Darker Still

by Leanna Renee Hieber

  Rallying a faint smile, I accepted the tea Marie offered, even though I’d had plenty already that morning.

  “I have it on high authority that you’re not like other girls, my dear, so don’t worry about being like anyone else. Do you understand?” Mrs. Northe said.

  “I think so,” I signed. She smiled in return, but then the smile faded, and with its departure, a chill crept into the room.

  “And I’m sure we’ll have plenty of cause for tea and company. But I wish it were under better circumstances. There’s something in this morning’s paper that you must see. Unpleasant, I’m afraid.”

  “Unpleasant” wasn’t the half of it. I’ve included the article here so you will understand my distress.

  The Herald, June 12, 1880

  Young Aristocrat Slays Woman in Brothel Nightmare

  Late last night just off Cross Street in the hellish zone of the Five Points, nineteen-year-old Barbara Call was found beheaded in the back room of a house of ill repute and with bizarre markings carved into her forearm.

  Witnesses described Miss Call’s “suitor” as shockingly handsome, with a fine suit of worsted wool, black curls, and bright eyes. The British-accented man called himself “Barry.” A composite sketch is rendered here from accounts of witnesses who saw the man take Miss Call into a private room after he’d taken care to ascertain her name. No sounds were heard from within the room, and no one saw Barry exit. Nor did they see Miss Call alive again.

  The New York City Police Department requests any information the public might have about this man or his further whereabouts.

  On the opposite page was a newspaper artist’s sketch, and there I saw my Denbury!

  “How similar and yet frighteningly different a face can be, can’t it?” Mrs. Northe murmured. “Barry, the fine clothing, the accent…it’s as if his every feature is heightened, a caricature of itself, not,” she scoffed, “that newspaper artists are known for their verisimilitude. I daresay the novelty is a handsome killer and so grisly a deed. Is this what you saw at the Art Association?”

  The dark circles below his eyes were like paint, his curls twisted into near horns on either side of his head, and the high cheekbones were set even higher as if to hollow his cheeks—but even then, there was a haunting beauty to him. My blood ran cold. I nodded. The devil that held Denbury’s body hostage was a killer…And my dream had foretold it. Barbara. A beheaded woman in the Five Points.

  “I dreamed…” I signed, not bothering to hide how much I shook. Mrs. Northe was patient as I struggled to relay my thoughts. “I visited Denbury through the study door he cannot access. I brought nightmares. The demon Denbury came. I hid against the wall. Then, in the corridor, I saw…a corpse. Headless. ‘Barbara’ was carved into her arm.”

  I gestured to the paper and shook harder as I wrote on the margin of the paper: “My nightmare foresaw this! Why am I tied to this? Worse, I just saw the fiend strolling in Central Park! What can I do?”

  I fought back the tears welling in my eyes. Mrs. Northe remained ever calm.

  “You must ask Denbury to tell you every detail about his imprisonment. We cannot solve a mystery, supernatural or no, without clues.”

  “The Denbury I know in the painting…Tell me he’s not the one responsible—”

  Mrs. Northe shook her head. “From everything you have said, your Denbury appears just as much the victim as Miss Call. At least, part of him is. And we must do everything in our power to make sure that the side of good prevails. Trust in his good, and it will not fail you.”

  I gulped and nodded. It was dizzying to think about such impossibilities. What a contrast from the chatter of society ladies and upper-echelon intrigues! “Did Maggie see the article?” I signed.

  “I doubt it. She only reads the society pages.”

  I asked about what the murder could mean. Why beheading? What about the symbols carved on her arm? Would logic have any bearing in such circumstances?

  “I can’t say,” Mrs. Northe replied. “Perhaps those were more runes. I’ve made progress on the verses carved around the painting, but the translation isn’t yet complete. What’s clear is that this is the work of devils, not spiritualists. But come to the museum. You must meet with your father, and we must keep up appearances. I’ll see you in the exhibition room when you’re done.”

  We rode to the museum in silence, sitting overwhelmed with the shock of the murder.

  I am reminded that I’ve lived a sheltered, protected life. Were my circumstances different, I could have easily been Barbara Call. If my father had less respectable work, less stability, I could have been forced to such a house of ill repute as poor Barbara. My heart goes out to all the women whom society has cast onto the streets and put at the mercy of devils. Perhaps women like Mrs. Northe and me are the sort to do something about it.

  But none of this to my father. Such things as this troubled him greatly; his heart was a delicate one, an artist’s heart, and I hoped he would hear nothing of this brutality. In Father’s estimation, I hadn’t a care in the world, and I appeared unusually compliant as we discussed my schedule and duties. I might not speak, but I’m a decent actress. We agreed I could spend several days a week at the museum, and he suggested several pleasant activities such as cataloguing and sketching. He did not need to know how much of the time I would spend sneaking in to see Denbury.

  I do believe this apprenticeship will lead to very little work and a deal of watching, giving a restless female something to do and giving Father the sense that he’s doing right by his daughter. When he introduced me to his fellows, it was clear no real responsibility would be offered to my hands. All those stoic male tones confirmed as much. But I cannot take issue. It’s best that my duties remain vague, that my tasks are set on observation and time for sketching, that time is not always entirely accounted for…so that I may slip into the other world of Denbury’s quarters to unfold magic and mystery.

  • • •

  I’ve taken these few free moments, as I sit amid the glorious Greco-Roman sculptures, to write down every mad detail thus far. The pieces between important events may provide a truer sense of the whole.

  Mrs. Northe will meet me here in a few minutes, and then we’re off to see my lord. My Lord Denbury. Forgive me, God, if that sounded disrespectful. My compulsion to see Denbury is total. Unseen hands push me toward him, terror be damned. Everything has been shaken inside me, and I’ve begun to pray more heartily than ever before. How odd that when one is faced with the expanding petals of a blooming, supernatural rose, one must cling to faith to keep one’s head. I’ll report anon.

  Later, June 12th into the 13th

  (I write late at night and into the next day, burning the gas lamp low but steady.)

  My poor Denbury has been terribly scarred!

  When Mrs. Northe and I arrived in his room, his canvas portrayed him in his usual stoic position, tall, broad, striking, and bold. But today he had a bright red gash upon his cheek, and his mouth was taut with pain. The curators would think that someone with an errant brush has offered a foul addition, but I knew better. Something has been inflicted on his soul from the inside out, made manifest upon the artwork.

  I turned to Mrs. Northe in alarm. She clearly saw the wound too. “Should I go to him?” I asked.

  “Yes,” she replied. “We must find out what he knows. And by the time you’re out again, I’ll have finished the runic translations of the frame.”

  I nodded. One weird task after another. My heart pounded.

  I braced myself for that most peculiar sensation. Dipping my forehead and my shoulders and then swiftly launching my weight, I was in. Denbury was at my side in an instant, catching me again. My body thrilled, flooding with heat in that delicious moment. I could feel the press of his firm hand at my back as it lingered there.

  “Oh, Natalie,” he murmured, flushed. His breath, hot on my cheek, smelled of bergamot, of Earl Grey tea. Another detail my dream had foretold…

  I
used tending to his wound as an excuse to remain close. I plucked a kerchief from my bodice and pressed it to his bleeding cheek. “Are you well? What happened?”

  “I’m so glad you’re here,” he said, wincing in pain. “You are here, aren’t you? This isn’t one of your dreams, is it? I can no longer trust my senses. I don’t know what’s real…” He trailed off, as I stepped away, the bloody kerchief in my shaking hand.

  “My dreams? You…remember?” I gestured to the door that in my dreams was a portal. I ran to it and tried the knob. It was locked and would not open. Not in this reality. I turned back to him, blushing and confused.

  “Of course,” he replied. “You shared your dream with me.”

  “Oh…” I blushed, remembering how easily I’d fallen into his arms, how instinctively I’d run to him for protection, how we had nearly kissed…

  Reaching out, I pressed the kerchief to his cheek and lifted his hand so that he could hold it himself. A shivering energy passed through our hands as he took the linen from me.

  “But today you’re really here, not just your mind, but your spirit,” he clarified, looking past the frame where my body stood, his hand upraised. “I can touch you.” And as if to demonstrate, he smoothed my hair and then brought his thumb down my cheek, just as I had done on first meeting him face-to-face. It was true; this place did make one question all reality, and tactile sensation seemed to be the only grounding force. I could not tell him not to test me.

  He took a deep breath as if registering my scent, and I was glad I’d rubbed some of my lavender oil behind my ears. Seeking further sensation and confirmation, he brushed my mouth with his fingertips, and my lips parted involuntarily in a little sigh.

  “I am real to you now, here,” I told him. “I feel you as you feel me. And I am here to help you. You must tell me what happened. Did the demon hurt you?”

  “You were there to hear his threat, but then you were gone so quickly. It almost felt as if you were a ghost. I was afraid I’d imagined you all along.”

  I shook my head.

  “Within an hour after you both were gone, the museum room shifted as if the devil wished me to see through his eyes. The images were clouded, as if viewed through some fortune-teller’s globe, but I saw dim, distant flashes and the form of a woman struggling. The room crackled with red fire. I felt pain and smelled blood.”

  He gestured to his scarred cheek. “Then everything went black. I heard screaming. I’ve no sense of time, but when I collected my senses again, there was stillness and my museum view had returned. I can only imagine the scene that devil left behind him—”

  He turned to me, cheeks pale and those unearthly blue eyes now heartbreaking. “Please. Please tell me that was a dream.”

  I bit my lip. Ignorance would do him no good. “I wish it were otherwise.” The more I spoke in this world, the more my voice became a foundation with less faltering. I had to be strong for the both of us. “There’s been a murder in the Five Points. Downtown. A difficult place, a poor place.”

  I described the particulars of the situation, fumbling over the word “beheaded”—truly the most horrifying word I could imagine speaking—and we both glanced at the doorway where the same terror had stood, a terrible omen down to the victim’s very name.

  “There was a picture in the paper, an artist’s sketch, of the last man seen with Miss Call. It…looked like you,” I murmured.

  “Natalie, it wasn’t me. It was that wretch outside me. You must believe me—”

  “I believe you!”

  He raked a hand through his hair and tried to remain calm. “He preys on the weak, the unfortunate. As if to spite me. There has to be a way to stop him, a way to get me back,” he insisted.

  I took his hands in mine. It was a bold act, an improper act since we were not in courtship, yet in our moments, broaching custom had become custom. “Listen to me. Strength and noble virtue draw evil like a magnet, like a moth to a flame. The light of your will is attractive.” I blushed and tried to mitigate what sounded flirtatious. “To both the noble and the ignoble.”

  He stared at me with such sudden gentleness that butterflies took flight in the pit of my stomach. His moods, with their shifting directions, were enough to make anyone reel. I became dizzy again, because in the next moment he darkened.

  “But it is my fault. Perhaps in part. Can I confess something, and will you promise not to hate me?”

  My throat went dry. “Please tell me you’re not somehow a killer—”

  “No.” He spoke with such quiet conviction that I could not doubt him.

  “All right then, I’ll not hate you…”

  Restless, Denbury moved to the bookshelf and slid out a book. It was Dickens’s Hard Times. Oddly fitting. It shook a bit in his hand, its image flickering like a candle, caught between mist and mass. Things weren’t entirely solid here. Only he was.

  Denbury shook his head, weighing the book in his hand. It was not real, and yet he was requesting it to be so. Staring at Dickens’s sullen work, he pondered: “This room responds to what you expect of it, but here I am testing its limits, forcing this volume to become what it represents. This dread room is full of phantom objects. If only that were the case with the way out. The longer I’m here, the more these objects strain against existence. Will I be the same?”

  I placed my hand on his shoulder. “No. You are firm. Strong. Remember how your light bid my nightmares fade? Like a guardian angel? Hardly a phantom.”

  He smiled, and the dark circles of weariness below his eyes seemed to lessen a bit. Bolstered, he had an idea.

  “So help me demand these to be real. Until I find a way out, I’ll have to keep living, keep hold of something tangible, else I’ll go mad. Come, let’s alphabetize the books while you talk to me.”

  I nodded, accepting a few books he thrust in my hands. “But I believe you had something you were about to confess to me.”

  “So I do,” he sighed.

  We moved methodically. The task kept him from having to look at me, which is always best with a confession.

  “I returned to the Greenwich estate upon my parents’ death. The servants were hysterical, driving me mad. A solicitor awaited me there, Crenfall. I didn’t like him. He was eerie and odd. Yet he was the only one not screaming, crying, or demanding something of me as a new lord.” Denbury ground out the words as we hovered back and forth along the shelves. “Over properties and ledgers, he promised he’d take me to a place to cure me of all pain and frustration. I didn’t realize he would take me to an opium den.”

  I shouldn’t have gasped, but I did. It was a bit shocking. Denbury was blushing and ardently avoiding my eyes. But he continued.

  “There were beautiful women strewn about, all dazed and blissful. Everything was dark and filled with sweet scents. I took a pipe into my mouth and I was lost. I don’t remember a thing past the drug overtaking me. I awoke bound to a truss and trapped in the Greenwich study with a mad artist painting my doom.”

  He moved closer, shifting a book over my head, and I could feel the heat from his cheeks, which were burning with shame. My heart broke further for him and his plight. “So you see, Natalie,” he murmured, “I was Adam. I bit the apple. I tasted. I fell. This is my punishment.”

  “No. That wasn’t fair.” I shook my head, looking up at him. “You were vulnerable. Tempted, tricked—”

  “So was Adam. He paid the price. We all did.”

  “You can’t think that way. People make mistakes. You were targeted. Crenfall counted on you being inexperienced, vulnerable—”

  “Still, I should have been smarter—”

  “I don’t think less of you for one mistake in the throes of grief. And regrets won’t fix your present situation.”

  His tortured grimace eased as he reached out as if to touch me and then suddenly dropped his hand, thinking better of it. I bit my lip. I craved that touch again. We touched in moments of emergency and fear. Touching for the pleasure of it was new.
Still, it felt so natural, right, comfortable. If it were reality—Oh, who was I fooling? Reality meant I couldn’t talk and I would never be the sort of girl to attract a man like Lord Denbury. I don’t turn in all those godforsaken societal circles I’d been hearing about all morning.

  I changed the subject, handing him more books to sort. “Tell me more of your hopes for the future, about your work as a doctor.”

  He nodded and brightened. “Ah yes, a doctor’s noble work…A horrible cholera outbreak during my childhood made me wish to understand its causes. Ever since then, I’ve felt my purpose in life is to tend to those afflicted and have studied whenever and wherever I could. A lot of English wealth was built upon the backs of the poor. It’s my duty to make a return on that investment of blood.”

  As he moved to place a book on the same shelf as I did, he gestured toward my mouth and we were close enough that his fingertips inadvertently brushed my throat. I couldn’t hide my delighted shudder. “That this strange affair granted you a voice is my only comfort. You are my only comfort. My only friend.”

  The brush of contact had me thinking of our near-kiss in my dream, and I had to steady my hand upon the shelf. Denbury’s next words were sobering enough.

  “I wonder if I’ll survive another day if the demon strikes again. If consequences of death fall on me, I wonder how long I have.” He threw a few books onto a cleared shelf.

  “I don’t know,” I replied.

  As he glanced at me, the wild light of his startling blue eyes stilled me. It wasn’t the foreign, reflective darkness of his other half, yet it was still frightening; his natural gallantry had been supplanted by slow-building desperation. And yet with us standing only a few feet apart, the heat between us was palpable and the effect of his fingertips a wonder. I didn’t know what to do around this man: how to act or what to say. Every moment was charged, meaningful, and unexpected.

  My mind spun with the crime and its results, but Denbury’s magnetism overpowered all. I didn’t just wish to take his hands again; I wanted to bring them to my lips, confessions and all. My own impulses were dangerous. The mad shifts of emotion that this world evinced affected me too. My eyes closed and opened slowly. I had known from the first that I was under his spell, so why deny it?