Promise—easy to make, difficult to keep. An angry heart, a shallow heart, wants justification, gratification.

Tease out the lines, shade and contour . . . one, two, three, four. The ones that hurt her, take them both. String them up; they deserve no better. The boys, she'd said . . . one way or another, no care for the brothers. But the girl, her girl, not that one. Leave the girl. Let me have the girl, she'd said. When I'm dead and spread, when the one who filled me fulfills my last wish . . .

The promise was this: the others for your fun, but leave me my one.

The lines of the bargain were drawn, crafted from human delight and fright. Paintings and dreams. Memories and delusions. Madness and sorrow. And he, his working parts—they, or it, more like—for in modularity it works, combining and separating itself, dragging itself from hollows too fathomless and foul to grasp in order to lure with its dazzles, to fish for men, to make of us bait for ourselves.

Who plays with the deep knows not what he does, and to renege on a deal is a danger because . . . because!

Ashes in the sea; what more can there be? But a clever girl, a good girl—

There's a chance in that.

✪

There was a small structure, not much larger than a shed though perhaps something more like a greenhouse, made of glass and wrought iron as it was. The thing sat on a massive piece of land behind a forgotten farmstead somewhere west of Ottawa. It'd last been visited about ten months prior, when a middle aged man by the name of Martin Quaxton had taken stock of his property—the property he'd let his nephews, Greg and Max, loaf around on rent-free for the past two years. Local word was the good-for-nothing thirty-somethings had been running some kind of shady business out of the old barn, and not only that but they'd been letting all kinds of friends live up there in the house with them, men and women alike. Well, whatever the rumors, no way Martin Quaxton was going to let a couple younger Quaxtons drive the family name into the ground. He'd quickly enough brought in law enforcement and cleaned the addicts off his land. Sad scenario the whole thing had been—not just his own damned reprobate nephews but there'd been a few neglected kids running around, filth everywhere in the house, some really ill people.

Junkies, all of them. Or most of them, anyway. The elder Quaxton hadn't realized how terrible it'd become, him living away in New York for business the last decade and happy just to have someone watch the house for a while when his sister had suggested setting the boys up there.

He'd never listen to her again, anyway. Wouldn't need to—she'd stopped talking to him about the moment her boys had been arrested.

Oh, and the worst of it all had been that dead woman out back, where a dumpster had been set up to deal with the accumulating garbage. Those people hadn't paid any bills or anything, put a moratorium on the waste management services. The dumpster had overflowed, pulled peculiar but disgusting white rats from all the neighboring forested areas and the trailers down south. When Martin had found the body, the rodents had already been digging in for at least a day or two.

She'd just been another one of his nephews' junkie friends. Sad people, all of them.

It'd all been left to the police, after that, notifying the right people and everything. Martin hadn't wanted anything to do with it, had in fact washed his hands of the entire property once it'd been cleared of vagrants. Now the house and accompanying buildings sat vacant, waiting for future occupants, but it was going to be a hard sell.

The little storage shed had all but been forgotten by Martin Quaxton in the kerfuffle that'd consumed him, and since it was secluded as it was by a small pond, sheltered by a cluster of trees, it'd remained hidden and become overgrown. As days turned into weeks turned into months, the contents of that tomb all but died, suspended as they were in silvery beams of whatever Canadian sunlight deigned to present itself through the glass. The rats moved within as well as without, though they found little nourishment here beyond the detritus of memory, of what had once been. A scuffle, a whisker, a nose peeping from a dusty corner—these creatures fed on leftover phantasm, on the sort of sickness and decay encouraged by misfortune and anger. For within this silent, still space lay a woman's true remains, not the lifeless corpse turned to ash but the actual body she'd been compelled to leave behind.