For Lenore, a playroom.
For Ezekiel’s wife, a nursery.
Now it is something else.
Now it breathes.
That room is the house’s lungs, ghosts.
Lenore built her walnut men out of loneliness. She made a dollhouse and brought it to life with real teeth, gluing them in one by one as marble for the floors. Vivian kept it alive. She fed it. She made the dolls for Lenore like a ritual. Sewing hair from dead people into dolls’ heads.
One big, fucked-up, stitched-together family.
Vivian always had someone to take care of. And the kids they took, the ones who drank her tea, they didn’t last. Overdosed. Every one of them. Because the tea was laced with oleander leaves, poison from her sister Rose, back in La Maddalena.
She said the sickness ran in the family.
That kind of poison doesn’t just live in plants. It lives in blood. In bones.
She talked about it too much.
Now she doesn’t talk at all.
I keep her tongue, dried now, hanging on the same hook they used to torture others.
And me?
I did things too.
I brought them more poor souls. Thought if I gave them enough, they would let Lenore go.
But you can’t free what’s already broken.
You can’t rescue someone shattered because when you try, they fall apart.
And I was the one who caught the pieces and bled on everyone.
You can’t fix the broken. But you can learn to love the cracks.
You can’t glue someone back together and expect them to be whole. The fractures stay. The scars stay. Nothing broken is perfect.
And I never wanted perfect anyway.
I just wanted her.
Scars and all.
But if I wanted to save myself, I had to let go. I had to leave, just like she left me.
Gloomsbury Manor chooses the broken ones. The people who are already one step into the grave, not because they’re dying, but because they’re decaying. The house picks its ghosts carefully, traps them, feeds on them. Everyone who got stuck here had something dark growing inside. Something that had been growing from the start.
And I was all alone, in the place where dark things bloom. Where everything we buried stayed behind. Roses in full bloom, and underneath them, rot. A graveyard dressed in petals.
Nagi hissed against my neck. She hadn’t left my body since the night I almost died. Maybe she was scared too. Or maybe she just wanted to make sure that the next breath I took was the last.
But that’s just me, right? I was always the crazy one.
And you shouldn’t touch the crazy.
