The Twelfth Enchantment: A Novel

the chair, and ignoring Lucy completely, threw open the door to the office. The dust from the mill filtered in at once, as did the gloomy silence and the heat of so many bodies in close proximity.

“Get back to work, you mutinous bastards!” cried one of the overseers.

Lucy saw the balding red-haired man shouting and swinging his cudgel at the shoulder of a child not twelve years old who sat perfectly still, his hands in his lap. The cudgel struck with a dull smack, but the boy did not respond. None of the workers moved or spoke or so much as turned their heads. They sat entirely motionless, rows of them, silent and still as the dead, a mute audience with glassy eyes.

“You must make him stop it!” Lucy cried. She could not believe what she saw. The strangeness. The cruelty. This was not the world as she knew it, but some terrible, alien place, and she wanted no part of it.

Mr. Olson did not hear her. “What goes on here?” he demanded.

None of the workers spoke. The overseer stepped forward. “They on a sudden stopped. No reason, and all at once.”

“I can have replacements for every last one of you before sunup,” said Mr. Olson. “Do not think to test me.”

No one answered. Somewhere within the building, a bird took wing. Mr. Olson balled his hands into childish fists. “This is Luddite business. These people have been put up to combining against me.”

Lucy managed to take a step closer. One of the women in the row closest to her suddenly turned her head in a sharp and twitchy gesture, like a startled squirrel. She studied Lucy briefly and then opened her mouth. She paused for a moment and then spoke. “Gather the leaves.”

The fear that had been building within Lucy now gathered its forces and engulfed her. The words spoken by the mill worker had been enough to stagger her, but there was far more here to terrify. Everywhere in the mill were dark corners, pockets of shadows. Every one of these seethed and pulsed with insubstantial creatures such as the one Lucy had seen when she’d removed Lord Byron’s curse. Like that shadowy presence, these beings were composed of darkness, but they had distinctive shapes. She saw legs, spindly hands with wispy fingers, flickering tails, and vile teeth that rose from open mouths to dissipate like smoke. They were visible only from the corners of her eyes, and the instant she gazed directly at one of these forms, it vanished in the shifting light. Still, Lucy sensed them moving and throbbing and swarming like great clusters of slick and pulsating insect larvae. Instinctively, she understood that she alone could perceive these awful creatures. She had been touched by something, and now she could see what others could not. Perhaps what frightened her most was that she understood these things had always been there, lurking and watching and pulsing, and she too had once been oblivious.

Without thinking, she grabbed one of Mr. Olson’s arms, but he shook her off as though she were an ill- behaved dog. The absent cruelty of that gesture helped her to clear her thoughts.

One of the other laborers, a little girl, also turned her head. “You must gather the leaves.” She spoke the words, and the shadow creatures writhed and shifted and leapt from rafter to rafter, like clouds of darkness that passed over Lucy’s head.

More mill workers now spoke. Gather the leaves. You must gather the leaves. Their sound was a cacophony, each speaking over the other, but all fifty of them said it again and again. An entire mill full of workers had ceased their labors to tell her something desperately important, and she had no idea what it meant. And while they spoke, the shadowy forms circled above them, all moving clockwise, as though forming a vortex that would suck them all upward, flying into oblivion.

“This is utter rubbish,” Mr. Olson told her, “but it is Luddite rubbish, and therefore dangerous. You must go.” He took her arm with an impatient grip and opened the outer door to his private room. Lucy cast one more glance at the mill workers, calling out as though mad, as though lost in religious ecstasy. She took in one more peripheral glance of the frenzied creatures, and then helplessly and gratefully let Mr. Olson lead her away. The cold air rushed into her lungs, the safety of the woods invited her. Lucy wondered if he had a private door for convenience or to allow for an escape should he ever face such an uprising.

“Have no fear,” Mr. Olson said. “The mill will continue to produce.”

He spared a brief look in her direction and then closed the door without further ceremony. Lucy stood in the cold, unable to determine what to do. The sudden silence, the stillness in the air, the absence of the host of insubstantial creatures now seemed odd and inexplicable. The quiet felt unnatural, like an accusation. How could it be that all those people spoke the exact words Lord Byron had said? How could those creatures be real? Was this truly—and she hardly wished to use the word, even to her herself—magic? It was like that moment, in the inn in Dartford when she’d seen her father standing by the fire, tears running down his face, and she’d understood, all at once, that the world was far different from what she had always supposed. Then, she had discovered the world’s sadness, and today, she had discovered its darkness.

Lucy forgot to breathe, and then, against her will, she sucked in a thirsty gulp of air.

With nothing else to do, Lucy began to walk from the mill. She was afraid, but also curious, and so she swallowed her fear and circled around to the still-open front door. As she grew closer, once more she could hear the mumbled chanting, the rustling non-sound of the creatures’ frenzied circling.

Frightened, but too curious to turn away, Lucy approached the front of the mill. The dirt and dead leaves and twigs crunched under her feet. She heard the distant hooting of an owl. The overlapping voices repeated their refrain until she was no more than twenty feet from the open door, and then, all at once, the chant stopped. For a moment there was only silence, and then came the clacking of a single loom, joined by another, and then a loud cough, and the busy thrum of a fully functioning mill. Lucy had the strange idea that if she were to step only a little closer the work would cease once more, the chanting would resume, and the shadows would again quicken. She believed it as much as she believed anything, yet she dared not put this notion to test lest she discover that she was right.

A hundred feet up the path, with the declining sun now in her eyes, Lucy saw a figure—still and straight and tall with wide shoulders. She could not see his face, so glaring was the sun, but she had the distinct impression that he stared at her, that he waited for her.

Lucy thought of retreating to the mill, but she could not go back there, not with those workers, with their dead eyes and their monotonous chants. And this man had not threatened her. He might only be a farmer or a laborer on his way, wanting nothing more from her than to tip his hat and wish her a good afternoon.

The figure did not move. She could see almost nothing of him, and put a hand to her forehead in an effort to shield her eyes from the sun’s glare, but it did little good.

“Good afternoon,” she said cautiously.

He stepped closer. His movements were stiff and lumbering, and yet unnaturally quick. The whole effect of him presented a convoluted image, as though his limbs were attached in some wrong way and as though he, like the creatures from the mill, were made of shadows. He did not seem vile like those scattering, pulsating things, but he was somehow similar. And yet, unlike too, for despite all the shimmering obscurity, he was a lumbering figure of a man, dressed in rough clothes, and he held in one hand a massive hammer—the sort used for … for breaking things. He was, she now understood, a machine breaker. This man was a Luddite.

“Miss Derrick,” he said in a voice deep and resonant and low, like the mournful note of a brass horn. She felt her bones vibrate. “Miss Derrick, you must gather the leaves.”

Partly out of terror, and partly out of exasperation, she squatted down and clutched a handful of limp winter-worn leaves that remained upon the ground, holding them out toward the silhouette. “Will this do?”

The man laughed, and the sound was rich and throaty. “That is not what is meant.”

“Then perhaps you will tell me what is meant,” said Lucy. She dropped the leaves and slapped her hands together to knock away the dirt. She was beginning to find her confidence, and liked it. Whoever, whatever this man was, he was not like the black thing she’d seen last night; he was not a creature of void and darkness. “Who are you? And where are these leaves I must gather, and why and what must I do with them once they are in a nice little pile?”

His face was still hidden, but Lucy had the distinct impression that he smiled. “You will know when it is time. You have seen that there are those who do not wish you to succeed, and so you must wait until you are ready. You are not yet ready.”

“Then why do you tell me to do what I am not yet ready to do?”

The hidden man cocked his head slightly, giving the impression that he smiled, though she could not know for certain. “So you will make yourself ready. Those who are to be your allies prepare themselves. You have seen the mill and the horror it brings. With what shall you counter something like that?”