The Twisted Tragedy of Miss Natalie Stewart

by Leanna Renee Hieber

  “What if she’s been targeted too? And isn’t it too soon? The magic too fresh—”

  “She’ll know what to do. Don’t argue with me, please. I allowed you to come this far. No man would place his treasure in any further danger.”

  Moving in to kiss me, he had just pressed his lips sweetly to mine when we heard footsteps hesitate at the landing. Wishing to avoid what might be a ferocious German scolding from Mrs. Strasser, Jonathon cupped my cheek fondly in his hand before reluctantly retreating down the hall toward his room, his scorching gaze upon me to the last.

  I ducked into my room. I heard Mrs. Strasser’s slow tread down the hall after I’d shut myself in. She paused at each of our doors to listen for any telling noises.

  Crawling into bed in my nightdress, I felt the uncertainty of the coming days settle over me like a damp cloud. What would Father say upon my return? And how long would I have to be secretly courted by a man secretly pretending to be a demon? When he played the fiend, would I forever be reminded of that creature that nearly killed me?

  The thought of the demon must have triggered something. I found myself scratching at my wrist. The skin around it was nearly rubbed raw, and a scratch mark was visible in a thin line of blood. A marking. A letter. No.

  A rune.

  Runes like those that had been carved into the demon’s Five Points victims, onto the painting, onto Jonathon. Now onto me as I sat stewing in a bed in Minnesota. Runes were just an ancient alphabet. But in this case, the letters channeled something more. I turned my arm one way, then another, seeing if it was trick of my eye. I closed my eyes and opened them again. The mark remained.

  I couldn’t remember what this letter represented. But there it was on my arm. Delicately written in blood. “Natalie, you’re exhausted—you’re seeing things,” I whispered to myself. “Besides, I’m done with you, dark magic. I renounced you.”

  I looked down again to find the marking had faded. Convinced that it had been delirium, I eventually realized I couldn’t hold out against how little I’d rested on the train, and I fell into a deep and dreamless sleep where even Jonathon could not find me.

  Chapter 4

  I awoke nearly at first light, lying in bed, kicking at the sheets, and sick to my stomach. I lifted my arm to see if any mark remained. Smooth skin.

  I resolved to look up the mark in Mrs. Northe’s book on runes. I made note of the figure in a fresh diary she’d placed in my bag with the inscription:

  A Gift to Miss Natalie Stewart, whereabouts unknown. Dream well, dear girl.

  Love, Evelyn Northe

  Dream well. Did that mean pleasantly or prophetically?

  I tried to make myself presentable. Bless Mrs. Northe for sending me off with a nice tea gown; she did have an eye for clothing. Someday I hoped to have enough options that I might not be seen in the same array of things for a whole week and a half. That would be luxury. I tucked a few errant tresses behind my ears and pinched my cheeks for some color.

  I pulled out the rosewater toiletries. Miss Rose indeed. The finery made me feel better, and I needed all the help I could get. I glanced in the long mirror of the armoire to see wide green eyes staring back at me that appeared older, wiser, and more harrowed than they had mere months ago.

  My footfalls at the top of the stair must have alerted Samuel. He popped his head around the corner with a smile, bounding up the stairs onto the landing beside me and extending an arm to escort me down the stairs.

  “And how are you this fine morning, Miss Stewart?” he asked, sure to bend his face into my view so I could read his lips.

  I grimaced and thought about the question. Everything I was worried about must have passed over my face. I shrugged.

  Samuel looked at me blankly for a moment before replying: “Well, the good news is that your hair smells like rosewater.”

  I stared at him, and suddenly I smiled. My shoulders relaxed. What a kind soul. How, then, could he be blinded by Preston? Clearly, grief could keep strange company.

  Bread, butter, and coffee were laid out for us. The day outside the wide windows was bright, the trees green. I could hear birds singing, and I recalled glorious summer days in Central Park. I hoped I’d have the presence of mind to enjoy them this year. My reverie was interrupted by the entrance of Jonathon, freshly groomed and breathtaking as ever, but with suitcase in hand. Back on the run again, the two of us. Mrs. Strasser had put my things by the door.

  “Will your ward be traveling with you to England?” Samuel asked. “Miss Rose would be welcome here.”

  “Thank you for the offer, Samuel, but I’ve made arrangements.”

  “It’s Preston, isn’t it? He changed your attitude immediately.”

  Jonathon gave a little laugh. “Nonsense.”

  “Denbury, you once praised me on my attentiveness to a patient’s symptoms. I couldn’t miss the icy pall that came over you when he entered. He means well—”

  “Does he?” Jonathon said sharply.

  “He’s a grieving man, just like me. All he wants is to help others rouse their loved ones again.”

  “We can’t cheat death, Samuel. None of us can. Even science, the all-mighty savior, can’t. We took the Hippocratic oath including the promise to do no harm. Don’t deal with devils, Sam.”

  “Why? Because they haven’t treated you nicely? Preston told me you’re involved with his associates—”

  “Nothing is as it seems, my friend. And if you say one more word about me to Preston or anyone he knows, it may end in my death. Truly, this time. Yours too. Maybe Miss Rose here if we’re not careful.”

  “I’m sorry…” Samuel said softly. “If I thought I was bringing some sort of ill luck upon anyone, least of all you—”

  “Oh, no, I think we were targeted, my friend, but not for ethical reasons.”

  “Preston said you’re not the man you were. What do I trust or believe? Preston and I bonded over grief. Over tragedy. Over young lives ruined too soon. Surely you of all people can understand that.”

  “Grief can make you vulnerable and lead you down a path from which there is no return,” Jonathon said darkly, his gaze downcast, his face coloring in shame.

  The day Jonathon’s parents died, he’d been persuaded into an opium den. From there, he’d been taken prisoner, and the curse began. He couldn’t forgive himself for it.

  Jonathon sighed. “I’m sure Preston, like me, is being used. Just…extricate yourself from his acquaintance. Tactfully. But by your own wits, not by anything I’ve said,” he warned. Breaching the icy gulf, Jonathon embraced Samuel by the door. “We’ll be in touch,” Jonathon said.

  Samuel looked at one of us and then the other. “Travel safely.”

  “Indeed. And…give Elsa our best,” Jonathon said. “Keep faith, my friend.”

  ***

  So. Here we were again on a train. Jonathon had been quiet for hours, staring out the window, brooding, and scowling.

  “You’re worried about him,” I said.

  “I’m worried about everything: Samuel, what I’ve yet to face in England, you, everyone. I wish I had some sense of security.” He returned to silence.

  The lazy motion of the train had me nodding off. And once I did, the nightmares returned. I suppose this was a day-mare, as it was daylight outside when I fell into the fitful sleep that produced yet another traumatizing vision.

  A long corridor, a hallway, with doors on each side. The floor is slightly damp. Perhaps a basement. The lamps are trimmed too low. I hear a distant sound of moans. This is not a place of happiness but torment. As I pass each door, they recede in number; 10, 9, 8, etc., and either no light or only dim light comes from the other side of the door. There are sharp smells, medicinal but below an astringent scent, like something elderly, decaying.

  And just as I arrive at the end of the corridor, glass doors on each side of me and a brick wall ahead of me, I glance to my right. My heart stops as a yellowish hand suddenly slaps the glass, splaying out as if in
pain or trying to reach for someone. There is a whooshing sound of exhaling breath like a last breath. I try to scream, but nothing comes out, my voice again unreliable.

  A door opposite flies open.

  Inside the dim room is a girl in a white dress trimmed with lace, dark hair pinned up but askew, hands folded tightly on a circular table. Her face glitters with tears. The room is freezing cold, wind in the air where there should be no flow.

  Wait, I know that girl. That’s Rachel. Rachel Horowitz, my friend from the Connecticut Asylum. She left school to tend to her aunt in the city, and we lost touch…

  “Rachel,” I say but then remember to greet her in sign language instead.

  “Help,” she signs in return. “Help me. Make it stop.”

  Her face distorts with horror, as if she sees something behind me that I cannot. Suddenly I am shoved hard back into the hallway by an unseen hand and the door slams in my face, shutting Rachel away again.

  The ghostly shove backs me up against a door. A knob jabs against my corset boning. I turn to the door, put my hand upon the knob—Wait, I know that door. I open it to find Lord Denbury’s study, the study from the painting, and this was the way my dreams always let me in.

  But the room of his prison lies in cinders.

  His study has been burned to bits, leaving only smoldering beams. The books are all unbound, pages in the air and falling like dead leaves. Where I used to look out of the frame, out onto the world, there is only blackness. The frame itself, the device used to trap and hold Jonathon’s soul, smolders with dying fire, yet the runes carved around the edges burn brightly.

  There is a pile of ash on the blackened Persian rug in the middle of the room, a pile of ash where Jonathon would stand. And whispers. So many whispers, the growing sound of chanting that rises in the air like thunder. Words I can’t make out. A rite. A spell, perhaps. The room darkens as searing pain shoots up my arms…

  I awoke with a guttural sound in my throat, sitting up in the gently swaying sleeper car, feeling something ugly and ungainly like when I first tried to speak, and I croaked out, “Jonathon,” before blushing and remembering myself. He turned to me, propping himself up on his bunk with one elbow.

  “Yes, my dear?”

  I hesitated.

  “What is it?” he urged.

  “Do you think clairvoyance may be contagious?”

  Jonathon thought a moment. “You’re dreaming up clues again, aren’t you?”

  While trying to reverse Jonathon’s curse, I’d dreamed various clues related to murders the demon had committed. Perhaps I just needed to give in to the fact that I was, at least while dreaming, a bit psychic. The idea didn’t frighten me if it could be useful.

  “I dreamed of a friend from school. Someone I haven’t thought of in a while. But I realize, in seeing her, how much I miss her. I think it’s the girl Mrs. Northe mentioned in her telegraph.”

  “Well? Tell me about her.”

  “Rachel was one of those girls who bore her disability—she can’t speak or hear—so graciously.” I smiled. “It would have been annoying if she wasn’t so darned sweet. Shyness made her seem more fragile than she was. But she noticed everything. I told her she’d make the perfect arch-villain. No one would suspect her in a million years. She smiled and blushed at everyone she met, the perfect foil.

  “She was greatly amused by the idea of being an arch-villain. I was the first to get her out from under her rock,” I said. “I passed her notes in class that made her laugh. Then one day she confessed that while she couldn’t hear nor speak to the living, she heard the dead. That’s when I knew she was a true friend.”

  Jonathon took a sharp breath at that. “We must attract the haunted to us, Natalie.”

  I shrugged. “I told her I envied her,” I continued. “I was jealous that she could hear the dead when I had always wondered about Mother. She told me she’d gladly give up the gift and give it to me instead. It was likely more of a burden than she ever let on.”

  “I’m sure it was. What were you like in school?”

  I thought about myself, my friends, my circumstances. “Rachel was fearfully obedient and always watching. Mary was a helpless romantic obsessed with saints. Edith did all our math homework. I was a restless prankster. They all kept waiting for the day I’d start speaking, as if my whole time there had been one big stunt. But I really did have a hard time with my voice. It took you for that,” I said, running a hand over his as he smiled. “While I was good at my studies, I preferred changing out Sister Theresa’s communion wine for whiskey.”

  Jonathon laughed. “I bet you were the most popular.”

  I rolled my eyes. “Winning the popularity contest among the ‘unfortunates’ at the Connecticut Asylum for the deaf and mute isn’t something to write home about. Maggie and her snotty friends sure would have a laugh over that, now wouldn’t they?”

  “I’d have still fancied you if I’d been there.”

  “You’re just saying that. Now, your turn,” I murmured, suddenly blushing with what I wanted to ask. “Samuel mentioned you hadn’t the time or inclination for a sweetheart. Is that true?” Jonathon raised an eyebrow. “I suppose it’s not ladylike to ask—”

  “No, it’s all right,” he said, bemused. “There were a few girls at balls, all of us curious about whether chaperones were really paying attention, a stolen kiss here or there, mostly for sport. Most young ladies found my scientific obsessions boring or frightening. All of them were being pushed to marry, so they preferred talk of courtship over medicine. It wasn’t their fault. I’ve always been free to pursue my interests, but girls your age are forced to appear as though finding a husband is their sole preoccupation.”

  “But it isn’t,” I defended. “We’ve other interests.”

  “I know that now. And now I’ve finally found a girl who interests me.”

  I smiled. He snatched up my arm, kissing me on the open patch of skin between my glove and my sleeve. Where the rune had appeared…I bit my lip. “It’s good you’re going on to England to further break the spell. The dark magic might still be hanging on to me.”

  “Why? What happened?”

  “A mark. On my wrist there. It faded. Surely I was just seeing things, exhausted—”

  “Don’t assume anything is your imagination,” Jonathon said sternly. “Tell Mrs. Northe. She’ll help counter any aftereffects and take care of you until my return.”

  I nodded. “If what I just saw in my nightmare is a clue, Rachel is in immediate danger. She’s my first concern upon arrival. Mrs. Northe’s telegram said I was again at the center of the mystery.”

  “Mrs. Northe won’t be deterred.”

  It had occurred to me too, that all this revolved around Mrs. Northe; she is both a mother and harbinger of doom to us all. She uses us without giving us any proper training as to what we might encounter. And she’s getting closer to my father, maybe Rachel. What might she inadvertently bring upon my friends and family? Did spiritualism bring more than one bargained for, even if one was trying to practice it in the best way possible?

  I stared at Jonathon, suddenly terrified for him. “In my dream, I visited your study again, the one from your painting, but you weren’t there and everything was in cinders.”

  “That’s a good thing. Of course I wasn’t there. I’m free. I doubt your dreams would operate the same way now that I’m released. I’m glad for the ashes. I wanted to torch that canvas. I would’ve, too, if I hadn’t been worried about burning down the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I don’t want anything left of that horror but dust. You’re dreaming of our vindication, not an omen of worse to come.”

  I took his assurances and fell into his arms, and we watched a glorious sun set from one state to the next.

  Chapter 5

  The Germans have a good word for nightmare, or a nightmare dreamscape.

  Schreckensvision.

  The word itself is like shrieking when what enters your vision is too terrible to descr
ibe, and a long cry is the only thing to do. But I’ll try to put words to the terrible.

  If one could find a profession in nightmares, I’d have quite a career.

  The hallway again, all medicinal sharpness and low-trimmed lamps. My every sense alive, I feel the damp moisture of the cool basement humidity on my face and on my arms below the sleeves of my robe. I’m traveling a frightful corridor in my dressing gown. I see a door marked with a word to chill any sane soul: MORGUE.

  I really needed to stop reading Edgar Allan Poe before bed.

  I enter the room, which is gray-white and cold.

  There are bodies under sheets, laid on tables. Four of them, vague human shapes below the sheets. They are either being kept for family before transferred to a funeral parlor, or perhaps they’ll be used as cadavers for science. Who knows?

  Regardless, the vision was unpleasant. I hadn’t been in a room with a dead body before, much less several, so my mind could only imagine what the stale smell of beginning decay was like. It was an unwelcome detail nonetheless. My dreams are nothing if not thorough.

  And then, all at once, the dead bodies sat up.

  Their white sheets slid down to reveal bare, gray flesh. With a raspy gasp, their blue mouths fell open.

  And as they began to shriek, the bodies turned to me with sightless eyes, and yet they knew I was there or that I would be coming.

  And I, like those bodies, shot up upon the train, glad to be alive and not under a morgue sheet myself.

  With a gasp, I opened my eyes. I was on the train. With a cup of tea in hand. Jonathon had nodded off to sleep in our compartment shortly after nightfall. I, however, had been too restless for sleep. I’d made my way to the dining car for a calming cup of mint tea. Apparently it had soothed me right into sleep; unfortunately, it hadn’t been able to lull my dreams.

  An older woman a table away must have noticed my frightful expression. “Bad dreams?” she queried.

  “Always,” I replied.