Chapter 1: Many Happy Returns

The song arrived before anything else in the room did.

“Black mandrake, black mandrake,
the rose says you have stolen her light.
The lily says you have soured her bed,
and the little moss climbs the wall in fright.”

Second floor of the castle, the small west study. The sun was still sliding down the sky at that hour — the Tail, the district at the bottom of the city, asleep under it, and Vesper asleep behind the Tail — and a small speaker on the shelf played on at low volume, cold and sweet and very clear, the way a children’s choir is when it has been recorded well.

The lord of the house lay on the rug. Face down, and square to the rug: straight lines, right angles, one cheek turned so that he looked into a dark crystal bottle. A tube ran from the bottle into the back of his skull, and it had been at its work a while.

The lord’s pupils had already gone.

A pair of white-gloved hands came into the lamplight. They pinched the tube shut, lifted the bottle, held it up and turned it, watching what moved inside. Then a dropper. One drop onto the tongue. A pause while the drop was considered, and a sigh at the end of it — the sigh a man gives a wine that has gone wrong in the barrel.

The gloves set the bottle down. Their owner bent, took the lord up off the floor, and stood with him.

Three hundred pounds and then some. When he sat, the fat of his belly ran over the edges of the chair; the gloves lifted all of it without a change of breath, the way you lift a mattress, no weight in it at all and no good place to get a hold of, and carried him around the desk and put him into a suit. White plush, one piece, feet and hood together, the kind of thing that goes to a children’s party or a hospital ward.

The speaker went into the next verse.

“Black mandrake, black mandrake,
the bee won’t make a sound.
The spider is sewing a funeral gown,
and the ants sing: burn it, burn it, burn the bad flower down.”

The gloves fitted the long ears over the lord’s head, eased them down until the fit sat right, and turned the soft white muzzle to the light to see how it hung.

Then a needle, thread, a pair of small shears, and a ruler.

He sewed the nostrils narrow first, two stitches to each, until they were two slits with nothing human left in them. Then the mouth: three cuts with the shears, and the lips came open into a rabbit’s split lip, three lobes, wet at the seams. Then the whiskers. Long needles of pale metal, three to a side, pushed into the fat of the cheeks at an angle, and the ruler was there to keep the spacing exact — the distance from each needle to the next, from the first needle to the corner of the mouth, from the last to the jaw. Measure, mark, push, measure again. Nothing was allowed to sit crooked.

By the end of the verse, the fat lord was a soft white rabbit, seated, hands in his lap, ears up.

The gloves brought a small cake out of the toolbox and set it on the far side of the desk, across from the rabbit, and stuck it with candles — colored ones, the sort that come twisted, in a paper pack of twelve. He lit them with a match. The flame took, and on that exact beat the speaker finished one track and began the next: the birthday song, the one everybody in the world knows, as though somebody had rehearsed the changeover twice.

The gloved hands folded. Whoever was in them shut his eyes. The birthday song played through to the end.

He pinched the candles out, one at a time. It had probably not been a wish for world peace. Then he cut the cake into sections with the side of the fork and ate all of it, sitting across from the lord, taking his time.

“Many happy returns, Mr. Rabbit,” he said, and pushed his chair back. “Good night.”

He stacked the plate and fork on the tray, closed the toolbox, and left the room.

His shadow stayed where it was.

It lay on the rug a moment, flat as spilled paint, and then it began to move — spread out, thinned, ran up over the desk legs and across the desktop and down the front of the drawers, and wherever it went it left nothing behind. Dust, hair, a crumb of cake, the mark of a glove on the wood, a smear of something at the edge of the rug: gone, taken up, the way an eraser takes up pencil. It worked the floor from the wall to the door and found no more to do, and then it slipped out under the door and went after its owner.

Business finished, the killer went out unhurried along the west corridor of the second floor. The lord’s conceit had done him a kindness: the inside of this castle had never been wired, only the walls and the garden and the paths. The corridor was his.

Soft-soled shoes, thick carpet. He barely made a sound.

At the corner he stopped and turned to the window.

Through the glass and the low gold light he saw three small figures crossing the back garden. The one in front was a girl of ten or so, flaxen hair in a thick braid down her back, wrists and ankles grown too fast for her, so that she moved like a thing still learning its own length. A boy and a girl came after, the same age, or near enough, their hands locked together, stumbling and hurrying, losing the braid and finding her again.

The killer leaned against the window frame and watched them.

His shadow ran off him into the stone like ink into paper. It went through the wall and down over the garden and the walk and the far hedge, and every camera out there stopped having anything to look at. He hummed the mandrake song under his breath and followed the children with his eyes, with some interest, all the way across the grass to the dark of the hedge and out the other side.

“Lucky little things,” he said. “You picked a good day for it.”

Then he straightened and went on down the corridor, and the shadow pulled itself back off the wall and out of the garden and followed him. Behind him the cameras shivered on their brackets and swung back around to the empty garden and held on it.

By evening the light had come down low and flat and the ultraviolet had not let up, and the cleaners were already on shift. They were the bottom of the castle: first up, last out, the worst work, the lowest pay. Two of them came up the back stairs to the second floor, quietly, the way you go up stairs in a house that isn’t yours.

Halfway along the corridor, the one in front stopped.

“What’s that noise?”

“What?”

“Shh. Listen.”

A pause. The sound of a children’s choir, small and cold, coming through a door.

“…Is there a speaker left on somewhere?”

“Small study, I think.”

“Was the lord in the small study last night? He hates noise. Look, let’s leave the second floor. We’ll say we never got to it.”

“Can’t have been. Every curtain on the second floor was wide open when I came on at shift change, and he won’t have a curtain open, not one, not ever. And the study door isn’t even latched. That’s the night crew skiving, and us getting the— oh. Oh — sorry. Sorry, sir!”

The door came open, and he was already backing out of it. For a second he thought he had walked in on the lord’s private habits, and he did not look. He took the handle and pulled the door to, apologizing, saying they hadn’t known anyone was in, saying they’d come back later, saying anything.

“What?” said his partner behind him, blocked, seeing none of the room. “God, that’s bright.”

The study faced west. It had the strongest sun in the castle every afternoon, and even now the low light came in flat and gold across the desk, across the rug, across the chair.

The cleaner in front stopped with his hand on the door and his shoulder in the gap, and before it shut he turned and looked once more.

The lord sat in the rabbit suit with the curtains wide open and the last of the sun full in his lap. Nobody had moved him. The light was behind him and the smile was in front of him, red, wet where the stitches pulled, dried dark at the corners of the mouth, and it had set there.

The door clicked shut.

In the corridor, the small speaker carried on.

“Black mandrake, black mandrake—“