sprouted black wings and fluttered, batting itself against the lid, its entire being bent on escape. Soon enough, I thought. Soon enough you can come out and start your work.
From my breast pocket I took the vial of Konrad’s hair and set it on the table.
I looked at Henry and Elizabeth. “We will do this,” I said.
Henry nodded. “Yes.”
I saw Elizabeth take a deep breath, but her gaze was steady as she nodded. In the church that day, before the painting of Jesus and Lazarus, she’d made her decision, and she’d never been one to back down. “What do we do first?”
“Well, it’s… fairly straightforward,” I said. “First the hole.”
I passed Henry a shovel, and plunged mine into the dirt floor behind the table. Working together it was a quick enough job. The hole was shallow, no more than a foot deep, and six in length. A crib, I thought.
But it looked more like a grave.
At its bottom the earth was moist and claylike. Elizabeth pushed back her sleeves and knelt. She took several handfuls of thick mud and started working away, fashioning a torso, pinching off a head, then arms, then shaping the lower half into two legs. She used the tip of her little finger to make indentations for the eyes and then traced a mouth. Watching, I had a sudden memory of her as a little girl, sitting in the courtyard garden, making shapes in the soil with a stick, her brow furrowed with concentration.
I couldn’t help laughing. “I can’t see you taking such care over me,” I said. “Two splats of mud, and away we go.”
When she looked up at me, her eyes were wet.
“You’ve done a fine job,” I told her, my voice softening. I knelt down beside her. “Here.” I helped her smooth the outlines of the little mud creature, as though this would give it a greater chance of becoming perfect, of becoming Konrad. Our fingers touched and, for just a split second, lingered, as though remembering something. Then she pulled back her hand to continue her work alone. I stood and watched.
“How long will it take, before it grows to its proper size?” Henry asked.
I conjured up the stone book’s searing chain of images-the sun chasing the darkness across the twitching body of the mud man. “I’m not sure. It was a good number of days. Six, perhaps?”
“And then?”
“We’ll give the body a drop of the elixir and enter the spirit world.”
“But wouldn’t the body appear in the spirit world too?” asked Henry. “And then we’d have two Konrads?”
From the floor Elizabeth shook her head, frowning. “The body won’t enter. It has no spirit, and it’s our spirits that inhabit the land of the dead.”
“Precisely,” I said, though it had taken me some time to puzzle this out myself. “The body will wait in the real world for Konrad’s spirit to claim it.”
“But how will Konrad find his body without a talisman?” Henry asked.
This I’d already considered. “Before we enter, we’ll put some talisman in the creature’s fist, and when we enter the spirit world, the body won’t be there but the talisman will be. I’ll need your help now, Henry.”
We returned to the table.
“We need our butterfly spirit to bind with Konrad’s hair,” I said.
Henry took up the jar with the spirit and peered inside. “The moment we unscrew this lid…”
I nodded. “It’ll try to escape onto one of us, me most likely. It seems to prefer me.”
“Your irresistible charm,” said Henry.
I chuckled nervously. Everything suddenly seemed unreal. Were we really doing this?
“Is our mud creation complete?” I asked Elizabeth.
She nodded and came to the table.
I handed Henry the vial of Konrad’s hair and took hold of the jar with the butterfly spirit. “I’ll slide open the lid just a touch, and you jam the end of your vial inside and shake out the hair-quickly, mind.”
“I’m ready,” he said, removing the small cork from the vial.
The moment I put my hand atop the lid, the spirit became still at the bottom of the jar, attentive, coiled. I unscrewed the lid and held it firmly in place for a moment, while Henry positioned the vial. He nodded, and I slid the lid an inch to the side.
Henry darted the vial into the gap but didn’t even have time to shake out the hair. In the blink of an eye the spirit sprang into the vial, where it stretched itself long and spiraled in a frenzy round and round the strands of Konrad’s hair.
“What do I do?” whispered Henry.
“Stay still, stay still,” I hissed. “Elizabeth, the cork!”
She snatched it up from the table. I pulled back the jar’s lid so she could reach inside with her slim hands and jam the cork hard into the inverted top of the vial.
“Thank goodness,” I breathed. Trapped inside, the spirit hungrily twined with Konrad’s hair until it was difficult to tell them apart. Henry’s hands were shaking slightly.
“What’s the best way to put this inside the mud creature?” he asked.
“Let’s do it now while it’s occupied,” I said. The spirit was still ecstatically entangled with Konrad’s hair.
Swiftly we moved to the hole, where Elizabeth knelt and pressed her thumb deep into the center of the little mud creature’s torso.
I seized a small handful of clay, ready. Henry held the stoppered vial against the cavity in the mud man’s chest.
“Look at it,” Elizabeth said, pointing. The spirit had bundled itself and Konrad’s hair into a small compact ball. It pulsed darkly.
“Open and pour,” I told Henry.
He yanked out the cork and shook the vial, and the hair and the spirit rolled out and into the mud creature. Instantly I pushed some clay over the top, sealing the cavity. Elizabeth added a little more, smoothing it. Then we pulled back our hands and just stared.
It was only mud, just a sad little mud baby made by children.
“Will this work?” Elizabeth whispered.
“Yes,” I said fervently.
After a few minutes we left the cottage, secured the door with a padlock, and started the walk back to the chateau, all our hopes and fears carried silently within us.
We’d just entered the main hall, our hands still damp from washing them at the stable pump, when Dr. Lesage appeared, coming down the main staircase.
“How’s Mother?” I asked.
“Oh, her spirits seem improved today. She said she had a nice chat with you earlier.”
“May we visit her?” Elizabeth asked.
“She’s taking the rest she needs right now,” said the doctor. “Don’t look so grave, Miss Lavenza. She has no disease of the body. Time will be her cure, I have no doubt.”
“Well, I’m glad to hear it,” said Elizabeth.
The doctor turned to me. “And I’m glad to catch you before I leave, young sir. Your parents wanted me to have a quick look at you.”
“But I’m not ill,” I blurted, and regretted it, for I’d sounded almost guilty.
“I merely want to examine your hand,” the doctor said with a reassuring smile. “Your father said he still sees you wince from time to time. Is it giving you pain?”
Elizabeth and Henry left us. We went into the empty dining room, and I sat by the window while the doctor bent his head to examine the ugly stumps of my severed fingers. His forehead bore liver spots, and there was dandruff among his thinning hair. He seemed older than I remembered. His hands were pleasantly warm, and I felt my shoulders relax.
“The wounds are healing well. There is no sign of infection or disease.”
“It was never the wounds that hurt,” I told him.
“No. You feel the pain where the fingers once were, yes?”
