by Jerico Lenk
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The author makes no claims to, but instead acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of the word marks mentioned in this work of fiction.
Copyright © 2017 by Jerico Lenk
THE MISSING by Jerico Lenk
All rights reserved. Published in the United States of America by Month9Books, LLC.
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-946700-56-8
Trade Paperback ISBN: 978-0-9968904-7-2
ePub ISBN: 978-1-945107-22-1
Mobipocket ISBN: 978-1-945107-23-8
Published by Month9Books, Raleigh, NC 27609
Cover design by Najla Qamber Designs
For everyone waiting to be found.
Dear Reader,
THE MISSING by Jerico Lenk is one of the richest and most honest stories I have had the pleasure of reading and considering for acquisition by Month9Books. On the surface, it is quintessential Month9Books. It is spooky, alive with the kind of writing you wish you’d written yourself, and dark, and foreboding, and layered.
Will Winchester lives in a time when the word “transgender” wasn’t even a possibility. You were either male or female. And those who were “other” hid in the shadows, afraid and alone, much like Will, who was born as Willow Winchester.
As a publisher, it was important to me that I support Will’s story and invite you to join his journey of self-discovery, while growing up in a house of ill repute for wealthy patrons, keeping some of the most personal and private of secrets. His relationship with his father is at the center of the story as much as it is with that of his dead mother.
Will is one of the most complex and yet simple characters I have come across in YA, and yet, there is something so familiar about his struggles, something so recognizable in his plight. Of course, we had to balance this historical account with what we know today about transgender people, so, please be sensitive to that when reading. I hope you find the Curious Cases of Will Winchester and the Black Cross to be as engaging and electric as I did. A haunting good old fashioned ghost story can be found in THE MISSING, but just beneath is something much deeper and undeniably real.
Happy reading,
Georgia McBride, Publisher
LONDON, 1890
Making my usual rounds through the townhouse, I weaved in and out between the front and back drawing rooms, carrying a silver serving tray of brandy and gin slings and ready smoking pipes.
“Look at you, boy, all dapper. But your collar’s turned down … ”
Mr. Shelby, editor for a rather popular serial magazine and one of the night’s guests, stretched from his chair to right my collar for me. “Thank you, sir,” I said, pausing just long enough to accept the kindness before passing a cock-tail his way.
Near the mantle, the chemist, Dr. Lowells, noticed my approach and smiled. He parted the gentlemen with whom he mingled so I might slip by, balancing the serving tray propped against my side. One of Dr. Lowells’ conversation partners, a gentleman with a mustache alarmingly liken to a chimney brush, and quite clearly a first-time visitor here, snatched a pipe from the tray with a twitched smile.
“And what is this?” A jolly-looking older man with a pink silk necktie lit up with a grin as I swung by his little group at the armchairs. Miss Calico sat perched on his knee as if she were his daughter—and we all knew she was not his daughter, especially by the way his hand rested comfortably at her hip.
“Oh,” I said, slowing to a stop. The man seemed familiar to me for some reason. “Me, sir? Another refreshment?”
“Yes, you!” His eyes shone brandy-bright. “You were at the planchettist party last week. You’ll call at the next get-together, won’t you? The planchettist said you were an interesting little fellow I’d be keen to acknowledge.”
Miss Calico sent me a knowing look from the corner of her eye. Ah, yes. That was why I felt I recognised him. Blushing, I waved my free hand hard, not because I cared if the man’s cabaret hosted another planchettist party like the one in Mayfair last week, but because I did not want my father or Miss Valérie overhearing and making inferences about just how often I snuck away to such Spiritualist events.
The gentleman’s smile fell away and he looked at me anew, bushy brow furrowing. “But what the devil has you here, boy?”
Miss Calico sighed, nuzzling her nose into the man’s temple. “Darling,” she said, dismissing me with a twirl of her hand, “young Mr. Winchester is presently at work, himself, so you mustn’t busy him with your own boring business talk.”
I left a drink for the man, for when Miss Calico was through distracting him. She was right, after all; I was at home, but I was indeed at work.
My father ran an accommodation house for respectable mistresses and their respectable partners colloquially nicknamed Julien’s-off-the-Strand after himself, never mind the distance between Belgravia and the Strand. Throughout the week, under the guise of stylish after-dinner parties, it was a clean, sophisticated maison right out of our 18 Winston Crescent townhouse—certainly not a place for children.
But I was sixteen, hardly a child anymore. And, even knowing the secrets beyond the townhouse’s closed doors—some of them, secrets of my own—playing waiter at my father’s parties was certainly better than some vocations with which other ’teens were faced.
My father’s guests never complained for the absence of real domestic hands. The outrageousness of me, a sprite of a server, a Julien in training, wandering about with sweets and hard liquor, was apparently just part of the establishment’s draw, equal to that of my father’s girls in their lacy, low-cut dresses and scandalous black knee stockings.
Long after a large, hot dinner by now, the townhouse was full of guests and tobacco smoke. A Berliner in the rear drawing room spewed forth a frolicking, lighthearted German opera; the clatter of a table tennis game echoed from the downstairs reception room. Voices and laughter sloshed together like champagne in glistening stemware.
My father found it greatly distasteful when others referred to his girls as “prostitutes.” They weren’t, he always clarified, and adamantly; they were companions of matching class, generally adhering to the most virtuous of womanly beauty. Mistresses of married men, solitary men, bachelors, bankers, barristers, barons. Everyone knew the importance, for virtue and for health, of outlets for the masculine appetite both before marriage and after marriage. Such vigour was admirable, but it required regulation. Thus … respectable establishments such as that of my father’s.
At least, that was the narrative I’d overheard. I thought it a very forgiving comment on the sort of oppression, repression, depression or humdrum Hyde Park persuasion which drove men to pay such an awful lot of money for one evening with one my father’s ladies.
And I was certainly not exempt from eyes which, at times, followed me around the place more than they followed any of the ladies—like tonight, those of a man with hair so slick with hair wax, one might mistake it for polished wood in the light. I caught him twice staring, but he looked quickly away as soon as I did. The third time, his hand twitched, and I knew he was soon to wave me over for refreshment, so I turned sharp on my heel and marched back to the other roo
m before he could do so.
“Oh—Will!”
Miss Agatha, one of my father’s girls, waved at me from the corner where she and her most regular gentleman visitor lingered at an open window.
“I want one of those cakes, John,” she said, looking so pretty and young with her long dark hair falling casually down the back of her lavender gown. Her regular, Mr. John, plucked some sweet things from the tray as I drifted to a stop with the two of them, glad for a short break. I liked when Mr. John called. He was no rake; he always treated Agatha so nicely. Not that my father allowed his girls to be treated any other way, but John’s niceness was different—as if Agatha were a lady whom he truly wished to court. She came alive when he visited, the two of them always exchanging playful glances and secretive laughter, teasing and elbowing like old friends.
“Why, Will, what’s the matter? Your eyes are like a stormy sky,” Mr. John remarked suddenly. His faint new mustache danced around a sip of Brandywine.
Agatha reached out, affectionately finger-combing the hair around my ears. “Oh, he always wears that look in the wake of his father’s neglect.”
“What look?” I echoed, brow knotting. “Father’s neglect?”
Agatha gave a dramatic sigh. “A stormy sky, he says. How poetic for brown eyes! Why can’t the man be as poetic about my eyes? My eyes are plain, then?”
Mr. John laughed and hooked an arm around Agatha’s tiny waist, leaning forward against her even as she smiled but avoided his kisses. “Your eyes,” he said, “your eyes, sweet dove, are finer than the Crown Jewels.”
Miss Nina strode up beside us then, prodding me in the side with her closed hand-fan. Leaning close, she whispered, “She’s giving you that look again.”
She meant Miss Valérie. I turned a little, casting a glance around the rest of the drawing room.
Yes, with her feet in their bejeweled slippers tucked up beside her, elegant Miss Valérie lounged on the floral-print loveseat, the usual spot in which she spent most every party smiling and watching through hooded eyes.
Of the six ladies employed by my father, Miss Valérie was the oldest and his obvious favourite. She’d retired from the profession before the parties had ever really begun, playing head mistress now, the unofficial manager of the others.
“A longtime friend!” my father always said. “A business partner!”
But she could have been my stepmother if there were any papers to say so, and she surely didn’t pay a shilling of room and board since she’d moved in.
I knew the look Nina meant. It was Miss Valérie’s sharply observant face, at once soft but cold, lofty and attentive. Her gaze lingered on me a moment longer after I met it, brow gently arced as though she meant to say, Yes, I am looking at you. After a few uncomfortable seconds, she was greeted by a barrister friend of my father’s, and back she went to her carefully sociable character, releasing me from her scrutiny to accept the kisses he rained upon her ringed hand.
“She hates me.” I turned around again with a sigh, raising my brows. If I hadn’t won her affection when I was small, I wouldn’t now.
Mr. John raised his drink as if to toast. “Well!” he said. “One day this will all be yours, you lucky little chap; and you’ll breathe easy.”
Thump!
I leaned to the side quickly, looking down the hall into the other drawing room. Someone had tripped, perhaps, or conversation was getting rowdy. Yet no one else seemed to have heard the sound at all.
“What do you mean?” I asked Mr. John.
“You’ll inherit all this, won’t you?” He swept his hand around the expanse of the lively room. “You could send Lady Valérie off for good!”
“I suppose … ” I shrugged. As if the solution to my problems were so easily attained. I certainly did not covet such a business.
Thump, thump-thump.
I bristled. There was that odd sound again.
Agatha must have heard it as well. She tipped her head just slightly in the direction of the noise, then suddenly flashed me a pointed look around Mr. John’s shoulder.
Thump-thump-shuffle, thump-thump-thump!
The ruckus came from upstairs—like children played tag or chased hoops in the attic room just overhead. Which also happened to be my room.
My heart sank. I knew what it was.
“Blast,” I muttered, plenty flustered. I needed to stop the ruckus before anyone else noticed, especially my father. This was how it always went.
I pushed my silver serving tray at a spirited Mr. John, who took it in tipsy confusion, and struck off as smartly but casually as I could so as not to draw much attention. But once I reached the main stairs, I took off running in the direction of the noise.
The attic floor was closed to visitors, bearing just a handful of small bedrooms—mine, Daphne and Agatha’s, the cook’s, and Miss Zelda the housekeeper’s. The door to my room, a bit crooked on its hinges as it was, remained closed.
Thump-thump-thump!
Hand curling on the high brass knob, I pressed my ear to the door to listen.
Patter of feet. Hollow giggles.
The doorknob clicked as I turned it slowly, deliberately, then edged the door open with a gentle creak.
I saw them instantly in the mirror across the room, felt the gust of air and throb of fast footsteps as little Charlie and Colette dashed to-and-fro before me, playing some game all around the loft room.
“Charlie, you cheater!” Colette whined. But she should have known better because Charlie always cheated.
Outside the mirror, the room was empty.
Quickly, I stepped inside and closed the door.
“Hey!” I interrupted, quiet but stern. The children had moved beyond the scope of the mirror, but I could feel them looking at me in guilt. “Could you both kindly hush up?” I pressed. The sound of the party echoed up through the house as their play had echoed down. “You’re rather loud, and you know we can’t have my father’s company hear you.”
“Sorry,” the two of them chorused, voices tiny and warped. Then, like candles blown out in the wind, they were gone.
Charlie and Colette were dead, after all—there in my attic room, but also dead—murdered by a friend of their scoundrel brother back in 1861. They were still here because the clothes in which they’d died lay hidden beneath the floorboards. My mother and father hadn’t known as much when they acquired the townhouse, but I surely was not about to remove the clothes. One night two years ago, Charlie and Colette had roped me into a game of Hot Boiled Beans, whispering excitably, “Warmer, warmer—hot!” until I had the slat of wood wedged upwards and could see in the candlelight a blue dress and shirt collar, both bloody and crumpled up in the dust and dirt below. Since then, Charlie and Colette had been yet another secret of mine to keep safe.
My room was still again. I breathed a short sigh, relieved.
I felt as though, somehow, I’d become their caregiver. The fact of the matter was that I often felt responsible for them, because for as long as I could recall, it had been my unique curse to see and hear the Missing, a sensitivity normal men and women didn’t generally possess.
The Missing. Ghosts. Spirits, phantoms, the dead. Nobody else called them that—missing—but I did, as they quite clearly weren’t completely gone, just caught somewhere between mostly unseen and generally unnoticed. Never mind why I saw and noticed them, or that they saw and noticed me.
“Hello!” Charlie had chirped the first time I met him and his sister, their two little, foggy, grey faces peeping at me from the door of what used to be my playroom. I’d been quite small, too small to understand the significance of their differences from me. If I think deeply enough, I can remember a lady in the nursery with me then, perched in the window seat across the room, her dark hair swept up in a loose bun and the back of her neck soft and white in the sunlight like her dancing dress. Turning. Waving for me. Laughing. My mother.
“Guardian angels,” she’d said.
I didn’t see Charli
e and Colette again until she was gone. Perhaps they’d worried I was lonely without her, or maybe they finally felt permitted to find a playmate in me. And they were certainly my playmates for a while, I suppose. They weren’t always around, just suddenly there now and again to pet my hair or insist they could not play marbles because the marbles went through their ghostly fingers.
Of course, I mentioned them to everyone. “The child just wants attention,” Miss Valérie said, after she’d shown up and effectively stepped into my mother’s shadow.
“Well, we’ll leave these imaginary friends at home and go to the zoo, then!” my father said, swinging me up to hold on his hip. The zoo, the carousel, the park, the toyshop. “See now?” he’d cry. “You shouldn’t be lonesome! You have Miss Valérie and I, and Miss Zelda, of course … ”
I don’t recall exactly how old I’d been—it was just before the mistress business started—but it was a Christmas Eve telling ghost stories together in the front drawing room that it finally sank into me what Charlie and Colette were. I burned my mouth on hot chocolate and sputtered from the pillows stacked on the loveseat, “Daddy, they’re not guardian angels, they’re dead! Ghosts come from dead people!”
“Well, yes, they do, darling.” My father had chuckled, exchanging a glance with Miss Valérie.
Afterwards, aiming to assert some sort of authority as the living one, I boasted to Charlie and Colette, “I should be afraid of you, but I’m not.”
But, inevitably, I outgrew them as playmates, and grew quite irritated that blame always fell to me for their occasional puckishness even when it was impossible for me to have moved this or that item while never in the room, or slammed a door downstairs all the way from my playroom, or made a mysterious ruckus on the wide old staircase while I sat with my primer and tutor.
The business of respectable mistresses for respectable men began slowly. Acquaintances of Miss Valérie came for dinner, pretty ladies and young women who cooed and fussed over me as if it were some contest in affectionate nature, until their gentlemanly friends arrived, and Zelda toted me off to bed. At times, I was sent off without dinner, like the evening on which I adamantly explained that I had not made my first real human friends cry—the son and daughter of a hired woman to whom my father let out an empty loft room—but Charlie had, after pulling their hair and stamping around, furious they couldn’t see him like I could.