“Changes in diet,” Lizzie supplied. “That’s another one. No one cooked anything anymore. Only cold food. That part happened gradually. God, I wish I’d kept some sort of journal at the time. I could’ve traced this better, in retrospect.”

“You had no way of knowing,” he told her, without taking his eyes away from the growing list of issues. And when we couldn’t think of anything else, he said, “Very well, let’s move on to the more demonstrable, physical symptoms in the afflicted. Tell me more about your parents.”

“The eyes,” Lizzie and I said at once, startling ourselves.

Then I amended the thought. “A certain dullness to them. A constantly dilated pupil . . . but then again, it’s as I said—we were living in the dark.”

“And eventually, they stopped blinking,” my sister concluded.

Seabury paused, his pencil hovering over the sheet. “Yes. I’ve seen that symptom, too. In Matthew,” he murmured. “I noticed it, but didn’t know what it meant.”

“And then the slowness comes . . . ,” Lizzie said as well. The closer we came to the details of death, the more quietly all of us spoke.

“Slowness,” he jotted.

I added, “Their skin—it changed, became paler. They took on a bloated appearance.”

He swallowed hard, licked his lower lip, and said, “I saw it. In your stepmother. Not in time to do anything about it, but I know precisely what you mean.”

“And toward the very end, they moved oddly,” Lizzie said. “Jerkily, like they had difficulty with their joints. It was different from the clumsiness of moving slowly, as if half asleep—this next stage, it was violent, almost. Their arms and legs shot out, knocking things over, breaking things, hitting things . . . hitting people. Sometimes Mrs. Borden would spasm so hard that her back would arch up, and it looked like she was trying to bend herself in half. Once I thought I heard a crack, as if her ribs would not withstand the strain.”

Her voice was fading, and her eyes were drifting . . . so I tried to bring her back, away from those last days, with another detail, one I’d only just remembered. “But before that, there was all that . . . well, spit, Doctor. Like they couldn’t or wouldn’t swallow anymore.”

“Excessive saliva, perhaps?”

“Perhaps. All in all, I’d say it was as if they’d stopped paying attention to their bodies entirely.”

“Toward the end,” Lizzie went on, “they had trouble breathing. That wheezing noise . . . you must’ve heard it when you met the creature outside the other night. They make that sound, too. It’s a sound that scrapes against your very soul.”

She might have continued, but upstairs I heard Nance awaken and begin to moan.

There was a heavy thump, and a rattling sound, and a cry. Lizzie excused herself, but not before I saw the tears in her eyes.