Eterna and Omega (10 page)

“Why couldn't you see it? None of the carvings? Was the change in him not obvious?” she prompted. Louis shook his incorporeal head.

“You've not been allowed to spend time around scientists, Clara. ‘Mad,' to a scholar, theorist, scientist, is all relative. We all have—had—our quirks, odd notions and wild, sweeping moods. Goldberg was always a bit paranoid. The escalation, we assumed, was due to the stresses of his particular side of the research, working with living and dead tissue. It was rather gruesome, and at a critical point his mind went off the rails.”

“Could there have been sabotage somehow?” Clara pressed. “From what I saw on the second floor hidden beneath carpets, the writings and scrawlings on the floor were similar to a case two years prior where a powder, an agent, was used to turn people's minds.”

“Oh. Well, then, yes,” Louis said, earnestly contemplative, “that would explain Goldberg's sudden shift.”

“How do you
know
you created a Ward?” Clara continued. “What in the disaster tells you so? Shouldn't a Ward have stopped the horror, not encouraged it?”

“The forces that entered the room went right to the material, trying to snuff it out, strangle it, take it apart particle by particle. In a neutral space, the Ward would have the upper hand, but the darkness had it that day, due to the rituals. They took us with them in the exact same way. Strangled and plucked apart from life to dust.”

Clara fought back tears. She had always had a keen streak of empathic gifts, and she could see and feel what he described as if it was happening to her, before her eyes, in the instant, in a terrible duality. And she still felt responsible, for having the Eterna idea in the first place. Louis knew that look, and he held up a transparent gray hand.

“No, Clara, I'll have none of that guilt. Let me rejoice in being here with you, in your bright contrast,” the ghost said lovingly. She nodded, breathed deeply, and regained hawk-like focus on the luminous figure before her. “In life we are faced with profound moments of quiet loneliness,” he stated, hovering at the edge of Clara's bed. “Those solitary, bleak moments are all the more extreme in death. To escape searing isolation, souls go rushing back into life again for another turn around the globe, bringing elder aches unto the next mewling existence, without any thought to that quiet corridor between life and death. So many souls bumble on, unaware of previous lives, eras, meaning, or purpose.”

He wafted closer to her, engulfing her in chill. “But, God help us, those of us who know, remember … We dare to take the hand of another who shares the same bruises in the very same tissues of the soul. I don't know which, in the end, is more lonely—to see life and death alone, or in the company of very old souls. What a thrillingly terrible, inevitable, amazing cycle I see from this vantage point…”

Clara stared at him. Through him. “Oh, Louis…”

Before they could muse further, solid and shade, they started at a sudden sound and movement as Senator Bishop flung wide Clara's bedroom door.

“Clara Templeton, who the devil are you talking to?” Bishop barked. He spotted Louis's floating form and cocked his head to the side. “Good God, a ghost. Is that … Mr. Dupris?”

Louis jumped—wafted—to his feet and bowed. “Senator. I assure you I was in no way disrespecting your ward.”

Bishop clenched his jaw and pointedly looked away from Clara in her nightdress. “I take it you are here to report to Miss Templeton some matter of import regarding the Eterna disaster? I am sorry for your loss … of yourself.”

“Thank you for your empathy, sir,” the ghost said earnestly. “I'm very impressed that you can see and speak with me. It is a high caliber of talent indeed that can do such things.”

“I'm not falsely modest, Mr. Dupris. I know I am very talented, but I'd say this exchange has more to do with your being a high-caliber spirit with a … very strong connection to us. I've never seen nor heard one so clearly.”

“It is true, it is our collective connection. My brother, Andre, can also see and hear me,” Louis said thoughtfully.

Clara blushed threefold, thinking of Andre, who had kissed her while pretending to be Louis, of her and Louis's more passionate encounters, and of the senator's talents, which always had her in a bit of awe.

The ghost abruptly looked pained, as if something tore at him. “I feel my brother's call upon me. Perhaps he got himself into trouble again.” The ghost sighed. “If I can come again, I will.…” He stared longingly at Clara in a way that made her blush again.

He faded into the wall and was gone. Clara rose, went to her wardrobe, and pulled a quilted satin robe on over her nightdress, all the while ordering her thoughts in preparation for the conversation to come. She locked her emotions away, determined to focus on work and mission.

“Well?” Bishop asked with an edge.

“There's another force at work,” she stated. “We've a far different enemy than we think.”

Bishop stepped farther into the room, and she turned to face him. There was a long, tense moment as Clara watched him pour over all the things he could say, then seize upon the one thing he should ask. This decision process was hidden to most, under the veneer of his calm, politicking ways, inscrutable, but Clara had made a habit of cataloging his every expression, especially the ones that he took most care to hide.

“What happened the night of your last seizure?” he asked. “There are too many secrets here, Clara. I thought we were working on that.”

“Eterna has always been complicated,” Clara countered.

“That's not an answer.”

“Secrets never are.”

“Don't be coy. Why were you overcome? Lavinia tended to you but said she didn't know what you'd been doing. What did you do on your own to trigger a fit?”

“I was … trying to divest us of Eterna,” Clara said sheepishly. “I … buried it all. Anything and everything I had.”

Bishop's generally kind eyes, more worried of late than gentle, widened. “Buried it? Whatever for?”

“Because I thought everything—the silhouettes, the whole of the spirit world—was telling me to destroy it and by doing so make things right,” she exclaimed. “I tried burning it all. I dug a little grave for the files and tried to strike a match, but it kept going out. And then Pearl Street exploded with that electrical fire.”

Bishop scratched his head. “Yes. That is a whole other matter. But the spirit world. Why did you listen to them when you know how a host affects you? Why did you act without, at least … consulting me?”

He was genuinely hurt by this.

“I'm sorry. I should have,” Clara said. “I thought it was beyond us. It was the best I could do. The signals have been so mixed when my instincts used to be so clear … but with the new information—”

“In light of your ghostly lover here tonight, you mean?”

Clara barreled past the accusatory truth and her own blooming blush, blurting: “
Mr. Dupris
said he was trying to stop me, not encourage me. He blew out the match when I tried to burn the research.”

“Stopping you, then?”

“Yes. Because what they made in that house was a
Ward.
The shadows that snuffed out their lives, in that already tainted house, were threatened by the protective magic and killed them for it. So it isn't the Eterna work or the Ward that was the danger; it was what was already inside.”

Bishop's frown deepened. “I worry about your getting information from a ghost who may cause you an … episode.”

Clara's eyes flashed. “Louis has not made me seize. Not even the first numbers on my safety countdown were triggered. I manage to commune at length with a spirit, for once in my adult life, without pain and humiliation, gain vital information, and you question it?”

Bishop came closer, wrestling with anger, she knew that expression well.

“Not only nice things want to speak with you, Clara,” he stated. She stiffened, but he continued. “Had we not developed a system? I don't believe that you can be handled like a marionette to do evil's will, but hiding things from me is not your style. But then again, there was Mr. Dupris. Perhaps I don't know you at all, Clara Templeton.”

Clara was hit by the onslaught of Bishop's emotions. Her empathic abilities felt how thick and unwieldy they were and how complicated for them both. She spoke very, very carefully.

“I cannot make a case for myself that is not indeed marred by a secrecy you would not have wished. I can do nothing to change that now but try to regain your confidence. To find that my generally accurate instincts acted in polar opposite to what Louis was trying to protect, while your trust in me has shattered, is devastating.” She sighed, her tensed shoulders falling with the weight of exhaustion and unprocessed grief. Fussing with a cup and saucer, she poured milk into cold coffee. “I don't want to start over again. Am I no longer gifted? I don't want to live that way. Give me ‘fits' over a life without
insight.
I could have burned their protective work that night, and they'd have died in vain for my lack of proper intuition.”

Tears sprang to Clara's eyes and she screwed up her face to force them back, which only made them splash into the untouched coffee. She wasn't sure what she wanted from Bishop in the moment, but she didn't want him to be angry.

“We don't have to start over,” Bishop began gently. Clara looked at him hopefully. “If it's a
Ward
that the lads made, then we'll make up the same kinds of compounds as we did in Salem, we'll build and prepare. You will resurrect what was paused by the Pearl Street explosion—and save that electrical mystery for another day—and we will attempt to find out
what
had you so convinced in your course of action.”

“Yes…” She smiled. “Yes, Senator, very good, and thank you.”

“Back to ‘Senator' again?” He smiled wearily. “I can't keep track of when to be formal and when not, you'll have to tell me.…”

They stared at one another for a long moment. She was trying to determine if that was some kind of invitation and if she wanted it to be one.

“I'll get dressed and start my day,
Rupert,
” she said, turning away so that he could not read her face. “I'll have no further supernatural phenomena making me feel an invalid. Either I take these forces on, or we give them the impression that they can take on me. I won't countenance it, and I know neither will you.”

Bishop smiled then. “That's my Clara. I'll help you this time.”

“You don't need to—”

“That wasn't an offer, it's an order, my dear,” he said with a particular curt smile of finality that had so often punctuated her life. “We'll bring Lavinia to stay next to you in case of another fit. We'll resurrect those files and make them into magic. And this time, let's
try
not to keep secrets?” he asked hopefully. Clara nodded. It sounded like a wise promise impossible to fulfill. “So let's get to it, then, shall we?”

Clara stared at Bishop. “Now?”

“I'll…” Here he smirked a bit, as if hiding a delicious secret. Clara recognized this expression as the one he used when indulging the idea of Mesmerism. “Keep people away from the graveyard. If dark forces are amassing, let's not waste any more time than we already have. Whatever England's involvement, I think they must be off the mark. Let's get Louis's material back and see if we can resurrect what he recommends.”

“Thank you, Rupert,” she said quietly.

“For what?” he asked.

“For believing me, for believing Louis, and helping me now. You are so good to me.”

He could stand in the way of so much. Instead, he facilitated. He truly did want the best for her and what they had undertaken. There was little altruism and general good nature in the world. She'd been lucky enough to be ensconced in it all her life, despite the tragedies that surrounded.

He smiled broadly at her praise.

“Besides, you don't let me be powerful nearly as much as I'd like.” He tapped his temple. “My muscles need flexing.”

Clara pursed her lips at him. It had been a long-running skirmish between them how much of his power of suggestion he would employ on others. He limited his own power vastly more than Clara thought he should, but—in a fond, playful way—he always blamed her for being the one holding him back. Seeing her expression only broadened his smile.

There was a time when Clara had felt she could share anything with her guardian. That was before she'd harbored any feelings for him, and long before she'd sealed those sentiments away like Montresor bricked up Fortunato in the nitre-filled caves of Poe's landmark story. The jingling bells of a flame of love sounded deep in her catacombs, and she looked hastily away, wondering if she could ever regain what had once been so innocent and pure but had become so complex and awkward in her adult life.

*   *   *

Digging things up in Trinity churchyard, a few streets northwest of their home and their offices, even in the light of day and after Bishop persuaded the groundskeeper to temporarily close it to other visitors, proved more difficult than Clara expected.

Once again her friend, the Eterna Commission's receptionist, Lavinia Kent, accompanied her, alert against any sign of a seizure. Though only two days had passed since the misguided burial, the ground had been tended, leveled, making it difficult to locate her diggings.

Clara couldn't let the energies of the graveyard derail her, as much as she adored the small brownstone Gothic chapel whose rich elegance she so enjoyed. She refused the attempts of past-life tendrils and wandering spirits to wrap around her senses. Focusing her core life force, she snapped it out from her person as if she were cracking a whip, erecting shielding boundaries, creating a modicum of spiritual and psychological safety.