“They’re never going to buy this,” Christine murmurs. “Nope. No. Never. This is a terrible idea. Is it too late to call it off? Can we call it off? I’m calling it off. It’s off. We’re done, I… Amber, are you listening?”

“Don’t be a worrier, sweetheart, it’ll give you wrinkles,” Amber replies brightly, somehow conspiring to sound as if she’s standing uncomfortably close despite being on the other end of a phone call. That this isn’t the primary source of Christine’s discomfort speaks volumes about the rest of the situation; her car is presently wending its way slowly along the long, snaking driveway leading toward the great looming ivy-wreathed bulk of Madrigal House, its windows the sole source of light in the almost oppressive nighttime stillness of a broad expanse of lawn circled by dense, pitch-black woodland.

She’s dressed in a classic Chanel two-piece in black and white; conservative by Amber’s sartorial standards but with the jacket left artfully open to reveal a filmy black bustier underneath. Great loops of antique pearls hang cool and heavy against her chest, rising and falling with her quick breaths, and her buttery-blonde hair - a wig, so expertly applied that even she finds herself forgetting it isn’t hers - is teased into a meticulously planned half-twist that perfectly straddles the line between appearing spontaneous and fussy. Tonight she’s Lucy Alston-Powell, socialite granddaughter of a conveniently deceased backer of the Dorley-that-was, recently returned from her schooling in Switzerland and eager to discover the salacious secrets of her family’s old social circle. Hungry, ambitious, almost entirely lacking in moral constraints, and in control of enough hard cash that when Amber made a few probing inquiries on her behalf, an invite was extended with genuinely unseemly haste. And, after an intensive three-day boot camp in how to speak, how to act and generally how to appear rich, vain and callous, Christine is still certain she’s about to fuck it up spectacularly.

“There are still so many things we don’t know,” she says, trying to sound calm and rational while very much feeling neither. “Why are they sniffing around for cash all of a sudden? They’ve not met for ages - what’s this party actually for? What’s going on with the security system? We could be walking into absolutely anything, and I really think we could take a bit more time-”

“Ah-ah-ah, let’s not let ourselves get bogged down with trifles, darling. What matters is that our suspect is in there. Remember who we’re doing this for: our dear Sisters, who someone in attendance tonight very likely murdered, the fiend. For all we know, they’re throwing a party to celebrate striking a blow against their enemy. It wouldn’t surprise me, knowing just who these people are.”

“And how likely do you think we are to see anything, you know… weird? I mean, like, sexually. On a scale of one to ten. I just want to know how hard I should be cringing, so I can get started ahead of time.”

“Realistically? Probably a six at best, which is a bit disappointing,” Amber replies. “I do so love catching people with their pants down. But they don’t have any engagements booked with their usual escort agency, so if they’re planning anything it’ll have to be kept in-house, so to speak. And honestly, if there’s anyone in the world these people would less want to fuck than each other, I would be amazed.”

“Hold on, you didn’t say anything about escorts,” Christine protests. “Why am I only hearing about this now? I need to know this stuff, Amber.”

“Really, darling, it isn’t all that important,” Amber says breezily. “They sometimes used to hire a sex worker or two for a night’s jolly larks,” she continues, a sharp note of disapproval entering her tone. “Trans girls, I believe, with whom to play-act something of the good old days. As far as I know they were treated well enough, which probably says more about their precautions than it does the Madrigal House bunch. They seem to have given it up lately, perhaps because they can’t scrape the money together any more, or perhaps it just didn’t give them the thrill they were looking for.”

“A girl who wants to be one just doesn’t give the same satisfaction,” Christine agrees, darkly. “God, these are horrible people.” 

“Don’t dwell on it, darling! We’re here to have fun! Just think Lucy thoughts, all right?" Amber says happily. She says something else, but a buzzing and crackling conspires to break up her voice into incomprehensible fragments of sound, and Christine's phone makes a soft, slightly plaintive beep before it manages to reconnect the call.

"Amber, I'm losing you," Christine says unhappily.

"We knew this was going to happen, sweetie; there's absolutely dreadful reception out there in the country's nether regions. I'm amazed we're still connected, honestly. I wouldn't expect any phone service whatsoever in the house itself, between the location and those thick old walls," Amber says. "Just remember, for tonight you’re the absolute worst! Break a leg!” she trills cheerily in her ear, then the connection is gone in a burst of digital noise and a final series of beeps. According to the plan she’s in her own car, with her own driver, scheduled to arrive separately and somewhat insouciantly late, although for all Christine knows she could be calling from a hiding place in the rafters. For tonight the pair don’t know one another; Amber will be playing the role of Phoebe Fitzgerald, heiress to some extremely sketchy diamond mines halfway across the world, and freshly in sole possession of her family’s fortune following the untimely death of her dear parents. Amber swears she had nothing to do with that, nor the subsequent disappearance of the real Phoebe: serendipity, she claims, does sometimes conspire to make one’s life easier. Christine isn’t sure whether she believes that, but she isn’t sure of very much lately, and by this point the death of a couple of conflict-diamond magnates barely registers on her moral scale.

“Alright,” Christine breathes, half to herself and half to her murderous counterpart, who she feels slightly guilty for wishing was with her. The car draws to a smooth halt, and the immaculately-dressed driver the company supplied opens her door with a deferential nod. She steps lightly out onto flagstones that have only recently been cleared of leaves and general detritus from the ragged-looking flowerbeds and bushes, a theme of hasty and surface-level sprucing-up that seems to extend to every part of the house and its grounds. The building itself is enormous, almost comically oversized for its reported single inhabitant and his handful of staff; once it was a bustling estate, home to dozens of servants and multiple generations of the sprawling Haverthwaite family. To say it’s fallen on hard times is to leave oneself hopelessly underprepared for the sheer state of much of the place, although again there are only hints visible from the front; Christine guesses there’s been something of a scramble to replace drapes and swap out glass over the last few days, in an attempt to present the majority of the house as somewhat habitable. She especially notes the long, serious-looking metal boxes, starkly out of place in their utilitarian white paint and their relative newness, affixed just outside every window; part of the surprisingly beefy security system that’s been a major cause of her anxiety, particularly for her inability to get a full set of specs ahead of time. She and Amber have concluded that it had something to do with the owner’s brief and largely fruitless attempt to refit the place into another Dorley, back in the early 2000s before the kitty ran dry, and there’s a reasonable chance that none of it even works any more, but seeing it firsthand troubles her in a way she can’t convince herself is irrational.

There’s a uniformed man shivering by the main door, who looks to Christine barely older than seventeen and who might be on the world’s worst workfare placement. Slightly guiltily she thinks his jug ears and genuinely impressive overbite might be a blessing, just in case the guests were to get it into their heads to revisit the old days and go looking for someone pretty to feminise: she writes the ungenerous thought off as Lucy practice and gives him a disdainful sniff as she sweeps by.

Inside, the cavernous entrance hall of Madrigal House is brightly lit by a whole constellation of chandeliers, sconces and lamps; from what she’s read about Haverthwaite’s finances, Christine wouldn’t be surprised if he was blowing half a year’s electricity budget on this one night. The wood floor is passably polished, the paintings look relatively unstained and the broad, sweeping arms of the grand staircase are carpeted in an almost consistent burgundy. There’s a surprising amount of Christian iconography and paraphernalia around, and Christine is reminded that Haverthwaite senior likes to put on something of a show of extravagant piety in lieu of demonstrating any actual morals whatsoever. A cloakroom servant fusses around her, but she elects to hold onto her jacket, sending the woman on her way with a snippy rebuke that makes her cringe internally with embarrassment.

“Welcome, ma’am. Most of the guests are in private gatherings ahead of the party; catching up, you understand, I’m sure. The, er, the younger set are meeting in the lounge, if the lady would care to join them,” a second staff member ventures with obvious discomfort. Christine rolls her eyes and lets out a theatrical sigh, but she allows herself to be guided down a hallway to one side, past a geriatric grandfather clock and a spot where someone’s clearly tried to cover a threadbare section of carpet with a similarly-coloured rug.

Down a short flight of stairs is a dark wooden door with ‘Raeburn Lounge’ inscribed on a neat brass plaque, and beyond lies what turns out to be a dimly-lit, overdecorated little bar, complete with a harried-looking bartender standing in front of a handful of bottles amid wreaths of cigarette smoke. Arrayed around slightly yellowed upholstery are a mere seven or eight people, a slightly sad turnout that’s at the lower end of Amber’s estimates for attendance among the younger scions of the old Dorley crowd. Ages range, in Christine’s reckoning, from maybe twenty-two to mid-thirties, and fashions from louche and soi-disheveled to formal and not a little frumpy. Red faces and over-loud laughter are in style, and every head turns - if somewhat drunkenly - to watch her enter. Christine steels herself; she knows they’re expecting her, have had days to be made aware of her interest in attending; similarly, she has names and at least a brief biography committed to memory for every one of these people, courtesy of Amber’s research and a set of flash-cards which she suspects the serial killer had a disproportionate amount of fun making. Thus armed, she tries to calm her hammering heart, and steps up to the bar.

“The prodigal returns!” one of the men exclaims, and something in his jovially mocking tone and chortling, drink-flushed face makes Christine briefly visualise spearing him with the cutlery. Too much time spent around Amber, she tells herself, and manages to keep her face frozen in the broad, slightly brittle smile that it took her far too much practice to master.

“Yes, well, I thought it was about time I showed my face,” she says. “As one does, when one hears their dear grandparents used to run a… mmm, what would you call it?”

“I usually call it the tranny factory, although we’re probably supposed to call them something marvellously politically correct and completely at odds with basic biology these days,” scoffs Penny Huntington-Flynn, a diminutive brunette with a build and demeanour people probably describe as ‘formidable’ and the perpetual expression of having discovered half a wasp in her salad.

“A private spa to help the unfortunate find gainful employment as women of penised experience,” Christine suggests, wincing internally but garnering a few titters from her small audience.

“I’m sorry, are we supposed to know who this is?” Penny sniffs to the room at large.

“It’s the Alston-Powells’ girl, stupid. Miffy, or Muffy or something,” replies the man beside her dismissively. This is Henry Elginton, ostensibly Penny’s boyfriend but whose roving eyes, condescending tone and whole posture broadcast that this state of affairs is purely until someone less disagreeable comes along.

“It’s Lucy,” Christine says, voice acid behind her bright smile. “I thought it was time I popped by to see how you were all managing my family’s legacy.”

“Your family’s?”

“The Alston-Powells were one of the primary benefactors of the old pile,” drawls Elginton, sounding bored. “Come on, Pen, you’re really supposed to know this stuff.”

“Well, I’m sorry for not memorising the entire history of our grandparents’ sordid little enterprise!” Penny erupts, turning a furious shade of beetroot and glaring daggers at her beau.

“Should be, it bought you that horrid necklace,” murmurs a rake-thin girl sprawled artfully in a deep chair, before apparently becoming exhausted by the effort and returning her focus to her cigarette and her expression of elegant ennui. Penny glares daggers through her, to which she appears completely oblivious, and Christine has to fight hard not to instantly develop a mild fondness for the woman. With a yawning awareness that every eye on the room is on her, Christine keeps her head high, tosses her hair to one side in a move Amber spent a disproportionate amount of time teaching her, and struts over to the bar without paying any of them the inestimable compliment of her attention.

“So, tell me, whyever would a gorgeous thing like you keep herself hidden away all this time?” asks Henry, leaning in toward Christine across the bar in flagrant disregard of his girlfriend, who emits a wordless huff of annoyance from behind his fog of boozy breath and too much cologne.

“Oh, you know. Schooling. Travel. Learning how to utterly destroy a man’s balls with a single kick. Just completely obliterate them,” Christine answers with a smile, batting her eyelashes once and casting her gaze fleetingly toward the man’s crotch, which raises a titter from those of the group close enough to see. “But really,” she continues, switching track to a feigned sincerity, “I must admit, what mostly brings me back is business. Specifically, my interest in what our grandparents used to get up to. I’d love to hear-“

“Ah-ah!” chides the drunken man who first welcomed Christine, from across the bar. “Shop talk! We’ll have none of that before dinner, thankyou very much. Believe me, when the Olds get going you’ll thank me; listening to a bunch of octogenarians reminisce about their glory days of sexual torture is quite enough to put one off one’s aperitif.”

“Ugh, and don’t get them going about losing the old place. Last time I swear old Noddy Fanshaw was about to cry. Absolutely ghastly,” chips in the willowy blonde in the armchair - Amelia Benedict, memory supplies - who has apparently recovered from her brief enervation.

“Do go on,” Christine begins, barely able to believe how easily the conversation has turned but eager to seize on the opportunity.

“Now, now. Surely there’s something else in that pretty little head, eh?” slurs the first man - Percy Leavensworth, according to Amber’s dossier. “Come on, loosen up a bit, darling, eh? It’s a party!”

“Yes, nobody likes a frigid bitch,” Penny says nastily.

“What does Lucy Alston-Powell fancy when she’s feeling naughty, hmm?” the man asks, leaning bodily across the bar to fumblingly grab at whatever bottles he can get hold of.

“Oh, you know, whatever. A little tipple, a spot of snow. A touch of performative bisexuality, for the boys,” Christine says, smiling, then impulsively grabs Amelia’s willowy figure from where she’s perched on her right and dips her into a long, deep kiss, which the girl reciprocates with a sort of lazy insouciance. In Christine’s mind she’s babbling heartfelt apologies to Paige like a mantra, but she’s in deep enough now that she figures she has to do whatever Lucy would do, and Lucy would definitely be doing this. Amelia tastes like stale tobacco and something sharply chemical, and she either believes kissing involves trying to bite the other party’s tongue or has lost track of what’s happening, but the effect at least seems not to have been lost on the men at the party, who whoop and cheer with the expected rather stock enthusiasm.

“Oh, attagirl! Encore, encore! Why stop at one?” brays Percy, knocking over his half-empty tumbler with the grandiosity of his applause, looking dazedly concerned by the spreading pool of whisky. Christine, dizzy from performance anxiety and what she’s coming to suspect might be a mild contact high from Amelia’s spit, arches a practiced eyebrow across the bar at the sour-faced Penny.

“Is there more than one?” Christine asks innocently, looking down her nose at Penny, eliciting a round of braying laughter and causing the shorter girl to flush with barely-suppressed anger and embarrassment.

“Not like I would have anyway. Disgusting,” sniffs the clearly affronted Lady Huntington-Flynn, and stomps out of the little bar with her fists clenched and her nose pointed at the ceiling.

There follows a long and increasingly awkward silence, especially given that Henry doesn’t even attempt to follow his girlfriend, which Christine elects to fill after a carefully counted-out period by snorting loudly and descending into peals of increasingly loud and genuine laughter. It’s not clear whether the resulting stares are disapproving or amused, but either way she figures it serves to build a picture of exactly who Lucy Alston-Powell is.

Out of nowhere there’s a resounding bang and clatter from the direction of the entrance hall, and the increasingly urgent sound of voices over the loud clacks of a rapidly approaching set of heels.

Before tonight, Christine hasn’t actually seen Amber in full Phoebe Fitzgerald mode - ‘far better that our characters’ first meeting is as real as possible, darling’, Amber said, talking blithely about two actual, dead women - and the effect is something like being struck unexpectedly in the head by a glittery cannonball. The real Phoebe was the definition of a party girl, infamous from the Hamptons to Dubai and beyond. Amber’s resemblance to the paparazzi photos Christine’s seen is genuinely unsettling - the woman’s built a masterful artifice out of makeup, hair, tape, and subtle cinching and padding, and if Christine didn’t know better she’d swear she was looking at someone with a completely different facial structure and body shape to Dorley’s murderous alumna. Amber’s dress is a shimmering Givenchy ballgown matched slightly awkwardly with a pair of silver heels, and she’s meticulously arranged any number of details - a slipped strap here, a twisted bracelet there - to sell a general sense of disheveledness that’s at stark odds with the money on display. Her hair is so dark it’s almost black, and hangs loose past her shoulders and down her back in glossy, full waves.

“Shut up, no, of course I was invited. I’m a legacy, you silly little person!” trills a high, slightly dreamy voice quite different from Amber’s usual eerily calm affect. “I… yes, Fitzgerald, that’s what I said, I’m… ahaha, staff, eh? You really can’t, you know, get the… the, you know, the quality or whatever, right?” Amber-as-Phoebe exclaims, lurching from addressing the couple of uniformed staff still nipping at her sparkly heels to the room at large, and giving every impression of being absolutely off her head.

“Aha, what the fuck is she doing here?” murmurs an overdressed redhead Christine thinks might be named Rosie, sliding in alongside Christine at the bar with the air of someone excited to witness a car-crash in motion.

“Maybe she heard someone say ‘open bar’ in the VIP lounge somewhere and just sort of wandered in,” snickers a Hattie or Hettie or something of the sort.

“Only place left she isn’t barred from,” Henry mutters drily.

“Who even is she?” Christine asks, leaning in conspiratorially, trying to position herself as one of the gang in contrast to this scandalous newcomer.

“Hah, have you been living under a rock?” one of the girls laughs, but without any real venom, thrilled as she clearly is to be the one who gets to elaborate. “That’s Phoebe Fitzgerald. She fell completely off the radar after her parents died. But before that, there was barely a society event or party she hadn’t started a fight and passed out on the floor at. Her granddaddy was one of ours, but she’s never deigned to grace us with her presence before now.”

“It’s been what, a year or so since she vanished?” Percy adds, obviously relishing the impending scandal. “Everyone said it was either rehab or that she’d overdosed and died. Personally I was convinced she’d found Jesus and run off to a convent or something equally tedious. But apparently not! And for some reason she’s decided to turn up here, now; absolutely hilarious! But those tits, though, right?”

“Yes, yes, hello, hi, it’s that bitch, as seen on TV,” Amber tells the roomful of less-than-covert stares. “Grandmummy was a, you know, a participant or whatever, so you can all stop looking at me like I’m a spy or a Guardian reporter or some ghastly thing. I’m one of you, inside the, like, circle of trust and all that, so don’t act like a bunch of crap old bores, all right?”

“I genuinely have no idea what on God’s green Earth you’re talking about,” Henry says, face caught in a well-worn expression of sneering contempt. This raises a couple of snickers from elsewhere in the room, but fewer than Christine might have expected.

“Wait, what do you… wait. Hold on. I am at the right house, aren’t I?” Amber asks, making no secret of the fact this may well have happened to Phoebe before.

“I don’t know; are you?” Penny drawls from the doorway, returned to see what the fuss was about and failing to bother to mask her hostility; she’s clearly expecting a big laugh for this contribution, and looks personally offended when she doesn’t get one.

“Don’t be a cunt, Pen. Lovely to have you, Miss Fitzgerald,” Percy says, eagerly switching his focus to Amber, and specifically to her semi-illusory cleavage.

“Percy!” Amber exclaims, darting forward to grab a clearly unprepared Percival with both hands and treating him to a closer look at her breasts, which his eyes stay locked onto for long enough that Penny sniffs in disgust and looks pointedly away. “It’s been absolutely ages, sweetie! Oh my God, you’ve gotten so big!”

Given the amount of studying their embellished histories Amber’s made her do, Christine knows for certain that the closest the young Percival ever came to meeting the real Phoebe, god rest her soul, was maybe being in the same county once or twice. His expression reflects this confusion once he manages to tear his attention from Amber’s boobs, but he’s drunk enough that Christine sees a sliver of uncertainty there, and she knows from experience that that’s more than enough for Amber to work with.

“We used to play together all the time! In the gardens, remember, with the maze?”

“The gardens at…”

“At Bosford, sweetie! The Fanthorpes’ place! Don’t tell me you don’t remember, Percy-poo,” Amber purrs in a sickeningly sweet tone that sets Christine’s teeth on edge all the more for who it’s coming from.

“At, yes, at… at Bosford, of course.”

“We must have been, I don’t know, five or six? I’d be the mummy and you’d be the daddy, or was it the other way around? Appropriate, haha. Oh, I’d be ever so sad if you’ve forgotten!” Amber trills, slipping one arm around his shoulder and gesturing vaguely at the harried bartender with the other, which the man correctly interprets as a request for another drink from someone who doesn’t mind too much what it is.

“Oh, no, of course, of course! Little Phoebe! Of course!” Percy replies, sounding more confident in the memory as he goes. Amber shoots Christine a lightning-fast wink, and she can’t help be impressed at the woman’s ability to gaslight. “Come on, the lot of you, stop being shits,” he declares to the rest, “it’s Phoebe; she’s one of us. Someone get her a drink; Pen, you’re not doing anything, make yourself useful.”

“She’s already got one,” Penny grumbles, indicating the glass that’s been placed behind Amber. This is snatched up and downed in one go, to the accompaniment of a couple of unkind giggles, but for his part Percy looks relatively impressed. “Problem solved!” Amber says sweetly, looking expectantly at Penny, which seems to be the final straw: with a wordless exclamation of pent-up frustration and anger, she turns on her heel and storms out again. Amelia mutters something critical to Percy, which appears to be grounds for the pair of them to have a whispered, drunken domestic, while Henry, perhaps intuiting that he might actually be watching his meal ticket stamp away for good this time, follows Penny in what almost passes for a straight line. This leaves Amber and Christine temporarily alone at the bar.

“Heyyy… so, like, you look a bit lost, babe. First time too?” Amber asks Christine, propping an elbow against the bar and leaning in, letting her artfully disarrayed hair fall across her shoulders with a very un-Amber-like lack of concern.

“First time for a lot of things,” Christine says, raising her glass to tap against Amber’s with a self-deprecating smile. “Lucy Alston-Powell. A pleasure.”

“Oh, the Hampshire Powells?” Amber exclaims excitedly. “Wait, that would make you… Yes, do you know, my Mummy used to walk out with your Daddy, back in the day? Small world! I bet they fucked like horny bunnies, ahahaha! Oh, don’t look at me like that, Mummy used to talk about it all the time. Bit inappropriate, now I think about it; thank God I turned out so exceptionally normal, right? Anyway, what was I saying? Oh! Yes! We could almost have been sisters, girl! Wouldn’t that just be wonderful? To be sisters?”

“It certainly would be something,” Christine replies, cool in the face of ‘Phoebe’ and her terrifying enthusiasm.

Phoebe Fitzgerald’s rampage through the treasured memories and alcohol supply of the Madrigal set is interrupted before it can really get started, by the ringing of a bell from somewhere upstairs and deeper inside the mansion, and the appearance of a deeply uncomfortable-looking member of staff at the door. “Well, there’s our cue,” says Percy, fight instantly abandoned, with a note of what in Christine’s opinion is slightly unseemly anticipation. He offers Amelia his arm, then hauls her rather abruptly to her feet when she’s predictably, chemically slow to react. With a cheeky smile, Amber finger-waves goodbye and lets herself be swept along in the minor press of people, leaving Christine to set her face in an appropriately Lucy-like expression of dismissive hauteur and follow at a careful distance. In this fashion she makes her way back out into the hallway and upstairs, then down another corridor from the entrance hall and into a passably-kept and extremely over-warm sitting room, where there are a good thirty or so people already milling about, dressed in a variety of expensive, if somewhat out-of-date, fashions. Christine estimates the average age of the crowd as seventy-plus, with little to no obvious representation from the forty- or fifty-something parents of Percy and Penny’s set, and wonders whether direct exposure to their own elders’ proclivities has put those people off the idea entirely, leaving their children to grow curious and take up the insalubrious mantle in their absence. Standing apart, and very obviously at the head of the room, is a short, elderly man with the genial, slightly campy air of a club impresario or retired entertainer, and from Amber’s exhaustive briefings Christine knows him as Peter Haverthwaite, very possibly the cruellest and most depraved of the old ghouls in attendance. Once upon a time he might have considered himself part of Dorothy Marsden’s inner circle, but in reality he was never half as valued as he believed he was, and after the Hall was lost and his money dried up, he was abandoned and forgotten in extremely short order. If Amber’s research is to be believed, he’s never gotten over it.

“A-hem-hem,” Haverthwaite fussily clears his throat, once the younger guests have entered and situated themselves on chair arms and against walls, the good seats being very much already occupied. He taps at a gold-inlaid glass with a delicate little spoon, and the general susurrus of muted conversation falls silent.

“Well, first, please allow me to say welcome. Welcome, one and all,” he begins, with an avuncular smile directed at the room in general. “It’s been far too long since we’ve been gathered beneath the same roof, and longer still since we had anything to celebrate. And welcome, especially, to our youthful guests,” he adds with a sly smirk, tipping his glass to the loose knot of under-thirties. “It’s a wonderful thing to see the new generation taking such a keen interest in their elders’ traditions. And it seems we have a pair of genuinely fresh faces among us!” the old man exclaims, gaze alighting on the alleged Phoebe then Lucy in turn, which draws every other pair of eyes in the room and makes Christine squirm under the collective scrutiny, even if Amber has trained her well enough that she doesn’t let it show. “The Alston-Powells and the Fitzgeralds were such wonderful supporters of our work, back in the salad days. Alas, your parents quite understandably felt obliged to cut ties with the rest of us, which is why it brings me such joy to welcome the two of you back into the fold tonight, as it were. And it’s on that subject - thinking of the past, and of friends and compatriots lost along the way - that I wish to speak, my dear friends,” Haverthwaite says, clearly settling into a comfortable oratorial stride.

“Here we go. I told you. Once he gets going, there’s no stopping him,” Henry murmurs to Christine, rolling his eyes. Christine gives him a Lucy-appropriate smirk back, but really she’s struggling not to lose the thread of what the little man at the head of the room is saying.

“-when Dorley Hall was stolen from us, we were cast adrift,” Haverthwaite proclaims, making Christine suppress a jolt of recognition at the name. “Dorothy Marsden and her little clique cared not one whit about the people who supported and enabled the work, and the brazen hussy Lambert came for us nonetheless. No protections for us, no détente. No, we had to burn the paper trails, scurry away and hide as if we were scared of the ridiculous girl and her mutilated half-man accomplice,” -here Christine really does have to wrestle with her impulse to stride up and punch the man, and knowing Amber and her bizarre protectiveness toward Dorley and Aunt Bea as she does, she’s quietly amazed all his skin’s still on. “But we stick together, we harried few. Here we stand, somewhat bowed, yes, but still unbroken. Would that there were some way for us to extract some measure of satisfaction. Alas, alas.”

This raises a round of what seem to Christine slightly inappropriate titters and meaningful glances from certain segments of the audience, which she feels completely unequipped to decipher but which fill her with suspicion and a looming dread. Haverthwaite’s speech goes on for a while longer, culminating in a round of enthusiastic applause, but Christine takes in exactly none of it; all she can picture is the Dorley graduate files in the sweaty hands of this man and his compatriots, the three women stalked and killed in the cruellest fashion as part of some spiteful act of revenge. It takes the boozy, plummy sound of Percy’s voice to snap her out of her internal doom-spiral, and even then it seems he’s had to repeat her assumed name more than once to get her attention.

“Lucy. Have you gone deaf? I said, that was a bit of a misery, eh? Touch defeatist, if you ask me.”

“Am I to infer you take a brighter view?” Christine asks, arching an eyebrow with a practiced smile to soften her tone.

“All I’m saying is, if there were a way to claim a pound of flesh from the degenerates who took old D.H. from our families, I think whoever managed it would be very justified in leaving that fruity old fuck out of the loop.”

“Are you implying that heroic avenger might be you, Percy dear? It’d be awfully exciting if it were,” she presses, looping her arm into his and allowing him to lead her toward the nearest tray of drinks, which seems to please him immensely if the tent in his trousers is anything to go by.

“Me?” Percy scoffs. “I’m just here to get absolutely smashed and discreetly tug one out over the proceedings. I don’t give a fuck about any of that historical stuff; the Olds can seethe their other foot into the grave for all I care. Why, are you feeling a twinge of spite over our forebears’ pain and anguish?”

Christine forces out a laugh. “Hardly,” she replies, smiling as sincerely as she can manage. “Still, knowing the names and faces of the culprits, this Lambert and the other one… it’s a bit of a surprise nobody’s actually done anything. Might almost be interpreted as weak.”

“Liquidity,” interjects Henry, who’s clearly ditched Penny somewhere, and who positions himself at Christine’s other elbow, clearly vying with Percy as to who’s standing infinitesimally closer and talking loudest into her ear, without a hint of shame. “Try one of these, they’re marvellous,” he adds, practically shoving a canapé into her mouth; it’s something involving shrimp and feather-light pastry, and is as good as advertised, although Christine privately opines that it’s probably better when you aren’t discreetly trying not to choke on it. “Anyway, yes. Liquidity. That’s this lot’s problem,” Henry goes on, blithely. “They’ve got the Bentleys and the mansions and the family jewels, but in terms of actual, spendable cash, half the people here are flat broke, and the other half are squeaking along on a pittance that’d make a street-sweeper feel a touch light in the old wallet.”

Christine doubts Henry has the faintest idea what a street-sweeper gets paid, but she refrains from commenting. “Not a surplus of financial nous amongst the angina-and-sex-crimes set, then?” she laughs, taking another canapé from the caterer’s tray and enjoying it at a slightly more measured pace.

“Not a bit,” Percy agrees, clearly trying to reclaim Christine’s attention. “Do you know, I brought up the most wonderful business opportunity at the last one of these things, and most of them didn’t even know what the blockchain was? I despair, honestly. Although, now I mention it, you seen to have a good head on your shoulders, Luce - I’m sure someone of your calibre would be very interested in what I have to say…”

Christine tunes out the subsequent pitch and mansplaining session almost entirely, although she does refocus when Percy and Henry seem about to come to blows over which of them has bought into an obvious crypto scam (both, in Christine’s opinion) and which is on the road to effort-free billions (neither). Other than that, she concentrates instead on eavesdropping on the conversation Amber’s having with a whole circle of assorted toffs, which is made easier by the fact she’s being extremely loud.

“Ahahaha, stop, you naughty boy!” the alleged Phoebe giggles, which is such an un-Amber thing to say that Christine swears she experiences a brief burst of dysphoria. “No, but really, really, it sounds absolutely fabulous. And you say it was all done in the one place? Like, some dull lump of a boy goes in one end, and out the other comes the most wonderfully pliable plaything? That’s hilarious; I love it!”

“Alas, all lost to us now, and no justice to be had,” one of the older men says, eyes locked shamelessly on Amber’s cleavage.

“Oh, don’t be defeatist, Hector,” Amber says, jokingly chiding with a flirty glint in her eye. “I bet there are tons of things a bright chap like you could come up with for a little bit of payback. Come on, don’t tell me nobody’s tried? I’d be ever so thrilled to hear about the virtue-signalling shits getting one in the eye!”

Privately, Christine thinks Amber might be laying it on slightly thick, but between the age and inebriation of her audience it seems to be working; there are no admissions of responsibility for the murders, but from the general sheepishness and shuffling of feet she can tell Amber has the lot of them eating out of her exquisitely manicured hand.

“It’s Lambert, you see,” another elderly gent offers, regretfully. “Damnable gel’s got her sticky fingers in all sorts of places. And with the whole blasted country gone to the dogs, the degenerates and invaders running the show,” - “Hear, hear!” “Damn Bolsheviks!” go the inebriated and moderately confused cries of support from elsewhere in the room - “there isn’t much we can really do. Terrible shame. Terrible.”

“Oh, don’t mind this bunch of old miseries,” a woman who can’t be far shy of eighty herself says into the awkward, slightly mournful silence that follows. It’s obvious from the tone of her voice and the eagerness of her interjection that she’s no less hungry for Amber’s attention than the men. “Let me tell you a little story from the good old days. Ah, we did get up to some tricks, back then… now, if I recall correctly, it was a little slip of a thing named Julian. Julie, we’d call her after the surgery, and oh, how she’d cry…”

It obviously isn’t apparent to the circle of guffawing one-time torturers that Amber’s assembling a mental list, but Christine can see names sliding into place as clearly as if the woman had pulled out a clipboard, and she’s about as grateful not to be on it as she’s ever been about anything. Still, the predatory currents swirling just beneath Amber’s sparklingly oblivious facade make her shiver, and she quickly returns her focus to the ongoing lecture coming at her from both sides, which has moved on to the absolutely unforeseeable plummet suffered by some obscure cryptocoin and how it was everyone’s fault but Henry’s, and how people should really stop blaming him for their losses. To Christine’s immense relief, before she’s forced to supply an opinion on this, she’s saved by another tapping of a wine-glass at the head of the room, where Haverthwaite has regained his position and the gathering’s attention with practiced ease.

“Now we’ve, aha, all gotten ourselves loosened up a little,” he begins, visibly loosened up more than a little himself, if his ruddy cheeks and nose are anything to go by, “it’s time for the first entertainment of the night!”

At this cue, a shriek sounds long and high from outside the room. Despite it being somewhat stagey in delivery - Amber rather unsubtly rolls her eyes - Christine, nerves already stretched about as taut as they can go, almost drops her champagne flute. A uniformed servant hurries into the room, catches Haverthwaite’s eye with surprising alacrity, and whispers something to the man behind a raised, white-gloved hand. The host turns to the room at large, a look of terribly grave solemnity plastered across his features that doesn’t at all extend to his eyes.

“It is my sad duty to inform you,” he announces, with great, theatrical aplomb that completely belies the sentiment, “that there has been a murder!”

Christine is certain the situation can’t be what it appears, but not quite so certain that she doesn’t lock eyes with Amber for a moment and raise her eyebrows. Amber returns a minute shake of her head, which is provisionally enough to convince Christine she wasn’t responsible, but it’s accompanied by a broad, sparkling grin of genuine delight, presumably at what to her is the delicious irony of the situation.

“How marvellous, a murder!” Amelia titters, clinging to Percy’s arm in order to stay upright after her last mid-party top-up.

“Really, Miels? We’re all going to tromp up and down the manor until everyone’s too drunk or overcome with dementia to solve the join-the-dots from a pub children’s menu, then some geriatric with a plastic knife will announce they’re the killer before falling asleep face-down in their profiteroles. It’s tedious, Amelia,” Percy huffs.

“Oh, do lighten up, sulky boy; I’m sure we’ll find some way to make it fun,” Amber says happily, lightly taking the man’s other arm and allowing herself to be led along with the rest of the group, out of the parlour’s double doors and down the corridor behind Haverthwaite. In the opposite direction, Christine’s interest is piqued by a handful of caterers and servants moving as a group, carrying equipment and bags, looking thoroughly packed up and done for the night. She’s in no position to follow them and asking seems out of character for Lucy, so she’s left to nurse her worries. The rest of the party appears split between tipsy enthusiasm and the same weary resignation as Percy along generational lines, although there are certainly a couple among the younger set who, like Amelia, are easily amused or high enough to be sincerely thrilled. Christine moves with the group, exchanging sardonic comments with a couple of the others, but she’s distracted, trying to plan how she can parlay this new thing into an opportunity to get people alone and extract a confession. Meanwhile Haverthwaite is practically skipping along the passageway with rather unseemly excitement.

“Behold, the scene of the crime!” the man proclaims, throwing open another grand set of doors to reveal what turns out to be the manor’s library. This is another richly-appointed affair, a two-storey orgy of mahogany and leather bounded on all sides by towering shelves, bearing books Christine suspects are mostly decorative. As promised, a body in a bloody dress is sprawled in the middle of the room’s centrepiece rug, surrounded by a pool of crimson that even Christine, after her recent experiences, can tell isn’t quite the right colour for fresh blood. She risks a glance over at Amber while everyone is arranging themselves in a circle with a flurry of theatrical gasps, just in time to catch a truly world-class eye-roll and, upon catching Christine’s attention, a quirk of the eyebrows and a meaningful glance at the allegedly deceased, which Christine chooses to interpret as intended to draw her attention to the fact the ‘corpse’ is very clearly made of plastic.

“Now, in a quite astonishing stroke of serendipity, we do in fact have one guest among us who might be able to assist,” Haverthwaite announces, waggling his eyebrows as if he’s trying to take off. “Ladies and gentlemen, among us tonight is none other than Benjamin Weiss, renowned detective and private investigator, formerly of Scotland Yard and now, aha, one of us. Mr Weiss, please, come up and join me.”

Christine has never heard of the man; it isn’t as if she routinely keeps up with the latest from the private detective community, although in thinking that, it occurs to her that maybe she should start, since Dorley Hall’s activities probably constitute the biggest honeypot imaginable for the profession. Certainly, if there’s a Gumshoes Today she could subscribe to, she imagines Weiss would be on the cover: he could be anywhere between forty and sixty, with exactly the worn-out, heavy-eyed Basset Hound look that TV and movies have led her to expect, and even if he isn’t wearing a trenchcoat and hat, his tuxedo is appropriately ill-fitted and decidedly the worse for wear. He actually reacts to suddenly being the centre of attention with visible discomfort; he makes a couple of throat-clearing, mumbling attempts at an introduction before he successfully finds his voice, and Christine suspects that Weiss was genuinely unaware he was about to be made the main character in Haverthwaite’s little entertainment when he RSVPed.

“Uh, yes, that’s, erm, that’s me. Good evening, everybody,” Weiss eventually manages, speaking in a broad, gruff Northern accent that’s jarring in the sea of plummy tones and public-school diction that is Madrigal House. “Now, how shall I, erm… that is, Mr Haverthwaite, do you mind if I have a look at the, uh, the body?” he asks, awkwardly half-deferential and unsure of himself.

“Call me Peter, my good chap, please. And yes, by all means, prod away,” Haverthwaite replies, gesturing toward the mannequin corpse like an impresario. Weiss stumps over to the pantomime scene with ill grace and bends, wincing, and although it’s subtle Christine doesn’t miss the tiny slip of paper the man finds tucked in beside the bloody face of the deceased. While Weiss is the centre of attention, Haverthwaite exchanges a few words with his heavyset employee, who turns and leaves out of a side door with a minimum of fuss.

“Right. Well. The, er, the victim appears to have been dispatched by way of a single slash to the throat,” Weiss declares, much more confident now he doesn’t have to ad-lib quite so much, and clearly starting to get into the game, much to Haverthwaite’s delight.

“Let’s see the body!” Percy brays drunkenly, far too loud. “Turn her over, let’s have a look at her gash!”

“No, no, we mustn’t, we mustn’t!” Haverthwaite snaps, protecting the already-shaky plausibility of his dummy victim, as Weiss stumbles over his words and a number of partygoers tut and mutter in disapproval. “The police will surely want the body to be left unmolested, after all,” Haverthwaite says, “And none of us, I’m sure, would wish to be implicated in the crime, would we now?”

Christine, among others, flinches as a sharp buzzer sounds, close but difficult to place, and a rattling clack emanates from somewhere behind the heavy drapes across the window. Amber grins like it’s Christmas morning, which Christine doesn’t think can possibly be a good sign.

“What’s this?” Haverthwaite exclaims, mugging for all he’s worth. “The security system has been engaged! What a dastardly move from the killer; with the staff dismissed, now only we merry revelers and my most trusted men remain. There is no way in nor out of the manor, my friends; we are trapped with the killer, and the killer with us!”

There’s a degree of consternation about this among the guests: the gist of the muttering Christine catches is that Haverthwaite has gone too far with his silly game, and they too far in indulging him. The disgruntled expressions only seem to make the little man’s grin broaden, though, until he can apparently no longer contain his enthusiasm.

“Now, to the one who correctly identifies the villain, I have a special prize waiting,” he says, which does appear to mollify the guests more than Christine might have thought an unspecified reward from a severely cash-poor host would. “A prize I think whoever wins will appreciate very much indeed.” This is accompanied by a lascivious little smirk that makes Christine feel a queasy sense of dread. “I have no doubt the killer has left clues scattered all across the manor; perhaps even riddles that might assist in the solving of the crime. So, my friends, our course is clear: we must split up into pairs and comb the house for evidence. But who, I wonder, shall accompany whom, and to where?”

Amber and Christine have planned for this; not for the murder-mystery theatrics, but to isolate and question a very specific subset of the attendees. Through a combination of Christine’s talent for chasing digital trails and Amber’s hunter’s instincts and arch backseat commentary, they’ve assembled and exhaustively studied a dossier of the most likely culprits for the Dorley murders - the most vocally bitter, those who lost the most when the Hall was taken from them, the few who still have the resources to pursue some sort of revenge. Those wrinkled faces and hyphenated names are practically embossed onto the inside of Christine’s eyelids, and it’s from that list that she selects what she thinks is the likeliest culprit.

“No, no, hmm, no. I need someone who can keep me safe, I think. Someone mature. A man, not a boy,” Christine says, pantomiming indecision as she looks straight past the eager faces of Henry and Percy and the rest with a teasing smirk, before alighting her eyes on a shrivelled creature the approximate size and shape of a tortoise. She takes great pains to project every outward appearance of genuine excitement while inside she cringes herself into a reef knot; she only manages to keep it together by running through a mental list of the seemingly harmless old man’s past crimes when Dorley was in its original incarnation. She bats her false eyelashes for good measure, really playing up the flagrantness in the hopes it diverts suspicion away from her real motive, and breathes, “What do you say, handsome? Can I hold on to you if I get scared?” in the sexy voice Amber insisted on somewhat clinically training her to produce on demand.

“Oh. Oh! I say, er, yes, I should be honoured to escort the young lady, what,” the relic wheezes, puffing out his chest and gallantly presenting a twig of an arm for Christine to take. “Arthur Featheringley-Worthington, at your service, my dear. Oh, ah, my. Indeed.”

Hating every moment, fantasising about what she’s going to do if it turns out the evil old bastard did it (and then getting frustrated with herself because she knows she isn’t Amber, and realistically she won’t do a thing), Christine keeps an eager smile plastered across her face, takes her elderly suspect’s arm and allows herself to meet the eyes of absolutely nobody as she manoeuvres him somewhat ungracefully away from the group.

“The brazen, conniving, gold-digging slut!” she hears Penny exclaim, all righteous dudgeon. “You know what she’s planning on getting up to while they’re ‘looking for clues’!”

“You’re just mad you didn’t think of it first, Pen,” Henry snickers, giving Christine a wink that makes her feel like she needs a shower.

“Ahaha, what a fun idea! We all need a chaperone in this dangerous situation!” Amber slurs, slipping effortlessly through the close-packed bodies to attach herself to Colonel Lawrence Huxtable (retired), another face from the dossier, whose expression rapidly shifts from confusion to lottery-winner glee, although his wife looks decidedly less impressed.

“What the fuck is happening? Was there something funny in the stuff? Does coke even go off? Why is everyone horny for extremely old men all of a sudden?” Percy mutters, slightly too loud to plausibly have been meant to stay private.

“Oh, lighten up, Perce, it’s just a bit of fun!” says Amelia, dangling drunkenly back and forth from the arm of a significantly younger and better-looking senior than the other two. “Why don’t you take Lady Battersley for a quick spin around the servants’ quarters, hmm? You two make such a lovely couple!”

The formidable Lady Battersley, who looks significantly more enthusiastic about the arrangement than Percy, wastes no time at all in steering her new partner away in the direction of the doors. Christine appears to have started something of a fad, and before long almost all of the younger set have been paired off with an older investigative partner, some tittering at the jape and others visibly uncomfortable at the prospect of time alone with their allotted elder. She’d feel more sympathy if these people weren’t expressly here to mope about the liberation of Dorley Hall and reminisce about its worst days, but she still can’t entirely suppress a minor pang of guilt for indirectly putting the women in this position. She does her best to shake it off and makes a move toward the darkened hallway, her unsuspecting interrogatee in tow. “We’ll have a look around upstairs, then, shall we?” she decides on the spot.

“Very good, very good. Don’t forget to check every nook and cranny!” Haverthwaite calls out, with an utterly appalling twinkle in his eye. Amber lets out a glassy peal of laughter at this, one arm draped lazily around Colonel Huxtable beside her.

“Now, for those of us possessed of a less, ah, adventurous spirit, Detective Weiss and I shall repair to the dining room, where there awaits sherry and nibbles to fortify our spirits while we consider the evidence. We shall reconvene in… hmm, shall we say thirty minutes? And then we may compare findings and, hopefully, identify the wicked perpetrator, eh? Barring any, aha, further tragedies, of course,” Christine hears Haverthwaite laughingly say as she turns to leave.

“First sensible thing I’ve heard all night,” Weiss mutters with ill grace, but he allows himself to be shepherded away along with the rest of the partnerless guests while Christine steers Featheringley-Worthington into the rearguard of a nascent train of clue-seekers, moving out into the darkened corridor at a measured pace to account for the old man’s shuffle.

“Isn’t this exciting, Lucy? Absolutely anything could happen!” Amber asks delightedly, having appeared right behind Christine despite the volume of her dress and what should have been the telltale sound of her heels on the parquet floor.

“Thrilling, Phoebe,” Christine says flatly, reading entirely too much enthusiasm in the killer’s brilliant grin. “As long as everyone remembers it’s just a game.”

“Oh, but really, isn’t that just life? Or games, or… life is a… ahaha, I don’t know what point I was going for there,” Amber laughs, not entirely reassuringly, and with that she pivots on her heel and spirits her mildly shellshocked-looking chaperone away into the dark before Christine has time to figure out how to voice any of her growing concerns.

***

Down the hallway to the entrance hall, pairs of investigators peel off into a variety of rooms, within one or two of which Christine thinks she spies plastic knives spattered with fake blood, incriminatory pieces of discarded clothing and the like. As promised, she leads her elderly charge back down to the entrance hall, where she leaves the stopped grandfather clock, the bloody footprints leading back toward the bar and the rest of the pantomime paraphernalia to the other would-be sleuths, and instead chivvies old Arthur up one of the two grand, winglike staircases to the first floor, where she figures there’s less chance they’ll be interrupted or overheard, if only because few of the participants’ knees will be up to the climb.

“Oh, oof, oh dear, I must confess, that rather knocked the wind out of me,” Arthur wheezes upon achieving the summit, and Christine experiences a moment or two of genuine worry that he’s going to expire before he can admit to anything.

“I have something to confess, too,” she says. “I had something of an ulterior motive for asking you to accompany me tonight.”

“Oh dear, well, if it’s money you’re after, I’m afraid you shall be leaving empty-handed,” Featheringley-Worthington harrumphs, regaining perhaps a measure of the hauteur he displayed in his younger days.

“I don’t need your money, Arthur,” Christine says evenly. “No, I wanted some time alone with you because you’re one of the originals; one of the giants who founded Dorley Hall, one of the bold souls who lived the stories I can only thrill at. I must admit,” she continues, voice breathy, fanning at her chest in a calculated move, “I got a little flushed at the prospect of talking to you, of hearing about the larks you’d all get up to firsthand. And how angry you must be at Lambert and her gang of freaks and perverts for stealing it all away! Well, I’d happily hear about that too, especially if you’ve found some small way to poke them in the eye for their insolence. What do you say?” she concludes, pasting a sultry smile on her face while inside she kicks him out the window and runs a mile. “Favour a girl with some first-hand experience? I’d be ever so grateful.”

Arthur doesn’t exactly react the way Christine is expecting, although she has to admit to herself that comes as something of a relief. “Oh, crumbs. I may, ah, that is to say, I fear I have inadvertently misled you, my dear girl,” he stammers, clearly flustered and tripping over his words, fidgeting compulsively with the gold links in the cuffs of the expensive-looking, immaculately starched shirt from which his arms emerge like dessicated twigs. “Not to say I am judging, of course; quite natural to be intrigued by the dark secrets of one’s forebears, I daresay, and especially when they lean in so, ehm, salacious a direction. But I’m afraid I’ve rather put all of that behind me,” he admits, seeming genuinely embarrassed. “Something of an attack of the conscience, that most horrid of fates,” he adds with a sad smile.

“You’ve put it behind you?” Christine snaps, frustrated.

“Indeed, at least insofar as that is possible, given the terrible things we did,” Arthur says, shaking his head regretfully. “I fear charitable donations can only go so far in salving the blot on one’s soul, especially given the sorry state of my finances at this point. But I have at least resolved to do and say as little as humanly possible regarding those times, and to let the horrors therein stay firmly bound in the past where they belong.”

“But why even come here, then?” Christine demands, her confusion making her seem angrier than she is, in the face of which the elderly man visibly quails. “Why hang around people celebrating everything you say you wish you’d never done?”

“Oh. Well. This is, ah, not an easy thing for me to admit,” Arthur begins, looking as if the last remaining air has been sucked out of him, “But I am in fact rather desperately lonely. These are the last friends I have. And if their peccadilloes, their… obsessions… make it rather more difficult than I might prefer for me to escape my own past misdeeds, well… perhaps that is exactly what I deserve.”

“Oh.” Christine can’t think of anything else to say. She’s struggling with her own overactive empathy for the wretched old man, trying to force herself to remember the genuinely awful things that, as he says, a self-pitying show of contrition and a small amount of money slipped into the pockets of some charity or other can’t come close to erasing. It isn’t entirely successful.

“I, ah, apologise. I rather suspect I’ve made things awkward,” Arthur murmurs. “Shall we, hmm, perhaps forget any of this was said, and search for these clues? What do you say, my dear?”

Christine wracks her brain for anything to fill the yawning, intensely awkward silence that follows, although that ends quickly when out of absolutely nowhere it’s thoroughly inhabited by a genuinely chilling shriek. The second of the night, and one that couldn’t be more of a perfect opposite to the sound-library scream that announced Haverthwaite’s mystery game. “That’ll be another body found, and us without a clue, eh what?” Arthur says, all forced jollity, but a definite shiver makes its way down the back of Christine’s neck: unless Haverthwaite has really stepped up his game when it comes to the theatrics, she finds it hard to believe this is just another part of the game. She wrenches the door open without hesitation and quickly descends the stairs, not bothering to slow to let the lagging Arthur catch up despite his wheezing protestations.

It comes as something of a surprise to be met at the foot of the grand staircase by none other than the Colonel himself, standing surprisingly straight-backed and fixing Christine with an intensity of gaze that makes her wonder if she’s supposed to salute. The lights are still mostly turned off, and the elderly man is positioned at the centre of one of the only pools of light with a visible nervousness that perhaps slightly belies his rigid bearing.

“Miss Alston-Powell, wasn’t it? Is Mr Featheringley-Worthington accounted for?” he asks in a brisk, military manner.

“He’s a tad winded; he’ll be along,” Christine replies with an appropriately Lucy-like lack of concern.

“Jolly good, jolly good. And, ah, you didn’t happen to see Miss Fitzgerald up there, did you?” he adds, a touch plaintive beneath the slightly tarnished military steel.

“No. Why, what’s happened? Where is she?” Christine blurts, momentarily forgetting that she and Amber are meant to be strangers. She tries and fails to suppress a stab of anxiety; with Huxtable present and Amber absent, the thought creeps unbidden into her mind that maybe she and Amber have been found out. She can’t quite conceive of the sound she heard ever coming out of Amber’s mouth, but who’s to say, she reasons, what even the most cold-eyed killer might sound like when she’s in the midst of being captured and/or killed herself?

“There you are! Darling, you mustn’t wander away like that! Absolutely anything might happen!”

Amber’s reappearance is more of a relief to Christine than she’ll ever admit, and seemingly to the Colonel as well; he offers the smirking killer his arm with the appearance of one intensely relieved he hasn’t lost his charge in the dark, and pats her hand in a vaguely patronising manner.

“Well then, shall we see what all the fuss is about, hmm, what?” the old man says in a brisk tone. “I bally-well wonder what’s going on?”

What’s going on, once the foursome have navigated a brief maze of darkened corridors and empty receiving-rooms, is a gaggle of party guests milling about outside an impressive pair of doors, with which Haverthwaite is fussing and rattling a heavy ring of keys, to no apparent avail.

“Can’t seem to get the blasted things open,” he huffs, turning to the growing knot of bodies with a self-deprecating smile. “I swear we had the hinges oiled only the other week. Whole place is going to the dogs, I say. Ah, Cyril, would you mind?”

Cyril is, apparently, the name of the one of the moderately out-of-shape security staff who’s come jogging up, red-faced and winded, and is very obviously trying to get his employer’s attention semi-discreetly, a point which seems largely to elude Haverthwaite.

“Er, Sir, I mean, Mr Haverthwaite, I, er…” the man begins, stumbling over his words.

“Not now, man, we’ve got a stuck door and what very well might be another ghastly murder waiting behind it,” Haverthwaite says sharply. “Although if so it’s hopelessly off-cue, and there shall be notes,” he adds, mugging shamelessly and raising a handful of titters among his nervous audience. Cyril, still beet-red and clearly bursting to say whatever he came to, tries the handle and gives the door an experimental shove, then looks to his boss, who assents with an indulgent tilt of his head. The old, worn latch gives way after a couple of solid whacks from the big man’s shoulder, to a scattering of sarcastic applause from the less frightened among the observers. The door bangs open, revealing a long dining table set for a meal, illuminated from above by soft candlelight from an enormous chandelier. And seated at the head of the table, eliciting cries of shock and disgust from the party guests, along with at least three legitimate faintings, is Percy. Percy has definitely had better days; both his hands have been hacked off at the wrist, and are folded almost delicately together atop a gilt-edged plate placed in front of their former owner. His eyes have been scooped out, and placed nearby on another, smaller plate, like an aperitif. As a final touch the young man’s throat has been sliced wide open, and it’s from this second mouth that he’s making his final bubbling, choking exudations, staring sightlessly with the dark pits of his ruined sockets while his body jerks and twitches its last. Blood is absolutely everywhere, jetting from both stumps and pouring from Percy’s neck like a thick waterfall, sticky and intensely red and making a sad joke of Haverthwaite’s earlier corn-syrup mummery.

“Oh my god, this isn’t the dummy… I mean, this is, ah, ah, oh no… I, ah, uh, I don’t…!” Haverthwaite stammers, clutching at the doorframe for support, leaving Christine wondering whether he’s about to have a heart attack. A few of the older attendees actually might be having heart attacks themselves, if their doubled-over, hyperventilating, chest-clutching state is anything to go by. Amber’s face is a perfect mask of horrified surprise, but Christine knows her well enough by now to see the barely-suppressed glee bubbling just behind.

“Don’t just stand there, man! Call the bloody police!” Haverthwaite snaps at Cyril, turning, suddenly flushed and furious.

“That’s, uh, what I was trying to tell you, sir,” the luckless man ventures. “The phone lines are out. We’re totally cut off.”

“What? No, you lunkheaded buffoon, that was part of the game! Honestly, the caliber of staff these days, I despair,” Haverthwaite begins, flapping a hand at his subordinate in frustration. “The murder mystery, man, the entertainment! It was fake, you fool! And now this, here, there’s been a real murder! Do try to keep up!”

“I’m well aware, sir,” Cyril huffs. “The phone lines are actually cut. And something’s up with the walkies; I can’t raise the other staff. I’d have dispatched young Eric to go for help, but sir ordered the doors locked down, and I’m afraid Mr. Danforth has the keys.”

“Isn’t there a spare set in the office?” Haverthwaite demands, eyes wide with growing panic.

“Gone, sir. Dunno if one of the other staff has ‘em or if they’ve been taken,” Christine hears Cyril say from the other end of a long tunnel filled with a sudden rushing in her ears, but her attention is entirely taken up by Amber, with whom she fleetingly locks eyes and who seems to be struggling to suppress her laughter at the manor’s woeful security arrangements.

“B… b… but that must mean,” Henry blurts, eyes still fixed on the mutilated corpse of his former frenemy, “That whoever did this really is still in the house!”

“Let us, ah, let us repair to the smoking room,” Haverthwaite stammers, ushering people away from the slumped body with that same birdlike flapping of his hands. “A stiff, fortifying drink will do us all some good, eh? And then we can… we can work out what to do next. Yes. Come along, come along, don’t dawdle!”

With some grumbling, some weeping and no small effort to carry those who have fainted or appear close to expiring, the group assents to be herded back down the hallway. Christine allows herself to be overtaken, pretending to fuss with the heel of a shoe, until she spots an opportunity to grab Amber’s arm as she sweeps by and half-drag her into a convenient niche behind a marble bust of some haughty historical figure.

“Why?” Christine hisses between clenched teeth, unable to quite believe how quickly the evening has gone off the rails after all their meticulous preparation.

“Bit insulted you’re assuming this was me,” Amber sing-songs out of the corner of her mouth, keeping her face firmly fixed in an expression of fear and grief for the benefit of any audience they might acquire.

“This was definitely you. Come on,” Christine says, expression hard, refusing to play.

“So, did yours do it?” Amber responds sweetly.

“My…? Oh, you mean Arthur? No. He feels terrible about it all,” she says.

“Mine too. Or rather, he doesn’t remember which shoe goes on which foot, let alone how to execute a convoluted revenge plan against the people who took his torture factory away. Either way, the plan wasn’t working. I decided to go with a different approach.”

“Wasn’t working? Amber, we’d only questioned two of them!” Christine protests.

“The two most likely, though,” Amber murmurs. “Haverthwaite’s silly little game changed things. It’d have looked a bit suspicious if we kept stealing people one by one to grill them.”

“And how is this any better?” Christine demands.

“In timore, veritas, darling,” Amber purrs. “Or is that in timore est veritas? Whichever; I confess I’ve never really bothered with Latin overmuch. I don’t particularly enjoy playing with dead things, especially not when there’s so much fun to be had with the living.”

“In… fear, truth?” Christine haltingly translates. “Do you really think that’s going to work? Or are you just enjoying yourself?”

“¿Por qué no los dos?” Amber replies with a quick, brilliant grin, then she’s hurrying ahead to catch up with the others, leaving Christine afraid, annoyed and thoroughly off-balance.

***

“Is every window in this bloody place barred?” someone bellows, as Christine and Amber belatedly arrive at the door to the cramped, cluttered little smoking room and pause for a moment outside to listen. There’s a frustrated rattling, swiftly followed by the sound of someone sitting heavily in an armchair that has probably been in need of repair since the sixties. “You can’t afford new carpets, but you can put automatic bars on every window and door?”

“Well, you see, security… enemies everywhere, and all that. And, well, the… special guest…” Haverthwaite’s reedy little voice replies, sounding very much as if the teacher has called him to the front of the class and the dog’s eaten his homework.

“You’re a paranoid fool, man. And the key to open all this nonsense is on your missing chap Danforth. So let’s bloody well go and find him!”

“I suspect it would be a big mistake to go tramping around the manor without a plan,” says a third voice in the unmistakable accent belonging to Weiss, the detective. “No. If we’re to survive, what we need is to understand and identify the killer.”

In the musty dark of the smoking room, a handful of candles have been lit, casting the heavy drapes and deep armchairs in sinister, wavering shadow. As Christine slips through the door, excuses ready on her tongue, she realises she might as well be invisible; Benjamin Weiss is holding court by the fireplace, and all eyes are on the man’s gesticulating hands and grim expression.

“Note the assailant went after the victim’s hands and eyes,” the detective says, indicating a crude sketch he’s made on a bit of paper, a gingerbread-man outline of a human figure with Xs scratched across the sites of Percy’s mutilation. As a visual aid, Christine can’t really see how it helps, but it does at least seem to have focused the guests’ attention on something other than the late arrivals. “Now, to me that speaks of a killer who’s set out to punish this fellow, after some twisted fashion. Our boy Percy was a bit of a randy bugger, I seem to recall. So who’s he been staring and grabbing at tonight, I wonder?”

“He’s been all over Lucy since she swanned in here! And none of us know anything about her, really!” Penny declares with a triumphant expression, pointing a wavering finger at Christine, causing the gathered partygoers to draw back in a loose circle as if she’s been found infectious. Christine’s heart hammers, and she glances around for Amber, but she’s nowhere to be seen; thankfully, of all people, it’s Arthur who leaps to her defence.

“I say, the lady was with me the whole time!” he protests. “Never left my sight for a second! Can’t have had a thing to do with the… unpleasantness.”

“And I find it hard to believe she’d manage to keep a white outfit so clean while hacking off a man’s hands,” Weiss muses, stalking in a circle around Christine and inspecting her with a thoughtful eye.

“Do you mind?” Christine snaps, remembering to act at least somewhat like Lucy, snatching back her hem from the detective’s fingers, internally thanking all her lucky stars that Amber chose ivory for Christine’s costume for the night.

“She could have worn an apron!” Penny protests, clearly hungry for blood.

“We should go to the kitchens and see if any aprons are missing!” exclaims Henry, looking immensely proud of himself.

“Idiot boy, do you even have any idea how many there are supposed to be? Or where they’re kept? You heard the detective: the last thing we need is to go charging off into the dark on some fool’s errand!” erupts someone older and so ruddy-faced that Christine thinks he might at least be able to lead their way in the dark.

“And who’s to say she wore an apron? She could have draped herself in a sheet from one of the disused rooms,” an elderly woman with extreme dowager energy suggests.

“Or perhaps she did nothing of the sort!” Christine snaps, eager to move the suspicion train along to another station.

“She’s right; we’re more likely looking for someone in dark clothes, or who’s missing their jacket,” Weiss proposes. Christine considers his methodology a little lacking, and wonders if he’s actually ever been in a situation more dangerous than snapping photos of someone’s illicit affair from across the road, but she’s happy to see him shifting the group’s attention elsewhere. She also vividly recalls Amber’s sparkly black dress, and hopes the others have been paying less attention to their newest members than she has to them.

While Christine has been preoccupied with these thoughts, a couple of partygoers in dark clothing have been loudly protesting their innocence, for reasons of age, infirmity and/or prior good character, but she snaps back into focus when she hears Penny’s plummy tones again cut through the chatter. “What about the other one, then? Phoebe what’s-her-name? She’s wearing that tacky Givenchy thing, and you’d never see a blood-stain amid all that ridiculous tulle! And I never liked the way she was looking at me, frankly!”

“You were with Miss Fitzgerald when the murder took place, Colonel; anything to report?” Weiss demands, turning alongside half the assembled guests to fix the doddering old military man beneath an accusatory stare.

“Oh, I, er, that is… I’m not sure, I… I think I needed to use the facilities, and Miss, er, that is, the good lady, she was kind enough to escort me, I think… I think I should like to go home now, if you please,” Huxtable finishes weakly, the stress and confusion of the situation clearly taking a severe toll on his condition.

“And where, I wonder, is the ‘good lady’ now?” Weiss asks.

“I think she said something about needing the loo herself,” Christine ventures; on a sudden spark of inspiration she mimes covering one nostril and sniffing something up the other, which raises titters from a few quarters despite the circumstances.

“Well, I think we’ll have some questions for Miss Phoebe when she gets back,” Weiss huffs. “In the meantime, let’s-“

“Has it occurred to you this might have something to do with Dorley Hall?” Christine blurts out, her fear-induced adrenaline high and the minor success of her previous lie running away with her mouth before her brain has time to catch up.

“What the blazes do you mean?” demands a tall, well-preserved man somewhere in his sixties or seventies.

“Well, if Mr. Weiss is correct and the killer is acting out some kind of punishment for, you know, looking, touching…” Christine goes on, extemporising wildly, “Almost everyone here either is or is related to someone who was involved in old Dorley, when Dorothy Marsden ran the place. Me included. And this pervert bitch who took over has all sorts of scary connections, we’re told. So couldn’t it be that? Is there any reason someone might be coming for us now? What’s changed? Has anyone done something to rile them up?”

Christine feels fleetingly hopeful that she might extract a confession yet, as various members of the gathering shuffle their feet and look anywhere but toward her, and she wonders just how many of them have been nursing some futile scheme to retake Dorley for years, and are now panicking that they’ve brought nonspecific vengeance down on their liver-spotted pates. Still, nobody says anything about murdering graduates, and she’s afraid to push any harder for fear of revealing that she knows more than she should.

“This is pointless! We’re just going around in circles!” Henry declares, drawing a poker from the cold fireplace and striking what he probably thinks is a suitably inspiring stance. “Mr. Haverthwaite, your man with the keys is out there somewhere, right? Well, I for one intend to go and find him! I don’t care who this murderer is: they can’t take on the lot of us, and if they try I’ll give them a bloody good thrashing!” He swishes the poker back and forth for effect, which ends up making him look more like a child playing at pirates than a force to be reckoned with, but it’s clearly enough to fire up a handful of the more hot-headed men among the party (and Penny) into something of a mob, armed with anything and everything they can get their hands on, from antique candlesticks to crystal decanters and, in one case, a house slipper. Christine doesn’t exactly rate their chances against Amber even on a well-lit, open field, and in the dark halls of Madrigal House she’s fairly certain they’re doomed, but she unobtrusively attaches herself to the back rank anyway, in the hopes of regrouping with her fellow intruder and trying to figure out some sort of plan. Penny shoots her a venomous glare, but even she seems to see the value in another warm body between her and the unseen killer, because she keeps her mouth shut. Haverthwaite comes along too, which is something of a surprise, but the concerns raised by the group staying in the drawing room re: the likelihood that the murderer might come for or, in fact, be one of them seem to have spooked him. Christine’s naggingly aware that she should probably be against Amber murdering people, on balance, but given the specimens on display, the deeds chronicled in the older set’s files, and the fact the younger attendees seem uniformly desperate to relive their parents’ and grandparents’ sins, she finds her moral objections almost refreshingly relegated to background noise.

“We should make for the kitchens,” Haverthwaite is saying, taking up a position near but not actually at the head of the party, as the sound of something heavy being dragged in front of the smoking-room door echoes behind them. “I seem to remember that being where the servants were supposed to go, in case of emergency. Perhaps Mr. Danforth will be found there.”

***

Amber slips back into the little band somewhere between the smoking room and the kitchens, at approximately the point where the manor’s state of repair has begun visibly to slip from just-about-serviceable and reveal peeling paint, sagging ceilings and water damage. She has a sparkling, manic smile on her face, which - intentionally or not - Christine figures is probably reinforcing her lie as to what Phoebe has actually been doing.

“Just a quick little trip to the powder room,” Amber replies brightly when inevitably questioned, giving an unselfconscious sniff.

“And how exactly did you know where the facilities were without having to ask?” Haverthwaite inquires

“Babes, it’s cute that you think this was the first time I’d been tonight. I have a, ahem, tiny bladder. Like a, what do you call it, a camel. Or, no the opposite of a camel. Hm, what would be the opposite of a camel, like, a squirrel or something? Or a bird! Because they fly, and camels don’t, ahaha, obviously. But then there are fish. This is shockingly complicated.”

This diatribe doesn’t so much seem to dispel the others’ suspicions as bludgeon them into submission with sheer weight of words, but it at least prevents anyone else asking her any questions, if only because Amber is still talking so fast and energetically that nobody can get a word in. Christine has to admit it works better than it has any right to, as a tactic: by the time Amber finally subsides it seems the others have largely forgotten what they were even suspicious about. Even she has to admit, if she were experiencing Phoebe as a real person rather than a carefully-crafted artifice, the babbling, profoundly unserious socialite in front of her is the last person she’d suspect of being a serial killer.

“Don’t think I don’t know what you’re up to,” Christine murmurs, once a safe moment to sidle up to Amber presents itself.

“I have no idea what you mean, darling,” Amber replies with a twinkle in her eye.

“Just… will you stop bloody killing people?” Christine hisses in abject frustration. “It’s not… it’s not helping anything!”

“Oh, I don’t know about that; it’s doing me a world of good. You wouldn’t believe how much tension I’ve built up over the last few days,” Amber whispers back. “Do you know, it’d never occurred to me to do a reverse murder-mystery before. I’ve been missing out; this is an absolute riot! Look how frightened they all are!”

“How does this possibly help us figure out who did it?” Christine whispers back heatedly.

“Don’t you see it yet? I’m removing the ones who it wasn’t; soon we’ll have a nice, neat little band of likely suspects, under quite spectacular pressure. And then, my darling, we shall find our culprit. I don’t just do things without a plan, you know,” Amber chides, but it’s accompanied by a surprisingly genuine smile.

“Look, I admit Percy probably didn’t do it, but, like… how many people are you planning to kill here?” Christine asks desperately.

“That really depends on them, darling, doesn’t it?” Amber murmurs, smirking. “No, but really, do pay attention for the next bit; it’s quite good,” she continues, which only multiplies the dread - and the guilty sense of anticipation - Christine is feeling.

***

“Here we are,” Haverthwaite declares, after an uneventful further couple of minutes’ nervous huddle-walking through the dark, the whole group vaguely resembling a Roman phalanx with unlikely and ineffectual weapons poking out and swinging wildly at every creak and rustle from the old, decaying bones of the manor. Phone flashlights catch on spotless worktops, empty sinks and hulking ovens, enough capacity to cook a grand banquet for five times as many people as are present, and very little of it apparently ever used or kept up to date.

“Mr. Danforth! I say, Mr. Danforth, are you in here?” Haverthwaite calls, sounding decidedly less than confident about finding himself at the head of the group, but seemingly feeling he has little choice.

“And do you have the keys, perchance?” quavers someone else, positioned firmly behind him.

As the torchbeams swing around to illuminate the far end of the cavernous kitchen, it rapidly becomes clear that Mr. Danforth does not, in fact, have the keys. Nor does he have arms, or legs. These are arrayed alongside his dripping torso, still dressed in what remains of its security uniform, hanging from meat hooks beside racks of lamb and sides of beef in a meticulously-arranged little diorama inside the kitchen’s walk-in freezer, all cast in eerie uplight from the victim’s carefully positioned torch. The hand of one severed arm still clutches a walkie-talkie in a literal death grip, and the expression fixed on the man’s bloodless, slack face is one of abject surprise. There is once again an absolute ocean of blood: black and glistening in the half-light, drained by gravity as if from a slaughtered pig. Seeing all of this, Haverthwaite makes a strangled, choking sound; Henry drops his poker in shock, which somewhat undermines his claim to being capable of protecting the others. Amber lets out a pitch-perfect shriek of horror, chorusing with many of the others, but Christine, standing right next to her, feels a shudder of what she can only imagine is pleasure ripple through the woman at the sight of both her handiwork and the reaction she’s garnered. For her own part, Christine - having been forewarned, and also becoming worryingly inured to carnage - is mostly impressed that Amber managed to hack up and arrange a heavyset adult man’s body parts in such a short time. Murder builds core strength, she can only imagine.

“The keys, man, the keys!” someone is snapping at Haverthwaite, who seems to be having a minor breakdown and is clutching at a stainless-steel worktop for support, although nobody seems overly bothered about helping him. Henry, having regained both poker and composure, makes a few desultory prods at the places on torso and severed legs where the victim’s belt and pockets might have been, but it’s to no avail: it’s obvious that anything in there is long-gone, either lost in the slick of blood or taken by the man’s assailant. A brief attempt at fishing in said blood doesn’t turn up anything, either, but does leave a couple of the more weak-stomached among the group heaving over a nearby sink.

“So what do we do now?” a nasal, angry voice demands from somewhere in the defensive huddle the guests have unconsciously formed themselves into.

“We just have to make it through til morning; someone will turn up when we don’t check in, surely!” someone else says plaintively.

“No,” Weiss says, firmly. “We’ve got two murders so far, and it’s only been a bloody hour. We can’t just sit around waiting to be picked off. We need to figure out who’s responsible, and soon.”

“Well, at least we know it isn’t any of us! Frankly I didn’t like the look of some of the bunch we left in the smoking room; shifty eyes, the lot of them,” Amber proclaims, which Christine thinks might be pushing her luck, but which seems to pass unnoticed, save for a pointed glance from Weiss himself. “Mmm,” he assents, noncommittally. “Well, if not, then we’re looking at a member of staff who didn’t clear out as ordered, or an actual intruder,” he says, although he doesn’t sound convinced.

“If you ask me, it’s more likely the killer is still among us,” Henry declares in what he probably thinks is a knowledgeable tone, apropos of absolutely nobody asking. “Pen, make yourself useful, will you? We need a list of suspects. Get on your little notes thingy and… hang on. Pen? Penny? Where the hell has she gotten off to now?” he snaps, clearly more annoyed that his deductions are going unrecorded than genuinely concerned for her safety.

“We’re missing someone? And nobody thought to mention?” Weiss barks, obviously despairing of the calibre of people he’s found himself trapped with.

“I don’t think anyone noticed! And can you really blame them?” Amelia titters, still hanging off of Penny’s boyfriend’s arm with absolutely zero shame.

“Well, when did anyone last see her?” the detective demands, turning a very unimpressed glare on the rest of the attendees.

“She was definitely with us just before we left the smoking room,” someone ventures.

“Right. So we retrace our steps, and look for where she might have gone,” says Weiss. Multiple people turn to Haverthwaite for either confirmation or dissent, but he seems still to be deep in the throes of dissociation or despair, because he barely even acknowledges anything having been said. He shuffles along with the group willingly enough when they leave the grisly scene in the kitchen, though, torchbeams flickering and unlikely weapons at the ready, accompanied by a constant refrain of sobs and terrified yelps. Given how focused the majority are on watching the shadows for imaginary killers, it’s easy enough for Christine to allow herself and Amber to fall behind enough for a few whispered words.

“What was the point of that? He was just security; he didn’t do anything!” Christine hisses angrily.

Amber shrugs, leaning her head against Christine’s shoulder as if they’re best friends at a sleepover. “Okay, I’ll admit, I had a vision and I went with it,” she confesses, infuriatingly casual. “Anyway, with the keys off the board, we have all the time we might desire to figure out who bumped off our darling Sisters. Isn’t that what you wanted? You should be thrilled!”

“Ecstatic,” Christine murmurs back. “What did you do with Penny, by the way?”

“Oh, I’m sure she’s around here somewhere, my darling,” Amber whispers. Christine sighs wearily, and tries to prepare herself for the next horror show.

***

There are two bodies lying in the middle of the corridor, just over halfway back to the smoking room, not far from the entrance hall. The vanguard - consisting of Weiss, Henry and a giggly, oblivious Amelia - stop dead as their torchbeams reveal the grisly sight of a couple, both elderly and well-dressed by present standards, who must have left the smoking room with the intent of catching up with the exploration party. Both have had their throats slashed, and they’ve died tangled together: less an embrace than a seeming attempt to shove one another in their killer’s way and escape, or so it seems to Christine, although she admits to herself she might be letting her opinion of the party guests cloud her perception somewhat.

The second row don’t get the message in time and bash into the first, then the rest collide with them in a disorganised pile-up of arms, legs, cummerbunds and stoles. Amid the resulting clamour, confusion and screaming as more people lay eyes on the corpses, Christine takes the opportunity to sidle up to Amber.

“How did you even…?” she whispers.

“Would you believe this wasn’t me?” the killer murmurs.

“Oh, come on. If not you, then who?” Christine hisses.

“No idea! Isn’t that exciting? Maybe they took the opportunity to settle a grudge they’ve both been nursing for decades now, and achieved the rare mutual kill. Wouldn’t that just be so romantic?”

“It doesn’t look like they killed each other,” Christine whispers, ignoring her and looking critically at the scene. “What did they even use? And look, there’s blood trailing off…”

“Good eye,” Amber says, barely even bothering to keep her voice low amid the cacophony of voices. “Do you know, I really, truly haven’t a clue what happened, then. Hm. And to think I worried tonight would be boring…”

“Quiet, all of you! Do you hear that?” Weiss snaps, suddenly. Christine, along with the rest, turns from side to side, listening, and realises she can indeed just about hear something; a rhythmic banging or knocking, coming from a dark side-passage that looks meant for servants’ use, from the shabby decor and the mop and bucket discreetly leaned against the wall. Weiss holds his phone light aloft and strides forth, and about half of the group musters the courage to follow, Christine and Amber among them. Christine’s heart is hammering as she imagines scenario after scenario Amber could have set up, but in the end, it’s unprepared and filled with dread that she watches the detective zero in on a cleaning cupboard, and throw open the door with a warning yell.

“Aieeeekk!” Penny shrieks, painfully loud in the enclosed space, suddenly faced with a small crowd of people shining bright lights in her eyes, all yelling at her and at one another in total confusion. The woman keeps screaming incoherently for a few seconds, eyes dish-wide and crazed with fear, before gradually subsiding as she realises that whoever she’s so terrified of, this isn’t them. She looks groggy to Christine, as if she’s only just regaining consciousness, and she’s half-slumped against the back wall of the little storage closet, but other details take precedence in the minds of the rest of the observers: namely that she’s spattered all over with blood, that in her slack left hand is a gory meat cleaver taken from the kitchen, and that at her feet is the hacked-up, rapidly-cooling corpse of Colonel Huxtable.

“I knew it!” Henry breathes, apparently wholly sincere. “Didn’t I always say she had the dead eyes of a murderer, Ames?”

“You did say that. Quite often,” Amelia agrees, although Christine suspects she’d enthusiastically confirm that unicorns are real, pigs fly and shoes are worn on the head, too.

“What? What? What’s happening? Get out of my face! God! Why are you all looking at me like… like…”

The sound Penny makes when she finally becomes aware of what’s at her feet, in her hand and all over her outfit genuinely causes Christine’s brain to go into protective shutdown for a few seconds. By the time she comes back to herself, ears ringing, the unfortunate Penny has already moved on to remonstrating furiously with Henry, Weiss and a couple of the less easily intimated olds.

“How could you possibly think I did this?” she cries, toeing at the corpse with an expression of anguished distaste.

“Oh, I don’t know, Pen, maybe the knife in your hand? The literal dead body at your feet? Something in that general area?” Henry snorts.

“Henry, you absolute oaf, it’s obvious I’m being set up! You, White or whatever your name was, you’re supposed to be a detective: tell him!”

“Nine times out of ten, when someone says they’re being framed, it’s because they did it and they’re trying to cover for themselves,” Weiss says contemplatively.

“Well, this is the one time! I’m the one out of ten!” Penny wails.

“You’re saying you’re a one out of ten, Pen? How lovely, we agree on something!” Amelia titters, completely out of step with the mood of the moment.

“Henry, you know me! You’ve known me for years! We went to school together, for God’s sake!” Penny pleads.

“Yes, and don’t you think I’ve forgotten the class hamster mysteriously going missing when you were supposed to be taking care of him, Pen,” Henry replies accusatorily. “The signs were there,” he says with extreme gravitas, shaking his head. “None of us wanted to see, but the signs were there.”

Weiss, at length, harrumphs and steps back to let the trembling Penny out of the storage closet. “So, you say you were approached from behind, you lost consciousness, and the next thing you knew, you were waking up in here with the body of the late Colonel,” he says. “If we assume for now that what you’re telling us is true-“

“Which it is, you lump!” Penny exclaims.

“-Then you’re the only person who’s even been close to the killer,” he concludes, sounding exasperated. “Was there anything you noticed - anything at all - that might help us work out who it was?”

“Er, excuse me, it seems fairly clear it was her!” Henry protests, although by now it seems everyone but Amelia is ignoring him.

Christine has to work to stay calm as Weiss ushers the trembling Penny into the care of a couple of the other guests, who wrap a jacket around her shoulders in a well-meaning if ineffectual gesture, and leads the half of the group who ventured after the noise to reunite with the handful left trembling in the corridor.

“You can’t seriously have thought they were going to buy that,” Christine whispers to Amber in passing.

The killer shrugs minutely in response. “You’d be surprised what people will believe when they’re desperate for a culprit,” she murmurs the next time the two of them happen to move close to one another. “But all right, yes, mostly I thought it’d be funny.”

Christine has to admit, if only in the guilty privacy of her own head, that it sort of was.

The remainder of the little band is waiting where they were left, formed into a rather pathetic little defensive huddle in the middle of the room, by the pair of bodies some enterprising soul has now covered with a handy dust sheet. The fact this group has diminished in size by one evades everyone’s notice until Weiss chivvies them into some sort of order and turns toward the smoking room.

“All right,” he says. “Let’s get back. It’s time to speak to everyone together. I suspect I’ve got the… oh, come on, now. Where the hell has Haverthwaite gone?”

***

Christine is almost surprised to find the nine or ten people left in the smoking room alive and intact; despite Amber being beside her continuously since the kitchens, she’s been half-expecting to open the door to see a charnel house and the murderer grinning like the Cheshire cat. Nevertheless, they are alive, caught in the middle of making some sort of semi-co-ordinated attempt at shifting the window bars, but to little avail; meanwhile the rest appear to have found an ancillary liquor cabinet and decided to deal with the situation by getting absolutely sloshed, which doesn’t seem to have helped. It takes a couple of minutes’ furious arguing to get them to shift their impromptu barricade and let the returning party in, and once they finally are admitted, it’s to suspicious stares and hawklike watchfulness all round.

“Now,” says Weiss, with some relish, once he’s corralled everyone into the room and gotten them largely grouped up around the fireplace, sitting in armchairs (or lounging draped across the arm, in Amelia’s case) and standing with glasses of brandy in hand. “I’ve gathered you all here because we need to identify the killer before anyone else dies. But that isn’t why Mr. Haverthwaite hired me.”

“It was for the murder mystery, wasn’t it? Weren’t you something of a prop?” asks a red-nosed, hefty figure Christine recognises from the dossier as Edward Fanshawe, in a sneering tone. It doesn’t escape Christine that everyone has smoothly switched to talking about the Hall’s owner in the past tense, and nobody has suggested going to look for him. Nor can she ignore that, with Amber by her side and looking genuinely rapt with curiosity, someone else must have been responsible for the man’s vanishing act.

“No,” says the detective, sounding like he very much enjoys gainsaying the boorish oaf. “In fact, I’m here because he was deeply concerned that his big event might be infiltrated. He sincerely believes there are forces out there with a real desire to threaten the reputation and safety of the good people here tonight. The forces that took your Hall from you; the media, who’d love a story as salacious as yours. Even the former owners of that place, wanting to tidy up loose ends. Mr. Haverthwaite didn’t know who, but he was concerned. So, he contacted me.”

“Paranoid, as I said,” Fanshawe scoffs. “The old man was losing his mind. Wouldn’t be surprised if all this was his doing, what.”

“Wait, you think we’re being picked off by a journalist?” Henry scoffs.

“Obviously not,” Weiss says, speaking slowly to emphasise that he’s well aware he’s talking to an idiot. “No, what I think we’re dealing with tonight is a different kind of intrusion.”

“What in heaven’s name are you getting at, man?” a sharp-faced dowager in a fussy dress that smells strongly of mothballs demands.

“I’m saying that someone here tonight isn’t who they say they are,” Weiss declares, turning his gaze across his audience one by one and sending an icy shiver down Christine’s spine. “There’s one among us who was conveniently nowhere to be found while the late Percy and Mr Danforth met their ends, and very likely when Miss Huntington-Flynn was framed and the Colonel and the pair in the corridor killed. Now, being absent while the initial killings took place is not in itself proof of guilt - more than one of us was, after all - but it did give me cause to pay extra-close attention to certain persons of interest.”

“Persons of what?” Noddy Fanshawe splutters, clearly too drunk to be keeping up especially well.

“Before the party even began, I did a bit of digging into certain names on the guest list. Certain names who’d been getting invites to these little gatherings for years, and who’d never before done Haverthwaite the courtesy of replying, even to tell him to get fucked. Who’d never, in fact, shown any sign of even noticing Madrigal House existed before suddenly turning up tonight. Does that sound like anyone you know… Ms. Fitzgerald? Hmm?”

Christine breathes out, but her heart is still pounding in her ears. Weiss is pointing an accusatory finger at Amber; she herself seems to have escaped his attention for the moment, and of the two of them she assumes the silver-tongued serial killer is the one more likely to find a way to turn this around.

“What I discovered is this,” Weiss goes on, while Amber watches him silently, with a small but steadily growing smile which Christine just knows can portend nothing good. “Phoebe Fitzgerald loved to run around splashing money and scandal wherever she went, but she never actually had access to the Fitzgerald fortune. Her parents kept her on a strict stipend; her lifestyle was mostly funded with confidence trickery and IOUs. Then a convenient plane crash took out Mater and Pater and her elder brother to boot, leaving her in sole control of the family’s wealth. She vanishes from her very, very public life for a year and change - she’s grieving, she’s working out how to manage the family businesses, she’s sorting herself out and getting serious about her life, whatever. That’s reasonable. But then the first thing - literally the first thing - she does when she resurfaces? She comes here, tonight, and people start dying. Now, Haverthwaite had me sit on this information because he wanted her damn money, but since he’s not around, I can confirm it: the crash was no accident. Phoebe Fitzgerald is a murderer, and I believe she developed a taste for it when she killed her way out from under Mummy and Daddy’s boot heel. Now she’s come to punish the people who sent her all those begging letters over the years, driving her mad, mocking the fact her family never took her seriously, telling her all these stories of the weird shit they used to get up to. Haverthwaite thought he’d landed a whale, but what he got was a shark, and now there’s blood in the water she won’t be satisfied til we’re all dead.”

Christine, despite everything, is genuinely impressed at how fundamentally stupid and incorrect a theory Weiss has produced, while still accidentally identifying the right culprit. Amber cocks her head to one side, still smiling, looking more and more amused by the whole chain of events.

“She really killed them? The devious little minx,” she breathes, seemingly mostly to herself. “She didn’t even admit to that when I… well. That’s another story.”

“Who are you talking about?” Weiss demands.

“The real Phoebe, of course,” Amber says offhandedly, before visibly catching herself. “Wait. Shit.”

Amber now stands at the centre of a rapidly-widening circle of empty space; beside Christine, Henry is holding his poker in a decidedly combative stance, and despite the ineffectuality of a lot of the Madrigal crew, there are more than enough bodies armed with more than enough weaponised bits of decorative metalwork that Christine can’t see a way for even Amber to get out of this. Once Amber’s in their clutches, Christine’s panicking brain reasons, her own exposure and capture will inevitably follow close behind. And, considering who these people are, she’s desperately trying not to imagine what fate might follow. Even being turned in to the police would most likely spell doom for Dorley Hall if the investigators manage to put the pieces together, let alone for Christine as the accomplice to history’s most prolific and depraved serial killer. And that’s the very least a bunch of well-established torturers and sexual sadists like the Madrigal House party set might do.

“See, this is why I absolutely despise detectives,” Amber says to the room at large, as conversationally as if they were gossiping over tea, while the circle narrows and multiple pairs of hands begin to close in. “They suck all the fun out of a good mystery.”

Then she stabs Weiss in the throat.

It happens with the speed of a snake striking: one moment Amber is standing in the contracting circle of bodies, utterly relaxed in stark contrast to Christine’s light-headed panic. The next Weiss is recoiling, a horrific bubbling sound and foamy spray of blood coming from a hole gouged deep into his neck. Amber slashes with pinpoint precision at the nearest guests, a vicious little blade suddenly in her hand; someone screams and flails, clutching at his eyes, taking another couple of people down with him as he falls, while Christine swears she sees a couple of Fanshawe’s fingers go flying. Almost instantly this triggers a stampede, as guests all around Christine shove, bite and elbow one another in a desperate push for the only door. Christine herself is carried along with the crush, and it’s only once she’s forced bodily out of the room ahead of a grinning, wildly slashing Amber that she realises this was probably her intention. “Hmm… you’ll do,” the killer says brightly, counting along victims until alighting on Christine and grabbing her by the lapels of her short jacket. She slashes wildly with the knife to corral the rest of the overspill on the other side of the hallway; the side leading to the entrance hall rather than deeper into Madrigal House. “Scream,” Amber hisses between clenched teeth, voice pitched low for Christine’s ears only, while alternating holding the little knife so tight against her throat that she can feel it biting the skin, and thrusting it aggressively toward the small crowd in order to keep them at bay. Christine has had a recurring nightmare about almost this exact scenario, so it’s very easy for her to produce an extremely believable shriek when Amber, an arm so tight around her throat that she’s starting to see stars, drags her bodily away into the dark.

***

“Whew! That was exciting!” Amber says cheerily, once they’re far enough away that they can no longer hear the angry shouting and panicked clamour, and she releases Christine with a friendly little pat on the arms. Her face is flushed and she’s breathing a little heavily, and Christine has rarely seen her look so genuinely in her element. She’s pulled off her wig and the cap beneath, releasing her razor-straight blonde hair, and has dispensed with the more easily accessible bits of padding, meaning her dress looks uncharacteristically loose-fitting but she presumably has a somewhat freer range of motion.

“What the hell do we do now?” Christine demands, shaking hard and trying her best not to let the brimming tears spill over. “It’s all fucked! They’re on to us, they’ve seen our… well, your face, and mine, even if they think you’ve kidnapped me again. We need to get out, not… go further in! What did you do with the, the keys, where are they? We need to open the door and go, surely! This has all gone wrong! Amber!”

“Don’t get yourself worked up, darling, you’ll ruin your makeup,” Amber says gently. Predictably unconcerned, she strides quickly around turn after turn but refuses to break into a run. Somewhere far behind the two girls, heavy footfalls echo down the darkened halls, before terminating in a jarring crash and distant cacophony of shouting voices. “I think it’s a little defeatist to say this has gone wrong, honestly. Things have taken a turn, certainly, but we’re just playing a new game. And about time,” she adds, flashing a knife-sharp smile. “Between you and me, I was in danger of getting bored. But now we’re in fresh, virgin territory, and anything could happen! Just do exactly as I say, Sister dear, and we’ll have our culprit yet!”

“Amber, for real, they’re after us!” Christine says, voice high and panicked.

“That’s the best part!” Amber enthuses. “It means we have a delicious opportunity to turn things around on them - you know, hunters become the hunted, predators become the prey… enemies to lovers, if the night really delivers,” she murmurs, eyebrows raised to what Christine considers an unacceptably lascivious height.

“Amber,” Christine says, flatly.

“I saw how that Amelia was looking at you,” Amber says, giggling happily at Christine’s scowl, which is itself halfway a reaction to the fact Amber has successfully distracted her from her panic. “Who knows how the… oh. What’s this now?”

There is another dead body sprawled rather artlessly on the floor here: one Christine recognises as Cyril the security guard. He isn’t featured in Amber and Christine’s dossier of likely murder suspects, and therefore hasn’t really figured into any of their plans for the night, so finding him lying in a heap, white shirt stained red from multiple deep cuts, comes as a shock.

“For God’s sake, Amber,” Christine groans. “When did you even…?”

“This one wasn’t me either,” Amber says, casting a rather critical eye over the ragged wounds in the corpse’s back and neck, which bespeak a frenzied attack. “I’m starting to feel a bit like someone’s trying to steal my spotlight here,” she complains, petulant. “This was meant to be my night.”

“At least your priorities are in order,” Christine murmurs.

“On the other hand, this could mean the Dorley killer is actually here tonight,” Amber muses, pacing a neat arc around the body, considering it from all angles. “It’s a mess, but I can’t fault the passion. Very outsider, you know: art brut, sort of thing. And just think, we could have the opportunity to wrap up this whole thing with a neat little bow.”

“And how exactly are we going to achieve that?” Christine asks, not really wanting to hear the answer.

“Ah-ah, my darling, wait and see!” Amber says with a broad, infuriating grin.

They’re back in the deserted kitchen now, which remains mercifully free of any corpses save the one Amber put there earlier. Idly, walking by with a model’s strut and a predator’s focus, she swings the walk-in freezer door closed, hiding the suspended remains of Mr. Jenson the security guard and the light she set up to illuminate him, leaving the cavernous room lit only by the scant moonlight from the broad, barred windows. In the dark, straining to listen for any distant sound of pursuit, whipcord-tense and reaching as close as it’s possible to be to the edge of panic without actually letting out the scream that’s building inside her, Christine eventually snaps, walks over to where Amber is fussing with something by the main door, and practically pulls the cheerily humming murderer to her feet. “Amber!” she hisses. “What are you doing? We’ve got to hide, or… shit, I don’t even know! God! Fuck! Can we block the entrance…?”

“No need: it’s all well in hand. You just stand here,” Amber says, maneuvering Christine just beside the door leading to the servants’ entrance, “And hold this.” She hands Christine a small but wickedly sharp-looking meat cleaver, which she takes automatically then holds at arm’s length, as if it might bite her at any moment. “Lovely. Now, just wait for my signal.”

“Wait for your signal to do what? Amber, I’m not going to help you kill anyone,” Christine protests, grasping the cleaver helplessly.

“Is maiming entirely off the table?” Amber inquires, from on top of one of the freestanding rows of stainless-steel worktops, which she’s ascended with a dainty step and the assistance of a handy serving trolley. “Just for curiosity’s sake. Oh, I’m playing with you, darling, don’t panic,” she laughs, seeing Christine’s face. “I’m taking your delicate sensibilities into account.”

“Wh-” Christine begins, but before she can even fully form the thought the hammering of running feet becomes horribly immediate, and a portly, blotch-faced man in a sweatstained, half-unbuttoned tuxedo shirt rounds the corner, directly facing the terrified Christine, who’s standing there in her Chanel, illuminated by a pool of moonlight, holding up her meat cleaver like an incongruously glamorous Sweeney Todd.

“A-HAH! Got you now!” the man bellows in triumph. He charges bullishly forward, candlestick raised for the fight, paying no heed whatsoever to his surroundings. This rapidly proves a mistake: his foot catches the line of butcher’s twine that Amber has laid across the doorframe, which frees the far end of the overhead cookware rack, where it’s been disconnected from two of the four chains suspending it from the ceiling and left supported by only a thread. The whole heavy armature hinges down toward the man, its short edge coming in almost exactly at head-height, and it’s only now that Christine realises Amber has wedged what must be half the kitchen’s stock of knives into it alongside the serving spoons and frying pans and the rest. Christine is bleakly certain the sounds which follow will stay with her forever; both the awful, meaty thunk of a half-dozen sharp knives embedding themselves in the man’s face, and the shocked, anguished keening that he emits in response. The other end of the rack stays firmly attached to the ceiling, leaving the unknown toff jerking and twitching out his last moments dangling suspended by his head, swinging madly back and forth, spraying blood all over the spotless kitchen surfaces as his legs kick for purchase and his arms flail. Amber erupts in absolute peals of delighted laughter, giddy and genuine, while Christine struggles not to faint, feeling suddenly as if she’s observing from the end of that long, dark tunnel which is starting to feel uncomfortably familiar.

“Oh, I love it when everything goes to plan; I was in such a hurry that I had to wing it a bit, but that was perfect!” Amber gushes, grinning ear-to-ear, absolutely delirious with joy. “Did you see the way his… and the angle… ahaha, oh, I wish I’d been recording! Christine, help me get him down and we’ll set it up again, then we can film the next one! No? Why not? Oh. Hello! Hm. This is a bit awkward, isn’t it?”

This last part is addressed to the five or six enraged partygoers who’ve crashed into the kitchen through a side door while Amber was lost in the throes of murderous ecstasy, one of whom even now has a struggling Christine held firmly by both arms, having relieved her of the cleaver by the simple expedient of reaching in and taking it.

“Gotcha! Hold on, you’re not her,” a nauseatingly boozy wash of breath announces from somewhere uncomfortably close to Christine’s ear, as the realisation that these new arrivals believe themselves to be rescuing her fights with the tight grip the unseen man is keeping on her and fails to provide any relief whatsoever.

“Give yourself up and nobody else has to get hurt, alright?” one of the men says, punctuating his words by jabbing toward Amber with what appears to be a letter opener.

“Well. This is an unwelcome turnaround,” says Amber, flicking a strand of hair back behind her ear and visibly considering the situation. She cocks her head to one side, seeming to hear something nobody else can, even in the taut silence of the kitchens. Gradually a beatific smile spreads inexplicably across her delicate features as she flicks her eyes to meet Christine’s for a fraction of a second.

“Run. I’ll find you once we’re done,” she mouths, still smiling, as a cataclysmic bang ruptures the tense silence. The barred back door explodes inward, almost wrenched off its hinges, and suddenly everything descends into an abject chaos of light, heat and noise.

The first part of this - the part that later lodges in Christine’s memory, like a painful splinter she can’t remove - is watching something small and metallic flying through the ruined door, bouncing once on the black-and-white tiles with an almost musical chime, then erupting in a sound so loud she feels like the world is ending, and a burst of light so bright that all she can see is blotchy masses of green spots superimposed over everything. Beyond that, the room seems to suddenly fill with thick smoke, taking visibility from low to zero, and unfamiliar, angry voices are making sounds that her ringing ears refuse to resolve into language. In the midst of all this, she feels the hands clamped around her arms slacken as their owner reacts, and - Amber’s words repeating in her head like the chorus to a song - Christine takes the opportunity to wrench herself loose, shedding jacket and pearls and stumbling blindly in a direction she hopes is away from her captors-slash-rescuers. Dark, bulky figures loom from the smoke - she sees a slender silhouette in a party dress that can only be Amber perform a sort of acrobatic twist over one, leaving it clutching at its throat, only to rise holding what Christine belatedly realises is a rifle. Despite it still being strapped to its former owner, Amber fires this methodically into the choking clouds, adding more flashes and cracks to the noise and chaos - but the armed and armoured new arrivals seem barely any less disoriented than the fumbling guests or Christine herself, and evading the clumsy grab one figure makes in her direction is almost easy.

After what feels like an hour compressed into a minute spent stumbling in the smoke, trying to blink away the afterimages from what her mind has recovered enough to realise must have been a flashbang grenade - and for the implications of that to trouble her immensely - Christine finally reaches an end to the wall she’s groping her way along, and follows it around a corner in the hopes of putting something substantial behind herself and the ongoing shouts, screams and occasional bursts of gunfire. Objections temporarily erased by the bottomless-pit lurch of fear, she experiences an outsized surge of hope at the thought of getting out of the firing line, regrouping with Amber and the morally questionable sense of safety she projects, and even maybe figuring out what the hell just happened.

On and on Christine stumbles through the pitch-black manor, heedlessly throwing open door after door, hurrying through receiving rooms and studies and who knows what else, seeming to have left the inhabited areas of the house behind and encountering more and more old furniture draped in dust sheets and stacked paintings too damaged or amateurish to sell. By now she’s kicked off her shoes and has them swinging from one hand, and with the other she’s still feeling her way along the wall, totally reliant on that and the sporadic moonlight from exterior windows to keep from blundering into anything in the dark. She has no plan, no sense of what direction she’s heading in, and no idea where she might feel safe enough to stop, but the occasional muffled yell or bang from somewhere behind keeps her moving as fast as she can go.

Eventually she slips into almost a fugue state from the sheer sensory deprivation, after the bludgeoning light and noise of the kitchens, in addition to the aftereffects of the metric ton of adrenaline that’s still pounding through her system. As a result, she fails to register for a full second or two that a black-clad, balaclavaed figure has come hustling around a corner ahead of her; she only belatedly tries to make a run for it and manages to fall backwards when her bare foot skids on the dusty floor, leaving her sprawled and scrabbling desperately for enough purchase to get back up. A torchbeam snaps on, harsh and dazzling, and in its glare she eventually realises the figure is holding out a gloved hand to her.

“Ms. Hale, it’s okay. We’re here to help you,” a female voice calls from beneath the black helmet and face-covering, to Christine’s mild surprise. Numbly she takes the proffered hand and allows herself to be helped firmly but respectfully to her feet; there doesn’t seem any point in resisting, and she figures complying now might make the soldier or whatever she is better-disposed toward her if she needs to make a break for it later.

“Christine Hale,” the woman confirms. Christine nods. “Sergeant Moss. Peckinville Security Services,” she says, briskly. “We’re here to get you out. Orders from Ms. Lambert herself. Follow me; we’ve got a vehicle ready out back. If there’s any trouble, you get behind me and stay low, all right?”

“What about Amber?” Christine asks, feeling tiny and vulnerable beside the Peckinville soldier in her bulky protective gear. The woman talks into her radio briefly, mostly a string of code and shorthand Christine is unable to parse, but she catches euphemistic mentions of what might be ‘the package’ and ‘target one’ in there, which makes her queasy with anxiety.

“Orders are to extract you only, Ms. Hale,” the woman says, tone somewhat taut, as if she’s anticipating pushback. “We were instructed not to engage the kidnapper unless necessary. But don’t worry; she can’t hurt you now.”

Christine’s memory supplies a flash of Amber garrotting one soldier and shooting at another, as clear as the afterimage from the stun grenade, which is still fading in smears of blue and green. “Look, I know your team and Amber might not have gotten off to the best start,” she begins, glad she doesn’t have to see the reaction this elicits on the Peckinville woman’s face. Even her body-armoured back contrives to look disdainful. “But she’s not… I mean, I’m helping her by choice. I won’t just leave her here!” Christine finishes weakly, feeling like that statement sounded a lot more resolute and less petulant in her head.

“Ms. Hale, I want to make it very clear that we are here to rescue you, not to do you any harm,” Sergeant Moss says, carefully and with a distinct sense of being heard to have fulfilled her legal duty. She turns, and Christine’s eyes widen at the sight of a single-use plastic restraint, similar to the ones they use at Dorley, in the woman’s heavy glove. “However, we were informed that you might be… resistant to separation from your kidnapper. Just stay calm, please, and let’s make this easy for everyone. I’m required to inform you that I am authorised to use non-injurious force, but neither of us wants it to come to that, do we?”

Christine takes a couple of steps back, dread weighing her insides down like she’s swallowed a lead weight, but there’s little she can do to prevent the cuffs being snapped around her wrists. She feels a hot, angry rush of humiliation inescapably colour her face, and refuses to meet the soldier’s eyes as she looks at her with what Christine chooses to interpret from the thin strip of visible face as a brusque sort of embarrassment.

“Come on. Let’s get you out of here, then we can take those off and forget this ever happened,” Moss says, not unkindly, turning flashlight and gun back to face down the disused hallway. As the beam highlights the irregular shapes of shrouded furniture and dusty fittings, Christine blinks in confusion; she could swear for a second she saw something that can’t possibly be there. Just after-images from the flashbang mixed with stress, fear and the oppressive darkness, she tells herself, because there’s no way it could have been- no. That’s ridiculous.

Sergeant Moss leads the bound Christine along toward what she thinks must be the rear of the manor, and the whole time Christine can’t keep her eyes from flicking nervously toward the water-stained ceiling, as if daring her hallucination to be real. It surprises her less than it might have, then, when the apparition proves itself by reaching down again, this time successfully grabbing the unsuspecting soldier by the head. Moss barks out a startled, angry sound and reacts with admirable swiftness, free hand flying to the quick-release clasp on her chin strap, meaning the groping fingers withdraw holding only her helmet. Wild-eyed, the Sergeant yanks her twisted-up balaclava off, steps back and swings her gun upward, revealing nothing but a loose ceiling panel hanging from its mounting.

“PE1, contact, repeat, contact, West wing. ID unknown. In the fucking ceiling,” she barks into her radio. Christine, back pressed against the wall, bound hands clasped demurely in front, watches the woman calculate, take aim and brace to fire at the would-be assailant’s likely position, and is therefore almost as surprised as Sergeant Moss when a pale, indistinct shape slips out from beneath one of the dust sheets and jabs something shiny and sharp into her exposed neck. Moss goes down choking, clawing frantically at her throat, first to her knees, then - as the shadowy shape strikes upwards, through her jaw - collapsing face-first to the grimy wood flooring. The spreading puddle of blood marks an inky absence in the dim backscatter from her torch, which falls pointing away down the hall, illuminating an empty corridor lined with sheet-covered fixtures, which Christine now views with unbridled suspicion. Too late, perhaps in response to the late Moss’ radio call, an almost indistinguishable black-clad shape comes absolutely pelting around the corner at the end of the hallway before slowing to a shocked, appalled stop at the sight of Sergeant Moss’ corpse. Christine tries to hold her hands up and demonstrate she’s not the threat, but standing as she is over the still-warm body of the man’s comrade, she cringes in anticipation of the bullet she’s certain is coming. Instead she sees in the circle of Moss’ fallen flashlight one of the shrouded antiques suddenly right behind the soldier, a face straight out of nightmares coalescing out of the dark beside it. She almost can’t reconcile it with the rest of the scene; it looks unreal, like a horror-movie monster, all empty eye sockets and leering, lipless mouth. The blade it silently raises and draws across the Peckinville man’s throat, eyeless gaze never wavering from Christine’s, is real enough, though, and after a brief and one-sided struggle, this new arrival falls only a handful of feet away from Moss.

Christine makes a keening whine of panic that jump-starts what little of her conscious mind is still operating, just from the realisation that she’s alive and capable of producing such a sound. She backs away from the gurning corpse-faced apparition and whoever is under the dust sheet, both of whom advance gradually, clearly under no illusions about her ability to get away before they can strike. The terror that’s mostly drowning out her thoughts rises to a fever pitch, overflows and finally reboots into what she suddenly imagines as a sort of mental safe-mode of fatalistic clarity as her back bumps into a third body in the dark, and she feels clammy hands grip her and spin her firmly around. She screws her eyes shut, tries to prepare herself for the final blow, and-

“Christine! Hi!” Jessica says, shocking Christine into opening her eyes. Amber’s daughter is hunched over with her hair-veiled face pressed close, speaking in that raspy, damp croak that’s featured in more than one of Christine’s nightmares since they first met.

“Uh, hey. Fancy seeing you here,” Christine manages to say, and then she passes out.

***

“Do you think she’s going to be okay?” a voice unmistakably Jessica’s asks, sounding worried insofar as it’s possible to tell.

“Ugh, no, this one’s ruined too. Jessie, do you always have to go for the nose?” asks a voice she doesn’t know, further away - a South London accent, and soft-spoken considering the subject matter.

“Noses are the tastiest part. Nosies and toesies and soft little sweetbreads, that’s what pretty girls are made of.” Jessica again; who else?

“If she’s dead, bagsy her clothes.”

This voice makes Christine sit bolt upright. “I’m not dead!” she exclaims, partially out of shocked recognition and partially so no-one tries to loot and/or skin her.

“Oh, I’m so very glad! I really thought one of the mean old tin soldiers might have done you in,” Jessica says, stroking at Christine’s hair with a slightly unsavoury solicitousness.

“They were useless. I wanted to see the replacement’s guts come all out like confetti,” pouts Annabelle, face painted in full porcelain-doll style, still clutching her dust sheet around her like a shroud. Christine can’t help imagining that pretending to be a piece of forgotten, dusty furniture was basically Annabelle’s dream situation.

“Annabelle! You’re alive!” Christine blurts, trying to scoot away with just her legs to push her.

“See? Somebody cares. Shame it’s only the stand-in,” Annabelle sniffs.

“Annie. Be nice. We’re all family here, remember?” the third figure says, voice slightly muffled by its nightmare face. From closer up Christine can see the tight curls tied back behind her head, the pink nails and the incongruous University of Central London hoodie, and oh of course she wears the faces as masks.

“Hey, Lily. Nice to, uh, finally meet you,” she says, weakly.

“Likewise, Cousin,” Lily says, pushing back the tanned human-leather mask and regarding Christine with a crooked smile on her own strikingly pretty features. She holds out a hand, which Christine takes with only a moment’s hesitation, and pulls her to her feet with the same surprising strength she’s seen far too often from Amber. Given the amount of blood currently spreading across the hardwood like an oil slick, Christine elects to slip her shoes back on and deal with the consequences if she’s forced to run.

“So, er, yeah… What are you three even doing here?” she asks, directing the question more in Lily’s direction as probably the most coherent of the trio.

“Saving you, silly goosey!” Jessica laughs throatily and for far too long.

“So ungrateful!” Annabelle opines. “We should have let them take you and put you in jail and feed you to the dogs in the hole where the dogs eat you.”

“We’re not actually here for you,” Lily says, casually but without malice. “We just saw you in trouble, and these two wouldn’t shut up about wanting to help, and I thought that first soldier woman had a really nice face, but then Jessica ate half of it.”

Jessica lets out a discreet little burp, then covers her mouth as if she’s made a faux pas at dinner.

“Wait, okay - thanks, Jessica, by the way - but Annabelle wanted to help me?” Christine asks, focusing on that so as not to think about the rest.

“No, I just… shut up!” Annabelle snaps, looking for all the world like she’s blushing beneath the heavy white makeup. Christine faces up to the horrifying realisation that this might mean they’re friends now.

“So you’re here for Amber, then. I don’t even know where she went; I haven’t seen her since these Peckinville people arrived,” Christine says. “It seemed like she was on top of things.”

“I’m sure Mumsie is just fine,” Jessica says, picking at her ragged nails and shuffling from foot to filthy foot. “She’s fine. We mustn’t worry. Definitely fine. Nothing can happen to her. She happens to other people.”

“Tra-la-la, wait and see,” Annabelle sings, eyes unfocused.

“We need to find her, before… you know,” Lily says. Christine is finding the sisters’ ominous allusions to something they won’t quite say so annoying that she’d be on the verge of screaming at Lily if the girl weren’t a known coveter of faces.

“Doesn’t know what?” Christine asks instead, facing down Amber’s monsters and also apparently the newest members of her family, throwing her arms wide in frustration.

“We, uh. We kind of fucked up,” says Lily, pulling down her mask so she doesn’t have to meet Christine’s eye.

***

AMBER

Amber hasn’t felt so good in ages. She’s been making the most of the unexpected arrival of the soldiers - who, judging by the split-second glimpses she caught of their IDs during the melee, come from Beatrice’s benefactor’s silly Peckinville outfit - by herding them into contact with the remaining, increasingly panic-stricken and violent guests. The paths she might take through the ensuing chaos shine bright in her vision, perfect trails of balletic violence just waiting for her to pick one to inhabit. The implements she could employ to cut and pierce and hobble chime sweetly, as if calling eagerly for her attention. Everything around her is singing for her ears alone, glowing in colours whose names only she is privy to. She is exactly where she wants to be. So it comes as a genuine shock - a rare thing, for Amber, and to be cherished - when she’s stopped short for a moment, one-point-seven-two metres from the open door on the north-west-facing side of the kitchen. On the very edge of her hearing, beyond the range most people would likely detect, she catches a faint tune drifting from the darkened interior of the manor. She cocks her head to listen, twisting at one point to evade an enraged party guest wielding a chair leg and planting a steak knife in his back without turning. It’s the opening guitar melody from Taylor Swift’s Better Than Revenge, being whistled in the distance with perfect accuracy, and while it occurs to Amber that most people would probably find this creepy or ominous, she’s simply captivated.

Now, the Peckinville squad, the party guests, the original mission to find out who’s been killing Dorley graduates, and even Christine temporarily forgotten, Amber is following a subtle trail of clues that she suspects can only have been left for her. She’s well aware that her curiosity tends to push less immediate concerns into the background, and not always to her benefit. Still, this breadcrumb trail is so enticing to her that she’s almost powerless to resist. The grandfather clock positioned slightly offcentre four-point-six-one metres along the west wall of the grand hall has its hands set to two forty-nine, the exact time Amber was snatched by Dorley Hall; a number she holds very dear, and has shared with almost no-one. The second hand is bent a fraction out of true, and Amber follows its pointing finger through a storage closet and into an old servants’ kitchen, apparently now used as a break room for the staff. She glances about; there are five chairs scattered around a table - the wood walnut, the grain lateral, scratched with the initials A.B. at the far end, old enough that it probably means nothing - and imaginary lines drawn from the backs of each converge on a point by the sink. Amber scans the room more closely: among the clutter of kitchenware on a draining rack, a knife sits exactly 249 centimetres from the centre-point of the room. There’s a single smudge of blood on the blade, beginning precisely one third of the way down. Third floor. Amber keeps the precise angle of the knife held in her head as she passes through rooms and corridors until she finds a set of stairs. As she ascends, the strains of Better Than Revenge float down again from somewhere above her. She follows to the second floor, then third, and stalks the carpeted passages and darkened bedrooms until she identifies the spot precisely indicated by the knife’s tip; a long hallway crossing the breadth of the manor, lit by the wan moonlight admitted by a tall, arched window at the far end.

Peter Haverthwaite is here; he’s been strung upside-down by the feet from a ceiling beam, his shirt and jacket removed to expose a slack-skinned, fleshy paunch that dangles almost to chin height His arms are pulled out at a painful-looking ninety-degree angle by a further pair of taut ropes, a spreadeagled inversion of his hypocritical faith in a God who would condemn his past acts, perhaps. He’s alive, moaning weakly through a bloodied mouth - Amber suspects his tongue has been removed - although he probably won’t remain so for terribly long; his belly has been sliced neatly open, exposing layers of yellow adipose fat beneath the pallid skin, and the tantalising hint of redder, more vital things pulsing within. The quality of the piece is excellent, the cuts intentional and precise, the interplay of meaning and violence exquisite. It’s almost like looking at her own work. Placed daintily into the steadily-flowing wound is a gilt-edged card, which upon careful investigation is revealed as one of Haverthwaite’s own invitations to the night’s festivities. In place of the recipient’s name, the card simply says MOTHER.

It’s very quiet and still now; the party, the murders and the subsequent fighting could be taking place in another world. Someone is standing at the far end of the corridor, past Haverthwaite, silhouetted against the silvery light coming through the tall window. Amber hesitates; she isn’t so overcome by curiosity that her mind hasn’t been working on the problem of what’s going on, and there’s only one plausible answer as to who would even be capable of luring her like this. But by now the situation has a gravity all its own. Feeling nothing, Amber steps forward. Sensing Amber despite her preternatural quietness - which is exactly what she’d expect, considering - the figure turns.

***

CHRISTINE

“Okay, there’s a fourth one of you. So?” Christine says, experiencing some trepidation as she walks flanked by the Sisters of the Abandoned Abattoir on all sides. Nevertheless she’s disturbed by how relatively comfortable she feels with them; it isn’t long since Annabelle repeatedly tried to kill her, and Jessica has always strongly given the impression that she’s one misunderstanding away from biting out the throat of anyone and everyone in her vicinity, but either Lily’s deceptively ordinary presence or the too much time spent with Amber has made them feel almost safe to be around; the aura of menace just isn’t there any more.

“Four isn’t like us,” Lily says. Her disturbing skin-mask is back in place, so the visage Christine is faced with is the stretched, cured remnant of some victim long past, and her voice is slightly muffled by the stiff mouth-slit. “She was Mother’s masterpiece.”

“And her biggest failure,” Annabelle adds portentously.

“The cutting and stitching and the funny medicine and the snap-crackle shocks did more than just make her be a good girl for Mummy Amber,” Jessica chimes in. “She was the best. Best at hiding, best at hurting, best at murders. The best at everything. That made her Mumsie’s very special favourite.”

“And didn’t the rest of us know it,” Annabelle sniffs bitterly. “’Oh, why can’t you be more like Four? She can laugh and sing and spin like a sparkly dancing top, when all the rest of you do is wail and cry and get naughty sepsis. She gets dinner and you get the nail chair! On with the gas jets, on with the electric floor, on and on and on, but not for her, no! She’s special!’” she spits, clearly still working through some things.

“Okay, so what happened to her?” Christine asks, trying not to dwell on most of that.

“Well, she got the lion’s share of Mother Amber’s attention. I bet you can imagine how that was for her,” says Lily with a shrug. “In the end, she just… broke. Not too long before we got our names, Four… she stopped responding to anything. Just lay there. Nothing Mother did would shake her out of it, and she really tried some stuff. Normally she’d have been washed out like the others, but Four had been so promising that Mother couldn’t bear to get rid of her. She set her up in a mental hospital somewhere; dumped her and left her there. I don’t think she ever even bothered to check in.”

“So you can only imagine how thrilled we were when she began to talk to us in our special computer clubhouse!” Jessica says, excitedly. “Our lovely lost Sister, come back to us to stay forever and ever and ever!”

“No idea how she found us, or got hold of a phone,” Lily fills in equivocally. “This was a couple of years ago. She gave us… advice, sort of, after Mother kicked us out to fend for ourselves. Helped us survive. She was good at that. I guess at some point she got better? I kind of got the feeling it came and went, like she was still catatonic most of the time. Or pretending to be. Sometimes she’d slip and say something that made it sound like she snuck out of the institution at night… I’ve no idea what she was doing when she did.”

With an icy stab of clarity, Christine realises that she might be able to venture a guess, but before she can even frame the question Annabelle has chimed in again.

“She told me once she was still becoming,” the white-faced doll-girl reminisces dreamily. “And that when she was finished she’d be a butterfly so beautiful it would burn out everybody’s dirty eyes just for looking.”

“She was kind of scary,” Jessica confides.

“Uh-huh,” Christine says, finding that extremely easy to believe.

“We really shouldn’t have told her about Mother coming to see us, or what she was looking for, but we didn’t see the harm,” Lily continues. “Four always just listened and told us what she thought we should do. She never ran off and did anything.”

“But then she got weird,” says Jessica, loping along beside Christine, staring up through the lank mess of her hair.

“She said a whole lot of stuff; it kind of freaked us all out when we figured out what she was actually getting at,” Lily says. Part of Christine really wants to know what could possibly have upset all three Sisters of the Abandoned Abattoir so badly, but the rest of her is metaphorically holding that part back and digging in its heels, so she leaves the question unasked. “We think she might want to hurt Mother.”

“So you’re here to, what, stop her?” Christine asks, not sure whether to be terrified or amused by the idea.

“I’m just here to watch,” Annabelle says, primly. “I don’t care one little bit what happens to mean old Mummy.”

“Oh, shut up, Annie, yes you do,” Lily snaps at her, in a tone that makes very clear she’s rolling her eyes beneath the disturbing, leathery mask. “She was practically hysterical in the car. And Jessica was being weird - weirder than usual - and I just- I don’t know. Maybe I was worried, maybe I just want to see what happens. Whatever; it seemed like we should be here.”

“But, I mean, it’s Amber,” Christine protests. “She’s… I mean, you’re… I just can’t imagine… do you really think she’s in danger?”

Lily fixes Christine with a steady gaze from those deep, empty eyeholes, within which the slightest reflection from her own is visible. “If you knew what she said, you’d understand.”

“Oo-kay,” Christine replies awkwardly, suddenly quite eager to move the conversation along. “Well, do you have any idea where Amber even went? The last time I saw her she told me she’d come and find me, but she was pretty busy with, uh… my rescue squad, I guess. I haven’t seen her since.”

“Hm. That’s a bit concerning,” Lily says, managing to inadvertently sound very Amber-like for a moment. “I wonder if-”

She’s interrupted by a sharp knocking sound from one of the doorways ahead. Everyone reacts in their own way: Jessica springs directly upwards like a cat and scrabbles her way into a loose ceiling panel, Annabelle vanishes beneath her sheet and freezes as still as a statue against the wall, and Lily slips sideways into the darkness with an almost supernatural ease. Christine is left standing there, functionally alone, feeling extremely exposed and abandoned, until it gradually becomes clear that the hammering is coming from the other side of a locked door and is punctuated with indistinct, muffled cries for help. The Sisters of the Abandoned Abattoir all poke their heads out of their respective lurking spots, forcing Christine to hastily suppress a laugh; while it does appear they’re all friends now, she can’t be certain how they’ll react to her acknowledging how comical they look. They’re curiously hesitant to approach the door, though, and for the first time Christine really gets a sense of how afraid the three of them are. By extension her own already-formidable anxiety about meeting the mysterious Number Four increases by a healthy few degrees.

“Hello? Who’s in there?” she calls, staying a cautious distance from the door, having taken her heart in her hands and approached, trailed by her three nervous, murderous ‘cousins’.

“It’s her! She’s trying to trick us!” Jessica whines, nervously gnawing at her clawlike nails.

“If it was her she’d have killed Christine already to establish dominance, dummy,” Annabelle hisses, which doesn’t fill Christine with joy.

“Uh, hello? The door’s locked and I can’t get out! I’ve been in here for hours, and I thought I heard gunshots earlier! Are you… are you with the party? I promise I’ll be good if you let me out!” calls whoever is inside. It’s a hard voice to gender without external cues; if anything it reminds Christine of the Dorley girls’ early efforts to train their own voices, clearly shooting for a normatively feminine pitch but falling somewhat short. The unexpected surge of recognition and protectiveness that particular comparison triggers has her bashing into the sturdy door with her shoulder before conscious thought has much of a chance to intervene, and it’s only after a number of fruitless attempts that she gives in to Lily’s increasingly forceful attempts to get her to stop.

“Christine, for fuck’s sake!” she snaps, the sense of menace imparted by the mask only slightly undermined by the university hoodie.

“You really think that’s her? It sounds like they’ve got some poor girl locked up in there! You know what kind of people these are,” Christine snaps, refusing to be intimidated.

“No, I was trying to tell you the key’s right here,” Lily says flatly, indicating a heavy brass key carelessly abandoned on a round little table nearby, next to a vase that clearly hasn’t seen fresh flowers in decades. Annabelle snickers to herself until Jessica punches her lightly on the arm. Christine rubs at her bruised shoulder in embarrassment and unlocks the door, then swings it open on suspiciously well-oiled hinges with a very active sense of foreboding.

“Oh, thankyou, thankyou!” the voice inside the room calls out before the door is even fully open. “If you, er, that is, ma’am would like me to, uh, do anything to, er, service…” she continues, sounding hesitant and unwilling but resigned. The person - the girl - locked in what looks to be a dusty, disused guest bedroom looks to Christine to be no older than twenty, to be the recent recipient of some unsubtle cosmetic work, and to have been dressed in a cheap, gauzy-looking maid’s outfit that very nearly qualifies as lingerie. Her overdone eyes are wide with fear beneath heavy false lashes, and she’s sitting gripping the edge of a musty old bed with tense, extravagantly manicured fingers. Christine reacts to the whole scene, and the girl’s offer of ‘service’ in particular, with unbridled revulsion, then feels awful when she sees the captive cringe away as if she’s done something wrong.

“We’re not with the party,” Christine says hurriedly. “We’re nothing to do with those people. Or I was, uh, pretending, but only to, you know, stop them,” she stammers, conscious that what remains of her outfit somewhat contradicts her claim. She figures it’s close enough to the truth not to count as an outright lie. “Come with us; we can get you out of here,” she says, although she belatedly realises that giving a traumatised captive an immediate eyeful of the Sisters of the Abandoned Abattoir probably won’t help matters, and subtly tries to block the view out the door with her body, to limited success.

“Oh no, I can’t! I’ll be… they’ll punish me. Like the last time I tried to… I’ve got to stay here,” the girl mumbles, fidgeting with the hem of her hopelessly inadequate outfit, misery evaporating off her like steam.

“Nobody’s going to be in a position to punish you after tonight,” Christine says, pitching hard toward gentleness now she’s seen a glimpse of how damaged the girl appears to be, despite the white-hot anger burning inside of her. “I’m Christine. What’s your name?”

“Sa… Sabrina,” the girl replies, little louder than a whisper.

“Are you okay with being called that, or would you rather I called you your name from, you know… before?” Christine asks, becoming conscious of an intra-sibling squabble taking place behind her as the less reputable fruits of the Dorley family tree get impatient to see the new girl for themselves.

“My name before? Mm… no, no, no. I’m not that any more. I’m Sabrina,” Sabrina says, agitated and nervy.

“Okay. That’s okay,” Christine says, as reassuringly as a woman can when a collection of sharp points and elbows that can only be Jessica is insistently trying to move her aside. “Sabrina, listen, I know somewhere you can go where you’ll be safe from the people who did this to you, okay? A place full of girls like you; girls who understand. I’m one of them,” she says, feeling a mildly shameful moment of pride at the girl’s wide, disbelieving eyes. “These three are, uh, not from there,” she adds hastily, as Jessica and Annabelle force their way into the room.

“I’m from there!” Jessica protests, gazing unblinkingly at Sabrina from beneath her veil of black hair, seemingly oblivious to how the girl is visibly shrinking away in fear.

“Jessie, spending six months living in an air vent and sneaking out to secretly lick the eyeballs of the one boy you’re obsessed with is not being ‘from there’,” Annabelle says derisively.

“It is if I want it to be,” Jessica sulks. “Ignore her, new Sister, she’s a horrible little sneak. But me, oh, I’m going to wrap you up all warm and snug where you can never, ever run away. Like maybe in a straitjacket, or a tiny box. And we’ll have lovely sleepovers and talk about boys, and I’ll feed you the very bestest bits of the boys, like the liver and the ears!”

“Jessica, shut up, Little Mabel says you’re upsetting her with how weird and unlikeable you are and how bad your personality is,” Annabelle says, elbowing her aside with some difficulty. She has indeed produced the chipped, stained porcelain doll from somewhere and is dangling her at head-height, manipulating the strings to turn the puppet’s glassy gaze from Jessica to the stunned-looking Sabrina. “What’s that, Little Mabel? Oh, that would be fun. But isn’t she, you know one of us? Mm-hmm. Uh-huh. You make a good point. No, I don’t think it would bend that far. Mmmn,” the white-faced ghoul croons. “Okay. We’ve talked it out and you have provisional permission to be our Sister,” she tells Sabrina. “But you’re on thin ice, little missy, so be good.”

All the colour seems to have drained out of Sabrina’s unsubtly made-up face and she’s trembling harder than ever, which Christine suspects is exactly how she herself looked upon first meeting each of Amber’s creations.

“Don’t mind them, you’re safe with us. We don’t hurt Sisters, and you qualify on account of having an origin story almost as fucked-up as ours,” Lily says, wrapping an arm around each protesting sibling and pulling them back to give the terrified new girl some space. This probably would have been more reassuring if she’d remembered to take off the leering flesh-mask first. Christine, deciding that taking things slowly is only going to allow for more interactions like this one, darts forward and takes hold of Sabrina’s hand.

“They won’t hurt you. I promise. They’re on our side,” she says, and is surprised to find she actually believes it. “But we really do have to go. We need to find a way out of here before things get any worse.”

“Oh, er… okay. Yeah. Can I… Do you mind if I keep hold?” Sabrina asks. Christine gives her most reassuring attempt at a smile, which ends up feeling like it comes out as more of a grimace but only after she’s too committed to it to stop, and helps her dispense with her ridiculously impractical stripper heels before leading her back out into the darkened hallway.

“So why’d they even have you locked up like that? If you were the maid, shouldn’t you have been, like, serving?” Lily asks, bringing up the rear with Christine and Sabrina while her more exuberant Sisters scuttle and skip ahead. Christine doesn’t exactly think the question is the height of tact, but nobody’s describing their most recent vivisection in intimate detail, so she decides to let it slide.

“T… they said they were having a… a game,” Sabrina manages to get out on the second attempt, unable to meet Christine’s eyes. “They said I was the special prize.”

Christine’s expression goes through a few permutations before settling on cold, hard and as furious as she’s ever felt in her life.

“Listen, Cousins? I know I’ve been pretty solidly against murder, on the whole, up til now,” she says softly. “When it comes to the party guests here, please consider my objections rescinded.” Just saying it feels like a weight lifting, and possibly another piece of her soul abrading away.

“Yay, I knew you were just like us, deep down inside, behind the ribs and cartilage!” Jessica rasps, sounding profoundly disturbing in her heartfelt glee.

“As if we were worried how you felt about it,” Annabelle sniffs, but Christine swears there’s the hint of a smile beneath the doll-face makeup.

Lily peers through her eyeholes at the bars on the window at the end of the darkened hall. Beyond, the shadows of trees are just about visible against the velvety backdrop of night. “It’s going to be a pain getting the pair of you out, you know.”

“Well, how did you three get in?” Christine asks.

“There are no bars on the attic windows,” Lily says nonchalantly. “But I’m not sure you or Sabrina the sexy maid would be up for four storeys straight down sheer stone in the dark. They probably didn’t think you were brave enough to try. No offence,” she says to the saucer-eyed Sabrina. “We’ll need to open the bars: how do they work?” she asks, businesslike and efficient and once again the most reminiscent of Amber out of the trio.

“Th… they’re all controlled from the security room,” Sabrina murmurs, sounding as if she’s afraid to share such proscribed information too loudly even now. “I know where it… I can get us there. But we need the key.”

“Amber took the keys for the security system when she killed the head guy,” Christine says helplessly. “I didn’t ask where she put them. I didn’t think we’d get, you know, separated.”

“Wait, Mr Danforth is dead?” Sabrina asks, quietly. Christine nods; she thinks it might be the first time she’s seen the poor girl smile.

“We should head for the kitchen,” Christine says, reluctantly. “The Peckinville people broke the door down on their way in. There should still be a way out without having to lift the lockdown or whatever. But last time I was in there, it was… bad. Really, really bad.”

“Bad is my special favourite!” Jessica exclaims. “But what about Mumsie?”

“She does have a way of making her presence known,” Christine replies. “Surely if her and this… ‘Number Four’ are here, we’ll see some sign.”

“What’s that, Little Mabel?” Annabelle asks, hunched over by a closed door Christine thinks might lead back toward the inhabited parts of the manor, conferring with the dangling, jiggling doll. “Uh-huh. Oh, that’s a bit concerning, isn’t it? Okay. I’ll ask.”

“What is it?” Lily asks her, anticipatorily pulling out a cruel little curved blade that Christine thinks might be meant for cutting tiles or some other thick material, but which she can all-too-easily imagine making short work of someone’s face.

“She wants to know, does anyone else smell burning?”

***

AMBER

“Number Four?” Amber calls out, in a mixture of surprise and delight. “You’re up and about! Not even drooling a bit! This is simply wonderful! You should have told me: oh, I know you were locked up, but that’s clearly no impediment to you, now, is it? You could at least have called!”

“That isn’t even a name,” the figure says, in a clear voice entirely devoid of emotion and tone. She turns from the window, a slender silhouette in the harsh moonlight, and in her perfect poise and coiled-spring tautness, Amber clearly sees reflected her own.

“So you’ve taken a name! That’s marvellous! What should I call you, darling?”

“Charity,” says Charity. Her hair is long, black and draped down her back in a coincidental reflection of Amber’s earlier appearance as Phoebe, her skin a shade warmer than her creator’s milk-pale. Her full lips, where the light catches them, are painted a dazzling ruby. She’s dressed for the party, in a figure-hugging bodycon piece in a deep wine-red; given that Amber last saw her in the bland, loose clothing given to patients at the institution she dumped her at, she can’t deny it’s quite the glow-up. Her manicured hand flicks minutely, an all-too-familiar economy of motion and easy efficiency; Amber tilts her head, and feels some pilfered piece of cutlery tease her hair in passing before it embeds itself in the wall behind. Grinning as if hearing her native language spoken for the first time in years, Amber twitches a weighted razor blade from the hidden pocket stitched into her clutch and sends it flicking out in reply. Charity’s fingers pluck it from the air barely an inch from her face; Amber’s eyes widen fractionally in surprise, an involuntary response that’s thrilling in its spontaneity.

“You’ve gotten better, darling,” she says, smiling brightly to mask a faint but growing unease that’s so unfamiliar she barely recognises it for what it is. “Catatonia was good for you, it seems!”

“Becoming oneself takes time,” says Charity flatly. Her accent is neutral and placeless like Amber’s, but entirely different in the details, as if she’s chosen the individual sounds to be distinct from her creator. “It’s something to be savoured, just like everything worthwhile is. I always wondered whether something similar happened to you; before Dorley. Before Almsworth. Before Amber.”

“It did,” says Amber, truthfully: the closest she’s come to talking about her childhood in her entire adult life.

“Come with me,” Charity says. “I have something I want to show you.”

She swings the window wide and steps without a moment’s hesitation onto the narrow ledge outside, untroubled by her heels; she hops to some unseen architectural flourish, then another, then she’s gone. Amber takes a couple of cautious steps forward, checked by an uncharacteristic hesitancy. Despite it, she continues; the desperate, bone-deep yearning she feels for a true peer is genuinely irresistible. She follows Charity (and isn’t that name a wonderful choice? The charity she herself dispensed to her creations; the charity in turning a life debased by mediocrity into something of beauty and meaning. So many interpretations, such a rush of pride!) with an inexorable momentum; her Louboutins click on narrow ledges above a three-storey drop onto sharp gravel without uncertainty or pause.

***

CHRISTINE

In Christine’s absence, the kitchen of Madrigal House has become a scene from some poorly-maintained hell. The bodies of a good seven or eight people are strewn across worktops and tiles in a variety of states of dismemberment, and one especially unlucky man appears to have had the door of the AGA slammed repeatedly shut on his head until all that remains is a red mush trickling sludgily down the tarnished fascia. Mr Danforth, former security head, is still strung up piecemeal in the walk-in freezer like a particularly grim exhibition piece; smoke is pouring in and has reduced visibility to only a few feet, gathering in a portentous black cloud that’s already dense enough to obscure the ceiling and the far side of the room from view, but which doesn’t hide an unsettling, fiery light.

“Oh! That’s one of Mumsie’s! Pretty!” Jessica exclaims, scuttling over to admire the charnel display in the walk-in, heedless of danger. Annabelle accompanies her with the air of one with criticism to share, Little Mabel dancing and swaying drunkenly from her outstretched hand. Lily warily circles the edge of the room, poking at each corpse she encounters, which leaves Christine and Sabrina to desperately snatch up tea towels to cover their mouths and noses as they wave their way through the ominous orange-glowing pall, in search of-

“Shit!” Christine exclaims, as the outside wall comes into view through the murk; its broad, barred windows looking out on the nighttime woods, its deep, oversized sinks, the hungry streamers of flame rising from where the Peckinville crew’s rugged four-wheeler has smashed through the back door and brought part of the first floor down on top of itself, severing a gas line along the way. The driver is still visibly slumped over the wheel, body blackened and shrunken, and the furnace heat from the fire is palpable even from where Christine is standing.

“Well, we’re not getting out that way, unless you think third-degree burns would look good on you,” Lily says evenly.

“I think they really would; maybe you should go for it!” Jessica opines, to all appearances completely sincere.

“Shit!” Christine repeats. “Where did.. God, why didn’t Amber tell me where she put the bloody keys?”

“Do you mean these little keysies?” Annabelle calls out from across the room, with a jingle that’s just about audible over the crackle of the fire. Christine hurries over, feeling the faintest spark of hope; she finds the Annabelle standing heedlessly in the partially congealed slick of blood beneath the late Mr Danforth, where she’s used a table knife to lever open the corpse’s stiffened jaw, leaving him locked in a final, silent scream. From her hand dangles Little Mabel, and in the puppet’s porcelain mitts are what can only be the security keys. Christine half-expects the girl to play keep-away with them, or otherwise make a potentially lethal nuisance of herself, but she hands them over with a welcome lack of fuss which Christine thinks might bespeak a silent understanding of the danger they’re still in.

“How did you know?” Christine asks, wafting away the cloying smoke to little effect.

Annabelle shrugs, simultaneously manipulating Little Mabel to do the same. “It just seemed like the obvious place to put them,” she replies.

“Makes sense to me,” Lily agrees.

“Riiiight,” Christine says, biting her tongue while she considers. “Well, there’s our way out, hopefully. Sabrina, you said you know the way to the security office?”

Wide-eyed and clearly soaking up trauma like a dry sponge, the girl gives a jerky nod. “I think so,” she says. “When I was… when they first brought me here, Mr Haverthwaite showed me all the, the… ways they could stop me escaping. I wasn’t allowed upstairs very often, but I can get us there. I’m sure I can.”

***

Despite Christine’s hope that they’re now moving away from the fire, the smoke clouding the passageways of the mansion doesn’t abate, and it rapidly becomes clear that the blaze rising from her would-be rescuers’ vehicle isn’t the only one to have taken hold. The Daughters stalk ahead or lag behind according to their respective peculiarities: Jessica spidering between roofbeams and fixtures in sudden, twitchy bursts, Annabelle skulking, Lily slipping smoothly from shadow to shadow without a sound. As a result, Christine and Sabrina could almost be alone in the dark when a side door bangs abruptly open, releasing a bellowing, paunchy figure in sweat-stained shirtsleeves from a hellish tableau of burning drapes and suffocating smoke. The man yells wordlessly, mindlessly; he’s bleeding from a wound in his side, and behind him Christine’s eyes catch on a motionless, sprawled figure in the black special-forces gear of the Peckinville squad. The erstwhile party guest has an ornamented rifle torn from some wall display clutched in his hands, but it’s clearly either unloaded or non-functional, because he comes out swinging it wildly like a club. Christine jumps backwards in surprise, colliding painfully with some bit of ornamental furniture; she manages to stay on her feet and just about avoids the man’s blind flailing, but she’s left staggering and completely open to the next assault.

Jessica, unseen, drops on her assailant, teeth and nails ready, but this time her timing is off; the enormous difference in weight means she’s hurled clear with relative ease, and she screeches and scrabbles to find her feet while the man advances on Christine once again. Annabelle, glimpsed from the corner of Christine’s eye, seems content to stand and watch, which is about the level of support she’d have expected. Lily - she assumes - is responsible for the sharp, glinting sliver of something metallic that sprouts from the berserk man’s neck, sending him reeling and moaning, but her desperate footfalls are still too far away, and he’s back upright and swinging again before anything further can befall him. It’s Sabrina who finally puts the man down, to Christine’s dizzying mix of relief and horror; rising unnoticed from a cowering crouch, she cracks him in the back of the head with the heavy base of an ornamental lamp, sending him crashing bonelessly to the parquet with all the grace of a sweaty sack of potatoes. She doesn’t stop there; yelling incoherently, she rains blow after blow on the fallen man’s body and face, wrestling against Christine as she tries without much success to get her to relent.

“That’s for the stupid fucking jokes I had to laugh at! And that’s for the things you’d whisper when nobody else was around! And that’s for your nasty, sweaty hands! And that’s for the goddamned surgery they put me through when you said my fucking tits weren’t big enough!” Sabrina screams, voice cracking, making a mushy ruin of her victim’s features and raising blooms of bright crimson beneath his torn-up shirt. The man moans incoherently, struggling without success to stand. “And that’s for my family, you took me and I didn’t even do anything, I didn’t deserve any of-”

“Yes! Good! Lovely! Keep going! Get his eyes, they make such funny little pops!” Annabelle gushes, suddenly engaged, eyes shining in her white-painted face. “I knew you were more fun than boring old Christine!”

This effusive praise seems to be what finally jars Sabrina out of her fugue; gradually she slows her assault, appearing to become conscious of her surroundings again, her face crumpling into abject horror at the mess she’s made of her former tormentor. Christine, still wary of the gore-soaked lamp clutched in the girl’s hand, takes her elbow and gently guides her away, while Lily bends and slips something long and thin up beneath the man’s jaw, bringing a swift, spasming end to his moans.

“You’re okay. You’ll be okay. Come on, let’s keep moving,” Christine murmurs to Sabrina, who’s now shaking harder than ever, eyes streaming wet tracks down her cheeks. She carefully takes the lamp from the girl’s trembling hand, although in the interest of pragmatism she decides to keep hold of it, just in case.

***

AMBER

The roof of Madrigal House has seen better days: the moonlight reveals a multitude of holes both cheaply patched and left gaping to let in the rain, and the steep, tiled faces look decidedly threadbare. The whole roofscape is a collision of multiple past bursts of repair, extension and refurbishment over the manor’s long life, meaning flat and peaked styles are jammed together without concern for aesthetics, and no two gables have the same pitch. Charity is standing at the edge of a flat, narrow area, staring out at the dense, dark woodland. Amber hops from a chimney to a gutter to the other end of the same short expanse, where she rises to her full height, facing her creation with back straight; her heart is hammering and breaths come fast, and she lacks her usual easy conviction that these are purely the physical symptoms of exertion.

“Well? What’s so terribly important I have to stand on a wet roof in January to see it?” she asks, keeping her tone cool and level.

“You always claimed you wanted an equal,” Charity says without turning, ignoring the question. “But I’ve come to realise what you really wanted was a mirror. A little pet to share in all your delights, to reflect your own brilliance back upon you so you could bask in it forever. I’ll never be that, Mother.”

Amber blinks, raises one exquisitely-threaded eyebrow. “Is this about the Punishment Hole? Because I’ve heard a broad range of feedback about that, and I’m prepared to admit I might have overdone the rats a smidge.”

This seems finally to elicit a reaction from Charity: the tight line of her mouth twists angrily and, blade in hand, she flings herself at Amber, feet preternaturally sure on the rain-slick surface. Amber matches the younger, taller woman’s movements, reading the ready tension in her muscles, the whispers of intent in her stance. A high, lateral swipe at the ninety-degree line; a darting, daring lunge, a backhanded feint, a quick, savage slash upwards and inside her reach. She’s vaguely aware that many of these moves have names, prescribed responses, a history written somewhere in the dusty annals of dueling, but to Amber the most efficient ways to have her body achieve her aims have always come naturally and without a need for formal learning. It appears the same is true for Charity, which raises a warm bloom of pride in Amber even as she follows the shining lines of her opponent’s motion to deflect, evade and misdirect. She’s giddy, ecstatic, perhaps moreso than ever before in her life; this is what she’s wanted - no, craved - and now she’s faced with an equal at last, it’s better than she ever could have imagined. It’s only natural that her miracle girl - lost, returned, against all expectations - is testing her; she’d do the same. It’s how family expresses love. She parries, stabs, dodges, with an ear-to-ear grin and a laugh of wild abandon.

***

CHRISTINE

There follows a seeming eternity spent trudging through the choking dark, a silent Sabrina to one side and the abattoir girls to the other. The three of them are growing twitchier and more obviously anxious by the minute, checking every doorway and passage the group passes and even experimentally calling out Amber’s name from time to time, but to no avail. Christine is so distracted worrying about both what they’ll do in their agitation and what’s happened to Amber that she gasps and starts, then has a brief coughing fit despite the rag clutched to her face, when she glances up to see a pair of figures emerge from the smoky gloom at the end of the hall. The taller of the two seems to be almost dragging the other behind, striding out of the murk with a slightly desperate swagger that’s quite unlike the efficient movements of the Peckinville soldiers or the crazed abandon of the panicked guests. He - it’s fairly obvious it’s a he - has something long and spike-tipped in one hand, and even with the reduced visibility it doesn’t take long for Christine, heart sinking, to identify the pair as Henry and Amelia. Annabelle readies her knife with a palpable air of eagerness, and Jessica drops into a hunter’s crouch, but to Christine’s genuine surprise, both of them look to her for approval before they act. Lily seems more amused than anything, and when Christine - in defiance of her earlier statements, and feeling curiously ashamed of herself - shakes her head, she lets out a snort of laughter.

“I knew you didn’t have the stomach for it. My sweet cousin and her delicate constitution,” Lily says, but she says it fondly; Christine feels a momentary desire to prove her wrong, and has to remind herself that being mocked for not being enough of a murderer is probably a good thing.

“Lucy!” Henry exclaims, having by now drawn close enough that faces are recognisable. “Thank fucking God; the whole place has gone absolutely mad! There are soldiers running around looking for some cunt called Christine, half the olds have decided they’re back in the Naopleonic fucking Wars and gone positively feral, and to top it off, the whole ugly heap of shit of a house has caught fire! It’s complete bloody chaos, is what it is, and Ames and I are getting the fuck out.”

Henry is very obviously even more drunk than before, and his expensive shirt is spattered all over with blood, although whether it’s his own, someone else’s or a combination of the two isn’t immediately clear. Amelia still doesn’t appear to have surfaced fully from the effects of whatever cocktail of substances she took; Christine is sincerely starting to wonder whether this is just what she’s naturally like. Whatever the case, she reacts to the Sisters of the Abandoned Abattoir with more fascination than fear, or Henry’s ill-disguised mixture of revulsion and lust.

“Who’s this? Was there a fancy dress party next door? Bit early for Halloween, girls,” Henry says to the three Daughters, although his tone of jovial mockery lacks much of its usual ease, as if even he can’t rationalise away Lily’s all-too-real skin-mask. For her part, Sabrina is trying her best to hide behind Christine, her mouth a tight line and her gaze firmly fixed on the floor.

“A-hem. We dressed up extra-nicely for the fancy party and personally I think you’re being very rude,” Jessica says, smoothing her blood-smeared white shift with a spidery hand, and Christine thinks that if Henry can’t see the huge, flashing warning signs then he almost deserves what’s coming next.

“Really? Because you look like a- ow!” Henry begins, cutting himself off with a sharp yelp as Annabelle - showing a level of restraint Christine hadn’t thought her capable of - stamps down hard on his foot with one black Mary Jane.

“So much for beauty and grace,” Henry sniffs, but it’s possible some subconscious warning signal has finally made its way through his thick, alcohol-soaked skull, because he lets the matter drop.

“We’re playing a game where you look for keys! And Henry is so shit at it that we don’t have literally any!” Amelia giggles, reaching out to touch Lily’s mask with the tip of a finger then recoiling in squealing, tittering horror.

“We’re trying to find the keys for the security room, so we can get out of here before we die,” Henry corrects her, voice heavy with the weariness of clearly having said the same thing a million times already. “But fuck only knows where that lunatic Penny hid them when she decided to snap and start killing people.”

“Yes, that Penny, what a monster,” Christine says, managing to keep a relatively straight face while trying to convey with her eyebrows to Annabelle that she should keep her instant opprobrium at the misapplied credit for Amber’s murders to herself.

“And now she could be anywhere - she’s surprisingly fast on those little legs, as every eligible bachelor within fifty miles of Cambridge can attest,” Henry mutters. “I never knew she was strong, but now I think about it, I did always say she had disproportionately long arms - she’s got that chimp ratio thing, clearly.”

“I think I would like to meet this person,” Jessica opines, very sincerely.

“Are you talking about these keys?” Lily asks, voice suspiciously saccharine, holding up the set pulled from the mouth of the dead man.

“See, Henry? Creepy mask girl has some keys, because she’s good at the game, whereas you’re total shit. Just like I keep saying,” Amelia exclaims, laughing riotously and swinging to and fro from Henry’s arm. Henry looks very much as if he’d like to drop her, but instead he snatches at the keys and, upon singularly failing to take them from Lily, snaps something about keeping up as he turns and marches away as the assumed head of the group. Christine shrugs and, abattoir girls at her side, Sabrina trailing mutely along behind, consents temporarily to be led.

“Walking, walking, much too slow, we need to find our Mum and go,” Annabelle sings, out of nowhere, hauntingly high and carrying in the hot, choking dark.

“She’s got a point,” Lily replies, as if she’s been presented with a rational proposition rather than a little song. “These idiots are only slowing us down; if we really can’t kill them then we’ll meet you at the main door when you’ve got those bars open. With Mother, I hope.”

“Well, I’m staying with lovely Christine and dear Sabrina and whoever these unpleasant people are,” Jessica mutters. “They’re delicate and fragile and who knows what might happen in the dark?”

“We do,” Annabelle says, her painted smile broad and crooked and intensely unnerving, and then she and Lily are away, and the group is down to five.

“Fuck was that about?” Henry asks, genuinely perplexed.

***

AMBER

“You genuinely don’t get it, do you?” Charity says, halting her onslaught for a moment and looking almost pityingly at her creator. “This has nothing to do with anything you did, or how it made me feel. I’m not like the others, holding petty grudges over this surgery or that torture. I understand, Amber. You helped me become, and for that I’m truly grateful.”

“That’s wonderful!” Amber calls out to her, breathing deeply, spinning her knife between the fingers of one hand in an attempt to ground some of her fizzing, bursting anxiety. “So come on, darling, let’s go inside and we can-”

“It’s simply that you’re flawed,” Charity continues, looking down her nose, spitting the words and visibly barely holding her anger in check, a raw show of emotion that to Amber feels oddly like a challenge. “And your flaws offend me. How am I to make my way in the world with you moping around wanting a sister? Or believing that whatever I do, it's nothing but an imitation of you? Worse, that I might share your mawkish sentimentality for a place and people you should by rights have outgrown, and cut out like a tumour, or a tongue? No. Intolerable. I, creator - mother - am as far beyond you as you are everybody else. I don't want you. I don't need you. You're nothing to me but an impediment. I will never be your Sister, or daughter, or anything but the end of you! Before the night is out, I have every intention of destroying everything you are - EVERYTHING!”

Amber is certain that there’s a distinct, palpable sound the moment her heart breaks. “Really, my sweet, this isn’t necessary!” she protests helplessly, as Charity redoubles her assault, dancing back and forth in a whirlwind of feints, slashes and jabs. The girl’s speed and reflexes are pushing Amber’s to their limits, a new experience and one she’d savour if her mind weren’t spiraling, shocked and aghast. “We needn’t fight! We can coexist! You don’t know the value of what we represent to one another: without me, you’ll be alone! You have no idea what that’s like!”

“No,” Charity says contemplatively, backing off for a moment, leaving Amber near-unprecedentedly flushed and out of breath. “But I rather think I’d like to find out.”

***

CHRISTINE

There’s a marked increase in the frequency of distant screams and cracks of gunfire now two of Amber’s daughters are loose in the manor; the smoke coiling around the ceiling is only getting thicker, and beneath a number of doors is the telltale orange flicker of the dusty furniture and curtains having caught. Christine tries her best to set a hurried pace despite Henry’s drunkenness and whatever Amelia’s bloodstream is currently loaded with. Jessica lopes easily alongside, seeming very much as if she could move at twice the speed but content to stick with the group even if Sabrina repeatedly recoils from Jessica’s attempts to hold her other hand.

Two half-crazed party guests attack the little troupe on their way across the entrance hall, past the double-barred main door beyond which escape from the growing smoke and heat seems cruelly just out of reach. The first - who may or may not be Arthur Featheringley-Worthington beneath the blood and soot, based on what remains of his clothing and his shrunken stature - comes shrieking out of an adjacent hallway brandishing an antique rapier, whacks Henry once or twice with its blunt edge to no appreciable effect, and rebounds off into the hellish orange haze without stopping. The second - a middle-aged woman with an equestrian’s build and a liberated Peckinville rifle, who bellows ‘HALT!’ in a taut, plummy voice somewhere by the stairs down to the little bar, is shanked by Jessica with cold efficiency while Christine distracts the others by shoving them bodily behind a display cabinet, ostensibly for cover.

“Oh. She ran off,” Christine says, guileless, while her eyes inexorably follow the last few inches of the woman’s feet sliding jerkily out of view.

“Must have gotten a proper look at who she was dealing with,” Henry says, puffing himself up in what under other circumstances would be a comically pathetic show.

A Peckinville soldier with wild eyes and blood pouring down one limp arm runs out across the upstairs balcony, heedless of being seen by the little pack of survivors and likely not even aware of their presence. Christine freezes, startled, and watches him lurch across the landing, silently letting Henry and Amelia go ahead for fear of alerting the man to their presence. He’s barely stumbled from view when there are footfalls on the opposite side of the horseshoe-shaped balcony, and a smoke-wreathed Lily emerges from a door further along, almost directly above Christine.

“Jessie, he saw Mother not long ago! We need to get him to talk!” she shouts down, tone sharp and urgent. Jessica doesn’t even say anything, just tilts her head back and gives Christine a quick upside-down smile before leaping upwards higher than would have seemed possible from a standing start, just about catching the edge of the upper floor with her nails and frantically, inelegantly scrabbling with hands and feet until she’s crouched on the railing alongside her Sister. Christine doesn’t object - she’s always known the Daughters’ loyalty was to Amber first and foremost, and she’s concerned about her too - but it’s with a renewed and very present sense of what dangers might be lurking that she follows after Henry and Amelia, Sabrina in tow.

***

The security room could scarcely do a poorer job at disguising its former function as some sort of servants’ quarters; separated from the better-kept parts of the manor by a narrow passageway, down a single step from the level of the main house’s floor, as if to reinforce its lower status. The bare, whitewashed walls now play host to a handful of cheap, outdated monitors on a desk housing what, compared to Dorley’s system, looks to Christine a hopelessly basic and amateurish setup. The rest of the place seems more like a break room for the three-man security corps: raincoats hang on hooks, a worn-out coffee maker sits with contents cold and congealing, and a deck of cards has been roughly stacked, awaiting a game that will probably never now come.

“Alright,” Christine says, sweeping her gaze over keyboards and displays, feeling for the first time that night almost in her element. “We’re looking for a physical release, so we shouldn’t need a login for the computers, which is good. It’ll be a little box a bit like a light switch or a plug socket, with a keyhole and maybe a red switch, if it’s anything like Dor… chester. like the one my parents have. At their house. In Dorchester,” she hastily amends, on the offchance that maintaining the charade in front of Henry and Amelia still remotely matters.

“Henry, I’m getting bored,” Amelia complains, after less than thirty seconds spent half-heartedly glancing around places Christine has already looked. Henry opens his mouth to reply, and that’s when Penny bursts from the gear locker behind them in a frenzy of noise and violence.

“Stop right there! I don’t… I’m, ah, God, this is awful, this is the worst night of my… do you know what I’ve been through? I’m being hunted, I, I getawayfromme, you’re with them, you, you, YOU!” Penny babbles in a manic, piercingly high stream of words, a slow-fast-slow eruption from a disheveled figure who barely resembles her fussily put-together earlier self. She’s blindly swinging a kitchen knife she must have picked up earlier, or, it occurs to Christine, from someone else who didn’t make it. “I’ve… they’ve been after me, all of them, with guns and knives and a fucking poker, Henry, a poker! Because they’re so stupid that they still believe I did it! And the soldiers andtheshooting and and and… And you, you bitch, youandyour little friend, this is ALL your FAULT!”

Christine backs away from Penny’s sudden, windmilling assault, but before she can even begin to come up with a way to talk the girl down from whatever mental break she’s suffered, Henry shoulders her out of the way. A combination of alcohol and a lifetime’s lack of respect for Penny means he seems to pay the blade little mind; he steps in mumbling something about silly girls and calming down, only for Penny to bury the knife so deep in his thigh that it slips out of her suddenly blood-slick hand and stays stuck there.

“OW! Pen, you little bitch!” Henry yelps. Reflexively, furiously he jabs out with the poker and, drunk as he may be, his aim is surprisingly good. Penny clutches at the fountaining wound in her throat as Henry falls to one knee and Amelia starts screaming fit to bring down the roof; Sabrina freezes up completely, clutching Christine’s hand so hard it hurts. Christine desperately casts around the room for something to stanch the bleeding, but before she finds anything suitable it’s very clear that it’s far too late.

“We have to go,” Christine says, once the noise has subsided into a series of long, sobbing gasps from Amelia and Henry’s ongoing moans of pain. She keeps her voice level, aiming to seem calm and in control, but her gaze keeps wandering to Penny’s cooling body as if the corpse is magnetic, and every time it does she struggles not to break down.

“Erm, I don’t think you should do that…” Sabrina pipes up, surprising Christine because she’s previously seemed terrified even to be noticed by Henry and Amelia, but turning from her to them, she sees what was urgent enough to break the girl’s silence: with one hand braced against the groaning Henry and the other on the knife’s handle, Amelia is trying to pull it out of the wound. Christine yells a wordless warning, but blood is already gushing out of a huge, ragged rent in Henry’s leg, covering Amelia in thick, slimy gore, and she’s screaming again and waving the freed knife in panic, seriously at risk of cutting herself or someone else.

Wordlessly Sabrina undoes the satin apron from her skimpy maid’s costume and proves surprisingly practical at helping Christine use it to tie a rough tourniquet tight around Henry’s thigh and knot both of their face-covering tea towels around the wound itself, somewhat to Christine’s chagrin. Henry lows like a distressed cow, long and pained, face leached of colour, breaths coming short and fast.

“I knew the fat little cunt had a vicious streak, but I didn’t know she was demented,” he mumbles to no-one in particular, clearly hazy from the pain and blood loss.

In a small, belated moment of serendipity, it’s while crouching there on the floor, hands covered in blood, watching the red stain quickly saturate the boozy idiot’s pants, that Christine’s eye finally falls upon the emergency release for the security system. It’s fixed to the wall under the desk, presumably installed without much planning, and it responds to her shakily inserting the key and turning with a satisfying clunk. Hastily standing, she joins Sabrina in staring desperately at the monitors, willing the bars to open; together they release a held breath as the grainy feed from the entrance hall shows they’re finally free to leave.

“Does this mean we can… can we get out now? Can we just go?” the girl asks, in little more than a whisper.

“Yeah. We… I mean, there’s… someone else. The other three went looking for her. I don’t want to leave without… it’s complicated,” Christine says helplessly, tripping over herself as she tries to compress her relationship with Amber and the unlikeliness of the woman actually needing rescue into anything less than a whole novel’s worth of words. “Let’s just get out,” she decides. “The others can look after themselves. Come on, up you get,” she tells Henry, sympathy for his condition wrestling with an ongoing awareness of his general awfulness and producing a brusque, efficient manner that she almost doesn’t recognise. Sabrina shoulders his other arm with intense reluctance, not actually taking that much of the man’s substantial weight, but mercifully it’s enough to get him moving, if not particularly quickly. Amelia doesn’t offer to help; she isn’t screaming any more, which Christine considers a blessing, but recent events seem to have plunged her from a giggly obliviousness which she now doubts had anything to do with drugs into a state of mute, glassy-eyed shock. Christine, hardened veteran of countless horrors in the last week alone, understands but wishes she’d get over it a little more quickly; dissociation may be a common reaction to sudden trauma, but it hardly makes maneuvering however many pounds of anemic toff through a burning mansion any easier.

AMBER

Slash, parry, feint, riposte, step and strike, lunge and spin and pause to desperately catch her breath and force her hammering heart to slow; Amber is fast running out of cards to play. Her chest is heaving with sheer exertion and she’s bleeding from innumerable wounds where her speed and reflexes have proved insufficient - although in all fairness, so is Charity, who is presently circling her, laughing long and loud in an explosion of raw feeling that Amber almost envies her ability to express so freely. There’s a lot of pain, although that’s never been any impediment, and she’s aware of having lost enough blood that extended consciousness is more a privilege than a guarantee. But more than any of that, she’s becoming deeply afraid that Charity might be right.

Amber has always drawn an intuitive line between the singular workings of her mind and her physical capabilities; other people can’t do the things she does because their brains refuse to push their bodies so hard, keep muscles and organs so tightly and intentionally controlled, held back by the chains of hurt and exhaustion and the fear of damage. But it follows, then, that if the two really are the same sort of creature, and if Charity is Amber’s physical superior - as it’s gradually becoming clear may well be the case - it can only be because her mind is the more sharply-honed of the two, the more willing to master her body in pursuit of her goals. And that means the question is less whether Amber can win and more whether, in a sense, she deserves to. Perhaps, in the end, they’re the same question. And it doesn’t change anything, really. She wants to live; she loves life and all the rich, beautiful things there are to be carved from its secret, soft places. And it seems inescapable that if she’s going to keep living, she has to destroy the one thing she’s wanted most in the world.

Heart hurting with the disappointment and the sheer cruelty of it all, Amber darts back in for the kill.

CHRISTINE

The fire has by now taken full hold, and the manor is proving ideal fuel; smoke is everywhere, and a medley of deeply concerning creaks and snaps are audible over the constant background crackle of hungry flames. More than a few doors the group drags Henry agonisingly slowly past have fire licking under and up their faces, and Christine, coughing harder, sincerely wishes she’d kept the cloth for herself. At least their progress is unimpeded; any surviving guests and soldiers appear to have either found their own egress, succumbed to the choking smoke or fled upstairs. Christine is by now intensely regretting that her bruised but intact sense of morality wouldn’t let her just ditch Henry; she can’t help imagining how Amber would have acted in the same situation, and with each labouring step beneath the dead weight of him, cold self-interest looks all the more appealing. So it’s an exhausted, frustrated, angry Christine who, during a brief break where she and Sabrina have let Henry slump against a wall while they catch their breath, sees him turn his bleary gaze on the former captive as if he’s seeing her properly for the first time.

“I know who you are,” he mumbles. She emits a little squeak of shock and scrambles to her feet, eyes wide in their dark circles of smudged mascara. “You’re the prize, aren’t you? The sexy little shemale old Haverthwaite was hiding away. They did you up specially, right? How about a quick handy, to keep my spirits up? I know you want to, you little perv; why else would you let them do all this to you?”

Sabrina looks horrified, but Amelia’s eyes light up, and almost immediately her trauma seems all but forgotten as she starts grabbing and squeezing at the terrified girl’s body, even if there’s the occasional hitch in her voice that exposes her miraculous recovery for the thin veneer it is.

“God, you’d never know he was a man under all that, would you?” she laughs, a little too long and loud. “Don’t be shy, you little pansy, let me see what all the olds’ scrimping and saving bought them. Oh, it’s such a shame I shan’t get to see the boys play with you.”

“I… I…” Sabrina mumbles, eyes darting back and forth, whatever awful things have been done to make her so meek and compliant fighting with her desperate, obvious desire to get away.

“All wasted now, of course, all their precious pennies. He’ll be off like a shot as soon as he gets in sight of the door if he’s got any sense, won’t you, darling?” Amelia laughs, seeming to be on the very edge of losing her grip on events again. “Or perhaps not,” she considers, smirking. “All sorts of things might happen to a pretty little tranny, alone in the woods at night, looking like that. Imagine him trying to flag down a car or knock on someone’s door! Wouldn’t it be so much better to come with me and lovely Lucy? We’d have such fun, and really you don’t have anywhere else to go, do you, darling?”

Christine, furious beyond words, shoves Amelia away from the trembling Sabrina as hard as she can. She wishes Amber were here. She wishes she had the guts to do what’s clearly necessary and right; wishes the Daughters were around to make off-colour jokes and act like murder is a trivial, everyday thing. She wishes it were as easy as Amber makes it look. But she’s alone, and afraid, and despite everything she’s still herself, so all she can do is turn her back on the spluttering Amelia and, leaving Henry sprawled speechless against the wall, lead the weeping Sabrina out into the entrance hall.

This is like stepping into an incinerator. The ceiling is sagging and shedding bits of burning debris, the drapes and half of the paintings are already ablaze, and there are plumes of smoke billowing out of almost every aperture to hang like stormclouds around the chandelier. As luck would have it, Christine’s arrival roughly coincides with all three Daughters barrelling out of an upstairs doorway, coughing and spluttering and - in Jessica’s case, at least - seemingly unaware that the ends of their hair and hems of their clothes are on fire.

“Did you find her?” Christine yells up through the smoke, noting the absence of Amber among her creations.

“We’ve decided dear Mumsie can probably manage by herself!” Annabelle yells back, sounding panicked. “It’s nasty and terrible and horrid upstairs! We have to get out before the whole thing comes all tumbling down on our pretty little bonnets!”

She takes the stairs three at a time in great lurching bounds, while Lily comes sliding down the banister on the flats of both boots in a move that under other circumstances Christine would consider extremely cool. Jessica eschews the whole thing and tips herself bonelessly over the railing to land in a loose crouch on the tips of her calloused toes. As if to illustrate Annabelle’s point, a hunk of burning support beam that must weigh half a ton comes crashing through the lacquered wood of the ceiling, opening a ragged hole to the raging inferno that the first floor has become. As if emboldened, more pieces of old, brittle structure crash through, scattering embers and thick, choking soot. Patting desperately at her dress and hair, Christine abandons caution and makes a frantic dash for the entrance, yanking a screaming Sabrina along with her, less concerned for her immediate comfort than she is for both of their lives. The pair of them meet Amber’s daughters halfway across the polished hardwood, now a chaotic maze of splintered wreckage and fresh fires, and Lily simply half-hoists the bawling, terrified girl onto her back and continues running at a barely diminished pace. There are fifteen metres to go, then ten - a flaming armoire crashes through the ceiling to Christine’s left and shatters, spraying Jessica with jagged splinters, which she barely seems to notice even as spots of blood blossom across the soot-stained grey of her once-white dress - then five, then three, and finally they’re out of the furnace heat and into the plunge bath of a shockingly cold January night, stumbling panting and heaving for breath across the hellishly orange-lit driveway. Beyond, tall trees stand silhouetted against the cloudy sky, and parked cars form a neat semi-circle almost like an accidental amphitheatre.

***

“Lucy! The gate! Quickly!” cries a frantic, shrill voice from within the burning manor. As Christine sluggishly parses the words - as her mind gradually comes back to her, animal panic receding to a background buzz of adrenaline and exhaustion - she becomes aware of a high-pitched beeping coming from the main entrance. A single red light is flashing by the raised security bars at every window, and the door; she guesses that either she failed to input some command that would disable the system properly, or the fire has eaten through something important. Shading her eyes, she squints back into the maelstrom of flame and embers that is the grand hall; through billowing smoke she can see Amelia and Henry, the latter limping painfully with only the girl’s willowy frame to lean on, presumably out of sheer desperation to survive. Christine looks frantically around; there’s no way she’s setting foot back inside the manor, and the Daughters are showing no inclination to act, all three looking at her with naked curiosity as to what she’ll do. Henry and Amelia stumble closer through the inferno, hands raised to ward off the omnipresent embers and debris; it’s clear they can barely see where they’re going, and the bars could come down at any moment. Christine’s eye finally alights on a keyhole beneath the brass-faced intercom panel, similar to the one in the security room and fitted to the key she still has clutched painfully tight in her hand. She moves toward it; the pair of survivors redouble their struggle through the scant - and rapidly shrinking - gaps in the fire.

“Lucy!” Amelia yells out again, pleadingly, between bouts of coughing. Christine feels someone at her side, half-turns with a start to find Sabrina standing beside her in the singed remains of her maid’s costume. Her eyes are wide and wet in their smudgy circles of ruined makeup, locked on the indistinct shapes of Henry and Amelia in obvious terror. Looking at her, Christine’s head rings with every word, every terrified reaction the girl struggled to hide. What their peers and elders must have done to her; what they would have done themselves, given the chance. Meeting Amelia’s desperate, horrified gaze head-on, unblinking, breaking it only to make sure Henry sees too, she throws the keys as hard as she can into the damp, chilly grass of the lawn and turns away. Behind her there’s a resounding plurality of slams as the bars crash down. Somehow she can’t imagine a sound more final. After that there are some other sounds, too, and they go on for a while, but they’re eventually lost to the night air alongside the cracks and crashes of the fire.

“Well, that was satisfying,” Lily says, after a moment. Christine doesn’t reply.

“My face is itchy,” Jessica complains, picking inch-long splinters out of her cheek with the tips of two spindly fingers and throwing them away with a sour expression.

“I think Little Mabel needs a trip to the dolly hospital,” says Annabelle, critically regarding the scorched puppet and her blackened clothes, frowning.

“So what now?” Christine asks after a short while, squatting with her arm around a trembling Sabrina, who hasn’t said anything but has firmly resisted any attempt on Christine’s part to let go.

Lily lifts her singed skin-mask to rest on her forehead and turns, her back to the furnace glow of Madrigal House, making for an oddly dramatic figure. Flames are by now billowing freely between the bars on the windows on both sides of the main door; the upper floors are nothing but fire and great, greasy plumes of smoke, reaching all the way to the peaked roof and beyond into the dark sky. Great cracks and bangs sound again and again from within, as further parts of the old house succumb and collapse. Something frozen in Lily’s expression makes Christine tear her gaze away from the hypnotic dancing of the fire and turn, blinking, to face the guests’ cars, the long, winding driveway and the expanse of lawn stretching out to the pitch-dark treeline.

“What is it…?” she asks, as Lily wordlessly darts forward past her, paying her no attention whatsoever; she’s rapidly joined by her sisters, who’ve clearly picked up on whatever Lily has seen. Christine disentangles herself from Sabrina as gently as she can and stands too, squinting to try and figure out what the abattoir girls are reacting to. All three are bent over something indistinct, like a bundle of rags or forgotten clothing. She wonders for a moment if it’s the guests’ coats and they’re all about to fight over who gets which. Suddenly Jessica lets out a high, wavering wail entirely unlike any sound Christine’s heard her - or anyone else - produce. Annabelle is heaving out great wracking sobs, and even unflappable Lily takes a couple of steps back in apparent shock. Hurrying over, a leaden dread dragging at her insides, Christine sees what she belatedly realises she knew it must be, but couldn’t bring herself to even envision; Amber, soaked in blood, beautiful dress torn to ribbons by whatever weapon has left her bare limbs laid open in a series of deep cuts, and made a trio of yawning, thickly pulsing holes in her abdomen and chest. Christine feels like she’s watching from the far end of that deep, dark tunnel and receding fast, like she might faint at any moment or already has; she doesn’t know where to start trying to bind such dire injuries, or with what, or if there’s even any point. She desperately doesn’t want to admit it to herself, but she’s certain that if Amber isn’t dead already, they’re all witnessing her last moments, and there’s nothing anybody can do. Certainly the last thing she expects is for her kidnapper, renegade Sister and - yes - friend to be conscious, and yet as she draws inexorably closer, horrified and unable to look away, Amber effortfully turns her head and focuses on her with those colourless, knife-sharp eyes.

“Might have… miscalculated a touch,” she croaks, voice barely more than a whisper, lips flecked with bloody froth as she struggles and fails to smile. “Last Daughter. Alive. Charity.”

“I know,” Christine says quietly. “Your girls are here. They told me all about it.”

“Stop,” Amber manages, and Christine puzzles over what she means for a moment until she realises the woman’s arm is lifted a pathetically short way off the tarmac, her hand weakly pointing out across the rolling grounds. “Dorley. She’ll kill… everyone. To destroy me. Have to stop her,” Amber rasps, breaths horribly laboured and rattling in her chest. And then, “Can’t. I’m… sorry.” Finally her eyes close; Christine isn’t immediately certain she’s even still alive, but after a yawning, vertiginous silence punctuated only by Annabelle’s sobs and Jessica’s eerie keening, those painful rattles start up again, shallow and desperately weak.

Standing, facing away from the house, Christine squints; distant but unmistakable, the lights of a car are wending their way down the long, serpentine strip of the driveway, almost at the gate and away from the inferno that used to be Madrigal House. Out through the woods toward the nearby town, and from there, the motorway. Travelling in the general direction of Almsworth.