She answers the door faster this time. It’s almost as if she’s expecting me. She slides the pull-away notch in the door open and peers out, hawkish and severe.

“You again.” She purses her wrinkled lips. “I don’t want anything from you, and I will not sell any of my creatures to you. I want to be left alone.”

“I lied before.” I hold a raw hand up to the doorframe. “It was my mother who asked we visit you. She disappeared, ten years ago.” I hesitate. “Mireille Foix Hammick.”

The woman’s nostrils flare.

“I don’t want to cause you any more pain,” I continue. “I just want to understand.”

“Understand?” Her voice drips with disdain.

“I want to understand what happened ten years ago.”

“What happened. What happened.” She scoffs. Before I can say another word, she slides the partition shut.

“Wait.” I tap on the splintery door. “Please. Please. I need to speak to your son.”

I wait, chest rising and falling inches from her door. The wind picks up around me, and I hear a creaking inside the house.

But then the door unlocks and swings wide. It’s dark inside, but I see her—her hunched back, as she drifts deeper into the smoke-filled interior.

I step over the wooden threshold.

Candle flames bob in their protective glass jars, illuminating the nooks between hundreds of wooden figurines. It’s a fire trap that scares me—it’s a tinder box she must painstakingly reconstruct every day.

But it’s beautiful, too: The characters look animated by the dancing flames. Alive. I tiptoe past them, meeting Mrs. Arakit at the foot of the stairs, firelight licking her gaunt face.

“My son has been paid to speak to no one,” she says, caressing a new creature in hand. “He might not speak to you.”

“I see.”

She nods once, as if confirming this. Then she turns and walks up the stairs, one small step at a time. “Follow me.”

She hobbles down a hallway made of rough-cut wood and stops in front of a nondescript door. She knocks, once, then cups the creature in hand. Waiting.

“What do you want?” growls a joyless voice that turns the ground under my feet spongy, as if rotten.

Mrs. Arakit mumbles something low in Vilosh through the door, like she’s soothing a trapped monster. But there is no reply.

Still, she opens the door for me shortly thereafter, her face drawn.

Inside, on the bed, sits a man with three scars stretching across his sallow cheek and forehead, the edges ragged and red, inflamed years later.