Resonance

by Celine Kiernan

  No, that is wrong.

  ‘It has lost,’ she amended, ‘something like you … its you: what you are to me.’

  Shaking her head, she groped to find a latch. ‘You have to get out.’

  She found a heavy padlock securing the gate, and she shook it, desperate. Joe’s arms snaked through the bars again. She could feel his hands exploring the deformity of her waist.

  ‘You’re trapped,’ he whispered.

  She pressed her palms to the corset, which was denying her lungs their right to expand. What she wouldn’t give for a pair of scissors.

  ‘I can’t breathe.’

  His fingers scrabbled at the dress as if it were the hard outer shell of a crab, and Tina realised he was trying to free her. She turned awkwardly and presented her back to him.

  ‘Hurry, Joe.’

  He found the rows of buttons that were out of her reach and gouged at them, ripping them apart. The bodice fell loose, the heavy fabric peeling away like petals, but it made no odds because it wasn’t the dress that was trapping her, but the terrible bone-and-canvas construction beneath.

  She felt him pluck at the lacings, unable to figure the knots in the dark. Suddenly he went still. He seemed to be listening. He turned from the gate, and she could feel him staring down the steps.

  As soon as his hands left her the confusion poured back, and with it a clear vision of the creature in the rock-hewn caverns below. Bright and terrible, it was rushing towards them, hurtling upwards through the dark.

  ‘It’s coming, Joe! You have to run.’

  He reached for her. She pushed him.

  ‘Run! Before it traps you against the gate!’

  There was the brief clutch of his hands, icy and desperate on hers, then he was gone. Tina pressed her face between the bars, calling into the darkness.

  ‘I’ll be back! I’ll bring Harry!’

  But he had fled from her. And there was no sense of him at all; there was only the creature racing upwards, light trailing behind it, light pushing ahead … focused for the first time in centuries – understanding for the first time in centuries, that there was something here other than itself. Running forward. Rushing forward. Longing. It began to howl, in a voice that could unravel worlds.

  Tina scrambled backwards, her eyes fixed on the writhing air below. The lights were so bright, now that Joe had left her. Thrashing. A chaotic, riotous disorder of the air. Her thoughts and the creature’s thoughts were all mixed up, and it felt as if her skull was about to rupture with a million tiny fissures. Her legs tried to push her away, but the skirts of the dress knotted and snared her.

  The thing was directly below her now. With layers of rock between them, it pushed itself through an entrance of stone and into the shaft of steps. Its head dropped between hunched shoulders, its body curled, and it insinuated itself into the spiralling passageway like a snail into its shell. Its wide spread of tentacles trailed behind it like a bridal veil. Its feet and hands left fading prints where they gripped the stone. It flowed past the crevasse where Joe curled like an insect, and he convulsed within the confines of his hiding place.

  Tina could feel a seizure coming on: the fierce butterfly-frenzy in her temples that signalled an impending loss of control. Oh no, she thought, not now.

  Light pushed itself up from the steps below her – the cold and buzzing luminance of a creature not made for this world. At the same time, light made itself known on the curve of stair above, warm and earthly: the golden radiance of a candle.

  Someone was carrying a candle down the steps.

  Tina fell back, her body already beginning the jittering dance of a convulsion.

  As she fell, the creature exploded from below. It seemed not to expect the gate nor understand it, and its great body slammed against the bars. Portions of it surged onwards – ribbons and tendrils and eels of light flowing through the bars like weed pushed forward on the tide. Then the outflung surge flowed backwards above Tina’s head, slipping against the stones of wall and ceiling as light and tentacles returned to gather around the creature that moaned and hunched and pressed itself against the gate, uncertain and trapped.

  Tina stared up into its heavy face-not-face, and the creature seemed to pause. It looked down at her. There was a sudden stillness, a moment taken after centuries of pacing. Even the relentless movement of the light seemed to hesitate. The creature’s song changed in pitch: a high, silver question being asked.

  Then someone was shouting overhead. A woman. She came into view around the spiral of the stairs, a candle held high in her hand, and with a frantic kind of joy she leaned across Tina and shouted into the creature’s face.

  ‘Protest all you want, Angel! Your master can’t hear you here!’ With the candle still held high, she grabbed Tina’s wrist. ‘Come along, child! Have no sympathy for God’s dread soldier.’

  The woman was incredibly strong. It cost her no effort to drag Tina up the stairs.

  The creature’s voice became frantic as they left it behind. Calling without words – calling in feelings – it screamed its rage.

  Tina was dragged up and up, on her back, stone steps bumping sharp against her hips. She wanted to shake free, to take to her own two feet, but the seizure was rising, strong and relentless, and every part of her was clenching tight.

  She felt the darkness close its fist. Her head battered the woman’s skirts. The glow of the candle was a brief comfort; then the convulsion locked down, and everything was stolen in the familiar nightmare dance.

  ‘WHAT A SURPRISE to meet you down there in the dark. I had expected to find Cornelius.’

  The woman was speaking from somewhere out of sight at Tina’s back. She tutted, reminding Tina of Fran, and Tina opened her eyes to candlelight and moonlight and those incessant ropes of wavering light that only she seemed to see. The air smelled of apples. She was lying on her side in long grass.

  There was no moment of confusion on returning to consciousness. She knew exactly where she was: in the orchard by the ruined castle. Below her lay a hundred feet of rock. Beneath it, the creature pressed itself against bars of iron. Joe had just tumbled from his cramped cell. He lay a moment on the damp stone, then crawled away. The creature did not hear nor sense him.

  It only senses me, she thought. It only senses what Joe is to me.

  Its voice was mercifully silent to her.

  There were a series of small sharp tugs along the length of her back, someone cutting the laces on the corset, then cold air as the garment was unclamped from around her ribs. Tina lay still and quiet, allowing herself to breathe, her body too jittery yet to risk movement.

  For the first time since the séance at the theatre, she felt sure and part of herself. She recognised the feeling as that strange clarity which often came after a convulsion. People thought she was stupid after, but she wasn’t – she was just far away, and too comfortable to want to talk. She took stock of herself.

  She was not about to vomit. There was no nosebleed. She had not pissed herself. This was good.

  The woman’s skirts rustled as she came around to peer into Tina’s face. ‘You are awake,’ she said. She sat down in a puff of dark fabric and glitter of jet beading. She had a knife in her hand, the kind of small lethal folding knife that some of the Dublin prostitute girls carried. Tina eyed it.

  This is what she cut my stays with. It must be sharp. She looked the woman in the eye. I’ll get that knife.

  The woman gestured the torn bodice. ‘Who did this to you, flor? It was not Vincent, surely. Certainly it was not Cornelius. They are not men prone to inflicting themselves on women. Was it that American boy?’ She weighed the knife, grimacing, as if considering what she’d do to Harry when she got him. ‘You took refuge with the Angel, I suppose. Well, fear not. You will suffer no more of that unwanted jerking and thrusting here. I promise. No further intrusions will be made upon your person.’

  Tina pushed herself up with shaking arms. The corset fell to her waist, and she flung it aw
ay with a groan. She shoved the remains of the dress to her knees, kicked it from her and sat back in her petticoats and stockings, breathing deeply for the first time in what felt like a very long nightmare.

  ‘I am so glad to have you here,’ said the woman. ‘Cornelius has been so lonely. I almost thought it might kill him.’

  Tina eyed her warily.

  The woman smiled. ‘We shall be wonderful friends.’

  Tina punched her in the jaw.

  It was like hitting stone, but the woman rocked back anyway, surprised, and Tina leapt to snatch the knife from her shock-slackened fingers. She twisted the woman’s hair and straddled her, and pressed the knife to the slim arch of the woman’s neck – as quick as any stall-woman ever grabbed a thieving urchin or turned the tables on a cut-purse in the dark.

  ‘Listen to me,’ she said. ‘I want you to get me the keys to that underground place – the place with the creature. I want you to get me the keys to the gate.’

  The woman regarded her from the corner of her dark eyes, strangely unperturbed.

  ‘Release my hair,’ she murmured. ‘Have some decorum.’

  To Tina’s horror, wavering brightnesses began weaving themselves back into her vision as the post-convulsion clarity faded. The piercing voice – the song she now recognised as that of the creature – intruded once more on her thoughts.

  With a gasp, she tightened her grip on the woman’s hair and pressed the knife harder. ‘The key,’ she insisted, blinking to stay focused. ‘The key.’

  ‘Well, aren’t you a rum girl? Full of defiance and your own grand purpose.’

  The woman took hold of Tina’s wrist. Her grip was not brutal, but her flesh was hard, and hot as water-scalded china.

  ‘There is no need for knife-wielding here,’ she said. ‘Though I forgive you the assumption – it took me long enough to realise it myself and, as you can see, I never lost the habit of carrying one. But release my hair now, flor, before I take offence.’

  The voice of the creature was rising – tearing and probing at Tina’s mind as if, having been unheard for so long, it was now determined to be understood.

  The woman squinted keenly at her. ‘What is it?’ she asked, her voice muffled beneath that of the creature’s. ‘What do you see?’

  Fingers of light pressed themselves to the woman’s face, rising and falling, curious at her curiosity, interested in her interest.

  ‘It is frightened,’ gasped Tina. ‘It is terrified.’

  ‘What is? The Angel?’

  An angel. Yes, of course. An angel. Something in Tina’s brain slid into place, something relaxed. The creature straightened in her mind: waving tentacles spread to glistening wings, splayed appendages became elegant hands. An angel – how had she not seen?

  ‘He is frightened.’

  The woman’s dark eyes read her face, intense. ‘Of course it is. Its Father has abandoned it, as He does us all.’

  ‘No … no. There is something … He is …’

  The Angel’s voice was screaming within her: Someone to talk to! Someone at last! Help me. Help me. Help!

  She staggered to her feet. The woman rose with her.

  ‘There,’ said Tina, pointing, her other hand pressed to her head. ‘There!’

  She stumbled forward. The woman followed her through long grass and darkness, past hedge and white gravel, across flagstone and moon-shadow, until – standing on a plain of dew-soaked grass, gazing down towards a frozen lake – Tina pointed through fog and frost to two men in the moonlight, pulling someone slack and powerless from a hole in the ice.

  Alive

  I AM NOT DEAD, thought Harry. I am not dead.

  He watched his water-blurred hands flex and probe as they pulled him along the under-surface of the ice. There were tiny bubbles on his knuckles, tiny bubbles fizzing against his cheeks. The world was reduced to a rush of bubbling darkness around him and the unfocused light of the moon right in front of his nose. He was not even remotely cold, and he had yet to consider taking a breath. How was this possible?

  I should want to breathe, he thought. How is it I do not need to breathe?

  He had been slammed down hard against something on the bottom of the lake. There had been flashes of ornate metal, glass, green light, a low pulse-deep throb as, still held fast within the grip of the current, he had been rolled helplessly. Then he had been caught in an upsurge and shot to the surface like a cork from a bottle, to slam against the roof of ice. He had not even felt the pain of the impact, and now he crawled like a bug on a window trying to find a way out.

  I am not dead, he thought.

  The men’s silhouettes appeared above him again. One of them beat down hard on the ice with his foot, and Harry felt the vibration in his hands as they once again tried to lead him into the shadow of the bridge. No matter how vehemently they insisted, he would not go back there and risk getting caught in that current. Instead, he headed for the shallows of the reed beds.

  The current gradually fell away as he neared the shallows, and the water grew completely still. Harry did not like the sensation of it; it felt as if it had closed more tightly around his face. It was not cold – not at all – but for the first time, Harry realised that it felt dead. The water felt dead, and it pressed like corpse hands against his ears and cheeks and mouth. Harry felt a sharp thrill of fear and grabbed, limpet-like, to the ice. He did not want to be trapped down here in this motionless place. He did not want to be abandoned to this pallid half dark.

  I’m not dead! he thought. I’m not dead.

  The men moved from sight, and Harry battered the ice.

  I’m not dead!

  They returned in a pounding of feet, a sudden blur of shadows. There was an impact, a dully muffled bang, and the ice overhead star-burst with cracks. It came again, a sudden downwards shadow, and the cracks brightened with another resonant bang.

  More pounding followed. The ice fell through. Hands reached under, grabbed and pulled.

  His breath came out in a vast cloud – ‘I’M NOT DEAD!’ – and all of a sudden, Harry was agonisingly cold. His teeth began to chatter. His arms and legs curled in on themselves.

  ‘Not dead,’ he chattered. ‘Not …’

  A man laughed above him. ‘And quite the feat that is!’ he said.

  There was a quick movement, and Harry was covered in something that afforded him a moment of intense, blissful heat before the water from his clothes soaked it through and he was freezing again.

  ‘What is amiss with you modern boys, that you wilfully fling yourselves into any available water? Is it a fashion now? Or some new ploy to separate bystanders from their jackets?’

  Harry looked up into the grinning face of the carriage driver. Over the man’s shoulder, Cornelius Wolcroft watched with tight-jawed suspicion. Both men were in their shirtsleeves; neither seemed bothered by the terrible cold. Harry opened his mouth to tell them that it had been Wolcroft’s brats, that they had killed Wolcroft’s dog, but all that came out was the incoherent burr of his chattering teeth.

  The carriage driver offered his hand. ‘Up you get, little magician. Tough as you are, I would wager this cold will get the better of you.’

  Harry tried to move, but his body seemed locked tight. The carriage driver frowned.

  ‘We must get him inside, Cornelius. Perhaps light a fire. We cannot reward such resolve with a shivering death upon the ice.’

  ‘The chimneys will not take a fire,’ said Wolcroft. ‘It’s beyond memory since they have been swept.’

  ‘Then we shall wrap him in blankets and chafe him dry. Come now. He has at least earned the right to another audition.’

  ‘He was no great wonder as a conjurer. Another audition would do little towards proving him otherwise.’

  Harry jerked out a hand and grabbed the carriage driver’s ankle. Vincent, thought Harry dimly. His name is Vincent.

  ‘I escape …’ he chattered. ‘I’m an … I’m an escapologist.’

  The carriag
e driver savoured the word. ‘Escapologist,’ he said. ‘Why, that sounds marvellous. I should say the children would enjoy that immensely.’

  Wolcroft’s lip was just curling around a reply when his attention was taken by something up on the shore. Vincent twisted to follow his gaze, and Harry saw surprise and then concern cross his dark face. He stood, and Harry found himself staring helplessly at his polished boots. Wolcroft’s shoes came into view, and the men stood side by side gazing towards the house.

  ‘Raquel,’ called the carriage driver, his voice ringing out in the frozen stillness. ‘What is the matter?’

  Wolcroft stepped from sight. ‘You cannot bring that girl out in her underthings – she will catch her death!’

  The woman’s voice called out in reply. ‘I did not bring her out. That boy drove her into the Angel’s arms. It seems to have robbed her of her mind.’

  Tina, thought Harry. He tried to sit but, like his thoughts, his actions were disorganised and dim. Vincent disappeared from view. A blur of conversation drifted to Harry through the chatter of his teeth.

  ‘The boy did nothing to her. He was here, busy drowning himself.’

  ‘Well, who else could it have been?’ said the woman. ‘It matters not, in any case – it is the result, not the cause, that is of interest.’

  There was a small breath of silence. Then the woman’s voice came again, much closer this time, snapping an order: ‘Leave her! She is on a mission from the Angel.’

  Harry marshalled every inch of endurance he had within him and rolled to his elbows. His fingers scrabbled spastically as he tried to push himself up. Soft footsteps padded towards him. The filthy lace of a petticoat flashed past and was gone. He flung out an arm, fell flat on his face.

  ‘Tina,’ he croaked.

  The men’s feet came into view, following behind the girl. They were accompanied by the woman, wide skirts of rustling green sweeping frost in her wake. She spoke in a fascinated whisper. ‘She is driven here by the Angel, to show us that which frightens it.’