open. From one she hefted out her Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, which she figured a suitable weapon for doing battle with ghosts trying take up residence under the stairwell. She held the substantial bulk of the alphabet in her hands, a word for every reality. Madness was for when words failed.
Her bare feet felt cool against the floorboards. A hot breeze through an open window rustled her gown. The heavy dictionary hooked under one arm, she opened the door and advanced into the hallway. The parsonage was a two-story built of German red brick, an aging home with many empty rooms where the air had long gone stale and undisturbed. The bones of the house creaked in the night but then went still when her footfalls sounded in the hall. In this breathless quiet the boy’s crying magnified. His help me throbbed in her ears.
Before she could lose courage she hurried along the hallway and crept downstairs. On the lower level the child’s sorrowing continued to reverberate through the kitchen and dining room.
She felt the pull of that voice tugging her onward, a coiling rope of sound to bind her. She let it lead her to the lip of the stairwell and waiting basement. Here she paused, threw on the light switch, and went down, step by step, to meet the boy’s ghost. The light did not comfort her because the stairs were painted nail-polish red and glistened like the inside of a sick person’s throat. A waft of sour breath exhaled from the basement. This had once been a root cellar, and it retained a smell of rotting potatoes and onions, even though it was paved over with concrete when they put the washroom down here. At the base of the stairs shadows formed a tarry pool.
By the time she reached the bottom of the stairs and fumbled for a cord, she smelled the oil from the old furnace and under that a sharper scent of musk and blood. Every tiny hair along the back of her bare legs stood on end. Her nightgown stirred against her shoulder, as though a hand touched her there, but she did not scream or go back up the stairs. Shivering, she held the dictionary to her chest like a shield. The sound garbled here, an eerie whimpering no longer amplified by the empty space in the stairwell.
Clara found the cord and was momentarily blinded when a bulb swinging from a metal chain blinked to life. She waited for her eyes to adjust, her breathing tight and tense. Beneath the stairwell a shredded box lay on concrete, and here shapes writhed and cried out. As shadows retreated and spots quit dancing in her vision, she saw four tabby kittens squirming on the cardboard next to their mother.
“Oh,” she said aloud. “Oh.” What a fool you are, Clara Warren. Your husband told you it was a tomcat and you took his word for things without checking yourself. You made a monster where none existed. Laughter rippled inside her until she quaked with it. She set the dictionary down on the bottom stair and knelt beside the kittens. They sounded so very human in their distress. They had exchanged the warm seas of their mother for this cold ground, this blinding light. The cries they made were the cries of any newborn thing. This is what she discovered two nights after the murder: In birth all things are kindred, the sounds we make universal to any species. We enter wailing of a lost world.
The mother cat licked her fluids from the kittens, purring in her pride.
One of the kittens was slick and still. Clara picked it up and massaged it. A runt, born too small. She toweled it with the edge of her nightgown until it gave one soft mewl. A familiar warmth touched her cheeks, and she held the kitten there, trembling now, but when it mewled again for its mother she set it back with the others. She hated the thickness that welled up in her chest. There wasn’t any reason for it, was there? She had been saved, too, hadn’t she?
And yet something scratched at the corner of her brain, a lingering presence just below the trapdoor of her consciousness. Somewhere from the land of the dead, Seth Fallon was still crying out for help. Clara shook the thought away.
“Why, Herr Soren,” she said, “you sly, sly minx. We shall have to give you a new name, fräulein. Sorena?” She smoothed the