He nodded solemnly.
“I want an apology,” Jane said as she took one step forward. The Cunninghams stepped back, as if in a dance. They were just outside an unbroken circle, one drawn with ink and metal rather than chalk.
“An apology?” Mr. Cunningham said. “It is the role of a parent, of a guardian, to tell a child when she has grown wayward. I am only helping you.”
“You were cruel,” Jane said.
“Cruelty has a way of cutting through to the heart of things,” Mr. Cunningham said. “Surely you have learned that by now.” They both smiled at her, and their smiles could have been loving, from a desperate angle. But Jane saw only hunger.
She clasped both by the shoulder.
“You’re right,” she said. “I have.”
She shoved the Cunninghams over the bounds of the circle, and Jane drew up the wall.
She didn’t know what to expect—if they would howl, or shout abuse, or throw themselves against it—and so she built it high and fast, reckless with her conceptualizing. The bricks she envisioned teetered and threatened to fall. Her stomach gave a raging pang. Inside, the Cunninghams only stared, no rage in their faces, only stillness.
And then their flesh began to crack.
It gave way in flakes and peelings, not like skin or muscle or organ, but like burning wood, craquelure spreading in fine-webbed networks across their faces, their hands, their clothing. It sloughed away in curls and fragments, and beneath her guardians’ familiar shapes, their mortal bumps and curves, there was only impassive stone. They grew tall and attenuated, their heads stretching out in downward-arcing crescents, and Jane made herself watch it all.
These were not the Cunninghams. Ghosts were not real. Jane could not know if her guardians lived or died; the masks these creatures wore were no proof at all.
If they spoke, she could not hear it. The wall obliterated all sound. But they moved, heads tilting, bodies beginning to glide. Jane built higher still, shoring up the misplaced blocks, building floors and ceilings.
The creatures contorted. They lifted from the ground, limbs twisting in upon themselves, until they were only strange sculpture, barely recognizable. They hung, motionless, in the mirror image of Dr. Nizamiev’s photographs, imprisoned as magicians had been before them.
Jane realized with a lurch that she had almost joined those photographed magicians. If the servants had not come back for her that morning, she might have built her walls this high, despite the pain in her belly, and she would have been only another collection piece for Dr. Nizamiev’s asylum. Mad or frozen; the doctor would have accepted her either way.
She stared up at them, her unreal tormentors, and slowly began to back away. She let go of the wall, expecting it to tumble. But it stayed erect, no brick sliding out of place, no flexing of the structure.
They could not pursue her.
And yet, though they were immobilized and fixed in amber, she could not leave that hallway without a surge of fear. Gathering her supplies—fresh chalk, fresh salt, a candelabra with fresh candles, and every other tool of ritual she had amassed, all bundled into a bag made out of Mrs. Luthbright’s abandoned apron—was the work of frantic, harried minutes, each one a panicked opportunity to glance again at the stairs to the third floor.
She did not hear their footsteps or their voices.
At last, Jane went to where the cellar door had been transformed. There, she built up her own walls, and sat in contemplation.
Everything in her urged her to barrel on ahead, to know the wall was gone and simply walk into the crypt. But she knew now that to rush was to falter. She might bring the whole house down upon her head if she erred, or erase the crypt from existence entirely. Could she bound her knowledge enough, by focus of will alone, to know she was not changing the reality below?
When she had built her circle high around the creatures, she had seen their true form. If only she could have worked a circle around the expanse of stone, she could have investigated it, flayed it down to component parts, drawn up some equation, some geometry, to reorganize it.
But perhaps the circle did not need to be around the stone. When she had built her circle too high around herself, she’d seen the world fade, revealing hidden details, inner truths. She had seen the angles of the house’s joinery, and some meaning in them. Reality could be delineated. The wall was as much a lens as a fortification. Looking in or looking out—did it matter which direction?
She drew up the walls around her, overhead, thick enough that she could see the lines of truth sketched out upon reality. Her stomach gave more angry protests, but she blocked them out, searching for the borders of the slab before her. Its corners were an inhumanly perfect ninety degrees, traced out in blinding light. Its sheer unreality, its divorce from any earthly manipulation of pen and paper, leapt into her fingers.