Jane of Air

by Jessica Penot

  I can feel the baby moving inside of me. I will name her Jane. She will not be mine. She will be my god’s. She will be a daughter of the old ones. I don’t own any part of her. I have promised her to him. I wish you would sing to me now, my love. Sing to me like you used to. Tell me how you love my eyes. Tell me how milky white my skin is. I sing to you while you sleep. I creep up from the darkness below your Thornfield Hall, where I have taken up residence, and I sing to you. Tomorrow, I will take your bride’s eyes, but tonight I will take your mother’s head.

  Forever Yours,

  Liliana

  I drew a deep breath and put the letter away. The room felt very cold and I pulled the covers up over me. The house was full of people, but I felt more alone than ever. Cocooned in fear, I had no choice but to keep reading. There was no other option. I couldn’t leave my room and there would be no sleep for me tonight…

  Beloved,

  Tonight is the winter solstice; my dark god is king, tonight. He is the winter king and he loves me above all others, but I cannot love him for I will always be yours. I have fashioned you a new bride and you don’t even see the difference. My dark lord brought me your sweet, soft bride and I cut out her eyes and tongue. I burnt her body and fashioned you a new bride out of her ashes, Jane’s blood and filth. I gave your new bride with your old bride’s eyes and tongue and, even though she is made of filth, her smile is still pretty. You still kiss her at night. You still love her. I killed your mother. You wept, but not enough. Is it incest now that you commit laying with your new bride? She has your mother’s fingers. When she touches you, she touches you with your mother’s hands.

  Can you hear the voices, my love? Can you hear them? They tell me that it is almost time. My baby is almost ready to be born, but I have one last thing to do. One last curse before she comes. I have no soul left. All I have is hate and blood. When I am done, the very bricks of Thornfield will scream for centuries to come. All your children and your children’s children will make love to blood and filth and death. You have forgotten me. You never loved me, but your children will remember my name.

  Liliana

  The next letter was caked in dried blood, but I read on. How could I stop?

  Beloved,

  This will be the last thing I write. This will be my last will and testament. Tonight, you and yours will see me burnt at the stake. I am a witch. I deserve to burn. I belong in hell with my brethren and my god. He will keep me safe there. There is no room in heaven for me. I gave birth to Jane, last night. I gave birth to her in the basement of Thornfield Hall. I screamed and labored alone in the dark. My blood stains the bricks there, now, and so does Jane’s. We are part of this place, now. I held my sweet girl for a few hours. I kissed her head and then I carried her up to Witching Hill. I left her there, alone. My god will take her. She is his now as am I. It is strange. I thought she would be misshapen and hideous like my god. I thought she would have horns and goats’ feet, but she was perfect. She was beautiful and quiet and sweet. I wanted to hold her forever. I wanted to let her suckle at my breast. I wanted to be her mother. For a moment, I remembered what real love felt like, again, and it hurt so terribly that the fire I face tonight seems like solace. Letting her go was so much harder than letting you go. My arms ache for her now. I am sobbing. Can you taste my tears? They all think I am afraid of the fire, but I have nothing to fear, there. I am afraid for her. I am afraid for her, alone on Witching Hill, with only my terrible lord to comfort her. What will he do with her? Where will he take her? This is all I ever need know of hell.

  You hate me now. You hate me more than any man has ever hated any woman. All the love is gone and I must admit that if I could take it all back, I would. If I could be a maid, again, I would. I would never walk down the path that leads me to you. I would never let you take me in the green grass and leave me untouchable and forsaken. I would never wander the path to Witching Hill. I have earned your hate. The bride I fashioned for you tried to kill you in your sleep and you killed her. You held her and wept over her body and found that she carried your son and that he lived, but neither of them was real. You probably hold your son in your arms, now, and imagine him a gift from God. But your wife and son were not gifts from your God. They were gifts from my god, the god of the vast and infinite abyss. They are a gift from the old gods that call out to me. They are doors to a world filled with horror and wonder. Can you see a glimpse of that world when you hold your baby? Can you see that he is one of the old ones? You tasted my blood when you kissed your wife and the baby you hold in your arms is only mud. It has no soul. Now, the spell will seep into you as you seeped into my life and created a soulless child. Now all your sons will follow in your path. They will marry young and all the women they love will die. Death will follow them like a lover. Their lips will be poison, as will yours. Forever, until the end of time, this shall be for Rochester men. Girl after girl will die in your arms and you will weep until you decide that love isn’t worth it. Until you stop loving at all and you are empty and hollow and dead. Such is my curse. Such is your hell. You will die alone, knowing your sons will suffer as you suffered. Your sons will carry on forever, but they will all be soulless creatures made of my blood. There will never be hope or love. There will only be hate and loneliness that eats away at your soul until there is nothing left but rage. Until the very soul in you dies as my soul has died. Every woman they touch will wilt and die and if they don’t touch a woman, the air they exhale will carry death with it. I have given you the gift of death, my love. Not death for you. Death for all those who come near you. Cruel and brutal death.

  I think they are coming for me. I wonder if I ever loved you, really. I wonder if such a thing as love can ever be real. Even still, if you came to me tonight and told me you loved me, I would end all this. I would end the curse and the blood. I would silence the chorus of demons and ghosts that have risen up to make your Thornfield their home. I would silence my own breaking heart. The night is long and dark. Forgive me.

  The letter ended and I rested my head on my pillow. Liliana was right. The night is long and dark. I fell asleep dreaming of demon babies that bore my name and hoping that Edward wasn’t sleeping in Blanche’s arms. I wondered if I should have followed Helen and left Thornfield. But I couldn’t imagine belonging anyplace else.

  Chapter 24

  “It might, too, have been the singular cold that alienated me.”

  ~ .H.P. Lovecraft

  EDWARD AND HIS FRIENDS LEFT in the morning. He never did find me to say goodbye. It was for the best, anyway. I stayed in my room all morning. With Edward gone, Thornfield Hall grew quiet again. The extra servants left and life went back to normal. I packed the letters away and tried to forget about Liliana and Richard Rochester and his descendant, Edward. My mind was quickly lost in my school work. I spent my days mired in my classes and studies, and my evenings were filled with all the books I needed to read. I was determined to keep a 4.0 GPA, so I buried myself in studying.

  I took care of Miss Adele at night. I put her to bed when I found her wandering the halls. I sat with her at dinner, but Miss Adele changed after Edward left. She grew distant and she stopped making sense. The nurse said it was the Alzheimer’s. She said that it would get worse with time. I understood that. I had read enough to understand the dismal progression of dementia in an elderly woman nearing the end of her life, but Miss Adele seemed to be suffering from more than Alzheimer’s. Her inner light had faded. It was like she was giving up on life.

  Some evenings, after all my work was done, I would write long emails to Helen and send them off the next morning, at school, since the house had no Wi-Fi or Internet service. I hadn’t been able to reach Helen since our fight. It was like she had vanished. I tried calling her. I’d even gone to her apartment, where she lived with her boyfriend Jake, but there was no one home every time I stopped by. It was weird. Like she’d completely disappeared.

  The
weeks passed quickly. School was everything I had hoped it would be. The people there were different than they had been in high school. They were focused and worked hard. It helped that all my advanced placement classes and testing had made it so I could skip all of my freshman level classes. I was in classes with people who were serious about their work. No one looked at me like I was a dork or a nerd when they found out I had the highest marks in all my classes. Instead, they came to me for help and respected me. It was an entirely new world and it felt good. Finally, my life was starting to feel good. In between classes, I would sit in front of Morton Hall, the biology building, and read my books in the grass. I would look up at the wondrous neo Gothic buildings and watch the clouds drift by. Sometimes, thoughts of Edward would drift through my mind like the clouds I would gaze at. I wondered if he was okay. How were his classes going? Did he still wish he was an English major? Was he still dating Blanche? On weekends, would he go off campus and head into Manhattan? Would he go to clubs and fancy restaurants with Blanche and her glamorous friends? I shook my head. It would make me crazy if I kept thinking about him. Not Liliana crazy, but still…

  I was sitting on the grass going through my Chemistry notes, one warm October afternoon, when a young man came and sat down next to me. I recognized him from the pre-med group I had joined on campus. I hadn’t talked to him, but I rarely talked to anyone, so this was nothing new. He was a little taller than me and slim with short, medium-brown hair and round wire-framed glasses. He reminded me of Harry Potter. He smiled at me and looked at the tattered copy of For Whom the Bell Tolls I had been dragging around with me since that night in the library with Edward.

  “Doing a little light reading?” he asked.

  I laughed and shook my head.

  “We’re in the same pre-med group. I’m Sinjun.”

  My eyes widened. “That’s a cool name.”

  “It’s my grandfather’s name, very old English name; short for Saint John.”

  “Well, it’s very unique.

  “Thanks…

  “Oh—I’m Jane,” I said, realizing he was waiting for me to tell him my name.

  He nodded and then shoved his hands in his pockets. “Hey, a few of us are putting together a trip to Haiti this summer. It’s kind of an education-volunteer-help-the-poor-but-get-some-good-experience-too, kind of thing. Your name came up with one of the professors, I was talking with, as a promising pre-med student who might want to join us.”

  I was taken aback. I didn’t think I had made that much of an impression on anyone. “Really?”

  “Yeah. Dr. Blackwood has wonderful things to say about you. She thinks you’re brilliant.”

  I blushed. “Wow.”

  I had two classes with Dr. Blackwood and they were notoriously the hardest classes in the pre-med curriculum. Dr. Blackwood had a reputation for making things hard for her students. I had put in my best effort and done very well on all my tests in her classes. I’d even gotten full credit on the essay questions, which was, apparently, unheard of. It hadn’t been easy. I had stayed up late, studying until my eyes felt like they were going to fall out of my head; but I had done it.

  “Anyhow,” he continued. “I thought you might want to join us at some of the planning meetings for the trip.”

  “I would love to!” I said. “But I don’t know if I’d have enough money to pay for airfare or accommodations or anything.”

  “We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. I just think you’d be a good addition to the team.”

  “Thanks,” I said with a shy smile.

  “The meeting is on Monday night at six. It’s room 412 in Morton Hall… So, I’ll see you there?”

  I smiled again. “For sure.”

  Sinjun smiled back at me and, for a moment, he looked like he wanted to say something else, but he just said goodbye and stumbled away. I watched him leave. Wow! My hard work was actually being noticed.

  I went to the medical mission meeting in Morton Hall that Monday night and then every Monday after that. I sat with Sinjun and two girls, named Mary and Sara, and we brainstormed ideas for the upcoming trip. Dr. Blackwood would join us with two doctors, who were supervising the mission, and they would oversee our plans. We planned fundraisers to collect donations, both money and stuff that we could bring to Haiti. Old glasses, vitamins, medicine. Over the following weeks, we managed to collect 60 boxes of Ibuprofen and 100 containers of prenatal vitamins.

  Fall came and went quickly. Between my weekly meetings and my studies, I was so busy that I almost forgot about Helen and Edward. Almost. I had gotten used to the middle-of-the-night eerie laughter. I had gotten used to finding Miss Adele wandering the halls at night. I had gotten used to the expanded tattoo on my back.

  I’d packed up Lillian’s letters in a box and hid it at the back of my closet. I had no idea what I would do with them. Technically, they belonged to Edward. But I didn’t have his cell number or even an email address. So, it wasn’t like I could just text him or email him: Hey I found a bunch of letters that I had no business reading, in the attic where I had no business snooping, written by a woman who was in love with one your ancestors. Oh, and she went insane and cursed your family, BTW, how’s Blanche? Yeah, like that would go over well.

  No. For the time being, I would keep the box of letters in my closet and then wait to see what to do with them. I would keep waiting. That’s what it felt like at Thornfield since Edward had left. There had been no more ghostly visitors. Whatever those strange spirits at Thornfield were doing, I had no idea. What do spirits do when they aren’t popping up in hallways or attics ready to scare you? I also had no idea what they wanted from me. But it felt like they wanted something and I had no way of figuring that out.

  Chapter 25

  We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far.

  ~ H. P. Lovecraft

  THE FIRST DAY OF DECEMBER was colder than usual. Snow flurries peppered the mountains in a blanket of white, and Thornfield Hall was so bitter I had to get up and check the space heaters in Miss Adele’s room once a night to make sure she didn’t catch a chill. I didn’t dare use the fireplace for fear of another fire. I had just tucked Miss Adele in after I had found her wandering the library at 11:00 p.m. I went back to my room to finish my work on my final paper for my English class. I had finally invested in a laptop. I was making decent money and I needed it for my classes. I sat with my laptop in front of me and a mountain of books from the university library around me. My head was aching, but I wanted my paper to be perfect. My paper on French existentialists would be the last English paper I wrote. I wanted it to be magnificent. I had read so many books about Albert Camus that I could quote him.

  Thornfield Hall had been so quiet since that night with Helen, I had almost begun to believe the ghosts I had seen were products of our overactive imaginations. It all seemed so strange when you thought about it. I might as well have believed aliens had come to visit me. The only proof I had that it might have been more than a dream was the collection of letters. I should have given them to Mrs. Fairfax, but then I’d have to admit to her that I was in the attic, snooping. I certainly couldn’t tell her a ghost told me to go up there. I knew the letters should be in a museum or in some Rochester family vault. I was surprised that all the rest of the stuff in the attic was just sitting there, collecting dust and mold. But that was none of my business. Besides, something about the letters held me enthralled. I liked to look at them in the evening and study them. Liliana’s story ran through my head, over and over again, and I knew almost every word of each letter by heart. I was doodling the horned man, from my dream, in the margins of my notebook late one night and my head began to throb.

  I took my glasses off and set them down on the nightstand and rested my eyes for a moment. When I put them back on, the white lady was standing right in fron
t of my bed. I jumped backward and my books and papers flew off the bed. I screamed and then put my hand over my mouth to muffle the noise. I had almost begun to believe that the ghosts had been my imagination.

  “Run!” the white lady whispered.

  I sat, frozen in place. My heart pounded in my ears like a big bass drum. I couldn’t find the courage to breathe let alone run.

  “Run!” the ghost said again.

  Slowly, fear melted into curiosity. My hand came down from my mouth and I studied the spectral visitor in front of me. She was diaphanous and beautiful. She was dressed in a simple white gown. Her long, dark brown hair spilled down her back like a waterfall. She seemed sad.

  “Are you Liliana?” I asked.

  The ghost nodded. “He’s coming,” she said, fading in and out. “You need to leave this place.” Her voice floated around me, swirling around my head. “Leave now. Fight your fate. Run.” For a minute, I thought I must have been suffering from sleep deprivation. Too much Red Bull and too much Camus had addled my brain and turned me into a psych case. I rubbed my eyes and Liliana was gone. It had all been a dream.

  Then the laughter started. It began far away and it crept up the hall. As it grew closer to me, it became louder and louder, until I had to put my hands over my ears to stop it from driving me crazy. I crawled under the covers and pulled them up to my chin. The lights flickered off, leaving me in the dark. I screamed. I didn’t do anything to muffle my scream. I just screamed. My laptop shut down and complete darkness consumed the room. The laughter became so loud that I couldn’t shut it out.