ACCOUNT III — The Child at the Window

If my interaction with Elias Thorne felt similar to pulling teeth, speaking with Silas Bell presented quite the opposite problem.

Before I could even ask my second question, Mr. Bell had already given me detailed accounts of his twelve siblings, the time he’d tripped into a pond looking for some Firekeepers’ Shelf mushrooms (a good thing, he’d remarked, that he went into the water before finding the mushrooms), and no less than three rundowns of the last travelers he’d met on the road.

Oh...

And what he’d had for breakfast that morning.

I had simply asked Silas where he was from.

I must admit, I found myself particularly grateful then for the enchantment placed upon a Mythkeeper’s quill. So long as my notebook remains open, the quill requires no hand to guide it. It records the account exactly of its own accord, setting to paper what is said and observed until the notebook is closed.

A useful bit of magic under ordinary circumstances.

An absolute necessity, I discovered, when speaking with Silas Bell.

Had I been required to keep pace with him myself, I suspect my hand would have cramped before he ever reached the third sibling.

Eventually, I steered Mr. Bell toward the topic of my visit.

“Elias Thorne, you may remember him—”

“Aye! Good man, Mr. Thorne. Dark story, that.”

“Indeed. Well, he tells me—”

“That poor sister of his. Died so young. That’s why he took the confectioner’s job, you know.”

“I’m sorry. What are you on about?”

“Those barley sweets were his sister’s favorite.”

I blinked at him.

“Right,” I said after a moment.

I paid the information little mind. I had come to speak with Silas Bell about Gloam Cats, not the childhood confectionery preferences of Elias Thorne’s deceased sister.

“Ah, well. Quite… tragic indeed. Anyway, Mr. Thorne tells me you know something about Gloam Cats.”

“Ooooh, no, Miss Rowan.” He waved a finger between us. “We don’t talk about those.”

“On the contrary, we are presently talking about them.”

“No, you are talking about them. I’m telling you we should not.”

“And why might that be?”

“Bad news, those… creatures.”

“What sort of bad news?”

“The sort that sensible people leave alone.”

I waited with a raised brow.

Mr. Bell did not.

“You know, that’s the trouble with you, Mythkeepers. Always poking at things everyone else has had the good sense not to poke. My brother Thomas was like that. Not a Mythkeeper, mind you. But would have made a fine one with the way he just wouldn’t leave anything well alone. Once found a wasp nest beneath—”

“Mr. Bell.”

“Hm?”

“The Cat.”

“Right. Oof. Nasty business.”

It occurred to me then that Silas Bell was perfectly willing to answer my questions. The difficulty lay in preventing him from answering several others along the way.

I decided specificity might be my greatest ally.

“How many have you seen?”

“One.”

“One?”

“Aye.”

“And, Mr. Thorne said you encountered one as a child?”

“That’s correct.”

“And you have not encountered another since?”

“Didn’t say that.”

I frowned, waved a hand toward my quill to pause its documenting, and flipped back through the notes.

“I’ve noted here that you’ve seen one.”

Mr. Bell chuckled, raising a brow as he glanced between me and my quill. “I have.”

It took me a moment.

“Ahh. So then, you are saying you have seen one Cat, multiple times?”

“I know it was the same Cat.” For once, there was no humor in his expression. “And yes.”

This interested me.

Mr. Thorne had been equally certain that the Cats he encountered were separate creatures. Neither man, unfortunately, had offered me any useful means of determining how they had reached their respective conclusions.

“How old were you when you first saw it?” I waved my hand back toward my quill, and it started scribbling again.

“Seven,” he said with certainty. Then he frowned. “Had to have been. Clara hadn’t been born yet. Or… she had just been born…”

“Clara?”

“Aye. Youngest. Mother’s last, thank the gods. Thirteen children altogether, can you imagine? Well, suppose you needn’t imagine, I’ve just told you. Thomas and—”

“So, you saw the Cat when you were a child, and then again…”

Silas Bell thought on it for a moment.

Strange that he did not immediately answer.

What follows is his exact account, word for word.

“There had been a stretch of time, many years ago, when the forest was quiet of travelers. You would have been too young to remember, Miss Rowan, but I do say, it was a dark time indeed.

“Something had come and taken all the lanterns that lit the paths through The Wood. It was a dark creature that at one point had been called The Lantern Keeper, though its name did not stay that.

“Tradespeople became fearful of the forest. Refusing jobs that led them this way.

“But goods still needed to be transported, and so, a very select few of us were left to the job. 

“It was a lonely time. There was no one to share stories, or make anyone laugh, or even to talk about daily ongoings with. 

“It had felt as though…”

And then, the man who had needed to fill every spare second with words suddenly, and without warning, went quiet.

“Go on.” I pressed.

“It was as though I had gone right back to my childhood home, where you could sit in a room with eight other people and somehow not one of them would notice you.”

He looked down at his hands, fiddling with the stick he’d been using to stoke the fire.

“Funny thing, that. You’d think a house with thirteen children in it would be the last place a person could feel lonely…”

He swallowed hard, frowning at the thought. 

I hummed thoughtfully, readying myself to reply, and he jumped at the sound. Blinking at me, he let out a startled laugh. 

“Oi, yes, well, anyway. There I was one night, humming to myself for the silence, when I felt something watching me. I tell ya, I knew what it was before I looked up. The warning had been set right in my mind for years.

If you see two glowing eyes beyond the firelight, continue speaking as though you haven’t noticed them.

“The only problem was, I hadn't a soul in the world to continue talking to. And when I looked up and saw those two glowing eyes, I couldn't quite look away now, could I? And what's more…

“I recognized them.”

“The eyes, you mean?”

“Aye. They were the same eyes that watched me as a child, beneath my window.”

“How could you tell?”

He grunted. “I could just tell, couldn’t I?”

“I suppose so.”

I glanced down at my notebook. The quill hovered patiently over the parchment for its next words, though only the fire crackled between us.

And something occurred to me then. I opened my mouth to speak.

But Mr. Bell could not let the silence stand and, once again, beat me to words before I could ask my next question.

“You see, the night I’d seen the cat for the first time, it was after I had been sent to my room for trying to make Clara laugh. She’d been crying in her crib from the noise of the smithy downstairs. I’d been making funny faces and silly noises, and my mother had shooed me away. She’d said it wasn’t my place and sent me upstairs.

I remember sitting cross-legged with a wooden train, pushing it across the floor, when the same sensation of something watching me pulled my attention to the window.

And there it was. I could only see the top of its head silhouetted against the oil lamps in the street. And those eyes.”

He shook his head then.

“Weren’t you afraid?”

“I wasn’t at first. It wasn’t uncommon to have stray cats around our street, and I’d been told to leave them alone. What was strange was, my room was on the third floor. All Mother’s washing lines were below, on the second floor, and there wasn’t a ledge beneath my window. Nothing for a cat to sit on.

“And I think I just… knew. I knew it was a Gloam Cat. What frightened me was that the Cat wasn’t looking at me. It was looking into the room beyond.

“Couldn’t sleep in my own bed for months after that. Thought there might be a ghost.”

But my attention had snagged on something else.

The thought slipped out of my mouth before I had a chance to stop it.

“You were lonely.”

“Lonely? In that house? Psh. Couldn’t find a moment alone if I’d paid for one.” He laughed.

“And yet, you were.”

Mr. Bell opened his mouth, though nothing immediately came out.

“I suppose,” he said eventually, “But being alone and being lonely are not quite the same thing.”

“That’s true. But you were also lonely when you encountered the Cat during the time of The Lantern Eater.”

Silas’s mouth fell open. “So you do know…”

“I recall the stories, yes. I am a Mythkeeper, after all. It’s rather our entire thing, to keep records.” I smirked, glancing down at the quill dancing across the parchment.

Silas made a surprised noise. “Touché.”

I flipped back through my notes at that.

Twice the Cat had appeared to Mr. Bell.

Once in a house overflowing with people, and once in a Wood nearly emptied of them.

The circumstances could hardly have been more different.

The feeling, however, was the same.

And perhaps that was the connection.

Twice Silas Bell had encountered the creature. Twice he had been lonely.

Whether the feeling itself mattered, I could not yet say.

But I no longer believed the timing entirely coincidental.

I stayed with Silas Bell for quite some time before I made my way back through The Wood to The Keeping.

I flipped through the record of my conversation with Silas for a time before returning to the scant notes from my conversation with Elias Thorne at The Wayward Lantern.

As I did, two things caught my attention:

The first was so insignificant that I had nearly overlooked it entirely.

Barley sweets.

Mr. Thorne had been working one between his teeth when he encountered the creature upon the road.

Those barley sweets were his sister’s favorite.

I stared at the words.

Silas Bell had offered the information before I had managed to ask him a single useful question, and I had dismissed it accordingly.

Perhaps I had been too quick to do so.

Elias had remembered those sweets from childhood. His sister had loved them. And on the morning of his encounter, he had taken one for himself.

I could not say what memory accompanied it. Nor could I presume to know what Mr. Thorne had felt when he tasted it.

But I could no longer dismiss the timing.

The second appeared in both accounts.

Aside from the creatures themselves, there was perhaps only one similarity between them:

Neither Cat appeared to be looking at the man before it.

I read Mr. Thorne’s account again.

He had moved aside.

The Cat’s eyes had not followed.

He had looked behind himself and found nothing there.

I turned back to Mr. Bell’s account.

The Cat was not looking at me, but rather, in the greater room beyond.

I sat with that for some time.

Two men. Two accounts. Two creatures whose attention appeared fixed upon something their witnesses could not see.

I thought then of an old description I had encountered more than once in the archives.

No one knows what they watch for.

For the first time since beginning my investigation, I wondered if perhaps I did.

I confess, my first thought was perhaps the most obvious.

A ghost.

It would explain the creature’s gaze.

It might even explain why the sweet mattered.

For several exhilarating seconds, I thought I had it.

Then I remembered Silas Bell.

And swore.

Mr. Bell had mentioned no death associated with either encounter. No departed sibling. No lost companion. Nothing at all, in fact, that suggested the dead had anything to do with it.

What he had mentioned was loneliness.

Twice.

I tapped my quill against the page.

If the Cats were watching spirits, Silas Bell made little sense.

If they were watching loneliness, Elias Thorne made even less.

And yet the barley sweet bothered me.

I closed the notebook.

There was somewhere else I needed to look.