A Summoning of Souls

by Leanna Renee Hieber

  Prenze seemed delighted by her panic and leaned in to plead in a sickening, saccharine manner. “I want in. Now let me in. Let me see what you see. Let me walk your walks.” He reached out as if to touch her temples.

  Eve closed her eyes and sent what shielding she could muster out from her body in an explosive capacity, hoping she could sever the tie, close the door, shove him back. “I…renounce…” She couldn’t manage to speak the full rejection, but her energy burst from her like the slap of a hand.

  Prenze rocked back from the force of her shielding, but rather than being put off, he smiled that terrible smile again.

  Her shielding blow was directed overbroad rather than specific, magnified by the wiring. Her radiant energy created a psychic wave that furthered the electrical charge. She could see it on the air, a transparent, cresting, outwardly surging, sluggish tide that glittered with Tesla-coil edges.

  The lightning tendrils of psychic power consumed the nearest floating spirit, a young ghost that wore a long robe, the wispy form dissolving into mist with a little cry of surprise, like blowing a tendril of smoke and seeing it disperse. The forked tongues of the electrical edges of this psychic, electric tide paused for a moment, its pace slowed by consuming the ghost, but then continued to spread.

  Vera floated in proximity to this epicenter, and the old woman’s eyes widened as she saw the wave begin to crest over the edges of the bridge and reach out toward Manhattan, hungry.

  “Run,” Vera cried, screaming to the spirits of the city. “Run! Keep away from the sparking light!” The woman gestured behind her wildly. The spirits heeded her, fleeing in careening, airborne speeds. Vera floated in place.

  Zofia wafted to her side and wrapped her arm around the old woman’s torso and closed her eyes, standing as if they could stop the flow or at least slow the wave down from the rest fleeing in terror and buy them time and distance.

  “No!” Eve cried.

  Vera tried to remove Zofia from a clinging grasp. “No, mi pajarita,” Vera lovingly scolded the floating child at her hip. “I lived a full, living life, a second one in death, I’m ready, you are not. Run to safety, you know where to go.”

  Zofia struggled to keep hold as Vera tried to disentangle her. Olga’s form appeared on the air, always the big sister who swooped in when order needed restoring. The adolescent ghost wrested Zofia free with a gentle, Ukrainian admonishment. Picking up the child she’d taken on as a ward, a fellow casualty from a garment district fire, Olga nearly threw the little girl away from the encroaching spread, putting distance between them.

  Throwing her arms around the old woman as if to shield her from any pain, Olga turned to see the Tesla-coil tendrils work their way up her skirt, leaving nothing behind. The current slowed, surging around them as it encountered their forms, pausing to take them apart as other spirits fled. Olga was the first to disassemble, Vera’s light merging with her own, and soon their clutching images were only vapor, then a bright shimmer of light, then simply part of the hovering clouds.

  Eve’s throat was raw, choking a cry, as further away Zofia screamed, weeping, hands clenched in her slightly singed dress. The little ghost ran away from the consuming tide, as it began spreading again, toward a small, dark point in the air.

  In the distance, between two heavy clouds, a shape seemed to grow in the sky: a small Gothic arch. But the clouds obscured it as the wind picked up across the whole of the harbor, and even Zofia’s form was lost behind mist and vapor. Eve didn’t know where she’d gone, but she prayed it was somewhere safe that only a spirit knew.

  “You can’t…take…m-my spirit family,” Eve mumbled. The rattling of her bones and chattering of her teeth drew blood as she bit her tongue; she had no control to keep a stream of bloody spittle from dripping down the side of her slack jaw.

  “But I can. I am…” Prenze applauded. “You’re doing so well.…” He turned to the harbor and shrieked, “NO CRYING FOR THE DEAD!”

  The only thing Eve could think to do to try to stem the tide, to try to reroute all the energy bent on dispersal of spirit, was to drag it down with her to murky depths. The Corridors between life and death were as much of life as they were of spirit. As this energy wouldn’t harm the living other than perhaps a slight shock or sting, she hoped the dead could take shelter from dissipation in the meantime.

  With the last of her physical control, closing her eyes, Eve said a private benediction known only to her and Gran and let herself slide under into darkness as if slipping beneath the surface of a great body of water.

  Life was unpredictable and cruel, but in death, the spirit should have more control as to when to move on, an idea Eve took great comfort in. As she tumbled into darkness, waiting for the metaphysical floor of the Corridors to catch her falling spirit, Eve mourned her colleagues.

  Vera and Olga should have been able to choose their times to say goodbye, not in an abrupt spiritual sacrifice. Being so tied to her spirit colleagues, Eve could feel the immediate absence, the utter silence of those once vibrant energies. Wherever the wisps went, Eve could only beg the divine mystery of all that was beyond their reach to gather the essence of her friend and hold it in eternal, beautiful, peaceful light.

  But she had to still fight, to warn every spirit to brace itself. Everything of body and spirit existed in a balance, the reality of which only the most dedicated Sensitives could truly grasp, a subtlety lost on Prenze’s vendetta. He had forced her to create an imbalance, used her power to hurt others. She wasn’t going to do that again.

  Her fall into darkness had never taken so long and the Corridors had never felt so foreign. The rising murk she’d first encountered at the beginning of the search for missing and unsettled children during the first brushes with Prenze’s great experiment was now even thicker, as if she were floating in ooze and smoke.

  Eve hoped that by slipping away into the Corridors it could somehow detach her from being a conduit of destruction, but her mental and physical state was so addled, she didn’t know if she was making anything worse or better. Time was lost to her. All she felt was raw pain, every nerve singed and flayed. She tried to stay conscious, but the darkness of the Corridors was so soothing.

  Dangerous, this precipice. Gran had often warned her of this place; when the Corridors seemed like a place to sleep, it was a place one wouldn’t wake up from. In this walkway, souls often got lost. Jacob nearly had been—confused and misdirected. She thought of bringing him back to himself when the injury had knocked the spirit right out of him.

  “Jacob,” she whimpered, wishing for all the world she could just curl up in his hold and rest there, indefinitely, at peace, warm, safe, and in love. Folding her arms around her chest, she sank to her knees on the cool, murky floor of this liminal space and closed her eyes.

  At some point, she roused to the distinct feel of hands on her shoulders, shaking her, demanding she wake up. Prenze’s angry voice was growling her name. Good. Let him rail. She wanted to sleep. Forks of lightning flashed across her closed eyes; the current had made her a Tesla coil from the inside out.

  He wanted further into her mind. But he didn’t know the Corridors. He was a bully and a coercive mesmerist, but he did not have her gifts and could not go all the places she had experience going. Yes, he’d been in them during his own near-death experience, but he couldn’t know how to slip between the cracks of life and death as Eve had become accustomed to in her work of late.

  Her diving into the Corridors was stalling for time, yes, but Eve didn’t know how much longer her body could hold out against the current. Prenze was varying the levels, keeping it shy of fatal, though there was only so much a body could take. He did seem to be trying to skirt murder charges, even if he was the proxy for many deaths.

  If one was at a precarious threshold of physical vulnerability, as Eve was, this walk between life and death was generally, in Eve and her family’s experience, full of
framed moments, slivers of memory, hope, happiness or poignance, frozen in static pictures on the liminal walls of an endless hallway; the art of a life on display for the purposes of reflection. As she’d seen with Jacob. But here, the walls had gone dark. Everything of life and death had been hiding from Prenze this whole time. Perhaps that was for the best.

  Just as she felt herself beginning to fade into a sleep from which she might never awake, there was a ring. A distinct, glaring, irritating ring. In sequence. A telephone. She opened her eyes and focused on an object.

  Out of the dark pool ahead rose a telephone box floating in the darkness.

  Eve slowly got to her feet, drifted to it, picked up the bell, and whispered hello.

  “Hello, Eve,” came a familiar voice, still distant, crossing between life and death. Lily Strand, calling from Sanctuary.

  “He’s here.… He wants in, don’t let him,” Eve whispered.

  “I know, dear heart. We know,” the deaconess assured her. “We have help from your dear ones, here with us now. Your Antonia disengaged the wire. We’ll be all right. But you? You’re very precarious. Shield and let go.”

  “But the shielding just disassembled Vera and Olga—” Eve wept.

  “It won’t again. The spirits are no longer in play.”

  “I’m sorry I—”

  “Hush, child, I couldn’t have known, when my soul cried out in hopes of protecting a lost child, finding you through the modernity of a telephone wire of all things, how this would come to pass. We wander life’s labyrinth until great forces nudge us away from dead ends toward the right path. We are prepared. You’re a product of now. We’re a product of eternity. Go live, Eve.”

  There was a click on the line, and then the telephone dissolved into mist.

  “But what do I do…” Eve whispered into the darkness, having never felt so lost.

  Eve was seized. Not by darkness but by familiar hands, and she was whirled around to see a concerned face.

  “Cora!” Eve exclaimed. The brilliant woman had found her by astral projection.

  “Eve, I have to pull you out. You’re in far too deep.”

  “But Cora, beloved friend, be careful; you could get lost here too,” Eve cautioned, looking around for a path forward. “I fear I’ve fallen deeper than I can find my way out of. Please don’t get lost here too, on my account.…”

  Cora cupped both hands around Eve’s cheeks.

  “As mad as I am when you try to take on the whole world all on your own, I can’t stay angry because you do it out of care. It’s noble, but maddening.” Cora stepped back and gestured to herself. “I’m a projection, but you won’t be alone for long. Just hang on. In the meantime, take care of your mind.” Cora gave her a shove.

  The process of falling back into herself began again in a sickening tumble.

  She wondered what Cora meant by not being alone for long; her heart lurched at the idea of Jacob coming. Her aching body longed for his touch: a soothing, all-encompassing salve. If she ever felt safe enough to see him again, she’d let him hold her for hours, days even, to restore her.

  Praying the rest of the spirits she loved had all somehow weathered the blast, she had to trust Lily Strand and listen to Cora. She fought back up toward the surface of life.

  In returning to herself, vibrating pain rousing her back, she knew she couldn’t amass her own energy again, not in shielding as Lily had instructed, nor in reaching for spiritual contact. Prenze’s ultimate cruelty was that her efforts of protection were used against her. Did he plan to just roast her slowly with low voltage until she collapsed, spent, charged to a crisp? The amperage was now a light cyclical thrum, but her nerves were so exposed her skin felt raked by coals.

  Her eyes fluttered open as her hands shifted onto her lap. The candle wax pooled on her knee, a burned spot on the wool, the bell was upturned, her hand was inching toward the pockets sewn into the waist gathers of her jacket. For the moment, Prenze was nowhere to be seen.

  The sky had entirely cleared of spirits. Eve had never, in her memory, seen the skyline, the harbor, without them. She had to blink to believe her eyes. While for Eve and any ghost, the bridge was an apocalypse; for most New Yorkers, the day remained pleasant and the sky striking.

  A shadow fell over her face; then a cruel smile came back around into view.

  “Are you ready to reach out once more?” Prenze asked quietly. “You can’t have gotten all of the spirits. More will come if you ask nicely. Then we’ll banish them like all the rest.”

  “This one too?” Eve mumbled as she withdrew the tintype, shaking violently even though the current had let go.

  Prenze’s eyes widened in surprise; then his face contorted into hatred. “Where did you get that?!” he growled. “Yes, most certainly that one, that one’s why there’s all this! Why we’re going to wipe the whole city free from the dead!” He swung his hand in a violent gesture across the harbor.

  It was as if just looking at the image of Mrs. Prenze summoned her in a banshee wail of righteous fury as Eve’s and Prenze’s attention were drawn to a knot of Pinkerton guards and a cluster of protesting people some yards toward the mouth of the walkway.

  Her heart surged at the sight of Cora, gesturing toward the Gothic tower, but her colleague was pushed back by a Pinkerton guard. Sergeant Mahoney tried to calm the situation, but the guards still argued. Several New York police hired by the event seemed confused as to which loyalty they should attend.

  Above them all floated the ghost of a wild-haired woman, eyes dark pools of fury, in a tattered gown that had once been fine; but now the fabric looked like it had been shredded to pieces by the old woman’s sharp nails. Whoever was in the right or wrong concerning the Prenze family now, the matriarch was terrifying.

  Whatever spirits had been open and drawn to Eve’s call, Mrs. Prenze had not been among them. Instead she made quite an entrance at the mouth of the approach, her wail as intense as the shrillest train whistle.

  One woman, shaded behind a parasol, scurried around the melee and made a direct line, an odd, disjointed run, toward them. Another tall, lean figure in a black frock coat edged around behind her, face and head shaded by a large-brimmed black hat. The wiry figure made Eve’s heart surge with hope.

  A harpy shriek was bearing down upon them as if no amount of charge would stop her. Even despite her trembling form, Eve held on to the tintype, her own bond with the object tethering the spirit in a channel that mere zaps of electricity couldn’t disperse. Albert Prenze likely hadn’t accounted for the fact that the ghost he most wanted to kill, his own mother, would be the hardest to drive away. The pain, anger, and fury between them had forged an unstoppable haunt and worn a psychic groove to the bone.

  “Brother,” Arielle cried from paces away, moving awkwardly. “End this. Stop now! I can’t protect you anymore. I won’t. Alfred knows all. Punishment is up to you.”

  Horrified, Prenze stared back and forth between his younger sister and the screaming, translucent form of his mother, arms out, claws raised.

  The stanchions kept the crowd at bay, but some watched in wide-eyed fixation at the intense play being performed before them, oohing and clapping alternately. Eve couldn’t be sure if anyone saw the ghost above or if onlookers might think it was some elaborate stage effect.

  Suddenly Albert ran toward the side of the bridge, and Eve couldn’t tell if he was about to fling himself from its side or was just looking for escape. He grabbed hold of a switch that had been rigged to the suspension cables and moved to turn the dial, but his mother’s ghost dove at him, and the force of her knocked him back onto the planks.

  She stopped screaming and began crying, folded over him in wispy scraps and tatters like gnarled branches of a windswept tree bent over a weary body.

  “I’m no good at showing care,” the ghost cried. “I never was. But if I thought it would drive
you to all this…I’d have tried to do better.…”

  “Better isn’t in you! Leave us be!” Albert howled. “Go to Hell,” he cried, scrambling toward Eve. His hands fumbled across hers as he reached for the levers and settings, knocking the candle and bell aside where they clattered to the planks before spilling hot wax on Eve’s hands. The tintype slid from her hands, which had turned into sudden claws in the pain of the increased voltage.

  “Come away, Mother,” Arielle cried. Having gained swiftly on them, she dove for the tintype image before it fell through the cracks in the boards, but Arielle caught it, the sharp side of the image slicing her finger.

  Prenze had turned the current higher than before, and Eve was sure she wouldn’t survive it this time. Her body shook with a fresh violence. Mrs. Prenze returned to her screaming and flew back as if shoved by the current, tatters of her gown flying away into mist. Eve lost sight of her as another form swept toward Eve in a swirl of black fabric.

  A fist came barreling toward Albert Prenze’s face, and the man was knocked back cold onto the planks, a spurt of blood spilling onto his cloak, head lolling to the side.

  The resulting cries of the crowd and guards telling people to keep moving were drowned out as the current crested in Eve’s body and her eyes rolled back in her head. As she was barely managing to murmur, “Help,” strong arms scooped her up and out of the dais, yanking away all the wires, tearing off the discs with swift pulls and a hiss of pain as the electricity stung her liberator.

  With a swift kick, her rescuer knocked the monitor box from the throne where it crashed to the planks.

  She was entirely at the mercy of whoever had struck Prenze and now held her tightly, whisking her away from the dais. Limp and barely conscious, Eve found the hold familiar and her racing heart skipped beats as tears leaked from her eyes, hope and need surging in her soul.

  “Evelyn Whitby,” Jacob Horowitz murmured with loving admonishment in her ear.

  “Jacob,” she murmured achingly, her deepest desires answered by his voice, by his covetous hold. “M-make sure the e…lectric is off.…”