It was amazing, so simple, Karigan thought. No fires that needed to be started and kept burning. No flint and steel, just the turn of that key.
Mirriam twisted the key once more and light filled the room. Despite the lack of magic, this world was filled with wonders. What else Karigan might discover, she could scarcely imagine.
“In the morning,” Mirriam announced, “there shall be bathing and a change of bandages. Mender Samuels will stop by to see how you are doing.” With that, the housekeeper left her.
Karigan sighed. Whatever discoveries she made about this world, they would have to be made at night, as the household slept. Did Mirriam sleep? Maybe she’d ask Lorine. In any case, she’d learn the rhythms of the house’s occupants and discover what she could.
She yawned and reached for one of the novels. She’d bide her time as evening wore on and begin her investigations once the house fell into somnolence. But before she was four pages into the book, her head nestled in the pillow, and she drifted away once again into the healing sleep her body so desperately needed, unaware of when Lorine came in later and removed the book from her hands, pulled the covers up, and turned off the light.
APPARITIONS
A scritching sound irritated Karigan to wakefulness, an incessant noise that scraped at her nerves. She blinked in the predawn gray, once more having to orient herself to where she was and when. She rubbed her eyes and yawned, wondering what caused the noise that had awakened her.
Scritch-scritch-scritch, like a pen rapidly stroking across paper.
She raised herself to her elbows. “Hello?” she queried, searching into the shadows spilling across her room.
She discerned nothing, but she pinpointed the noise emanating from a particularly dark corner. She stared hard, perceived movement. A trick of her eyes?
“Hello?” she said again, a slight quaver in her voice, and again there was no response. The scritching did not sound mousey, and it had a sort of rhythm to it.
I’m becoming just as mad as they think I am.
She tossed aside her covers and stood on the rug beside her bed. She took tentative steps toward the dark corner. The scritching grew a little louder as she approached. She made out the frame of the one chair in her room. She thought to turn back and ignite her lamp when she caught a faint flutter of movement around the chair, like pale moth wings in the night. Transfixed, she drew closer. Spectral smoke wafted and drifted above the chair until it resolved into a vaguely human figure.
A wave of cold rippled through Karigan’s flesh lifting the hairs on her arms. She licked her lips. She dared not step any closer to the apparition lest it vanish. Its features were so blurred she could not even tell whether it was male or female. It sat bent over a flat object on its lap.
“Who are you?” she whispered. Perhaps, she thought, Who were you? was the more appropriate question. In any case, she received no reply.
The gray of her room began to lighten, the puddles of black retreating. The faint apparition faded even more.
“Can you see me?” Karigan whispered, but the hunched figure remained intent on whatever was on its lap, even as it faded to a wisp of smoke.
Scritch-scratch.
Was it writing?
The city bell clanged and, startled, Karigan glanced at the window, which had brightened with the dawn. The bell to call the mill slaves to work. Between tollings, she heard no scritching, and when she glanced at the chair, the apparition had vanished.
Either she had indeed gone mad, or apparitions could appear even in a world deprived of magic. Not that spirits of the dead should have to rely on magic to exist, but it still surprised her.
Why had it appeared to her? She’d enough experience with the supernatural to know such meetings did not usually occur by chance.
She stood there staring at the empty chair for several moments, then shook her head. She gave some thought to using the early hour to sneak around the house, but she heard footsteps in the hallway and other sounds of life elsewhere in the house, bringing to an end any such notion. At least now she knew the household began to awaken with the first bell, which was more than she’d known before.
She sighed and limped back to bed to await the day.
• • •
After breakfast Karigan suffered through the humiliation of the sponge bath, protesting all the while there must be a way to take a regular bath without getting her cast wet, and couldn’t she do this herself, please. Mirriam was as immovable as a granite pillar and informed Karigan this was not her first sponge bath. Karigan had known someone cleaned her up upon her arrival to the professor’s house, though she’d not been conscious. Being awake and aware of it was a whole different level of embarrassment.
“Stop your fussing,” Mirriam ordered as she scrubbed Karigan’s back. “You’re just making it take longer.”
After the sponge bath, Karigan had to admit she felt better, especially when Mirriam and Lorine set to work washing her hair in the bathing room sink, which was shaped like a giant clam shell. Mirriam deftly shifted the various levers to make the water temperature just right while Lorine’s nimble fingers massaged Karigan’s scalp. Afterward, Lorine put much care into detangling and brushing Karigan’s hair. The strokes of the brush felt marvelous.
“I wish my hair was half so lovely as yours,” Lorine murmured. “Long and thick.”
Karigan had not yet seen Lorine’s hair for it was always wrapped beneath her scarf.
Lorine expertly braided Karigan’s hair, then helped her back to her room, where Mirriam and Mender Samuels awaited with fresh bandages. Karigan withheld cries of pain as crusty scabs were yanked off with the old bandages, the one around her leg hurting the worst by far. The mender bent over her leg and took a long whiff of the wound.