One lone platter of sliced meats greeted me in the dining room. Roast beef, ham, turkey, they had all made an appearance the last two nights. Now, limp and dry, they were clearly the leftover dregs. It was as though the staff grew less diligent without Emrick's presence and supervision. With each day, his absence seemed to cause a material and spiritual decline in Foxcroft House.

How long until his return?

I had expected to find him at hand when I ventured downstairs, but there hadn't been so much as a note.

Did he really expect me to wait indefinitely for him?

I'd already been here for three days. Although, my mind insisted this number was not right. Five or six felt closer to the mark, which must have been a sign of the monotonous nature of the visit.

I emptied the plate and decided to sample some of that country air Emrick had spoken of so fondly. Foxcroft was a stuffy place, and not merely in terms of its furnishings, although the drab formal character of the old place was wearing on me. The summer heat made the rooms stuffy and brought out a musty odor of age and long ago damp. This heavy atmosphere darkened my mood and filled me with an unsettling lethargy, which I hoped a tour of the garden might remedy.

And perhaps—although I would not admit it to myself at the time—I'd hoped I might encounter some evidence of the woman in white, if not the lady herself.

Clouds had rendered the night moonless, so I went in search of a light to guide me on my walk. I felt confident I might find a flashlight in the kitchen, perhaps since this is where I kept my own trusty Ever-Ready. My Hyde Park graystone may be a hovel compared to this grand estate, but some parallels should exist. There is a general order to a household. If I store my emergency light in a drawer by the back door (along with a spare set of C-cells), then so must it be everywhere. Or at least, this was my line of thought.

However, like most things in this house, I found my expectations unmet.

The kitchen was rather pokey for the scale of entertaining that must have once taken place here. Yes, it was more than double in size of my own, but considering the imposing dining room, the presence of a ballroom, and the extraordinary number of bedrooms, it was ill-equipped.

Not only was it small, but little had been done to modernize it. The only sign of the twentieth century (or the nineteenth for that matter) was the incandescent bulbs and a gas stove. The sink was still equipped with a hand pump, a feature I had not seen in use since my youth. And even then, it was while visiting my aunt and uncle's farm outside of Peoria.

And of course, nothing so sophisticated as a flashlight could be found in any of the drawers or cupboards.

There was indeed a backdoor, however. Proving not all my assumptions had been false. Beside it was another that I suspected led to a scullery. In one last effort to satisfy my search, I opened it for a look.

An intense cold rolled out to meet me, cutting through my shirt and jacket and causing an instant shiver. A constant trick of water could be heard coming from the impenetrable darkness of the room. As I probed blindly for a switch, a vapor caught in the light from the kitchen and filled the blackness with a dense fog.

My curiosity piqued, I lit a match and stepped inside.

The mist rose from four blocks of ice. They were no more than a day or two old, still large and solid but with edges rounded from melt. Three walls of the room were filled with shelves containing a butcher's shop worth of meat. Rows of plump roasts, knobby shanks, and whole haunches crowded together. But there was also an excess of offal. Pert specimen-looking brains, wet meaty hearts, and livers and kidneys that sagged and oozed, almost as though they were attempting to escape from their perch.

The cold made it inhospitable to insects, but did not stop a few errant flies from buzzing about, feasting, and laying their putrid eggs. By tomorrow, much of this stock would be unfit for consumption as a full bloom of maggots took over.

The chill also dampened the rank scent of blood and aging meat, but it built with each second I spent in there, growing into a presence—an incorporeal force sharing the tight space with me. Bile rose in my throat, and I was forced to retreat back to the kitchen. As my match sputtered and went out on the damp floor, I slammed the door shut.

But the smell stayed with me.

That terrible smell.

How haunting? How familiar?

I'd long fought to forget it along with the first winter when I was stationed by the Saar River. Those cold days and nights amputating so many limbs from so many boys that my fingers went numb, and my bone-saw grew toothless. Arms and legs—oh God, how alike they were to the haunches I'd seen—too many to count, piled into pits. Warmer days were the hardest. Before the lime was spread and the troughs filled in, that smell was everywhere around the camp. Discarded and lifeless flesh in the melting snow. Meat on ice.

I crossed the room in a haze, running my hip against the edge of the sink. I pumped frantically long enough to wonder if the well was dry before cold water started to spit from the spout. Only by submerging my head in the bracing water could I clear the hot, itchy cobwebs of terror clawing over my face.

When my panic had subsided to a thin electric grip on my heart, I escaped the kitchen and its larder and that horrible, unrelenting smell.