Our father devoted much of his life to the study of these homunculi. He was, as Ms Galeazzi had told me one evening, as we bed together, one of the brightest minds when it came to such things. Yet, it is chilling to think that so much of our fortunes were built as a result of this research. That, what proved to be a critical part of our making, may also turn out to be our undoing.

  The Lucien household became a terrible place following the death of their mother. It was a dark winter, Maria’s seventeenth, and she spent much of it alone, weeping. The house was always cold and inhospitable, and in the few times their father was home (which was not often at all) he would spend it alone and without saying a word to them.

  They did not have a proper burial for their mother. Shortly following her passing, the children had gathered in the backyard of their estate where their father had dug a hole. After several prayers and words, they buried her.

  Rain had hardened the ground where she lay. There was hardly a marker to show where it was, only a few sticks that were bent from the weather. Of course, even without this, Maria would not soon forget. She walked past it each day on the way to school with Alfred, and she could rarely stomach to look at it. In their father’s absence, the siblings had been forced to fend for themselves. Maria cooked, and Alfred continued to work a small job after university, even though their father had left behind a substantial sum of money that served to ensure that the house remained in good stead. Meanwhile, Edgar, who was thirteen, mainly read books and focused on his schoolwork. His contributions to the house were minimal.

  It was a horrible night. As heavy rain battered the house, leaks in the ceiling caused them to weaponize a number of buckets to catch water. Lightning flashes illuminated the dark halls of the farmstead, and the wind through trees caused horrible whistling sounds that made it seem as though the storm were alive.

  That night, Maria had ventured inside their father’s study. This was something the siblings would never be able to do while he was home, but their father had not been home now for several days, and their last correspondence was that he would not be returning for quite a few more. In this time, the house (despite their best efforts) had become untidy. Maria had only been searching for some light reading, but became fixated on a number of scrolls and bound textbooks scattered about the room. At first, she thought nothing of these, but then took one and glimpsed that it was completely covered with strange shapes and symbols that were unfamiliar to her.

  Maria lit a candle and read several of these pages by the faint light, holding them close to her face and glancing up and down, checking for anything she recognised. It was like a challenge to her. Spot the word of French amidst what was certainly made-up.

  A letter fell out of one of the books. She furrowed her thick, unkempt brows, unfolded this letter and held it to the light of her candle. Addressed to her father, it read:

  Dear Odilon,

  I am proud to announce that your second study on “homunculi” has been accepted for publication with the Institute of Matera, and you will be receiving a grant of 800 francs to continue this exciting and groundbreaking research. Both myself and others at the Institute were captivated by your work and in speaking with you. We are excited to see where this leads.

  If you would

  She stopped reading, deciding to skim the rest of it. What on earth was “homunculi” and the Institute? These were things that their father had not once mentioned to them, nor their mother for that matter. All Maria knew was that eight hundred francs was indeed quite a significant sum of money. She looked up from the letter, rummaging through some more of the scrolls.

  It was, suffice it to say, like the workings of a madman. Mathematics and science, ingredients and minerals and other elements. She had never known her father to dabble in such things. As far as she had always been told, their father worked at a postal service.

  Yet, her curiosity only grew. Before long, she was searching everything there was. She saw more correspondences with this strange Institute, and with other scholars. After some time, she took an armful of it out of the office and into the lounge where her brothers were studying and reading by the flames in the hearth.

  “Look what I’ve found,” Maria said, throwing everything upon the table, some of it falling onto the floorboards and the slightly-wet rug.

  Her brothers took a moment to get up. Alfred put down his book and slowly approached the table, getting down onto his knees to take a closer look. “Maria, where did you find this stuff?” Alfred asked, picking up a scroll and examining it.

  “In Father’s study,” Maria responded.

  Alfred gave a horrified look. “Maria! You know Father does not permit us to go into his study. You’d better put all this back immediately or—”

  “Aren’t you interested in what it is?” she chortled. “Our father had all this research he was doing behind our backs. I’ve looked at some of it. It is ridiculous. Complex, frankly hard to even decipher. You know they were paying him to do this?”

  “What!” Alfred’s mouth went super wide. “How much?”

  “Eight hundred francs, it said! And just for one book!”

  “Whoa,” Edgar said from where he was sitting near the fire, peering up from his pile of schoolwork. “Go on then, what is it?”

  Alfred had begun staring very intently at one of the pages. Slowly, he jumped to his feet and said, in a dark voice, “It’s witchcraft, Ed. This stuff, we shouldn’t have it.”

  Maria furrowed her brows. “How…How would you even know what witchcraft looks like, Alfred? Did Father tell you about this—”

  “No, don’t be stupid,” Alfred said firmly, throwing the scroll back where it had been. “I’ve seen things like this before, in passing. At the university, sometimes you come across such illegal texts—and must I stress that word, illegal. We could get in serious trouble for even having these in our possession. Let alone what could happen to Father.”

  “I’m guessing they already know, since they’re paying him,” Edgar said, seemingly a little more interested now with the prospect that it could get them into trouble.

  “Well, I’d imagine they would be paying so much for this research precisely because of the nature of the work. They’re probably criminals themselves! Oh god, it isn’t good.”

  “Do you think Mother knew?” Maria asked.

  Alfred made a thinking sound with his mouth. “Possibly.”

  “Wait,” Edgar said. “You don’t think this is why Mother got sick in the first place? You know how Father was always acting so strange, saying those things…Hang on.” He got to his feet and went over to the table, snatching the scroll from Alfred. “Let me see this.”

  “Be careful with it!” Alfred snapped.

  Maria felt a sharp discomfort in her stomach as the implications of this discovery dawned on her. She gripped her arms around herself and exhaled strongly, crossing the rug in the middle of the room towards the window that framed their dark, front yard. It was pitch black except for when blasts of lightning forked the sky. Skeletal trees and roads that were hardly travelled became visible in the light for brief moments.

  Several days passed without their father returning. Alfred still attended the university, and Edgar and Maria to school, but in the nights when they were together, they pored over their father’s notes in the lounge room. Even after retiring to bed for the night, Maria took several armfuls of notes to bed and read until she couldn’t keep her eyes open.

  Their obsession with these texts grew, and their understanding of things becoming more profound. Yet, still a sizeable portion was beyond their comprehension. They had only hand drawn diagrams to deduce information from in these cases.

  It was still long into the winter when their father returned home mid-afternoon. He was soaked when he entered, water seeping from every part of his baggy, black clothing. He seemed more frail than when they had last seen him, and exhausted. He spoke no more than a “hello” to the siblings before heading into his quarters and shutting the door.

  The siblings spoke about it in Alfred’s bedroom, which was on the other side of the house to their father.

  “Should we confront him about what we have found?” Maria inquired.

  “I think that would be the wise thing to do,” Alfred responded in a mature tone. “At the very least, we ought to be cut in to what he is doing, and where he is going to. He is our father, after all, yet it feels like he is becoming more and more like a stranger to us with all these secrets.”

  Maria did not know how she felt about Alfred’s position on this. If it were up to her, she would not tell their father at all. Though, she wasn’t quite sure why this was. Did she not trust him, perhaps? Were there things he had not told them about their mother? What dark deals had he made? The pregnancies, the dead children, the miscarriages...

  She bit her lip, shaking her head. “I’m not sure, Al. What says he won’t just keep lying anyway?”

  “Well I guess that is a good point. What do you think, Ed?” Alfred asked.

  “I don’t know. I…I guess I agree with Maria. We should not tell Father about what we’ve been doing. He might get angry.”

  “Huh? So we pretend it never happened?” Alfred said, as though this were the worst idea anybody could ever come up with. “You realise we are complicit in this if we do nothing. We could be accused of being witches and executed! I don’t know about you, but I have things to live for. I want to get married, have kids, do good service to—”

  “Blah, blah, blah, we get it,” Maria said.

  “Well, I…” Alfred sighed, rubbing his head tiredly. “Sorry.”

  “I’m tired,” Edgar said, getting up. “And you two, you better keep your voices down or Father is going to hear you talking about this anyway. I suppose you want that, Alfred. Anyway. Goodnight.” He walked out of the room, the door swaying ajar behind him.

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  Later that night, Maria was cleaning up in the kitchen when she spotted her father’s massive briefcase sitting on the floor in the corner. You could barely see it in the darkness, but she knew this had been the one he brought home with him when he returned.

  Looking around to make sure nobody else was there (and surely by now everybody in the house except her was asleep) she knelt beside the briefcase and opened it up. There was a piece of manuscript inside it, similar to those she had been poring over for the past week. Lifting it into the light, she read her father’s handwriting.

  She immediately felt goose bumps all along her arms and the back of her neck. Shivering it out, she looked up instinctively to be sure she was alone.

  She quickly memorised what was on the manuscript page and then shoved it back into her father’s briefcase, putting everything as it was and climbing to her feet. On this page was a recipe, and detailed drawings of what could only be described as greatly disturbing. She felt cold just recalling it. She ran to her bedroom and shut the door.

  Their father was not home the following morning when Maria woke up. Walking into the kitchen for breakfast, she pointedly avoided the briefcase in the corner. Alfred was awake early, even though he had a day off from the university.

  Maria put a kettle on the fire and collected some eggs. The distractions were in vain, however, for it was not long before Maria could not hold it in anymore and ran over to the briefcase, grabbing out the parchment she had seen the night before, and sticking it right in front of her brother’s face. Alfred looked at her with a concerned expression.

  “What are you doing?” he said with a mouthful of food.

  “Look at it,” Maria urged him.

  Alfred did, though not with enthusiasm. He spent a while looking at it, then finally glanced back at Maria. “I told you, Maria, we should tell somebody about this.” He stopped, then, glancing around to be sure their father had not returned when they weren’t looking. The house had no sign of him. Yet, he continued still in a lower voice, “What on earth is this about? It looks like…”

  “It is, Al.”

  “And…” He shook his head, throwing away his spoon with seemingly little to no intention of continuing to eat. “That is it,” he said, getting up from his chair. “When Father returns, I will confront him about it. And no, don’t you try arguing with me, Maria, somebody has to do it. We cannot have this…this witchcraft in our house, I will not allow it! And yes, I’m acting as though I’m in charge now, because I’m the oldest! So what I say from now on goes. Maria, I’m sorry but do you realise how horrible this is!”

  “Keep your voice down, Al.”

  He spread his arms. “I don’t care anymore. Let him hear!”

  “Oh, you insolent toddler!” Maria grumbled, grabbing his mouth with her hands.

  “Ew, gross!” Alfred bemoaned, jumping out of the way. He grabbed the page from the table again, holding it up beyond arm’s reach, so she could clearly see. He then clutched it in both hands, staring hotly at her. “I’ll rip it!”

  Maria lunged forward. “No, stop!” She swung for it but Alfred whipped it out of her reach, up and above his head towards the ceiling. Maria pouted. “Don’t be a baby, Al. Give it back to me. It’s Father’s anyway; you can’t rip it up! Or I’ll tell him you did all of this!” She threw her fist at his chest and he reluctantly gave it back to her in the most aggressive manner.

  “Fine. What do you plan to do then?”

  “I was just showing you, geez!”

  Alfred growled sceptically. “Sure. Well, if I catch you looking at it again, I will follow through on my threat to rip it.” With that, he waved her away as though she were a fly come to get his food, which was now going very cold on the table.

  Their father did not return home. What the siblings were told, much later on, was that Odilon Lucien passed away from a sudden and catastrophic heart attack, which was unpreventable on every level. His body had been discovered only a short walk from the estate, by a pond, and with no evidence of anything other than it had been natural.

  Maria did not cry when this happened. Perhaps this was because she wasn’t sure if she even believed it—nothing about her father’s death felt real. How it seemed to have just happened, nothing like her mother’s death, which seemed to be carefully planned by the grim reaper and carried out over years—no, decades. When Odilon Lucien died, there was no fanfare, he simply dropped dead one cold morning.

  Of the three siblings, Edgar was certainly most affected. Alfred showed little to no care or grief. In fact, in the days following this, he would casually stroll around the house and at every opportunity state that their father deserved every bit of it.

  At night, or when nobody else was around, Maria would sneakily retrieve her father’s manuscript pages, now abandoned, and study them. She did this without either of her brothers knowing. Her favourite time was when Alfred was at university, or the boys were both fast asleep. In her bedroom with the door closed, in her father’s study, underneath her sheets. She read and studied his notes, deciphered his code, bit by bit learned what he had been doing.

  She learned about things that witches did. She learned about the homunculus, an artificial being created from an old corpse, which acted as a vessel for which new life was born. It was both gross and engrossing. Her father wrote about it with such passion and excitement. Letters exchanged between himself and the Institute (and other people, some who took kindly to his studies, and some who turned their noses at it) revealed more even than the diagrams.

  Meanwhile, she kept thinking about that last page her father had brought home, those last notes stashed in his briefcase—the last her father had ever written. This remained in the back of her mind all these months following her father’s death.

  Had someone asked, she couldn’t even explain why she was so obsessed with this. Perhaps it was out of boredom. There was not much to do in the house except tend to the farm (of which there was very little), clean, or do school work. She didn’t know why. She was simply smitten with it, taking every chance she got, becoming more and more immersed in the work.

  Very slowly, she gathered materials. The petals of chrysanthemum from the cemetery grounds. A sprig of rosemary from the cupboard. The pits from peaches from the market in Saint-Corsheim, down near the lake. Vials of spoilt goat’s milk. Rotten eggs from hens. Yet there was one final, vital piece she hadn’t been able to come upon. She had often stared at it, through the window of her bedroom. There was no marking on the grave—the sticks were long gone—and for all they knew their mother was far beneath the ground, rotted and all but skeletal.

  Maria would not be able to do this alone. The others would find out—they would find out eventually, anyway. She would need their help, even just to get her out.

  That evening, once Alfred had returned from the university and sat down to eat a stew Maria had spent the afternoon preparing, Maria told her brothers of her plan. Neither of them immediately reacted to the news. Alfred had already seen their father’s pages, had known what all his research was leading towards. This did not surprise him.

  She explained it further, told them of the preparation she had been doing, that she had already found the ingredients for it and that, while there were gaps in the knowledge, their father had left a highly organised manual to the ceremony.

  She truly believed they could do it.

  She knew that Edgar would be willing. He was never very opinionated about anything the siblings concocted. But it was Alfred who would be the problem. But who could he tell on her to now? Everybody was dead, and they were all that was left.

  She stared at him, urging him to agree.

  “Nobody has to know,” Maria said in a soft yet pleading voice.

  Alfred stewed in silence, not meeting her eyes.

  “And, besides, Father would have done it anyway!”

  “No,” Alfred snapped, his blue eyes meeting hers. “We aren’t doing this for Father.”

  Maria drew nearer to her brother, placing a hand on his wrist. “As you say. If it doesn’t work, I promise we’ll forget it all. We can bury all of his work, pretend like it never existed. Please, Al? Just this once? We could bring back Mother. We could save this family.”

  “Do you actually believe Mother would want to be desecrated like this?”

  “It isn’t desecration. It’s love.”

  “Love,” said Alfred, as if testing the word in his mouth.

  “I can’t do this without you. Please.”

  Alfred’s expression did not change. “Very well. Not for Father. For her. For this family.”

  “Thank you.” She leaned over and gave him a kiss on the forehead.

  #

  Maria held her breath and pushed open the jail door. The door groaned on its large hinges. She took a lantern from the wall and lifted it in front of her, illuminating the cavernous space before her. Then, leaving behind the jail warden’s cold, frozen body, she walked inside, her feet ringing on the hard rock.

  The lantern only lit up a very small area in front of her, so she heard the monster before she saw it. She stopped at a point where she could only make out its vague shape. Haze of dust swam through the air. It wafted to the back of her throat and in her nostrils, hitting her with a stinging sensation she had to fight not to choke on. The lantern light trembled in her hand as she raised it, catching only the rough outline of the monster.

  The sounds it made, gurgles and gasps, like somebody who was near to death. The only movement from the monster was the hoarse breathing that caused its limby shoulders to recoil and relax agonisingly. With each breath, it shuddered.

  Maria could not approach any closer. Her feet were as rooted to the spot as the collapsed warden outside, or the large steel bars that encased the monster. Yet, judging by its diminutive size and malformity, she did not think such safeguards were necessary.

  “Edgar?” she whispered.

  There was no distinct response. Even though she could only make out his frame, she knew he was smaller than he had been, his limbs thin and gangly. She dared not move closer in fear of what the lantern light might reveal. Her hand had grown completely slick with sweat around the handle. Afraid she might drop it, she tightened her grip.

  “Edgar,” Maria said, more firmly this time.

  Two beady silver-blue eyes emerged from the darkness, catching the light of her lantern. She jumped, the sudden urge to vomit filling her body.

  My god, what have they done? Her foot took one step forward of its own accord. She could tell that the cocoon of his old body had peeled away, and its new body—no larger than a young child—had taken form. Though, it was not fully-free. Additional arms and legs jutted from this new body. Teeth, coming out of its skin. A nose from its arm.

  It was crouched animal-like on the ground, its shoulders pulled back, like—and she could think of no other comparison but this one—a chicken’s wings. Its head was tilted towards her, not upright but sidelong and parallel to the floor. It did not blink; perhaps, bereft of eyelids, it could not. It was all just pounds of flesh and sinew, with bits of bone. It was barely distinguishable as a human. More like the essence of one.

  She took another step closer, so that her lantern illuminated the monster’s skin. The colour was greyish-blue, like a corpse. But the most terrifying thing of all, now as she stood just one more step out of proper view of it, was the detail of its eyes.

  Those were Edgar’s eyes, perfectly human.

  And they just stared at her, as though suspended in animation. There was something truly terrible about human eyes that did not blink.

  We caused this, Maria thought. And she spoke for all three siblings when these thoughts came to her. Well, Alfred never wanted any of it. But he did not stop them, when it came down to it. Maria, taken back to her childhood, her father’s notes, finally understood.

  They should have destroyed it all when they had the chance.

  Alfred was right. He had warned them.

  And Edgar Lucien, who she had always blamed for it all, just continued to stare at her. It was unfair that, despite how great he had become in the eyes of others, this would be how he ended up. Nothing but a malformed puddle of moving flesh parts.

  Edgar had told the world what happened, yes. But Maria had found those books in their father’s study. She had been the one to read them, to come up with the sickly ideas that forever cursed them. Her obsession with it, she forced upon her brothers.

  Yes, without her, maybe none of this happens.

  No Edgar. No witches. No cabaret.

  She slowly knelt down in front of the cage and put her lantern on the ground. “I want to scream at you, tell you how you’ve doomed us all because of your loose tongue. But I won’t. I probably did that enough when you were alive. Well, the first time you were alive.”

  The homunculus just continued to stare at her, showing no signs that it understood.

  “I have thought a lot over the past few days about what we did, Ed. By the end of this, certain things will come out about our family. I will likely go to jail for a period of time. My only hope is that our brother still has some heart left for me. Not that I blame him if he doesn’t. So here’s what I’m going to do. I will tell them that it was me who orchestrated everything. That, like when we were kids, I did this out of love...and fear. I will be punished for this, but I have protections that the other witches may not. And if I were to be executed for it, then isn’t that better than a witch hunt? After all, Alfred was right, our reckoning is long overdue. There is one more thing to do before that, though.” She picked up her wand and stood up. Edgar watched her as she did this, his two hearts pounding, his lungs expanding and relaxing.

  This would begin to make things right. She had learned, over time, that when you threw the universe in imbalance with evil magic, it became determined to right itself. And the universe had been trying to right itself for a long, long time.

  If she left Edgar alive, in this suffering—an existence that should not be—Maria knew that there would be further consequences, that the curse would endure.

  So she raised her wand at her brother. He did not flinch. Perhaps, he did not even understand that something had occurred. He simply stared, unthinking. For, Maria had learned this, you could create new life, but you could not manufacture humanity.

  This was no longer Edgar, just a poor attempt of him.

  “I guess I never got to say this the first time. Goodbye, Edgar.”

  She did not hesitate to end him once and for all.