But as she made her way to the dock to confirm that the motorboat had indeed ferried her sister away from the island, Desdemona literally stumbled upon an even crueller leaving: Father’s corpse had been left to putrefy on the muddy slope of the lawn where the Mother of Swords had felled him. Time and the elements had transformed his handsome face to an unidentifiable mass of something like congealed roast drippings. The skin was as colourless as the mud on which the body lay. The nose had deflated and the eyeglasses sat askew over the empty eye sockets. The crows had visibly been supping on his eyes and the meat of his uncovered back. The blood, all that blood, had run out to slake the earth or had become indistinct russet stains on Father’s pyjama bottoms.

In some final symbolic gesture, whose meaning Desdemona could not parse, the thing that had once been Mother had driven several long knives into Father’s remains, pinning it to the ground.

Only after she’d begun to recoil in pity and disgust did Desdemona realise that Father’s positioning was identical to the figure in the Ruina card. He was pinned to the soil by blades, his head was turned to face some mysterious expanse of unknown terrain (in this case, the lake and whatever lay beyond it), and then Desdemona saw them; the colourful scraps of fabric that Mother must have culled from her sewing room. They were tied to the hilts of the swords and now fluttered in the wind like the flags of some fallen kingdom.

She thought of the Tarot card, of Celeste’s ‘feeling’ toward it, and a glimmer of hope brightened her soul. Could the child be hiding out there? Perhaps she had tried to put the matryoshkas back in place?

Desdemona turned on her heel and raced toward the family vault.

The crypt door was still an open passage, but the colourful vine that had hatched from the buried card had shrivelled and turned grey and now laid on the vault steps with the other dead foliage of autumn.

“Celeste!” Desdemona was pleading with the darkness in the tomb. The realisation that the Mother-thing might be waiting inside there did not occur to her until it was too late. She was inside the vault now. The various matryoshkas were nestled among the leaves and grit. The altar bowl was empty, as was the vault itself. Desdemona sank down onto the cold stone floor and curled into a foetal position and prayed with Fate to erase her. Her sobs bounced off the unfeeling stone walls and echoed back as if to mock her anguish.

Now almost catatonic, Desdemona was sprawled across the vault floor, staring emptily at the autumnal world outside.

She doubted her eyes when the first snowflake fell, but in time the flakes multiplied.