Journal of Elinor Winchester, Harrogate Hall, Yorkshire — 14th October, 1886

I found her portrait today.

It was tucked behind the loose wainscoting in the west wing corridor, where the damp has been eating at the plaster for years. I was having the corridor papered — Mrs. Gable insists the old damask is past its best, though I cannot see how anything can be past its best when it has been this dull for a century — and the carpenter's chisel struck something hollow. Behind the panel, wrapped in oilcloth that had yellowed to the colour of weak tea, was a canvas I had never seen before.

The face on it was recognisably human. That is the only way I can describe it without sounding as though I have taken too much of laudanum. The features were all there — the nose, the mouth, the closed eyes with their long lashes still visible even in pigment — but they were pressed flat against the canvas as though the woman who wore them had been pressed against it herself. There was no depth. Her cheek was not painted; it was a surface, smooth and featureless as a medal, with the eyes and mouth rendered in such precise illusion that a foolish person might have thought them real from a distance.

I know that foolish person is me.

The oilcloth bore a date inscribed in faded ink: 1818. And beneath it, my grandfather's handwriting — Lord Reginald's hand, which I have seen in the family ledgers: First touch. The colour is wrong. It has no shadow.

I asked Cedric about it at dinner. I placed the portrait on the sideboard between the silver candelabra and he asked him casually what he made of it. He did not startle — Cedric Hale does not startle at anything — but his fork stopped halfway to his mouth and he set it down with the quiet precision of a man who has calculated that any other movement would betray him.

'Where did you find that?' he said.

'Behind the wainscoting in the west corridor. Do you know who it is?'

He poured himself wine. His hand did not shake. 'It is what it is, miss. A portrait. Your great-aunt Marguerite, if you must know. Died 1821, aged thirty-four. Consumption, the doctor said.'

'That is not consumption.'

'No. It is not.'

He ate the rest of his dinner in silence. I did not touch mine.

I have been thinking of dimension all week. The word came to me from a book I found in the library — a treatise on projective geometry, something Reginald would have read in his youth. The artist draws a three-dimensional room on flat paper. The walls have no depth. The furniture is an illusion. But from the right angle, from the right distance, you could almost sit in the chair and almost feel the wall at your back.

My shadow has not matched my posture for some days.

I stand before the mirror in my dressing room and turn slowly. My body turns with me, but the shadow cast by the candlelight on the wallpaper behind me lags a fraction of a second — not a trick of the light, I have checked this by the clock multiple times — as though it is being flattened, reduced, pulled toward the wall the way a river is pulled toward the sea.

I am not ill. The doctors say so. Dr. Pemberton examined me last month and pronounced me 'robust for a young woman who reads too many Gothic novels.' He was kind, or at least polite. He listened to my heart and found nothing wrong. He pressed on my abdomen and found nothing wrong. He did not press on my shadow.

Cedric has been watching me for years. I know this now. He watches everyone at Harrogate Hall — the servants, the birds on the lawn, the sky — but I have caught him watching me with the same expression he uses when checking the uranium ledgers. The expression of a man counting numbers that he wishes were different.

'You should not be in the west corridor after dark,' he said yesterday. His voice was dry as autumn leaves. 'The damp is bad for your constitution.'

'I am not afraid of damp.'

'No. You are afraid of something else.'

He knew. He has always known.

Arthur Pendleton came to the hall today. He is blind — an accident with acids in his studio, he says, though I suspect the truth is connected to the mine — but he sees things that sighted men do not. He paints in the morning room, and I have watched him from the doorway. His brush moves across the canvas with certainty, mixing colours that I cannot name. When I ask him what colour he is using, he says something that does not correspond to any name in my paintbox.

'I see them,' he told me once, when he thought I was not listening. 'The colours that exist between the ones you know. The ones that are flat and deep at the same time. Your great-aunt Marguerite was one of them. She is in the painting now.'

He showed me a canvas from last year — a landscape of the Yorkshire moors, but the moors were rendered in layers so thin that looking at them made my eyes water, as though I was seeing through the grass and earth and stone into something underneath that should not be visible. In the centre of the canvas was a figure, barely perceptible: a woman standing on the moor, her body rendered so flat that she looked like a cutout placed on the landscape. But her eyes — her eyes had depth that the rest of her lacked. She was looking at me from a dimension I could almost reach.

'How many are there?' I asked him.

'Twenty-three Winchesters,' he said. 'Since the object fell in 1818. Twenty-three who touched it. Twenty-three who are becoming flat.'

'What happens when you are completely flat?'

Arthur smiled. It was not a comforting smile. 'You become art, Miss Elinor. You become eternal. You become a thing that can be looked at but never touched again.'

I went to the mine yesterday.

Not the active mine — the Winchesters have long since stopped extracting uranium from the Harrogate shaft; the ore ran thin in the 1860s — but the old entrance, blocked with timber and rusted iron gates, down the slope from the east paddock. I went with a lantern and a length of rope and the key to the gate, which Cedric had left on his desk where I could find it. I do not know whether that was intentional.

The shaft descended at a steep angle. The air grew warmer as I went down, which seemed wrong — earth should be cold, but this air was warm and carried a smell like ozone after a thunderstorm. My lantern flickered. The walls of the tunnel were not rough-hewn rock; they were smooth, glassy, as though the stone had been melted and re-frozen.

At the bottom of the shaft, in a chamber no larger than my dressing room, it rested.

The object was not what I expected. I had imagined something metallic, luminous, otherworldly. It was none of these things. It was a flat disc, perhaps two feet in diameter, no thicker than a shilling, made of a material that was neither stone nor metal nor anything I can identify. It was the colour of nothing — not black, not transparent, but the absence of colour, the way a hole in the world would be colourless.

And it was flat.

Not flat like a tabletop. Flat in the way that Marguerite's portrait was flat. Flat in the way that my shadow is becoming flat. It had no depth, and yet I could see it from every angle as I walked around it. It was visible from the top and the bottom and every point in between, as though it existed in fewer dimensions than I did and was bleeding into my world the way ink bleeds into water.

I reached out.

I know I should not have. Every instinct screamed at me to run, to seal the shaft, to burn the key, to leave Harrogate Hall and never return. But I reached out and I touched it.

The cold was instantaneous and total. It was not the cold of winter air or iced water — it was the cold of absence, of something that had no temperature because it existed outside the category of temperature. My fingers went numb. My hand went flat.

I pulled back. My hand was still three-dimensional. But the numbness remained, crawling up my wrist like frost on a windowpane.

I understand now.

The object fell from the sky in 1818. Grandfather Reginald touched it and began the process. Every Winchester who touched it since has begun it too — begun becoming flat, begun reducing toward a dimension that the object occupies and that we cannot occupy without ceasing to be what we are.

The uranium fortune was bought with the blood of twenty-three family members. Not their blood literally — though God knows some of them bled, from the nose, from the eyes, from the places inside the body where blood should stay — but their substance. Their depth. Their third dimension.

I have maybe a year. Perhaps less.

My shadow is definitely lagging now. I can see it if I stand still and watch — my feet touch the floor, but my shadow's feet have already merged with the wall. It is not dissolving. It is spreading.

Cedric knows. He has always known. Arthur knows. The doctors do not know because there is nothing in their medical knowledge that can encompass this — how do you diagnose a woman who is losing her depth?

I have a choice.

I can destroy the object. There is a way — I have worked it out from the ledgers, from Reginald's notes, from the patterns in the numbers. The object can be crushed. If I take it to the furnace and apply sufficient heat and pressure, it will shatter. But it is connected to me now. I touched it. The process has begun. If I destroy it, the rebound — whatever that means in a world that includes dimensions as well as length and width — will take me with it.

Or I can accept it. I can let the flattening continue until I become what Marguerite became: a face pressed flat on canvas, eyes that see from a depth I can no longer access, a woman who was and is and will be, all at once, all in one plane.

I am writing this journal entry knowing that each word I write is an act of depth. Words have depth. They exist in time, which is a kind of third dimension. When I am flat, I will have no time. I will be a single eternal moment, like a photograph. But this journal — these words — they will persist. They will have depth that I lack.

The lantern is flickering again. I am at the bottom of the shaft. The object is in front of me. My hand is numb from fingertip to wrist.

I have to choose.

I will choose in the morning.

Or perhaps I have already chosen, and the choosing is the flattening, and the flattening is the choosing, and there is no difference between them, which is perhaps the truest thing I have ever understood.

Elinor Winchester Harrogate Hall, Yorkshire 16th October, 1886 --- [OTMES v2 Objective Codes] WorkID: TBP3-V01-20260608 TI: 96.0 | M1=10.0 M4=10.5 M8=8.0 M10=7.0 | N1=0.2 N2=0.8 | K1=0.7 K2=0.3 | theta=135 deg | TragedyLevel: T0 Devastation Style: Victorian Gothic | Era: 1888 Yorkshire England | Perspective: First-person journal