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The Canaan Archives
Episode 3: Seeing Septuple
ABIGAIL:
Ah. This isn’t about the tapes, is it? You’ve come to make a statement.
PALAMEDES:
How did you guess?
ABIGAIL:
Let’s call it a hunch. I would still like to discuss that other matter afterward, if you have the time? Excellent. Oh, yes—it’s already running. What is your statement about, if I may ask?
[Beat.]
CAMILLA:
Duplicates.
ABIGAIL:
Right then. Let’s see…
Joint statement of Palamedes Sextus and Camilla the Sixth, regarding duplicates. Recorded direct from subjects by Abigail Pent, 15/10/10,000, at Canaan House.
Statement begins.
PALAMEDES:
Looking back, the first time we saw the imposter was just after your anniversary party. We had planned to accompany Dulcinea and Protesilaus back to their rooms, but they turned out to be more intent on lingering than we were. Dulcie was quite engrossed in a conversation with Marta the Second, and Pro was—
CAMILLA:
Reciting poetry.
PALAMEDES:
Yes, I believe he wished to bestow a poem upon you and Magnus. Do you recall, Lady Pent? Anyway, Cam and I stepped out into the corridor to wait.
CAMILLA:
We wanted air.
PALAMEDES:
Hmm. Is that the royal “we?”
[CAMILLA snorts]
PALAMEDES:
We’d been out there for perhaps five minutes. The Eighth and Ninth Houses had—
CAMILLA:
Fled.
PALAMEDES:
—taken leave of the party almost immediately, and the Third House had—
CAMILLA:
Flounced off in a tiff.
PALAMEDES:
—departed shortly thereafter. We hadn’t seen anyone for several minutes by the time the first strange thing happened.
I was staring away into the darkness at the far end of the corridor, going over an unrelated puzzle in my mind, when a figure stepped partially out of the shadows. It was pale and slender and seemed to be wearing a flowy green dress. It stood crookedly, leaning upon the wall for support, waving one hand as if in greeting, or to call for help. My ears began to ring. I took a step forward, almost without realizing it. I said, “Cam, is that Dulcie?”
CAMILLA:
I took a long look where the Warden was pointing. His description of the apparent person is accurate to what I saw there. Given the distance and the poor lighting, I could distinguish no additional details. Obviously it couldn’t have been her, though. She was still back at the party. It wasn’t as if she could have slipped past us unnoticed. I said as much to the Warden, but he had this odd, glassy look in his eyes, as if he wasn’t quite hearing me. He was like, but what if there’s another door?
PALAMEDES:
For context: I had doors on the brain. At that point I had heard multiple rumors about impossible doors. Thus far only one person had admitted to opening one—Gideon, of course—and up until that night, that was my only point of reference for inexplicable happenings at Canaan House. Thus my first thought was that Dulcinea had stumbled into such a door by mistake, and it had dumped her out alone and in need of assistance elsewhere in the building. That she might be frightened and injured. That she might need me. It was a leap in logic. I’ll grant you that. But it was not without reason that I started once more down the corridor. Lucky for me, Camilla has a singular intuition for danger. She seized me by the back of the belt and hissed, “Warden! Stop. Assess.”
CAMILLA:
He looked at me, eyes clearing. Asked me what I saw that he didn’t. I said, “You don’t know if that’s her, and something’s off. Please bear that in mind.”
PALAMEDES:
She was right, of course. I worried still, but there was a way, other than approaching that unknown figure, to ascertain something of its identity. I backpedaled to the door, cracked it open, and looked in upon the remains of the party. To my mingled relief and dread, Dulcinea and Protesilaus were still within. He was helping her into her wheelchair. She gave me an apologetic little wave upon seeing me and mouthed that they were on their way. When I reemerged into the drafty corridor, the figure at the far end was gone.
CAMILLA:
It had faded away into the shadows the very moment the Warden had turned his back on it.
PALAMEDES:
Later, back in our quarters, Cam and I discussed the matter at length. We didn’t, however, have enough data to draw any meaningful conclusions.
CAMILLA:
For all we knew, it was Ianthe Tridentarius playing dress up in order to creep us out.
PALAMEDES:
Which in itself paints a macabre sort of spectacle, but not of the kind relevent to your present research, which is why we did not report it to you at the time.
Several days elapsed with no further sign of the figure. The experience remained in the back of my mind, of course, but when viewed next to keys, trials, and the mysteries of lyctorhood—and your boxes of pre-resurrection paper—it seemed rather less significant. It wasn’t until the second encounter that I began to comprehend—
No. ‘Comprehend’ is the wrong word. I didn’t comprehend, and I don’t yet. There is something in the matter antithetical to comprehension.
It was late last night. More accurately, early this morning. I was studying in the library. Camilla was with me, and for several hours, Harrowhark Nonagesimus was there as well, poring over her notes at a nearby table. At some point, though—
CAMILLA:
1:25.
PALAMEDES:
—she left. I was engrossed in my reading and did not see her go.
CAMILLA:
I did.
PALAMEDES:
When I next looked up, she had gone, and Dulcinea had taken her place. Or I thought it was Dulcinea. She wore the same gown and lacy shawl I had seen her in earlier that evening. She was equipped with the fluid drain I had designed for her. Her face—well, now that I think about it, there was something amiss there. Like…
Y’know how in dreams, right, you might encounter, say, your mother. And objectively your brain did not conjure the correct facial features for your mother. But subjectively you are nonetheless certain in the dream that this person is your mother. Or am I universalizing an uncommon experience?
CAMILLA:
Dunno. I’m not sure people in my dreams ever have faces at all.
PALAMEDES:
We can unpack that later. Anyway, my point being, I don’t think, in retrospect, that the imposter actually resembled Dulcie in the least. At least not convincingly. But my mind registered it as her. Pro was nowhere to be seen. Neither, for that matter, was Camilla.
CAMILLA:
Put a pin in that.
PALAMEDES:
There was nothing yet, to my mind, that couldn’t have a reasonable explanation. Sure, she was up unusually late, but who among us has never taken an impromptu insomnia excursion? I was a bit put-out that she had opted not to sit at my table, but then again, it was strewn with so many books as to be uninviting. Perhaps she hadn’t wished to disturb me.
I raised my voice in greeting. Her only response was to wave her hand. It was a jerky, inelegant motion—quite unlike her. I reached for a rational cause for that, too—I don’t know, a stiff elbow joint, a muscle cramp—but it was beginning to dawn on me the sheer amount of excuses I was having to make to justify her odd behavior. It was time that I put on my big-boy pants and faced up to the possibility I was willfully deluding myself. This, just like the figure outside the party, might not be Dulcinea.
I said, “Duchess Septimus? Are you well?”
She only smiled. Then, slowly, she began to beckon to me, as if she had a secret she would only share if I drew near.
Dread struck me then. I threw a wild glance over my shoulder, looking for Cam. It could not have been more than a second that I took my eyes from the imposter, but in that brief interval it began to reach for me. Between us was a gap of at least four meters. That proved no obstacle. Its arm…unfurled…from its body and shot toward me, impossibly long and thin. Many jointed.
I’ve never had the best of reflexes. In order, I 1.) tried to inhale and yell at the same time, accomplishing neither, 2.) pissed myself—
CAMILLA:
I wasn’t going to mention it.
PALAMEDES:
—and 3.) caught the abomination by the wrist just as its fingers closed about my throat. I intended to bind its muscles and immobilize its body while forcing its hand to slacken and release me. This, for reasons I did not understand at the time, did not work. It lifted me, kicking and gurgling, out of my chair. Blackness ate away at my vision while I struggled for consciousness.
[Pause]
CAMILLA:
Firstly, the reason I was not at the Warden’s side when the imposter appeared and attacked him.
Just after the Reverend Daughter left the library, I heard a faint cry from the corridor. I went to investigate. I did tell the Warden where I was going, but I suppose he was too stuck into his work to hear me.
Cracking open the heavy wooden doors, I peered out of the library. Before me was a scene I struggled to make sense of. There, on the floor, fighting to stand while shuffling backwards, was Nonagesimus. Bone constructs surrounded her in a defensive formation. I could not see what they would be defending her from. At least, that is, until something long and thin—an arm, horribly stretched—sprang from a shadowed doorway, seized one of her skeletons, and flung it away down the stairs. It smashed to pieces. There was a clattering, almost musical, as bones showered to the floor below. Nonagesimus yelped and tried again to stand up, but couldn’t get leverage. This was possibly due to the fact that she had fused her exoskeleton into plate armor from her neck to her waist.
“Nonagesimus,” I said, to alert her to my presense. “I’m coming up behind you.”
She did not look at me but gave a twitch of acknowledgement, skeletons adjusting to allow me nearer. One of them lifted her to her feet, and she staggered over to the nearest wall, leaning against it. I joined her there. She was panting, drenched in bloodsweat.
I asked what was hiding in that doorway. She said she had no idea. I asked what it looked like, what she thought she saw. She got strangely defensive about that. Said she barely got a look at “her” before “she” ambushed her. I asked if the thing was pretending to be someone it wasn’t, because the Warden and I had encountered something like that the other day. Something pretending to be Duchess Septimus. Some of the tension left her when I said that. She said, yes, that was the face it had presented before its transformation.
I was just about to suggest we return to the library to regroup when the Warden squawked from within. Dragging Nonagesimus with me, I charged back into the library. It was only then that I got a solid look at the imposter.
It was all wrong. A body that was almost human but not quite, like someone botched the proportions when making a construct. The skin was wrong-sized for the frame underneath. With one single, spindly arm extended, it had seized the Warden by the neck and was dragging him out of his seat. It seemed to be having some trouble keeping a grip on him, though.
PALAMEDES:
I’d managed, just barely, to extract lipids from the creature’s epidermis enough to lube up its fingers. Still, I was much too weak by that point to free myself.
CAMILLA:
With no time to waste, I threw myself at the thing. I thrust my rapier through its eye socket, and as it hissed and flailed, I ducked underneath to hack at its arm with my knife. Beside me, a bone construct sprang up from the floor, fell upon the creature, and melted, coating its body in liquid osseus matter. It jerked violently, trying to shake off the goop before it solidified. I lost my grip on my sword. I put all of my effort into sawing its arm off instead.
The skin was human. Or at least organic. But my blade did not bide into muscle or bone. There was the pop and twang of severed rubber bands, and my knife stuck in dense plastic.
That was enough to make the thing drop the Warden. With a hissing scream, the monster reeled off into the shadows, sending books cascading off of shelves, dragging its half-severed arm, and taking my rapier with it.
As soon as it was gone, I ran to the Warden, who was sat, coughing and gasping, on the floor. I took him under the arms and hauled him upright, shouting, “Go! Go! We’ve got to go!”
PALAMEDES:
Then Nonagesimus asked, what about the other ones? And I spluttered, “What do you mean, the other ones?” But we could still hear the thing scraping about in the darkness. There wasn’t time to chat.
CAMILLA:
We crept into the corridor, surrounded by bone constructs. As before, the creature reached out and grabbed the first thing that passed in front of its doorway. This time, though, as soon as it launched the bait skeleton into the stairs, we bolted past it before it had time to reset and strike again. I glanced back when we reached the landing. The thing had not emerged to follow us.
PALAMEDES:
At the stairs we had a decision to make. The Sixth House quarters were up, the Ninth House quarters were down. We did not know if there were more of the creatures than the two we had encountered, but given whose appearance they had chosen to steal, it seemed I was their primary target. Likely Nonagesimus had simply stumbled into a trap meant for me. Her skeletons, however, had proven invaluable. I would struggle to create such decoys myself, as I am much less practiced in bone magic, and my cavalier was without a sword. We would be fucked without Nonagesimus’ assistance. So after she reinforced her skeleton army with the remains scattered below, she agreed to accompany us up the stairs.
CAMILLA:
Not out of the goodness of her heart, I’m sure.
PALAMEDES:
No. She seemed to like the idea of me owing her something.
Canaan House that night seemed exceedingly dark and empty. As a group we scuttled between sparse patches of light, often relying on the narrow beam of Cam’s pocket torch to see anything at all. We did not encounter anyone or anything else, however, until we had reached the final stretch of corridor leading to our chambers. Awaiting us on the edge of a pale pool of moonlight was a faux Dulcinea. And beyond that, lurking just outside our door, another.
CAMILLA:
So we elected to turn back and spend the night in the Ninth House quarters instead. There was no further trouble on the way, and we haven’t, to our knowledge, seen any Dulcinea imposters since.
PALAMEDES:
The real one seems fine, though. She’s been…made aware of the situation. I think everyone ought to be, with things like those skulking about.
[Pause]
ABIGAIL:
Statement ends.
Thank you both. Now, about those tapes—
[Tape recorder clicks]