A Study in Sable (13 page)

“Ah, you have come on time! Come, come and join me for a little supper. I never eat before a performance. I was singing
Tosca
tonight. I am famished!” Without waiting for Sarah's answer she sailed over to the table—Alicia was right there to pull out her chair at the right moment—and settled down.

Well . . . I am hungry, but I had better not eat much. If there
are
ghosts haunting her, I need to be wide awake, alert, and not bogged down with food.
She joined Magdalena at the table—Alicia did not pull out
her
chair, as she was too busy serving Magdalena—and settled down.

Sarah waited until Alicia had finished serving the diva, then indicated what she would like. Her plate was about half-full compared to Magdalena's; the singer really
was
famished.

Magdalena was not inclined to conversation, at least not at this meal, so Sarah was able to study her covertly while she nibbled. Some actresses could be careless about removing their stage makeup; not Magdalena. She had no more than a dusting of powder on her face and a reddening of her lips that might merely have been staining from the stage lip-rouge. In contrast to the perfectly coiffed hair Sarah had last seen her wear, she sported a very loose pompadour from which a few strands had escaped. Sarah studied her features, trying not to be critical, but read what she could without judgment. There was a set to her chin and her mouth that suggested she was not to be trifled with when someone stood between her and what she wanted. But then . . . actresses and singers often had to be ruthless; dancers, too, but brilliant dancing talent seemed to be rarer than brilliant singing or acting, and one could get by appealing to the audience.

Finally Magdalena patted her lips with her napkin and indicated to the maid that she was finished. Sarah had finished several minutes before and waited with her hands folded in her lap for the diva's instructions.

Surprisingly, however—surprising because Sarah had gotten the distinct impression that Magdalena always ordered things to go
her
way, and was never disappointed—it was the singer who looked hesitantly to her. “Alicia will help me to get ready for bed; this will take perhaps an hour. After that, I will endeavor to sleep. Will you need to be in the bedroom, or—”

“If it would be more comfortable for you, I can certainly work from out here,” Sarah assured her, not really wanting to be in the same room with Magdalena while she slept. “If there
are
spirits, they will certainly come to me here as soon as they sense me, rather than plaguing you. If there are not . . . then I may enter your room to see if you are suffering from night terrors. If so, I will awaken you to rid you of them, and in the morning I will suggest a physician who might, and I stress
might,
be able to help.” She shrugged. “We still do not know what causes night terrors, but he has effected some cures by some of his suggestions.”

“That will be quite satisfactory,” Magdalena said. “You will never need to come into my room; there
will
be ghosts.”

Sarah could not help but notice that poor Alicia looked utterly terrified. She did
not
like this idea, but she did not dare protest it. Sarah resolved to speak to her after Magdalena went to bed.

“Have you some means of amusing yourself?” Magdalena continued, a little doubtfully. “The only books I have are in German—”

“I brought a book. Just send Alicia out to tell me when you have gone to bed, and I will make my preparations so that the spirits come straight to me instead of coming to you.” “Preparations” were not exactly what she was going to do, but Magdalena didn't need to know that.

The truth was if there were active spirits, they tended to be drawn to a medium like moths to a flame, because if there was anything that an earthbound spirit wanted, it was to have someone to hear its story. There just generally were not that many active spirits about. Most people passed on directly to whatever afterlife they were bound for. Some stayed because they didn't realize they were dead—those were mostly people who had died suddenly, or in a state of
intoxication, or children. Some stayed because something held them here, which could be anything from a message to impart to a terror of what punishment they were bound for. But
all
of them were subject to attenuation and fraying, and the longer they stayed, the more frayed and faded they became, and the less they remembered. That was why there were no ghosts of Romans haunting London, nor early Saxons, nor the Vikings who had raided here—most haunts were people who had died within the last hundred years.
Most.
Because there were always exceptions, and the more powerful the personality, the stronger the will and emotions with which they held to earth, the more they knew of magic, and the more powerful their reason for remaining, the likelier they were to create a long-lasting haunt if they so chose.

Satisfied, Magdalena retired to her bedroom. Sarah settled onto that comfortable fainting couch with a book by Dickens.

At length, she heard a footstep and looked up; Alicia had closed the bedroom door and was turning around. Seeing that Sarah was looking at her, she hurried over.

“Mistress has gotten into bed, miss,” Alicia said, looking over her shoulder nervously. “It will take her a half hour or so to fall asleep.”

“Then you go to bed too, Alicia,” Sarah said, trying to make her voice as kindly as possible. “I promise, I will keep any ghosts here, far away from you. Just stay in your room unless you are rung for until your usual hour of rising.”

“Will you be all right, miss?” Alicia asked anxiously. “The necessary room is just there—” She nodded at a door in the same wall as the door Magdalena had gone through earlier. “It has a door into here, and one into Mistress's room.”

“Then that's all I need,” Sarah assured her. “Go to bed.”

With a look of infinite gratitude, she hurried off to her own little room, probably just big enough to hold a narrow little bed. Sarah put her book away in her purse, went around the room turning the lamps down or putting them out entirely, and then sat down straight on the couch, hands folded in her lap, facing the side of the room where Magdalena's bedroom was, waiting.

To be honest, she really expected to discover Magdalena was prone to night terrors. That would be in keeping with someone who kept the hours she did, ate a heavy meal before going to bed, and probably drank a little too much.

So she was a little shocked to see the wispy shape of a thin, haggard-looking girl forming just above the floor, halfway between herself and the wall.

She looked like a sketch done with white pencil on black paper, though everything on the far side of the room was visible through her. Her feet were not visible; what there was of her dress looked a little like something a scullery maid might wear, and like a scullery maid, her hair was hidden beneath a cloth cap that was much too big for her.

The girl looked utterly pathetic, painfully thin, and frightened, and Sarah felt a moment of contempt for the diva, if
this
was the sort of spirit that “made her nights a terror.” She held out her hand, coaxingly. “I can see you my dear,” she said, aloud and in her mind. “Come and tell me what you need.”

The revenant drew nearer, looking as if she would burst into tears at any moment.
“Sick,”
she whispered into Sarah's mind.
“Sick, so sick. Then lost . . .”

“Then I will show you the way home,” Sarah told her gently. She closed her eyes and . . . well, there were no adequate words for what she did then. “Opening the door,” she called it; it was something it seemed she had been able to do since she began seeing spirits. And sometimes she saw the result, a kind of shining opening hanging in midair, and sometimes she didn't. This was one of the times she didn't—but the ghost certainly did; her face, what Sarah could see of it, was utterly transformed with an expression of disbelief and joy. She moved toward Sarah, and when she was about two feet away, she just vanished.

And that was when the horde arrived.

6

T
HE
temperature in the room plummeted. The lights dimmed, then burned blue. The fire in the fireplace all but went out, and a chill that had nothing to do with the physical cold came over her. She braced herself, knowing that this meant that there was not one ghost here. As Magdalena had claimed, there were many.

They began to form all around her, in a circle about twenty feet across with her at the center, at first nothing more than faint wisps, thin threads of light, and then threads became outlines and the outlines took on shape and tenuous substance. Two, six, a dozen . . . glowing and shifting in the now-dim light of the three lamps still alight and the dying fire.

This was a larger group of spirits than she had ever seen in one place at one time before, and there were more forming even as she watched. Her heart began to beat faster, and her breath quickened as a trickle of fear threaded its way down her spine.

Carefully, so as not to startle them into action before they had decided to actually do something, she slid her hand over to her purse, then inside it. She had brought Puck's talisman, something he had given her before she and Nan had left Criccieth in Wales. She had
done so not really thinking she would need it, but just on the grounds that it was no great effort to bring something so small along, as she had so many times before. She hadn't taken it with her when they'd trapped the Shadow Beast at Number 10 because she had been afraid that it would sense Puck's magic and not come—but for this, well, it had seemed like a good precaution.

She felt a thrill of relief as her fingers closed on the little package of twigs and iron and she drew it out concealed in her hand. Just holding it made her feel bolder, and better protected. She brought both her hands together in her lap and cupped the empty one over the one holding the three twigs and a horseshoe nail, tied up with a bit of red thread. Who could have guessed there would be so much powerful magic bound up in something so ordinary?

“An iron horseshoe nail?” she had said, holding the thing in her hand. “I thought that magic creatures didn't care for iron, or salt, or—”

“Piff,” he had snorted, tossing it from one hand to the other. “I am the Oldest Old Thing in all of Logres, and little things like iron and salt trouble me not in the least.” Then he gave it to her. “And this will ward you from those things that cannot read my hand upon you.”

The spirits had formed up into a silent ring all around her. Most of them looked “recent,” that is, they were recognizably human, if wispy and transparent, and any obvious clothing looked relatively modern, so they must have died within the last fifty years or so. How long had the hotel been standing here? Twenty or thirty years, certainly. It was the largest hotel in London, with five hundred guest rooms and suites; that meant, just by the odds of such things, that there were more than a few guests who would have died here over that time period. There were probably hundreds of maids and other servants who worked here, and a goodly number of
them
had likely died on the premises, too.

And there were workmen who certainly would have died here while the hotel was being built. Every great building in London had had its share of accidents and deaths.

With so many people coming and going, living and working, it would have been odd if the Langham had not had its share of restless
spirits. Guests died, though no hotel wanted you to know that; of old age, sickness, suicide, and murder. Servants dropped dead at work, poor things; no servant could afford to take days off for illness, and unless they had uncommonly kind masters, few were sent to their beds when ill. The response of a hotel manager to a sick maid would have been, “Get your work done and stay out of sight of the guests.”

Most of those would have moved on, but there was plenty of time to have accumulated dozens of displaced haunts. And what had been on this site before the Langham?
Langham House and Mansfield House, I think.
More chances for haunts, for both had had heavy populations of servants, as well as their aristocratic families.

These all seemed bewildered, as if they could not imagine why they were facing
her,
and yet were irresistibly drawn to her. Some were barely recognizable as human beings, they had become so thinned out by time. Most, like the first wraith, were like white pencil sketches on dark paper. A few were so clear and crisp they were almost like white-on-black photographs of their former selves. Sarah began trying to categorize them, in an effort to sort out which of them might need her help the most urgently.

That was when
it
came screaming out of the dark at her, a raging, maddened thing, all tangled hair, eyes and claws and a frothing mouth, flinging itself at her as if it intended to rip her throat out! She gasped, and clutched Puck's talisman, the thing he had said would always keep her safe from “ghosties and ghoulies and things that howl in the night,” and the creature
slammed
into an invisible barrier no more than three feet from her face.

Sarah—and it—were both frozen in a kind of shock. She recovered first.

Seemingly stunned, it hung there in midair for a moment . . . still scarcely recognizable as a human being. And then she saw, as she caught her breath and convinced her racing heart to slow, that there was another revenant with it, a weeping female in rags, far more human-looking than her companion. The woman was bound to the creature with a kind of silver cord that went from her navel into somewhere within the mass of tatters that comprised its body.

In a moment, the thing had gotten over the shock of slamming into Sarah's protective barrier and began circling around her, raving and clawing at her protection the entire time. It seemed to be testing the strength of what kept it away. Sarah had perfect faith that it would never break through something that a Great Elemental had set in place, but until she could get rid of this thing, she would not be able to help the other spirits here.

She looked at them, and they gazed at her despairingly. She licked her lips, and thought. The barrier would protect her, but
she
had no ability to affect a ghost, except to give it a way into the next life.
She
could not do anything to control this insane haunt.

But they could. Ghosts could affect other ghosts, as the living could affect the living.

“If I am to help you,” she said quietly, but firmly, ignoring the insane
thing
that still prowled around and around her, dragging its prisoner behind her. “You need to help me first.
That
thing must be dealt with.” She pointed at the mad spirit, who didn't seem to realize she meant
it.
“I can do nothing without it being restrained and controlled. And the living cannot control the dead.”

That was not
entirely
true. There was a kind of magician, called a “necromancer,” who could control spirits. But she wasn't one of those, and honestly, even if she'd been given the chance to be a necromancer, she wouldn't
want
to be one.

The remaining ghosts stared, first at the raving creature, then at each other. And then, without a word that she could hear, they swarmed it.

It had
not
been expecting that, and they took it entirely by surprise. They flung themselves all over it, stopping it in its tracks, and binding it in what appeared to be yards and yards of their own wispy substance, though so far as she could tell none of them got any weaker for binding it. After a few minutes of furious, utterly silent activity, they parted, revealing it to be bound up like a mummy, with only its eyes still uncovered. Then they waited, in a patient group, to hear her reaction.

“Well done,” she said, and turned to the weeping revenant cowering
in midair beside the creature, where she had fallen when the others had stopped the mad one. She was still sobbing into her hands as if she had no idea what the others had just done. “You, girl—what is your name, and why are you tied to that horror?”

The female spirit started and sat up to stare at her, as if she had not imagined Sarah could see her, much less speak to her. But instead of responding, the ghost simply stared at Sarah, her face half-hidden in a cascade of ghostly hair.

“She loved
'
im, an' 'e killed 'er.”

Sarah turned her head in the general direction of the faint whisper of a voice, and saw one of the other spirits, a thin, malnourished-looking waif in a ragged Mother Hubbard gown too big for her, nodding at her. “Is that so?” she whispered back, and held out her hand. “If you mean me no harm you will not be hurt by coming to me.”

The waiflike spirit ventured nearer, one cautious step at a time. Encouraged by passing the point at which the mad one had been stopped, she came even closer, peering at Sarah as if she was trying to see through fog.
“She loved 'im,”
the waif repeated.
“An' 'e murderated 'er.”

“Then that would be why she is chained to him,” Sarah said softly. “Thank you. When I am done with them, you and I will speak next.”

She turned back to the captive female. “Listen,” she said, urgently, staring into the revenant's wide eyes. “He has to pay for what he did to you, and he is holding you back from where you must go. I know that you loved him once, but you must let go of that love, or you both will continue to be bound here together, in a terrible state of unlife.”

She reached deep within herself and called up the “door” again. She still could not see it.

But the spirits could. There was a faint, collective gasp of horror as they all concentrated on a spot just past where the mad thing stood, bound.

The woman to whom it was tied gasped as well, and shrank back. Sarah reached inside herself again, and opened a second door, for her.

The revenant started with surprise, one hand going to her mouth,
her eyes growing so wide they practically filled her face. But not with terror.

With longing.

“If you want that door—you must let go of him,” Sarah told her quietly. “That love you have is one-sided, it binds you to him, but not him to you. Let it go. Let him go. Save yourself. You could not save yourself then, but you can now.”

The spirit turned her face back toward Sarah, and now her eyes streamed tears. She mouthed two words; Sarah could not hear them, but she knew what they were.

“Yes,” she replied firmly. “You must. Do not let him hold you here. He is not worthy of you. He never was. In life, you bound yourself to a dream that never was. Do not allow yourself to be so bound in death.”

The spirit cast her head back in agony, though no sound emerged from her mouth. For a moment, Sarah feared that she would not be strong enough to free herself.

But then, the silver cord began to unravel, to thin into mist, and then . . . to vanish.

The wraith turned her back on the thing she had been bound to; the creature began furiously struggling, but she paid it no heed. She drifted forward in the direction she was looking, brightening the entire time until she became almost to too bright to look on.

And then, she disappeared in a burst of light.

The amassed spirits, and the child at Sarah's knee, gave out a collective sigh.

And then . . . as one, they moved on the bound thing, determination in every face. They moved on it, and shoved it, despite its increasing struggles, until suddenly, it too vanished.

Then, they turned to Sarah.

She smiled. “I promised I would begin with this one,” she whispered, and turned toward the waif.

• • •

This is going to take a very, very long time.

Sarah cradled her face in her hands and eased her aching head with fingers that were very cold. It was taking a long time to warm up after the preternatural chill that had suffused the sitting room of the suite as long as the ghosts had been there. She accepted a glass of cold water that Alicia brought her and smiled as the maid hovered anxiously at her elbow.

The spirits had faded away at the first light of dawn, but not before she had promised those who remained that she would be back until she had helped them all. Alicia had appeared in her uniform, anxiously peering around the door, not long after that. On seeing Sarah sitting there, unharmed and alone but obviously very tired, the maid hastened to get her water, gasping a little when she realized the temperature of the water in the cut-glass pitcher on the sideboard was barely above freezing.

“Are you all right, miss?” Alicia asked, timidly, after waiting for some sort of further orders from Sarah. Obviously she was used to the constant demands of Magdalena. “Shall I order you some breakfast? The kitchen will be staffed by now, and ready to take orders.” Unspoken was the fact that while it was unlikely her mistress would be awake any time soon, there were plenty of guests in this hotel that kept the same hours as working folks. Men of business, for instance, who could not afford to loll about in bed.