you would, sister.’ Under the watchful eye of the Superior, with her hands shaking, Rose gave Edith a spoonful of a honeyed-black treacle.
‘Thank you, Superior,’ Edith whispered. ‘It’s exquisite.’
Afterwards, Edith grew glaze-eyed, slack-jawed, incoherent. Rose and Lilah moved Edith to her room, and left her rolled on her side as spit bubbled from her mouth.
* * *
It was warm in the greenhouses, a warmth that took the edge off the cold wintry days.
Finished planting out the last of their seeds for the day, and with evening encroaching, Edith and Lilah left for dinner. Rose remained behind to savour the silence.
The medicines kept Rose fatigued, particularly when the Superior changed the doses, or to a new concoction altogether. What was it now? The black treacle… violet… azure… chartreuse. If Rose shifted from one task to another, she could keep the fatigue at bay. But when she stopped – took a moment to herself – nausea struck.
She found herself spinning, then kneeling, slumping against the door to close her eyes for just…
She fell backwards, smacking her head on the doorframe. There was a tall, spindly man staring down at her. In the moonlight, his green eyes looked as if they were on fire. She could barely make out his face covered as it was in long greying locks.
‘Oh, you’re bleeding,’ he said.
He reached down to help Rose, but she thrust one arm out at him. The skin on the back of his hand was spotted red, cracked, cragged.
‘Don’t,’ she said as the man tried to help her again. ‘Don’t touch me.’ She pulled away a hand from her head, sticky with blood.
Several heartbeats passed between them before Rose asked, ‘Why are you here?’
‘I gave that old reptile the slip,’ he said. He attempted a smile, but it came out crooked, as if he weren’t in full control of his faculties. ‘Can I hide here? I don’t want to go back. Not yet.’ The words ran off his tongue with almost childlike glee, so much so that Rose couldn’t help but smile herself.
Yet this man was a stranger, and so Rose edged closer to the gardening fork plunged into the potted dirt a few feet away.
He noticed her movements, shrunk back into himself. ‘I don’t mean harm. Truly.’
He closed the greenhouse door most of the way behind him and crouched on the floor next to Rose. Rummaging in his pockets, he proffered a stained handkerchief.
Rose cautiously accepted and placed it against her head.
The man reminded her of a spider, all limbs. When he smiled, his breath stank of chemicals from the Superior’s ministrations. His misshapen teeth were a dark violet.
‘Why are you Saint July?’ said Rose. ‘Most of the Superior’s… guests leave after she’s had her time with them.’
‘Ah.’ He looked at her unblinking and absentmindedly touched the frayed, stained bow tie at his collar. ‘One does hear the most frightful sounds…’ He looked through the gap in the door. ‘I’m told I’ve been placed here for my own protection.’
‘From whom?’
He only looked through the ajar door to the courtyard beyond.
Rose studied him in the gloom. Behind his hair, his heart-shaped face was ghostly pale as if he would fade away should the light of the moon dim further. ‘I know you, I think.’
‘You can’t. No-one’s supposed to known. Not here.’ He started to lift himself up, but Rose pulled him back down. His hand against hers was warm, hot even. She felt the flicker of his pulse.
Outside the greenhouse, the tall figure of the Superior was searching the grounds, the light of her lantern swooping to and fro.
Rose found she couldn’t speak. She felt her own pulse, throbbing at her temple, in her throat. ‘I shouldn’t get you into trouble,’ the man whispered. ‘The Superior enjoys her treatments a little much. Just imagine the punishments.’
‘Can one even tell the difference?’ said Rose. ‘I’m afraid for you.’
‘Nonsense. I’ll survive, I’m sure.’
He strode to the opposite door of the greenhouse and stepped outside.
The lantern glow bobbed to his position and the Superior and the man exchanged heated words before both of them disappeared inside the convent.
* * *
Rose met the man the next night, and the night after. She avoided the other sisters, stealing moments away from them here and there. Her excuses were about her work, that there was always something needing attention.
The man did not give his name, but Rose knew him. A prolific and celebrated artist, cousin to Queen Anastasia. She’d attended a gallery of Albrecht’s artwork once. His self-portrait was etched in her memory: a well-dressed man befouled by an incredible sadness.
Rose learned that those closest to the Queen were doing all in their power to quell burgeoning violence across the realm. Already, several deaths in the bloodline meant that the royalty was in danger, as if some force were targeting the Crown. The Queen had disappeared into convalescence, while the Queen’s Legion was doing what it could to keep the realm from falling apart as threats circled, blood in the water.
The Superior, as Rose came to learn, was a former tutor to the Queen, tasked with keeping Albrecht hidden until the capital was safe again, or so he believed. For now, there was chaos in the capital: fires, fighting in the streets, a string of murders.
Rose did not share much of herself with Albrecht, at least at first. She dreaded one of the others stumbling across their meetings.
Most of all she dreaded what was inside her. She stole the bone-handled knife from the kitchen and brought it with her each time she met with Albrecht, brought it for her own safety.
Albrecht kept playing games with the Superior, and when the Superior caught up with him, he’d suffer punishments, growing worse each time. More extracts, more tinctures, more elixirs. Albrecht’s face shaded colours Rose didn’t think were possible. Sometimes Albrecht wouldn’t recognise Rose, nor even his own name.
* * *
During another of their snatched evenings together, Albrecht asked, ‘What brought you to this place? You don’t seem one of those types, one of those problems to the Queen.’
He watched her with one good eye, the other swollen, yellow-rimmed, hidden behind his hair.
A frown creased upon his forehead and he began coughing violently. He held up a stained handkerchief to his mouth until the coughing subsided.
For some time she could not find her words. As if giving thought and meaning to what was inside her would be the most terrible thing. She couldn’t bear to keep it all inside any longer.
‘There’s something malignant growing in me. Some… some violence. I couldn’t stay in Valrona. If I were to do so, I would do terrible things.’
‘And has it?’ he said. ‘Has it taken over you?’
Rose shivered uncontrollably. She said, ‘It did. Once.’
She stood up straight. ‘I’ve come to learn to be by myself. That’s how to overcome it.’
There was silence between them, and Rose knew that Albrecht did not judge. He accepted her reasoning, much like his own ailment that would eventually kill him.
‘This thing in me stirs. I shouldn’t see you again.’
Rose reached out, laced her finger with Albrecht’s, feeling the scabbed skin.
* * *
This night they were seated on the floor in the confined space of one of the convent’s closets.
Albrecht smiled clumsily. He tried to speak several times but a stupefaction was upon him. He could not focus his words and he began to cry.
They sat in companionable silence for a time and, eventually, Albrecht found his ability to speak, repeating what he’d said on other nights. He was frantic, as if trying to impart his thoughts while he had them.
‘She has other guests in her quarters, you know. Some don’t come out… whole. I think she has a room up there. A place where she makes the medicines. Where she conducts her treatments.’
Knowing she should do anything but this, Rose reached out and put her hand on Albrecht’s shoulder. He shuddered.
The closet door wrenched open.
The Superior looked down upon them.
‘Sister,’ the Superior rasped, struggling to draw in breath. There were sharp scowl lines over her face. ‘Go to your room and lock yourself in. I shall attend to you shortly.’
As she lurched in, her hand snaked to Albrecht and pulled him to his feet. ‘With me,’ she said.
* * *
The Superior was waiting in the dining room with the bone-handled knife on the table before her. Edith and Lilah were seated mutely.
‘Sit,’ the Superior said.
Rose paused at the doorway, felt woodgrain under her fingers, before she acquiesced to the Superior’s instructions.
There was a clink of glass as the Superior rifled through the bottled medications on her trolley. ‘Ah.’
Into a glass tumbler, the Superior poured several foul-looking liquids. Rose felt a burning sensation in her nostrils.
‘Drink.’ Rose’s shaking hand reached for the glass. Edith started, but hastily composed herself. She knew what was coming. ‘This will help you to be more accommodating.’
Rose drank from the glass and almost retched a few times, but eventually the glass was empty.
‘Now, sisters,’ the Superior said, ‘escort Rose to the chapel.’
Already Rose felt light-headed. Two darkening figures blurred towards Rose and hefted her upwards and half-dragged her from the room. She had flashes of veiled faces hidden in the shadows. Edith was singing softly, Lilah silent.
The chapel was dark, and she was unceremoniously dropped into one of the pews. She saw stars, vortexes of milky light. The concoction overcame her and she drifted in and out of sense. A cloud swam up in her mind and she couldn’t articulate thought, action, anything around her. The chapel grew dark, light, dark, light. Figurines of Queen Anastasia on the altar glared down at her. A soft glow enveloped the pews, the windows, the walls. A golden flame. Whispers of a goddess seeping through the cracks of heaven.
The shadows gave way to a glimmer, spiralling around the rafters of the chapel. She felt nausea, vertigo, a sense of herself moving into other selves, all calling for everything to stop moving. But she glimpsed and heard echoes of other places for just a moment before she rushed headlong into infinity and darkness.
Edith and Lilah escorted Rose to the dining room each night. After the evening meals, the Superior locked Rose in room. Her mind was frequently murky: she hardly had the focus to contemplate her mistakes, her reasons for coming to Saint July, anything.
This night, however, the door unbolted and the shadow that slipped inside was not that of the sisters nor the Superior. Albrecht looked at Rose with one eye and a lopsided grin on his face.
‘The Superior is away.’
Albrecht led Rose through the convent hallways, and they eventually climbed to the second floor and paused at the stairs to the third. ‘I’ve begun fearing for myself,’ said Albrecht, breathing heavy. ‘That I will soon no longer be me. I fear that you will stop being you. Her treatments are becoming worse. There was a man in her chambers the other night. In the corner, drooling, cradling some head injury.’
Once they climbed the stairs further, they found the door to the Superior’s chambers. Panels of polished oak. Iron studs that to Rose seemed like spikes. Leaf-like patterns across the door arms that might strangle her. Rose had been here before many times, but never beyond.
Albrecht offered up a tarnished keyring – counted to find a particular key – and then they were through the door to the Superior’s chambers. Here, Rose could make out the solitary oak through the wide window – broken into stained-glass fragments. There was a loud hiss as rain began to sheet down outside.
They each lit a candle and started to look around the room. The Superior’s wide desk, a mess of stained papers. Shelves with books and scrolls shoved haphazardly about. In a corner of the room, a teetering stack of dirty, mouldering dishes.
There was an open doorway on the other side of the room. Behind the threshold, the air reeked of antiseptic and stringent herbal concoctions and underneath all that a sense of something rotting. There were benches and tables of tools, glass bottles and, what caught and held her eye, a small cot raised upon a metal stool. A hand-cranked drill, speckled in blood and some pink tissue, sat in a bucket by the bed.
On the far wall was a wide cabinet with many compartments, all closed.
Albrecht said, ‘There’s sometimes just a malignancy amongst us, allowed to take root when others turn a blind eye.’
Rose approached the cabinet. Part of her hesitated. As if there would be some great secret inside. Some driving reason for the Superior’s actions. Some noble plan.
But inside were only more bottles, vials, jars, test tubes – all with coloured fluids in them, all labelled. One of them was even labelled Rose.
So no great plan, no great reason. Only the Superior’s will. Only cruelty.
Albrecht stood there with a hand on Rose’s shoulder for a while.
The creaking of a door sounded behind them.
The Superior came slithering out of the darkness and into their candlelight. Rain was beaded on her hood, her skin, her lips. She opened her mouth several times as if to say something.
Eventually, the Superior said, ‘This is unfortunate. I could have let you continue here at Saint July, as long as you only listened to my rules.’
‘But…’ said Albrecht, ‘you’re meant to be away. In Zeigburg.’
‘The weather turned sour,’ the Superior said. ‘We thought it best to wait until tomorrow. Come, Tanner.’
Behind the Superior came the large form of Tanner, and Rose shuddered at the sight of him. There was a hunger in his eyes. A thin sliver of drool crept from his mouth. Rose had never seen him this close before.
There was a wound at the man’s temple from which some fluid was dribbling.
‘Sister,’ the Superior said. ‘I know you came here to put an end to your… urges, and I have made progress with my ministrations to stop such things. With the realm crashing around us, so many have turned against each other. I can almost stop it, perhaps one final treatment? You don’t need to be this way.’
The Superior waited, giving them a chance to speak, to confront her, to challenge her. When they said nothing, the Superior seemed to shrug. ‘Well, Moore cares not what I do with him,’ the Superior said, indicating Albrecht. ‘No-one will care as long as he remains… viable.’
‘He’s the Queen’s cousin,’ said Rose weakly. ‘You can’t do this.’
‘Can I not?’ said the Superior. ‘It’s falling apart. All of it. I can provide answers they need.’ There was laughter in the Superior’s eyes.
‘Little one,’ she said. ‘My work helps Valrona. I will be a saviour.’
Albrecht went to shield Rose from the Superior. He flinched as the Superior raised one arm in the air. ‘Hurt him, but do not kill him,’ she said.
Tanner lumbered forward. With one hand, the hulk clutched Albrecht by the throat and lifted him bodily upwards. With the other hand, he sent Rose crashing backwards into a table of glassware.
At first shock kept her numb amid the broken glass, but Rose soon felt the heat of lacerations.
‘You… damn yourself, you… damn all of us,’ Albrecht gasped. He beat against Tanner, kicked at him, but he was frail, weak, small.
‘Quite,’ said the Superior. Rose saw something familiar in the Superior then. Something had grown within the Superior, metastasised into the desperate need for power over others.
Rose’s hand fell on one of the bottles, unbroken in her fall. Inside was some yellow pus-like liquid.
Albrecht continued to struggle and was growing weak at the hands of Tanner, his breath crushed from him.
‘Come, sister,’ the Superior said as she took a step towards Rose.
‘I came here by choice,’ said Rose. ‘I choose to leave.’
‘No,’ said the Superior. ‘You came because you needed to be away from what’s out there.’ She stabbed one long finger at Rose’s chest. ‘And from what’s in here. Let me help you.’
Rose swallowed. It was true that she had asked around in Valrona for a place such as this. That she had travelled far and wide to find seclusion, isolation – to be removed from society – before anything more terrible happened.
But she had not sought out the harsh treatments the Superior lavished upon her.
‘You came to escape the violence you wanted to inflict on society. And so,’ said the Superior, ‘you shall not leave. I haven’t exorcised what’s inside of you just yet.’
The Superior loomed over Rose until their faces were inches apart. Her breath smelt of wormwood. ‘You will remain until I am finished with you.’
‘Just as you finished with the other sisters at the convent? With the men too?’
Rose scuttled backwards, stood up, and whipped the bottle around and smashed it on Tanner’s head. He fell back with a gurgled cry, dropping Albrecht and clawing at his face. Whatever had been in the bottle bubbled on Tanner’s face and around his eyes.
The Superior came at Rose, scratching at her. Rose’s hands searched the nearby bench for anything to defend herself, and they fell upon the bone handle of the knife.
She raised it and swiped once. The Superior hissed and Rose broke free from her grip.
Then Rose ran with everything she had left, knife clutched in both hands, at Tanner, who was oblivious to her actions. The knife buried deep into his side, up to the handle.
Tanner didn’t notice at first, intent as he was on his ravaged eyes. He started batting at his side as if angrily swatting away an insect. He reached around and pulled, the knife sliding out slowly, as if still hungry.
Albrecht twitched, but he lay on the ground gasping, his forced breath a choking rattle.
‘Mu… muh… Marianne?’ Tanner groaned. He gave a bellow as red seeped from his side. He charged towards Rose, but she was small and nimble, and Tanner could not see, his eyes covered in blisters.
‘No, you oaf,’ was all the Superior managed to say as Tanner staggered at her at full speed. They tumbled out of the room, hit the window in the Superior’s office, crashed through the glass, and fell into the night. Their bodies hit the ground below with a loud wet crack.
Rose lingered at the broken window, the rain lashing her face. The Superior crawled a few paces before becoming still, both her and Tanner only phantoms in the dark.
* * *
They buried Tanner with the Superior in the overused cemetery, next to sisters and other inhabitants Rose had barely known.
After the Superior’s fall, Rose unlocked the doors to Lilah’s and Edith’s rooms and told them of the Superior’s fate.
‘You’ve seen it too, haven’t you?’ Edith said to Rose. ‘The flame.’
Rose closed her eyes as Edith ran fingers gently down her face.
Then Edith and Lilah were gone, taking back their freedom through one of the convent’s many gates.
Rose stared at the belltower door for a long time before she reached across and opened it. The courtyard below was covered with tiny dark purple flowers. Beyond the convent, a wreath of mist hung just by the woods, rays of sun cutting down from the broken clouds above.
Albrecht joined her, a handful of paper clutched in one hand, a piece of charcoal in the other. They could just make out distant Zeigburg on the horizon.
In time, they noticed fire and smoke.
‘What do we do now?’ said Rose. ‘How do we…?’
Albrecht coughed into his silk handkerchief and studied it for a moment before he slipped it back into a pocket. ‘Let’s exist in each other’s company for a little longer,’ he said and attempted a smile. ‘We live the time we have. Who knows, others might need help here, need shelter.’
They sat in the silence of each other. Rose, watching the glints of fire and smoke erupting above Zeigburg. Albrecht, thoughtfully sketching away on the handful of papers before him. One picture, an oak with dreams of first new growth.