A Summoning of Souls
Page 23
You must understand what we’re dealing with. See what I saw, my new friend, Maggie said to her host, mind to mind, and let her thoughts wander to the stage set in the theatre district when the spirits of children superimposed themselves onto infernal set pieces to show Eve and her team where parts of dead bodies were hidden in each statue of the elaborate set.
Arielle now saw these four bodies in the room not as sculpture, but as they truly were: an active crime scene of desecration. Above the heads of the figures were wisps of eerie light, like old engravings of little fires above the heads of prophets, demarking fire of holy spirit. Only this was the flicker of dying embers. Unlike the souls of children that had recently been set to rest, whatever pieces of life left within these statues belonged to souls that were so long detached and kept away from what unsettled them that they’d begun to entirely fade. Not potent enough to cry out for help.
Arielle choked back a sob and turned her body away. Trembling to the point of her knees nearly buckling out from under her, she ambled toward the smooth-lacquered ebony desk trimmed in gilded, Grecian patterns.
What all happened here? Maggie pressed.
“You’ll hate me if I show you,” Arielle whispered to her possessor, leaning her fair hands on the dark desk’s edge for support.
“I come not to hate, but to help,” Maggie countered, bidding Arielle hear her out loud, hoping if she heard it on her own tongue, she’d believe it.
Behind the desk, in lieu of a fireplace, floor-to-ceiling bricks appeared a fireplace shaft. But the bricks were odd—not clay, but metallic.
“What’s this?” Maggie pressed. Arielle quailed. Maggie forced Arielle’s hand into a fist.
“Before he built the downstairs prison for spirits… Here he began torturing Mother’s spirit, several years ago. Bricked her ghost up behind electrified bricks to keep the spark of her spirit contained. Like Poe’s Fortunato behind Montresor’s mortar. For the love of God.”
Her body sunk heavily into the leather desk chair as Maggie shuddered in her body, recoiling from the description of torture, thinking about how Albert ripped her own soul apart for Sanctuary to piece back together. She opened her mind to the memory and let Arielle see it, feel it. Feel the pain, the darkness, the fear. Maggie kept the memory of Sanctuary to herself.
The woman cried out. “I’m sorry, spirit, I’m sorry,” she begged the spirit within her.
My name is Maggie.
“I’m sorry, Maggie.”
“You may not think of us like the living.” Maggie ground out through Arielle’s clenched teeth. “But we were. We still are, just not in the way the world can comprehend, nor legislate, nor protect.”
“It was, at first, for the love of God,” Arielle explained, fresh tears spilling down her cheeks. “Albert and I were always close. Mother always said too close. I hated how cruel she was to him so I tried to love him enough for all of us. But I guess it wasn’t enough. Like Albert, I did think the persistence of ghosts was unholy, and I tried, with Albert, to stop those women, the ones using ghosts like they were some sort of service.”
My auntie Evelyn, you mean? Maggie pressed. And my best friend Eve? Those gifted women who do so much for the living and the dead?
“I always thought communing with the dead was wrong, evil.”
Do you think I am evil, Arielle? Maggie asked. If I were evil, I’d be here tormenting you, not trying to help. Take a moment. Feel my heart. Search my mind. We’re a lot alike, Arielle, women of privilege blinded by the wrong things. Seduced by dark forces. That’s what killed me. I don’t want it to hurt you too.
In a strange, swirling moment, as if the two women were swept into a waltz through time, scenes were shared of mistakes and missteps, bending to the will of those who held uncanny power over them rather than thinking for themselves on their own terms.
Maggie watched a potent memory: Arielle threw her arms around Albert who had snuck into her rooms to see her in secret, begging her to keep the fact that he hadn’t died a secret. He placed a tonic for sleeplessness by her bedside. Only much later would she realize he was slowly poisoning her to keep her compliant and out of the way as his obsessions escalated.
In turn, Arielle watched as a young Natalie Stewart, a year before Eve would be born, held Maggie in her arms as she died, in a dining room covered in blood, as the dark cabal Maggie had unwittingly assisted fell apart around her. Maggie remembered there’d been so much she’d wanted to say to her friend before her body failed that night.
Maggie’s ghostly tears fed Arielle’s living ones.
“I never hated ghosts,” Arielle murmured in a plea. “I thought we needed to let spirits pass on and go to Heaven to help them, not contact them to linger. Though I doubt Heaven’s where Mother would have gone.” Arielle shifted into her mind again for the next part, looking around as if frightened she’d be overheard. Mother was too hateful, too spiteful for Heaven.
It was as if the mention of her summoned her.
The screaming returned, that terrible banshee wail. The woman’s fine gown had gone to tatters during her imprisonment, along with a floating mess of wild hair and scraps of satin, glistening black pits for eyes bearing down on her daughter and her possessor with brute force and searing cold.
“Get out, get out,” dead Mrs. Prenze shrieked, “get away, get away, you wretched little brat, get OUT.… What good have you done to MY house but squander it?!”
Ducking away from the raging spirit, Arielle fumbled beneath the center desk drawer for something, her fingers closing around a small key and prying it loose.
Your proof, Arielle said internally. In these moments, Maggie was no longer the driving force, and all she could do was offer energy and support as Arielle shied away from the lunges of her mother’s ghost.
Maggie admired her host in this moment. Despite being screamed at by the ghost of Mrs. Prenze who rent the air with icy talons, swiping at Arielle’s hair and face, Arielle managed to open a desk drawer and fumble past papers and glass vials with marks of poison on their labels.
You’ll have to come back for the rest of the papers, they’ll likely be telling. But this…
Arielle finally pulled out a black leather-bound journal. You’ll want this.
Clutching the volume, Arielle ran.
Her body far more responsive than when Maggie dove in, the entwined souls tore down the flights to the ground floor entrance foyer where Mahoney was trying to help Alfred Prenze into a chair, a pool of vomit on the fine rug.
“No, stop, I must get out and follow Albert,” Alfred mumbled. “I have to stop him from hurting more people.… I have to help.…”
“You are in no state to do so, my friend,” Mahoney said gently.
Ignoring them both, Arielle went to the front armoire and threw a russet-brown wool riding coat over her day dress, tucking the leather-bound journal into a deep interior pocket.
“Just where do you think you are going?” Mahoney asked wearily, as if he’d been fighting all day with exhausting children. Maggie could feel Arielle hesitate, so she helped supply the response.
“Where do you think? Help or get out of the way!”
Arielle threw the door open, blinked at the bright light of day, finally free, and kept running.
Chapter Seventeen
Eve walked in darkness. Regaining a sense of herself only in sound, a crying child. One by one her senses returned. Vision finally arrived. She stood in the hallway of a large house with no lights on, only moonlight through tall windows with every shutter open and creaking in a high wind that gusted against shuddering panes. Beyond was a sleepy New York that seemed less built up than she remembered. She didn’t recognize the grand home.
The last thing she remembered, she’d been thrown against the wall of a carriage by Prenze’s manipulation. She was, for all intents and purposes, unconscious. But where was she now
? This was like no psychic journey she’d ever experienced before.
She passed a little boy in a room with two beds, two sides of the room identical to each other. One of the beds was empty. In the other sat a boy, in a white nightgown, stock still, bright red hair mussed, a frightened look on his young face.
There was crying from the end of the hall. Eve was drawn to it and looked in: a miserable looking alcove with one narrow window and an empty wardrobe with no doors.
“What did I tell you?” a sharp voice yelled.
“To stop inventing nonsense,” the child repeated morosely.
“To stop being stupid. Pray to God he makes you smarter, like your brother.” The woman shoved him toward the door. “If you don’t quit your fantastical ideas you’ll be sleeping in this closet for the rest of the week.”
She raised her hand as if she was about to strike him. He ran back to his room down the carpeted hall and slammed the door.
Eve followed toward it and moved through the door as if she were a ghost.
“I think they’re good ideas, Albert,” the other boy whispered. “In fact, I think we could make a whole business of your tonics and cure-alls. Just keep it to yourself.”
Albert said nothing, just climbed into bed and crawled under the covers, turning away from the brother who was clearly concerned for him.
Albert and Alfred Prenze as children. How was she watching this memory?
The malevolent Albert had truly gotten into her head. With his level of psychic connection to her, albeit an unwelcome bond, perhaps when she went unconscious, she had slipped into his unconscious mind? An unexpected merge?
The scene changed. Eve stood in the corner of a lavish parlor draped in black crepe and filled with vases of pungent lilies. A man was laid out in finery with his arms crossed over his chest. A wake. The two boys, a bit older, were staring at the body before them. To their right was a pretty little flame-haired baby in a white lace dress set in a pram. Mrs. Prenze, tall and severe, looking older than she likely was on account of her harsh face, gripped each twin’s hand tightly.
One of the boys—Eve couldn’t really make out who was who—was sniffling quietly.
The woman seized each of the children’s hands and placed them on their father’s cold face. Each boy whimpered.
“Your father is dead and that’s that,” the woman scolded, her voice rising. “No crying for the dead!”
The baby in white lace began to whine.
She whirled toward the pram and screamed. “NO CRYING FOR THE DEAD!”
A sharp, dizzying shift in vision and the scene changed. Partially.
Eve was staring at the same room. Some of the furnishings of the gilded parlor were different, but the room was again draped in crepe. The two boys were now adults. The differences in personality became clear: Alfred had a softer face that was pensive and peaceful: Albert was hard and harsh. Arielle was a young and lovely thirteen or so, wide eyed and vulnerable. All were dressed in black.
Before them lay another body.
Mrs. Prenze. She even died with a scowl on her face.
There was a tense, dreadful silence between the siblings.
Suddenly, Albert screamed at the body. “NO CRYING FOR THE DEAD!” Abruptly, he turned on his heel to leave the room.
A ghost shot up from the body in a move so sudden it made Eve gasp.
Mrs. Prenze’s greyscale body, her transparent form swathed in the widow’s weeds the undertaker had dressed her in, flew up above her body and turned toward Albert as Arielle’s hands went to her mouth in a shriek. Alfred’s mouth gaped open.
The newly risen spirit flew after Albert as he ran to the door with a moan of despair, her shrill, berating tone like nails on a chalkboard. “YOU UNGRATEFUL WRETCH!”
Eve followed the ghost and Albert, but at the threshold of the parlor, everything changed again. She was plunged into a long corridor that was entirely dark ahead, save for the slight silhouette of Albert, lit by a building in flames behind them, framed by a doorway.
The hall they were now in was a distinct one, a psychic precipice Eve had been in often of late. The Corridors between life and death that opened up to anyone at a particular crossroads. This was the day Albert nearly died.
“I want to be free,” he pleaded to the empty hall. Eve found it striking that there were no framed pictures on the Corridor walls indicating distinct moments of Albert’s life, only the faint flicker of fire behind them vaguely illuminating a misty darkness.
Suddenly Albert put a hand to his head, and Eve felt a sympathetic pang in her own. A different pain than that of a blow. A specific tearing, rending feeling. She knew it well. It happened to her when she was young and her psychic gifts first took over her awareness, obliterating all else.
Then, the air of the Corridors spoke in an eerie chorus:
“You want power you feel you were denied, do you not, Albert Prenze?” The collective unseen voices made for an unnatural sound. Eve didn’t trust that it was human; it sounded like an elemental force given capacity for speech.
Gran had always told Eve to be careful if the Corridors ever spoke, and never, ever accept if the Corridors offered something. It was like eating something in the underworld: it would prove binding and never for the soul’s own good. The Corridors were a place where souls could easily be tempted to darkness before they searched out the light.
“Yes,” Albert gasped desperately. “Give me what I deserve.”
“Then go,” the seething murmurs chorused. “See what you can do with it.…”
Still clutching his aching, expanding mind, Albert turned back to the threshold, toward the living, toward the fire, his eyes falling on something. Eve watched as he bent to examine a wooden crate set just at the edge of the portal toward death.
Inside the crate was a makeshift box with a spool of paper, wires, and graphing implements. The early great experiment. Propped against it was a medical journal boasting bold queries as headlines:
Can we map the human brain? Can we chart a sixth and psychic sense? Are we merely a sequence of electrical charges or do we have Patterns? What does our mind possess?
“I will possess control,” Albert murmured, sweeping the box into his arms as he rushed out from the Corridors into the burning building. Eve followed as if she were attached to him. Heat flashed across her face and body. Out of the corner of her eye across a smoke-filled factory floor, she could see a figure choking and falling to his knees. Albert, coughing, escaped onto the second-floor landing as the flames crested without helping the man behind, the body that would be left in his wake.
As he was about to hobble down a metal set of stairs to a loading landing, Albert turned to Eve.
“You,” he sneered. His face could have been handsome if it weren’t so hardened and weighted down by bitterness. “You’re not welcome here,” he said, and pushed her down the stairs of his memory.
Eve fell as though she were falling down a pit or a well, falling away from memory and back against the hard wood and upholstered fabric of the present carriage, her consciousness crashing against the pain erupting in her head.
Lifting her hand, she felt the large lump where she’d been cast against the side of the carriage and a narrow gash that was slightly bloody, although coagulation slowed the flow. She gritted her teeth as she raised her injured shoulder. Putting her cuff to the small gash, Eve pressed to stanch it fully, hissing at the sting and throb. Otherwise she seemed intact.
Opening her eyes slowly, she cried out at the face that floated before her: Albert Prenze still projected his presence just on the other side of the carriage window, a rivulet of her own blood intersecting the pane from where she’d been knocked against the corner of the frame. She put her hand to the sheathed knife but stopped. It would do no good against a mere projection.
You intruder, his presence growled.
Prenze’s image just laughed and faded. She hadn’t banished it; he simply disappeared. Eve wasn’t sure she wanted to know why.
The metal walls of the carriage still blocked out the ghosts beyond from coming too close, though nothing could keep little Zofia from maintaining a watch at a safe distance, floating as the carriage slowed in downtown congestion.
Lining up behind other fine vehicles outside the bridge side of city hall, the carriage stopped. No one came for her. No one stepped down from the driver’s perch. She tried the door. It was locked securely from the outside by some sort of device. Average hired hacks and hansoms had no such impolite trappings.
Glancing out the window past gaslight streetlamps not yet lit during the bright midday, Eve noticed the side seams of city hall. Like so much of New York, it was all façade and positioning. The building’s face was marble and beaux arts finery while the back of the building remained plain, its 1811 designers foolishly thinking no one would bother to be anywhere uptown of it, especially not near such a derelict district as the former Five Points. That infamy was gone; the gilded age consuming every scrap of the teeming island at the center of the world, and nothing spoke of its dizzying appetite as much as the great landmark ahead.
It was impossible not to be in awe of the inimitable New York and Brooklyn Bridge, no matter what.
A stunning web of wire rope sloped gracefully to the brown granite and limestone towers set with two enormous, pointed arches. The vast, suspension bridge was unmatched, a wonder of engineering and the vision of the Roeblings, finished thanks to the steadfast effort of Emily Roebling, one of Eve’s inspirations. Countless New Yorkers strolled its pedestrian walkways.