“You could have stopped this,” she gasped, over and over again, like an actor who had forgotten his next line. I wanted to sob, but I swallowed it down. I felt not just useless, but helpless as her hands tightened around my arms. Then her mouth opened without sound, and as blood spilled onto my chest, she leaned forward as if to consume me.
I could no longer contain it. I screamed.
I sat up with a start, lungs trembling. I pressed my hands over my mouth as if I could take back whatever terrible noise I had made. I prayed my screams had not reached Monsieur Agreste’s bedroom upstairs, and though I hoped I had not startled Adrien in the study, I found it unlikely. But if I had disturbed Adrien, he did not come to check on me.
I took the lamp with me and moved as silently as I could. The house creaked terribly, and I winced at every misstep. I would learn, eventually, how to move through the house with little noise, but my first venture felt deafening.
It was cold and lonely in the kitchen, and as I prepared the tea I kept pausing to stifle a fresh set of sobs. I couldn’t rightly explain them. My dream had been horrifying, but horror was not the primary feeling in my chest. Neither was it grief, at least it was not grief like I had felt when I had mourned my father. This feeling swelled through my stomach and my chest and threatened to consume all of me, just as my mother’s corpse had tried to consume me.
My hands still trembled too much to carry a tray back up to my room, so I sat on the floor of the kitchen and clung to my warm cup. I kept the lamp on the floor with me, afraid if I moved too far from its orange glow, my mother’s rotting hand might reach out from the darkness.
It was foolish to be so terrified of a dream. In some part of my mind, I could hear my mother scolding me for being so impractical and pathetic, but that vision was so small in comparison to the corpse that consumed me each moment I closed my eyes.
Once there was no more tea, I had no more excuse to linger. I tried again, unsuccessfully, to move quietly. I buried my tears in my handkerchief, but the tension in my chest only mounted as I got closer to the bedroom door. I paused before Adrien’s study, wondering if perhaps I could beg him to keep me company, to keep me awake until morning, but I could not quite bring myself to let him witness my current state.
I turned the handle of my bedroom door and something creaked, though my feet had not moved. I turned, thinking perhaps Adrien had heard me after all and come to check on me, but the study remained closed and dark.
Instead, I saw her for the first time.
In truth, I smelled her before I saw her. She was announced by a gentle wafting of something floral, something I could not yet name. And though my small light was not quite enough to truly illuminate the second floor balcony, her long-sleeved white chemise was in such contrast to the dark paneling of the walls above that her movement was rather easy to follow. She glided from the west wing to the east, as light and airy as the lace edges of her nightgown, which was cinched above the waist in the fashion of the twin girls pictured below her feet, and I knew at once that I had just seen the ghost of Émilie Agreste.
