by Kelley York
We seat ourselves across from one another at the table, candle centred between us, hands linked. Miss Bennett says it’s better to have someone close to the deceased present, or a possession that was important to them in life. I’m hoping being in their house, on their blood-soaked floorboards, will do.
We’ve watched a séance be performed more than once. We’ve participated in them. Actually performing a summoning for unwilling spirits is different from merely encountering them by chance, or even goading them into showing themselves. This? This is pulling them from wherever it is the dead go when we cannot see them, from some realm invisible to our eyes. Sometimes, they aren’t pleased when that happens. Something about the circle helps keep us safe, and we are not to break it until the spirit leaves or has been dismissed.
I close my eyes, chin tucked toward my chest. Deep breaths.
“We are here to speak to the Brewer family. Flora, Hugo, Jules, Lottie, Douglas, and Alice. We need you to be seen and to be heard.”
Moments tick by. The house remains silent. A howling wind outside rattles the windows. I repeat the words again, this time omitting the names of the children, who I fear would not be as helpful to us anyway, and I’d rather we focus our energy on Mr. or Mrs. Brewer. We know Mrs. Brewer still lingers somewhere nearby after encountering her in the woods the other day.
I repeat again. And again.
The hairs along my arms begin to stand on-end, a familiar sinking sensation in my gut draws my attention. But this is different from normal; not a prickling feeling, a pulling, like something is in the room with us, but more like…
Pressure. Something bearing in on me from all sides, like sliding into a lukewarm bath that’s just on the wrong side of too cold. It’s a vaguely familiar sensation that I cannot place, a feeling of being dragged under while the rest of the world dims, a soft hymn in the silence lulling me into a false sense of calm while invisible hands wrap round the inner workings of my soul to cast me aside and take over…
James squeezes my hands. The warmth draws me back, my fingers flexing tight in return. As best as I can describe it, I push back against the force bearing down on me.
The world brightens back into focus and I suck in a sharp breath, lungs burning in protest as though I’ve not had proper air in ages. I don’t know if I’ve been out of it for seconds or minutes. When I dare to open my eyes, it’s to see someone standing in the darkened corner of the room.
James’ gaze remains on me. “She’s here.”
I drag in another deep breath, shaking off the effects of…whatever that was I just experienced.
“Flora Brewer,” I call, tentatively, hoping she’ll not become violent like she did last time. “We need to know what happened to your family. Can you tell us who attacked you?” Not killed. Sometimes the reminder that they’re dead sends them into a fit, and that is the last thing we need. The circle of our linked hands protects us, but it does not make us immune.
Flora Brewer shifts, subtly, slowly. A creak of flooring beneath bare, blackened feet. “Fletcher boy. Madeline… Madeline… Madeline…” Her voice snags on the name.
“Edison.”
“Edison,” she agrees, voice crackled and scarcely a whisper. “They took… They took… Oh, my little Jules, my sweet girl…” Her tone turns raw and pained with loss.
James asks, “Do you know why?”
It’s difficult to tell whether or not she fully grasps the question. Although I’m refusing to look directly at her mangled body, I can see from the corner of my eye she’s wringing her hands together.
“All my fault. All my fault. My babies, all of them. I just loved him so very much. Thomas, I’m so sorry, so sorry…”
James and I lock eyes.
“Thomas? Do you mean Reverend Thomas?” I ask.
Flora Brewer lets out a shrill, wailing sob, hitting a pitch that sets my teeth on edge and makes my hands clench around James’. Her words become unintelligible, fragments of sentences that, when strung together, make no sense. “A good man, such a good man, not like Hugo, but he just…”
She trails off. Her restless rocking ceases and her head drops back, black and bloodied mouth open mutely as her eyes stare into nothing. Slowly, her head rolls to the side.
“It’s come back again,” she whispers. Then she shrinks into the shadows and disappears.
James watches me until I give a curt nod. “She’s gone.”
He gives my hands one last squeeze before we break the circle. “Shall we, then?”
We fetch our greatcoats, ensuring we each have our holy water and crucifixes on our persons. I catch hold of him as he reaches for the door, knowing I cannot ask him not to run off, but—
“Please try to stay close?”
Try. As best as he can.
James touches my cheek, leans in, kisses me sweetly. “I will do my very best.”
With the utmost reluctance, I release him. Once I’ve the lamp in hand, we step outside.
In the still gloom, I see nothing of note. James’ better eyesight, however, lingers on something in the distance, and he points. “There’s our boy.”
I raise the lantern higher. I’m only just able to make out the shape of Abraham, and it’s only because he moves, an inky blotch against a smudgy grey backdrop. “Let’s see if we can keep on his trail this time, hm?”
James follows Abraham, and I follow James, watching our footing in the slush and freshly fallen snow. We travel beyond the clearing we came to the other day with Virgil and Adelia. Farther still. Widely spaced trees pass in blurs, shadowy sentinels that sometimes look like people from the corner of my gaze, and it takes everything to focus on Abraham, not to lose him in the night.
We hit an incline that takes some effort to scale. At the top, the trees thin out further for only a spell before cramming in close, more like a proper forest than the scant smattering of trees I’ve seen elsewhere here. No sooner has the ground levelled again than Abraham’s tracks vanish. The snow here is thin, more mud and ice. I hold out the lantern to try to discern his footprints while we catch our breath.
When Abraham lunges from the shadows, we aren’t entirely caught off-guard. James braces himself for the impact of Abraham’s heavy frame barrelling into him.
I abandon the lantern, ripping a bottle from my coat. James’ back is pressed to a tree, one arm braced against Abraham’s throat, keeping his gnashing teeth a few inches from his face, but not preventing his fingers from grabbing at James—his hair, his throat. Uncoordinated and clumsy, but still dangerous.
Bottle uncorked, I empty its contents against the side of Abraham’s face, fully intending to pry his grip free so James can focus on his scriptures.
Except Abraham isn’t fazed. I may as well have flicked his nose for all the good it does.
I catch sight of James’ eyes, growing wide, looking at me—past me—and his frantic voice: “William!”
Something solid connects with the side of my skull, knocking me clear off my feet and bringing the ground colliding with my face.
Fuck.
Vision blurred, I roll painfully to my side and then to all fours, grasping for my bearings. The world has become muted and far away. James’ voice, too—I can hear him shouting, as though from the end of a long tunnel, underwater.
“William, move!”
Everything snaps back into clarity just in time for me to throw myself to one side, narrowly avoiding another deft swing from a short plank of fence post. It strikes the ground where I laid a second ago and splinters in half, much to the dismay of the man wielding it.
James is still contending with Abraham, so this man is…
I haven’t the time to study his face. He’s dressed in the clothes of a worker, shoeless and jacketless, the cold not seeming to bother him in the slightest. His mouth twists into a vicious grin as he stalks closer. I scramble back, tr
ying to get my footing long enough to stand. A low-hanging branch grants me assistance. I grab hold and lurch to my feet.
In my other hand, I clutch tight at another phial of holy water. The last did not work against Abraham and I don’t know why, but I’m willing to try again.
“Prayer to St. Michael the Archangel,” I grind out, summoning the words to the forefront of my panicked brain. “In the name of the Father, and of the Son—”
The creature lets out a vicious howl and makes a dash for me. I uncork the phial; the second he closes the distance between us, I splash the water across his face, into his gaping mouth.
This time, it works.
It does not, unfortunately, halt his momentum.
He staggers. I grab his shoulders as he claws at his own face, and I put out a leg to sweep his out from under him, to get him to the ground.
A simple misstep is both a blessing and a curse. The man lashes out blindly and I fall back. The ground gives way beneath my foot, sending me backwards. Out of reflex, I flail, catching hold of his outstretched arm.
We drop down the hill like stones in a pond. For a few alarmingly slow seconds, I am airborne, before I hit the steep decline with enough force to slam the air from my lungs. Momentum keeps us rolling, unable to grab at anything to slow our descent.
Until I collide with a fallen tree in my path.
A brief, splitting pain blossoms at the side of my skull, and then—
Darkness.
I open my eyes to a brightly lit room.
No, not just any room. My room at Whisperwood.
The light is too bright, blowing out the colours of everything around me. I woke because I thought I heard James’ voice, but I appear to be alone.
The door bursts open. A girl twirls her way in, making it a point to draw attention to the fluttering blue ribbons in her hair. I know her face almost as well as I know my own. I’ve seen it often enough.
“Charlotte?”
“Up, Will! Up! You promised we’d go to see Mr. Roberts’ horses.” She grins, missing a front tooth.
This is all wrong. My sister is ten-and-six now, no longer a gap-toothed seven-year-old. Still a vivacious, tenacious creature, but it isn’t the same.
Still, I find myself sliding out of bed even as she dances out of the room. Her laughter transitions from familiar and comforting to something twisted that makes my stomach roll with nerves. Somewhere in the distance, I swear I can hear James.
James.
He was fighting the Fletcher boy, and I was—
And we—
Separated.
I step into the hallway. Charlotte has vanished, though I think I hear her voice behind a closed door as I pass. I pause there, reaching for the handle, when I spot a figure at the far end of the hall.
James, standing with his back to me, head down and motionless.
I abandon the door to go to him.
At each door I pass, I almost halt, because the voices behind them are calling to me. Mother, Father, my older brother Peter.
“You’ve got to get your head on straight,” Mother hisses. “Don’t embarrass the family, William.”
I am ten again, shaking with nerves, unable to breathe while she grips my arm tight enough to leave remnants of her fingerprints on my muscles. I try to calm myself. There’s a dining room full of people—colleagues of father’s, their wives, prominent members of society, all with their eyes trained on the hysterical boy whose mother is dragging him from the room.
Peter’s voice is loud. It rattles around my insides with the taunting sound of his laugh. “You’re a bloody loon, Will. Stop your crying; you’re acting like a woman.”
I am eight again. Peter and his friends have ripped the book from my hands and thrown it into the well, snatched the spectacles from my face, and are jeering as I grasp blindly where they dangle the spectacles above my head. Peter says I need to toughen up. He shoves me to the ground and allows his friends to snap my glasses in half.
Father’s voice is lower, less intelligible, but I catch all-too familiar words, “…no son of mine…”
I am fifteen again, my mouth full of blood, the air knocked from my lungs. I lie on the cobblestone streets with four boys surrounding me, driving their boots into my stomach and back while I clutch at my head and duck my face to protect it. They caught me kissing another boy near the docks and chased me down. I think they might leave me for dead until a constable on patrol comes across us and helps me home.
I do not tell Father the reason why I was at the docks, but he knows.
He knows. And he looks at me in a way that says, you should have let them kill you.
I grit my teeth and press onward, determined to reach James.
Yet the hallway seems to drag on endlessly. For every step I take, it extends another two, and no amount of running will put those doors—and my family—behind me. I call for him, but my voice is muddled, lost in the thickness of the air weighing in from all sides.
“Will, why are you always gone?” Charlotte whimpers from behind her door.
Stop it.
Stop.
“Peter says if you behaved better, Mummy and Daddy wouldn’t keep sending you away.”
STOP!
Finally, by some miracle, I burst through whatever invisible barrier had been preventing my progress. The doors fall away behind me. I crash to my knees, grabbing hold of James’ arm.
Be all right.
James.
Please.
He turns to me slowly, chin tucked down, watching me there on the floor.
But his face is ashen, and his eyes are as empty as that of any corpse.
The world goes cold.
Too cold. My lungs burn with it.
James slips away through my fingers again.
My eyes snap open, and the cold is all around me. A faint, metallic tang sits upon my tongue. The forest is deathly silent. Snow has seeped through my clothes.
Every inch of me hurts.
Including, and especially, the side of my head.
Wincing, I bring a hand up to touch it, and my numb fingers come away stained red and sticky. My spectacles are long gone, lost somewhere in the sharp tumble down the hillside. I’m fortunate that the tree stopped my progress because I’m not even all the way to the bottom.
Someone is, though. Through the haze and darkness, I can make out a prone body at the bottom of the incline, and my breath momentarily seizes in my throat. It may not be James. It likely isn’t. But it could be, and that’s enough to have me dragging myself forward, easing down the hill to where the ground levels enough for me to stand without slipping.
It is not James, but the boy who fell along with me. His eyes are wide and unseeing, and his neck is bent at an unnatural angle. Another life we could have saved and failed to.
What’s more, I think I might recognize his face. Dimly. Perhaps someone I spoke to at Lord Wakefield’s party.
Nothing to be done for him now; I need to find James.
I turn around, head spinning, still trying to shake the fog from my brain and work some warmth back into my freezing limbs. How long was I out? It’s snowing again, and it’s still dark, but it’s on the morning side of midnight, judging by the pre-dawn light hazing the sky.
Has James been searching for me? The fall was a long one, but only vertically. He could have spotted me from the top of the hill.
And if he hasn’t found me, then…
I launch myself back up the hill as quickly as I can. There is no graceful way about it. The rocks and grass and snow make the ascent slow, and my palms are bruised and torn by the time I reach the top.
Back in the clearing, there is no sign of James. Plenty of signs of a struggle; the snow and dirt are disturbed, a few low-slung branches broken and littering the ground. But no James.
Panic seizes my chest so tightly I can barely get a breath in to scream his name. The plea vanishes into the night and receives no response. I cup my hands around my mouth and try again, louder, though my voice cracks from exposure to the cold.
He’s gone. He did not look for me. Which could mean a million things, but none of them are good.
I’m moving blind through the darkness. There’s no telling where my glasses got to and if they’ll be in one piece should I find them. So, when I locate a moderately clean set of tracks leading away from the clearing, I have to move slower than I’d like to follow them.
Not just tracks, either. Drag marks.
Would Abraham have taken James away? He hardly seemed to have the mental facilities for such a thing. He’d attacked like a crazed animal. Except…not entirely, right? Because it occurs to me he led us away from the safety of the farm out into the woods, to where the other boy sat in waiting.
They set up a bloody ambush for us.
And…what, kidnapped James? To what end? None of it makes any sense.
I stumble through the trees and fields, following the tracks as far as they’ll take me. I haven’t a clue how far I go or what direction I’ve gone, but by some turn, the tracks eventually lead to the road…and then disappear. Did they board a carriage? A horse? That would be the reasonable explanation, yet if so, there are plenty of recent tracks and no way to know which ones to follow. Hell, some of them could even be from our own carriage on the way to the Brewer’s the night before. If this is even the same road.
It’s cold and I’m lost and I am not thinking clearly.
And I need to find James.
A wave of nausea sweeps over me. I double over, hands to my knees, head down, incapable of getting in a proper breath. My heart is racing faster than any horse ever could. I’m positive my trembling legs are going to give and I’ll pass out right here on the side of the road.
It’s all right, I try to tell myself.
I envision it in James’ voice instead of my own. That flippant, easy smile and the low cadence of his words against my ear: It’s going to be all right, dear William. Steady on.