Who Counts in the Fog

The door is locked when you get home, and there is a letter on the table anyway.

You stop on the threshold with the key still in your hand. The fever room smells of vinegar, cold chamomile, and the tallow of the lamp you forgot to turn all the way down this morning. The jars are lined up on the shelf. You left the chair by the stove at an angle, and that is how it stands. There are two keys to this house. One is in your hand. The other one went with Hedda, your teacher, the woman who always smelled of mint, when she left one autumn for a sick child in the south and never came back.

Something stirs in your apron pocket. Kerbel pushes his head over the edge, a round, moss-green Beanling hardly bigger than your palm, with two broad leaves on top of his head that he raises when something makes him curious. He does not raise them now. He stares at the table with his black button eyes, and the leaves fold down until they lie flat against his head.

Nobody at the well can tell you what a Beanling really is. A creature, round and stubborn, and every one of them carries the place it came from. Kerbel came from the herb garden behind this house, from Hedda’s garden. When he is frightened, the whole room smells of crushed chervil, the herb he’s named for. Right now it does.