The wax figure was cadaverous, the cell deliberately squalid. (cadaverous: gaunt, ashen, deathly pale; squalid: filthy, sordid, dirty) Visitors were told an angry prince had ordered his men to immure a poet for an insolent rhyme. (immure: imprison, incarcerate, confine; insolent: impudent, impertinent, rude) A painted crow picked at carrion beneath the window. (carrion: rotting flesh, dead flesh) It was a grisly room for a writer whose best-known work concerned peaches. (grisly: gruesome, macabre, horrifying)
The apprentice noticed an anachronistic detail. (anachronistic: anachronic, anachronous, chronologically misplaced) The cell lock bore the stamp of a factory founded after the poet died. She was loath to gainsay her mentor, whose reputation rested on the exhibit. (loath: unwilling, reluctant, hesitant; gainsay: contradict, dispute, deny) Still, she took the lock to the curator, who asked for the earliest plans of the edifice. (edifice: building, structure, construction)
They found the room labeled "Cool store." No document placed a prisoner there. (document: written record, paper, written account) The apprentice kept the lock and the painted crow in a new exhibit about how legends flourish. (flourish: thrive, prosper, bloom) On opening day her mentor contributed his first sketch, with peach baskets in the corner and a question mark beside the word dungeon.