Page 24 of Foresyth Conservatory
Chapter 10: The Singing Tree
I hadn’t dreamt much since my father died. But by the end of my first week at Foresyth, and after countless hours in the library, my restless mind began to conjure them again. It was as if some remnant of my father lingered in the House, coaxing me back into visions each night.
I heard his voice before I saw him. Deep and smooth, like velvet. Even though my resting body tingled with the sensation of falling, his voice anchored me to my bed.
“What did I tell you about following in my footsteps? You ought to be with your mother,”he said.
My eyes were open now, but I couldn’t move. Not my arms, not my legs. Father stood over me, brushing a hand through my hair. I relaxed, despite my paralysis.
“I’m lying down, not following anyone’s footsteps,”I teased, though my lips didn’t move. He sighed, offering a small, sad smile, as if he understood.
“Death changes all of us. Sometimes for the better,”he said.
I tried to shake my head—your death didn’t change me—but my body refused to respond. His deep blue eyes—mirroring the shade of mine—traced my face, pausing like he noticed something for the first time. He froze, then looked up, startled by an unseen presence in the room. I tried to follow his gaze but only found the darkened corner of my room.
“The House. It knows I’m here,” he whispered, his voice losing any hint of calm. I struggled to move, but to noavail. My throat tightened when my father’s features began to shift. His mouth and nose split and pushed out into a feline snout, his eyes stretching, pupils turning to narrow slits. Scales erupted across his skin as his body twisted and elongated into a serpent.
The creature with a lion’s face slithered under my bed, disappearing into the shadows. And then I began to fall.
*
I awoke on the ground next to my bed, the smell of rotting wood entering my nostrils. I pressed my palms to the damp ground, adjusting my weight, when one of the floorboards gave way, and my hand fell a few inches through. I rushed up to a seated position, putting distance between myself and the underside of my bed. After I collected my bearings, I crouched down and flipped the dust slip, sending a plume of grey into the air. I coughed as some of the dust entered my lungs, then. I peered underneath my bed but saw nothing, aside from my father’s leather briefcase and dead dust moths.
A dream, of course.
Despite being stiff from sleeping on the ground, I gingerly donned my usual uniform of black slacks and a grey sweater, looking forward to getting back into the lab and putting distance between me and my bed.
I stuffed a letter to my mother and Gabriel into my breast pocket, intending to leave them with Richard to post, as I made my way out of my dormitory. After a quick meeting with the Meister, where I ran through the outline of my proposal, I then spent the whole day with Nina in the lab, deconstructing and reconstructing the light analyzer. Itwould prove useful in evaluating physical evidence, and it also helped to keep my mind off my unsettling dreams.
It took several hours, but I finally got the machine to work. Nina called it magick. I called it mechanics.
“Don’t tell me you’re becoming a lab rat like Nina,” Aspen said, sitting as far across from me as possible at the dinner table. “You reek.”
I sniffed myself and winced. I had to remember to take a shower after the lab. “I lost track of time.”
Nina followed in soon after. “Dahlia fixed a light machine downstairs.”
“Light analyzer. It uses polychromatic light to analyze chemical signatures,” I corrected.
“Could it be used for artifact dating?” Leone asked, piqued.
“I think mass spectrometry would be better suited for that, but we could try if we get a suspension. It would be destructive, though,” I said.
Leone considered. “I don’t want to destroy the cartographs.”
“We’d only need a very small sample. Just a scratch of the surface.”
“Maybe that could work. You’d have to show me how.” Leone nodded.
Aspen said nothing, but I could sense his discontent as he plated greens onto his dish.
“Is there anything you’d like dated, Aspen?” I offered.
“The only kind of dating I do is the kind where copulation is involved.” He smiled. “Otherwise, I prefer to do the chronology of my work using scholarly means.”
“Very well,” I scoffed.
Nina and I continued chatting about the light analyzer and its potential uses in assessing the legitimacy of a species she’d received from Spain, while Aspen made conversation with Leone about a new sculpture he was working on.
