“It will be the scent of something or a sound we cannot discern,” Emily said, though her voice trembled a little. “The sooner we make sense of this, the sooner we can pack it away again.”

“I hoped it would be about the child,” Anne said, frowning at the pattern. “Something such as a memorial that might tell us who they were. This seems to be of another language entirely, almost of another world.”

“I had hoped for a message of remorse,” Charlotte said, “a confession.”

“I had hope of neither,” Emily said. “But equally I failed to imagine this, whatever it might be.”

She climbed onto one of the rickety chairs that surrounded the dining room table to get a better view, spreading her arms like a bird to gain her balance. After a moment Anne followed suit, as did Charlotte. The three sisters standing upon their chairs gazed at the pattern while the dogs paced and whimpered below. A sense of disquiet wended its way between them, settling in the air and on their shoulders. Suddenly the little warm room ceased to be their soft grey haven, and from where they stood, it looked so small and long abandoned, damp and full of cobwebs. It felt to Anne as though they were looking on their own lives from very far away, and there was so very little of them left—nothing to prove they had ever lived at all.

Doing her best to swallow the sense of dread that infested her chest, Anne made herself examine the design. There was a circle enclosing a triangle. Several other smaller circles radiated around the latter, and within it appeared strange symbols and images the like of which Anne had never seen. There was something about it that felt malicious and—more than that—alive and knowing, as if it were watching them. Reaching for a piece of paper and a pencil, Emily began to draw what she saw.

After but a minute, the dogs began barking and howling again, Keeper catching at the hem of Emily’s dress and tugging at it as if he wanted her to come away. A moment later the door opened and Tabby entered, mortified to see her girls standing on chairs. With a startled yelp, her gaze travelled from the sisters to the stones on the table, her expression turning from admonishment to ashen grey fear.

“Oh, dear Lord, save us!” Tabby cried, pulling first Emily, then Charlotte off their chairs with quite some force. Before she could be yanked down, Anne got off the chair on her own to find Tabby grabbing hold of Charlotte’s face in her hands, pulling down her lower eyelids and examining the inside of her mouth. “Be there a devil in there? Get thee out of my children before I fetch the parson to drag thee out!”