Darker Still

by Leanna Renee Hieber

  “We…shall meet each day as it comes,” I stammered, trying to regain some sense of myself, only to find that he’d drawn closer. “You’re not alone. Mrs. Northe is your friend too.” I turned to face the frame, having entirely forgotten about her and my mission for information.

  The room was empty except for my stilled body on the other side of reality, alone in the exhibition room.

  “No one else comes through,” Denbury stated, gesturing to my stationary self. “Not that I called to anyone but you, and only then when I saw your light. None who’ve handled the piece can travel through its portal, save you and the demon.”

  “But Mrs. Northe is versed in magical things. Why me?” I asked.

  Denbury looked at me curiously and suddenly chuckled, wincing from the pain of his wounded cheek but unwilling to let it keep him from smiling. His ability to maintain some humor did him credit. “Haven’t you read fairy tales? I’d have thought a girl like you would know all about the manner in which they work magic.”

  I bristled and held my head high. “I’m nearly eighteen years old, I’ll have you know, a woman, not a girl. While I read fairy tales in my youth, they are foggy in my memory as an adult.”

  This was an outright lie. I read my book of fairy tales cover to cover at least once a month. Still, I wasn’t about to have a man near my age thinking I was a child. I wasn’t exactly sure what he was getting at. He just kept smiling at me.

  “You must be special. The moment I saw you, my world shimmered, like bright light through dark water. Like an angel.”

  “Does that mean you’re a frog? Or a sleeping princess?” I asked, unable to hold back a giggle. “You need a kiss and you’ll be free from this painting?”

  Wincing as his expression caused a drop of blood to weep from his wound, Denbury pressed the kerchief to his cheek again but valiantly maintained his smile. “I’d be lying if I said I wouldn’t be honored by a kiss from such a fair maiden. If you’d like to try, I daresay it would make for a most pleasing experiment.”

  My cheeks were on fire. He kept that delicious grin on his lips, the lips of a prince in need of kissing.

  “I am a gentleman, Miss Stewart. I promise,” he assured me. “But in a circumstance like this, it’s easy for one’s fantasy to get away with them, for I exist in a fantastical premise. You must think I’m a cad.”

  “What, for wanting to kiss me?” I breathed. I thought it was a fabulous idea. “Would you think me not a lady if I wanted to kiss you too?”

  “I think in this particular case, being a lady is overrated.” He stepped closer and took my hands in his.

  I wasn’t adept at flirting. I’d only cast longing glances at Edgar Fourte, and look how far that had gotten me. I’d have to write Maggie for advice. Surely she was a genius. Though I wasn’t about to tell her I wanted to sharpen my wiles upon her professed beau.

  But as his mouth lowered toward mine, I had a moment of panic. “What if by kissing you, I become trapped here too? A girl doesn’t simply press her lips to a man, however attractive or titled, unless she’s quite sure a curse won’t similarly imprison her.”

  He released my hands. “You are too sensible by half, Miss Stewart.”

  “You know, you’re the only person who’s ever told me so!” I said, pleased with the idea of being sensible, even if he perhaps hadn’t meant it as a compliment. I shook my head, clearing its fog. “This place bewitches me. We must talk business. If I’m to help you, I need to know every particular of your predicament. Mrs. Northe awaits me, and I need to tell her we spoke of something other than kissing.”

  His humor was gone and the wildness in his eyes returned, making me shudder. I liked the flirting Denbury so much better. But flirting would not solve his imprisonment. We eagerly took up the books again.

  “What of the curse itself?” I prompted. “Were there words? Powders and explosions? Magic wands—”

  “Words. But not ones I recognized. The artist had a French accent. There was an odd phrase in Latin, but…something was off. Do you know Latin, Miss Stewart?”

  “I can read a bit of it. Never quite saw the sense in learning a dead language. Considering my inability to speak, I thought it would be doubly pointless to learn it.”

  Denbury laughed. “Again, how very sensible of you.”

  “It’s a shame, really. Speaking here, I realize I’d like to know every language on this planet, living or dead, to feel them all on my tongue and taste each syllable on my lips.” I paused as I noticed him leaning toward me and focusing on my mouth. This peculiar place had its witchcraft!

  “Business, Miss Stewart, yes.” Denbury rallied, stepping back.

  It seems mad to assume a man as exquisite as Lord Denbury would be “under the spell” of a girl like me. While I maintain that I’ve been told I’m pretty, I’ve nothing to offer a titled man of his station. However, I tell you that this odd place brings out the honesty in two souls. When we look into each other’s eyes, it’s as if we already know one another intimately, our strengths and our weaknesses plain to see. But we finally recovered ourselves from fawning reverie. This world wasn’t real, as much as we could lose ourselves in it. The wound on his face was a garish reminder of unfriendly territory.

  “Mrs. Northe needs details,” I stated. “If anyone can help, surely it is she.”

  Denbury went to his desk. “I wrote an account. Please, take it. I’ve had time to reflect on every detail of the horror—if nothing else, to try to keep my sanity.”

  He pulled papers from the top drawer and handed them to me. His penmanship was hasty and strained, the script reflecting the fear I’d seen in his eyes.

  “Thank you. I shall study these with great care.”

  “Mrs. Northe knows what has come to pass here?”

  “Yes, she alone. Thank God, she doesn’t think we’re lunatics. She awaits my report.” I brandished his account. “This will be vital evidence.” I had no other place to tuck it but into my bodice, directly against my skin, which prolonged my blush. But he had not handed me a love letter. I held a damning account of supernatural terror against my bosom. That was enough to cool my cheeks.

  “Oh, and there’s this,” he said grimly, lifting back the cuff of his sleeve to showcase freshly scabbing red marks on his arm, just as he’d revealed in one of my dreams. The same sort of marks that coursed around his portrait frame. Runes.

  “Last night, after the fiend came to declare his evil, this sizzled fresh onto my skin as if I were again branded, perhaps at the time of the murder,” he said bitterly. “It was part of the screaming and everything going dark…”

  I snatched a pen from Denbury’s desk. The implement shook in my hand—as it took on the reality I demanded of it. I began to copy the marks upon my own flesh.

  “Careful,” he cautioned. “Take those symbols lightly. Don’t curse yourself in effigy.”

  “Mine’s hardly in blood,” I retorted. “Still, there’s sense in your warning. These are runes. Mrs. Northe is working on the translation of what’s around the frame.”

  I altered the characters from what was written on his arm by omitting crossing lines. I’d present the whole of it to Mrs. Northe and let her guide me. I glanced out at the museum beyond. Mrs. Northe stood as a hazy shadow, watching. What was time like for her? I moved about the room, wondering what she’d see from the other side. I went to the window at the side of Denbury’s bookshelf and tried to peek out, but my head and hands hit resistance, as if a wall was there, though dimensions appeared to carry on beyond it. The room remained terribly deceptive.

  “I’ve thrown myself against every wall,” Denbury said. “The only way out seems to be through the front, and even then, not for me.” He glanced then at the door that would have led, if this were truly his study, to the rest of the house. It was the way to him via my dreams. But it was no way out.

  “I’ll…I’ll keep trying to find a way,” I promised. “Awake or asleep.”

  I glanced out the “windo
w.” The sky was beautiful beyond, and the rolling hills of the Denbury estate were stirring. This was England at her most lovely, but it was all a flat pretense. Eerie and unwelcoming, the forced cheer was painted with perfect reality, more clear and realized than any photograph, and yet so false.

  I heard Mrs. Northe calling as if from a great distance, an echo beyond the murky expanse between us. She drew close. And then she touched my body’s arm. I felt split in two. I felt both sides of me—the me outside and the me at Denbury’s side, both of them in excruciating pain. This was the pain he must have felt when he was banished here, and it was awful.

  As with two magnets that at first repel but once turned slam against one another, I felt a violent push and pull between my spirit and my corporeal self. I was nearly sent to the ground. Denbury moved to steady me, but I was roughly tossed into my own body again and I gasped as I fell against Mrs. Northe in the exhibition room beyond.

  “Oh, dear! I’m sorry!” she cried. “Did I startle you? I didn’t know my touch would affect you. Are you hurt?”

  Nauseated, I had to keep my arm steady upon her. I opened my mouth to attempt to speak but was hardly capable or brave enough to try out the sound. I pressed my shaking hand to my bosom to reach for Denbury’s account…

  It was not there. Something itched against my skin within my clothing. I heard a sifting noise onto the floor. Glancing down, I saw that the pages of Denbury’s account had turned to dust and sand upon my bosom. The paper could not withstand the cross between worlds. How on earth, then, did I? A small sound of defeat gurgled in my throat. I was far from answers and farther from a solution.

  Mrs. Northe helped me onto the bench outside Denbury’s exhibition room. “Your father came looking for you. I could hear him calling so I made up some excuse. But as we can’t have you simply disappearing, we’ll have to keep your forays within reason of your ‘apprenticeship.’”

  “Denbury wrote an account,” I signed to her and then gestured helplessly at the mess made along the collar of my dress and the sand on the floor.

  She looked at the remains of the papers and frowned. “His portal is the stuff of spirits, not objects,” she said. I furrowed my brow. That didn’t make sense. I gestured to my skirts and brushed my sleeves. She caught my meaning.

  “Why, then, would your clothes go through?” she clarified. I nodded. She shrugged. “Have you ever seen a naked ghost? They usually appear in the clothes in which they died. I’d hope your spirit would travel with a sense of itself. And of propriety.”

  Somehow she made the most ridiculous ideas almost make sense. I smiled.

  She touched the flaked paper remains in the folds of my skirt and ran them through her fingers. Her mouth contorted with the same frustration I felt. “I will need that information or we’re all helpless.”

  “Let me go back in,” I insisted, my hands shaking as I signed a viable excuse. “Tell Father that I’ve gone to the ladies’ room and to meet us at your home, that you’ll take care of me. Tell him…how fond of you I am. That I can’t ration our time together. You’re trying not to hurt my feelings by humoring me.”

  Mrs. Northe eyed me with admiration. “Why, Natalie, you’re quite good at fabricating plausible, emotionally substantive lies.”

  I grinned and signed, “It comes from my literary heroes. I’m a born storyteller.” I gestured to my throat. “The greatest irony.”

  Mrs. Northe laughed and touched my cheek with a mother’s fondness. “You are so much cleverer than Maggie. Bless her heart how she tries.”

  My face fell. I wanted to like Maggie, obnoxious friends and all. She’d tried to be as nice to me as she knew how, and who could help swooning over Denbury? And yet I was Evelyn’s favorite. That she trusted me with things she would not entrust to her niece gave me a rush of pride. I felt a keen desire to keep the place I’d unexpectedly earned intact and without competition. Any good society lady would do as much, as I’d heard firsthand from Maggie and her friends; one should jealously guard the place of privilege one has gained. I wanted friends my age, but I needed Evelyn Northe more.

  Always attentive, she watched my face, and I doubted this would be the last time I’d wonder if she could read minds. “Oh, I care for Maggie, Natalie, don’t worry. But you are meant for things she is not. She has been given every advantage in this world, while you have not. You need me. She does not. That’s the simple truth.”

  I nodded and turned my thoughts back to Denbury, signing, “I fear for him. He’s hurt. When the demon strikes, Denbury suffers.”

  Mrs. Northe nodded. “Yes. We can’t let this continue. I don’t know how many blows he can take. Go on then, all the more urgent to get the details,” she encouraged. “I’ll await you and fend off your father as you’ve suggested. Then I’d like to tell you what the runes say.”

  I rushed back into the room, stepped into my position, reached out my hand, and fell forward into Lord Denbury’s world. He was eager to see me again, his altered sense of time not realizing it was a mere moment since we’d last met.

  Oh, goodness, and I’ll have to tell you all about it in the morrow. It’s late. Even madness such as this cannot entirely win over the need for sleep. It won’t do if both Denbury and I look so wearied around the eyes. I wonder if I’ll dream of him again. I wonder if I can help myself.

  June 14

  If I did dream of him last night, I do not remember it. And I would be hard pressed to forget anything about him. So one quiet night among my many troubled ones. Perhaps there is hope for my subconscious and its travels. Though one could hardly blame me for wishing to travel to Denbury. The problem is all the other things I seem to bring along.

  I’ve a day at home, blessedly, a day I shall fill with words of yesterday’s happenings again, from where I left off…Pardon the crumbs in the spine, dear diary. Bessie brought me scones since I’ve been spending most of my free moments bent over my desk writing. She made some sort of comment that Jane Austen didn’t die of starvation so I’d best not either.

  I did go back to Denbury immediately to hear from his lips what he’d written in the account that had been destroyed in my transition between the painting and reality. He caught me again, per custom (clearly my favorite part of this odd routine), and brought me up to meet his gaze.

  “Hello again, fair lady. Do you come with news?”

  I shook my head. “Sadly, no. Your papers turned to dust,” I said, closing my eyes and allowing myself a moment to relish the sound of my speech in my ears and the feeling of it in my mouth. I opened my eyes again and added, “It seems my spirit is the only thing that can pass through this portal. Nothing more.”

  He shrugged. “I’d rather have access to your spirit than to all the papers in the world.”

  If left to its own devices, this world would encourage me only to stare into his eyes, to reach for his hands, and to lose all sense of urgency to the desire that was increasingly difficult for us to ignore. I blushed at his kind words but sobered at a thought I didn’t bother to hide.

  “Here, I’m your only tie to reality. But in the outside world, I doubt we’d be so bold. I’m a middle-class mute. Hardly the sort of girl you’d notice, let alone be allowed to notice.”

  He looked as if I’d slapped him. “That isn’t true,” he protested. “And you’re not mute any longer,” he said proudly, as if he could claim some personal triumph.

  “Out there, I am still,” I said sadly.

  “I’m sorry about that,” he said, looking at the floor, kicking the edge of the rug, and adding defiantly, “But I’d still notice you.”

  My heart leaped. But I had to stay on task. Attempting to ignore the seductive charms of this world, I spoke as crisply as I could: “I need to know everything about what happened. I’m told that this doorway is the stuff of spirits, not objects. I’m sorry the papers were destroyed. You’ll have to tell me.”

  “You couldn’t have known. Though I did hope to spare telling you of these horrors personally
. Somehow reading them lessens their effect.”

  “I don’t know,” I replied with a little laugh. “I’ve been keeping a diary, and writing about these mad events seems as vivid as living them.”

  A partial smile tugged at his mouth. “Perhaps you’re a better writer than I.”

  “There’s no withholding now,” I replied plainly, bracing myself. “Tell me.”

  He breathed deeply. This time, to preoccupy himself, he began to sort his desk, which I noticed had become rather cluttered with papers, doodles, pen scratches, and random measurement devices. I wondered if some were medical equipment that he happened to have kept lying about.

  “As I said, it was something of ritual and witchcraft,” he began. “I can scarcely remember the face he wore before taking mine, though his presence was potent, his accent was French, and his manner was odd. As, of course, were his eyes. While I was trapped with my hands bound behind me, he painted, working furiously. Sometimes he would pause to ask questions. The questions were too personal: about my family, about whether or not I planned to take a wife—”

  “Do you?” I blurted.

  He eyed me, a smile playing at one corner of his mouth before he returned to an open drawer. “For your information, I do not have a girl at the ready.” Any amusement faded. “The fiend asked why not and then began to rhapsodize on the beauty that is woman, but he talked too much of servitude, dominion, and pleasure for my taste. I got the distinct impression that I was in the company of a hedonist.”

  “But surely you’re promised?” I asked, curiosity besting tact. “Aren’t all landed young men eagerly positioned for politics and money?”

  “You, too, with such personal questions?”

  I blushed. “I am asking merely for investigative reasons, not personal ones.” (That was an outright lie.) “I assure you I am no hedonist,” I added. (That’s not a lie.)