When she passed Grace’s cottage, she didn’t slow. Then realized that she hadn’t even seen the turnoff until it had gone by. Looking down from the track she was able to make out the cottage roof by the gray smoke rising into the deeper gray of the sky, but no light escaped its shuttered windows.

By day the house’s isolation had seemed romantic, almost poetic. But at night, simply unwise. A late visitor might cause a panic; she imagined being Grace, inside her home and hearing a sudden banging at the door. How brave Grace must be, to live so far out here alone, where no cry would be heard, and with no help at hand. If she was not brave, then she was foolish. Or perhaps simply desperate—as Grace herself had pointed out, her choices were limited.

Evangeline rose in the saddle as her wheels jolted over a rock. She dropped back hard, but did not slow. It was easy to imagine that something was behind her, breathing on her back, its presence growing as she pedaled. She might have a rational mind, but no one has a rational soul. Whatever dogged her, it did not go away, but kept a distance as if biding its time.

THE DAIMLER WAS NOWHERE TO BE SEEN. SEBASTIAN WANDERED the field among grazing horses and factory trucks that had been pressed into service for workers’ outings, thinking that perhaps Sir Owain’s man had moved the car to a safer spot. But he had a growing suspicion that he’d moved it rather more.

He stopped a couple of people and asked them. No one had seen the man or the car.

He went back to the lower field and wandered the fairground for a while, keeping an eye open for the driver. Alone at the fair, he felt awkward.

It was a long time since he’d attended such a thing for his own pleasure. The freaks, the puppet shows, the hurdy-gurdy men. A father’s role was to take along his family, and to stand back and draw his satisfaction from their amusement. He was too old to be a target for the flirtatious groups of factory girls, too respectable-looking to be hailed and challenged as he passed the boxing booth. The pitchmen on the stalls called over his head, to less sober and more likely-looking marks. He felt, to all intents and purposes, like an invisible man.

He passed the freak show a couple of times, and on the third pass he paid the money and went inside. Everyone was crowded in shoulder-to-shoulder: the nervous, the curious, the callow, and the near-hysterical. They shuffled around slowly under the harsh electric bulbs, following a course from entrance to exit. At the front of the show was a “six-legged calf,” actually an animal with bifurcated forelegs that could not support its weight. It crawled about its stall on callused knees, trying to reach a few scraps of hay that had fallen from its feeding trough. Around the corner was the fat lady, seated on a stool and knitting to pass the time. She was large, but not so large as to be worth paying to see. Then there was the usual Fiji Mermaid in a glass case, half dead monkey, half dried fish, the two halves stitched together by a taxidermist’s needle.

Last of all, in a partitioned area at the back, forbidden to children and costing an extra penny, there were the Seven Freaks of Nature. Their signage was freshly painted, so the smell of glue size mingled with the lingering odor of formaldehyde. Some balked at the extra charge, but most paid up and went through the bead curtain to see what was there.

The specimens of human tissue included a pair of lungs, one from a city dweller and the other belonging to a country person. The city dweller’s lung was gray and mottled, rather like a bad green cheese. The countryman’s lung was drained and lifeless but comparatively pink. There was a preserved half of a brain. A human uterus. A child’s healthy heart, white as folded silk as it hung there in the preserving fluid.

Among the severed heads and flayed torsos and part-dissected limbs, Sebastian found his friends from the train. They now bore the name Lusus Naturae, The Human Monster, but were otherwise as before; their heads merged in some fantastical lovers’ kiss, their arms around each other in a fearful embrace. Unable to function in life, earning their keep in death.

He stood before their jar for a while, until pressure from the crowd behind him moved him on. As he emerged back into the fairground, he saw Will pushing through on some urgent-seeming errand with a case of lightbulbs, and managed to catch his eye.

“Your film’s done, it’s drying now,” the young man said. “If you can stick it out until the last show, we can put your pictures on the big screen afterward.”

“I may as well,” Sebastian said. “My driver appears to have abandoned me.”

WHEN THE last comedy ended and the audience left, Sebastian stayed behind. All through the program of subjects, his heart had been hammering. Now he realized why. It had nothing to do with the show that he’d seen. It was for the show yet to come. Not an involuntary excitement, but an involuntary dread.

No one appeared for a while, and he wondered if they’d forgotten him. The lights on the show front were extinguished, one set after another.

But then Will arrived, carrying a heavy metal spool with not very much film on it. Sebastian followed him into the projection booth, where he watched as the young man loaded the spool onto the projector arm and threaded up the film. Sedgewick joined them before the operation was done, along with a couple of others, sideshow workers drawn by curiosity at the mention of the dead girls’ moving pictures.

“Close the doors,” Sedgewick said to them, “and put a chair across.”

The tent was secured and made private. According to Will, the Birtac was an amateur’s camera designed with a double function. With the addition of a suitable lamp housing, it could be converted into a projector to show the images it had taken.

But with no such accessory available to them, Will had made do with a carnival hand’s ingenuity. He had exposed the half-width camera negative onto normal-sized film stock to produce an oddly proportioned, but viewable, positive image. At least, this was how he told it to Sebastian. Who still failed to understand until he saw the first, running-up-to-speed, flickering image on the big screen.

One entire side of the screen was blank while on the other, two near-identical images appeared. One above, one below—until Will put his hand before the projecting lens in a crude mask, leaving just one bright image in a quarter of the screen.

It was a garden scene.

“Are those the girls?” Sedgewick said.

“I believe they are,” Sebastian said.

He could not easily relate the figures on the screen to the bodies that he’d seen the night before. Though made of nothing but light, these girls were life itself. Whereas those bodies, though flesh and blood, had borne the full weight of death.

Now here they were, in summer dresses and grown-ups’ hats, with a backdrop of lawn and rhododendron. One bright girl, one dark one. Their antics would never change. Nor would they age.

Nothing really happened. The girls were doing the kinds of things that people do when someone points a camera at them for no special reason. Just standing there in the garden, hesitant, smiling, uncertain.

Sebastian was disappointed. These scenes had been made earlier in the summer, probably by Florence’s father. They told nothing of the night the girls had died.

Then the scene changed. Though the film continued, the screen went dim.

Sedgewick turned to the open door of the projection booth and called out to Will, “What’s the neg like?”

“Very thin,” Will replied.