Part of me wanted them to stop me. But the rest of me knew this, just like everything else the dark magic had wrapped us up in, was inevitable. Mrs. Northe was likely still recovering from what had been a somewhat violent-looking channeling, and my father was still asleep. I promised myself I would write and wire him whenever possible. I owed him that much and so much more than my circumstances allowed me to give.
I moved, acted, and reacted as if I were a horse with blinders, staring straight ahead at my next immediate objective, unable to heed my mind’s various cries, denying the sense memory of what it was like to have that dark magic breathing down my neck and prickling upon my skin. Though those discomfiting sensations threatened to overtake me one by one, I beat them back with sheer will. I drove myself like a draft horse pulling weight, moving onward toward a specific task.
It was the second or the third day in—the days began to blur immediately—that I allowed myself to truly pause for breath, staring out over the vast and unfathomable Atlantic Ocean under a brilliantly moonlit sky that I hadn’t seen quite so unhindered in some time, due to Manhattan’s constant gaslight. I permitted a moment to take stock of myself and my state. My anxiety kept pace at a dull thrum to match the steam engines decks below my boots. I had hoped against hope the steamer would make a bit better headway and arrive to port a bit ahead of schedule.
This large, impressive boat made me nervous. While the view above me and around me remained spectacular in theory, the truth of it was terrifying. I had never been this far out on the ocean, and I didn’t realize how much it would unsettle me until it was far too late to turn back. The steamboat was indeed a wonder, but its behemoth engines were also like strange monsters of this modern world that seemed at any moment able to turn into dragons that could eat us all alive. My father was right. My imagination was far too fertile.
Every now and then I felt tears itching at the very back of my eyes like small pixies, emotional imps demanding I pay attention to all the things I refused to face. All the potential realities. All the potential finalities. But I bit everything back. Perhaps the rolling crest of seasick nausea was its own blessing, for it was quite a distraction.
In the pocket of my modest linen pinafore, I palmed my notebook in a trembling hand. That simple action allowed for my tensed shoulders to fall just a fraction. Each of my notebooks through the years always proved such a comfort as they were the infallible way I communicated with the world. On a page, I could converse and present arguments with my inner self that needed to externalize its thoughts. The written word had proved in my life to be far more reliable than speech ever was. I’d had far more years writing and communicating in Standard Sign than I’d had actually speaking. The written word held a power that the ephemeral spoken word did not, and I valued the written word like I would a vow.
I flipped through to the latter pages of the notebook, where I’d managed to write down Mrs. Northe’s final warnings. I knew better than to ignore or disregard anything out of that woman’s mouth, especially if she were in contact with the spirit realm.
A book. A sequence. Whatever had overtaken Mrs. Northe zeroed in on those items. I wondered if any of what had come before, the countercurses we’d learned, the ways of a split soul, beating the Society at their own games and particular experiments would serve us anymore, or if we were instead dealing with another layer of puzzles. The aforementioned clues would crop up, surely, and I hoped I would know them when I saw them and have an instinct as to how to solve their mysteries.
But first, the only sight I was desperate to see was Jonathon Whitby’s beautiful face. I wondered if he missed me. If he’d propose again. I’d not hesitate. I’d say yes. Every moment away from him, every circumstance keeping us apart, proved that I simply didn’t want to live a life without him. Here I was placing myself in danger just like I’d always done for him, because I simply couldn’t take a reactive stance. I had to do something, and it was for his sake, because he was such a good soul. And I’d seen it, held it, cherished that soul. I’d never met another quite like his. Never would. Never needed to.
Everything around Jonathon had been targeted, as the powers of evil always gravitated toward the brightest lights. And we now sought to control the epicenter of that outbreak.
I wondered if there was yet a reason to be revealed as to why Jonathon and his family had been chosen as an initial point of entry for the Master’s Society, besides Jonathon’s inherent goodness. What of his family? The Denbury lineage? Was it as noble and good as its heir?
The fleeting thought crossed my mind that Jonathon might be dead. I swiftly blocked that from even being a possible reality. Not only did I pray for God’s help but I demanded of God’s will that Jonathon lived. I needed to dream of him again, to keep me going, to remind me why. I needed him to be there when I landed. I needed something solid.
And then, at the corner of my ear, came a whisper, a tiny kiss of sound upon the wind, a flicker of white at the edges of my vision. Mother. Mother’s whisper, that had haunted me so beautifully since I lost her so early in my life.
She was there to remind me why too. From her perspective, she didn’t want any more demons walking the earth than I did. She was protecting not only her daughter, but the whole fabric and web of life around me. While I might need something solid, so too did I need a shade.
There was so much of the spirit world to cherish and appreciate. It was not all a world to fear. It was a world that had helped me against the demons as much as the living had. Somehow my close contact with the spirit of my mother made death’s sting less terrifying. The demons counted on fear, fear of them, fear of chaos, fear of death. My mother vastly mitigated my risk, and the demons had vastly underestimated us.
In that moment I truly understood the lesson my soul being split from my body had taught me. There were two worlds at work every moment of our lives: the tactile and the spiritual. Each and every one of us lived a double life. Body and spirit. Solid and shade. And there was, of course, a constant battle over them. We needed to make friends in both worlds, because there were enemies in each.
And just because Mrs. Northe saw death, it didn’t mean it was mine. She specifically couldn’t pinpoint the future. And that was for the best. I needed to believe in the power of free will as much as I needed to believe in God. Being a puppet of a divine puppeteer never suited me; it would be with God’s help and my own will that we would conquer the problems laid before us. I didn’t overestimate myself. But I was damned sure of my calling.
I’d not risk anything before finding Jonathon. We were a good team, and we couldn’t dare be separated further. That’s when the demons had leverage. But the demons hadn’t accounted for my guardian angels that had passed on. I was reminded I was not alone. I had friends in both worlds.
The wind took a stronger turn, and I felt the need to retire, and I ducked down the narrow stairwell and down two levels toward our room. Lavinia had procured us distinctly middle-class comportments. She denounced first-class passengers as a nosy lot that would ask too many questions, but that steerage would simply be too miserable. Middle class was all I’d ever known so I simply tried to move as invisibly through this trip as I’d moved all my life as a mute female. I’d been cast out of “proper society” so long ago, frankly it afforded me far more freedoms than the scrutiny Lavinia had to seek actively to avoid.
It unsettled me that at dusk the dimly lit corridor leading unto our bunks resembled the constant corridors of my nightmares. As I opened the narrow door to our tiny room, Lavinia was laying on her stomach on the top bunk in a pool of sumptuous black fabrics, writing. She nodded to me as I entered and kept writing.
The realization about the familiar corridor must have affected me on a conscious and unconscious level for sure enough, that night a nightmare came in all its resplendent horror.
Why couldn’t I simply have a pleasant dream about nothing at all? That might be the greatest gift my mind could give, an entirely mundane dreamscape.
What a lovely interlude. Maybe, some night, I would be granted that simple pleasure. Tonight was not that night...
It didn’t surprise me that I was in a corridor again. That a simple corridor could take on as many troubling dimensions as it did in my nightmares was perhaps a credit to my powers of invention and manifestation. But a sinking realization hit me during that dream. The corridors were leading up to something not metaphorical but real and what might be found there would mean life or death at some future date. The corridors would lead up, eventually, to one. Or, at least, to several corridors. But halls all in one place.
The Denbury Estate.
Jonathon had once described his home to me while we communed soul to soul when he was trapped in the painted image of his Greenwich estate’s study. The architecture before my dreaming eye followed his descriptions. I stood at the end of a very long, shadowed corridor with gaslight sconces down several sets of doors, all of which were open, some dim threshold manifesting in gray gaps of light amid the dark structure of the house itself. Dark wooden paneling and deep purple wallpaper, arches and carving all in gothic styling, an aesthetic akin to something the Brontës would write about. My life had followed a relative Gothic novel style thus far, why stop there? These were just the culmination, the inevitable final chapters, were they not?
Looking from side to side, I noticed there were numbers painted haphazardly on each door. In a specific sequence, winding down from higher numbers to lower. The pattern; the one Crenfall had been repeating in the asylum. That was odd; houses didn’t generally number their rooms. So perhaps I was to consider that a metaphoric clue, not literal.
I’d honed the skill of logical deductions while dreaming illogical things. By now I’d had a bit of practice. Perhaps my mind knew that my life would depend upon it and my every faculty was expanded as a result; perhaps when my soul had split from my body, the part of my mind associated with these realms had taken on greater strength, capability, and a certain dominion over what was presented.
But before I could ruminate further on the nature or logic of the numbers, the hair rising on the back of my neck reminded me that I was in a nightmare and that something dreadful was about to be seen, done, heard, felt, or any combination of the lot. It was the most terrible of inevitable things, to have become so familiar with that dropping, sickening dread swinging like the pendulum in Poe’s ungodly pit.
I took stock of the corridor once more. It was empty, and yet, I felt I was not alone. The hallway stretched for a length that seemed absurdly long even for a grand estate, as if all proportions were off. At the end opposite me, an uncomfortably far distance indeed, I was faced by an oval portrait of a person whose details were too faint to make out. Anemic sconces on either side cast a subtle haze over the portrait’s façade. I tried to walk toward it, as it might be yet another clue, and it was the item pulling focus, the only thing truly lit with any brightness in this dim setting.
But, per that terrible convention of dreams, my least favorite of all the unfortunate tricks of the troubled mind, I could not move. Not forward, not backward. Not that I could go anywhere. A wall was to my back, the corridor’s end. Cool, carved wood paneling crested at the nape of my neck in arched patterns set within the fine mahogany. Leaving me to face the empty corridor with open doors and an unknown portrait. If I found my footing, at least I could go into the other rooms. But what might be in the other rooms was a question I doubted I wanted answered. The corridor answered for me.
With a slam all the doors at once shut of their own accord, and I started, backing against the end of the corridor behind me.
And then, one by one, in a frightening, invisible procession forward, the gas-lit sconces went out. First the lights illuminating the oval portrait went out. Doused. Instantly. Utter blackness lay in direct opposition of my place at the other end. And then from the end of the corridor forward, one by one, each set on either side of the narrow walls were snuffed out as if by a great wind. But there was no wind. And no one there to turn the key. Just an encroaching and all-encompassing darkness, creeping toward me. One set of sconces at a time. Like footsteps, but there were no footfalls. I tried to step back, to turn and run, but still damnably rooted. I tried to call out for someone, anyone, Jonathon’s name upon my lips, but no…
And then the darkness was upon me. My eyes were wide, the blackness thorough. There was a terrible, terrible pause in which I was helpless and sensory deprived.
Then an icy, unseen hand closed around my throat.
“This time you’re coming for me, are you?” came that horrid, familiar whisper of the demon in the pitch dark. Warm breath contrasted its icy strangle as it threw its own words back in my face.
Oh, God. It would be waiting. A congealed but yet incorporeal evil could never truly be killed, could it? It would just keep lying in wait… In New York, or England…it would always know me. Could it ever be bested?
I renounce thee… My mind screamed, words that had helped to keep the beast at bay more than once.
The inhumanly cold vise tightened, and I choked a gasp into the encompassing darkness.
I awoke with a start, nearly hitting my head on Lavinia’s bunk above. Breathing heavy, I choked but managed not to have screamed, which was for the best. I doubted making a scene or a fuss involving others on the boat would have helped my seasick nerves.
I took a moment to wonder what I could have learned from that dream, other than the obvious demonic pall. Clearly, if I was to travel to the Denbury estate, I should do so with a torch in hand. And a weapon. And avoid corridors. Noted. Also, try never to be alone. To be alone in a nightmare was a most despairing condition. Even worse, to be alone with potential dark magic swarming the air.
I thought of someone else alone in her own mind, and I pulled out my trusty notebook, neatly tore out a few pages, and began writing a letter to a girl recovering from demons’ thrall far, far away. A girl who wasn’t nearly as accustomed to loneliness as I had been. Despite all her faults, the Master’s Society had taken too much to additionally take away the one peer, the one possible friend she might still have, and the only one that could actually understand her plight. That was me, and I needed to rise to that designation. For I bet the demon haunted her too.
“Margaret Hathorn,” I murmured to the page before me. “I owe you a letter.”
Chapter Eighteen
Dear Maggie,
I would have liked to have written you sooner. But I fell ill. I was, in fact, targeted again, sought out by the demon’s tendrils, and laid low by the Master’s Society’s most recent experimental horrors.
Regrettably, the journey I am on currently will mean it will take even longer for this letter to arrive at your doorstep in Chicago. I embark upon a journey in hopes of resolution, as you have done. I hope you will keep me in your prayers, along with anyone in this dire situation who tries desperately to turn evils around into justices.
From your perspective, considering the expansive and bold contents of your letter, there are things I would like to encourage of you and things I would like to discourage. Not because I think I know any better than you. I chafe at people acting like they “know better” than me. What I write, I write simply because I am trying to take my own advice.
But first, allow me to thank you.
Not for what you did in almost getting us both killed.
But in being willing to reach out, to write a letter, to try and salvage something of what might someday be a truly beautiful friendship. For that, I commend you. It is a brave thing to reach out to another person. I spent most of my life being quite solitary due to my lack of speech, so I understand what breaking isolation means when you’ve been forced by circumstances to withdraw from average society. Society, for you, meant so much more to you than it ever did to me, so I’m sure your separation from it is all the more troublesome.
But, there are always consequences for actions, and this ostracizing is the unfortunate consequence of your letting the demon in.
I believe you are weathering it well, but I would not be a friend to you if I did not share my perspective on these most unique and peculiar and dangerous circumstances.
I encourage you to appreciate Chicago for what it is. My trip out west made me only appreciate New York all the more, so I hope you can truly take in the contrasts as perspective. Absence making the heart grow fonder for home will allow you to reclaim your own self more fully upon your return. You are displaced there for a reason. In my case, I did not weather the effects of dark magic well because I was too quickly wrapped up in it once more, snapped back to New York before the evil had worn off. You need this time, distance, and space for cleansing yourself of the spiritual grime and stain of the demon’s making.
I encourage you to listen to the counsel given you there. It is a precious gift. Karen is your guide, as is the lingering presence of lost Amelia. Treasure them as I treasure my deceased mother who yet guides me. Internalize their words and sensibilities down to your core. People like them will save your life. Mrs. Northe gave you the gift and protection of her friends; please see this as her taking care of you. Do not believe for a minute that she doesn’t care. She always has, though she hasn’t always expressed and acted upon it as thoroughly as she should, in my humble opinion. I do believe she grieves for what more she should have done with and for you. Allow her the opportunity to rectify it here, by sending you somewhere safe, with her dearest companions.
I beg you this: do not entertain the Master’s Society’s aims in the least.
The Double Life of Incorporate Things (Magic Most Foul) Page 14