Chapter 3 - The House of the Three Nails
The three lanterns stopped at the edge of the porch rail.
There was no sound of boots on the pine steps. No creak of the cedar balustrade. Only three yellow points of light burning through the thick glass of heavy, square-built sea-lamps that smelled of lard rather than kerosene.
Clara did not reach for the door bolt. She took the heavy iron poker from beside the peat stove, holding it low at her side, her thumb pressed against the cold turn of the handle.
"William," she said softly. "Get behind the table."
The door did not knock. It opened inward—three inches—with a slow, dry rustle of the hinges that sounded like dried leaves being ground under a heel.
A man stood on the threshold.
He was tall—nearly six feet four—and wore a long coat made of untanned seal-skin, the fur turned inward against his body. His face was long, narrow, and so pale that it looked as though it had been scrubbed with lye and sand until the blood had been completely removed from the skin. He had no eyelashes, and his eyelids were rimmed with a hard, white cartilage that prevented them from closing completely.
Behind him stood two younger men, built with the same narrow shoulders and long, heavy arms that hung down past their knees. Neither of them wore hats despite the freezing air, and their dark, coarse hair was plastered to their scalps with grey grease.
"Dr. Finch," the tall man said.
His voice did not sound as though it came from his throat. It was high, whistling, like the wind passing through a narrow keyhole in an empty room.
"I am Dr. Finch," Clara said, stepping between the door and the chair where Thomas Vance still lay unconscious. "If you are from the fishing village at the Cove, the dispensary is closed until six tomorrow morning. If you have an injury, step inside one at a time."
The tall man did not step inside. His lightless eyes moved past Clara's shoulder, fixing directly on the floorboards where the grey slime had evaporated into a faint, violet stain.
"You took the needle out of the bone," he said.
It was not a question.
"I extracted a foreign parasite from Thomas Vance’s right auditory canal," Clara said, raising the poker six inches. "He is my patient. If you are his kin, you may wait on the porch while I prepare his transfer to the district infirmary."
The man in the seal-skin coat slowly lifted his right hand from his pocket.
His hand had four fingers, but they were not arranged like a human hand. The thumb was set two inches lower on the wrist, short and thick as a turnip, while the remaining three fingers were long, twice-jointed, and tipped with flat, spade-like nails that were yellow as horn.
He held a small wooden box—three inches square, carved from heavy black oak, bound with three copper wire loops.
"Give it back," he whistled.
"There is nothing to give back," Clara said. "The specimen was destroyed during extraction."
The two men behind the tall man shifted their weight simultaneously. Their boots made no sound on the wet stone of the porch, but their coats rustled with a strange, dry rasp—like dry corn-husks rubbing together in a barn.
The tall man tilted his head four inches to the left. His neck made three sharp, crackling sounds, like dry pine twigs snapping under a boot.
"The bone in his head belongs to the Well," he said. "The thread was seventy years in the iron. It was nearly long enough to reach the water."
"He is forty-two years old," Clara said, her voice dropping into her professional register—the tone she used when confronting drunken porters at the infirmary gates. "His father was Samuel Vance, the cooper at the cove. He was born in the house behind the salt-works."
"His father was the well-head," the man replied. He took one step over the threshold.
His foot—encased in a heavy leather boot with no buckles—did not make a sound as it struck the cedar floorboards. But the tallow lamp on the peat stack flickered violently, its yellow flame shrinking down to a blue pin-prick no larger than a pea.
"William," Clara said, without turning her head. "The stove door."
The boy did not answer, but there was a sharp clank as the cast-iron door of the peat stove was thrown wide.
A wave of red light and intense heat flooded the front of the room. The glowing embers of dry peat and sea-coal cast long, blood-colored shadows across the seal-skin coat of the man in the doorway.
In the red light, Clara saw his eyes clearly for the first time.
They were not human eyes. There were no pupils—only two flat, milky discs of dark grey horn, covered in a thick layer of clear mucus that did not blink when the hot draft from the stove hit his face.
"Back," Clara said, lunging forward with the iron poker.
She did not aim for his chest; she aimed for the soft turn of his throat beneath his beard.
The point of the heavy iron rod struck him three inches below the jaw.
It did not feel like striking flesh. It felt like plunging a iron bolt into a sack of damp grain. The metal sank two inches into his skin, but no blood came out. There was only a dry, dull thud, and the tall man did not even sway.
He raised his four-fingered hand, his spade-like nails closing around the hot iron rod three inches from Clara’s knuckles.
May you like
His skin was so cold that the heat of the red-hot poker hissed against his palm, sending a thin curl of white smoke into the air between them. The smoke smelled of old grease and wet wool.
"The thread," he whistled, his face inches from hers. "Or the child in the box."
