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can’t,” she sputtered. “I know nothing of these things.”
    “You know how to quiet yourself,” said Miss Crawford. “I cannot do it. At least I cannot do it well, for I have not the concentration. You must simply grow quiet and then, with your mind rather than your eyes, have a look about.”
    Lucy shook her head like a child. She had not attempted to enter this state of concentration, not since that afternoon, the last time she’d tried to read the cards with Mrs. Quince. She recalled it now in a jumble of images—Mrs. Quince’s freckled complexion turning bright red, cards flying across the table, a crystal pitcher shattering. Mrs. Quince accusing Lucy of plotting against her. A slap across the face, shocking in its force and suddenness. Lucy had been unable to comprehend. She’d only known magic as something silly and trivial, something for street performers, or a kind of parlor trick practiced by wags like Jonas Morrison. She’d never understood why Mrs. Quince had taken the matter so seriously.
    The thought of quieting herself filled her with a terrible anxiety, but she knew it was Mrs. Quince who made her feel this way, not the act itself, and certainly not Miss Crawford. As much as Lucy wanted nothing more than to step back and recede into the wallpaper, she was determined not to disappoint this lady. She bit her lip and squeezed her eyes shut for a moment. “I shall try.”
    Lucy took a deep breath and let it out slowly, and then repeated this action several times, slowing her breathing, trying to slow her heartbeat though it pounded loud and quick. She tried to silence the chatter in her mind. She felt the light of the candle. The proximity of Miss Crawford, and the strange man on the bed who radiated a dangerous warmth.
    Then there was something else. Something red and black and angry. It burned, and yet, in her mind it seemed both cold and wet. On somedeep level Lucy understood that if she paused to consider the contradictions of what she experienced, the sensation would vanish, like a vivid dream that dissolves into a jumble of images only seconds after waking. She held on to this experience by the thinnest strand of gossamer, and it nearly eluded her entirely. It was a glimpse of something that flickered like a candle and that she could only understand by putting together fragments. She had no knowledge of what it was, but she knew precisely where it was.
    Breaking her concentration, Lucy strode forward. She opened the stranger’s coat and, gripping the lining in both hands, she tore it, and there, tucked in the folds of the cloth, was a little package of white linen, no bigger than a crab apple, tied with what appeared for all the world to be human hair.
    She began to reach out toward the bag when there was at once something between her and the bundle. It was dark and ill-defined and empty, and yet, for all its shapelessness, it seemed to Lucy to have a face—not composed of features precisely, but points within its blankness that stood in for features. It turned to Lucy and gazed upon her with its indistinct eyes and opened its absent mouth to reveal an even more black and undulating abyss within. There was something sick and wriggling about it, as swift and jittery as a beetle’s legs as it lies upon its back. It was more terrifying than anything Lucy had ever imagined. It was terror itself, given a cold and shimmering nonform. Lucy’s legs grew weak, and though she did not know it at the time, she would later realize she had nearly passed water where she stood.
    If the encounter had lasted longer, Lucy would have been unable to resist the urge to flee, but from the moment she first saw the thing until the moment she acted, only a second or two passed. She had almost no time to feel the full brunt of the terror, and so she reached past the shapeless thing and grabbed the cloth sack and yanked it away.
    She looked back and saw that the dark presence had gone, and the stranger was awake,