“He said he would never let the songbird sing for anyone else.”
The words hung in the dusty air of the manor’s dilapidated sitting room, a chilling echo of possessiveness that stole the easy banter from the space. Zeger felt the shift in Yfke, her presence solidifying, the usual spectral haze around her edges sharpening with purpose. The clue was undeniable, stark in its poetic brutality.
“A caged songbird,” Zeger mused, pushing himself off the armrest of the threadbare sofa. He moved with a sudden, uncharacteristic energy, the previous night’s surge of protective anger still a live wire beneath his apathy. “And a cage maker. Where would someone keep a songbird, Yfke? Not just any bird, one that sings.”
Yfke drifted from the hearth, her gaze distant, tracing the unseen lines of a forgotten memory. “My father loved music. He had a room, a grand salon, filled with instruments. He called it the ‘Klaverzang Kamer’ – the Clover-Song Room. I remember… I remember hearing the melodies from there, even from my own wing.”
“The Klaverzang Kamer,” Zeger repeated, the name rolling oddly on his tongue. He knew the manor intimately from his architectural schematics, even the abandoned wings he hadn’t yet explored. “That’s in the northern spire, isn’t it? The one with the vaulted ceiling that always looked like it was about to collapse.”
Yfke nodded, a faint smile gracing her lips. “Indeed. Though I doubt it was quite so precarious in my time.”
The trek to the northern spire took Zeger past collapsed floor joists and dry-rotted stairs. Yfke drifted ahead through the gloom, pointing out a concealed servant’s passage he had never bothered to investigate. The chamber itself, when they finally pushed past the swollen oak door, smelled of damp plaster and dead centuries. Dust motes danced in the slivers of weak morning light filtering through grimy windows. A grand, defunct harpsichord stood shrouded in cobwebs, its keys a crooked smile of ivory and ebony. Empty music stands leaned against the walls like skeletal conductors. But Zeger’s eyes were drawn to the center of the room, to a wrought-iron stand with a small, intricately designed birdcage hanging from it.
The cage was old, its black ironwork tarnished with age, but its craftsmanship was exquisite, a miniature gothic cathedral of metal. It wasn’t empty. Nestled on the sawdust-covered floor of the cage, almost entirely obscured by years of grime, was a small, oval pendant. It glinted dully.
“There,” Yfke whispered, her voice barely audible, a breathy sigh. Her spectral form hovered beside the cage, her translucent fingers reaching out, then pulling back, as if afraid to touch it.
Zeger, ignoring the layer of dust that coated everything, carefully unlatched the cage door. The mechanism groaned, protesting its decades of disuse. He reached inside, his fingers brushing against the cold, smooth metal. As his fingertips closed around it, a sharp, piercing cry tore from Yfke’s throat. It was a raw screech of agony that made the hair on his arms prickle.
He recoiled, dropping the pendant back into the cage with a clatter. Yfke was clutching her right hand, her face a mask of profound distress. Her translucent fingers, moments before ethereal, were now streaked with an unnatural, milky white. A section of her index finger, from the knuckle to the tip, had turned opaque, rigid, and resembled finely carved marble. The petrification was undeniable, horrifyingly real.
“My… my hand,” she gasped, her voice raw, laced with terror. “It feels… cold. Hollow. What is happening?” Her eyes, wide and bewildered, pleaded with Zeger for an answer he didn’t have.
Her gaze swept around the room, frantic, lost. “The… the canary. It was mine. But I can’t… I can’t remember the verse. The one I wrote about it. The one that began ‘Oh, little lark, with wings of sorrow…’” Her voice trailed off, swallowed by silence. The memory was gone, eaten by the curse, replaced by a hollow blank.
A faint, high-pitched chime echoed through the manor, a sound Zeger now recognized. It was Mevrouw van Schoonhoven’s arrival bell, usually polite, now imbued with an unsettling urgency. Moments later, her footsteps, surprisingly swift for an elderly woman, sounded on the staircase. She appeared in the doorway of the Klaverzang Kamer, her usually placid expression replaced by a look of grave concern, her spectacles perched precariously on the bridge of her nose.
“Oh, dearie, I felt it,” Mevrouw van Schoonhoven murmured, her eyes immediately finding Yfke’s stone-like hand. Her gaze softened with a deep, sorrowful understanding. “The curse… it is accelerating.”
Zeger stared at her, the pendant neglected for a moment. “Accelerating? What are you talking about? What is this?” He gestured wildly at Yfke’s petrified hand, then at the older woman. “You know something, don’t you? You’ve always known more than you let on.”
Mevrouw van Schoonhoven exhaled, an exhausted rasp built over decades. She walked into the room, her eyes never leaving Yfke. “Child, the curse binding you is not merely to this house. It is tied to the unresolved injustice of your death. Every passing day that the truth remains buried, that your spirit cannot find peace, pieces of you are taken. Your memories. Your essence. Your very being. It’s a petrification, not of flesh, but of spirit. It turns you from a vibrant soul into a mindless echo. An empty phantom.”
Yfke let out a low moan, her head falling forward. The implications were stark, terrifying. She wasn’t just trapped; she was slowly being erased.
“But… but why now?” Zeger asked, his voice rough. “She just lost a memory. A poem she wrote.”
“Because you are close, Zeger,” Mevrouw van Schoonhoven replied, her gaze meeting his, earnest and direct. “The closer you come to the truth, the more agitated the curse becomes. It fights back. It seeks to silence her before she can reveal what needs to be revealed.” She looked at the birdcage, then at the jewelry still lying within. “What have you found, dearie?”
Zeger reached back into the iron enclosure, fingers stiff against the biting chill of the silver. He flicked open the clasp. Inside, two miniature portraits stared back at him. On one side, Yfke, young and vibrant. On the other, the ancestral De Witt, his features a striking contrast to Hugo’s, softened by a genuine, tender smile.
He turned the piece over. Etched into the silver backing, in elegant, swirling script, was an inscription: “My canary, safe from the lion. With love, G.”
*Safe from the lion.* The De Witt crest bore the lion. This inscription did not come from her paramour. It was not from Floris van Kessel either. It was from someone else entirely—someone who wanted to shield Yfke from the De Witt heir. *G.* The entire narrative they had pieced together shifted, crumbling into mortar dust. Her suitor had not been the killer. Another player lingered in the shadows.
He looked from the fading Yfke, whose stone-like hand now pulsed with a dull glow, to the silver trinket, its new inscription tearing a gaping hole in their assumptions. His apathy, that carefully constructed wall of indifference, shattered, splintering into a thousand urgent pieces. The thought of renovating the manor into a slacker paradise, of escaping all responsibility, felt hollow, utterly meaningless.
“To hell with the treasure. I’m solving this.”