Eterna and Omega

by Leanna Renee Hieber

  “Secrets never are.”

  “Don’t be coy. Why were you overcome? Lavinia tended to you but said she didn’t know what you’d been doing. What did you do on your own to trigger a fit?”

  “I was … trying to divest us of Eterna,” Clara said sheepishly. “I … buried it all. Anything and everything I had.”

  Bishop’s generally kind eyes, more worried of late than gentle, widened. “Buried it? Whatever for?”

  “Because I thought everything—the silhouettes, the whole of the spirit world—was telling me to destroy it and by doing so make things right,” she exclaimed. “I tried burning it all. I dug a little grave for the files and tried to strike a match, but it kept going out. And then Pearl Street exploded with that electrical fire.”

  Bishop scratched his head. “Yes. That is a whole other matter. But the spirit world. Why did you listen to them when you know how a host affects you? Why did you act without, at least … consulting me?”

  He was genuinely hurt by this.

  “I’m sorry. I should have,” Clara said. “I thought it was beyond us. It was the best I could do. The signals have been so mixed when my instincts used to be so clear … but with the new information—”

  “In light of your ghostly lover here tonight, you mean?”

  Clara barreled past the accusatory truth and her own blooming blush, blurting: “Mr. Dupris said he was trying to stop me, not encourage me. He blew out the match when I tried to burn the research.”

  “Stopping you, then?”

  “Yes. Because what they made in that house was a Ward. The shadows that snuffed out their lives, in that already tainted house, were threatened by the protective magic and killed them for it. So it isn’t the Eterna work or the Ward that was the danger; it was what was already inside.”

  Bishop’s frown deepened. “I worry about your getting information from a ghost who may cause you an … episode.”

  Clara’s eyes flashed. “Louis has not made me seize. Not even the first numbers on my safety countdown were triggered. I manage to commune at length with a spirit, for once in my adult life, without pain and humiliation, gain vital information, and you question it?”

  Bishop came closer, wrestling with anger, she knew that expression well.

  “Not only nice things want to speak with you, Clara,” he stated. She stiffened, but he continued. “Had we not developed a system? I don’t believe that you can be handled like a marionette to do evil’s will, but hiding things from me is not your style. But then again, there was Mr. Dupris. Perhaps I don’t know you at all, Clara Templeton.”

  Clara was hit by the onslaught of Bishop’s emotions. Her empathic abilities felt how thick and unwieldy they were and how complicated for them both. She spoke very, very carefully.

  “I cannot make a case for myself that is not indeed marred by a secrecy you would not have wished. I can do nothing to change that now but try to regain your confidence. To find that my generally accurate instincts acted in polar opposite to what Louis was trying to protect, while your trust in me has shattered, is devastating.” She sighed, her tensed shoulders falling with the weight of exhaustion and unprocessed grief. Fussing with a cup and saucer, she poured milk into cold coffee. “I don’t want to start over again. Am I no longer gifted? I don’t want to live that way. Give me ‘fits’ over a life without insight. I could have burned their protective work that night, and they’d have died in vain for my lack of proper intuition.”

  Tears sprang to Clara’s eyes and she screwed up her face to force them back, which only made them splash into the untouched coffee. She wasn’t sure what she wanted from Bishop in the moment, but she didn’t want him to be angry.

  “We don’t have to start over,” Bishop began gently. Clara looked at him hopefully. “If it’s a Ward that the lads made, then we’ll make up the same kinds of compounds as we did in Salem, we’ll build and prepare. You will resurrect what was paused by the Pearl Street explosion—and save that electrical mystery for another day—and we will attempt to find out what had you so convinced in your course of action.”

  “Yes…” She smiled. “Yes, Senator, very good, and thank you.”

  “Back to ‘Senator’ again?” He smiled wearily. “I can’t keep track of when to be formal and when not, you’ll have to tell me.…”

  They stared at one another for a long moment. She was trying to determine if that was some kind of invitation and if she wanted it to be one.

  “I’ll get dressed and start my day, Rupert,” she said, turning away so that he could not read her face. “I’ll have no further supernatural phenomena making me feel an invalid. Either I take these forces on, or we give them the impression that they can take on me. I won’t countenance it, and I know neither will you.”

  Bishop smiled then. “That’s my Clara. I’ll help you this time.”

  “You don’t need to—”

  “That wasn’t an offer, it’s an order, my dear,” he said with a particular curt smile of finality that had so often punctuated her life. “We’ll bring Lavinia to stay next to you in case of another fit. We’ll resurrect those files and make them into magic. And this time, let’s try not to keep secrets?” he asked hopefully. Clara nodded. It sounded like a wise promise impossible to fulfill. “So let’s get to it, then, shall we?”

  Clara stared at Bishop. “Now?”

  “I’ll…” Here he smirked a bit, as if hiding a delicious secret. Clara recognized this expression as the one he used when indulging the idea of Mesmerism. “Keep people away from the graveyard. If dark forces are amassing, let’s not waste any more time than we already have. Whatever England’s involvement, I think they must be off the mark. Let’s get Louis’s material back and see if we can resurrect what he recommends.”

  “Thank you, Rupert,” she said quietly.

  “For what?” he asked.

  “For believing me, for believing Louis, and helping me now. You are so good to me.”

  He could stand in the way of so much. Instead, he facilitated. He truly did want the best for her and what they had undertaken. There was little altruism and general good nature in the world. She’d been lucky enough to be ensconced in it all her life, despite the tragedies that surrounded.

  He smiled broadly at her praise.

  “Besides, you don’t let me be powerful nearly as much as I’d like.” He tapped his temple. “My muscles need flexing.”

  Clara pursed her lips at him. It had been a long-running skirmish between them how much of his power of suggestion he would employ on others. He limited his own power vastly more than Clara thought he should, but—in a fond, playful way—he always blamed her for being the one holding him back. Seeing her expression only broadened his smile.

  There was a time when Clara had felt she could share anything with her guardian. That was before she’d harbored any feelings for him, and long before she’d sealed those sentiments away like Montresor bricked up Fortunato in the nitre-filled caves of Poe’s landmark story. The jingling bells of a flame of love sounded deep in her catacombs, and she looked hastily away, wondering if she could ever regain what had once been so innocent and pure but had become so complex and awkward in her adult life.

  * * *

  Digging things up in Trinity churchyard, a few streets northwest of their home and their offices, even in the light of day and after Bishop persuaded the groundskeeper to temporarily close it to other visitors, proved more difficult than Clara expected.

  Once again her friend, the Eterna Commission’s receptionist, Lavinia Kent, accompanied her, alert against any sign of a seizure. Though only two days had passed since the misguided burial, the ground had been tended, leveled, making it difficult to locate her diggings.

  Clara couldn’t let the energies of the graveyard derail her, as much as she adored the small brownstone Gothic chapel whose rich elegance she so enjoyed. She refused the attempts of past-life tendrils and wandering spirits to wrap around her senses. Focusing her core life force, s
he snapped it out from her person as if she were cracking a whip, erecting shielding boundaries, creating a modicum of spiritual and psychological safety.

  A shudder consumed Clara, a sense memory of the seizure on this spot. For a sensitive, she was too sensitive, her gifts sometimes entirely counterproductive. No great revelations came from the fits, and she thought this a wasted opportunity. For what she suffered, she’d at least have hoped God spoke to her during paroxysms. All she got for it were raging headaches and bruises.

  Clara knelt, lifting the light mauve skirts of her linen day dress to pool around her in a draping bell so as not to create a muddy mess of herself and removed her embroidered white gloves so as not to ruin them entirely. The trowel she took to the ground was plucked from the same carpetbag she’d brought everything in with in the first place.

  In moments, she revealed the shallow pit of materials she had so hastily dumped, marked by dirt, damp, a bit of the ink ran on folded pages that had tumbled out from their folders.

  “Not too much the worse for wear, thank God,” she murmured.

  All went back into the carpetbag; she’d sort it out at the office.

  She stood, and with Lavinia close behind, left the churchyard. As she passed Bishop at the corner of Broadway and Wall Street, he fell into step beside her. Though the senator was a head taller than Clara, she always managed to keep up, it had been a point of pride even in her youth to do so. Poor Lavinia had to pick up the folds of her black crepe gown and trot after them.

  The Eterna Commission offices on Pearl Street, near the tip of the island, occupied the uppermost floors of a dark brick and brownstone edifice. The city records stored on the first floor gave the building its cover as a government bastion, shielding the commission’s search for immortality and related supernatural matters.

  The recent addition of security guards inside the front hall, iron bars, and a few clever trip wires, while unnerving and a reminder of Clara’s kidnapping, gave the team a sense of increased safety about the building. Eterna’s offices were as much home to her as the town house she shared with the senator down the street. They were a place of meaning, of a sacred purpose that had once been so clear and now was so muddied.

  However, Clara wouldn’t allow the building to carry that burden. This edifice represented a life far larger than what most women were afforded, a profession that suited her restless mind and the legacy of her past lives. She hoped to make her old adventurers and explorers proud by charting the waters of the spirit, mapping the sixth sense.

  Making Louis’s idea of a protective Ward created from sentiment and sediment a reality might be her great achievement in this life, provided they could put the pieces together while avoiding Louis’s fate.

  Once Rupert opened the new locks, Clara raced up the stairs.

  “Remember the trip wire, Clara,” Lavinia cautioned, taking her position behind her desk at the landing alcove, the tulle mourning veil of her black crepe hat trailing over a host of variously morbid curiosities upon the desk before draping to rest on a canopic jar.

  “Right, trip wire. Thank you,” she called halfway up the steps. “These new safety measures will take some getting used to, will they not?”

  “Indeed,” the other woman said cheerily, her bright disposition an amusing contrast to her melancholic wardrobe and fascinations. Clara had similar interests but hardly the fashion commitment.

  Pausing on the landing to disable the trip wire that would lead to entrapment by rope, Clara then unlocked the wooden door of her top-floor office and swept in. She could feel the dramatic swing of her skirts as she moved about, lighting the stained-glass Tiffany lamps she so cherished: her jewel boxes of light, taking after Evelyn Northe-Stewart in thinking the whole world should be redone by their studios.

  The rich hues illuminated several wooden desks and a slew of sacred talismans, many mounted on the room’s plate glass windows. Clara immediately went to her rosewood beast of a desk with a bay window behind, and set down her bag. Here was her esoteric enclave built from ideas, stubbornness, and her guardian’s fondness.

  Bishop, a few steps behind, called to her from the landing. “Shall I work with you or fetch you a cup of coffee, Clara?”

  “Both,” Clara declared. He chuckled, and his footfalls retreated. The building was so quiet that she could hear the cups rattling, the maw of the coal stove clanking open.

  She turned her attention to the papers she had retrieved from Trinity, spreading the material out on her desk. She plucked a thin-haired brush from a drawer filled with random implements such as Masonic tools she wasn’t supposed to have or understand, a medium’s séance bell, and vials of medicinal herbs used in folkloric magic.

  This brush had been used to sweep debris from archaeological digs in Alexandria. New York was gaining impressive collections of that region’s plunder. It had been given as a token to the senator, who passed it along to Clara, as he did any item he thought she might find interesting. Removing her gloves once more, she used the brush on the papers, dabbing at moist spots with blotting paper.

  Clara traced her fingertips around the edges of the diary that held the key to Louis and Barnard’s system. She and Bishop would have to put this to the test, see if they could recreate it multiple times, to protect multiple spaces. A successful Ward would need to be broadly applied.

  She turned to the page of ingredients headed “The Heart of the Matter” in Louis’s neat yet flowing script. He was an artist; his penmanship spoke of dreams and brilliance.

  The theory of Eterna in Spiritual Materialism is as simple as it is profound:

  Seven ingredients are an ideal combination.

  Separate: inert.

  Combined: potentially the compound, and that which keeps this uniquely ours, American.

  From these distinct, live cultures, the tether to a long life begins.

  Herein are distinct examples of our localized compounds.

  Several cities were used as examples; Clara and Bishop had already put Salem to the test in a spontaneous adventure of curiosity. The results had been inconclusive but encouraging.

  They had yet to create the Ward for New York, but that had to be the next step, for Clara cared for her city as if it were an extension of herself.

  NEW YORK—The Economy and Engine of the Matter

  BASE MATERIALS:

  Take from the most charged place of the city; where the striving meet the gods.

  Soil of the harbor; cross—waters of the world.

  Mix with the air of the center of the city.

  Find haunts. Add item from scene.

  ADDITIONAL CHARGED ITEMS:

  Bone shards from Potter’s fields.

  Stone from Trinity churchyard.

  A Wall Street dollar.

  Final step: Burn elements collectively.

  Rupert entered then, carrying two cups of coffee. He handed one to Clara before seating himself opposite her and helping her clean and organize the files.

  “These are more of Barnard Smith’s notes than I recall we had before,” he said, pausing to sip his coffee.

  “Yes, I got more of them from Columbia,” Clara replied.

  Bishop’s familiar sigh spoke of his dislike for her doing things without telling him, but he did not pick a fight or complain, to Clara’s great relief.

  “Before us lies a precarious magic,” Clara said softly. “Laid before us like an offering at an altar. Vital, specific keys to magic … What if we put it together incorrectly?”

  “If Mr. Dupris has advised you to make these compounds as his papers instruct, then that is what we’ll try,” Bishop said, leaning toward her. “Together.”

  Her shoulders relaxed.

  “It was never our job to save the world, Clara,” he said calmly, adding, “It might just be that we have to cast a few magic spells in the right direction.”

  Clara smiled at his take.

  Several cups of coffee later, Clara and Bishop had laid out the notes in as much of a
chronological order as they could manage. The senator sat across the desk from Clara, examining the theoretical Wards pertaining to other cities and making notes in a small leather notebook of what to recommend to fellow statesmen if advising Wards as course of political action.

  Clara had shifted into her musing spot, tucked into the bay window, layered mauve skirts bunched up around her like a cloud of fabric. Her eye kept resting on the New York Recipe. Testing the assembled Ward would be critical—it would mean seeing if it held up against evil. And that meant risk.

  Although evil was entirely subjective, Clara was very good at sensing the tone or atmosphere of a person, place, or thing. The evil that wafted from the carvings in Mr. Goldberg’s home, where the Eterna scientists had breathed their last, reeked of a particular bent, one she had sensed in a few cases nearly two years prior. Could she run an experiment in the tainted property from that older case to see if the Ward would be successful? There was no proof the case was related to what Louis endured, but Evelyn seemed to think so.

  Franklin Fordham joined them in the offices, a gentle, noble-spirited man with useful powers of past insight. His psychometric touch Clara found of higher value to the team than the troubling pedestal he liked to place her upon.

  “I’m glad to see you, Miss Templeton, I was worried hearing you’d had another incident. Downtown Manhattan is very haunted—increasingly, it seems, considering a constant influx of immigrants and deaths at countless new factories. You might want to take your walks uptown, where there is open space, cleaner air, and fewer ghosts.”

  She nodded as if he were saying something very sensible, got to her feet, and took a more formal seat at her desk. Lavinia swept into the room moments later in a flurry of black crepe, always dramatically herself.

  “Your ladyship,” she said, handing Clara a wire from the telegraph office, bobbing her head, and retreating back down the stairs almost without pause.

  Clara examined the missive.

  DEAR TEAM,

  ENGLAND FULL OF INTRIGUE. TEAM OF JACKS NEW YORK BOUND. A ROVING FEW. TRAILED. OFFICES. LOCALE VIA FORTHCOMING TELEGRAM. MURDERS HERE RELATING TO SOCIETY. PARALLELS WITH STEVENS OF EARLIER CASE. TRYING TO ASCERTAIN GOVERNMENT DEPTH AND INVOLVEMENT. ACCUSATORY TO US RE: BODIES OF THEIR COUNTER-TEAM. US MOBILIZATION OF OFFENSES.