A Summoning of Souls

by Leanna Renee Hieber

  The double Gothic arches of the behemoth, the tallest man-made structure on the continent, seemed to hold up the bright sky as if the clouds were the clerestory of a cathedral. What a magnificent stage for her antagonist to set his scene. What did Prenze want with Eve here?

  The permits they’d found in the folder at the viewing parlor, Eve remembered with a sinking feeling. City permits for an art exhibit.

  Was she about to be on terrible display?

  Loud and abrupt, a barrel organ erupted into a clattering, eerie tune not meant for such a machine at the mouth of the pedestrian landing. The instrument and its grinder, a cloaked figure, were bordered on either side by the immense arches set out into the river, and suddenly the beauty of it all loomed as a threat.

  Eve placed the tune clanging from the organ bleating at the bridge approach; it was one of her favorites, a pavane in F-sharp minor by Gabriel Fauré. Written a decade prior, the tune was known to waft into her head more than any other. It was an intimate, particular personal detail Prenze couldn’t have known, and that terrified Eve more than anything yet had.

  She gripped the carriage door again, but this time, with a pinging, metallic click, the door swung open.

  That’s it, whispered a snide and sneering Prenze. Eve prayed she could unsettle and overturn his haughtiness. Come, it’ll all be over soon, just as you dared, so go on.

  A sign at the mouth of the pedestrian walkway proclaimed the arrival of a temporary exhibit:

  Welcome to The River Styx! Cross at your leisure or peril and reflect upon your life!

  Art installation courtesy of Arte Uber Alles

  Her mind remained wedged open, unable to reclaim her shielding. Nudged along, she felt as though her body was being carried in the eddy of a current. Stepping out onto the wooden slats of the bridge promenade, watching the buildings fall away below, a tenth of a mile passed before she was over water and nearing the great Gothic suspension towers.

  Couples, families, tourists, and workers strolled across the promenade in a range of immaculate finery to sooty work clothes, looking at the beautiful sculptures of angels and seraphim placed at intervals.

  To Eve’s horror, she recognized the sculptural style. Dupont’s figures, just like he’d made for the stage set: sculpture in the manner of reliquaries. What the passersby couldn’t know was that each figure held bits of dead flesh inside. Some might wear actual skin, others bones, organs, hair, each a token taken without permission, each a work of haunt.

  These statues represented more restless souls and unfinished business, hence the ache at the back of her skull, the constant whispers at the corner of her mind. But with these works now exposed, where were their spirits? Trapped, most likely. Hopefully not for long, if Maggie had her way and Mosley ruined his systems, but she couldn’t be sure.

  A few workers in suspenders and shirtsleeves were wrapping bits of wire across the railing. The bridge was made of wire rope, so much so the wire could wrap around the earth, designers were proud to boast. What was this additional wire needed for?

  You… murmured a reply in her mind. This is all here for you, my dear.…

  The hairs on the back of her neck rose as something bored into the base of her skull.

  Turning slowly around, the sight before her made her blood run cold.

  Above her and coming closer, a man floated in a black suit coat and cloak, hanging among the diagonal stays and vertical suspender cables, a fearsome spider in the web of wire rope.

  His smile was fixed like a mask, his eyes bright and hard, glasses slightly askew. Prenze’s projection had never been stronger or more unnerving.

  A man began walking toward her, his feet solidly on the wooden planks. In a dizzying optical shift, the projection retreated as the man strode closer.

  Body paralyzed, time slowing, Eve stood stock still as Prenze, the actual, physical man himself, approached and stood a mere foot away from her. The projection of his energy merged with the man in a sickening, disconcerting fusion of dimensions, his mask of a clenched-jaw smile unchanging as he regained himself.

  “What do you want with me?” She asked.

  “Nothing unusual,” Prenze replied calmly. The sound of his voice just before her and not against her ear was a relief, though his proximity was cause for alarm. She put her hand back on her forearm, ready to withdraw the knife if need be. “You’re just here to do what you always do, Miss Whitby. You’re here as a service to the dead.”

  He tried to nudge her forward with a physical hand on her shoulder, but she dug her heels in against the edge of the wood. “And what would that be?” Eve figured if she could buy time, to keep him talking, then she could strategize a plan of escape and any of her ghosts watching could find ways to help. Zofia had removed herself from view, which was wise, but she wasn’t sure who was on her side.

  “To talk to spirits,” he replied simply. “Come, let’s take in this art installation, shall we? Can’t make a scene if you’re already in a scene!”

  The sculptures were placed at forty-something-foot intervals along the bridge’s walkway, pedestrian flow keeping to the right coming and going but pausing in clusters and knots of family and friends taking in the harbor view and the installation.

  Hired guards, Pinkertons from the look of their uniforms, stood between the statue intervals as if they, too, were part of the exhibit. Each had a tray in their hands with faux coins and a small sign marked “For Your Safe Passage.” The coins representing passage across the river Styx, the principal of Greek mythology’s five underworld rivers the dead might pass over. Everyone was bid contemplate their mortality high above the East River current. It only played into Eve’s plea to make the spirit world that much closer to touch.

  The sky was so beautiful, the river so busy, the promenade so full of life. The ever-climbing skyline of New York—Manhattan and its boroughs, both inspiring and hard to fathom, the large and small scale—was all in view, from the teeming docks to high-finance rooftop spires gleaming in sun like cathedrals of commerce.

  Passersby along the promenade, tucking their parasols under arms lest they be turned inside out in the wind, top hats held by the brim, murmured toward Eve and Prenze in their black clothes, gesturing and complimenting the immersion of all the “performers” with their tokens of travel, their payment to the boatman, as they contemplated the sculptural visages of disquieted forms.

  The spirits of the city were equally intrigued by this display. Each statue had a throng of spirits floating around it, examining it, their transparent bodies silhouettes from a range of decades and cultures, imprinted against the sky like dimensional cameos with light shining through. Several spirits, their frock coats and dresses trailing away into wisps of vapor, tried to take the prop coins, looking at the offerings wistfully as if the tokens might return them to the shores of the living, their hands passing through the platters, gently rearranging the offerings.

  The art had drawn out the delighted living and the luminous dead in equal measure, mortality contemplated on the stage of man’s greatest feat of engineering far above the dynamic metropolis. It would be utterly poetic if it weren’t so spiritually threatening.

  “Keep moving,” Prenze murmured. He wasn’t touching her, but she could feel her body pressed as though a hand were clamped on her shoulder, pushing. “Toward the tower.”

  When she turned back, looking up at Prenze’s cruel face defiantly, he loomed over her. She could feel his mesmerism pressuring her to engage, to reach out to the spirit world she was so awash in. She closed her eyes and pushed back against the impulse.

  “What do you want?”

  “To end ghosts’ unholy reign of terror on this city. And I admit, I want to expand my influence and thrall over the living. Is that too much to ask?”

  He laughed. Whatever he had once been—once a scared, sad and mistreated child, then a hardworking chemist
and innovative businessman— exerting power now was the goal, the broken child trying to reclaim a dominance he felt was owed him.

  Slipping her hand in one of her jacket pockets, she felt for the tintype of Mrs. Prenze. She’d use it to unsettle him at the right moment. It wasn’t all ghosts he hated, it was just his mother, Eve intuited; but any ghost represented his childhood torment. All the vast wonders his expanded psychic capacity had offered and he’d gathered no nuance? Made no new discoveries of the wonders of the spirit? Eve pitied as much as feared someone so fixated on one violent retaliation. She and her team were each an example of how to live a haunted life more fully and meaningfully.

  However, righteousness didn’t free her. Trying to turn on her heel and run, she was quickly whirled back around again by psychic force. Eve had no experience in the kind of physical compelling Albert was exerting. She tried again to shield, but the wounds on her temple and shoulder throbbed instead. He was too far in for her to shield with any effectiveness. Even her hand was immovable, unable to unsheathe her knife after all.

  Ahead, set up against the formidable stones on the right side of the vast western suspension tower, sat a black-lacquered wooden dais topped with a carved wooden throne trimmed in gold. All this must have been made in tandem with Dupont’s stage work, a culmination of the elusive great experiment.

  Above the dais, a few feet above the apex of the throne was a golden diadem tacked to the stone, a floating crown with wires trailing away from it. Behind the throne was a whirring, circular dynamo, powering an electrical current that attached not only to the throne, but Eve could see bright new copper wiring tracing up and over along the whole of the bridge, wire upon wire, upon wire.

  “The Pretty Girl with the Electric Mind,” read a plaque at the base of the platform.

  To the side of the throne, under glass, sat a familiar object: the monitor box that had been placed outside her office to affect her engagement with spirits before Mosley blew it down and Jacob had taken it to Bellevue for examination. Here it was again, stolen from the doctors, repaired and in working order. As she approached, she noticed the graph, the ticker scrolling out graphite markings from a needle, reading more rapidly, a peak and valley, an undulating line. It sensed her fear; or, in fact, it was recording it. Perhaps even amplifying it, she couldn’t be sure.

  “What is all this?” Eve asked, folding her arms.

  Prenze smiled that disturbing mask of a smile. “You’re the most gifted medium of your age, Miss Whitby. And that isn’t, as I’ve realized, a lie or hyperbole. I tested your grandmother who is a known legend, but you…your readings were quite literally off the charts. I’ve never seen someone so open to ghosts. So utterly drowning in them,” he said with distaste. His eyes, perhaps once bright and engaging, seemed clouded by cataracts of hate. “You’re just covered in them. They swarm around you. Like a disease. It isn’t right, Whitby. You spread contagion.”

  Movement drew her eye to the monitor, the pencil making wide swaths along the ticker tape. She could feel the spirit world’s agitation. Whispers and murmurs, shouts even, were all coming at her as swift as the biting breeze, autumn shifting toward a distinct chill, the changing seasons and the ice of spirits entwined. She glanced away from the monitor to the harbor below, boat whistles suddenly mirroring banshee screams, the harbor noise traded for the clatter of the dead.

  “I’ve made adjustments to this device that was placed outside your office to gain readings on you, and your spirits.”

  “Blocking them, you mean—”

  “Not entirely. Many of your associates still got through. I learned a lot. Now I know how to cast your net, your signature, for the widest impact.”

  The barrel organ grinder was making his way across the bridge; the unsettling tune seemed to crescendo as Eve’s nerves mounted.

  “Step up, please,” Prenze said, taking her hand and, with his walking stick, pressing it against the back of her knee, forcing her to bend. She stumbled forward and onto the small dais, her knees crashing against the foot of the throne. “To your seat. Come. You cannot fight this.”

  He hoisted her up and sat her down. She closed her eyes and tried to push back, to shield, to reject his hold, but her body felt numb. A low-grade vibration pulsed across the seat of the throne, which she realized was a plate of metal, mildly electrified. Once she was seated, Prenze gingerly set small metal discs in place, one on each temple and one tacked with a theatrical adhesive to the center of her forehead—her third eye.

  Wires flowed from the discs and toward the bridge where they wound around the thick wire rope, wiring her into the thousands of miles of wire coiled across the structure. It seemed clear the wires were meant to amplify her mind. Once the spirit world was entirely open, truly open, that is.

  In her editorial, in hopes of a show of force, Eve had bid the spectral city open itself to goodness and fullness, to declare itself. For the living and the dead to rejoice in the presence of ghosts. They were all the more visible. Now, all the more vulnerable. Somehow, she’d played right into his hands when she’d hoped she was shaking a spear and appearing formidable as a unified spiritual front against him.

  The low-grade current made her teeth chatter and made her slump as if lifeless against the throne. Her body was unresponsive, but her mind raced.

  With horror, she thought about the additional wire servicing paperwork routing from New York to Tarrytown. There was another wire tracing its way to Sanctuary. She had warned Clara Bishop, advising her and Gran that the forest glade was in need of protection, and had told Antonia to follow her visions, which surely warned of the same concern, but was that enough now, when whatever burst of electricity she’d be a part of, would arc its way there?

  From the back of the dais, Prenze brought out stanchions with a velvet rope and corded off an area around them, nodding to one of the hired guards who then set up a similar barrier, indicating that the area Prenze and Eve took up could only be witnessed at a significant arm’s length.

  Movement out of the corner of her eye drew Eve’s attention: her operatives, including their quiet Olga, along with Vera and Zofia, were floating just beyond the wide curving tube of the greatest load-bearing cables of the main suspension.

  Withdrawing a black scarf from his interior coat pocket, Prenze unfurled a few specific objects that made Eve queasy. He’d been to her workplace to take her sacred items.

  He placed her séance bell, Cora’s painted box of matches, and her office tallow candle next to her on the wide arm of the throne. “No one can say I stole your séance materials if you have them,” he said, leaning in toward her with a smile.

  The insidious power-play of it all: he’d gotten to Gran, to her, to Cora, to her operatives, to the reverends. He’d loomed at her house. At her parents’. He’d gotten into her office. He’d gotten into her head. Her ears. Her life. Tried to hurt—no, kill, her love. He’d swiped at everything that meant anything, trying to destroy it all. Eve had never felt such fury or boiling hatred in her entire life. Perhaps he hated her just the same, for all the things he never had.

  She spat in his face.

  The smile unchanged, he used the black scarf to wipe the spittle from his nose and cheek. Still smiling, he struck the match and lit the candle.

  He picked up her bell and rang it, a clarion, resounding tone that seemed to carry, in Eve’s mind, across the whole harbor.

  “Go on. Call your work to order.”

  He turned a knob near the wires, and she felt a surging, painful snap. The metal buttons on her uniform sparked. Wisps of smoke came up from the buttonholes, and Eve let loose a panicked gasp before he turned down the knob again.

  “Call your work to order,” he repeated. “I’ve calibrated the amperage perfectly, for the best long-range effect. But you’d best get on with it, as women have a lower tolerance level to prolonged current, so call your work to order,” Prenze bid s
oftly in her ear. “Open.”

  She wanted to swing her fist and punch him right in the insidious mouth, but she couldn’t move her arms; the current had seen to that, weighing her down, tethering her where she sat.

  Eve was too in tune with the spirit world to ever be fully closed from it. The sound of the bell was an instinctual opening, a drawing back of a curtain, connecting to the spirit world was muscle memory tied to the ring of the bell, and Prenze was counting on it. The sounds of the rushing wind, an opened door, an unlocked gate, all followed. She was connected to the dead, and they to her. As inextricable now as ever.

  “Spirits, hear us…” Prenze hissed like a snake, aping her séance opening.

  He turned on the electricity, and Eve felt her body shake more boldly, felt her teeth snapping together, felt any scrap of physical control leave her.

  Every wire, cable, metal part of the bridge, all seemed alive and pulsing. Joints sparked. A string of colored lights and little paper lanterns along the bridge’s length lit up, buzzing and flickering with the pulse of Eve’s heartbeat, the sparks that the increased electricity manifested created small explosions of glittering silica dust of many colors that trailed out from the lanterns like firework streams. The crowd gasped and cheered at the unique visual effect.

  The spirits did too, reactive to the pretty fireworks, but to Eve’s horror, every spirit that touched the bridge, whatever spirit might be near a metal support or floated within any of the web of wires and cables, their form faded away. Dissolving like wisps of smoke blown by a swift breath. The tiny gasps of delight the ghosts had exclaimed while watching the show soon turned to stifled spectral screams.

  Where the spirits went, Eve couldn’t guess. The electrical force magnified by the wiring of the bridge was disassembling the spirits near it, whether the souls could amass ever again was a part of the divine mystery she couldn’t be privy to.

  “Get away, spirits…away from the bridge,” Eve cried, her tongue thick in her throat. She was parched, dizzy and nauseous.