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The Canaan Archives
Episode 2: Stain
ABIGAIL:
May I record this?
NABERIUS:
Can you give me your word that no one else will hear it?
ABIGAIL:
The Sixth may listen to these recordings. I assure you, [somewhat resentfully] they can be trusted to keep a secret. No one else will know. You have my word.
NABERIUS:
Fine.
ABIGAIL:
Statement of Naberius the Third, concerning a suspiciously-shaped patch of rot on the wall. Statement recorded direct from subject by Abigail Pent. Canaan House, 12/10/10,000. Statement begins.
NABERIUS:
There is rot in the rooms of the Third.
I noticed it first the day after we arrived. A small spot of discoloration upon the wall, grayish and no larger than a button, with a sort of…sweaty sheen. The wall in question is a whitewashed plaster, chipped away in places to show the stones beneath, and the spot is — was — at about head-height, to the left of the bed. It was almost obscured behind a length of dreadful rag that Corona generously speculated was a curtain. But I saw that spot, and I hated it on sight.
That isn’t to say I paid it much mind. Not at first. As the whole of Canaan House, so far as I understand it, seems to be in some protracted state of decomposition, it didn’t stand out particularly. There was a green film creeping up all our windows, and mushrooms like tiny tumors sprouting from the sills. My primary concern was the drab, permeating smell of mildew that clung to every bit of fabric in the space. I did not think it fit for human habitation. And god knows what it would have done to our clothes!
I, of course, went to Teacher at once and demanded something be done about it. And so I received several constructs to strip out and thoroughly launder the linens—though I believe they used water for the task, so I was reasonably skeptical of their results. Still, the bedclothes returned less awful, and the horrible curtains and musty rugs returned not at all. I was satisfied enough to turn my attention to the various other failures of basic cleanliness. The constructs seemed able to respond to instruction without need of a necromancer to alter their orders. One construct I set to the task of scraping the growths from the crevices about the windows. Another I left washing down the walls and floors with fungicide. By the end of the day, the chambers were at least properly clean, even if they weren’t remotely suited for royalty.
I didn’t sleep well that night. I imagined I could hear the rot spreading through the room. The crackling of plaster as rot bloomed forth from it. The insidious creaking as mycelial networks wriggled through the floorboards to establish themselves deeper into the spongy old wood.
The next morning—oh, God, the next morning that damned patch of mold was back. Right there on the wall. Same place as before. Except it had grown. No more was it the size of a button, but the palm of my hand. Other, smaller spots had begun to manifest in its vicinity: four points evenly spaced above it, a fifth to the left, and a smear of them leading diagonally downwards. There was also a smell, now. Ever so faint. Not of mildew, but…putrescence. Granted, it was subtle enough I thought it might be a product of my imagination, but the mold on the wall sure wasn’t, so again I went to complain and fetched back a construct to put it right.
By this point, well, the princesses were beginning to poke fun at me about my “mold obsession.” I am…not entirely certain why. It was for their good, after all, not only mine, and I’ve no doubt they would have been revolted by the state of the place had I not taken it upon myself to address the situation. I felt—I feel I deserve some amount of credit for that. Just imagining the spores floating about the room unseen, settling into our hair, our clothing, our lungs…eugh. Doesn’t bear thinking about. But when I raised the issue, suggested perhaps they owed me a bit of gratitude for their fungus-free airways…let’s just say it didn’t go over well. I was “making a big to-do over nothing, just a little spot of damp” and didn’t I know how poorly I wore the stress upon my face, how dreadful I looked with those bags under my eyes? I ought to leave it alone. Focus on what was really important.
[Pause. He teeters on the edge of revealing what was really important. Resigns himself to loyalty.]
But all that is irrelevant to the mold.
It regrew in the night, of course. I awoke next morning to find it had assumed the warped but unmistakable shape of a bloated corpse. The plaster of the wall was bubbled and leaking in places. It was yellowish about the edges—a sickly, spreading halo—and blue-gray at the center. The face was distended, nearly featureless, but the arms and legs were more distinct. Most defined of all was that region of mold which had appeared first. The innocuous blemish of two days prior had become the figure’s right hand, reaching forth in a clawing grasp. The fungus of its fingers and thumb had grown out from the wall—five fuzzy, black protrusions—such that the corpse-form seemed on the verge of plunging its hand right the way through the plaster to seize me by the throat.
I—I may have screamed. It was all a bit of a blur. Whatever it was I did or said, it was enough to rouse the princesses. They oozed, grumbling, out of bed and gathered behind me to gaze upon the horrible thing on the wall. The horrible thing that was, might I add, no more than an arm’s length from Coronabeth’s pillow. Neither of them seemed remotely as concerned as they ought to have been. Ianthe, in fact, acted as though she could see nothing amiss, merely scoffing and stalking off to get dressed. Meanwhile Corona was all, “So someone walled up a body in our room. No need to be like that, silly. You’ve seen corpses before.”
All that ignoring the fact that a corpse hidden in our chambers could easily have been an assassination attempt—something she ought to have understood—something they both ought to have understood, and the fact that a recently-dead or necromantically preserved cadaver, or indeed a set of fully skeletonized remains is quite a different thing from an actively decomposing body—and that if it was actively decomposing, it must have been placed in the wall not too long ago, which would make no sense, as the plaster over it was very clearly ancient. But still my points were either dismissed or ignored. I began to suspect, though the timelines did not add up—that the princesses had somehow conspired themselves to put a corpse in that wall. Which, props to them if so, but they could have at least told me.
I didn’t bother with Teacher or the servant constructs that day. Instead I sparred with the other cavs and tried not to think about the thing in the wall. Coronabeth stopped by a while to watch, and to play pretend that she was one of us, but there was no sign of Ianthe all day. It was only when I returned, alone, to our rooms that afternoon that I found her stood before the mold, wearing a respirator upon her face, carefully carving away the protruding fungal appendages with a scalpel and letting them fall one by one into a glass jar.
I stared. I don’t know how long. I could tell she knew I was there, but she did not acknowledge me. At length, I asked, “What are you doing?”
She said, “An experiment, pet. Don’t worry your pretty little head.”
And, without further elaboration, she sealed up the jar and whisked it away to…to whatever secret lair she has. I didn’t try to follow.
It was about then that I lost hold of myself at last. I vaguely recall breaking into a supply cupboard full of gardening supplies. It was where I’d seen the constructs source the fungicide the day previous. And then I was back in our rooms, hacking away at that dreadful stain with a rusty trowel. Every inch of my flesh burned with rage. I couldn’t think. All I knew was that I had to get that mold out of the wall, no matter what it took. I didn’t care if Corona or Ianthe wanted to leave it there for some wretched reason. It just had to go!
[Realizing] No. No…I did care. I…I wanted to ruin their plans for it. I wanted to get a reaction.
[To himself] Damn it. God damn it.
[He takes a breath]
I tore away at that wall for the better part of an hour. With the trowel. With my bare hands. Plaster dust sifted down upon me, stuck to my face, my clothes, was caked under my fingernails, now ragged and bloody. I could feel it coating my nostrils. God knows how much mold I’d inhaled. By the time I returned to my senses, I was left with a pile of broken, moldy plaster, ankle-high. There had been no corpse behind it. Nothing at all but the bare stone bricks of the wall. The mold was only skin-deep.
A new suspicion began to settle over me then. If the mold was not some sort of elaborate practical joke at my expense—which still seemed the most likely scenario—then what was it? Could it be explained through necromancy? If so, it wasn’t like anything I had ever seen. Flesh, I could understand. A rotting corpse, though revolting, I could understand. This would have to be something else. Some grotesque manifestation of the spiritual? A haunting? Was that why Ianthe had wanted to study it?
Best, I concluded, to imagine it a prank.
I gathered up the mound of plaster chunks and pitched them out the window. That done, I swept up the dust, beat the bedclothes clean, and thoroughly washed my hair. By the time Coronabeth and Ianthe had returned, I’d scrubbed away every trace of my brief mania—except, of course, the one glaring piece of evidence I could not hide: the two-meter-high scar in the plaster, roughly in the shape of a body, behind which the bare masonry was treacherously clear.
Corona said, “Babs! What did you do?”
Before I could begin to defend myself, Ianthe, over top of me, said to her, “Don’t bother about Babs, darling. He’s just had himself a little tantrum. Isn’t that right?”
And neither of them would listen to a word I said thereafter.
It was with an unexpected ease that I fell asleep that night. I suppose I was simply too exhausted to worry. That, and I had by then mostly dismissed the strange mold as a cruel trick the princesses had played upon me. But at some ungodly hour of the morning, I awoke with a start. I didn’t know why, but I was certain something was wrong.
Everything was very still. The only sound was the lapping of waves upon the stony shore, far below. After a moment’s intense concentration, it occurred to me. I could not hear anyone breathing. That was when I shot upright, heart racing.
The First’s single, lonely moon was hanging, strangely large, over the dark water. It cast a rectangle of pale light through the open window and across the crooked four-poster bed. It was empty. They’d gone and left me! After all the indignities already thrust upon me—!
Before I could finish the thought, movement caught my eye. There, projected in silhouette upon the bedspread. Creeping hands. Distorted head. The shadow of the thing now slowly, painstakingly crawling in through the window.
I yelped. Whirled. In an instant, my rapier was in my hand, and I struck out at the intruder.
I expected the resistance of skin. The firm cushion of meat over living bone. I did not expect my blade to slice clean through its forearm—easy as a hot knife through lipids—to ping off the wooden windowsill. My hand rang like a bell. Pain jolted up my arm. I did not drop my weapon.
It was only then, in that horrible eternity of an instant, that I got a good look at the thing in the window. It was vaguely human-shaped, though fuzzy along the outline, all of a uniform dark color. Its right hand was missing all of its digits, though the stumps still flexed and grasped at the window frame. Its left hand I had severed just above the wrist. But that had not stopped the thing from continuing to pull itself inexorably through the narrow opening, using what was left of its arm for leverage. Nor had it stopped the amputated hand from continuing to crawl forth upon its fingertips. As the figure brought its leg up onto the sill, the knee came into contact with the crawling hand, and they…fused.
I didn’t need to see any more. I’m not an idiot. You can’t kill mold with a goddamned sword.
So I fled.
Once outside the room—okay, well outside—I didn’t stop running until I’d reached the atrium—I paused to consider my options. I needed a necromancer. Preferably a spirit magician. Perhaps Ianthe could have done. She…ah, dabbles in the art—but I didn’t know where she was. I briefly considered Sextus. I slightly-less briefly considered you, Lady Pent. But I had the horrible feeling that either of you would want to study the thing to figure out what it was and how it worked, and I needed a necromancer who would not suffer that crawling rot to live.
[Pause]
ABIGAIL:
So you turned to the Eighth.
NABERIUS:
Yes.
ABIGAIL:
But Octakiseron did not succeed in exorcising…whatever it was, did he? Or else you wouldn’t have come to me. What happened?
NABERIUS:
I don’t want to talk about that. And you’d have to ask him about the details, anyway. Not exactly my area of expertise. But you’re wrong. Whatever he did, it worked. At least it seemed to in the moment. But…
But today I found a new patch of mold growing in that room. This time it’s on the ceiling.
ABIGAIL:
And this time you came to me instead. Why?
NABERIUS:
[Reluctantly] I don’t like how he uses his cavalier.
ABIGAIL:
Ah. Understandable. Statement ends.
Well, then—thank you, Naberius the Third. I’ll see about that mold.
[Tape recorder clicks off]
[Tape recorder clicks on]
ABIGAIL:
Follow-up.
I’ve warded the rooms of the Third. They’ve sat vacant for several days now, save for the mold. And it is a strange thing. Already clearly adopting the shape of a corpse. Naberius was right, I’m afraid. I do want to keep it around to study. But it shan’t come wandering out should it fully manifest. I’ve made sure of that.
As for where the Third House now resides, well, that is an area of some question. I’ve set Magnus to be my eyes and ears on the ground, and though he reports having seen both princesses and their cavalier on the regular, comporting themselves in much the same way as they have done ever since they arrived on the First, Ianthe and Coronabeth always contrive to vanish somehow, and nobody knows where they have taken to passing most of their time. Naberius, however, is frequently seen alone near the chambers of the Eighth House. Which seems to me quite a reasonable response to his ordeal. Colum the Eighth, I’m told, keeps a very clean room.
End recording.
[Tape recorder clicks.]