The Double Life of Incorporate Things (Magic Most Foul)

by Hieber, Leanna

  The black-clad crowd shook their heads. Like most people I’d ever met, they simply wanted to be left in peace and given leave to be their own masters and mistresses.

  Mrs. Northe approached me. She bent, and unceremoniously, she proceeded to draw me away from the body on the floor. Through her intervention I felt able to move, though I was oddly light-headed. The room spun a bit as I stood.

  “Have you seen Jonathon?” she asked quietly. “He and I were supposed to investigate a site that may be the very crux of the Society’s New York operations, but he didn’t show. That isn’t his style…” She trailed off, frowning as she stared at me. I didn’t like her words, and I didn’t like the look on her face even more so.

  She wiped something off my lip. There was a bitter taste in my mouth. She brushed her fingertips over my face, and then over my collar. Her lace gloves came away red. I felt a dull sensation blossoming in my stomach becoming sharper as panic opened into full bloom.

  “What?” My voice sounded far away to my own ear. “What did you say?”

  “Jonathon,” Mrs. Northe continued. “Not that you’re his keeper, but I thought perhaps he was with you… It didn’t seem like him to not turn up… I don’t mean to worry you...”

  “Jonathon,” I murmured. “Jonathon.” The sound of his name was an exotic spice upon my tongue. He was the whole of my heart, and he was absent. That was…unacceptable. I cocked my head to the side in an abrupt movement that felt foreign. My breath was heavy and strained against the stays of my corset that were suddenly violently tight against my rib cage.

  Damn Jonathon Whitby. Damn his beauty. Damn his hold over me. Were there not greater things to be held in the clutches of?

  I heard laughter, low and far away, deep and rumbling, like thunder. It was not mine, and it did not seem like the laughter of anyone in the room, which had dimmed significantly. Whispers coursed past my ear like wind.

  Oh, that couldn’t be a good sign. Whispers in my mind, unless they were warnings from my mother, were to be avoided. My mother was dead. This was not her whispers. It was a crowd. That meant something else entirely.

  I closed my eyes. My body shuddered with strange sensations that were both seductive and vaguely disturbing in their sudden sweeping intensity, as if every inch of my skin were suddenly on fire and sensitive to suggestion. And pain. There was a deep, widening, vicious chasm of pain...

  And then the curtain was drawn on rage. A pure, unchecked, heretofore unheard of rage took center stage.

  “Where is Jonathon?” someone shrieked.

  It took me a long moment to realize that someone shrieking was me. I think I tore at something. Or someone.

  That’s the last thing I remember before darkness overtook me in a swift and obliterating shot.

  Chapter Twelve

  Awake or dreaming? I couldn’t tell what state I was in, other than that it wasn’t a good one. All I could sense concretely was that there was pain, throbbing pain as if I were on fire. My mind swam.

  I was laid out horizontally, in what I assumed was a bed, from what I could tell by the feel of my back, but I was not lying in comfort; everything was pins and needles. Every sense and sensation felt raw and chafing. I was warm and perspiring, and yet my teeth chattered, and a constant, slow, undulating tremor went up and down my body as if I were my own tide, rolling in and out.

  Trying to open my eyes was a gargantuan task I was not suited for. My eyelids would not respond, so I remained in a shallow darkness and tried to discern meaning.

  There was the constant sound of screams. Whether the screams came from my mouth, my mind, from others, from nightmares…I was not at liberty to say, for I was not at liberty at all. My faculties were entirely compromised. I was not free. Something had taken over me. Some part of my mind was still my own, as I wondered if this was what it was like when a body was overtaken by a demon.

  If I was entirely far gone, or entirely overtaken, perhaps I wouldn’t have had a sense of self at all. It was said that people who were truly mad did not ask if they were mad. So perhaps, in this terrible state, there was hope for me.

  The first thing I remembered as a product of true awareness, rather than swimming in a timeless sea of discomfort and confusion, was that I was laid out somewhere familiar, and there were voices. Outside of myself. But there remained many voices within myself too. I had to take a moment to sort out one versus the other.

  After some time trying to pick apart the noises and distances, I began to recognize the exterior voices. Mrs. Northe. My father. The low, deep resonant voice repeating prayers. Reverend Blessing. He was praying over me. Was I being exorcised? What had happened? Had the demon, in speaking to me through that poor wretch who collapsed on Mrs. Northe’s floor, transferred something unto me? Into me?

  Was the pain I felt actually all those runes again carved onto my flesh? Was there any hope for me, or was this the beginning of the end? What had I done? Why did my wrists feel so sore?

  A particular searing scream from my own mouth shook me fully alert, and I looked up into the dark-skinned face of Reverend Blessing, who was anointing my head with oil and murmuring scripture.

  I renounce thee...

  I tried to help him in my mind, to echo, to reiterate, to join in the scripture by my own renunciation of the evil that had clung to me, but only unintelligible noises were coming from my mouth. My cheeks burned in shame; it was like the ugly sounds I made when first regaining my atrophied voice...

  That’s when I noticed I was bound.

  What had I done that required that I be restrained? A turn of my head revealed that my wrists were done up in long white strips. Ripped fabric from sheets or pillowcases were wound round my wrist and tied to the metal headboard in one of Mrs. Northe’s pleasant guest rooms that at this moment felt very stifling and utterly unwelcoming.

  My stomach churned in a sickening roil and clearly that nauseating sense of horror read on my face, for my father rushed to me with an awkward reassurance that was hardly reassuring...

  “It’s all right, Natalie. You didn’t hurt anyone. Too badly.” He chuckled nervously, miserably. “Just a...scratch or two, it was fine—”

  I made some kind of sound of protest or shame, my blush further ignited by humiliation and frustration.

  “Nathaniel and I held you back as you turned, before anyone was hurt,” Mrs. Northe added. “You received the brunt of the toxin borne in on that poor fellow... And that stuff...changes people. It makes sane persons into animals.”

  I wanted again to retch at this, but something stopped me, something small and lovely. Even in my fevered state, I noticed Mrs. Northe take my father’s trembling hand in hers, not in a measured gesture of comfort but a motion on instinct, a gentle act that was so natural and intuitive to her that wanted to join in that collective comfort, for us to be a family. Whatever fear and confusion raced inside my scattered mind, those same raw emotions were writ large directly on my father’s face... I wanted to be well again for their sakes, for Jonathon’s sake; all that was important to me bolstered me. I regained some sense of myself in my regard for my loved ones, as if I touched the foundations of some sacred site and the divine reached down to steady me in return.

  I seemed not in a fit state to respond to them, so I merely bit back a sigh, a cry, a heaving and exasperated curse. I felt my body conspire against me and the whispers near my ears threaten to drag me back under into the murky depths once more. Before I lost consciousness again, I overheard Mrs. Northe say something about Jonathon.

  His name was the one thing that could keep my eyes open.

  “Where?” I managed. Mrs. Northe and my father exchanged a look. The nauseating feeling I was fighting returned in force, but now layered with a fresh terror.

  “What...what about Jonathon!”

  “He’s gone. We don’t know where. It’s been two days.”

  My eyes rolled back in my head, my whole sense of self and sensation pitching and roiling as if I were tempest
-tossed in the worst of seasick throes. Before I lost myself again, I prayed with all my heart, then, that I could dream, and in that dream, find the man I loved and see where he’d gone and what he’d need of me if I could shake off these dreadful curses of ours...

  Chapter Thirteen

  When I thought I had the very worst luck a girl could possibly encounter, then the heavens proved me wrong in giving me a helping hand, extending down into my tired, addled brain and granting comfort and a useful turn. God or the angels or merely my clever subconscious, granted me my wish. Unsure what to thank, I said a prayer of gratefulness to all.

  A dream. At last. A shared dream. Like Jonathon and I used to have when his soul was bound to a painting and I was his one tether to the tactile world. Some part of that original bond of soul to soul held on and connected. Love and truth will out.

  Never mind the dream ended in nightmare. My dreams always did. My dreams forecasted unerring doom on sliding scale. It would be up to Jonathon and me, our waking selves, to make the tragedy into a happy ending. My nightmares were riddled with roundabout clues, gifted from some higher power than I could give myself any credit for, and their ignominious end, those terrible moments right before I wake, were the worst case scenario that we had no choice but to risk our lives to avoid.

  But what I was presented with in the depths of my fitful rest was no solution, only information. But a tether to a missing lover was far better than no exchange at all.

  I was getting very tired of the endless dark corridor in my mind where the dreams and nightmares take place, the narrow playground of terror, the dark, dank space where all things come to pass, where all clues are unfurled amid various horrors, my vulnerable mind unable to suitably brace itself against the inevitable onslaught. I wondered if at some point in my future I would see that hallway in my actual life and I would know that something important if not abjectly horrible and life-ending would take place there.

  I did not know what of my dreams was clue and what was fancy. ‘I had never known that balance or how to structure it. I dreamed and then I woke. How else can one live life, but to make sure their waking life is full of love and actions of grace? I could be held accountable for a mind in shadow that reveals what it would.

  But there he was, Jonathon. Paces ahead of me down the dimly lit corridor that had no discernible light source and yet was luminous as if by an eerie phosphorous.

  The British lord stood stiffly elegant in his fine black frock coat, navy waistcoat, and an azure ascot, his striking figure a greyscale palette with a splash of blue highlighting the spectacular color of his eyes. He was all the more striking for being against the run-down corridor, like in an old grand house but with wallpaper and paint peeling, wood panels cracked and splintered, foundations slightly askew so that the world was like a carnival mirror.

  Jonathon’s innate grandeur set against this sickened space made him all the more beautiful in contrast, and I could feel, with a swift punch to my gut, his absence from me. I could feel his distance as though a needle were pricking into my skin and drawing away something precious, threading out my heart in a thin bloody line of passion.

  Immediately, upon seeing him there in my mind’s eye, in this corridor where our minds entwined, I somehow knew that he was no longer in New York City. I shuddered as I tried to take steps forward in this rotting corridor toward his handsome form. But my feet were uncooperative and the length of the corridor just kept lengthening, drawing us ever farther apart.

  He stared at me longingly, then turned that beautiful head and began to walk away. As he did, a low and rumbling chant began to lift into the air as if a storm was rolling in and fast. I called to Jonathon, and he stopped. He cast a sad look over his shoulder.

  “I’ve gone back to England once more, darling Natalie,” he said. With great effort I raised my lace-swathed arm to achingly reach out to him. He continued, with a weary, grim tone. “I have gone where you cannot follow. There was no time. I was dragged along, bid not to write to you for fear of tracking. But you’ve got to look to the numbers. The toxin will go wide. There was a sequence. Find it before it finds the city.”

  And then the corridor around us started to collapse. Jonathon in his paces ahead began running. But not to me, away from me.

  “Let me go and save yourself,” he cried. If he said anything further, his voice was overrun in a horrid din, and I lost sight of him in the shadows.

  There rose into the air, filling my ears like a violent swarm of insects, a chant of terrible numbers. A fog of red smoke rolled in like water filling the moldering corridor. And then the walls came crashing down.

  I fell beneath the force of the rubble, and my last sensation was of the life being pressed out of me as my lungs filled with acrid, stinging smoke...

  I awoke with the gasping cry of, “I have to go to him.”

  No one was with me in the room, one of Mrs. Northe’s fine guest rooms where I was still bound to a bed. I couldn’t be sure when I’d be well, released, or safe around anyone, let alone the man I loved and was desperate to join, no matter the danger. Was I not in danger here in New York? Was I not in danger no matter where I went, when the demons seemed always able to pinpoint me, their insidious instincts by now having trained on my scent?

  I closed my eyes, moaning in pain, burning physical aches. I thought about what Jonathon had shared. His words. There was something in them to stir results. I had instructions to give. I couldn’t find any numbers or any sequences while tied to a bed. I figured I’d better start being useful by screaming for help.

  Chapter Fourteen

  The sound of my screams certainly sent the house staff scrambling. The door to my guest room–prison was opened, and two starched-hatted maids in black dresses and white aprons peered blanched faces at me before darting down the stairs in a cumbersome tandem, gingerly calling for the lady of the house.

  I heard Mrs. Northe muttering under her breath as a swift tread up the stairs came closer and closer.

  “I have to go to him, Jonathon,” I cried. “He’s in England.” I could feel my panic rising, calling out to her even before she entered the room. “He said to let him go and save myself, I don’t know what to do, what he’ll do, I have to—”

  “You’re not going anywhere, Natalie,” she murmured, her tone more weary than I’d heard it for some time as she turned the corner into the room. She was dressed down; in a plain workaday linen skirt, white blouse with sleeves rolled up, and an open linen vest; she must have been at work on something. She moved to a water basin by my bedside. She dipped a cloth in water and ran it over my forehead that I only now noticed was warm for the contrast of cool water.

  The next piercing physical sensation was how much my wrists hurt. I must have been wresting against my restraints in whatever level of precarious state I’d been in. The sight of the bonds made me freshly fierce.

  “I will find him, I will find Jonathon,” I cried. A wave of anger that felt foreign and reckless, huge and unwieldy, crested inside me like a cat extending claws. While the impetus of emotion was mine, it’s scope was something that I could only imagine that the Master’s Society would want to exploit in their endless drive to further misery... I tried to trade the anger for pleading, thinking I might get further on that sentiment, staring up into Mrs. Northe’s wide, piercing hazel eyes that missed no detail and seemed to know me too well. “I know where he is, he told me, I have to go—”

  “You know I can’t enable a mere sentence from a dream,” Mrs. Northe said gently. “But tell me more about the dream.” She dipped the cloth again and soothed my brow, fussing over me but making no move to undo my restraints. “I do appreciate that you often reveal clues—”

  “Don’t treat me like a prisoner.”

  “Tell that to the man you threw a punch at before Nathaniel managed to wrestle you to the floor downstairs,” she replied. I could feel the color drain from my face. “Not that it was your fault,” she added, “but we must take the greatest
care. I think you’re in the clear now, my dear, and I’d like to unlash you, but let’s be careful here, let’s see how you deal with what you’re telling me, let’s just talk a bit, you and me, so I can ascertain your mood and your physical reactions.”

  “Did...did the demon overtake me?” I asked sheepishly, trying to think back to what I dimly recalled as maybe having been an exorcism... “The demon, the one we destroyed, it...it spoke to me through that poor man George... At least, I thought it did...”

  “I believe you were merely in the grip of the toxin. Parts of you remained distinctly...you. Stubborn. Passionate. Opinionated. Hating to be restrained.” She chuckled. “Reverend Blessing was here with me as I would suffer no possible risk to your soul. Your father was relatively terrified, but seeing that you had a small army around you, save Jonathon, he knew you were being taken care of. It didn’t follow that you were actually possessed. Truth be told, I think you’re too spirited for anything to have room in there,” she said smiling, tapping me on the sternum.

  I felt a partial smile break through my anxiety. I tried to get a read on my body, my heart rate, my skin, the parts that ached, what seemed natural or unnatural. I tried to breathe and relax as she spoke. I needed to appear well. I needed to be well. Mrs. Northe continued, maintaining a calm, soothing tone as if her words were extensions of the cool compress.

  “And I’m not sure we should be thinking of the demon as just one, but rather, a negative force. I’ve been in my study, writing letters to my gifted friends to see if they’ve wind of a shift in their séances or communications with the dead. I’ve been trying to make contact with spirits myself, to seek a window in, to see if a whole army of hell is upon us or just isolated bodies of negativity seeking hosts—”

  “Mother,” I blurted. “Did you speak with my mother?”

  Mrs. Northe shook her head. “She remains elusive. Not out of love, I’m sure, but...”