by Anya Allyn
“You do know who I am speaking of?” Henry tells her. “They have been here before. Both tall—a brunette and a redhead.”
She gives him a deep, single nod. “Of course. The doubles of the poor souls in the basement.”
Henry straightens. “Doubles?”
She nods. “On life support. Or they were—they had a miraculous recovery just days ago. It is all in God’s hands, Mr. Batiste. If he chooses us for a miracle, then we are indeed blessed.”
Pausing, Henry strokes his chin. I can almost see wheels turning in his head. “Where are they now—these miracles of God?”
She pulls her bottom lip in. “They have been undertaking a recovery from their comas, and have been resting together for the past few days. Cassandra Claiborne took ill and has also been resting with them—when one traipses about in a wet negligee out in freezing temperatures, there is a good chance that one will fall ill.”
Henry gazes down at the medicine box in my hands. “Ah, the concerned suitor fetches medicine for his sweetheart. How utterly tragic.”
“It’s your fault she’s ill.” Hate is a coiled snake in my stomach. “You monsters almost killed her, forcing her to live underground with Balthazar.”
Sister Bettina shakes her head at me. “Cassandra belongs with her husband. We recognize that a marriage has taken place, and we respect that union.”
“We would have appreciated communication from you earlier, seeing as Lady Batiste was ill,” said Zach’s father to Sister Bettina. “As you said, she belongs to her husband now, and she must remain in good health.”
She stares at him down her pinched nose. “Nabaasa has been taking good care of her, as she has the other two girls. She is well-qualified in that regard. She is a trained nurse.”
She turned as Nabaasa walked from the museum, flanked by a guard.
Nabaasa faces down the men of the castle, her gaze so staunch it could level mountains. “They’re no longer here. The girls have gone.”
Sister Bettina gasps. “You’re telling an untruth.”
Nabaasa shakes her head. “Sister, lying isn’t something I do.”
Gone. The word filters through the chaos. Cassie and Molly and Aisha are gone. Why didn’t Cassie tell me she was leaving?
“Where did they go?” Zach’s father clenches his fist on the pistol.
“I don’t know that,” says Nabaasa. “I woke this morning and went straight to their quarters to see how they are all doing. Their beds were empty, and they are nowhere to be found.”
“You promised us Lady Balthazar Batiste,” Parker’s father tells Sister Bettina. “Bring her to us or we’ll tear this place apart until we find her ourselves.”
Alarm rises in her pale blue eyes. “You must not cross our thresh hold.” She glanced left to right at the other members of the council, as though to convince herself that she had a large circle of support and protection around her. “We could not predict the girls leaving. As you can see, even Ethan was not aware of this occurrence. We will let you know the moment they return.”
A humorless smile inches across Henry’s face. “I’m afraid things are no longer in your hands, Sister Bettina.”
She steps back, into the fold of the order. “Then we will be forced to block your entry.”
The Order joins hands, closing their eyes.
Henry raises an eyebrow. “You allowed us entry into this part of the world. That was your fatal mistake. There is nothing you can do now. I propose you step aside.”
The Order stands firm, tightly clutching each other’s hands like frightened children. Shrugging, Henry strides past them.
Calhoun drops his hold on me and levels his shotgun at Henry. The other guards follow Calhoun’s lead.
Henry and Armand raise their arms and thrust the guards backward—toppling them—the guards shooting their guns aimlessly in the air. Sister Bettina and the order are flung into the snow.
I take a run at the museum, but two of the castle men jump me and throw me to the ground.
Nabaasa lies prone on the snow, but her dark eyes remain watchful. A story Nabaasa once told me flashes through my head—a story in which she’d had to play dead in a village of the massacred in Uganda, just to survive.
No one but me and Nabaasa see Calhoun crawl toward his gun—which lies half-buried in the snow. With a cold determination in his eyes, Calhoun reaches for the weapon. Slowly his fingers curl around it, and I hope he can take at least two of the men out. He notices me watching him, and he stares back with a glazed expression I can’t read. Whipping the shotgun up, he pushes the barrel into his mouth. A shot explodes. Calhoun’s blood sprays the snow.
One of the men bring down something hard on my temple.
Drumbeats bang in my head—in a fast warning rhythm. I try to rise but my mind blackens. In a dark void, all I hear are shouts and screams and glass shattering... and gunfire.
22. Grandfather
JESSAMINE
Hours pass while I keep my eyes from the letter. I could destroy it with the merest flicker of energy. The letter burns on the shelf—it poisons the air, it cuts like a blade. I cannot remember love, but everyone I have ever loved has left me.
I take up the letter. And read it. I try to push the words out and away from me, but they are heavy—each word weighted and deliberate.
“Why, Grandfather?” I cry. “Why have you punished me with this? Have I not suffered enough?”
Behind me, the clock begins ticking.
An aged man shuffles into the ballroom—a man bent and sorrowful. He grasps the back of a chair to steady himself, his eyes rimmed red and his white hair grown wild like grasses.
He gives a slow, sorrowful shake of his head. “My sweet Jessamine. What have I done?”
My mind closes tight. My mind escapes into the locket and binds itself. My fingers try to reach for the locket at my neck, but the locket is gone.
There is but one thing I know. He is not a ghost like me.
“How did I let a century pass through my fingers?” He breathes in a long, sorrowful gasp.
I do not know what I expected upon Grandfather’s return. If I expected my heart to be filled at last, then I am sorely disappointed. My heart went away long ago. Everything... everything has been fixed upon his coming back to me. But I never thought about what might happen afterwards. I didn’t want to think that far. And now I see Grandfather’s face—the face I haven’t seen for so long. And I know that there is nothing beyond this moment. His eyes are full of dread and regret. I sense his horror at seeing me like this—revulsion even. I am no longer his granddaughter. I am a thing without blood and flesh.
I stare at him mutely.
He shakes his head. “I see you, Jessamine. You no longer have the mind of a small child. I see the decades of pain that I’ve put you through. I cannot excuse myself. I spent but a year in the other worlds, but here so much time passed. So much time....”
A sob wracks his body—all the more terrible for its silence. “I brought destruction on the world. I searched for something bright and wonderful, but instead I headed into darkness. I can never repay my debt to this world, or my debt to you.” Lines etch deep into his forehead. “And when I tried to return, I could not. Something blocked me every which way I tried. Finally, I knew. It was you, Jessamine. You blocked my return....”
Something broke away inside me, like a sheet of ice on a lake. “No....”
“Yes, it was you. You kept me away. Look inside, little one.”
I wring my hands together to stop an outburst, but I remember my life before—and it renders me powerless. “I hated you. I hated you for leaving me. I hated you for leaving me with Henry and Audette.”
He flinches as though a force has struck him in the chest. “I deserve all your anger. All of it. I lost myself in a fantasy. I found a world to take you to. Your father... is there. And your grandmother. I took the place of myself in that world. I paraded about like the deceiver I was. But my mind was tortured every da
y over what I’d done, tortured by what I knew. I was plagued by memories of your father dying on this earth—and so I forbid him from performing anything remotely dangerous. I even fired Mister Magnificent the knife thrower and burned the Wheel of Death. Simon hated me for it. He lived for the thrill and the danger—the excitement and the roar of the crowd. He’d been brought up in the circus— and I took it all away. I threatened to write him out of his inheritance if he disobeyed me.”
Memories of Daddy sink into me with teeth. A warmth that has been gone from me a long time. Eyes that crinkled when he smiled. A big, generous laugh that made you feel like everything was okay.
“You see,” said Grandfather, “that is the great problem with knowing the future—you cannot live. Your life becomes all about how to beat the ticking clock of death. Although of course, it is all a macabre lottery when it comes to a parallel earth. Some things that came to pass on the one you knew may not come to pass on the other. Your father might or might not die on the wheel. Your grandmother, Dora, might or might not already house the cancer that would kill her. The children of my good friend Zeke might or might not die in a terrible fire. The First World War might or might not end in 1918. But with everything exactly the same on this earth at the time I entered it, the possibility that these things would happen seemed to be almost one hundred percent.”
I stare at him with a question burning bright inside me. “Yet, you didn’t return.”
“No, I did not. My plan was to take you there, to have you take the place of the Jessamine of that world. In that world, she is still ten. But I would have lost you—you would have become her. I couldn’t bear the thought of that.”
“But you didn’t become the other Tobias.” My words sound petulant in my ears.
“I am not proud of what happened. I followed the circus around for days, always in disguise—hoping to catch a glimpse of Simon and Dora. The Tobias of that world caught me one night, and tore off my hat and glasses. He’d seen me skulking around in the shadows and was determined to see my face. Had his hand touched my skin, I would have been absorbed by him, but it did not. But when he looked into the face that was identical to his own, he fell to the ground, clutching his heart. He died knowing what none of us should ever know—that there are doubles of us out there in the universes.” He inclines his grizzled head. “A terrible thought came to me. And instead of doing what I knew was right, I paid someone to take his body down to the river and weight it so it would sink to the bottom. No one of course, ever looked for him, because to them, he was never gone. I took his place.”
With a weary sigh, he sits himself down on the chair. “My soul was warped by my act of evil, but I couldn’t tear myself away. I began to believe that I was once again the great ringmaster of the Fiveash circus, with my loving family surrounding me. I told myself I would remain in the fantasy for only a short while, then I would return and take you away somewhere and start again. But a year in that world was a century in this.” He takes in a sharp breath. “I had forgotten what a happy child you were, Jessamine—so full of life and laughter—as a child should be.”
Bitterness chokes me like ashes in my throat. “I can’t remember that life. I can’t remember the girl I was before Daddy died.”
“But you will have that life again, in another body, in another world. Trust in that, Jessamine. I cannot claim to know or understand the grand design of life, but I know we live again. We are given chance after chance to redeem ourselves. That is all I know.”
Silence—silence like the empty space between ticks of the clock—hangs between us.
He stares at my larger-than-life doll and bear as though he has never seen them before. “Why did I imagine that this—this underground dollhouse—was ever a good idea? And providing you with replicas of your childhood toys as companions—that was not something I should have done. My child, all I can say to you is that as much as I tried to run from the castle, I am a product of it. As a small boy, I once wandered down to the secret underground chambers of the castle’s original lord—Balthazar. I spied his terrible cabinets, filled with wooden dolls—replicas of all his past wives.” His body sighs. “Why he kept them, I cannot say. But of course, those could never substitute for anything real. Yet, I convinced myself that you would be kept safe, down here alone, with none but dolls to keep you company. Because I denied my history—kept it buried deep within me—I didn’t recognize the echoes of my past.”
I lift my chin. “Not all my dolls are made of wood and cloth, Grandfather.
His wet, rheumy eyes are uncomprehending as he stares at me.
“Look in the sleeping chamber. You will see them. They were gone for a short while. But they came back to me.”
A deep V forms between his eyebrows. His steps are heavy on his walking stick, and he huffs as he reaches the doorway of the bed chamber. I follow behind.
He gazes through the opening and then back at me, shock registering on his face. “Who are they?”
“I told you. They are my dolls. My companions.”
“But how can they live here, Jess? There is nothing here for them.”
“I exist here. Why cannot they? And besides, the eldest of them lived here for five years under my care.”
His expression breaks down—the edges of everything in his features crumbling. “I cannot imagine the times you’ve spent here whilst I’ve been gone.”
He extends a hand to me. “Come with me now. I will gladly end my life, so that you will not have to take that journey alone. That is all I can offer.”
“I must remain and care for my dolls. It is a great responsibility and a vexation, but one that I must follow through to the end.”
“No... no Jessamine. They have to leave here and live out their lives. I will not ask how they ever came to be here, but I will tell you that their lives are not your responsibility.”
I shake my head. “I cannot go with you, even if my dolls had not returned.”
It is a cold and wretched thing to have grandfather here with me now. At least, when I was waiting, I had some semblance of hope. But now he tells me everything was wrong. I waited for nothing. And now I cannot leave and go to another place with him. The weight of it all hangs on me, the terrible burden that hangs on those who waited too long.
He gazes at me steadily, his eyes glistening. “Then I have no choice but to take my leave. There is something I must do before the end of my miserable life.”
“You’re going to leave me alone again?”
“I must travel back to the place of my birth—La Falaise. I have travelled this life for eighty one years—running away from my past at the castle. But I didn’t manage to erase it. I have brought great evil to the worlds of men. I should have listened to Zeke, I should have listened to the fortune teller. I should have listened to my own better judgment. But I was so intent on what I desired, I blocked all else out.” His face crumples. “I can’t atone for my wrongs, but I must face them. My best hope is that I’ll do something worthy in my next life.”
Something inside me is squeezed so tightly I can almost imagine my breath has been stolen away. “You can’t leave me again. Remember what you wrote?”
Pain casts shadows in his eyes. “You and only you.” Again, he holds out a hand to me.
I turn to gaze upon the sleeping heads of my charges. They sleep so beautifully—unlike me, who cannot remember the depth and surrender of the human night. My rest has only been in the fading of the energies that sustain me—a gray void. Some long-buried part of me desires the human night, even if I were never to wake again.
The dolls of my dollhouse have taken their own path, and I can do no more for them.
I take his hand. He looks down, surprised he can feel the weight of my fingers. I am practiced at making any part of myself feel solid.
Wetness glistens in the corner of his eye.
And we are gone.
23. A Night of Ills
JESSAMINE
We step into a night. I
t is fitting, for I have known almost one hundred years of night.
The castle is everything Grandfather said it was and far more. I believe I should respect it as a place of my ancestry, but Grandfather says I should not. He stole away from the castle as a young man—but the castle never left him. I can see that as I look upward at the dark, forbidding structures. The high stone walls close in around me, claiming me as one of their own.
Grandfather treads towards the drawbridge. It opens as we approach, though no one seems to be about. The castle desires us, it wants us to enter.
Hunger emits from the rooms of the castle. I am inside a beast. Although I no longer have flesh, and although I am made of smoke and mirrors—fear travels through me. Grandfather is still human—he cannot sense what I do. There are forces here that can bind me, even as a spirit. I want to flee and return to my safe place deep within the earth, the place that Grandfather built for me. I stop in the midst of the wide corridor lit by torches—the orange light upon the ancient walls a vision of hell.
Grandfather turns toward me with an expression of dread and sadness. “I must continue. But I will not ask that of you.”
“I will take my place beside you.” I have come this far and I must see it through. It is the order of things to see them to the end.
We step into a cavernous hall. Humans and spirits turn to stare at us in shock—my relatives—ancestors and descendants of my family.
Henry strides up to Grandfather. “You old bastard. You’re alive. Uncle Tobias, I didn’t think you had the guts to make your way back here.”
Grandfather glares coldly at Henry. “It is a far greater thing that my granddaughter has ventured here. You will deal with all that you brought upon Jessamine in the next life. You and that woman of yours.”
Audette—standing next to a fireplace wearing a shiny red gown—smiles widely. “You left her, old man. We were stuck with her, remember?”
Anger crosses Grandfather’s lined features. “I left her in your care. And that was the worst mistake of my life.”