A curious structure stood amidst the expanse of marshes, built upon a great mound of granite and
earth to keep it from the rising swamp water. Its walls had been made of carved logs now in the
process of decay. Its interior was painted white and sparsely furnished, most rooms lay empty, with
splotches of continents made of condensation and mold. The scent of wet leaves permeated the halls
and winding staircases, occasionally a fire was lit within to ward off the darkness. There was no one to
wonder at how this cast away home came to be, such was its obscurity, for no other sentient eyes were
laid upon it than those of who were, or had once been, its inhabitants.
There was but one figure that occupied it permanently, an emaciated woman with skin that no longer
remembered the sun's caresses, though her eyes and her heart had known them well. She would spend
long hours gazing up at the menacing disk and then down at the reeds and the bog, she grew to find
them beautiful, though at first they did not welcome her. The marshland was wretched with decay for
the ferryman would come dutifully at dawn to lower unhappy hosts through the dark mirror of the
water to one day begin anew with the help of the serpents and the maggots. They were those who had
left their posts before their time, she was told. The ferryman would wave at her but she would not look
into his eyes for too long.
Most of her days were spent imagining from fragments of what she remembered of a life that now
seemed to her otherworldly. Other imaginings were crafted from the stories her keeper had told her.
She did not always believe that the words he spoke were truth but it did not bother her so long as they
was plausible. One such recollection was that the walls of their home were not originally painted
white and dampened by mildew, there had been a time when ornate furniture, marble sculptures,
embroidered curtains, and stained glass windows would have endeared the place to her. But all of these
pleasures were removed, the cold wind of night billowed through unobstructed. He told her that he
preferred it so, to remind them that they were of the living when they felt the goosebumps upon the
skin. No one spoke anymore, only in the tongue of wind, rain, and animals did she know sound.
There were the toads, the moles, the fish, the badgers, and the wolves. Some beings she had seen, some
others she had only heard of and knew to fear.
With delicate hands she crafted a fishing rod requiring a great spool of thread to reach the down the
towering structure and make its way to the fish. She boiled them or fried them but little could be done
to improve their flavor. The beings of the marshland were old and gamely, they did not die a natural
death for they fed on the life spools that had never been unraveled which lay buried in the depths.
Sometimes when she washed the black stains from his table and the cutlery she would feel a strange
sensation of foreboding as though he were there, she told herself that was unlikely as he took great
care not to be in her presence for very long. He fed on the blackness, she had no other name for it and
knew not were it came from. Once she had seen him carrying eight earthenware jugs filled with it to
one of the white rooms but his arms were weak and the last of the jars crashed to the bottom of the
staircase causing her to shriek in terror at the crash, penetrating the deep silence that he promised her.
It took her a week to clean it all away properly as she was given only one bucket of clean water per
morning for this purpose, she had once believed water was a rare commodity in these lands but every
other day he would bring her a steaming tub of it for bathing that was unnecessarily large. She
wondered how he had got it up the staircase each time, moreover unseen. During the week of the
Black Stain, curiosity got the better of her and with her fingers she dabbed at the liquid and licked it
tentatively with the tip of her tongue, it tasted bitter like tar.
The woman spat into the bucket in disgust and continued with her work.
Of the rooms that were neither empty nor locked, one was filled with stacks of parchment, most of it
with illegible scrawling in a childish unnerving hand. Another had piles of broken glass and wire
structures that must have held these assorted vassals. In the third he kept pickled vegetables. When she
had first arrived she detested the saltiness of almost all of the meals but eventually her pallet had
adjusted out of necessity. As for her keeper, there had been four times when he had dined with her but
only on the fourth she had been less nervous and more observant and noticed that he merely spread
the vegetables about the plate, attempted to hide a few morsels in a handkerchief while making the
careful gesture of wiping his mouth, or dropped them serendipitously on the floor. The combination of
these three methods was not enough to contrive his deceit and perhaps he sensed it for he did not dine
with her again.
In the fourth room were several rows of gray urns lined up on wooden stands and filled with dirt. Her
duty was to water these each morning. When she first arrived she had done this task with a certain
anticipation, wondering what would become of them, what would grow behind the dilapidating walls,
but it had been three years since then and to grow they solemnly refused to.
The fifth room was of the most interest to her, he had only allowed her to enter once after an incident
in which she had cut her hand while slicing the oozing mushrooms from the store of jars. She saw the
wound heal unnaturally before her eyes but from that day her hand always bore a black mark in the
place where the wound had been. When she had gone to bed that night a key lay on her nightstand.
She dreamt strange dreams but when she awoke she remembered very little, only the tumulus
emotions which had been evoked. The following morning she rushed through her tasks, sensing their
banality more so than usual, and went to check all of the doors to find one that the key would open.
When at last this door was found she had almost lost hope, wondering if it was more trickery to
oppress her. The key revealed to her a day of bliss, the room was a replica of her father's study, in both
worlds forbidden to her.
The walls were lined with leather-bound tomes and various curiosities from the man's travels. She
opened boxes of trinkets and minutely engraved statuettes, intricate maps and a chest of majestic
clothing, jewels in velvet-lined boxes, and paintings of delicate ink figures of nobility. All was covered
in a layer of dust that only added to the mystery and charm of the room. She spent the whole day
there looking through the volumes, feeling a sense of urgency to take in as much as she could of the
beautiful objects and tomes of history and verse telling of strange lands, all in her mother tongue to her
astonishment and delight. It had been so long since she had the opportunity to read, she had imagined
she may have forgotten how. As the hours slipped past, and the moon replaced the sun, she resolved to
sleep on the couch there when the keeper, for it could be no other, created a terrible awakening. The
old logs in the fireplace suddenly alighted and a flame surged forward, engulfing the room mercilessly.
Everything within burned easily, somehow preserved from the dampness, to prevent the young woman
from overstaying her welcome. She ran in horror, the door slamming behind her.
Since then she had tried many times to open the door but she was forced to abandon the key inside
and the heavy lock would not budge.