When cold mist clung to even colder glass, it condensed into tiny droplets. Strings of droplets joined together and slid down from the top of the window frame, resembling both a lustrous pearl necklace and the claws of a monster reaching down through the darkness.
After the fine mist gathered and flowed away, the trails it left made the glass seem clearer. Through those trails, a figure leaning back in a chair could be seen, his face paler than the mist.
Though he did not look haggard or frail in the slightest, his skin possessed an extremely unnatural pallor. He raised fingers nearly devoid of blood, touched his cheek, then straightened up, gripping the arms of the chair with both hands and pulling his back erect.
When he opened his eyes, the pupils at the center of his gray irises were barely dilated. The rest looked like a lifeless desert, desolate and barren.
Whenever he focused and fixed his gaze on something, there was an exceedingly unnatural intensity in his attention, yet it also seemed somewhat unfocused.
A knock sounded at the door. It was obvious that the person knocking lacked confidence; the final knock was so faint it was nearly inaudible.
Merkel, standing outside the door, could not be blamed for that. Just moments ago, Schiller had stepped out of the house and back into the garden soil, using a gardening trowel to dig up all the fertilizer that had once been buried there. He spread the relatively intact pieces across the ground, turning over each part with the trowel and picking through them like a customer at a vegetable market.
Merkel could tell that Schiller had not found what he was looking for. Therefore, he felt that knocking on the door now was not a wise choice.
But