Hell's Eyes

BRIANNA SHAFFERY

“Miss Hyacinth,” he started in what he hoped was an approachable tone, “could you tell me what Mr. Noblémyn was like when you called upon him yesterday?” Elsie nodded, swallowing the anxiety quivering in her throat. “He was…out of sorts. I would say he was very frightened, but of what I don’t know. He had all these bolts and locks on the door, and did them up again as soon as I was inside. He’d also had all the windows latched and hardly a candle lit.” “Curious, though expected,” Herman muttered, already aligning Miss Hyacinth’s description with the list of symptoms he knew Mr. Noblémyn would experience if his theory was correct. Elsie arched her brow. Her temper sparked, and she could not keep an irritated lilt from her voice. “Expected?” “I have a theory, though I am still uninclined to share it until you can confirm my suspicions. Please continue, Miss Hyacinth.” Eyeing the town’s Healer coolly, Elsie did as he bade and told him of the drawings that had littered Mr. Noblémyn’s sitting room before she’d cleaned them up this morning. “I’ve never seen such cold, merciless eyes before. Every drawing seemed to feature them, though I never knew Mr. Noblémyn to be an artist. But the strangest part, well to me at least,” she said with a tight, rueful smile, “is that Mr. Noblémyn claimed he had only seen the creature in his dreams. I would have thought he had been attacked by it in the woods for it to instill him with such fear, but yet, to my knowledge, Mr. Noblémyn has never seen this creature otherwise.” Slowly, Mr. Basil nodded. “That is indeed strange, Miss Hyacinth. Tell me, what do you know of a creature called the cerbertes?” Elsie’s frown deepened. “I did not think they lived so close to civilized country. Aren’t they all but extinct now, anyways?” “So they say,” Mr. Basil sighed, scrubbing his face. He didn’t dare say the theory had been rebuked by a zoologist who’d found they’d withdrawn to the deepest parts of the Shadow Forest where humans

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