The Rose Room, at least, may be made passably comfortable with a bit of sprucing up.

Although I have pulled open the drapes as far as they will go, the room seems impervious to light. Dust hangs heavy in the air, saturated by the cloying pink of the walls and floor. As I yank off the sheets and turn to beat the dust from them, to scatter the gray motes dizzyingly into the air where they will settle again at random, perhaps only to spite Donovan, to provoke some latent allergy, I hear, from just behind me, the wheeze of a consumptive inhale.

The sheet billows back down to the floor when I freeze, listening for the sounds of illness and decay that haunt this room: the death rattle of Frances Wakefield.

Behind me I feel a presence, the feeling when you know someone is watching you, such an intensely revolting feeling that you must turn around and double-check, even when you know you are alone—

I try not to. I take a few steps away from the bed, thinking I will escape this room, but the feeling compels me so, and when I am almost at the door I turn around and see a shape on the bed.

My heart wobbles with the shock of it. Even though I am used to the way this house works, one can never really get used to the sudden appearance of a figure where it hadn’t been only a moment ago.

The shape lies beneath a woven blanket, a relic from the past that doesn’t belong beneath the sheets I just stripped from the bed.

I step closer.

The figure reveals her face: an emaciated death mask with sunken pockets for eyes and chapped, gaping lips. Her lank hair lies plastered to her skin. From between those parted lips she draws a wet, labored breath.

Her glassy eyes, made delirious by disease, stare blankly at the ceiling, in some other realm halfway between the world of the living and the world of the dead.

“Frances?” I murmur.

She coughs convulsively, without even the strength to turn her head, and her eyes roll in their sockets like scattered pool balls. I watch in horror as blood bursts from between her lips, splattering her face and the blanket before sinking back down into her throat. Her breath is a wet gurgle.

One likes to think of death as a peaceful thing, a relief from suffering. A quiet slipping away.

But there is no one here to turn Frances’s head, and no relief from the choking.

Her body fights desperately to draw in air but can only suck blood back into those corrupted lungs, and the sound of her drowning in her own blood is terrible, like sucking the dregs of a milk shake through a straw, and she asphyxiates where she lies, her eyes rolling back in her head as her chest shudders, shudders, and it goes on and on—

Until finally she is still.