Read Chapter 15: The Baby's Room

The wallpaper came away in long, wet strips, like skin peeling from a wound. Elodie worked her fingernails beneath the seam near the doorframe and pulled. The floral pattern—faded roses on ochre—resisted for a moment, then surrendered with a sound like tearing fabric. Beneath it, paint the color of old cream, and beneath that, something else. Something bright.

“More light,” she said.

Julien shifted the lantern closer, and the beam caught a swirl of pigment: a dancer mid-pirouette, skirts frozen in a whirl of ochre and crimson. Another beside her, arms raised en pointe. A chorus of them, ringed around the walls of the sealed room, their faces upturned toward a ceiling that had once been painted like a night sky. Stars, faded to ghosts of gold, still clung to the plaster.

“It’s a nursery,” Elodie breathed.

Julien said nothing. He stood in the center of the room, the lantern trembling in his grip, casting long shadows across the dancing figures. The room had been sealed for nearly a century—they’d had to break the lock with a crowbar from the carriage house—and the air still tasted of dust and camphor and something sweeter underneath. Like dried flowers. Like milk.

“This wasn’t in the house records,” he finally managed. “My grandmother kept meticulous notes on every room. Every renovation. She wrote about the attic, the ballroom, even the dumbwaiter. But not this. Never this.”

Elodie ran her palm across the painted wall. The pigment was cracked, crazed with age, but the figures were unmistakable. Children, not ballerinas—their proportions were wrong, heads too large, limbs too soft. Young children, dancing in a ring. And at the center of the ring, where the mural converged above a narrow doorframe, a name painted in curling script.

*Céleste.*

The floorboards creaked beneath Elodie’s weight as she crossed to the alcove. The door was smaller than standard, built for a child’s proportions, and it opened without resistance. Inside, the air changed—cooler, stiller, as if the space had been held in a breath for a hundred years.

The bassinet sat in the center of the alcove. Wicker, darkened with age, its canopy draped in yellowed lace that crumbled at the edges. A quilt lay folded within, hand-stitched in a pattern of tiny stars and crescent moons. Elodie lifted it carefully, and the fabric was softer than it had any right to be. The stitching along the border spelled out a name in thread the color of dried blood.

*Céleste.*

“There is no Céleste,” Julien said. His voice had gone flat, strange. “I’ve read the family Bible cover to cover. Births, deaths, marriages—we have records going back to 1720. There is no Céleste Leveau. No Celestine, no Celeste-Marie, nothing.”

“The historians said 1859.” Elodie folded the quilt over her arm. “Marie Leveau would have been—” She calculated quickly. “Barely twenty. A daughter born in 1859 would have been her first child.”

“She married Bastien’s great-great-grandfather in 1861.” Julien shook his head. “Their first recorded child was born in 1863. A boy, named after his father.”

“So a daughter born in 1859 would have been illegitimate.” Elodie looked back at the mural. The dancers seemed to move in the lantern light, a slow rotation of faded joy. “Or hidden.”

The bassinet rocked. Just a fraction, a whisper of motion, and the canopy shivered.

“Did you see that?” Elodie whispered.

Julien stepped closer, his lantern casting wild shadows. “The floor’s uneven. Draft from the window.”

But the window in the alcove was bricked up, sealed with mortar that had aged to the same color as the walls. There was no draft. No floor seam beneath the bassinet’s rockers—Elodie checked.

The music began from inside the bassinet.

It rose soft and clear, the lullaby she’d heard a hundred times now, echoing through the mansion’s halls at midnight. But here, in this tiny sealed alcove, it wasn’t distorted by distance or muffled by walls. It was pristine. Sweet. A mother’s voice, somehow rendered in melody alone, floating from the empty cradle where no music box sat.

The quilt in Elodie’s arms began to tremble. No—her hands were trembling. She couldn’t tell anymore.

“Turn it off,” Julien said, his voice cracking. “Where’s the mechanism? There has to be a mechanism.”

He ran his hands across the bassinet’s rim, probing for hidden springs, lifting the mattress to reveal nothing but a stained ticking pad. The music continued, unbroken, as if it came from the air itself.

“It’s not coming from the bassinet,” Elodie said. She felt it then, a resonance in her chest, a vibration that had nothing to do with sound. She pressed her palm to the wall behind the cradle. The plaster was warm—impossibly warm—and beneath her hand, the mural changed.

The dancers were moving. Not an illusion of lantern light. They were moving, their painted limbs shifting against the wall, a slow and terrible waltz, and the name at the center of the ring was bleeding. The letters of *Céleste* were darkening, deepening, turning from painted script into something that looked carved. Something that looked fresh.

Elodie snatched her hand back. Warmth lingered on her palm. The music stopped.

Silence rang in the sudden absence of sound. Then, from somewhere in the bowels of the mansion—deeper than the cellar, deeper than anything she’d heard before—a crash. A groan of timbers and something breaking. The floor shuddered beneath them.

“The tremor,” Elodie said. “It’s getting stronger.”

Julien’s face was white in the lantern light. “That’s not the house settling. That’s not pipes or wiring. That’s something else, something beneath us, and it’s been down there for a hundred and fifty years, and I think it wants out.”

On the wall, the name *Céleste* glistened, wet and new.

Elodie looked at the quilt in her arms. The embroidered name seemed to pulse in the dim light. She thought of Marie Leveau’s note, discovered in the cracked music box, confessing the melody was a lullaby for a daughter. A daughter hidden, erased from records.

But Marie had written that note in 1859. And this room had been sealed sometime before the Civil War, the mural painted by hands that loved a child enough to cover every wall with dancers.

“If Céleste was born in 1859,” Elodie said slowly, “and she was hidden in this room, then what happened to her?”

Julien’s voice was barely a whisper. “I think we already know. The oak tree. The roots.”

The bassinet began to rock on its own, gently, steadily, as if an unseen hand were soothing a child to sleep. And the lullaby started again from inside it—clean, sweet, impossibly close, like a mother humming directly into Elodie’s ear.

From downstairs, Odette’s voice rose in a sharp cry of alarm. The front door slammed. And a man’s voice—not Thorne’s, but familiar somehow, distant and wrong—called out from the foyer in a language Elodie didn’t understand but felt in her bones.

Julien dropped the lantern.