Cordelia “the museum curator”'s Arc

Chapter 5 of 8

Cordelia climbed until her head met the hatch. She pushed it up with one shoulder and let it fall open against the attic floor. Dust rolled down onto her sleeve. She did not climb through. Something shifted above her in the dark. A slow drag, then a soft sound like a child drawing breath. She froze on the ladder and listened. The sound came again. A thin cry, no louder than a sigh. She lifted the lantern through the opening and set it on the boards just inside the hatch. Then she pressed down on the wood with her free hand, testing. The boards held. She slid the lantern forward by its handle, a foot at a time, watching for sag or splinter. The floor took its weight without a sound. Only then did she put her head through. A shape stood at the far end of the attic. A girl, small, in a pale dress, her edges trailing off into the air like smoke pulled from a candle. Cordelia's foot slipped on the rung. She caught the hatch frame with both hands and stopped herself from falling. The girl turned. Her eyes were very large and very dark. She saw that Cordelia saw her. "Please do not be afraid," the girl said. Then she thinned out and was gone. Cordelia held the frame a moment longer. "Peculiar," she said aloud, to steady her own voice. She pulled herself up through the hatch and stood. She lifted the lantern. The beam swept the room in pieces. First an easel, grey with dust, cobwebs strung corner to corner across the empty frame. Then a low table of dried brushes and cracked tubes, the paint inside gone to stone. Then an old trunk with its lid half open. Then, on the bare floor, a framed portrait laid face up. A pale girl with dark hair and dark eyes looked back at her. It was the same child from the carousel painting left at her door. The same face, Cordelia knew, that resembled her own at that age. Beside the frame lay a black stuffed horse, floppy at the legs, its mane matted flat. She had owned that horse. Her mother had bought it for her at the carousel. Cordelia knelt. She did not touch the portrait or the toy. Past them, near the trunk, a single sheet of paper lay weighted by a dry brush. She slid it free. It was a list, handwritten in faded ink, of paintings by title and date. She did not yet know what the list named, or whose hand had written it, or how a toy from her childhood had come to rest in a room sealed before her birth. She knew only that the list mattered. She folded it once, slid it into her coat, and looked back at the empty corner where the girl had stood.