but they were crude and random occurrences. Doyle systematized. And all he had needed were people like Agnes.
His wife. His kin.
But now there was no Agnes. Agnes was the gloom and the gloom was Agnes, and Howard Doyle, if he perished this instant, would still exist in the gloom, for he had created wax and a seal and paper.
And it hurt. It was in pain. The gloom. Agnes. The mushrooms. The house, heavy with rot, with hidden tendrils extending beneath and up its walls feeding on all manner of dead matter.
He is hurt. We are hurt. Look, look, look. Look!
The buzzing had acquired a fever pitch; it was so loud Noemí covered her ears and screamed, and inside her head a voice bellowed.
Francis grabbed her by the shoulders and turned her around.
“Don’t look at her,” he said. “We are never supposed to look at her.”
The buzzing had ceased all of a sudden, and she raised her head and looked at Catalina, who was staring at the floor, and she looked back at Francis in horror.
A sob stuck in her throat. “They buried her alive,” Noemí said. “They buried her alive and she died, and the fungus sprouted from her body and…dear God…it’s not a human mind anymore…he remade her. He remade her.”
She was breathing very fast. Too fast, and the buzzing had ceased, but the woman was still there. Noemí turned her head, tempted to stare again at that hideous skull, but he caught her chin in his hand. “No, no, look at me. Stay here with me.”
She took a deep breath, feeling like a diver who was surfacing again. Noemí stared into Francis’s eyes. “She’s the gloom. Did you know?”
“Only Howard and Virgil come here,” Francis said. He was shivering.
“But you knew!”
All the ghosts were Agnes. Or rather, all the ghosts lived inside Agnes. No, that wasn’t right either. What had once been Agnes had become the gloom, and inside the gloom there lived ghosts. It was maddening. It was not a haunting. It was possession and not even that, but something she couldn’t even begin to describe. The creation of an afterlife, furnished with the marrow and the bones and the neurons of a woman, made of stems and spores.
“Ruth knew too, and we couldn’t do anything. She keeps us here, she’s how Howard controls everything. We can’t leave. They don’t let us, ever.”
He was sweating and then he was sliding down onto his knees, grasping Noemí’s arms. “What is it? You must get up,” she said, also sliding to her knees, touching his face.
“He’s right, he can’t leave. Neither can you, for that matter.”
It was Virgil who had spoken. He was swinging the metal gate open and walking in. Strolling in. Very casually. Perhaps he was a hallucination. Perhaps he wasn’t even there. Noemí stared at him. It can’t be, she thought.
“What?” he said with a shrug, letting the gate close behind him with a loud clang. He was there. It was no hallucination. Rather than following them down the tunnel he had simply gone aboveground, through the cemetery, and descended the steps from the crypt.
“Poor girl. You actually look shocked. You didn’t really think you had killed me. You also didn’t think I accidentally happened to carry that tincture in my pocket, did you? I let you have it, I let you snap out of our hold for a few moments. I let you cause this mayhem.”
She swallowed. Next to her Francis was shivering. “Why?”
“Isn’t it obvious? So you could hurt my father. I couldn’t. Francis couldn’t. The old man ensured none of us could raise a hand against him. You saw how he forced Ruth to kill herself. When I learned what Francis was up to I thought: here’s my chance. Let the girl escape her bonds, let’s see what she can do, this outsider who isn’t subject to our rules quite yet, who can still fight back. And now he’s dying. Feel it? Hmm? His body is falling apart.”
“That can’t be good for you,” Noemí said. “If you hurt him, you hurt the gloom, and besides, even if his body dies, he’ll still exist in the gloom. His mind—”
“He’s weakened. I control the gloom now,” Virgil said angrily. “When he dies, he’ll die forever. I won’t let him have a new body. Change. That’s what you wanted, no? Turns out we want the same.”
Virgil had reached Catalina’s side and was glancing at her with a smirk. “There you are, dear wife. Thank