On stepping inside the house, it would have been reasonable to assume or expect that the general uneasiness of the day would continue within the walls. There was nothing normal or grounding about the place that promised to anchor those inside to a sober reality, nothing about the variegated light streaking the halls that offered stability in any way. In its basest essence, the house was Not Normal, and so it was almost compulsive to assume that, on a Not Normal day, it would adopt the role of epicentre for the widening disorder.

So it was a surprise to Layton when he closed the door on the outside and felt everything settle heavily back into place with the solid and reassuring thunk of things which had been floating returning sensibly to the ground.

Professor Layton inhaled and the world smelled thickly of sour oil paint and the tang of turpentine. Solid, sensible smells. Honeyed light from the ceiling lamps gleamed on the polished wood of the bureau and cabinet in patches and streaks of definite warmth that spoke volumes on their tangibility. He could feel the way the objects around him weighed down the reality, like rocks holding a picnic blanket down on sun-warm sands. Everything was real, everything was in its place. Standing in the hall, his back growing cold where it was pressed against the door, it struck him that the only thing disturbed in the scene was him.

Voices echoed down the stairs at the end of the hall, their dust-mote tones melded in to indistinction by the dreamy turns of the spiral. All the doors in the hall were stolidly closed, more walls than potential gateways, herding him towards the office, towards the voices that grew no clearer for closeness.

It was only upon opening the door, it's nameplate lit in crimson from the window's ruddy light, that Layton realised there was only one voice speaking, and that voice was Lillian's.

Here in the study, things were normal too, as obedient a scene as one could wish for… and yet still persisted the sense, in the minor details—the cracks between the floorboards, the patterns in the wallpaper, in the wetness of people's eyes—of something being amiss. Not severely so, but casually, nonchalant like a posture slightly askew in devilish invitation, careless like a few wisps of hair escaping a coifed style. If there had been intention in the slight disarray of the senses, it was gone now. What remained was incidental, unobtrusive, the soul stumbling on an uneven step before entering the room alongside the rest of you. It was barely worth noticing, and yet it, along with the rest of the day, stuck in Layton's mind like bone in teeth.

Sat behind Holt's desk was Lillian's portrait. Just in front of that portrait was the woman herself. The similarity of the two was such that, when Lillian noticed his arrival, The Professor almost expected the painting to mirror her welcoming smile.

"Ah, Professor Layton! We were just talking about you!"

Before the desk sat The Other Professor and for all that Sycamore had always been a strange and distant man never had those observations seemed more evident than now. Though his head was slightly bowed, his eyes had remained fixed on a point somewhere ahead and, as a consequence, stared up from beneath his eyelashes in a manner that, combined with his absolute blankness of expression, was faintly sinister. There was something… doll-like about the way he stared, unblinking, unyielding. Behind his rowan eyes lay very little, glassy windows to an empty room that was still full of the disturbed furniture and cooling teacups of recent occupation. Beneath them, the skin was a restless purple and clammy with what might have been tears.

Whatever had happened here was over and done with, and Layton recognised with a more than slight sinking feeling that he was too late to either witness or understand.

"Good afternoon, Lillian." Layton gently closed the door behind him and felt, as he did, the room settle back in to unity with itself. For the first time that day, it seemed everything was in its proper place, snug as cutlery in velvet. "We thought you must have left—"

"Afternoon? Evening, dear—" And indeed, the sky beyond the red glass was burgundy with dusk. Surely he could not have wandered in mist and madness for so many hours? But night was honest; it could not lie. Time did not bend—it could never give you a few more minutes, couldn't reinvent the curvature of the earth to stave off a rising or sinking sun. Night was coming; Layton would simply have to fit his understanding of the day around that fact. "And truly it's no trouble. As I said to Professor Sycamore here, I haven't left the house all day. You must have just missed me."

"I see… and after I returned to the village, you…?"

"—Invited your colleague inside and waited for you to come back." Sycamore made a breathy sound of what could only be called negation if one had foreknowledge of the man, but his unceasing stupefaction prevented further intervention on that front. Something that was almost a smile was pulling faintly at one corner of his mouth, exposing just enough teeth to appear ghastly in the stain of the light. His eyes did not moved from their focus on the wall.

"I see," Layton murmured.

"You do." Lillian gave a firm nod that concluded that matter with the deft and self-satisfied finality of scissors snipping thread. "Now, wasn't there something you wanted? Professor Sycamore here said you had some things to show me."

"Indeed." Layton allowed the conversation to move on. He did see. He saw that Lillian did not intend to pull back the cover on what had occurred in this room before his arrival. He saw a politely locked door in the depths of her pupil, which no amount of knocking would convince into opening; from behind it came the sound of feet and muttering, but the lights inside were off. Instead, he took the sheaf of missives from a pocket within his blazer. "We were hoping you could look at the handwriting of these papers we uncovered. Do you recognise it?"

With a little hesitancy that seemed less like reluctance and more like trepidation, Lillian took the letters. Layton let his freed hand fall back against his brother's shoulder, where it sat with all the agency and comfort of damp leaves on a marble sculpture, moulded there without awareness of either party.

For a what should surely have been a lifetime without interruption, Lillian gazed upon the papers in her hand with the mournful, contemplative look of one reading the paperwork for the funeral of a beloved relative. It was an expression too distracted by grief for all the important thoughts it was supposed to be having. Things formed like teardrops in the grey reverie, swelling into wet beads and trickling down the window panes behind her eyes to thin into obscurity; it was raining in her head. Her mouth, as she gently sifted the letters with a tenderness meant for broken things, had taken on a soft aspect, downturned at its corners and slightly open. It was the complex set of face of one who had been about to shout, but who has since heard or is in the process of hearing an explanation that is cooling all anger into disappointed pity too miserable for words; thus, the mouth lies abandoned, all its bitter words, still crammed inside, like damp kindling never to be used. When she spoke, it was not in the voice of one who knows they are speaking; it was quiet, and deeply tired, and unendingly sad.

"He's wonderful, you know. His art is... it's always been..." That complicated mouth squeezed itself in to a flat line as she swallowed. "I could almost understand his obsession with it sometimes. A very long time ago, I thought his paintings were the most magnificent things in this world. Of course, that was before..."

"'Before'?" Layton promoted when she stopped but his voice—any voice—was too loud in that reverie, and the moment was broken in to little pieces like so much glass. Lillian startled a touch, apparently having forgotten them both.

"Oh," she murmured, voice flat and heavy like a sour note on a piano. "Well, a lot changes, doesn't it? Time marches on." Again she stared down in to the letters, and the look on her face said quite clearly that the elegiacal expression of before had been directed at something other than the papers between her fingers; her face now said hate in a thousand virulent tongues. She threw herself to her feet, agitation beyond name making twists of her fingers. "'Before?' Before the years. Before we left our home and came here. Before these damnable letters!"

With that exclamation ringing harshly against the insides of her guest's skulls, Lillian made to cast down the papers upon the desk, but did so with such ferocity that the untidy parcel exploded. A snowstorm in miniature with square, white snowflakes, flurrying across the desk, carpet, and occupants with the loose, damp sound of pages turning. Rage exploded out with them, flooding the room with static; nerves shot up through Layton's bones, unsettled and excited, fright sudden and instinctive like being in a room with a horse that might kick. There was something too hard-edged and harsh about seeing this perfectly composed woman so angry, her terrible beauty sharp and strange. He simultaneously wanted to calm her and remove himself to somewhere very far away.

(Later he would remember Alice's mention of a fire she was not allowed to talk about, and he would wonder if that had been the proper time to ask about such things. But, as I said, that would come later, and 'later' is quite often just another word for 'too late'.)

All her energy expended, Lillian dropped her hands back down to her sides. She cast about with exasperated dismay; all the satisfaction of fury was gone, leaving a mess to clean up and the exhaustion of quickly spent feelings. Layton met her gaze; without meaning to or recognising that he had, he had reached out a hand to her and it hovered in the no-man's-land that had suddenly gone cold between, placatory and insufficient. She eyed it with something very much like regret, and when she looked at him again all her strangeness, all the degrees to which she unnerved any who looked at her, seemed now quite irrelevant in the face of this misery. Sorrow was such an intrinsically human emotion it rendered the abnormal intensity of her beauty little more than an inconsequential blemish, like a too-deep flush or too-dark freckle.

"He loves us. I know he loves us," the woman whispered in moth-wing tones, dusty with old sentiment. "I just... I think he loved whoever sent these more."

Layton looked at her and recognised the same darkness he had seen in his own eyes after losing Claire the second time. He watched it flicker beneath the surface of her pupil like black fish in a lightless pool and came to the gentle, precipitous realisation that he was looking in to rooms already draped in mourning garb. Loss was bleeding in to the expression, despite all efforts to stem it, like blood seeping through bandages. Pretence at normalcy, at tolerance and bravery was past—she no longer looked like she expected a reunion. A widow in rehearsal.

Something in the absolute, jet-dark stillness of that sorrow, it's marble hardness and cruel will to persist, reminded him intractably of Descole. Part of The Professor's mind was deeply aware of his brother behind him on the sofa, of the silence and the immobility that was somehow more concerning than thrown letters or tears.

"Do you have any idea who they're from?" Layton asked, only for Lillian to regretfully shake her head. Lines on her cheeks glistened as she moved.

"Oh, I couldn't tell you." Her eyes combined contriteness, bitterness, and something gently imploring, though for what it did not say. "I really wish I could."

For all the oddity of the place and its residents, and all the distrust it inspired, he had become fond of Lillian. The Professor was not a cruel man and it would be a cruelty of inaction to leave someone so distressed standing alone. After a second of searching through his inner pockets until he retrieved a handkerchief, and so doing, approached the still woman. He received a watery smile for his consideration, and Lillian turned her head aside to daub delicately at the skin beneath her eyes. The desire to say something to quell the pain, to offer kinship or counsel, was consummate, but he had nothing profound to offer—certainly nothing that had shallowed the well of his own sense of melancholy—and Lillian, for all her loquaciousness, did not invite condolence. So they stood together in a silent understanding, the three of them (though the degree to which Sycamore was a participant is debatable), all denizens of the same, bleak world, all travellers with no roadmap hoping to find some brighter place to reside. Perhaps that was enough.

Below them in some other unspecified part of the house, a clock struck the hour in resonant, dulcet tones that wandered up to the study with the circumspect gentility of a butler with a polite reminder that it really was getting quite late. Like congregants at a service long over, the atmosphere around them thinning and breaking, they broke apart ('they' this time including whatever remained of The Other Professor, as Sycamore startled, in a murky, underwater movement, at the intrusive noise).

Lillian smiled again, though it was brave and bare, like early flowers in morning frost, and would not and could never last.

Time to continue the performance of moving on. Time to be alive in spite of the things that weren't.

"We wanted to access the graveyard," Layton said, picking the thread of conversation back up. "Is there a caretaker we could speak to?"

"The graveyard?" Lillian shut her eyes, drew in a deep breath, and blew it out in a rush. And with it, she seemed to undo all the tension of the last half hour, her manner once again filled with bright vivacity. Her eyes were made of chill sunlight, gold that was all glimmer and no warmth. "Oh no, you won't get in there, I'm afraid. This used to be the undertakers house, you see—he would have had your keys."

It was a strange face that could make such monumental things as death unhappen simply by changing expression.

"Perhaps you could tell us where is he now?" Layton tried. Humming thoughtfully, Lillian drummed her fingers on the desk in a rhythmless pattern, sidling out from behind to finally stand among them.

"Quite dead; the graveyard was put out of use in, ohhh... the fifties, if memory serves—seventeen fifties, that is. No one's bothered with it since." She shrugged in a manner that said its out of my hands and folded her arms behind her back. "I have a book on local history, if you'd like to look at it? I picked it up for light reading when we first moved."

There should have been a second voice in that conversation, like a second thread holding a seam together. Sycamore's conspicuous a absence was a hole, and the hole was an expectant thing lined finely with silence. There was something eel-like in the curiosity of that silence, poking through the gaps; where did you go, it pestered in the seconds it stretched out before Layton or Lillian pushed it away, where are all your thoughts? Layton did not look at his brother, but it was something he very deliberately didn't do.

"Could you excuse us for a moment?" He requested, the hole tugging at his sleeve. He needed to know if there were indeed still thoughts behind that silence, and he felt it might be better to do that without this spectre of comedy and tragedy being quite so attentive. Fortunately, Lillian's smile seemed to say she understood.

"Of course; I'll be downstairs in the parlour if you need me."

Lillian left. The door swung shut, but there were no footsteps on the stairs outside. Layton opened the door a crack; there was no one in the hall. The empty stairs, their creaking voices silent, stared belligerently back and asked him what he had expected.

The Professor had intended the moment of solitude as opportunity to see how his counterpart fared (though it wouldn't be inaccurate to say the potential of the answer unsettled him; his brother had met death with less apparent anguish). Sycamore, it seemed, had much the same idea.

"There's something beneath the rug." That was the first words he had spoken since Layton's arrival; he had the bitten-tongued, indigo voice of a wounded dreamer.

"I'm sorry?"

"This chair; it's not level." Which was true, but the difference was so negligible it was unnoticeable to all but the most extreme extreme attentions. None of this told Layton whether or not the man was alright, but it said that he was still himself, which would have to be good enough. "It's resting on something under this carpet."

It was the work of only a few quiet moments to move the chair to one side and roll back the section of rug, and if either item seemed to grow heavier once ousted from their place, that could only be the work of a fretful imagination.

It was a trapdoor. A metal hatch, large enough to admit a grown man, with ornate filigree on the hinges and eight numeric tumblers offering a blank combination of surprised-looking zeros above a hatch door wheel. The whole affair looked out of place, like it had been pirated from some confoundingly elaborate submarine. Having thoroughly depleted his sense of surprise for the day, Layton instead felt hollowly tired. He wondered if he could put this discovery aside in his mind for a time when his thoughts were not so full of graveyard.

Beside him, Sycamore gave a breath of a laugh, a hollow wisp of sound with no joy attached. His eyes were unsmiling above the too-sharp corners of his mouth. If this discovery at all surprised him, not an ounce of it showed on his face, which was still consumed with an ugly, icy pallor, fraught in the red light with faint tracery of purple veins. Looking at him, Layton could find no concern left over to spare for matters of trapdoors and codes, or even graveyards and skulls.

"Desmond, are you alright?" His voice was hushed by compulsion beyond him. That house was a living thing, listening to the lives of the frail little creatures tucked in the hollow spaces in its bones like a drowsy sleeper listening to mice in his rafters; passively attentive but with dim and impersonal aspirations to drive them out.

"Are you?" His brother returned quite candidly, in a perfectly equable tone that suggested idle conversation rather than serious inquiry. Layton swallowed slightly; no machination or oddity of Descole could be worse than this second, more internal sort of mask that had come quite completely between them.

"I… I made it back here." That's seemed as good an answer as honesty would permit. Certainly Sycamore seemed to accept it. "I think we may want to revisit the cemetery. I feel that there is something important to be discovered there. You didn't answer my question."

"No, I didn't, and you'll excuse me if I don't." With weariness beyond his years, Sycamore rose to his feet. With slightly unsteady hands and an air of fastidious concentration, he began collecting the scattered letters. Stood side by side, the two men were about the same height; they watched each other for a short moment, like houses across the street at night seeing lights on in the other's windows. Sycamore's hand brushed gently over Layton's sleeve as he passed, briefly curling his fingers in the fabric in a gesture that was tiredly coaxing. "Come, we shouldn't leave the lady waiting."

Layton was about to follow him out the door when a face in the corner of his eye caught his attention and briefly wouldn't let him leave.

Three faces. The family portrait stared him down.

It looked like her, which was of no innate conceptual surprise as, with a portrait of oneself, one anticipates (and has likely paid for) at least a passing resemblance. What was uncanny was how completely it looked like her, how consummately similar the painting was to Lillian. There were certain lights and angles, specifically the ones in the corners of the eye, that rendered its flatness obsolete, and then the painting simply seemed to be a window with a woman looking through. Alice, too, was depicted perfectly.

Indeed, the only member of the little family that had escaped this compulsive strangeness was the painter himself. Holt's face was well rendered, but not so immaculate as to be uncanny, the eyes fixed on the distance in much the same manner as the other two but in a fashion that didn't discomfit the observer. He looked like a painting and a painting he obligingly was.

(It was only as he was turning away completely that Layton caught a flash of something else, like a the gossamer fin of a fish slipping under a rock reflecting the last light of a dying sun before both light and fish disappeared forever. By the time he had registered the change and turned back, in haste and horror, to confirm his eye's assertion, the painting was normal once more. But for a second—indeed, less than a second—he had seen something else; Holt stood beside a ruined caricature of his wife, her face burned down to its skull, her eyes yellowish, blind, and cooked like boiled eggs, her whole form reduced down to crisp bindings of muscle heaped upon cracked, blackened bones. Alice was nowhere to be seen, her spot in the painting empty. When Layton looked again, the illusion was gone, and no movement of the head or eyes would return it).

Lillian in the flesh met them both in the hall, where the fast fading light lit the room in purples. In her hands were two books, one a fat little travel guide with a piece of folded paper clamped between its pages, the other much larger and glossier. She handed both over with a small flourish.

"Here you go; 'Curiosities and Antiquities of The Moors: A Complete Guide And History For The Towns And Villages Of The South West'. It's a touch dated, but it will answer your questions about this place far more eloquently than I can, I'm sure." She gave the volume a considering look. "There's not much to go on really—this little place is so far adrift it almost doesn't exist."

"Than you."

"I also found this." She handed the second volume across. "It might be of use to you, it might not. It has almost all his paintings listed—I thought you might be able to figure out a commonality or, I don't know, some similarity that would give you an idea of what the thieves were interested in."

Layton passed the two volumes off to Sycamore, who slipped them in to his own capacious pockets. His alertness returned to him, and he was channelling this restoration in to staring fixedly at Lillian with mordant wariness. If she noticed, she paid it no mind.

"I do wish I could be of more assistance," she said, in the wistful, meaningful voice of someone who does indeed have a lot more to say but no time to say it in. "But I really can't say more."

Perhaps if they were to stay a little longer… but no; the air was cold with the impending dusk and it would not do to be out after dark. They certainly would not be staying the night.

"You've been very helpful, Mrs Holt. We won't keep you any longer."

"Of course." She looked a touch disheartened for a second. "Just one last thing, professors... if you see Alice on your way back, could you send her home? She's always getting lost in her head and forgetting the time—she's her father's child in that way. But it's getting rather late. She knows this place well, but..."

Layton assured her that of course they would. Then he was gone out the door, released from the house.

Sycamore was only a few, slow steps behind. He felt quite keenly as though he were missing something and, much though he didn't want to, he lingered on the threshold to see if it would come back to him…

"It's not Layton that's in danger."

Lillian sat slumped on a chair in the parlour, like a puppet with its strings cut. Her head hung forwards like the heavy, crumpled blossom of a dead flower, her hair draped thick across her face. Though the light through the prismatic windows was lurid as ever, none of it fell on her; she looked as white and dead as lily flesh. The woman did not look up. Indeed, she did not move at all.

"What?" He didn't… sound like himself; his voice was hoarse and thin, the merest scrape of substance left clinging to the glass of his throat. Somewhat against his better judgement (that is to say, Descole's judgement) Sycamore lingered on the threshold, one hand on the door. He could hear Layton's footsteps receding outside, the sound crisp in the cold air; the loss sent a frisson of something strikingly bitter through his senses.

"It's not Layton that she'll want." Sycamore's consciousness was swallowed like a pebble in black waters.

Descole shut the door and everything on the other side stopped existing.

•~*~•

In the dwindling twilight, the world, ever strange, was loosening its long tresses of hair and brushing the cobwebs from its braids. All around them, things were unravelling at such a rate that, moment to moment, it was impossible to see at all. The moors unfolded in azure infinities, steadily drowning in ink so that, very soon, everywhere not within an immediate circumference of your eyes seemed to be open oceans. Above, in the sky, the stars blinked themselves in to being, shrouded in a gauze of purple clouds, and set industriously about their celestial journeys. The sheering wind was chill and playfully mean; it appeared to have chased off the worst of the mist, but was at that moment uncertain if its antics would end there.

Layton had never before considered how strangely transitory his position as investigator was. It offered none of the privileges or protections of the police officers, none of the prestiges of the inspectors. He was there by invitation, at the request of strangers, exposed to the whims of whatever quandary they had found themselves in. In prior cases, the rawness of this had been mitigated by a stubborn police presence, the curmudgeonly Chemley or over-enthused Grosky never far from sight.

There was something slightly autumnal in their absence. Everything had changed after London, but that change had been mostly in the intangible, in the ever-looming discontent you could feel as a darkness on the horizon, as a blackening of the sky at night. Here it was, made physical in absence. The winter of their time was coming.

Layton walked with a stranger in the shape of his brother. Sycamore's skin in the growing moonlight was a peculiar thing; such radiance should have rendered everything under its gaze lovely, and indeed it had for most things, which made The Other Professor's disrepaired state all the more evident. There was a waxiness to him, something mortiferous in how starkly bloodless his cheeks were, in the sunken skin about his eyes. In some ways, he seemed in that moment preserved, as though he had always looked like this, as though he would always look like this. In others, he was something entirely alien; Layton couldn't remember seeing him look so tired.

Not just tired but guilty. Hunted. Haunted by spectres unrepentant and unrelenting. Layton could see the gears and levers within his brother's head, this case and a thousand others turning over in his intricate mind, with ghosts caught in in wheels of his thoughts. They tore apart on the cog teeth and shrieked malice at every turn.

He wondered what secrets of his own the moonlight had written across his brow in its silver pen.

"Did you—" Sycamore started, then cut himself off as his face contorted apparently against his will. For a long moment, the words tangled on his tongue and, when he forced them out, there was a certain deliberation to them that spoke of the sentence's desire to stay coiled between his teeth. The register of his voice altered, taking on its own dusk, and that blank stiffness to his features was back, the eyes bloody red—it was Descole and not Sycamore that was Layton's companion on that road. "Have you been seeing things? Did you find anything in the mist?"

'Did you find anything?' Was what he asked, but the too careful tone and the queer, sideways look his brother's spectre slid him said very clearly 'did anything find you?'

"I struggle to believe any of it was real," Layton began just as cautiously, and Descole's face fell almost imperceptibly, as though he had been relying on The Professor's sanity in stead of his own. There was a guilty spark of relief in his eyes as well, and Layton wondered desperately what had happened in that house. "I've never seen fog quite like it, not even in Folsense—"

(Folsense. Descole's face didn't change, but there was a motion in the dark centres of his pupils, a gesture like a duvet, heavy and soft, folding over some incrimination. Layton remembered the map and wondered.)

"My sense of time must have been distorted. It felt impossible to make progress along this path. When I did reach the village, I found it, to all appearances, deserted, except for the inn... I heard voices inside." Briefly, he relayed his discussion with Constance and was rewarded with a further dismayed spasming of his companion's features.

"Constance Throckmorten." Descole's voice was sharp and snappish as green wood. "You're certain that's what she called herself?"

"Quite certain, yes."

"And you're sure... she appeared to you as an old woman?" Despite the inherent brutality of Descole's hard voice, there was a delicacy to the manner in which the question was asked, as though it were an enquiry into a sensitive condition. It opened a pucker of unease in Layton's gut, the strangeness of it.

"It would be a rather difficult thing to be mistaken about. Does this mean something to you?" Descole waved a hand with a grimace.

"It might, but I've interrupted you. Please, finish the story."

"Very well." Layton resumed. "I was... compelled to follow a shadow through the town. I felt certain it had something to show me." Again, he felt the clammy chill of dull horror, keen as it had been first, as he recalled the little skull rolling away from him in to the ether. How was he to explain that? Factually, he supposed. Descole didn't seem surprised by this recount.

"You mentioned the graveyard?"

"Yes. I think… I think it wanted me to go there. Certainly it didn't want me to leave." Indeed, they were returning to that fork in the road and though that strange magnetism it held before was gone now there was still something dearly inviting in the crooked jerk the path took, like the subtle call of a beckoning finger. "Desmond—"

"He's not here." That dark voice had no inflection.

"—what happened in that house?" Layton finished, mouth dry as autumn leaves.

Whether or not Descole would have answered that question honestly (or indeed answer at all) would remain a mystery.

"Quiet! Listen... Do you hear that?" He didn't. Not at first at least. But then, soft as diaphanous silk...

"In the house of upside down, laughing cries and smiles frown…"

At the fork of the road up ahead there was a smudge that, after a moment's indecision, decided to be a girl-shape with the last of the fog wreathed about it. In growing closer (after a pause that felt longer than it was) it revealed itself to be, in fact, an Alice-shape. The little figure was as doll-like and doleful as she had been at their first meeting. Her black, bobbed hair was streaked blue in the dusk, moonbeams through lake waters, and her dress was much of that same blue; the sameness of it leant her a lurid appearance, like an illustration of a little girl in a children's story.

She turned to them as they came close. She did not smile; her little face was of the frank seriousness of one who has been waiting for an appointment and has finally arrived before their attendant.

"Hello." She scuffed a toe gently over the ground. For some reason, her shoes were missing. "Have you found him yet?"

Just a girl. Just Alice, whom they had been told to anticipate, so why did the sight of her chill the blood? Perhaps it was that anticipatory air, the sense that she had been standing there for some time with no other purpose than to wait until they came along. Descole was regarding her with narrow, reddish eyes that said he was not quite himself and whatever he felt beyond that was inscrutable; his presence at Layton's back was both solid and guarded.

"I'm afraid not, Alice," Layton told her gently. "But we're still looking." The little girl gave a slight, grim inclination of the chin that said she had anticipated this too. The gravity of the matter had been donned in seriousness, but hung from her tiny frame like adult clothes. "Your mother asked us to tell you it's far too late to be out; would you like us to walk you back."

Alice's severity cracked and a small smile twitched across her rosebud lips.

"Oh, I'm not going home yet," she replied, with the polite air of rejection of a hostess denying a guest. "You can come with me though! I need to go get my shoes—" she pointed demonstratively at an unshod foot, it's stocking bedraggled and furred with mud and lichen. "—I forgot them."

She left before either man could agree to the plan. What was there to do but follow? Layton had the strangest premonitory feeling he knew where they would be going.

Nothing had changed about the grim face of the cemetery gate, or that is to say, nothing had changed about it since their visit that morning, before it had been doused in phantasmagoria. In stony silence, it glared sourly at the light, lithe streak of navy blue that darted easily ahead of her companions over the river, which was once more a thin stream, tame and shallow. Even so, Layton felt uneasy as he stepped across each pebble, certain each time his foot met stone that this would be the one that swallowed him up.

As before, the view offered through the bars was of long rows of lopsided headstones slouching above what seemed to be long trenches. The angle of the dying sun, whose last rays were just strong enough to reach the dismal place though that strength was fading fast, had taken the shadows of the headstones, stretched them out in to limber, loose things.

Alice was waiting patiently for them on the far bank, watching them with dark eyes that at the moment seemed to have a lot in common with pebbles. Stern, watchful little pebbles from a ravine who's midnight depths could swallow up worlds. She gave them a little smile when they joined her, rosebud small with a glint of puckish mischief.

When they reached the other side, reality seemed to reconsider its posture. It did not... change, precisely, which is to say that 'it did not change' in the same way a person standing from their seat does not change. The essential composition of the thing was no different, just as a person by standing up does not alter their choice of clothing or order and function of their organs. And yet, with a sensation of unfolding that occurred deep in the bones, there was a difference in the scene; where, before, the hands affixed to the front of the cemetery gate had been steadfastly joined, they were now separated with just the very tips of their fingers touching as, in the space between them, they formed a heart. They had not moved. They had not changed. It was simply a straightening-out of what had already existed, again, like the creases in a person's trousers smoothing away as they rise from a chair.

And why were they rising? It felt like greeting, a welcome disturbance on a long night, an anticipated knock at the door that someone was eager to attend to. They, or at least Alice, were more than welcome—they were expected.

Seeing nothing amiss with the situation, Alice fiddled for a moment with a pocket hidden in the midnight folds of her skirts and eventually convinced it to produce a neat little key. The lock gave a hollow-throated click as it accepted the tool and the gate swung open with a shrilling of rust and a breathy flutter of dry leaves scraped loosely across flagstones.

Intrigue went through Layton like a bolt of golden blood, like a needle piercing a scrap of gauze and lifting it away. It was a sweet little thing, this key he had been told he would never find. How had it come to be in Alice's hands now?

"May I have a look at that Alice?" She handed it over easily, with no apparent concern for this key that should not exist. It was coldly real between his fingers, with a solid shank and bit whose heavy functionality was at stark contrast with the delicate, heart-shaped bow. It neither looked, nor felt like moonlight and mist; like every other impossibility that day, it felt a little like a dream, and yet he was icily awake. "Where did you get this?"

Alice offered him a half-glance and an insouciant shrug of one puff-sleeve clad shoulder.

"It's mine. Daddy said he found it in a drawer. I like to come here and look at the rocks, so he gave it to me." The look she shot him was mischievous and approving; one got the sense that, not only was she oblivious to the discomfort of her companions, she was rather pleased that they had come. "Nobody else wants to come here—I think they're chicken."

To hear that nobody else wanted to be in the graveyard was not a surprise; the graveyard did not feel like a place that wanted people in it.

Cemeteries are primarily places of atmosphere, each a little different but with enough melancholy commonality to make them all the same in the end, the same endless place spread out across time and space. With the gates open, that atmosphere oozed out, briny with old tears, soft with a grey down of voiceless sighs. The ghosts of mourners still walked between the headstones and, every so often, the wind blew hard enough to catch on one of their voices, giving rise to spectral cries that echoed hollowly through the centuries. Their patronage is cyclical; mourners, having once come here in despair, return in wooden boxes with their own grim entourage. Grief grows like a rind on anything solid, like salt formations in a sea cave, the crystallised skeleton of something both endless and formless.

'You will join us,' the ghosts said, in wind chime voices, 'now or later, you will always join us'. Whether it was warning or plea, the sound was gone too swiftly for anyone to say; anyone who stayed long enough to hear the words never leaves.

Graveyards a quiet. They are peaceful, but it is a sad peace. It is a peace that says to rest because you can do nothing else.

Layton felt more than saw Descole detach from them and drift to the ranks of stones and shadows lining the path. At a glance, it had seemed that the shade cast by the dying sunlight in the wake of each headstone was merely uncommonly dark, but that wasn't the case at all—each headstone lay before, not a shadow, but a hole dug deep and haphazardly refilled. Descole was going to each in turn, kneeling at the tombstones and marking down the name inscribed in his notebook; his wan face was growing steadily paler.

"Aren't you going to ask me questions?"

"I'm sorry?" Since that morning, his mind had felt dusty, had tasted of lavender. Now he was as awake with the clarity of glass, of cold water, of white sunlight. It was as though all the hours that had passed since waking were rendered irrelevant by their strangeness. His mind had found its way here, and he'd picked it up passing through the gate. Still, a non-sequitur was a non-sequitur.

"You're detectives," the little girl said, blunt and silver as a butter-knife. "Detectives ask people lots of questions and eventually that solves the problem. Daddy's still missing, so you must still be asking questions—I want to help."

She was such an enduringly solemn little thing. She was the only creature of animation that seemed to belong in the graveyard, the way that birds belong in the sky but planes must make an effort. The two professors were misplaced but not she. Quietly, Layton wondered how much time she spent among the tombstones. He had not seen any other children in the crowds of yesterday; perhaps these were Alice's friends and classmates that she left home each day to see and returned to her mother with stories about.

Strange, now that he had thought on it, that a mother who had only yesterday seemed so engulfed by concerns for the security of her child would let that child go out into deviant mists and fog unaccompanied the very next day. What had changed overnight? Or was this simply the way of things; was Alice permitted this freedom to wander hither and thither across the wild, barren moors so long as she was home be dinner time? He certainly wouldn't have allowed the same for Luke and Flora...

"Very well. Do you not think it a little foggy to be out wandering?"

"No, not really."

With an air of practice, Alice left the path. Their walk continued in silence through long clinging grass whose unruly tresses turned to grasping snares, long thin hands plastered over their feet and ankles as they walked. Layton's shoes were glossed with a varnishing of dew, and Alice's socks, rumpled and heavy with wet, were steadily greening under the tutelage of this moist earth. Maybe, if they stood still, she would sink into the accepting earth, skirts folding about her like a flower bud closing, leaving behind her voice and her bones. If such a thing did occur, Layton rather morbidly could see her meeting it with the same good-natured curiosity with which she seemed to meet mist things, but, perhaps sensing the possibility in the lonely air, Alice did no such thing; she flitted lightly, ever ahead, feet touching on stones and logs and burial markers too lightly to leave footsteps though her socks were wet, as though stillness was to her an impossibility.

"Your mother said you know this place well." He was having to pick his steps carefully to keep up. Whenever he fell too far behind, the girl would wait, bouncing up and down on agile feet.

"Of course. I've always lived here," Alice said softly, almost wistfully.

"You don't remember your parent's other house?" She shook her head, skipping ahead once again so that Layton had to call the rest of the question after her. "Do they ever talk about what it was like before they came here?"

"Daddy does sometimes; he likes to tell me stories. One time, he went all the way up to London to look at a museum, and the museum was shut. And there was a park he liked to go to, and a dog stole his briefcase. He said one day he's gonna take me there too, and we can get ice cream." The story bounced with her from stone to twig to tuft of thick, verdant grass.

Perhaps yesterday, Layton might have focused further on Holt's recounts of his life before this village of disappearances. He couldn't quite pin point the moment at which the line of inquiry in his head had turned from the vanished man himself to his wife.

"That's nice. Your mother doesn't talk about her old home though?" That drew her to a halt.

"She doesn't like it. She… she told me about the fire. She didn't like it."

Fire. Layton's pondering was tinged frustration at having pushed the child's words to the back of his disordered mind the day before. Alice, he recalled, was not permitted to speak about the matter for fear of The Lady, though who that was he still only had suspicions. But for her to bring it up as a subject in relation to her parents old home meant that it had to be part of something that happened before the letters...

(At the very beginning of this, hadn't the detective said Holt had to move house due to something terrible no one had put a name to? Why would Lillian forbid Alice to talk of a disaster that happened in a home she didn't remember, and why would The Lady have any investment in it if her involvement was constrained to Maidenhull? Perhaps they were looking at things wrong; perhaps this wasn't something that started with the letters at all.)

"It must have been frightening," he commiserated, instead of saying any of this.

"Mhm." Alice's mouth performed a jerky, convulsive gesture, settling in to a sharp shape that said distress. "She was trying to make me feel better."

Layton spent a long minute trying to twist his mind in to a shape where the logic of that announcement made sense.

"And… how was talking about fire going to do that?"

"I don't want to talk about it," Alice snapped, voice like a reactionary slap. Apology—unnecessary as it was—flooded her features immediately and she continued, unwilling but soft. "Their house caught fire, and then they had to come here. I used to have bad dreams about everything burning down—Mama said she had them too." The little face was creased with contrition. "I'm not telling you any more."

Catching up to her more easily now that she had stopped, Layton put a hand on her shoulder—cold beneath the silk of her dress—and squeezed it in as reassuring a fashion as he could, thoughts tumbling about within his skull as he pulled them from their place and laid them out in new shapes.

"That's alright Alice, you've done well. Thank you for being so helpful." The girl gave a small, relieved sigh and skipped on once more. It was clear that, for her, the matter was already forgotten.

These earliest stages of night were blue as they fell, and so it was easy to believe it was not truly dark. Evening came hastily on to the world stage, still straightening its hat and fumbling with its gloves. It rather felt as though the whole dismal day was being swept away with great determination, as though getting it over and done with would void it's tribulations. Of course, in actuality, it just left them all rather prematurely in the dark.

That evening, the air smelled of turquoise and jade, and was corpse-cold and corpse-still. Every second was an etching on a slide, the whole world a pile of these which great hands were sifting through at such a speed that things were allowed a semblance, an illusion, of movement. At any moment, they might stop, and the little creatures that wandered in the grim beauty of that place would find themselves back at the beginning again, having not moved at all. From time to time, the hands would pause on one of their slides; during those moments, time would stretch out like a stiff limb—carefully and with a little pain—and one could faintly hear, behind the veil of reality, the mother-of-pearl, bony chatter of all those impending moments clattering impatiently against each other.

There was an enamel coating on the vision, a thickening and solidifying of the lens that separated the individual and the world. Layton watched the graveyard pass by from somewhere, not outside himself, but deeper within his being than he had ever been previously. The best word for that walk through the graveyard was 'dreamlike', though with the slight sourness of a nightmare, the slight rosy ache of something on the horizon that was more likely to be fire than dawn..

Layton suddenly became aware that they were headed towards a precipice. Not one of the literal sort—the ground was composed of gentle rises and falls and, aside from the hollows before the headstones, was flat and uninterrupted—but, up ahead, somewhere in the distance, there was a point of collapse. It wasn't a matter of black holes or whirlpools, it wasn't drawing them in or participating actively in their march, but there it lay, a hollow crux that they walked towards at a pace inexorable. At the end of this path was the explanation and end of everything, and he was being led by a mischievous sprite made of mud and moonlight.

Surreptitiously, Layton tried to slow his feet and found them quite unwilling to comply.

"Alice, we should think about turning back now," he called to the little figure up ahead, voice too loud though he spoke softly. "Your shoes can wait until morning; we shouldn't be wandering around in the dark like this."

"No!" Sudden as lightning, the girl was at his side, small hands digging fiercely in to his arm. "No, no, you have to come! You have to! Tomorrow is too late!"

There was an air of strident insistence in that little face, a fury that was neither small nor girl-like. Her eyes were wild and full of stormy thrashing. It was more than determination; he would be going with her, and if she had to seize him by the scruff and drag him along with all the strength in her tiny, wrathful fists, then so be it. Going was not the question, the question was how he got there.

This was not about shoes anymore. Layton wondered whether it had ever really been about shoes, whether the abandoning of those shoes in the very beginning had been part of the plan.

He wondered whether Lillian knew of her daughter's conspiracy and what part she, unknowing or otherwise, played in its machinations. Or perhaps this had been Lillian's enterprise all along.

"Alright Alice," he whispered, watching strange things howl through the little girl's head. "Alright."

Their destination revealed itself to have not been much farther after that outburst. Perhaps the place sensed that it ought to catch its prey quickly lest they run from the place as everyone sensible had done before them.

There was nothing endemically unique about the crumbled little cluster of stones they had come to, but there was an air of finality to the place. Like a sigh, perhaps of relief, perhaps of resignation—here you are at last, the world breathed, closing its eyes, at the end of this road, where you were always meant to be. Four battered headstones, leant against one another in childish conspiracy, with the wind whisking secrets between them, and, set slightly aside was a fifth with its white stone stark, scraped of moss and lichen. A little clay vase, clumsily formed, sat at the foot of the last grave full of marigolds, their petals a little scrunched but still plump enough that they must have been picked recently, and there was an inch of clear water in the vessel that said their picker wanted them to stay lovely for a little while yet. Nearby was an arrangement of sticks and fabric, a configuration something like a fort or a tent, just large enough for a childish body to wriggle beneath; within the lazy gape of its mouth was a large, flat stone, upon which was piled a few worn books, a rumpled blanket, and a pair of shoes shiny as wet leaves.

The sheet was canvas, heavy and thick, richly stained and greasy with old oil paint. Alice dived into the dark gape of it's mouth and began buckling her shoes with an intensity of focus that said she didn't want to watch as Layton approached the lonely grave.

The earth before the headstone was sloped inwards and, though not freshly turned, fresher than it should have been for a place left abandoned for centuries. The central depression was just deep enough that it would be made level by a small body lying in its middle... as though something the size and shape of a child had been taken from its heart.

The Professor knelt before the marker like a reverent at an alter, momentarily overcome with a wretchedness that was immortal and inexplicable, a sense which was gone as quickly as it had come but had been enough to rob him of his breath and stiffen his lungs against taking in another one. At one time there had been many names inscribed in to the stone, but the visiting rains had, in their fascination, run their fingers over the grooves and stolen away the letter's meaning. Much of the text had been long since washed out to sea, washed meaningless by waters ancient and eager for thoughts to fill their depths, but one near the middle retained some soft distinction. A careful hand had scraped away at the deepest indents so that parts of the sunken words were still legible:

A L - - E L - - D - L

-73-/-4-

With careful fingers he could scarcely feel, Layton traced the spaces on the headstone where the lettering had been stolen by the intervening years, feeling the stone's memory of the words an equally careful hand had once etched there. It was readable, but only just. A straight vertical line after the wobble of an L, a curve before the E like a circle with a slice taken out of it. And again in the second word; a line, a shape that felt precisely the way the D beside it looked, and another vertical line, this time with three prongs extending leftwards, two from its ends and one from its middle.

ALICE LIDDEL

1739/1748

There were footsteps from behind him. Alice, her shoes recovered, her childish solemnity damning. "This one is mine. This is my stone." Alice's voice was small and gentle, the voice of someone with bad news.

"When you say yours, do you mean you were... named after the girl who was buried here? You two have the same name?" Already she was shaking her head.

"No. No I was named first. I was named before the stone. It's mine."

In so many ways, it was such an illogical question he felt foolish for even considering asking it. In others, it felt terribly appropriate.

"Were you buried here?" He could barely hear his own voice. They were coming to the end now, he could see the ground running out in front of him and yet he couldn't stop the marching of their investigation now. This was it; this was the precipice. Alice seemed to know it too.

"I don't remember. I don't know what happened to me. One day, I just woke up." The eyes in that little face were very wide, completely guileless, and entirely too old for her face. She had her mother's eyes. "Did I do well?"

Round, sad eyes, like the hollows in the little skull. A voice like a knelling bell that came and went from nowhere. The graveyard and Graveside House... it all led back to something dead...

"Yes," he whispered, transfixed, the feeling of old, weathered words cold where they clung to his fingers. "Thank you Alice." Quick fingers plucked a flower from its fellows in the vase and slipped it in to the band of his top hat.

Then he blinked… and when he returned to the world that sparse instance later, Alice was gone. The shoes were gone. The headstone was gone. Once more, Layton stood before the cemetery gates, which were closed by joined stone hands, it's secrets and spectres cradled close to its breast. Descole stood beside him, notebook clutched to his chest with white knuckles. Still The Professor could hear her voice finishing its song, that childish lullaby, over the contentious click of water and stone and the beating of his own heart:

"In the house of upside down, found is lost and lost is found…"

~END OF CHAPTER 3~