Nicole Field’s Reviews > The Fox and the Devil > Status Update

It looks less like a place people ever lived, and more like a cemetery. Stone edifices marking only absence.

“I know that expression. My aunt had it, too. She saw one, when she was young, and she never forgot it. It drove her mad, eventually.”

“Oh, Little Fox. I thought you’d read your father’s journals. I thought you understood what you were chasing.”

“Your father once had a friend over, some doctor. Upsetting young British man, about to start running an asylum. There was a coldness to his gaze I didn’t care for. I was bringing drinks up to them, and I overheard your father say that he was well within his rights to divorce me and have me put away forever because I was crazy with grief. But he had resigned himself to taking care of me out of duty.”

You look so sad, pretending to be a person as you walk these streets. Your costume strains at the edges. Your friends don’t see it, but I do.

Because by the time he died, my father was consumed with madness. I thought I would find the work of a brilliant scientist, doctor, and researcher. Instead, his journals detailed occult practices, theories about supernatural creatures walking among us, and outlandish tales of his own efforts to kill them. A genius, reduced to paranoid ramblings about vampires, demons, and monsters.