Field Notes

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Petrier didn’t know when his father had become an old man.

Maybe it was when his wife died in the summer of 73’ Licentious. Maybe it was when he had that nasty fall last year. Maybe it was when he started calling Petrier by his brother’s name. Maybe it was when the city he served as a butcher for sixty years had fallen to the Empire. Maybe it was none of those things.

Or maybe, and just maybe dear reader, it was when he saw his father collapsed on the butcher’s floor. His skin was loose around his eyes, sunken and red. His fingers looked like bones, gripped tight in rigor mortis around a bloodied cleaver. His muscles hung from him like loose robes, pulling taught a sun kissed skin that had been loved and abused for years too many. 

The butcher’s floor looked like a mortuary room, and the smell of the beast Petrier’s father had been smoking for the last two hours tasted like ash in the back of Petrier’s throat. Petrier looked in his father’s now lifeless eyes. He was never a cruel man, but he was not jovial either. He had cruel eyes, though. Sharp, pernicious things. Even if he had never muttered a single word against Petrier, he could always tell what his father’s judgment was with a single, demolishing glance. 

Petrier had imagined that, when this inevitability came, he would be more devastated. He would rend his clothing like Isosa had done for her daughters. But time, that Wolf’s curse, creeps in to all things. Perverts them, spoils them. And the years he saw his father limp around on one foot had curdled any such sentimentality. The man looked barely alive. His death did not change that. His skin had no glow, no warmth or roseiness. 

Neither did the man who was standing over him. His skin had the same grave pallor as Petrier’s father did. Same tautness, as if too little fabric spread over too much. Same bonechilling smile, same judgemental eyes. It was as if this stranger had stolen all of that from his father. Plucked it like a liver from Prometheus’s chest. This man was a scavenger in a long, black coat. Across his cheek, a single bloodless slash. Fresh, like an amateur surgeon cutting haphazardly into a corpse. His arms were crossed behind his back and a wide brimmed hat blocked out the sterile light hanging above him.

“Petrier, I presume?” He spoke in a friendly tone. Petrier reaches for his own cleaver. He had spent some hours in the butcher’s shop helping his ailing father. He was not as skillful with the blade as his father was. “I was an associate of your fathers, I’m so sorry about his passing.”

“No you aren’t.” Petrier responds, cleaver now fully in hand. . He had spend enough time around Le Marc street to know who this was. What shifty figures lurked in back alleys. “You’re a Bone Boy, a Garcons de Os.”

“That I am.” The man smiled back. “But that still makes me an associate of your father’s.”

“He would never associate with crooks like you.” Petrier gripped his cleaver a bit tighter, voice dripping with uncertainty. “So, you kill the man.”

“Do you see a cut on his flesh?” The man motioned towards his father’s pristine, lifeless body. Petrier furrowed his brow. His father looked peaceful. As if it had all just stopped. As if oblivion was contentment. “Or how about a gunshot wound? Anything that would hurt our investment?”

“He would never have taken your money.”

“And yet, here I am.” The man shrugged. “So who’s lying, me or the corpse?”

Petrier couldn’t know, shouldn’t know. Times were lean in Mariposa and the Bone Boys were just an arm of the largest conglomerate in the City, the Os’ Group. Their hands were in every field in every industry, from defense applications to biotechnical pharmaceuticals. They were the fist, the cruel gloved hand that collected on investments large and small.

“Ok then, maybe he did need your money.” Petrier nodded. “You have his body, that’s what you guys want right? Bones, flesh, memories? You’re butchers in need of meat. So take him.”

“Our contract was for money or living flesh. We don’t deal in old meat.” The man’s splitting mouth curled into an even crueler smile. “His debt falls to his closest family member. And since your brother is no longer with ust, that means such responsibility falls to you.”

“How long has he had this debt?”

“Longer than you’d think.” The man smiled. “ Didn’t you ever notice things just missing?”

Petrier looked down at his father and fought the urge to throw up.“Like what?”

“A bit of flesh here, a memory there.” The man kneeled down in front of Petrier’s father, his long black coat now pooling on the ground. “I’m sure it was nothing you’d ever miss.”

“Is this a shake down?”

“What a cruel way to think about this relationship. I’ve known your father for years, and this is how you treat me? I also lost a friend today.” The man coughed and produced a small card from his coat. It is bone white, and the print is gold leaf seemingly threaded in between the strands of paper. It was silk and expensive. 

“Bite me.” Petrier spat out, brandishing his cleaver in a useless way.

“I do have a job to do, however.” The man continued, clearing his throat in a soulless, purely utilitarian way. As if he didn’t really need to, as if he only did it to make a point. He glanced back down at the card in his hand and began to read aloud, reciting words that he had spoke many, many times before.“My name is Sacha. You do not need to know my last name. Welcome to our little family. Either you, or a loved one who no longer can remediate their debt, has entered into an accord with the Garcons de Os. While we are known for our philanthropy, our enterprise is a business. And so, your debt is.” Sacha pauses reading and pulls a small pocket watch from his pocket. It was silver and featureless, save a single chain attached to somewhere deep in the man’s coat. Petrier remembers a fairy tale his father had taught him, of how Death did not have a heart, but instead a ticking clock. “Eighty six hundred Imperial Thalers. Or equivalent in bones harvested from living specimens. My boss told me to make sure to specify that. Your father’s legs would have done, for example.” Sacha smiled, looking at the two limp legs on the corpse beneath him. Petrier follows his eyeline and grimaces. Could his father have ever saved him from this? “He was a prideful man, wasn’t he?”

Petrier drops his cleaver in shock. He knew he could not kill the Bone Boys and, if he had bested the man in front of him, there would not be a place in Mariposa he could hide where they would not find him. This debt was his now. “Where am I going to find this money?” He exclaimed. “Dad’s shop was barely holding it together as it was?”

“Not my problem.” Sacha responded with a shrug, returning his hands behind him as he started to move. He stepped over Petrier’s father’s corpse, black coat gliding across the floor. He moved past Petrier. The butcher’s breath hitched, Sacha’s watch ticked just a bit faster. It was excited. Petrier’s breath turned to frost. Sacha was at the door now, the wooden thing that Petrier’s father had used to keep the city out of his butcher shop for years. It creaked open, all the while Sacha’s hands did not move from his jacket. “I can offer you some advice though.

Petrier’s eyes couldn’t break away from his cleaver on the floor of his father’s butcher shop. It glistened in the cold light. A tool of violence, used to make a profit. A chicken squeals, as if it knows what fate might befall it. He could slaughter a million birds before he would pay back what his father owed. 

“What.” Petrier responds, shoulders low and voice hollow.

Sacha looks out into Mariposa. A young man stumbles home in the dark in front of him, bottle clenched in his hand. It is unclear if he is Mariposian or an Imperial soldier off duty. To Sacha, to the butcher, it does not matter. A smile crawls back over his face. It is an infectious thing, contorting the rest of Sacha’s face into that of unbridled glee. He turns his head back towards Petrier, eyes glistening and gleaming. They are his father’s eyes.

“They do not need to be your bones.”

The first thing Vera noticed was the flies.

Mariposa was not a particularly humid city, despite what its place on the coast of the Screaming Seas might lead you to believe. It was often cooler, even into the summertime, with wafting breeze coming from across the rocks on the Butterfly Bay. In fact, it is that cool breeze that allowed the city to become something of a mercantile hub, with the tradewinds stretching far across the continent, from the Coalition of Eastern Regencies to the Empire of Night. The air does not stick to the lungs, sweat does not coat the back of your head when you toil.

And yet, there the flies were. In the sticky, sweet air in Manor Tyra, just in the corner of the room, she saw them buzzing around a vent in the wall, flying in and out of the metal opening. They almost seem to dance, their humming almost melodic in its grating. They disperse across the room as they leave the air vent, maybe three, maybe four. One lands on a blood red chrysanthemum, one lands right on the cheek of the large painting of Rosalind Tyra, one lands on the brow of the head butler.

“Why do you want this position, Miss Hershal?” The head butler asks. If he notices it, if his brow twitching is in response to the little bug, Vera does not know. She did not quite get his name, with the introductions having been drowned out by the flies' incessant din. 

Vera responds, but not in any way she can really articulate. Something about dreams, as if every moment in Vera’s life was leading to her dusting and cooking. The buzzing of the flies has turned musical almost, as if their wings were harmonizing with the dust in the air, in the oscillation of the light coming from dim bulbs, in the growl of her stomach. Work was hard to find in Mariposa, but the corporate lords pay well.

The head butler coughs again, this time with less politeness and more hoarse. It is stern enough to bring Vera back to herself, as if he knew she was somewhere else. “So, Miss Hershal.”

Vera looks back towards the butler, still straining one ear to listen to the buzzing. “Please, Vera is alright I think.”

Behind the head butler, Rosalind’s daughter taps her finger just once. Enough to be almost imperceptible, save for the fact that she had not moved this whole conversation. The head butler scowles just slightly. “We prize objectivity here, Miss Vera. We may be a family, but we need to keep things courteous.”

Vera nods, a slight, warm and red blush creeps across the bridge of her nose. “Oh, then yea, um. Miss Hershal works.”

Rosalind’s daughter smiles. Besides her foot is a hunter’s ax. It leans against her leather boot. And even at this distance, Vera smells something of ash. The head butler continues. “Out of all the applicants, you’ve been selected for Rosalind’s personal aide. You must feel honored.”

Vera nods. “Oh yes! Very, very.” Her voice is dripping with faux sincerity.

“Technically, you’re the personal aide for the Tyra family as well.” The head butler rejoined. “Including Crimson, here. You serve at their pleasure. Tyra Logistics and Transportation welcomes you.”

The woman behind the head butler smiles and raises a single finger in recognition. Her grin is plastered in red rouge. She opens her mouth to say something, her teeth are pearlescent, almost clear. A single smudge of the lipstick marks her canine. “Charles.” Her voice is soft, lacking in any of the formality that the head butler prided himself in. “I might be getting ahead of myself, but-”

Vera’s face dropped, her hands fidgeted in her lap. The fabric of her dress was threadbare and hand hewn, her boots, which were still tapping on the ground in tune with the fragrant buzzing, were had nails driven through the sole. “A-Ahead of yourself?” Vera manages to get out. She brings her hands to her mouth in shock at the interruption. Tyra smiles.

“Really, Miss Tyra?” The head butler nods, refusing to look over his shoulder at the corporate lord behind him. 

“Oh of course I’m sure.” Crimson rejoins. She looks back towards Vera. “I think I’m ready to welcome you to the family, my attendant.”

Vera looks back at the woman. Crimson’s face is unreadable. It has a smile on it, and narrow eyes. But no actual emotion is anywhere to be found. She reaches over to her discarded glass of wine on the end table beside her. It is red and full bodied. One of the flies has landed on the surface, struggling to break the surface tension. Tyra brings the glass to her lips as the fly thrashes, as if she does not notice. A single drop of the bordeaux lands on her cheek. Her skin is like cotton, it absorbs the wine just as fast. 

“There are, of course, responsibilities to the task.” The head butler rejoins. Crimson brings the wine glass just below her lips. The fly has stopped thrashing. Its buzz still rings, maybe even a bit louder. “An important position such as this can’t just go to anyone.”

“If you don’t mind me being so bold.” Vera asks, fighting back a smug smile. “If it's so important, why me?”

Crimson looks back towards the portrait behind her. Her mother’s kind face. It’s eyes are locked on Vera. Wine drips from the edges of Crimsons’ lips. The edge of Vera’s body was thrumming in time with the gnashing tune on the fly’s wings. She looks back up towards the vent in the corner of the room. A maggot falls out between the metal slats. Vera licks her lips slightly. Behind her, a single petal falls from off the chrysanthemum. The sound it makes while falling is the exact same note as the buzzing of the fly’s wings. Crimson scowles at the painting.

“Call it a mother’s intuition.” 

A pen click. The butler coughs. “Are you still interested?”

Vera turns towards the head butler and smiles. “Yea, I am, I think.”

The servants quarters were surprisingly large. 

The last place Vera worked at, a home of a minor ambassador from a foreign land, was little more than a broom closet with a gas range. The air smells like sulfur and blood, laiden so thick that you could taste it on the back of your tongue.

The Tyra Manor did not smell like sulfur and the quarters had their own kitchen attached to it. Vera counted six additional bodies in the communal space. One was smoking a cigarette, one was playing chess with another. Each were young, attractive types, like Crimson Tyra was. Hard bodies, pretty hair. Obsessively clean, as well. One held a glass up to the light, his fingernails were bitten to stumps with not a speck of dirt or grime underneath them. That melodic buzzing could still be heard here, yet it didn’t seem to bother anyone in the room. Each of them were conversing, rapt entirely in their companionship. Vera could have been a fly on the wall for all she knew. She placed her bag on the ground next to the door, enough to be out of sight from the hallway, lest any of the Tyra’s see her belongings.

It was the man at the window between the kitchen and the common area who noticed her first. His teeth were perfectly aligned, and only slightly yellowed. His eyes had a slight band of copper between the iris and the sclera, and his eyelashes were long and inviting. He extended his hand up to beckon her further. It was at that moment, the other’s in the servants quarters turned to look at her. Not all in unison, mind you. But with a noticeable, almost deliberate delay in their towards her. Not unlike when an actor knows he is to be cut off in the script.

“New girl, right?” The man with the pretty eyes said as if they were waiting for her. Vera began walking towards him before he had even called her over. Yet when he spoke, when the words dripped from his mouth, she stopped, acutely aware of her movement. She felt them watch her and felt almost comforted by it. To be the center of their obsession, if but for a moment. The man continued, his smile still wide and boisterous.“Come come, get a drink in you.” 

She walks up to the window to the kitchen, as if this room was repurposed from some entertaining space. There were no stools next to the window, so Vera opted to stand. She wants to tell them she doesn’t drink, but can’t find it in her to lie. “Are we supposed to be drinking on the clock?” Vera asks instead.

“Bit of a teetotaler, hey?” The woman next to her responds. Her hair is auburn and she has long, slender arms. Her fingers are marred with scratches, each appearing now to only just be healing. Burrowing scars mark the length of her forearm. She sees Vera eyeing her and flashes her a coy smile. “Daphne.” She extends her hand towards Vera and she takes it. Her grip is delicate, and they hold for what seems a moment too long. 

“Vera Hershal.” Vera says almost off handedly. She still has not let go of her hand.

“You from Mariposa, Vera?” Daphne asks as the man with the pretty eyes fills a pristine glass with a slightly brown liquid. It sloshes around as if the consistency of syrup. 

“Who is?” The man with the pretty eyes chuffs, as if it was some grand joke.

“No, actually.” Vera smiles and takes her hand from Daphne’s to the glass. There is no discernible change in warmth between the two of them. “I’m from up north. Hinterlands. Near Verak.”

“You miss it?” Daphne asks, rolling her finger around the rim of her drink.

Vera takes hold of the drink in both of her hands. She rubs the ridge of the glass absentmindedly for a moment. The man with the pretty eyes leans forward a bit too far. So does Daphne.

“Do any of you actually hear that?” Vera finally asks. That buzzing, that droning, that gnawing sound. It was all Vera could do to actually pay attention to the two of them. It was at once melodic and dissonant, not altogether unpleasant. But its ever presentness, its continuity, flowed around hallways and into the rooms of Manor Tyra. There weren’t even any flies here, nor had she seen any in her walk down to the servants quarters. This place had looked scoured and clean, with hard pressed wood, treated with any sort of preservatives, and paneling placed at odd angles with secant points. The whole of the manor seemed to converge on what? All the pointing lines that focused on what? 

Daphne smiles. “No, not really.” Her thumb is pressing deep and hard into the ridge on the bottom of her drink. Vera furrows her brow. Her eyes dilate, her throat feels thick and full. Daphne looks over to Vera and nudges her with her own shoulder. “Not a lot of people regret moving to Mariposa, so I don’t blame you.”

Vera sighs and brings the cup to her lips. It is sweet, whatever is inside of it. Like rosewater, or hibiscus. Absolutely no discernable taste of alcohol. Like drinking liquified potpourri. Whatever grain or fruit the spirit was made from, this mixer almost fully masked its flavor. Vera, for a moment, closes her eyes, ignoring the frustration of being misunderstood building behind them. It does not taste like Verak. She is almost certain of it. But it doesn’t taste like Mariposa, either. She has had plenty of drinks in her stay here, and this certainly was not one of them.

“I’m Adrien.” The man with the pretty eyes finally coughs out. Vera opens her eyes and realizes just how long she had been drinking. The glass in her hands was half gone. “I’m the entremétier in the Tyra kitchen.”

“Which means he also cooks our meals too.” Daphne gesticulates towards the kitchen, glass still in hand. It was a small, cozy thing. Still unheard of in Mariposa, a kitchen for use only by the help staff. But the size of the Tyra manor almost required such atomization of labor. “He’s only typically on call when Tyra is hosting the Queen.”

“So it means, Miss Hershal, you’re stuck with me.” Adrien smiles and leans on the kitchen windowsill. His arms are toned and sinewy. He looks as if he’d be stringy, chalky in any sort of long standing soup. A thin, bristly mustache covers his upper lip, as if he was proud to be sporting it. “I hope the other’s like you just as much as the miss does”

Daphne snorts, undignified and beautiful. She is still shoulder to shoulder with Vera. “I think they will, yea.” She takes another drink. A fly, small thing with beady, crimson eyes, crawls from behind Daphne’s ear. Its wings harmonized with that buzzing that Vera could not get from out of her mind. If anyone saw it, no one made mention of it. The rest of the servants in the quarters were each obsessed with their conversational partners, enraptured with each other. The air was warm and sickly sweet. Like the potpourri that was at Vera’s mother’s wake.

“You’re so sure, huh?” Vera slightly bumps back into Daphne, separating the two of them for a moment.

“Yeah, you’re so sure, huh?” Adrien begins to pour himself his own drink. “You said that about the last girl, too.”

“What happened to her?” Vera asked.

“Rosalind liked her a little too much, so Crimson let her go.” Daphne sighed wistfully, as if she liked her just as much. As her mouth opened, that same buzzing came from inside Daphne. As if her lips were not making the same movements as they were before, like they were simply opening up for the noise to come out instead of forming the words themselves. “Our employer is a bit of a meticulous one.”

“Heard she works down near Le Marc street, in the lower wards.” Adrien lifts the liquor to his mouth and drinks it greedily. Liquid spills from the sides of his lips, his mouth open too wide for the mouth of the glass. His tongue lulls out the side.

“Nice one, too.” Daphne sighs, her voice almost drowned out by Adrien’s drinking. Like a pig drinking from a trough, guttural and wet. Vera looks at Adrien, at his bulging throat and his ragged breath when he takes the drink away from his lips. 

“Sweet girl, ya know? She brought a little basket of treats to introduce herself. Cared a bit too much. Cute little thing.” Adrien places the glass back on the table a little too forcefully, fills it again from the brown bottle, and then begins drinking again. The liquor spills around his hand, as if the act of pouring is foreign to him. He catches his breath. “Like, ah, you.”

“Is he-” Vera looks back at Daphne for a moment, then back at Adrien. His glass is on the table, he has resumed his previous position, resting against the counter. The glass is empty. It is dripping with condensation. A pool of liquid has formed from where he spilled the drink in haste. His hands are dripping wet. The words die in Vera’s throat.

Daphne raises an eyebrow. “Is he?”

Vera puts her own glass down.

“If you ask me, I think she has the Scarlet Song.”

The light is dim in their shared bedroom. Vera had, by chance, been assigned to the room that Daphne had been staying in. Two queen beds, facing each other on opposite sides of a room. In many of the workhouses of Mariposa, servants were assigned twin beds, as if to keep from any impropriety on company time. The walls were dark, with painted and stained wood paneling along the lower half of the wall. Vera had retired to bed some time ago, her arms behind her head as she stared at the ceiling.

When Daphne started to talk, Vera almost instinctively looked over to the corner of the room, on the side of where the door was. A single, budding chrysanthemum sat on an end table in that corner. It's leaves having all fallen off long ago, yet regrowing new ones outside of their budding season. She watches as a maggot crawls along the stem. Vera swears she sees it look at her.

“Scarlet Song?” Vera asks after exchanging glances with the maggot. She sits up in her bed, her nightgown feeling a bit too thin in the chill of the night’s air.

“Yea, Rosalind.” Daphne had already been sitting up, her arms wrapped around her knees. Her hair was up in a bun, her makeup had been removed. She had no wrinkles, at least less than she had during the previous day. Her hands were still immaculate, palms red from her repeated washing. “She goes out for a hunt in Blackvien years ago, then traps herself in her room.”

“Did you meet with her when you were hired?” Vera tilts her head to the side somewhat.

“Yea I did. We sat in the rose garden with her wife.” Daphne looks towards the dead chrysanthemum in the corner of the room, a plant she had been meaning to get rid of for some time. Its leaves have long wilted away. “She asked me some weird questions, then said congrats.”

“Oh,” Vera sighed. “Crimson and the head butler did my interview.”

Daphne sits up a bit higher. Her voice is still hushed. “See! That’s exactly what I mean.” She leans forward in the bed. “She goes on some hunting trip just before the last outbreak happened there. Comes back and locks herself in that room.”

“Or Crimson locks her in that room.”

“Might be.”

“Might be?” 

“Maybe she wants to keep Mariposa safe, or her mother safe.” Vera sighs and looks back towards the blooming plant. “It’s the disease of undeath, right?”

Daphne takes her arms from off around her knees and moves towards the edge of the bed. “Scarlet Song is a psychosocial illness. You don’t just catch it by being near someone who’s sick.”

“That wasn’t how I heard it spread.”

“Well obviously, if you’re around someone who’s sick, you might get sick.” Daphne rolls her eyes. Her iris glowed in the dim of the room. The way the stray light came in through the window, it almost made Daphne look like a cat you shined a light at. Red, like a photo caught mid flash. “But that’s only because you’re caring for them, because you pour so much into them.”

Vera brings her knees to her chest. The maggot begins to sing, harmonizing with the buzzing that had been blaring in her ears. “How do you get it then?”

“It worms its way into the parts of your mind that care.” Daphne finishes moving, sitting on the edge of the bed now. She was no more than a couple feet from Vera, but Vera could feel the warmth of her breath, the sickly, floral flavor on the tongue. Her lips were scarlet, her arms were slender and inviting. “Poisons your thoughts into obsession and infatuation. Makes you an object of desire, makes your vices just that much more apparent. Gluttony, lust, wrath.They call it the undead disease because of conservation of energy. All that obsession can’t just disappear once you die.”

Shambling corpses, replete of any desire but what was core to them.

“You hear voices, you see things, you misattribute motivations and feelings towards someone else.” Daphne gets up from off the bed. She is standing now, in naught but a night shirt. Her skin is translucent in the moonlight, like still water. Her eyes red and beautiful. “You could be infected, and just not know. It creeps into your mind, makes a vice of your heart.”

There is little now between their two beds, with Daphne standing square between them. Vera traced the lines of her shoulders, of her chin, of her lips. The edges of Daphne hummed and thrummed, as if their component parts sang with the maggot. Like a lichtenberg figure, Daphne seemed all secant lines. Convergent points, each inviting further study and obsession. Vera closed her eyes.“It almost sounds nice.”

Daph leans forward, towering over Vera on the bed. She raises a hand and, for a moment, Vera worries Daph might strike her. Her hand is now on Vera’s cheek, fingers finding themselves resting on her cheekbone. Vera, instinctually, bites Daphne’s palm. Daphne grips her head a bit tighter, blood running rivulets down into Vera’s hungry mouth. It is sweet, like the potpourri at her mother’s wake. Her other hand rests where Vera’s neck meets her shoulders, thumb placed gingerly just above her adam’s apple. Vera leans into the embrace, not sure whether Daphne will choke her or kiss her back. She would beckon either, readily and happily. Her skin was hot, roiling chaos. The cells across her body a throng of music, a veritable choir of blissful immolate. 

Daphne gasps, the heat proving too much for her. She opens her eyes and sees Daphne there, sitting on the edge of her bed, now seeming so far apart. Vera didn’t even notice her moving. Her skin was flush, her hands trembling, hand dripping blood onto her white gown. Daphne will not look her in the eyes, but a blissful smile is plastered on her face. 

She is shaking. 

“Yea, it does sound nice.”

Rosalind Tyra had a portrait of her wife on the bed stand next to her.

This was the first thing that Vera noticed when walking into the magnate’s room. Not the flowers that should have rotted months ago, not the empty plate picked clean of bones, not even the unmoving, veiled form that lay on the bed, covered by a single, white sheet. It was a simple photo, and the lights in the room had long been burnt out. A golden leaf frame surrounded the photo, with no glass covering it. The photo was yellowed and sour. Mary Tyra-Dayshaper was a young woman again, her hair it's natural blonde instead of the gray it was now. In the background, one of Rosalind’s kills at their chateau near Blackvien. Some grand reptile, head severed and blood dripping into a nearby patch of chrysanthemums. Mary was smiling, with a kind set of eyes. In her hair, a little flower pin. Sitting beside her, a child. Scarlet red hair and a bearded ax next to her. She was not smiling and she was staring a hunter’s stare at Vera.

The portrait was facing Rosalind’s bed, where she lay under a perfectly white sheet. No stains, like Vera had expected. No grime or muck or even dust. The room looked well kept, the room looked as pristine as the rest of the house. This is what Vera would be hired to do. To keep Rosalind company, to keep where she lays. Rosalind seemingly did not notice Vera’s entrance, even if the maid wasn’t particularly keen on staying quiet. As soon as she entered the small room, however, she felt almost reverent. As if her breaths must be measured as not to take too much oxygen, as if her feet must be kept in check lest it squash some beast underfoot. The stained glass window let in multi-colored light, trickling in and catching dust in its delicate beams. It was midmorning after a fitful night. The sky in Mariposa had that post-dawn haze, with nary a cloud in sight. Vera entered and shut the door.

The second thing that Vera noticed was the incessant, beautiful melody that had suffused the entirety of Tyra Manor had ceased as soon as she shut the door. It had become so much that Vera had almost tuned it out entirely by the time she woke next to Daphne this morning. And yet, in shutting it out, Vera had missed it in its absence. The walls vibrated, like being trapped in a room without air, like being stuck in the center of a storm. The silence rattles the wood, it rattles the bed frame, it rattles Vera’s bones.

“Good morning, Mrs. Tyra.” Vera says in a cloying affect like she was instructed. “Have you been sleeping well?”

The body does not respond. There is no rising and falling of the chest. Vera crosses the room gingerly. The tray in her hands rattles somewhat. The hem of her skirt rises with each step. Vera waits for a response that will never come. She places the tray down on the end table, next to the photo of Mary Tyra-Dayshaper. It is dried ham and it costs more than Vera will make that day. Mary is stout and elegant. Her sun kissed skin catches the Blackvien light just so and her hair smells of seabreeze and salt. 

“I have your meal.” Vera continues in rote repetition. Do not deviate, she tells herself.. “Will you eat it here or should we be expecting you down today?”

The body does not respond. Vera sits on the edge of the bed next to her in a fit of compassion. She was a nurse, before she was a maid. Back when money could be made in healing. She places her hand on the sheet almost absentmindedly, breaking the script. Perhaps she is just sleeping a bit tighter, perhaps she is just too cozy in the warmth of the morning. Vera creeps a smile as her hands reach the hem of the bedline.

“It’d be nice if you’d join us, I’m sure your daughter would-”

And that is when she hears it. The song. Not the disjointed choir of the maggots, not the single-noted sludge of the servants. But the whole of it. Every note, their counterplay, the harmonies, the sharps and the flats. It is like a cacophony of angels, like every tragedian of Mariposa was caught alight in a single, raptorious song. It is like screaming. It is like pain. It is like the crackling of ash and the dripping love of slavering mouths. It is incineration of the stars in the sky.

It is pure beauty and it drives Vera to tears. 

It drives her to the floor.

Sorrow was now burning into her cheeks. Her tears sublimating in time with the harmonies that now echo in her ears. She brings her hands to her face, as if she were to sob. A choked, painful note comes out of Vera’s mouth as the song stops, as she leaves Rosalind Tyra. She thinks she hears the whole manor scream.

The body does not respond. It sits there, mocking what obvious love Vera had felt come from her touch. This was not Rosalind as she knew Rosalind. Rosalind was the violent song that now dripped from her open mouth, not the meat sitting ripe and raw under the sheets. The song crawls from Vera’s pours like maggots. They stain the hem of Vera’s dress, mixing with the blood and bile that were pooling from her screaming, singing mouth. They are slick and inviting.

And then the discordance creeps back in.

Vera shoots her eyes towards the door as the incessant and beautiful song of the maggots is in her ears again, eyes burning from between her stained fingers. Red petals flow down her cheeks. And her mouth tastes only of song. In the doorway stands Crimson Tyra. Her boots are muddy and on her shoulder is a worn rifle. Its barrel still hot from the hunt. In her other hand, her dominant hand, her killing hand, was a hunting ax. It was bearded. It was dripping with ash.

“Did you do this to her?” Vera manages to get out as the song creeps behind her now fractiline eyes.

“I knew you’d break.” Crimson smirks, then quickly scowles. “What did my mother say?” Her voice is lacking any of the congeniality she once had. She takes a step forward, tracking the mud into the sickly sweet room.

Vera choked again, maggots spilling from her lips. She pulled herself forward. If only she could share this love with Crimson, maybe, maybe, maybe.

Crimson brings her boot down on what once was Vera’s hand, skin now splitting, unable to contain the flowers anymore. “I hired you for this reason, Miss Hershal.” Her voice was cruel, spitting and cutting. “Now, what did my mother say?”

“Sorry!” Vera sings, her bones breaking and eating away at her skin. “She says she’s sorry!”

Crimson sighs and frowns. She places the rifle on the floor. She hefts her hunting ax with both hands now. Its blade is dripping with blood. “That’s what she said the last time.” Crimson rejoins.

If Vera could just get to Daphne, just show her how beautiful this was when everything could be better. What once was Vera’s lips are replete with words and notes, some begging, some hateful, some pleading for violence. “I can make you! We can feel better!” Vera manages something coherent. “You need me! Love!”

Crimson smiles. She brings the ax above her head. Everything could be better, if she just opened her heart to the song. “I only needed you for this, Miss Hershal.”

Then, the body does not respond.

“We are in need of an entire new staff, Miss DuBois.” The head butler asks. Anne sat in front of him, her legs crossed at the ankles. Behind him, Crimson sat in her thick, leather chair. Behind them both, a painted portrait of Rosalind Tyra. “So, let me ask you. Why is it you want this job?”

Crimson smiles and taps her finger just once.

And the flies begin crawling from the vents.