by Adam McOmber
I hid in the tree line at the edge of the clearing and watched. The bark of the linden seemed a living bed where my friends lay together. Gnarled shadows moved over them, caressing them just as Nathan caressed Maddy.
I had never felt so very alone, not in all my life. Watching them, I knew I had nothing to add to their symmetry.
As Nathan tore at the clasps of his own shirt, kissing Maddy’s neck, I thought of how foolish I was for pushing him away on Saint Dunstan’s Day. I should have let him have me. I no longer cared that he only wanted what was inside of me. It was better than not being wanted at all.
This thought made me furious with myself and with them, and I wished we were surrounded by objects there in the forest. I wanted to raise all those wild and clattering souls. I’d make a wall of souls and sound, and then bring it crashing down on all of us. But we were in nature, and I was powerless. I was the helpless fool they imagined me to be. Quiet Jane who would never have left her rotting house if it hadn’t been for their help. They were the ones who knew how to live. This scene in the woods proved it. I continued to watch as Nathan lowered Maddy to the forest floor. I watched longer still, though I will not recount their lurid movements. There were no tears in my eyes. I felt as though I’d become a tree in those woods—my feet had turned to roots, my flesh to bark.
My retreat was silent too even though the forest floor was littered with bramble. Perhaps I floated. Or perhaps the forest agreed to assist me, just that once. It was, after all, the place I’d come from—born from a tree, said my mother. And why shouldn’t that be the truth? The forest knew me, and though it did not speak to me, it respected me nonetheless.
I stole away, moving through the woodland groves, and I did not return to my father’s house. Maddy would likely go to find me there after she parted with Nathan, and I couldn’t bear to see her. Instead I moved deeper into the Heath. I wanted the great gray fallows to swallow me. The silence of nature pressed in upon me as I stumbled toward the Kenwood pond. I would look at Daubenton’s bats, which emerged each evening to crawl on the twilit rocks, searching for insects. They were monstrous animals, furred and senseless with black eyes and sharp snouts. The ugly bats were what I needed. I wanted to see them slip in and out of the crevasses. They would make me think of my own heart, how it slipped in and out of normal life, how it at times seemed as foreign and monstrous as those creatures.
But just before I reached the bathing pond, I veered off and found myself at the flat field of shale where my mother’s dogs had taken her. It was the place where she’d sickened. I loathed that place, and I feared it too. This was where Mother had seen the other world, the world that had tried to swallow her. I walked along the rocks, looking down into the black fissures that led into the earth. There was no world in them, only darkness.
I lay down among the rocks, willing my body to become entirely still, attempting to forget what I’d seen in the woods.
I remember looking deep into the fissure next to me, studying the darkness. Eventually I pressed my mouth against it, and I prayed for Nathan to be taken—or not just taken but transformed. I wanted Maddy to lose him. I wanted him to lose himself. I pictured Nathan falling into those fissures in the shale. He would be swallowed as my mother said I should never be. He would live in the world below—in the still white forest—while Maddy and I lived in the world above. Nathan would have his Empyrean after all.
Did I lose consciousness on those rocks, listening to the echo of my curse? I think I may have, and when I awoke I no longer felt entirely myself. A red woman, the same one I’d later see on St. Dunstan’s Day, came to sit with me. Seeing her on the stage had jarred something loose in me, helped me to remember. Her face was veiled. She put flowers on my body, tucking them in my bodice and weaving them in my hair. It was clear she cared for me. She loved me in her way.
I dreamed of Nathan leaving Maddy by the linden tree and going off to the Theater of Provocation for The Royal Hunt. He tightened his belt and adjusted his military coat as he walked the narrow path toward the road.
The red woman told me he would suffer, as she twined white flowers in my hair. She made a song of his suffering and sang it. The vibrations of her music filled me. With every step, Nathan slipped deeper and deeper into my unconscious mind, as if dropping through the cracks of the earth.
I slept and dreamed.
And where my mother had once been poisoned, I thrived.
CHAPTER 23
Blackfriars Bridge creaked beneath the weight of the jolting Lee carriage, threatening to plunge us into the rushing waters of the Thames below, and the rapid beat of horses’ hooves matched a quickening of my own heart. Maddy, Pascal, and I were traveling over the bridge to Southwark for my meeting with Ariston Day, and looking through the small carriage window, I was reminded of another dark river—the River Styx. Stories were made from those rare instances when a hero successfully crossed that boundary to walk among the dead. To be sure, I didn’t feel like a hero. Seeing the Red Goddess wearing my face on St. Dunstan’s Day had affected me greatly. Everything I’d been trying to forget was surfacing again, and I was filled with guilt and regret. I knew that what I’d conjured from the field of shale may have destroyed lives, and I felt myself to be as low and jealous a creature as was ever made. When I looked into the faces of my friends, I became all the more determined to put right the wrongs I’d done. But in order to do so, I still needed to understand my own nature. If that meant meeting with a devil, then so be it. Even a devil as odious as Ariston Day.
I was glad when Maddy took my gloved hand and held it there in the carriage. Everything had been so confusing between the two of us as of late. I wanted nothing more than to feel close to her again. She and I shared a bench, our skirts intermingled, and Pascal sat across from us, holding a cane with a heavy brass handle he’d brought for protection. Maddy produced the pistol from the pocket in her skirt. She’d been carrying it since St. Dunstan’s Day. “You’ll take it with you, Jane,” she said.
Pascal’s eyes widened, and he leaned forward. “Where on earth did you get that?”
“None of your business,” she said.
“He knows we’ve been in Nathan’s room,” I told her. “And I’m not carrying a pistol into the Temple of the Lamb.”
“Give me one good reason why not,” she said. “It isn’t safe in Southwark, especially not for a woman. You really should have told Ariston Day to come to Hampstead—any sort of educated man would have offered that in the first place.”
“He’d never come to Hampstead,” Pascal replied, darkly. “And he doesn’t have the sort of education any of us can imagine.”
Maddy went on about the impoliteness of Ariston Day, and it was calming to be mothered by her. But when she started squeezing my hand too aggressively, I tried to distract myself by looking once again out the window. The view of the Southwark slums from Blackfriars was one of crooked houses inked on a vellum sky. Dwarf stone walls circled cinder gardens. An exhaustive tangle of streets, for which no map had ever been drawn, sprawled in all directions. The Roman soldiers had used the area to bury their dead, and in our time, it housed many of the city’s stink industries (glue factories, vinegar makers, tanneries, and the like). A brown haze drifted across over the cupolas and towers, nearly obscuring the skeletal dome of the pleasure garden called the Temple of the Lamb, beneath which we would find Ariston Day’s Theater of Provocation.
The Temple itself was not the Gothic behemoth I’d imagined but rather had the tarnished brassy look of those buildings built under William IV, complete with a once gleaming dome that had become a gaudy house for ravens. The streets of Southwark did not teem with activity as in central London; instead, denizens lurked about and tried to make themselves invisible to our procession.
As I stepped from the carriage, I felt the filthy air prickling my skin—so different from the air in Hampstead Town.
“How will you signal if you need our help, Jane?” Maddy asked from the open carriage windo
w. Lines appeared on her brow, and I half expected her to dangle the pistol out the window and offer it to me once more.
“If I haven’t returned in half an hour,” I replied, “send Pascal after me. Certainly, he knows his way.”
“And if, by then, it’s too late?” she said.
I touched her arm. “You mustn’t worry, Maddy. These are things which we cannot affect.”
She leaned down and kissed me gently on the corner of my mouth. It felt to me like a final act, a bidding of farewell, and I worried I might never see her again.
“Be cautious, mademoiselle,” Pascal said from beside her. “One can quickly become confused in his presence.” He paused. “And if, by chance, you see Alexander, tell him he can call on me. Tell him I will speak to him again.”
I agreed to do just that, at the same time remembering the emptiness I saw in Alexander’s face. Could a Fetch even know what it meant to be in love?
• • •
As I turned from the carriage, I attempted to conjure Nathan’s face. Already I was forgetting details, knowing my image of him no longer precisely matched the man himself. If I never saw him again, I would lose more and more of that face until there was nothing of him at all in what I imagined. I set my resolve against such an outcome. I would correct what I’d done on the field of shale.
As these thoughts fulminated, two young men dressed in shabby Fetch red—the very uniform that Nathan had worn—appeared at the threshold to the Temple. These were Day’s foot soldiers. Both of them bowed deeply and did not stand until I spoke.
“I’m here to see Ariston Day,” I said.
“Certainly, missus,” said the shorter boy. “We know very well why you’re here. We’ll take you to him. Follow us.”
I was escorted down a stone hall, away from the raucous tavern of the Temple, which I glimpsed only briefly. The tavern was garishly decorated with what appeared to be artifacts of amusement. Guarding the doorway was a metal tiger with gas flame eyes that belonged in a house of horrors.
I remembered that Inspector Vidocq said he could not find the Theater of Provocation, and I wondered how we would enter it. I followed the Fetches down a winding stone staircase that led into the earth. Torches lined the stony walls, and the three of us walked in silence, giving me time to imagine various scenes beneath the broken pleasure dome. Chambers flickered and transmuted in my imagination. I pictured everything from a debauched hold of opium eaters to a secret golden theater illuminated by candlelight.
At the bottom of the stairs was a velvet curtain.
“The theater is behind the curtain?” I asked.
“Sometimes it is,” said the shorter Fetch, “and sometimes it isn’t.”
After following my guides behind the curtain, we paused in complete darkness while the taller Fetch lit a torch. A blaze of firelight showed me a scene that I recognized. The three of us were standing inside the vision I’d first encountered when I touched Nathan’s button. This was the painted forest where the Red Goddess drank blood from the stag.
“What’s the matter, missus?” asked the shorter Fetch. “Haven’t you ever seen an underground forest before?”
“I have,” I said, more to myself than to him. “That’s the problem.”
The false trees still smelled of paint, and the trunks were tightly grouped in the darkness along a gravel path. It was a forest drawn by an unschooled hand; the imperfect circle of a phosphorescent moon hung above. The forest looked even more artificial than it had in my vision. This was not a proper theater, but a childish world, the environment in which The Royal Hunt had played out.
Branches extended upward into battens of thunderheads made from some diaphanous fabric. The vaulted ceiling, visible through the clouds, was decorated with bits of mirror glass and polished shells, which picked up the light of our torch and flickered like strange stars. There were animals too—taxidermy pheasants and foxes peering from the underbrush with melancholy glass eyes, patches of fur worn away. Wind in the reeds, perhaps from a hidden phonograph machine, could be heard. Unlike an actual forest, this place offered no sense of tranquility—only a constant reminder of the unnatural dark—the rumble of man-made objects.
“This is what we call the inner forest,” the taller boy said. He was the cleaner of the two Fetches as well, though covered in freckles and moles. I wondered if he might be the Fetch who’d sliced through Corydon Ulster’s cheek while Judith looked on. “Do you like it, missus?”
“I can’t say I do. Where is Ariston Day?” I demanded.
“We’ll be there soon,” the shorter one said. “Please don’t grow angry, missus. We know you won’t take us to the Paradise if you’re angry.”
“What is this Paradise you’re talking about?” I asked.
“Watch your tongue now,” the taller Fetch said to the shorter. “Mr. Day wouldn’t want you talking to her like that. We’re not to say anything about the Paradise.”
“We never get to talk to anybody,” said the shorter.
“Then speak,” I said. “Tell me.”
“We know you’ve got some abilities,” the shorter said, “the kind Mr. Day has been looking for. We know you could make these trees talk to us if you touched us. You might even be able to make this into a real forest if you wanted to—a forest in the promised place.”
“I can do nothing of the sort,” I said. “You’ve been misinformed.”
They laughed quietly, stone rubbing against stone.
“We’re almost there,” said the taller. “Mr. Day is waiting by the water’s edge in the grove.”
I wondered how large this inner forest could be. What were the dimensions of the subterranean chamber, and was it possible that there was really some underground lake here? I worried that this might actually be a theater of my imagination, shifting and changeable, one scene replacing the next in liquid fantasy.
“Tell me why you call yourself Fetches,” I said.
“It’s an old story,” said the shorter. “We don’t know its source—probably from Rome. Mr. Day likes all that bygone lore.”
“You shouldn’t tell her our story,” said the taller Fetch. “It’s meant only for us. A woman can’t understand it.”
“The missus will understand,” said the shorter. “Mr. Day says she will. And anyway, she isn’t so much like a woman, is she? Just look at her.” He cleared his throat. “The story goes that every one of us humans has a double down in the pits of Hell. So Hell is full of people who look just like those you see on the streets of London. The rich bankers have doublers, and the poor flower ladies have doublers. Little boys and little girls have doublers that grow old down in Hell just as those little boys and girls grow old here in London. And these doublers, they’re called Fetches because when it’s your time—when your final hour has struck—your doubler comes up from Hell to fetch you. The last thing that you see is yourself standing in the doorway of your sickroom or crouching above you where you’ve fallen in the street.”
“That’s wretched,” I said.
“We claim to be our own doublers,” continued the shorter Fetch. “We’re no longer the people that live above, you see?”
“Yes,” I said. “Children of Hell. That’s quite clear.”
CHAPTER 24
When we emerged from the false trees, I found not a lake but a shallow limpid pool surrounded by clusters of stones. The clouds above were made from the same battens of dark fabric, hanging low in the sky over the pool. And there, by the silvery water, was a man seated in a cane chair. Ariston Day was not precisely what I’d expected—not degenerate. His face was clean-shaven, and he wore a gentleman’s damask tie the color of coral with a silver tack. His arms and legs were lank, and his dark hair hung about his long face like an open curtain. I could see no part of the Irish peasant in him, nor did he appear to be the deranged messiah of a cult. He looked rather like some vestige of the previous century—a feudal lord ensconced in his stronghold. The bones of his cheeks were aristocratic and angular,
and the more I studied his face, the more it seemed that it might be a mask made from a substance other than flesh. I wondered if it was possible that Day himself might be a piece of theater—a painted facade.
Day was caught up in a reverie, staring toward the bottom of the silvery pool, as tendrilous shadows cast from a lamp behind the trees caressed him. When the taller boy announced our arrival, Ariston Day glanced at us with a certain ease, and he made what was meant to be a brief, casual smile, but movement caused the mask to momentarily crack, and his mouth took on a look of malignancy. The way his lips shifted over his teeth made me feel as though I should run back into the forest.
“Jane Silverlake,” he said, standing and offering his hand. “My humble welcome. I’m glad you finally decided to join me.”
I’d removed my gloves and did not offer my own hand in return, knowing the transference would occur and not wanting this creature to experience any part of it. “I’m not sure I had a choice,” I said. “You were persistent.”
“There are always choices,” Day said, dismissing his Fetches with a flutter of his hand. “So many choices, really. That’s part of the problem, isn’t it? Won’t you join me?” He indicated the chair next to his. I did so, glancing out across the odd pool. Its water reflected the lantern light that filled the subterranean chamber. There was a stale scent here, the smell of a place that had no traffic with the outside world. Day lifted a worn leather portfolio that had been leaning against the side of his chair and carefully placed it in his lap. I wondered if he meant to show me something. “I’m sure you’d like to delve into business right away,” he said. “I’ve heard you’re a matter-of-fact sort.”