Turn 2 of 8

Ask him what the thing that follows looks like, or sounds like

He sits where you point — the stool by the window, the one with the wobble you keep meaning to fix. You leave the coins on the counter and lean against the apothecary chest, arms folded, far enough away that he has room to think. Rain taps the glass behind him in no hurry at all. You let the quiet hold until he fills it, because the shape of what someone says first matters less than the shape of what they say when the silence gets too heavy.

"I don't know what it looks like," he says. He is looking at his hands, which are clean and well-kept and gripping his own knees.

"That's the worst part, in a way. I've never seen it. Not properly. It's always at the edge — the corner of a room, the treeline behind you when you turn a bend in the road. A shape that isn't a shape." He pauses.

"Like breath on a cold window, if the breath had weight."

You ask about sound, because sound is often more honest than sight when the Underwood is involved. Things from the wood are better at hiding what they look like than hiding what they sound like. The old accounts in your great-grandmother's ledger say that — she wrote it in the margin of the henbane entry, underlined it twice, and you've never forgotten it.

Aldous's jaw tightens. "Footsteps. Always footsteps, and always behind me. Never close enough to count — never a rhythm I can set my own walk against. It's like it knows exactly how far back to stay so that I can't be certain I'm hearing it. So that I'll tell myself it's the wind, or my own heartbeat, or water in a pipe." He looks up at you then, and the exhaustion in his face is worse than fear would be.

"But three nights ago, in a room with no wind and no pipes, I heard breathing."

You say nothing yet. You let the lamp hiss and the rain work its way down the glass, and you watch him hold himself together on your wobbly stool. He has told you about the sound and the absence of sight. He has not told you what he did — what he walked into the Underwood for, or what he took out of it. The breathing is new. Three nights old, he said, which means it is getting closer, or getting braver, or both. You need to know the rest, but you need him to tell it in the right order, and so you wait for him to find it.