The Twisted Tragedy of Miss Natalie Stewart (26 page)

It padded down the hall again into its room. We kept a slight distance behind. It turned and looked at Jonathon, and I could have sworn I saw some sort of pleading look there. Without taking his eyes off “Laura,” Jonathon reached his hand out and I placed the bottle in it.

The creature lay down upon the table, a few stitches popping. It gasped. It fumbled for Jonathon’s hand. Jonathon squeezed it, undeterred by Preston’s blood, and his tear fell onto the cold metal table.

Blessing joined his side, offering additional benedictions as Jonathon doused a cloth with the chloroform and pressed it to the slack mouth.

“Stand back,” Rachel signed to me, urging me toward the door.

“The spirits still need to be put to rest,” Blessing instructed. Rachel ran next to Jonathon, nearly pushing him back, grabbing my hand, and shoving me toward the door. “Back,” she signed, her face panicked, shooing Mr. Smith. Whatever she was hearing from the spirits, it really wanted us out of the room.

The sparks began again down the wires and the equipment again chimed. The body again shuddered, hands smacking against the table, the torso trying to raise, the head straining, knees twitching. The entire grid began to hum with increasing power, emitting a high-pitched whine. The body shook evenly and quickly. The crackling sound and the threads of lightning began weaving between the wires, lifting them as if they were hair…Yes, its hair lifted too.

We were captivated by the sight, rooted to the ground…

Rachel shoved us back further, one by one. A wire near the door came loose from the ceiling and burned the back of her hand where it made contact. At the door I turned to see the body burst into flames.

Thank God, it did not cry, nor did it scream. It only gasped and then was silent. I’d like to think it gave a sound of relief, but that was perhaps my wishful thinking.

It was an immediate, all-consuming incineration of the body, as if it were more combustible by its dead weight. Dead wood ignites all the quicker. The fire did not catch beyond the wires that singed and snapped. The metal table bore a body-length heap of glowing cinders in mere minutes.

In the end, the spirits had their say of what they wanted with it. I wondered if the Master’s Society would ever understand that: the human soul was not something to enslave, not living, not dead.

I wasn’t sure when it had happened, but we’d all taken hands at the threshold, even Smith, forming a chain. While the room was hazy with smoke, it must have been well ventilated, for the room was not completely overcome. But the smell of chemicals and burned flesh was still overwhelming.

Jonathon shut the door. No one should ever have to smell such an odor. I’ll add that to the list of things I will never forget. We stood between two sets of remains behind closed doors.

“Dr. Preston’s life-and-death work,” Jonathon murmured angrily. “All for what? A new age in the new world,” he muttered, words Preston had used when trying to recruit Jonathon as a resurrectionist. “What could drive a man to create such a thing?”

“Why man does any unnatural thing,” Blessing replied. “He was driven by love, hate, or fear. What makes this so terrible is that I think this was originally love.”

“Why would reanimation be useful to the Master’s Society?” I asked. “I’m sure the Majesty is hardly lovesick for some dead princess—”

“Did you see the effect the body had?” Jonathon said. “Not only was it flesh that they might command, but it knocked us all out. It also affected a whole floor above us, and I hardly think that was at full capacity. Let’s hope they’re not on an industrial scale with their experiments.” Surely he thought of Samuel and that Preston had mentioned other doctors. What terrible acts of love and grief may result in scenes like this elsewhere? “A creature like this could wreak havoc in a town, entirely overturning the natural order of things.”

On its own, the door to Room 01 opened again, reminding us we were not finished here.

“Not to mention the poltergeists,” Blessing murmured, staring ahead into the room. Everything inside—the sheet, the equipment, the bottles, the wires, all of it—floated.

“What
now
?” Jonathon asked wearily.

“Ghosts can affect objects to get our attention,” Blessing explained. “It’s our attention they want, not the room or you, Miss Horowitz. Their bodies were used for ill, and their spirits pulled from rest. They’re scared and confused. We must bury their ashes in consecrated ground. Miss Horowitz…” He turned to her, and I gestured for her to look up at him. “I do not wish to make assumptions, but are you Jewish?”

Rachel nodded.

“The spirits,” he said. “Do you have a sense of their faiths?”

“Some Yiddish,” Rachel signed. I translated aloud. “The rest, I sense, Christian.”

“So for our Jewish friends,” Blessing continued, “may they rest in peace, as we move about our tasks. Miss Horowitz, please add anything from your faith you deem appropriate. The more prayers the better, and the more tailored to the needs of the spirit—”

Rachel nodded. She stood straighter, her dazed eyes becoming more focused. I remembered the same shift in Jonathon. When he’d solved a piece of his own puzzle and had a task to do, he was less oppressed by his condition and more empowered, more alive, more effective.

Mr. Smith entered with a box of glass jars. Blessing beamed at him. “Mr. Smith, you read my mind.”

Blessing moved to each of us, anointing our foreheads with oil. He offered Rachel blessing in what I assumed was Hebrew. She clasped onto the Star of David tucked beneath the lace of her dress. I pressed my own talisman, a small silver cross gifted to me by the Immanuel congregation at first communion that I often wore against my skin.

As Blessing began to murmur benedictions to calm the spirits, Jonathon winced and hissed, suddenly shielding his face and giving me a start. “Sorry,” he said. “You’re all glowing.”

There was a pause. “What do you mean?” I asked.

“The light again. I see it when someone is about to affect something or become important. Natalie, you’ve a trace of your colors again. It’s beautiful, really.”

“You see the truth of the matter, Lord Denbury, the true
spirit
of things,” Blessing said, smiling suddenly. “Well, then, let there be light!”

There came a terrible crash as the metal table overturned. Ash flew everywhere, and we all clapped our hands to our mouths and fumbled for handkerchiefs. None of us desired to breathe in the dead. The surrounding equipment shook and buzzed. Sparks flew from whatever still carried a charge. A few bottles of chemicals crashed and shattered against the wall, making our jobs infinitely more difficult.

Mr. Smith had hardly said a word, eerie in and of itself, but he made himself useful by taking all objects that could be projectiles out of the room. The ash was settling enough for us to not breathe it in.

Blessing calmly repeated the Lord’s Prayer, then Psalm 23, the verse apropos:

“Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death…”

And we fell in with him as we all gathered ash into the jars. Rachel had steeled herself, and even though she shook and was surely receiving an onslaught of anger, she remained upright and forced her eyes to focus. She kept pressing the corners of her embroidered handkerchief with symbols on the edges.

She glanced over at me, seeing me squinting at the symbols, and she signed to me: “Hebrew. It means
life
.” And she continued breathing in, through
life
, filtering out the ash of death.

As I continued sifting ash into bottles, I repeated the Lord’s Prayer as many times as I could. Rachel had tied her handkerchief around her mouth and was signing rapidly. I couldn’t make out any of it, so I assumed she was spelling out words relative to the spirits who shared her faith.

“Release your anger and be done with it. Be done with this world,” Blessing cried, flipping open his
Common
Book
of
Prayer
to bestow rites. He ducked out of the way of an airborne bottle Mr. Smith had missed.

It was probably only a few minutes in that godforsaken room, but it felt like an hour. The bulk of the ash contained, Blessing ushered us back out. He kept the door open and dispersed holy water. He spoke a message of good news and benedictions of peace in a soothing voice that was not banishing devils but in fact begging for tranquility.

“I go now to take your ashes to hallowed ground, restless souls. Permit us to give you respect.”

After a long moment the table stopped shuddering on the ground, the equipment stopped shaking on its hinges, wires stopped swaying. There was silence. No more screaming upstairs. Peace.

No, not silence. Not entirely. There it was again, the whispering, the low, droning chant. It had been there all along; we were just too distracted by everything else. Did the wind pick up? Was there a storm outside? I couldn’t tell if I was hearing it in my own ears, like sounds underwater, or if it was external, like thunder. But it was familiar.

“Do you hear that?” I asked, a hand out to steady myself on the doorframe. It was the same noise from my dreams.

“Hear what?” Jonathon asked.

“The murmuring. Whispers. Chanting? It’s getting louder. Don’t you hear anything?”

“No, why—”

A jolt of pain ripped through my body and I screamed. It felt like someone was peeling my skin from my arms. I dropped to my knees as everyone stared at me in horror. No one else was affected. I saw Jonathon dive for me, and that’s the last thing I could remember.

Chapter 22

Some part of me knew I was unconscious as I saw the corridor.

It was the recurring corridor of my dreams. This time it was marked with light and shadowy threads. Thin sparkling vertical lines, thousands of them, each shaded differently. I’d seen this in a dream before with Jonathon, but this time I was on my own. The corridor went on indefinitely, but before I could explore I heard a whisper. Not a maddening cluster, but just one. One soft, kind, loving Whisper.

The Whisper, the one from my mother. This time I heard her clearly. She said, “Hold on.”

On each side of the hallway were open doors. Countless doors with windows onto the world, so many choices, thousands of diverging courses. Here a meadow with children running. There a battlefield. Here a family dinner. There a first kiss. Here a brawl. There a last breath. Deep darkness lay ahead of me and darkness lay behind me.

I watched the entities around me, dizzying flickering lines. Each thread was like a spirit or its own force of nature, weaving in and out around one another and pulsing at these doorways. Then at once they all converged on me, light and shadow.

“Hold on, I’m here,” I heard the Whisper say. I didn’t want to leave that voice. I didn’t want to leave
her
…

A deep breath of something sharp and pungent roused me with a coughing choke.

My eyes opened to see Jonathon before me, only this time he held a fancy bottle of ladies’ smelling salts beneath my nose, not some random hospital compound. I was in a boudoir I recognized: upstairs in Mrs. Northe’s home.

“Thank you,” I murmured and took stock of my body. “My arms hurt.” I glanced down at my blue blouse. No obvious damage, but my skin tingled strangely, my arms burning as if wounded under the surface. “What was that about?”

“I don’t know. Everything was finally quiet at the hospital, resolved, really, but then you heard chanting and blacked out. Maybe everything we’ve been through built up like a toxin in your body, all the magic and ritual. Since you’d been subjected to so much already, perhaps your body and consciousness was at a breaking point—”

I grimaced. “Maybe I wasn’t fully rid of it before throwing myself back in the center. That must be why a dream could wound me, why magic could reach up like a surging tide to drag me under.”

Jonathon kissed my forehead. “I’ll never let it take you.”

“Where are Reverend Blessing and Rachel? Mr. Smith?”

“Smith helped me bring you here, drove while I held you. Now he’s keeping watch on the house. Remind me to ask Mrs. Northe where on earth she picked him up. I still don’t know what to think about him.”

“Useful, though I think that’s why he’s around.”

“Blessing and Rachel have gone to place the ashes in consecrated ground. He mentioned visiting a rabbi friend of his as well. I imagine that will take up most of their day. How are you feeling?”

I nuzzled against him, kissing his cheek softly with a thankful prayer. He always reminded me of what was good and true in the world against such dark, draining magic. Surely not all magic was dark, though. Love was magic.

“Do you remember anything?” Jonathon asked. “You were murmuring, like chanting, but I couldn’t make any of it out.”

I told him about what I’d just seen, about Mother’s voice, about the entities that turned to swarm over me.

“As you fainted,” Jonathon said carefully. “I saw red and gold fire surround you, signs of the dark magic.”

I clutched at Jonathon’s lapels. “Could the demon still be active? How do you really kill a thing like that? And
why
am I in such pain if I’m not bleeding?” I asked, itching at my forearm. I spoke too soon.