“Lieutenant. Lieutenant.”
My ears were ringing so loudly that I could not hear the words, only see Miss Potter’s lips moving. I was on my knees. The damp chill of the crypt was sinking into my bones. My shoulder throbbed.
Madeline was gone. Her body was gone. Someone must have moved it. Yes, of course. Usher, perhaps, to conceal his crime. She had been dead for three days, so it was a bit late for that, but it was the only explanation. It was foolishness to think that she might have moved on her own, sat up on the slab, pushed the shroud aside like a blanket. The dead don’t walk.
“Lieutenant.”
I heard that word faintly. It had the force of command to it and I straightened involuntarily. “Yes,” I said, probably too loudly. “I apologize. There should be a body here. It was a shock.”
Miss Potter helped me to my feet. “Lieutenant, I fear that after the loss of your friend, your nerves may be somewhat overset.”
This was a polite English way of saying that she thought I was a squalling lunatic, and I couldn’t argue the point. At least the shroud was still here. I picked it up and spread it across the slab, looking for the white hairs that I had seen.
The relief when I found one was intense. At least this much was real. I pointed to a patch and said, “These. Are these hyphae?”
She gave me a narrow-eyed look, perhaps for dragging her mycology into my madness, but she took out her magnifying glass and set the lantern on the slab to look. I waited with my heart in my throat, looking toward the open door. A tiny voice whispered that it would swing shut and we would hear the bar fall into place and we would be trapped down here. I took a few cautious steps toward the door, wondering if I could rush to it in time if I heard the hinges creak.
“Hmm,” said Miss Potter.
“What is it?”
She made an impatient gesture. “Give me time.”
“Sorry.” I went back to my maudlin imaginings. Would it be Roderick Usher, determined to hide his crime? Or something worse? Would it be a figure in white, animated by some terrible force? The force that had moved a hare missing half its head to stand up and stare?
The dead don’t walk. The dead don’t walk. If they did, then … then … I don’t know what. Something dreadful. I had killed so many people and seen so many die, and what if none of them were peaceful in the ground? What if they were roaming around? What if I would have to face them and explain?
“Definitely hyphae,” said Miss Potter, setting down her magnifying glass. “I would require a stronger glass to state for certain whether it is septate or nonseptate, and I cannot swear that these are not the pseudohyphae found in yeasts. Nevertheless, they are not human hairs, nor fabric threads.”
“What if I told you those were growing out of human skin?”
Miss Potter made a well-bred motion of her chin that, in another person, would have been a vast shrug. “Saprophytic fungi—ah, that is to say, those that feed upon decaying organic matter—are exceedingly common. Unsightly, perhaps, but they pose no threat to living creatures.”
“Madeline was alive at the time,” I said, holding her gaze, “and there were so many of them on her skin that I thought her body hair had turned white.”
The English, in my experience, make an enormous deal about the most minor inconveniences, but if you confront them with something world-shattering, they do not blink. Miss Potter did blink, but only once, and then she looked down at her magnifying glass and said, “I see.”
“Could that be what sickened her?” I asked.
“If the fungus was so widespread that it was sending filaments through her skin … yes. Certainly.” The stiffness of her upper lip was magnificent to behold. “But what has become of her body?”
The dead don’t walk. Most likely Roderick moved the body, to further conceal his crime. And Denton must know that something is wrong with Roderick, and helped him cover it up, but he doesn’t know the cause. If he knows what it is, perhaps he can treat it. “I don’t know. But I must tell Denton.”
“Indeed,” she said. “You must tell everyone. If this is a fungus that can spread on a living host, it must be stopped immediately.” She reached into her bag and took out a small silver flask, which she dumped over her hands. I could smell the sting of alcohol from where I stood. “Give me your hands, Lieutenant. You touched the shroud.”
“I touched Madeline,” I said grimly. “Several times. The hyphae tore away in my hands.”
Her eyes lifted to mine. “Then we shall hope that this is effective even after the fact.”
I listened to the dripping of spirits on the crypt floor as she sloshed whiskey over my fingers, then rubbed my hands together. Were the hares also infected? How could I tell? What were a few more white threads in a hare’s pelt?
The fish. Like slimy felt, Angus had said. Did the fungus originate in the tarn after all? Had it jumped from fish to hare, perhaps when the hares came down to drink?
Had Angus touched it himself?
And where the hell was Madeline’s body?
“Denton,” I cried, bursting into the study. “Madeline’s gone!”
He stared at me for a long moment, then his face softened and he reached out and touched my arm. “I know,” he said gently. “I know. But she’s not suffering any longer, and—”
“No, you blithering idiot,” I growled, shaking his hand off. Damnable English language—more words than anybody can be expected to keep track of, and then they use the same one for about three different things. “I know she’s dead! I’m telling you, her body’s gone!”
Denton blinked at me. “What?”
“She’s not in the crypt. The slab is empty. We cannot habeas the corpus. Is any of this getting through?” (I was, perhaps, rather less reverent than the situation warranted, but it is a flaw of mine that I become sarcastic when I am frustrated.)
“Are you serious?”
Miss Potter coughed politely behind me. “I can assure you, young man, that the lieutenant is quite correct.”
“Miss Potter? What are—?” Denton obviously started to question her presence, then just as obviously abandoned it for more important things. “No. Later. This is dreadful.”
“Do you think Roderick moved her?” I asked.
I was expecting him to look away from guilt, but he met my eyes squarely. “Perhaps.”
“You know there’s something wrong with him,” I said softly. “You know what he did—”
Denton cut my words off with a slicing motion of his hand. “This is not the time.”
“Well, then let us find Roderick and—”
“He’s asleep,” said Denton.
“Then we’ll wake him and—”
“I gave him a sleeping pill,” said Denton. “He won’t wake up for hours. No, don’t glare so, Lieutenant. He says he can’t sleep at all, that he hears his sister walking in the crypt. I don’t think he’s gotten an hour straight of sleep since she died.”
“That’s what I’m trying to tell you. This bizarre malady of his—it’s the same thing Madeline had.”
Denton blinked at me. “What?”
“It’s not a disease! It’s a fungus! I—oh, for pity’s sake, Miss Potter, you tell him.”
Miss Potter drew Denton aside and explained, in what I assume was English, about saprophytic fungi and the hyphae. I stared at the wall and wondered if Roderick had moved Maddy’s body out of guilt or some notion that he would stop hearing her walk if she was no longer in the crypt. Christ’s blood! Now that we knew what it was, could we treat it somehow?
“Possible,” Denton was saying. “It’s possible. I would not have thought it, but no doctor worth his salt will ever say that he’s seen everything there is to see. But I don’t see how we can prove it. The shroud may have been moldy, after all.”
“An autopsy on Maddy’s body would show it,” I said shortly.
“A body that you tell me we don’t have. And I am certainly not going to slice open Roderick’s skin looking for these hyphae!”
I gritted my teeth. “Then it’ll have to be a hare. And this time I won’t miss.”
It was Angus who provided the hare. I had swallowed my pride and gone to him to ask for his help. “Not for eating, I won’t!” he said, but when I explained that it was going to be dissected, he put his head to one side and said, “How fresh do you be needin’ it?”
“Eh?”
“There’s one not a hundred feet from t’end of the causeway. Fell in the lake, by the look of it. Saw it on my way back from the village this morning.”
We tromped out to find it. Sure enough, there one was, lying half-in, half-out of the water, facedown. It looked as if it had simply wandered up to the tarn and fallen asleep.
I was wearing my riding gloves, but I went back for a long stick from the woodpile, and fished it out without touching the water. Angus raised his eyebrows at me, but didn’t comment.
There were four of us assembled around the breakfast table this time, although what was laid out was substantially less appetizing. The light was the best in the house, and that was all that we could hope for. We had brought in lamps and candles from our rooms and crowded them along the table until the table was drowning in light. Denton had fetched his doctor’s bag and opened it, a black leather mouth gleaming with scalpel teeth.
“Miss Potter,” said Angus, touching his cap. “’Tis a pleasure to see you again.”
Miss Potter actually went a little pink. “Mr. Angus. I didn’t think I’d see you so soon.”
“You two met, then?” Come to think of it, Angus hadn’t been complaining about the lack of occupation lately, but I had been too distracted to pay attention.
“Oh yes. Mr. Angus was kind enough to hold my umbrella at just the right angle the other day while I painted a particularly fine Amanita phalloides.”
I was trying to come up with a joke about phalloides that would not end with Miss Potter hitting me with her umbrella when Denton cleared his throat and called us back to reality. “I am making the first incision,” he said.
“Wait!” Miss Potter looked around the room, found a stack of linen napkins, and hastily handed them around. “Cover your mouth and nose. If there are spores, and this is indeed a dangerous fungus, we do not wish to inhale them.”
I knotted the napkin around my head. Denton muttered something about feeling like he was about to rob a stagecoach, then took up the scalpel again. We watched in silence as the blade parted fur and skin, then cut deeper.
It was hard to tell what might be hyphae. The ligaments that connect skin to flesh are also pale and very fine. But once he opened up the chest with shears, it became clear that something had been very wrong with the hare.
“Slimy felt,” said Angus. “Like the blood—Beggin’ your pardon, ma’am. Like the blasted fish.”
Denton touched the matted surface gingerly with the tip of the scalpel. It did indeed look as if something was adhering to the surface of the organs, something slimy and fibrous, though it was a dark reddish color instead of the brilliant white of the hyphae on Madeline’s arms. The red stuff looked almost like the seaweed you see dried along the rocks on the coast, forming a sticky membrane over everything.
“The animal is female,” said Denton dispassionately. And if it were human, would it be diagnosed with hysterical catalepsy? I thought.
Miss Potter took out her magnifying glass and bent over the animal. If being six inches from the animal’s viscera troubled her, she gave no sign. “Fungal,” she confirmed.
“Would that be enough to kill it?” I asked.
“There is no way of telling,” she said, folding the magnifying glass back into its case. “We know nothing about this fungus, about its malignancy, about how long it would take to grow to this extent. Some molds can spread incredibly quickly, and this hare has presumably been dead for some time.”
“Looked like it drowned,” volunteered Angus.
“If it drowned, presumably its lungs are full of water,” Denton said, drawing the scalpel almost absently across the left lung.
The tissue retracted and the contents bulged out in a sticky white mass. It looked like cotton wool, erupting from the chest cavity as if it had been packed in too tightly to contain. Denton jerked back with a curse.
“I will go out on a limb,” I said, “and say that’s not normal for drowning.”
“Good God,” said Denton. He opened up the other lung and the white woolen mat of fungus bulged out there, too. He grabbed a fork off the table and began digging around. I felt my gorge rise. I’ve field dressed any number of animals and I don’t mind guts, but this was something else again.
Denton shook his head slowly, setting down the fork. “The lungs are packed with it. That’s not possible. Lungs aren’t hollow, they’re like a honeycomb, but this stuff got in and … it looks like it just ate the interior away somehow.”
“A warm moist growth medium,” said Miss Potter, “is very conducive to the growth of many, many fungi.”
“Yes, but it can’t possibly have lived through—”
The animal moved.
There were three veterans at that table, battle-scarred soldiers who had served their countries honorably in more than one war … and all three of us screamed like small children and recoiled in horror.
The hare kicked twice, not seeming to care that its guts were open to the air, and managed to roll itself over. Angus flung himself in front of Miss Potter. I flung myself backward in my chair, knocking it over and taking me with it. This proved to be providential, because Denton flung his scalpel aside and would have speared me handily with it if I hadn’t been on my back on the floor.
By the time I was upright, the hare was crawling along the table, leaving a broad pink smear across the tablecloth. Denton was in the corner, quivering, and Angus looked dazed.
Miss Potter flipped her umbrella around and pinned the hare in place with the tip. “Gentlemen,” she said, “I will hold it in place if one of you would like to kill it. Again.”
Moving almost mechanically, I reached into Denton’s bag and pulled out a heavy blade that looked like kin to a meat cleaver. The hare twitched and paddled its feet against the tablecloth. The thin taste of bile coated my tongue.
One solid chop with the cleaver severed the hare’s spine, and it fell limp. I did not stop until the body had been fully detached from the head, and even then I might have kept going, but Angus took the cleaver away from me.
“It’s done,” he said.
“It isn’t,” said Miss Potter. “The head is still moving.”
I looked at the head pinned under the umbrella and saw the mouth opening and closing, the chisel teeth catching in the tablecloth, and then my gorge rose and I turned and ran to the privy.
When I was empty of even the memory of food, I dragged myself back to the drawing room. They had thrown the tablecloth over the twitching hare and wrapped it into a featureless ball. Denton was as white as the linen napkin over his face as he stood repacking his bag. “The fungus grew in greatest concentration at the top of the spinal column,” he said, in a distant, precise voice. “It had completely wrapped the vertebrae there and intruded into the skull.”
“But severing the spine killed the body,” I said. The image of Madeline’s corpse, her head bent, intruded behind my eyes.
“No.” He slammed the bag shut. “That hare has been dead for days. Whatever that thing is, it was moving it around like a puppet. All we did was cut the main strings.”
“Nor will they stay cut,” said Miss Potter. She sounded the calmest of the four of us. “The growth rate of some fungi, as I said, is extraordinary. I suspect that if we left this specimen alone long enough, it would regrow the connections and begin to move again.”
“Christ’s blood.” I put my head in my hands. The dead don’t walk. Except, sometimes, when they do. “Then Madeline…”
“Don’t.” Denton nearly shouted the word. After a moment, he said, “Let’s get rid of this thing. I can’t … I can’t think about the other thing. Not yet.”
“Throw it in the lake, then?” I said.
“I do not recommend that, Lieutenant. If it comes in contact with the water supply, it could infect anyone who drinks the water.”
Angus’s mustache sagged. So did the rest of him. “Miss Potter,” he said quietly, “it’s in the lake already. It’s in the fish. All our drinking water comes from the lake. All of us—the three of us—have been drinking it and bathing in it for days.”
“Weeks for me,” said Denton.
Miss Potter, to her credit, did not recoil in horror from us. She nodded once, slowly, and said, “Then I am afraid, gentlemen, that there is a chance that all of you have contracted it already.”
Denton nodded to himself. I looked down at my arms, picturing the skin under the fabric with its fine dark hairs. If I shoved the sleeves back, would there be long white strands emerging from the surface?
“We’ll burn it,” I said, grabbing the bundle of cloth. I fancied I could feel a quiver of motion inside. “Angus, bring lamp oil.”
The stable yard was empty, the horses tucked away in their stalls. (Oh God, was the foul stuff inside Hob, too? Had I killed him by bringing him here?) We passed through it to the ragged garden, to the burn pile. It was pitifully small. Every scrap that could be used to heat the house had already been scavenged.
I dropped the tablecloth and its contents onto the darkened paving stones and Angus emptied one of the lamps over the cloth, then knelt and lit it. We stood shoulder to shoulder around it in a semicircle, close enough to feel the heat of the flame, unwilling to leave until the beast had been reduced to ash. Occasionally Angus would stir it with a stick, and we used Roderick’s lamp oil recklessly to finish the job.
It was thus some time before we had finished, and the evening was drawing in. When we turned back to the house, Miss Potter’s startled cry froze us all.
“What is that light?”
Sickly greenish radiance haloed the near end of the house. It was faint enough that perhaps we would not have seen it if the sky had been brighter, but against the darkness, it stood out in sharp relief.
“A fire?” said Denton, although not as if he believed it. “A … chemical fire?”
We had only to go a little way before the edge of the tarn came into view, and that answered the question while raising many new ones.
The lake was glowing.
It was the same thing I had seen days before, the pulsing lights that seemed to chase one another along the edges of unseen shapes, but far brighter than last time. The glow picked up the faint mist that had settled across the lake and turned it into a cloud of sickly light. The waters themselves seemed to pulse like a heartbeat, but far more rapidly than any human heart. I wondered how it compared to a hare’s heartbeat, and then I looked around.
Not too far away, its eyes lit with reflected green fire, a hare stood and watched.
“Angus—”
“I see it.”
The four of us went very slowly around the edge of the tarn. The lights grew brighter. The hare did not follow and it was too dark to make out any others. My skin crawled with awareness.
At last we stood before the causeway that led into the house. “Well,” said Miss Eugenia Potter, gazing into the flickering water, “I can tell you that has not been recorded in the annals of mycology.”
“How do we destroy a fungus?” I asked Miss Potter. “Quick! How does something like this die?”
She tore her eyes away from the lake and stared at me blankly. “Antifungals?” she said finally. “There are woods with antifungal properties … some powders … hydrogen peroxide, perhaps…?”
“You don’t know?”
“I draw mushrooms, Lieutenant! I am usually trying to keep them alive!”
I put my head in my hands.
“We used to treat foot fungus with alcohol, in the army,” said Denton. “Have them soak their feet in it.”
“Certainly that could work, but how much alcohol do you have available?” asked Miss Potter. “Can you drown the full tarn?”
“I’ve got a bottle of livrit,” I said. “And presumably there’s still a wine cellar, although it may be somewhat picked over.”
Miss Potter’s expression indicated that the wine cellar was not going to work.
“Never mind,” I said, watching the pulsing lights. “Never mind, never mind. We’ll deal with it. I’ll deal with it. Angus…” I turned. “Angus, I want you to get Miss Potter away from here. Take Hob. If you can get a wagon, leave him at the stable, and if any of us live … Oh, Christ’s blood. Both our horses might be infected.”
“I’ll sort it,” said Angus. I had no doubts. He’d made his entire career sorting logistics far more complicated than a couple of horses.
“Lieutenant!” Miss Potter began, drawing herself up to her full height, which was taller than mine, and glared down at me. “I assure you, I am not some shrinking violet who requires an escort to safety, lest I faint!”
“Miss Potter,” I said, “I would never dream of suggesting it. But you are the only person who has the faintest idea what, scientifically, we may be dealing with here, and who has any hope of explaining it to the authorities in a way that does not sound completely mad. And if there is an infection, or infestation, or … whatever you would call this … the authorities must be warned. Angus will go with you to make certain that you are taken seriously, because … well…” I leaned in and said, in an undertone, “You know what men are like when women try to tell them anything.”
Miss Potter’s expression thawed. She sighed heavily and picked up her umbrella. “You are not wrong there, Lieutenant. Very well.” She gave the glowing tarn one last, grim look.
They vanished into the stable and emerged moments later. Miss Potter rode Hob, who seemed somewhat astonished but who was on his very best manners. “That’s an English gentlewoman you’re carrying,” I admonished him. “Probably fifteenth in line to the throne. You be polite.”
“More like a hundred and fifteenth,” said Miss Potter, “a fact which gives me great comfort.” She patted Hob’s neck. “Please take extremely good notes on what happens with the lake, Lieutenant. I do so hate to miss this.”
“I shall make observations that will cause the Royal Mycology Society to tremble in their boots,” I promised. “Angus, watch for hares.”
“Aye. And watch your own skin, youngster. I’m too old to break in another officer.”
They hurried away down the road, as fast as they could safely move in the dark. I watched them go, then turned to Denton.
“Now what?” he said, staring into the lake. The light show was beginning to wane, though flickers of light still went racing through the dark water at intervals.
“All right,” I said grimly. “They’re gone. Now we talk.”