The cellar.
She sprinted from the nest of circles and was halfway down the stairs when the next scream came. It was a man’s voice, a man in agony. Augustine. The pipes began to creak, to thrum in time to his pain.
But when she rounded the last turn of the stairs and stepped down into the foyer, the man in the center of the room was not Augustine. He stood inside a circle of chalk, and he was silent, arms spread, looking up at the ceiling.
It was Mr. Renton.
His skin was purpled with rot, his abdomen split open and gaping where he had injured himself, where Augustine had sliced through deeper, where Jane had spread the gash apart. His open shirt and trousers were stained with grave dirt, and Jane could feel it under her own nails, could remember the warm damp of the putrefying loam when she had dug below the graveyard lawn.
He screamed again, though he did not move except to let his jaw fall open. For all the pain in his voice, he looked like a photograph, a statue.
A statue.
She had spent the long night drawing circles, but now she was frozen. A little chalk, a little salt, and Renton could not get to her. But she would still be able to hear him, screaming, screaming.
Except he wasn’t screaming now. He was looking at her. He did not blink. His eyes bulged in their sockets.
“Jane Shoringfield Lawrence,” Mr. Renton said.
“How do you know my name?” she whispered. Augustine had only ever called her Miss Shoringfield during the surgery, and Renton had been far gone by then.
“Where is the missing part of me?”
In a jar, on display, in the surgery of a man who can no longer be reached. She stammered out, “Gone.”
“No,” he said. His lips sagged from his face, revealing teeth, worn and yellowed. “I would know if it were gone, but I feel it still. We are connected, me and it. The magician and the Work. If it were gone, I would know.”
The magician and the Work. Chalk and salt found around his body. Augustine’s fears. Here it was, confirmed: Renton had been a magician, and he had paid the price for it. A hysterical laugh threatened to bubble from her throat. What stood before her was an unnatural ghost, but more than that, perhaps. What happened when a magician died? What happened when he came back?
“It isn’t here.” How could she have known he would want it back? How could she have known they could give it back?
But they could have buried him with it at the first, or disposed of it like they had Abigail’s pregnancy.
Abigail. The memory brought with it the feeling of worms beneath her fingers. What had the skull meant? Had Augustine been wrong, that the cause of her affliction had been mundane?
She hugged herself tightly, swaying on her feet.
“You will put me back together,” Renton said. “You will fix this.”
“I—I can’t—”
“Something must be given for what has been taken.”
Her hands dropped to her stomach, which, as if on cue, gave an answering ache, called by the still corpse before her. “I don’t understand.”
“Something that grew out of place.”
A tangled bowel. A dead infant. A magician’s bones, growing wildly after a spell miscast. What might be growing inside of her? “And will you leave me, if I give it to you?” she whispered. “Leave this house, be laid to rest?”
“Make me whole,” Mr. Renton said.
She had no offal to give to him, but she had Augustine’s collection of strange growths, of other things out of place. They were the same. They were all the same.
“I can do this,” she said, though she wanted nothing more than to flee. Augustine’s medical equipment was sealed away with him, but there was needle and thread in the kitchen, for stitching up roasts, and elsewhere, for doing mending.
“The grave loam,” he said. “That as well.”
How did he know she had it? Did he also require the moss? The benzoin? Was this some wicked trick, to drain her supplies?
Or was this the next step of the awakening promised by the ritual?
“Can you move?” she asked, making herself meet his eyes.
He took one step, and then another, a jerking, stiff-legged puppet. But he moved.
Jane recoiled, bile in her throat. “Up to the second floor,” she gasped. “I will meet you on the landing.”
He stepped out of his circle and began to climb.
She retrieved the needle and thread from the kitchen, and tried to breathe, now that she could not see Renton. But she could smell the rot of him, and paused a moment before she returned to the stairs. When he reached the landing ahead of her, he tipped his head back and screamed again. His face remained impassive as she passed him, racing up to retrieve the loam, and, in an abundance of caution, the moss. He watched as she set her things down outside the bedroom, nodded at her selection. Jane ducked her head and slipped into the study.