The headlights of Jonas Pryce's rental sedan carved a pale corridor through the thickening dusk as Hollowmere assembled itself from the fog, one crooked roofline at a time. He had not driven this road in eleven years, but his hands remembered the camber of every turn, the soft spots where frost heaves had cracked the asphalt and never been repaired, the place just past the salt marsh where the road dipped and the bay opened below like a held breath.
He slowed as the dormant Calder Glassworks rose on his left. Its chimney stood against the dimming sky, brick darkened with decades of soot, the windows boarded over with planks that had warped silver-grey from salt air. No smoke had risen from that stack since the spring of 1987, the year his father had stopped speaking to half the village, the year Margot had stopped speaking to his father, the year someone had lit a fire that no one ever quite explained.
Jonas let his foot ease off the gas. The sedan idled past the chain-link fence, past the faded sign whose paint had all but surrendered to the weather, leaving only the outline of a melting pot and the words "Calder" and "Glass" still faintly legible. He did not look directly at the place. He had learned, years ago, that looking too closely at old wounds only made them throb.
The wheel of the car passed over a loose manhole cover and rang against the frame, a dull iron note that seemed to wake something in the village ahead. Lights appeared in windows. The smell of wood smoke threaded through the vents, mixing with the brine off the bay, and beneath both the faint mineral tang of cold glass, as if the place itself were exhaling.
Margot Halliday had died on a Tuesday. Jonas had learned this from the lawyer's letter that arrived six days ago at his office on the fourth floor of a building in Portland, the envelope thick with unfamiliar postmark and the weight of obligation he had not asked for and could not refuse. He had read the letter standing up, with one hand still on his coat, and by the end of the first paragraph he had understood that his life was about to require a room he had spent years boarding shut.
Margot had been his father's sister. His father had been dead for four years. The funeral, the letter informed him, would take place at the house on Glassmaker's Lane, with a small reception following at the Community Hall, and the executor of the estate, a Mr. Silas Grieve, requested his presence.
Jonas had not been back to Hollowmere since the summer his father had sent him away to live with his mother's sister in Augusta. He had been seventeen. He had packed one bag. He had not been invited to anything since.
The road bent left and the bay opened below him, slate-blue and motionless under the fog, and there across the water the dark shapes of the moored lobster boats rocked in their lines with a sound like someone knocking at a distant door. He pulled into the gravel lot beside the Community Hall, turned off the engine, and sat for a moment listening to the cooling ticks of the motor and the slow drip of condensation from the undercarriage onto the stones beneath.
The Community Hall was a saltbox building the color of old milk, with two windows flanking a central door and a hand-painted banner across the porch railing that read "Welcome Family and Friends." The paint on the banner was fresh, the kind of fresh that suggested someone had made it that afternoon with a brush still wet. Jonas stepped out of the car and the cold came up off the gravel and met him halfway, sharp and mineral, the same temperature the bay kept even in August.
He crossed the lot and pushed open the door and the room met him with the smell of coffee, of lilies already beginning to weep in their vases, and of wool coats still carrying the rain. A long table had been set along the far wall with folding chairs and plates of small sandwiches under plastic wrap. A coffee urn hissed quietly in the corner. Several people he half-recognized turned at his entrance, and the room performed the careful, practiced choreography of a community deciding whether to greet the stranger as a returning son or as an inconvenience.
Jonas saw the woman at the back of the room first. She stood with her back to a photograph of Margot mounted on an easel, arms folded across the chest of a wool jacket that had seen more seasons than the woman wearing it. Her hair was grey and cut short and her face carried the particular weathering of someone who had spent forty years watching weather come in off the water. Her eyes found his across the room and did not move.
"Mr. Pryce," she said. Her voice was rough and gravelly, deep for a woman's, the consonants shaped by salt air and a coastal accent Jonas had spent years trying to sand out of his own mouth. "Sheriff Delia Vance. I believe you've had a long drive."
It was not a question. Jonas crossed the room, nodding to no one in particular, and took the hand she extended. Her grip was dry and deliberate and held on a half-second longer than necessary.
"Sheriff," he said. "I appreciate the welcome."
"There isn't one." She released his hand and studied his face with the patient attention of someone cataloguing evidence. "You're Margot's nephew. You've not been in Hollowmere since you were seventeen. You arrived at six eighteen, give or take. You've come because a letter told you to, not because you wanted to. And you are surprised that she is dead, even though she was seventy-four and had been failing for two years, because in your mind Margot Halliday was the kind of woman the world would not dare to let go of."
The words fell one by one into the room, and around them the hum of polite conversation dipped and steadied, the way a room adjusts itself around a column.
"Yes," Jonas said. "All of that."
Delia Vance regarded him for another moment. Then something at the corner of her mouth shifted, not quite a smile, more the easing of a long-held knot.
"Good," she said. "Then I can talk to you straight."
She reached into the inside pocket of her wool jacket and produced an envelope, cream-colored, sealed with a wafer of dark red wax that bore the impression of a small, unfamiliar crest. The envelope was unmarked except for a line written in black ink in handwriting Jonas did not recognize as Margot's.
"Open at the house," Delia said, and put the envelope into his hand.
Jonas looked down at it. The wax was cool to the touch, and through the paper he could feel the weight of whatever lay inside, two or three sheets at most, perhaps a single folded page.
"This came to the station a week before Margot passed," Delia said. "She mailed it to my office, not to the executor, not to the lawyer in Portland, not to anyone you'd expect. She asked me to hold it and to put it into the hand of her nephew when he arrived. No one else. Not her sister Eira, not the lawyer, not Silas Grieve, who has been handling her affairs for thirty years. You."
"Why me?"
"Because that is what she asked." Delia's voice had taken on the cadence of someone repeating words she had rehearsed to herself in the dark of her office over many nights. "And because Margot Halliday, in my experience, was not a woman who asked for things lightly. If she wanted you to have this, she had her reasons. Whether she told those reasons to anyone, I cannot say. She told them to her ledger, perhaps, and her ledger is not a thing that talks."
Jonas looked up. "Ledger?"
Delia's gaze moved to the photograph of Margot on the easel, the older woman caught mid-laugh in a frame she would not have chosen for herself, and the sheriff's expression did something complicated and quiet.
"She kept books," Delia said. "Two kinds. The kind the bank saw and the kind nobody saw. I've been harbor master in this town for twenty-six years and I have known Margot Halliday since I was a girl, and I will tell you this, Jonas Pryce, because you are the only person in this room she bothered to write to in her own hand near the end. The bank books were the smaller of the two."
Around them the reception continued in its careful way. A woman in a green cardigan refilled the coffee urn. A man with a face like a folded napkin stood by the photograph of Margot and adjusted its angle by a degree, as though the dead were particular about such things. Through the wall came the muffled sound of someone arriving on the porch, the stamp of feet, the soft complaint of an old door.
"Mr. Grieve is here," Delia said, without turning. "Silas. He is the executor and he has been waiting for you. He has a manner. I warn you of it now, so you will not mistake courtesy for warmth. He is a careful man in a town that has not been careful with itself, and he does not like surprises."
"Then he should not have invited me," Jonas said.
"He didn't." Delia's eyes came back to his. "Margot did. From her deathbed, in a letter she dictated to a nurse and that Grieve has never seen. The lawyer in Portland has the original will. Grieve has a copy. You have nothing, except what is in that envelope, and what I have just told you, and a house on Glassmaker's Lane that has not had a light in it for nine days."
The envelope seemed to warm in Jonas's hand. The wax seal pressed faintly against his palm. Somewhere outside, a gull cried once and then stopped, as if it too had decided not to repeat itself.
He put the envelope in his coat pocket. The paper settled against his chest with the particular weight of things one cannot unread.
The house on Glassmaker's Lane had the look of a thing that had been waiting. Not patient waiting, not the quiet of a watched pot, but the taut, held-breath waiting of a trap, or a mouth about to speak. Jonas Pryce paused at the iron gate and looked up at it. Victorian, Delia had said, and that was true enough in the bones of the thing, in the steep gables and the narrow windows and the asymmetric porch that leaned a little east as though it were listening for something coming up the hill. But the skin of the house was wrong for the bones. Someone had painted it the color of dried blood, a deep oxblood red that swallowed the afternoon light and gave nothing back. The window frames were black. The front door was black. The steps were black slate, and they rang under his boots as he climbed them, each footfall a small, flat bell.
The envelope sat in his coat pocket like a live thing. He had not opened it. He had walked the six blocks from the church hall with Delia Vance at his side, past the harbor and up through the village's spine, and she had not asked him to open it, and he had not offered. Now she stood on the porch beside him, her hands folded over the head of her walking stick, and watched his face as though she were reading weather.
"Grieve is inside," she said. "Theo Calder too. Eira came down from the foundry when she heard the bell. You will want to go in. I will not go in. Margot and I made our peace before she died, but the house does not know that, and I am too old to argue with a house."
She turned and went down the steps without ceremony, the stick ticking against the slate. At the gate she paused.
"The key," she said, without turning. "If there is a key in the envelope, do not try it on the door until you have read the will to its end. Margot was particular about the order of things."
Then she was gone, her dark coat swallowed by the late light, and Jonas Pryce was alone with a dead woman's house and a letter he had not yet opened.
He went inside.
The hallway smelled of woodsmoke and cold stone and something fainter, something floral and old, like pressed petals between the pages of a book no one had read in a generation. A lamp had been lit on a console table, its shade a panel of amber glass that threw a warm circle onto the floor. Above it, a mirror in a tarnished gilt frame reflected Jonas back to himself: a tall man in a dark coat, hat in hand, hair pushed back from his forehead, the lines of his face set in an expression he could not have named. He looked, he thought, like a man arriving at a station he had not intended to stop at.
Silas Grieve stood in the parlor doorway. He was small and precise, in a charcoal suit that fit him without a wrinkle, his hair combed back from a high forehead, his hands clasped lightly before him as though he were waiting to be introduced to himself. He smiled. It was the smile of a man who had practiced smiling until it no longer required his participation.
"Mr. Pryce," he said. "I am sorry it has to be this way. Please come in."
The parlor was a room that had been loved and then neglected in equal measure. A sofa upholstered in moss green velvet sagged at one end. A piano stood against the far wall, its lid closed, a sheaf of yellowed sheet music fanned across it like a hand of cards laid down in surrender. The curtains were drawn, but the afternoon pressed in at their edges, a thin bright line that traced the window's geometry onto the carpet. Two chairs had been placed facing each other near the cold fireplace. In one sat a man Jonas did not know. In the other sat a woman.
The man rose. He was younger than Jonas, broad across the shoulders, with the roughened hands and the slow, watchful eyes of a man who worked for his living. His hair was dark and cut short, and there was a smudge of soot at his temple, as if he had come in haste from somewhere hot. He offered his hand.
"Theo Calder," he said. "I keep the foundry records. My grandmother kept them before me. I came because Margot asked me to, years ago, in case anything ever happened to the casting. I did not think it would."
His handshake was dry and firm. He held Jonas's eyes a beat too long, measuring, then released him and stepped back.
The woman did not rise. She was perhaps sixty, with iron gray hair pulled into a low knot and a face that had been handsome and was now something harder than handsome, something cut. She wore a dark wool dress and a single silver brooch at her throat, shaped like a small drop of water. She looked at Jonas the way a woman looks at a letter she is not sure she wants to open.
"Eira Calder," she said. "Theo's mother. I am the last of the Calders who worked the original pour. Margot and I grew up in this house. She was my best friend, when we were young. We quarreled later. We quarreled about almost everything. I am telling you this so you will understand that what I have to say later is not said out of spite."
"Sit down, Mr. Pryce," Grieve said, drawing out one of the chairs. "Please. There is coffee, if you would like it, and there is the matter of the will. I have a copy. Margot's solicitor in Portland has the original. But Margot left a letter for you with the bank's documents, and I think you should read it first. In private, if you prefer. We can step out."
"I would prefer you to stay," Jonas said. He did not know why he said it. Perhaps because the house was listening. Perhaps because he did not trust himself, alone in a dead woman's parlor, to hear what was coming without witnesses.
Grieve inclined his head. "As you wish."
Jonas sat. He took the envelope from his pocket. The wax seal cracked under his thumb with a small, dry sound, like a knuckle popping. Inside was a single sheet of paper, folded twice, in handwriting he recognized from a hundred birthday cards and grocery lists and notes left on the kitchen table: Margot's hand, quick and slanted, the letters leaning into each other as though reluctant to be read.
He read.
Jonas,
If you are reading this I am dead. I am sorry for the bluntness. I have never been good at the soft edges of things and I am not going to start now, even for an occasion like this one. You will forgive me or you will not, and either way you will have to deal with what I have done, because I have done it and it cannot be undone.
I am leaving you everything. The house on Glassmaker's Lane, the contents of every room in it including the things in the locked room in the north wing, the bank accounts, the papers in my desk at the newspaper, the small painting of the harbor that hangs over the sideboard in the dining room, the good silver teapot that I stole from our mother and that you have always admired, and the brass key that you will find in this envelope when you have finished reading. The brass key is for the locked room. Do not use it before you have read this letter to the end. I mean this.
There is more, and I have to be quick because the nurse keeps coming in and I am running out of the kind of breath that lets a person think.
You know about the casting. Everyone in the village knows about the casting, or thinks they do, which is not the same thing. You know that my father and Delia Vance quarreled over the waters. You know that my father won the quarrel, or that he thought he did, and that the casting was poured in the year I was born, and that something went wrong with it, or something went right with it depending on whose telling you believe. You know that I left this village and did not come back except to bury my father, and that I did not stay for the funeral, and that you stayed, and that you have been here ever since, tending the foundry and the books and the slow unraveling of a town that was already half unraveled when we were children.
What you do not know is what is in the locked room.
I am not going to tell you in this letter. I am going to tell you in person, or I was going to tell you in person, and then I did not have time. So I am going to do the next best thing, which is to leave you the key and the room and the house and the responsibility of figuring out what to do with all of it. I have left a packet of papers on the desk inside. There is a journal, and there are photographs, and there is a small object wrapped in cloth that I am not going to describe because I do not trust myself to describe it accurately and I do not want you to be looking for the wrong thing when you find it.
There are conditions, Jonas. There are always conditions. You knew me.
The first condition is that you do not open the locked room until you have read everything in the packet. The second is that you do not speak of what you find to anyone in the village until you have spoken to Delia Vance, and that you do not speak to Delia Vance until you have read the journal to the end. The third is that you do not destroy anything, and that you do not give anything away, and that you do not, under any circumstances, take the casting to market. It is not for sale. It was never for sale. My father understood this. Delia understood it. You will understand it too, when you have read the journal, or you will not understand it, in which case I am sorry for you and I am sorry for the village and I am sorry for the water.
There is a brass key in this envelope. It is stamped with a glass eye. The glassblowers used that mark, years ago, to indicate a piece that was not for ordinary commerce. You will recognize it.
I am tired now. The nurse is here again. I have to stop. I am leaving you the house because you are the only one I trust with it. I am leaving you the room because you are the only one who will not open it before they are meant to. I am leaving you the key because you are the only one who will know what to do with it, eventually.
Do not come to my funeral. I have asked Grieve to keep it small and I do not want a spectacle. Light a candle at the church if you feel you must, and then go home and open the envelope I have left in the desk in the north parlor, and then go up to the room, and then read the journal, and then do what you think is right.
I love you. I never said it enough. I am saying it now because I will not have another chance and because I am, as you know, bad at the soft edges.
Margot.
The letter ended. There was no signature line, no postscript, no PS. There was only the brass key, lying in the fold of the paper, cool and heavy against Jonas's palm. He turned it over.
The bow of the key was stamped with a small, neat symbol: an eye, rendered in glass, the iris a flat circle of darker metal, the lid half open as though it were watching him. He had seen that mark before, somewhere. He could not place where.
The room was very quiet. Theo Calder had not moved. Eira Calder had not moved. Grieve stood with his hands at his sides, his face arranged in an expression of professional sympathy that did not quite reach his eyes.
"She left you everything," Grieve said. It was not a question.
"She left him everything," Eira said. Her voice was low and rough, like Delia's, but colder. "Including the things she had no right to leave. The room is not hers. The room was never hers. It was her father's, and before him it was the foundry's, and before that it was the river's."
"Margot was specific," Grieve said. "The will is unambiguous. The contents of the north wing, including the locked room and all that it contains, are devised to Jonas Pryce, her brother, absolutely."
"She had no children," Theo said quietly. "She had no husband. There was no one else to leave it to. That is what people will say, and that is not what happened."
Jonas looked at the key in his hand. The glass eye stared back at him, half open, patient as a thing that had been waiting a long time and was prepared to wait a little longer.
The glass eye on the key seemed to deepen in the lamplight, the half-open lid catching a reflection Jonas could not quite locate in the room. He closed his fist around the brass and felt the weight of it settle against his palm bones, a small cold planet.
"I would like to see the room," he said. "Tonight. Before I sign anything further, or sleep in this house. I would like to know what she thought was worth the trouble of locking."
The words came out before he had fully decided to speak them. Theo Calder's hand, which had been resting on the back of a chair, tightened until the knuckles went white. Eira made a sound low in her throat, not quite a word, more the suggestion of one.
"Tonight," Grieve repeated. He was not asking. He was tasting the word, the way a man tastes something that might be poison. "The locks have not been turned in years. The hinges will protest."
"Hinges often do," Jonas said. He did not know where the calm in his voice was coming from. His own hands were not calm. He could feel the pulse of his blood in the fingers wrapped around the key.
The four of them stood in Margot's parlor, the will spread on the table between them like a small pale animal. Outside, the river moved in the dark. Jonas had not seen the river yet, but he could hear it through the walls, a low continuous sound like breathing, or like something vast turning over in its sleep.
Grieve produced a second key from his waistcoat pocket, smaller than the first, unornamented, and held it out on his palm. "The tower stair," he said. "You will need this as well. The north wing is reached through the passage off the upstairs landing, and the passage is gated."
Jonas took the second key. The two keys sat in his hand, one warm from his grip, one still cool from Grieve's pocket. He could feel the difference in temperature between them through the thin skin of his palm.
"I will go alone," he said.
"Jonas." Theo spoke for the first time in several minutes. His voice was quiet and carried the particular weariness of a man who had already said everything he meant to say and had not been heard. "Your sister was not well at the end. I do not say that to be unkind. I say it because whatever is in that room, it is the room of a woman who was not well. Prepare yourself."
"I have been preparing myself for three days," Jonas said. "Since the telegram."
He meant it. He had been on the overnight from the city, and the telegram had found him at his desk with the ink still wet on a page he could not now remember. He had packed a case without thinking, had walked to the station without thinking, had slept upright in the rattling carriage with his hat over his face, and through all of it the only clear thought he could find was that Margot had called him home at the last, and that he had not come quickly enough, and that he would have to live with that.
He turned toward the door. Eira stepped into his path. She was smaller than he had expected, and older, her face a brown wrinkled leaf, her eyes the pale grey of river water on a cloudy day.
"You will not touch the casting," she said. "Whatever you find, you will not move it. You will not take it down. It stays where she left it."
"I have no intention of moving anything tonight," Jonas said. "Only looking."
She studied him for a long moment, the way a woman studies a dog she is not sure of. Then she stepped aside.
---
He climbed the stairs alone. The house was quieter than any house he had been in. The boards did not creak so much as sigh, a long exhalation under each footfall, as though the house had been holding its breath for some time and was only now allowing itself to exhale, slowly, around him.
The upstairs landing smelled of lamp oil and old paper and something else beneath both, something mineral, like the smell of wet stone, or of water that has stood a long time in a closed place. The passage off the landing was gated, as Grieve had said, a low iron gate across the narrow corridor, and beyond it the darkness was thicker.
The second key turned in the gate's lock with a small dry click. The gate swung inward on hinges that did not protest at all, which surprised him, though he could not have said why.
The passage was short, only a few paces, and ended at a door. The door was old, the wood darkened with age and the salt air that came off the river, and set into it was a lock plate of tarnished brass. This was the lock the eye-key fit.
He stood for a moment with the key in his hand and did not put it in. He listened. The house was silent. The river was a murmur at the edge of hearing. Somewhere below, he thought he could hear the sound of voices, very faint, perhaps Grieve speaking to Theo, perhaps Eira speaking to no one.
He put the key in. He turned it.
The lock was stiff. It resisted him for a full rotation, then gave, with a sound like a small bone cracking. The door swung inward, and the smell that came out of the room hit him across the face, cold and mineral and thick, the smell of deep water and of stone that has never seen the sun.
He lit the lamp Grieve had given him at the foot of the stairs and held it up.
The room was small, smaller than he had expected. The walls were of the same dark wood as the door. There were no windows. In the center of the room, on a low wooden table, sat a shape under a cloth. The cloth was heavy, dark green, and it had been laid with care, the corners folded neatly under, the way one folds a cloth over something one intends to come back to.
Around the walls, on shelves that had been built into the wood itself, were rows of small glass objects. Paperweights, Jonas realized after a moment. Dozens of them. Each one clouded, each one different, some round, some oval, some shaped like teardrops or like closed eyes. He stepped closer and held the lamp toward them.
Inside each paperweight, suspended in the cloudy center, was a shape. At first he thought they were inclusions, the natural flaws of old glass, the bubbles and seed-lines that form when molten glass cools too quickly. Then he looked again.
Fingers. Each paperweight held a single finger, curled or extended, the joints visible, the nail beds pale through the milky glass. Some were small, clearly the fingers of a child. Some were larger. All of them were perfectly preserved.
He set the lamp down on the table. His hand was steady, which surprised him. He stood for a long time in the center of the room and did not move, and the lamp flame wavered slightly with his breath, and the paperweights caught the light and held it in their cloudy centers, and the fingers inside them seemed almost to shift, almost to curl, almost to reach.
He did not lift the cloth. He had promised he would not, and he kept his promises to the dead when he could not keep them to the living. He looked at the shape under the cloth for a long time. It was the right size and the right form, he thought, for a human head.
He left the room. He locked the door behind him. He climbed down the stairs and returned the gate key to Grieve, who took it without comment, and the eye-key he put back in his own pocket, where it sat against his chest like a second heart.
Eira gave him Margot's bedroom for the night. There was no question of the inn, she said. There was no question of anything else. He was Halliday's brother, in the end, whatever else he was, and the house would have him.
He lay in Margot's bed and did not undress. The sheets smelled faintly of her, or of what she had become, a dry papery scent, like old letters. The window faced the river. Through the glass he could see the water moving, a long slow gleam under a moon he could not see.
He did not expect to sleep. He slept.
---
He woke at 3:14 in the morning. He knew the time because the small clock on the bedside table had a clear face and a luminous hand, and because the waking was so sudden and so complete that he came up out of sleep as a diver comes up out of dark water, all at once, with the whole of the cold air on his face.
The sound that had woken him was already over. It had been, he thought, a single note, low and sustained, like the hum of a glass rim struck with a wet finger. It had come from the direction of the locked room, though the door of the bedroom was closed and the passage beyond was gated and there was no possible way the sound could have reached him as clearly as it had.
He lay still. The house was silent. The river murmured. The clock ticked, each tick a small dry click against the wood of the bedside table.
He sat up.
On the windowsill, just where the moonlight struck the wood, sat a paperweight he had not seen at bedtime. It was round, the size of a small apple, clouded to a milky opacity, and inside it, suspended in the center, was a single finger curled into a loose circle, as though it had once been reaching for something and had been stopped in the reaching.
He had not put it there. He was certain he had not put it there. He had not been in this room since Eira had shown him to it, and he had walked straight to the bed and lain down, and the windowsill had been empty then, he was sure of it, because he had looked at the river through that window and there had been nothing on the sill but a thin line of dust.
He reached out and picked up the paperweight. It was cool and heavy in his palm, heavier than glass ought to be, as though it had been borrowing weight from somewhere else. The finger inside it did not move. It stayed curled in its loose circle, patient as a thing that had been waiting a long time and was prepared to wait a little longer.
He set it down on the bedside table and rose from the bed and went to the door. The bedroom opened onto the upstairs landing. The gate at the end of the passage was closed and latched, as he had left it. The darkness beyond the gate was, if anything, thicker than before.
He went back to the window. He did not pick up the paperweight again, but he looked at it in the moonlight, and he looked at the windowsill on either side of it, and there, on the wood, on the inside face of the sill where no hand could have reached from outside, was the print of a hand. It was faint, more a disturbance in the dust than a print, but it was a hand, four fingers and a thumb, and it was small, and it had been made by a hand that had once been alive and was not alive now.
He stood very still in the moonlight and listened to the river. The river did not answer him. The river moved, the way rivers do, and did not care who was listening.
He thought of the shape under the green cloth. He thought of the finger inside the paperweight on the sill. He thought of Margot, his sister, who had called him home at the last and whom he had not reached in time, and he thought that she had perhaps not been calling him home at all. She had perhaps been calling him to the room. She had perhaps been calling him to the casting. She had perhaps been calling him to take up the work that she could no longer carry, the work of the clouded glass and the river and the things that slept in the deep water.
He picked up the paperweight and held it in his closed fist. It pulsed once against his palm, faintly, like a second heart, and was still.
Downstairs, in the parlor, a clock began to chime the half hour. The sound rose through the house, brass and clear, and fell away, and was gone, and the river went on moving in the dark.