The Ghost of Winn Peterson

19. Winn

11 October

Now that my first week has passed at the house of Igor Radcliffe, I have begun to understand the rhythm of my imprisonment. At the unholy hour of five, I am awoken for breakfast by another servant of the house, a totally lifeless woman of what could be fifty years or a hundred. She says nothing but "Ma'am" and "Sir" and has the worst habit of bowing her head so low to her chest, that her chin is affixed sternly to her own neck, making even this limited vocabulary muted and hardly intelligible.

Following this mess of a creature downstairs for food has its own pattern I've come to know without thinking on it. Once my door has been closed, I pat the handle for good luck and pray that it isn't opened by prying eyes when I'm not inside. Passing each of the grim portraits from my hall receives a solemn nod of understanding, and moving into the next hall warrants a suspicious look at each unfamiliar face. These ones do not watch over my bedroom, and thus, they cannot be trusted. As we spiral our way down the stairs, each of the skulls that leers at us, missing teeth or sporting curious holes in places there shouldn't be, gets tapped on the head. I don't know if my intention is to break them just to set something at odds in the doctor's house or merely to give myself something to do, but after the second day of treading down the stairs, I noticed skulls on the other side as well, and was at once obliged to tap these as well. The ancient servant gave me a glazed look of displeasure when she saw this, but as she was slow and ungainly in descending, the effort required to reprimand me or physically put a stop to it was too much for her to attempt. 

Eventually, we reach the main floor again, where I stare at the very long, glistening teeth of the animals stretched out across the ground. I haven't as of yet noticed the presence of any living pets, and being so deprived, I decided upon names for the unfortunate predators on the floor. The bear reminded me of my mother's family, and thus I named him Pyotr. There was a familiar reddish tinge to his otherwise brown fur that could have put him quite comfortably in the chilled fields beside the Ural Mountains. How I wished I could be with his family! Not always prone to violence, my mother had told me, they could even play music with humans and paint and the like. 

This poor bastard couldn't do much more than stare at me, so I vowed to one day remove him from the dusty house he'd been trapped in. 

Permanently yowling, the wolf looked pitifully on next to his ursine companion. His name was harder for me to determine, but wolves always reminded me of the French, and so I called him Pierre. There was an eagle (or not - I was not terribly well-versed in the nature of birds, but his claws were powerful enough that he seemed to me worthy of being an eagle) which reminded me of those Southern sailor boys, and I called that one Phineas. I didn't have time from my limited passing of these fine men to the kitchen, and thus, the swan, panther, and elk remained nameless, but I resolved to think on it more later. 

Once the residents had been acknowledged, I would follow the withered creature into the main hall, where I was instructed to stare into a mirror I'd missed on my first day and smooth myself over. As I hadn't been allowed to use the bathing room before this, my hair was often always a mess that found ways to make more tangles in sleep than if I had put it out in a storm. Forcing the bunch back and tying it with another unwilling strand, I developed a pattern of appearing for food looking as disgruntled and unfit for company as an urchin of the streets. This particular example was borrowed from the ever-romantic Atticus, who had sneered it my way the first day I stumbled down, sleep-deprived and wholly unused to arising at this hour. 

"My, my," he'd said when I initially threw myself into a chair, looking about for Evie. "Have the mounted animals conspired to come to life?" 

"That's hardly a way to talk to a lady."