Page 132 of House of Roots and Ruin
I desperately wanted to believe she’d not willingly subjected herself to his mad schemes.
With a fit of disgust, I slammed the diary closed and tossed itupon the nearest bookshelf, unwilling to keep hold of the dreadful things inside it for any longer.
As the diary fell heavily onto the shelf, the entire bookcase swayed back and forth.
I blinked, certain it was an optical illusion, a trick of the light in the dimly lit room.
But no.
The bookcase was swinging, back and forth as if…
As if it wasn’t really a bookcase at all.
I threw a swift glance back at the boys, wondering if they noticed what I saw. Julien was absorbed in a new notebook, his nose just inches from the page. Viktor’s eyes were closed and his head listed against the armchair, the bottle of absinthe nearly falling from his loosened grip.
With wonder and dread, I pressed tentative fingers to the shelves, gasping as the entire behemoth shifted, moving to the left. Just above me, I spotted a piece of tracking disguised to look like trim work.
The bookshelf was a false front, nothing more than a mask hiding in plain sight.
With anumphof effort, I pushed the bookcase to the side, revealing another set of shelves behind it. But these shelves held no books on them.
Instead, they were filled with jars.
Rows and rows of large jars.
Wet specimen canisters.
Artie had a small collection of them. He was forever bringing home deceased creatures found washed up onshore, caught in tide pools. He loved examining them and would stick the animals injars full of formaldehyde. The dark liquid preserved the creatures in a state free of decay.
My throat clenched as I wondered what things Gerard could possibly be keeping in his.
I leaned in to examine the closest shelf, right at my eye level, and twisted one jar round.
At first glance, it was an animal of some sort. It was pale and long dead, its surface strangely pliant and waxy. Elongated limbs bent backward, curled and compressed to fit within the confines of the jar.
A pair of animals, I guessed, counting eight appendages.
It bobbed in the formaldehyde, turning on an invisible axis.
My mouth fell open as the head came into view.
Heads.
It was then that I realized this thing in the jar, not the hidden cache of papers, was the reason Gerard kept the study locked up so tight.
The bodies—body, I mentally corrected, spotting the band of flesh that knitted all three chests together—were small. They’d been born prematurely, that much was clear. Their features, vague and flat in the liquid suspension, didn’t look finished, a piece of clay abandoned by a disinterested sculptor.
Even still, the features were wrong, so very wrong.
The triplet on the left side of the mass had a perfectly round head, without ears, and a gaping circular mouth that reminded me of the buckets of lamprey eels Cook would bring to Highmoor, fresh from the docks. Rows of serrated teeth puckered its edges.
The middle triplet’s face was a blank canvas. Thin membranestretched across the plane where eyes should have been. Its skin was mottled with a network of purple veins.
The baby on the right had no mouth and stared out at the world through a single engorged eye, directly in the center of its face. The pupil was oblong, like a goat or sheep. Its upper appendages ended in stumps, more flipper than arm.
I knew these babies, these things, were dead, but a trick of the light played over the cyclops’s eye and I could have sworn it focused upon me.
Wordlessly, I backed away from the jar, from the monsters it contained, and stumbled into Viktor’s armchair. Mid-sip, the pungent alcohol sloshed down his chest, staining his shirt the same sickly hue as the pickled babies.
