The fence, unsurprisingly, was made of bones. What was more disturbing was the scale of it. If the house had appeared oddly proportioned from a distance, up close it was even more evident. From the base of the hill, the fence had seemed to be built to be waist-high, coming up only to the sills of the lowest windows; but now Poison stood next to it, it was as high as her head, and she could easily duck through it into the thick, untended scrub of weeds and thistles beyond. Even the plants seemed huge, with thorns big enough to open a vein if she brushed against them and blades of grass as long as her arm. Everything within the perimeter of the fence was at least twice the size of things outside.

This house was half in the Realm of Phaerie, half in the Realm of Man, she reminded herself. In the liminal places of the world, there was no telling what was possible and what was not.

The structure towered over her as she picked her way carefully through the forest of weeds. She was approaching the side of the house rather than the front. If she wanted her presence to go unnoticed, she thought that knocking on the door was not the best way to do it. Cautiously, she crept up to one of the grimy windows, grabbed the sill and pulled herself up to peer through.

Inside, it was dim, and the lack of light and smeared glass combined to foil her. She could only make out an impression of size, and nothing more. There was no movement within. Had she not known better, she would have assumed it was empty.

She dropped back into the weeds and began to make her way around the back of the house. Her palms were already cold and moist with nervousness; she wiped them against her coarse dress. The windows she had seen so far had been nailed shut, and they could not be opened unless she smashed them. She would not do that unless it was a last resort. There had to be another way in.

She found it, eventually, when she almost fell down it.

Around the back of the house was a coal chute, hidden under the thick grass. It was covered over by planking, but rain and woodworm had made it brittle. She stepped on it before she saw it, and it gave instantly; but the feel of wood rather than turf beneath her feet had forewarned her, and she managed to shift her weight so that it was only her ankle that went through the flimsy covering and not her whole body.

She crouched on the edge of the rectangular shaft, massaging her bruised ankle while she peered into the darkness. The chute was slanted, and wide enough to crawl down. She regarded it dubiously, before getting up and making a full circuit of the house. As she suspected, there were no other ways in beside the front door or the windows. Climbing was not an option; the scale of the house was simply too big. She returned to the coal chute, glanced at the westering sun, and shrugged to herself. Well, the moon was up at least, so that meant she could go inside, daylight or no daylight. At least she would only have the dogs to deal with until night fell. Considering that everything else about the house of the Bone Witch was twice normal size, she was not looking forward to meeting them.

She pulled away the rest of the planking and eased her head and shoulders over the edge of the shaft. Cold air blew up from within, smelling stale and rancid. She took her pack from where she had laid it by her side and dropped it into the shaft ahead of her. It slid down with an ascending hiss and was swallowed by the darkness. She turned around, braced herself against the shaft sides with her boots and began to crawl down feet-first after it, her dress bunching up around her knees.

The descent itself was not so difficult; the shaft was just the right width for her arms and legs, and the slant was shallow enough so that she would not plunge to her death if she slipped. Nevertheless, she was frightened, and it was only by not thinking about what was ahead that she managed to force herself to continue down. The shaft was entirely lightless; only the rectangle of sky above her gave any indication that she was not completely blind, and that was moving further and further away with each step downward. She felt like she was crawling backward down the house’s throat, into its cold belly. In absence of anything else to occupy it, her imagination began conjuring pictures of the Bone Witch and her dogs, waiting at the bottom of the shaft, she sharpening her knives in anticipation of the morsel that was clambering into her lair.

Then her feet touched something lumpy, and she realised it was her pack. She cursed under her breath. Was the chute bricked up? Certainly, this did not seem to be the coal chamber she had expected. She worked her booted foot around the edge of her pack and pressed it against the obstruction. It creaked. Wood. Not brittle, but weak and thin.

I hope she really is deaf, Poison thought to herself, and kicked downward. The wood splintered and broke away with a clatter that made her shudder; but now there was faint light coming through from beneath her, and she knew that beyond was the cellar of the house. She held herself still and quiet, listening. Her heart thudded in her ear. But if the dogs had heard her, there was no sign.

She had to kick through two more planks before she could drop her pack through and squeeze after it. Each time was followed by a terrible silence, as she strained her ears for a noise in the house above; but each time there was nothing, not even a creak.

Whatever the coal had once emptied into had long been removed, and she dropped onto a flagstone floor in a cavernous cellar. Once again she was struck by the size of the place; here, she was a midget, and even the bricks of the cellar walls seemed massive to her. Dim light struggled in through thin slots of murky glass around the upper edges of the cellar. It was cold and heaped with sacks of coal, and other sacks of what might have been grain or oatmeal. A stone staircase led up to a shadowy door high above.

She took a few moments to listen. She was inside now; whatever happened, at least she would be here when night fell. She estimated she had at least an hour before dusk in which she could change her mind and get out. But after that, escape was not an option. She remembered Lamprey’s warning of the things that lived in the space between the Realms, and wondered if they would be worse than the Bone Witch. She thought of Bram, waiting out there for her.

Part of her counselled staying in the cellar, simply burrowing into a corner and hiding there till her time was done, and she could escape through the coal chute. But there was very little cover down here apart from a few piles of sacks, and she did not want to trap herself like that; if it came to it, she could probably clamber up the chute again and hide halfway, but not fast enough so that the dogs couldn’t reach her in time if they came bursting in. No, there had to be a better hiding place than this.

I’ll just have a look about, she thought, to placate her urge to escape. Then I’ll decide.

She crept up the stairs, taking giant steps. At the top, she listened again, but once more there was nothing. A faded brass handle was set into the door at the height of her eyes; she heaved it down and the door popped ajar, opening inward. She peered out through the gap.

The hallway beyond was massive, with its dirty walls of rough stone cast in a smeared light from outside. Skulls were set in sconces high up, with half-melted candles waiting unlit within their jaws. Their eye sockets and teeth were blackened by smoke, making them look strangely daemonic. Poison stared. She was not particularly scared; it was just that there was something odd about them, and it took her a few moments to work out what it was. Of course: the skulls were normal size, and in this house that made them look unnaturally small.

The angle of the sun through the window at the end of the corridor seemed lower than Poison expected; perhaps she had spent longer in the coal shaft than she had imagined.

Fear making her cautious, she stopped and listened again, but the house was eerily silent. A chill wind seemed to breathe through it, blowing gently one way and sucking back the next into the grimy lungs of the building.

She was about to step out when she heard a heavy thump from the wooden ceiling.

She shied back, ready to close the cellar door if anything should appear; but nothing did. Instead, she heard the loping of something massive overhead, the languid stride of a dog. Having never lived in a house with more than one storey, she was unaccustomed to deciphering the sounds of movement on the floor above, and it took her a long moment to realise that the thump had been the dog jumping down from whatever perch it had been lying on. She listened hard, her heart fluttering from the fright, but the dog seemed to have stopped moving.

At least that’s one of them accounted for, she thought to herself, eking what positive aspects she could out of her predicament. She determined to herself that she would stay downstairs for the moment.

Finally mustering her courage, she slipped out of the relative safety of the cellar and into the corridor. She felt terribly exposed here, like a mouse scuttling along the skirting-board; but scuttle she did, as silently as her boots would allow.

The corridor ended in a great, stone room, in which a vast black cauldron was bubbling over a fire and an iron stove sat against one wall. It was spacious in proportion to the dimensions of the house, so it seemed unnaturally vast to her, and the cauldron was far taller than she was. Above the stove was a shelf, on which an assortment of clay pots stood. Poison presumed they were spices or some kind of witch’s ingredients, but there were no labels on them.

Of course there aren’t, she thought to herself. She’s blind, isn’t she?

There were no windows here, and the only light came from the blaze beneath the cauldron, making the room stiflingly hot and painting everything in shades of sullen red. A set of stairs ran up to her right to a balcony which overlooked the room, and a door beyond that led on to the second storey of house. The balcony’s railings were made of smoke-blackened bones, as was the chandelier that hung in the centre of the room. It was this that snared her attention: a great cartwheel of human femurs, with skulls at each spoke, and in each skull an unlit candle. So entranced was she by this macabre sight that it took her a while before the most obvious thought occurred to her.

Who’s tending the fire?

She felt a sudden alarm. The fire had certainly not been burning since last night; it would have been embers by now. That meant somebody had been feeding it coal. And it wasn’t the dogs.

Was there somebody else here, someone Lamprey hadn’t warned her about?

She cursed under her breath. She should not have been so naïve, to trust a bitter and dangerous thing like Lamprey. If half of what he told her about this place was true, then that was more than enough to deal with. What if he had been lying to her about the house being a passing-place? What if he had meant to send her to her death?

A soft mewl from above made her jump out of her skin. She was halfway to running back out of the room before she processed the sound in her mind and determined that it was a cat. She looked up, and saw it on the edge of the balcony, a black tom watching her with eyes that glinted green in the firelight. Furthermore, it was of normal size, which meant… which meant… well, she didn’t know what it meant. It was gazing at her with an unsettling singularity of interest, and as she held its gaze, she felt curiously like it was sizing her up. After a moment, it wandered away and began gently scratching at the door on the balcony, wanting to be let through.

‘Sorry, cat,’ Poison said under her breath. ‘I’m not going up there for anything.’ She wouldn’t give much for the cat’s chances, either, if it came across the dog that she had heard earlier. Better that it stayed on this side of the door.

There was nothing more she could see in this room, and she didn’t dare to linger for long. She turned to head back down the corridor and go the other way. The second dog was still unaccounted for, and she had to find a good place to hide before…

night…

fell…

Her blood ran cold. The window at the end of the corridor was dark. The sun had set. She could have sworn she had not been in the house more than a quarter-hour, yet in that time the day had worn from evening to dusk and beyond.

The cellar! She had to get back to the cellar!

But it was too late. From the far end of the corridor, where it turned the corner, she heard the heavy creak of stairs, and a thin, cracked voice floated through the house.

‘I can smell you, my dear! I’ll have your bones!’

The Bone Witch was awake.