by Kelley York
Not that he waits for my permission. He places his hands against the box in the same way he did the night I woke on the ship and found him in his trance-like state. I swallow back a protest. Should it happen again, I’ll be right here to snap him out of it. I come to rest my hands over his, noting how chilled they are, and close my eyes as well, hoping that I can see or hear whatever it is that he does.
“We’re here to help you,” Benji says. “But you have to show us how.”
I open my eyes again to darkness.
It’s only midday, yet the sunlight seems to have been smothered in inky blackness. Outside our windows, there is nothing. Gooseflesh rises across my skin. Benjamin exhales and his breath fogs before him as his fingers twitch beneath mine. Somewhere in the darkness behind him stands the shape of a woman. Her neck and limbs are twisted as though broken. Her mouth does not move, but I can hear her regardless. Garbled whispers brush against my ear and I struggle to make out the words.
Somewhere outside, the howling returns.
Benjamin’s eyes snap open. The sunlight begins to peek through the darkness, gradually illuminating the room once more like a second sunrise. Our gazes meet. I do not know if we heard the same thing, if we felt it, but suddenly…
I know how to open the box.
“Three birds,” Benji says breathlessly.
I slide my thumbs across the dials, directing each of them to the image of the long-legged bird. A combination I had tried multiple times before, except this time I know that I must now press each dial in as though it were a button. The middle one first, then the left, and then the right. The entire mechanism gives a satisfying little click and pops out half an inch, enough that I can twist it like a latch until the lid pops open.
Sunlight catches on fabric, wads of silver-coloured silk packed into the box for padding. Benji is watching me, palms still pressed flat against the sides of the smooth wood, waiting for me to make the first move. I take a deep breath, reach inside, and carefully pull out the topmost object, swaddled securely within the fabric, and unwrap it. My thumb slides across a smooth surface, largely unmarred save the occasional odd, thin, suture-like markings. I stare down at the object, seeing it plainly, but my mind is not quite catching up with my eyes. I know what it is, but disbelief is a difficult thing to cast aside.
But I am most definitely staring down into the empty eye sockets of a human skull.
I barely refrain from dropping it, although I do abruptly place it onto the table. Benji stands, moving around to my side.
“Is that…”
“The reason why our cargo is haunted?” I rasp. “I would say so.”
His eyes go wide. “But…why? What is the point to transporting human remains?”
“I haven’t a clue. Wilkerson said it was to return it to its rightful owner, though who owns a body?” A pause. “Perhaps we’re returning it to the next of kin. A means of laying her to rest.”
“Why would she have been stolen in the first place? None of this makes any sense.” Benji extends a hand, fingertips brushing across the top of the skull. He then gathers it up, so achingly delicate, cradling it in its swath of silver fabric as though it might crumble to dust in his grasp.
“We can ask these questions until we’re blue in the face, really, and it’s not going to do us a lick of good. I think we should…” I trail off, distracted by the sudden subtle shift in the air. A chill coasts along my skin and up my spine. Benji has gone so deathly still that I tip my head back to look up at him. “Benji?”
His lashes are lowered over his dark eyes, almost sleepily, lips parted ever so slightly as he mouths something to himself that I cannot make out. Clutching the skull to his chest, he pivots away from me and begins to head for the door. I lurch from my seat before he can get too far, catching him by the shoulders.
He stops, does not fight me, but he also doesn’t register that I’m there.
I’ve seen this before. Years ago, with Esher at Whisperwood. With him, it was different. He’d had the milky eyes of a corpse when he walked out of the hall and into the cold, and Benji still looks very much like himself. Just a sleep-walking version.
This must be the woman trying to communicate with us. I may not be a professional ghost hunter like James and Esher or a medium like Aunt Eleanor, but I know enough to realise that if I want answers, I may have to listen to them in whatever form she wishes to give them.
With a grimace, I release my hold on Benji. He steps away, proceeding as though he’d never stopped.
I follow him into the hallway, down the corridor to where a set of stairs leads higher still. A sign begs no admittance except by staff, but Benji bears it no mind. He ascends the steps, pushes open the hatch at the top, and crawls up and onto the roof with me on his heels.
Our hotel is not a terribly tall building compared to several others we’ve seen in San Francisco. However, it stands just tall enough that we’ve got quite a view of the surrounding streets and the bay in the distance. Sunlight catches on the water, making it almost blinding if one looks at it too long. It would be a beautiful sight, the sort that would be lovely to watch a sunset over.
Admiring it is not on my agenda at the moment as I follow Benji to the edge of the rooftop. He stops there, the toes of his shoes just to the ledge. He cradles the skull to his chest with one hand, lifting the other to point off into the distance.
“There.”
“There, where?” I step up behind him, not touching, but close enough to grab him should he venture any closer to plummeting several storeys down. “What are we looking at, Benji? The docks? The water?”
When he speaks again, it is both his voice but not. As though someone is speaking the same words right alongside him from lips I cannot see. Yet the language is neither English nor Mandarin, and every syllable is utterly foreign to me. Can Benji understand any of it? He speaks it fluently now, as though he came into this world with the words on his tongue.
My heart is running a mile a minute. I bring a hand to rest upon his back.
“Benjamin, I need to know what’s happening. What is she wanting us to see?”
A pause. He breathes deep.
“The sea.”
He looks at me. No longer do I see Benji’s clear, dark eyes. I am staring into the hazy eyes of a corpse, and the voice coming from his lips is no longer his own.
“We all return there someday.”
He steps off the rooftop and into the open air.
I almost anticipated it. Almost.
The moment he moves, I lock an arm around his middle, hauling him back even as an inhuman shriek tears from his lips. Benjamin fights me like a wild animal, thrashing, kicking his legs back into my shins. His arms remain locked fast around the skull.
Small as he might be, he’s stronger than he looks. I stagger back, not resisting when our legs tangle and we hit the rooftop in a mess of limbs. With one arm fastened tight around him, I reach with the other, snagging a fistful of silk and what I think and hope is the skull within it, and yank it from his grasp.
Benjamin drags in a shuddering gasp and goes boneless in my arms.
We lay there for a spell, chests heaving. He draws himself up to sitting, running a hand back through his tousled hair. Thank God, his eyes are normal again, alert and wide and confused. I sit up, placing the skull aside and out of his reach. “Christ almighty. Are you all right?”
“Yes, I…” He blinks once, looks to the skull and back again. “I… I’m so sorry. I don’t know what came over me.”
“The ghost, I presume. Wait—do you remember coming up here?”
“I remember all of it,” he admits, brows furrowing.
Well, that’s new. When Esher was possessed, I recall him not remembering a thing after the fact. Aunt Eleanor did say Benji had some sort of special talent for all of this, didn’t she? This is perhaps what she meant.
He doesn’t look shaken so much as disoriented, but I still find myself reaching out to touch his hand. Almos
t out of reflex, he wraps his fingers around mine and tries to smile.
I ask, “Those words you were saying, what were they? Do you remember?”
“I recall speaking them, but I couldn’t tell you what they meant. I don’t even know the language, just that it felt…old.”
“Lovely. We’ve got a multilingual ghost who fancies the ocean.” With a sigh, I rise to my feet, keeping hold of his hand to draw him up with me. I retrieve the skull, turning it over delicately in my hands to ensure it wasn’t damaged during our tussle. Everything seems intact.
Benji steers his gaze ocean-ward. “It isn’t just that. It was… I felt this longing, Preston. Like every inch of my being—of her—needed to find its way there. If she’s unsettled because her remains have been separated and lugged about in a box across the world, perhaps she needs to be returned somewhere to be laid to rest.”
A sound enough argument, and yet… “Which ocean? Any of them? There’s an awful lot of them in the world.” I look down at the skull in my hand. “I wonder how she died.”
“She was strangled,” he murmurs, without missing a step. “I felt it last night when I saw her, and again just now. She was trying to escape from somewhere, or someone, and they caught her as she fled.”
I think back to how Benji struggled when I grabbed him from behind and wonder if that was the spirit’s doing. If it brought back the memory of fighting for her life. And I wonder again, are we returning her to someone who will do right by her remains, or are we merely passing them off from one thief to the next?
If we permit that to happen, what sort of people does that make us?
“Could we just go to the water here, then? The bay?”
Benji presses his fingers to his forehead like he’s staving off an oncoming headache. “I… I don’t know. I couldn’t sense that much. I just knew I needed to be near the water.”
I puff out a heavy breath and then shiver. “Well, we’ve already sent for our client. I’m not so sure we’ve got a good case for backing out now.”
“No, I suppose not.”
Lapsing into silence, we crawl back through the hatch and return to our room. I do not want Benjamin to put his hands on the skull again any time soon, so I immediately return it to its box.
Standing over it and glancing inside, I see something that gives me pause. The skull was not the only thing in there. I reach in, pushing aside more fabric, and pull out two small, leather-bound notebooks.
“We wanted answers,” I say to Benji. “Maybe we’ve got them after all.”
I offer them out as he hurries to my side, then place the skull back into the box, folding the silk over the top. Benji unties the first journal as he takes up a seat, head bowed, beginning to pore over the pages with such focused intensity it makes me smile. I pull up a chair beside him and take the other book to flip through it.
The outside is generic enough: dark brown leather, worn from use. The first page contains a stamped image of a circle with the silhouette of a wolf’s head within it. The rest of the pages are filled with small, scribbled writing, difficult to make out. For that matter, the longer I stare at it I realise it isn’t in English, although I don’t know what the language is. Amidst the paragraphs of condensed text, notes are scribbled into the margins, symbols and sketches take up pages and corners and anywhere else there is room. The same girl appears throughout the book, doe-eyed, thin lips, a round face. She couldn’t be any older than Benji or me.
And then there are the symbols. Odd markings and etches within circular patterns, unlike anything I’ve seen. Something fires in my memory. James told me about their last job with Reverend Thomas and the state of things in the cellar beneath his home. James recalled the symbols he saw there, painted upon the walls, but that they were too smeared to really make out. He knew nothing about them other than they were likely tied to whatever organisation the Reverend had referred to. The Order. I tap my finger against the page and look up.
“Do you recognise this language, Benji?”
“German…I think. I could be wrong.” He glances over. “My book has all those peculiar drawings, too.”
“Did Esher have anything like them in his notes?”
“No, nothing like this. But I think they and your aunt would be interested in the contents of these books.”
They would. Except we’ve got our client meeting us in a little over an hour to collect them.
We could take the items and flee, just steal back to England without a word. What would that mean in the long run? They think James and Esher are playing courier here and it would not be difficult for a disgruntled client who really wanted to get their hands on these things to track the pair of them down. I cannot put their lives or reputation in danger.
I retrieve a pen and Esher’s notebook from our bags and flip through until I find where his text ends and empty pages begin. Laying the two notebooks side by side, I hunch over, and begin to copy the symbols, exactly as I see them.
Benji looks up. “What are you doing?”
“They’ll want to see these, right? We don’t have time to copy down every word, but every bit helps. Keep reading. See if you find anything of importance.”
We sit in silence for the following hour. Benji reads while I copy every symbol and drawing I can, attempting to let my hand uncramp now and again. My fingers have begun to ache. What little is in English seems to be of no importance. A few dates, a few names. A location or two.
I’m halfway through the book. Benji is just about done with his, but I know he’s had to skim through much of it as the writing is so bloody small. I flip through several pages, scanning for any words that jump out, searching for more drawings. The same girl appears a few more times, along with the occasional face I don’t recognise.
Except one.
I stop, staring into the illustration on the page. There are two of them, one next to the other. But it’s the one on the right that catches my attention. Curly-haired and wide eyes… Except here, they’re lighter, shaded as though intended to be blue or green or something bright.
“Look at this.” I turn it around to Benji. “Is this Crane?”
He leans over. Frowns. “I don’t know… Perhaps? I didn’t get that good a look at him in the warehouse.”
“It’s the spitting image, except the eyes. Crane’s got these dark, intense eyes. Not like these.” I look to the adjoining page and press a finger to the text. “And here!” Amidst the German writing is a name: Nathaniel J. Crane.
“Copy that bit down,” Benji instructs. “We’ll see about having it translated later.”
I duck my head to begin doing as I’m told. But I’ve only got halfway through the page before footsteps creak on the floorboards outside our door, and someone knocks.
We exchange looks. Do we ignore it? Try to push off the meeting just a bit longer? Do we throw ourselves out the window or under the bed? All sound like appealing options. We could just keep the items and hand over an empty box, but what if they know how to open it and check while we’re standing right here?
Benji looks to me to make a quick decision. Damn it all.
I shut Esher’s notebook and leap out of my chair to cram it beneath the mattress. Benji scurries to get the other books back into the box with the skull, closes it, and fastens the latch once more. I smooth a hand over my hair, straighten my shirt, and step to the door to answer it.
There is not one, but three gentlemen standing in the hallway. The first is a lean, broad-shouldered man with a thick moustache and a full beard, with a Stetson perched atop his greying hair. The hat looks a bit out of place with his otherwise tidy suit, and yet somehow it works for him. Behind him are two men in bowlers and clothes more befitting a rancher than a gentleman. Nothing about their demeanour suggests they’re here for any reason other than to act as hired muscle.
I can only presume our gentleman in the hat is our cargo’s recipient, Mr. Carlton. He greets us with a charming grin as one of his men shuts the door behind
them.
“Evening, gentlemen. I’m Michael Carlton. You must be Mr. Esher and Mr. Spencer.”
“That would be us,” I agree, stepping forward to extend a hand. Carlton takes it and gives it a firm shake. “I’m James Spencer, this is my partner, William Esher.”
“Pleasure. I’ll admit, when Wilkerson told me he had two ghost hunters carting along such precious cargo, I was a little concerned. But here you are. I trust everything went without a hitch?”
I steal a glance askance at Benjamin before smiling. “No problems whatsoever.”
We step aside, gesturing to the box upon the table. Carlton’s eyes widen a fraction as he steps over to it, bringing his hands to rest on its lid. He runs his fingers along the locking mechanism, almost fondly. Then, he turns back around and snaps his fingers, and the taller of his two companions advances to retrieve the box. Carlton returns his attention to us, sliding an envelope out from the inside of his coat pocket and offering it to Benji.
“The remainder of your payment, as promised. Go ahead. Count if you’d like; I won’t take offense.”
Benji, too polite even on a bad day, only smiles fleetingly and holds the envelope tightly in his hand. “Quite all right.”
Carlton waves him off. “You English folk, always too nice for your own good. I could tell you I’d shorted you twenty dollars and you’d probably still smile and say thanks.”
“Manners are a burden, sir,” I say, smiling tightly.
“Indeed they are. So, tell me…” He tips his head, surveying the both of us closely. “Did either of you open the box along the way?”
My stomach damn near twists itself in two. Surely he has no way of telling. No seal that was broken, no evidence left behind.
“No, sir,” Benji says. “Although, I’ll admit, we’ve been quite curious about its contents. Might we ask what’s inside that’s so special?”
It could be my imagination, but Carlton seems to relax at this answer. “Just a few old books. Manuscripts. One of a kind, at that.”
Interesting. “Mr. Wilkerson told us we were hired due to some supernatural activity. Any idea why a few books would have something spiritual attached to them?”