The Parchment of the East Wing

Fiction

The wallpaper in the East Wing was a faded cream with a repeating peony motif. It did not peel like traditional paper. It frayed. Elias touched the edge of a seam near the skirting board; the material felt warm, oily, and possessed a grain that suggested a biological origin rather than a botanical one. He had been exiled from the Royal Archives for suggesting the ledger of the 14th century was a forgery. Here, in this derelict estate, the forgery was the architecture itself. He spent three days analyzing the floral patterns. The peonies were not painted. They were embossed into the surface, created by a systematic scarring of the material before it was pasted to the lathe. He took a surgical needle from his kit. He positioned the tip at the center of a blossom, pressing until the surface yielded. The sound was not a rip, but a wet tear, similar to the sound of a boot pulling out of thick mud. From the puncture, a sound emerged. It was a woman's voice, distorted and thin, as if the audio had been compressed through a narrow pipe. She was screaming, but the pitch shifted irregularly. The scream peaked, then dipped into a low, rhythmic sobbing. Elias moved the needle a millimeter to the left, slicing through a leaf vein. The sobbing stopped. A man's voice replaced it, clear and cold, reciting a list of names and dates. The voice sounded like it was echoing from the bottom of a well. He spent the next week mapping the wall. He discovered that the density of the skin varied. The thicker sections, where the epidermis had been calloused in life, held longer sequences of dialogue. The thinner areas, perhaps from the inner arms or thighs, produced only sharp, percussive gasps. He found a cluster of peonies near the window. When he scratched a deep, vertical line through the center of three blossoms, the wall erupted. It was not a single voice, but a chorus of overlapping confessions. They spoke of debts, betrayals, and the specific method used to strip the skin from their frames while they were still conscious. The sound was tactile; it vibrated in the marrow of his teeth. Elias stopped when he reached the corner of the room. There was a single, unpatterned strip of skin, pale and smooth. He pressed the needle in. There was no voice, only the sound of his own breathing, amplified and distorted, playing back to him from the wall in a perfect, mocking loop.