Dark Ballerina

It rained all night. Not the kind of rain that soothed or softened things, but a thin, persistent drizzle that made the house seem to shrink in on itself. The walls wept in quiet patches. Pipes sighed behind the plaster. No one slept well.

Christabel arrived the next morning.

She came from the city, unannounced, with one leather suitcase and a letter clutched in her coat pocket. It was not the letter that had summoned her, but what wasn't in it—the careful blankness of its phrasing, the way her mother had signed it without signing it at all. Something had changed, and Christabel had never trusted silence.

The house did not greet her. It never had. She was a cousin, a niece, a leftover. Her visits were infrequent, and always short. This time, though, she planned to stay.

Fedrica met her in the hall, barefoot and pale, a blanket trailing behind her like a train. "You came," she said, voice faint with sleep.

Christabel offered a dry smile. "Didn't think I would?"

"You never do."

No one asked why she'd come. Not her aunt, who sat now for hours at the window as if waiting for someone only she could see. Not her uncle, who had taken to muttering aloud to himself in the cellar. Not even Fedrica, who followed Christabel from room to room with a kind of dreamy silence, as though hoping to remember something she hadn't yet been told.

By the third evening, Christabel noticed the box.

It sat on the shelf in the upstairs study—an odd place for it, since the study was mostly unused and faintly damp. It was small, silver-laced, its paint peeling slightly at the corners. The ballerina was visible through the cracked glass lid, her face half-turned, her hand poised in a frozen arc.

Christabel didn't touch it. She only stood a moment longer than necessary, her gaze lingering on the red ribbon tied around the dancer's waist.

Down the hall, a door creaked open. The air shifted, faintly sweet with the scent of lavender and rot.

Fedrica's voice drifted from her bedroom.

"She dances when no one's looking. But only in mirrors."

Christabel turned sharply. "What did you say?"

But Fedrica had already disappeared down the corridor, leaving only a chill behind her and the quiet impression of bare feet against the dust-soft floor.