Some of the voices were familiar. Some of the music I knew.

Phantoms, perhaps-but whose?

This was Ebed Merlat’s storm, according to Mama. I listened to voices I knew weren’t there, and I began to wonder just what else had blown in with Lord Merlat’s angry tempest.

Voices joined the thunder. Mama’s hex stirred, and I almost made out the words.

“This is crazy,” I said, and I bounded out of my chair and stretched. Lightening struck right in the yard, rattling glass and ringing my ears, but Jefrey didn’t budge. In fact, he began to snore.

“Wake up,” I said, clapping my hands. “Wake up or I’m liable to start looking for jewelry to steal.”

Nothing.

I walked over to him, put my hands on his right shoulder, shook him. Shook him again, harder this time.

His head lolled, fell chin-down on his chest.

On the floor, on the far side of his chair, his coffee-cup lay where he’d dropped it. Something black and thick like tar had oozed out of it and pooled in a shiny black drop on the floor.

Even the widow’s coffee shouldn’t have done that.

I slapped Jefrey, hard. His head just flopped, but his eyelids never moved.

Thunder broke again, shook the House so hard lamp-flames flickered. I checked Jefrey’s pulse, found it and peeled back an eyelid to check his pupils.

While I did so, all the hair on the back of my neck stood on end, and though my back was to the window I knew in my bones that if I turned, if I looked, that Ebed Merlat was just beyond the three-bolt glass, waiting to meet my gaze.

“Two years in the grave,” came a whisper. “Dead mouth wide open.”

I bent and picked Jefrey up and heaved him over my shoulder. “Go,” said a voice, close by my ear. “Just go.”

The voice was that of the Sarge. The window at my back radiated cold, like a chunk of a Northland glacier shoved up tight against the House, white ice resting on the window-glass.

“Saving up a scream,” came a whisper.

A child’s hand slipped into mine. I looked to my feet, saw nothing, heard a soft giggle.

The hand in mine tugged me toward the door.

I went. I flung the gold door open, banged Jefrey’s head on the jamb lunging through and banged it again when I pulled the door shut.

The Hall went left and right. It was lit by two lines of new white candles, each standing in a brass dragon’s-claw set, eye-level along the walls.

One by one, starting at the left end of the Hall, the candles began to go out.

I turned and charged to my right.

“I cannot,” came a shout. I heard it, though it was faint and shrill and it sounded in the midst of an awful blast of thunder. It came from above. From the sick-room, locked and shut, the key buried with Ebed Merlat.

“I cannot,” it came again. “I love you.”

And this time, in the thunder, I heard the words “You must.”

Jefrey’s head struck a candle-holder. “Sorry,” I muttered. Then the Hall opened into the tile-floored foyer, and I stepped well away from the door and hid myself as best I could in the shadows at the edge of the candlelight.

Jefrey was as limp as a sack, but his breathing was steady and his pulse was strong. I thanked fate I’d only sipped the widow’s bitter coffee and hoped it had been laced with a sedative and not a poison.

Jefrey was getting heavy. I shifted him around, and I was deciding what to do next when I heard the sound of someone chopping wood.

I shook my head and pinched my nose. The sound of music from the ballroom faded, but the chopping sound continued.

Meaning it was real. Meaning that someone upstairs had an axe, and unless they were carving garden-gnomes, I figured they were chopping at a door.

The widow’s door.

All the servants gone. Jefrey and Markhat left insensate by drugged coffee. The widow alone in her room, too frightened to flee outside the House, too weak to fend off villains within.

Say you were a jilted heir. Say you decided the widow couldn’t file a new will if she, for instance, accidentally fell down three or four flights of hard granite stairs while fleeing from a revenant that everyone knows doesn’t exist. What if you told the Watch that Jefrey quit and left the country? What if you told them a finder named Markhat had departed the day before, after arguing with the widow and storming away, his pockets full of her money?

They’d shake their heads, make “there, there” sounds and quietly collect their inheritance tax and that, as they say, would be that.

“I cannot,” came the shout again. It was a woman’s voice. “You must,” spoke the voice in the thunder. “If you love me you must.”

And crash, came down the axe.

I lowered Jefrey to the floor, slipped off my shoes, picked him up again and padded across the dark ballroom. There was a cloak-closet just on the other side. I found it, got it open, and buried Jefrey beneath a pile of rugs I found in the back.

Music rose up when I turned, and in a flash-lit instant the room was full of dancers. They turned and they stepped and they twirled, and each face they lifted toward me was that of a grinning skull.

I blinked, and the floor was empty.

I reached down, took my knife from its ankle-sheath and closed the door on Jefrey’s muffled snores.

Footsteps sounded from down the darkened hall I’d just quit. They stopped at the Gold Room, and weak light filled the hall when someone opened the door to the lamp-lit room and stepped inside.

“Too late, kids,” I whispered. “Maybe another time.”

I darted across the ballroom floor. The air was chill in places, and once something cold stroked my neck, but I reached the foot of the stairs and charged up it sock-foot.

Halfway to the second floor, I heard toenails clack and scrape on the stones at my feet. Dog toenails. I pinched my nose, but the scritch and scrape continued, and were joined by panting.

“Thufe?”

Something warm and wet butted my right forearm and drew away. The dog-stink intensified, became at once familiar.

“Petey?”

Petey had been my dog, in the Army. In the tunnels. In the dark.

I pinched my nose. Petey was dead.

I smelled wet dog. You can’t mistake the scent of a big dog just come in from the rain.

Petey butted my forearm again. Time to get to work, boss, that meant. He’d always done that, when he thought my attention was wavering.

“Damn you, Mama,” I said.

Petey butted me, yipped. No time to get wistful. Not here in the dark.

I sprang up the steps, two at a time, quiet as a ghost in my sock feet. It’s only Mama’s hex, I thought. It’s only Mama’s hex, and a storm, and three long sips of the widow’s drugged coffee. I’ll be seeing Regents and dragons next.

I could hear the axe bite oak clearly now, and I knew that it, at least, was real.

Petey, he of the brave heart and the warm tongue and the white ring around his good left eye, Petey who lay buried in a weed-choked ditch five hundred miles and a dozen long years away, raced ahead and showed me the way.

Drugs or hex or haunts or all, by the time I reached the fourth floor-the widow’s floor-the dark was alive about me.

Petey was a dark bundle of shadows trotting steady at my feet. Voices spoke out beside me, others sang, others whispered or cursed or wailed or cried. Faces formed in the flames of the few lit candles that lined the walls, their mouths open, imploring, silent and small and gone with a blink or a flicker.

I’d pinched my nose so many times it had begun to bleed. I’d not noticed until I saw blood on my hand, and it was only then that I realized my fingers were going numb.

I shook my head.

“I cannot,” said a voice that silenced all the others. “I cannot, do not ask that of me, oh God I cannot.”

Petey butted my arm, halted and made a low, soft growl.