by Jerico Lenk
“Damn Quinn to hell,” Clement grumbled after a while, lighting a cigarette. He climbed to his feet and, for the ash, fetched a small porcelain dish from the curio cabinet over my head.
“Clement … ” I chastised in a tiny voice.
His smirk became a pout as he plopped down against the wall again.
“I can’t stand Dorland,” he griped. “Nothing shall turn me against a man faster than inflammatory call-and-answer—don’t bully the ghosts, for Christ’s sake! Winchester, I prefer Miss Jessica over Dorland, what does that say, hmm?”
Well, he was rather talkative tonight. More like he was in dire need of someone to fill Quinn’s place as his listener. For Cain’s sake—and slightly my own—and because I hadn’t the best check on my tongue, I muttered, “Yes, but just which part of Miss Jessica is so preferable?”
Clement’s eyes shot to me, dancing in the candlelight. “Hmm? Is little Winchester jealous?”
“What’s there to be jealous of?” I retorted. “Certainly not her haughty inefficiency as an inspector, or compulsive need to assert her elevation above you as if her fashion, which is unnecessarily fine for an inspection, doesn’t do enough for that. And I told you, it’s Will.”
“Woah, there,” Clement said with a mildly-guilty chuckle. “I only meant to tease you’re sweet on her … ”
My eyes widened; my face flushed weakly. I cleared my throat. “Oh,” was all I managed in reply, strangled by half a flustered laugh, before I buttoned my mouth shut and looked off elsewhere. “Well. No. Definitely, definitely not.”
“However.” Cigarette pinched daintily between thumb and forefinger, Clement tapped ash into the porcelain dish. “I would agree with you on most points. Though she’s not entirely inefficient.”
Another lilting whistle sliced through the quiet, this time from the morning room directly to Clement’s left.
I looked to him, eyes wide. He looked back, almost just as startled.
Murmuring, from a different room.
Clement stood, abandoning his cigarette in the porcelain dish with a hiss of tobacco smoke through his teeth. He stalked the sound, moving with a very careful, quiet stride. Aiming to be just as gently swift, I followed him.
As soon as we reached the room from which the murmuring had come, the sound echoed once more from the other side of the hall.
Clement sent me a look, seemingly at a loss. “That is a voice, is it not?”
I nodded mutely. It wasn’t very clear, more like overhearing a soft conversation. But it was a voice. We approached it again. And, again, it disappeared as soon as we came upon it, striking up a few moments later in yet a different place. It led us all around as if it knew we’d follow wherever it drifted.
“Clement,” I said, stopping in the middle of the hall. “It’s toying with us.”
Clement’s eyes veered my way, all quips and smirks replaced by the usual heat of his inspector’s tenacity. “Go fetch that wretched doll from downstairs,” he said suddenly.
“Yes, sir.”
I moved like a sylph through the darkness, alight with nerves and tense with diligent excitement.
“If you don’t mind,” I said as, with the Talking Doll cradled against my chest, I passed by the long dining hall into which Dorland and O’Brien had relocated.
“Of course not,” Dorland replied, far too congenially.
Upstairs, Clement and I set the doll up in the middle of the hall. He wound the little monster up and she recited a nursery rhyme with a sloppy, distorted recorded voice.
“Little Jack Horner sat in a corner, eating a Christmas pie … ”
Clement and I exchanged looks of disgust.
“That’s atrocious,” he said. He retrieved his cigarette and lit what was left of it. “Stay here, won’t you? I wonder if they’ve any news downstairs for us.”
He left me alone, seated glumly in the dark fingering the delicate ringlets of the Talking Doll’s hair.
If the ghost was lonely, or even just playful, perhaps simply sitting there was not the best approach. Hesitating if only for a moment, I set the doll down against the wall and wandered into the girls’ morning room. It was nothing more than an outgrown nursery, with plain seats and bookshelves and a few scattered penny bazaar toys—a horse whose chipping paint made its grin more a snarl, spinning tops and hoops. But there were some nice trinkets in there too, like the wonder turner I flipped to-and-fro, seated on a little stool. On one side was a birdcage; on the other, a songbird. If I flipped it fast enough, the bird was caged, and then free, caged and then free.
A daedalum sat on the small table next to me, surrounded by neatly-folded hand stitchings. I gave it a little whirl, stooping down to peek inside. Click-click-click. Dancing bears, swooping birds, men flipping off prancing horses—
“Little Jack Horner sat in a corner, eating a Christmas pie … ”
I bristled.
“He put in his thumb, and pulled out a plum, and said, ‘What a good boy am I!’”
Chills ran like spiders up and down my arms. Slowly, slowly, I turned around, to find that while I’d been peeking into the daedalum, the Talking Doll had moved from the hall. Into the room with me, seated on the stool at which I’d just sat.
I staggered back, tripping over a puzzle and tumbling down with a racket. “Shit! Blast!” I hissed, hurrying to pat out the flames of my taper, whose embers had rained all over the floor. Smoke curled like ribbons from the wick, its char and soot smudged on my hand.
“Clement?” I called, the metallic tang of fear rising on my teeth. “Clement, are you out there? This is not funny at all. You’ve … ”
My voice died out in my throat with each word until finally I gave up on speaking. I knew better. Clement was not upstairs with me. Whatever ghost was haunting the school’s halls had moved the doll.
The tiny phonograph inside the doll continued to wind as if beckoning me. Over, and over, and over again, it recited the rhyme until finally I dragged myself off the floor and stood, gawking at it.
“Hello?” I swallowed hard, a distinct tightness in the dark like something bound to snap—the scrim between us, perhaps, my aliveness and the Missing’s lostness. “I believe I saw you earlier. I did not … mean to upset you.”
The Talking Doll stopped.
Breathless, I backed away until I hit the wall. Feeling safe with my back to it, I slid down to sit with my knees drawn to my chest. “Hello?” I tried again. The silence rang in my ears. I knew this friction. Something sad, something desperate for connection. It was beginning to overwhelm me. Made me feel sick and panicky. I needed to call Clement and the others upstairs. Yet I couldn’t bring myself to do it. The words wouldn’t come out. I felt … cornered.
Whir. Whir.
The doll wound up again. But instead of the nursery rhyme, the stuttering phonograph inside the beautifully dressed little body echoed a choke of breath and a quivering warble of:
“Why are you here?”
My eyes widened. That was … how could it be? Impossible. There was no way those words could be on the wax cylinder inside the doll!
“Let me out … help me … just let me go … ”
The Talking Doll stopped and a figure made of shadows shot up in the far corner of the room. I pressed back against the wall, eyes wide.
But—somehow—I was also thrilled to laughter.
“There you are!” I blurted, just above a whisper.
How to explain the twist of hopelessness and exhilaration to see a ghost too weak to come together in colourful detail or shape, just a black figure in the vague outline of a person? A dark, moving shadow full of unknowable energy, intelligence, alive in some sense.
The shadow ducked down, still clearly defined from the rest of the dark room and full of intent. It crawled under a table and behind the chair along the wall. I rolled to my knees and followed, pushing toys out of the way. The shadow disappeared under a small bookcase. I dropped flat to the floor, peeking under.
T
here were … hinges there.
Confused, I sat up on my knees. The little Missing thing was nowhere to be found. Hesitantly, as though it were some transgression, I stood and pushed the bookcase out of the way. It ground against the floor, thin legs stuttering.
Behind it was a small, slanted door, hardly to my shoulder in height.
Of course, I opened it.
It squeaked in the most terrible way, hinges stiff from disuse. I opened it only enough to look inside, but the space beyond was pitch black. Damn it, I wanted to be horrified. But I was spellbound by the mystery, like I’d been when Charlie and Colette had shown me their clothes beneath the floorboards.
“Hello?” I whispered softly.
A wave of cold crashed through, seizing me with purpose. I stumbled backwards. It wasn’t as immensely frightening as the first time, now that I knew what it was. Mild possession. All right, so it was still terrifying to be sucked into the void unwarned, and to feel a life that was not your own, but at least I expected it now.
The ghost struggled with it. Or maybe my body struggled against it. My heart thrashed in my chest and I held my breath through the horrendous dizziness. Panicked shivers rolled down, one after the other, circling my head and then my chest and then my hands and my stomach and my knees, and then I just … crumpled down to the floor, a weak and disoriented mess.
Unforgiving stab of memories. Hackney. Bow Road. This was not the same London I knew. Cramped, sordid townhouses, weathered roofs and crumbling brick, falling apart around the people who called them home. Some East End street, the windows of a confectionary. Ginger beer. Ice cream. Jude. My name, his name, Jude. Newsboy hollering about Napoleon. Flash of a small crowd—tooling and dipping with a patched-together street family. Wanted to go to Church on Easter. On the Strand. St. Mary-le-Strand, great gothic Italianate tower stretching into the smoggy sky.
Everything was blurry, prismatic. I struggled to keep up with the images as they moved around me. Father, may I confess? The world tilted violently to one side and I fell into St. Mary-le-Strand Girls’ School. Everything cold, ascetic. Girls marching in tight, quiet lines, modest dresses and starched pinafores. I watched them as I swept the classroom, washed the windows. What’re you gawping at, sir? You don’ even speak! I emptied the chamber pails and listened to a girl cry miserably where she hid in the pantry because her knuckles had been switched. Can’t compare, can’t compare, she moaned. I’ll ne’er be a proper wife or mother, I’m doomed, mum!
The headmistress was a horrid woman with a prominent nose and puckered twist of the mouth, tiny eyes and a tight knot of hair at the back of her head. Whipped my hands for speaking to any of the girls. It was improper, immoral, dangerous. The Father said, Saints took whippings and arrows, remember. Read for me, Jude. I read the Bible for him best I could, alone together in his office. Come here, Jude, you’ve a soul so good though you were bad for so long. He stood me before him, hands on my arms, big, old hands, tender hold. I’ve saved you from the rot of those East End roads. Jude’s heart swelled the same that his stomach sank. Confession, he said, every week, once a week. Read from the Bible and kneel for the Father—
Bright, warm morning, sunshine dancing in through lacy curtains. The headmistress was a screeching bird. Not another one of you! Sodomite! Get away from my husband! Sent again and again by the Devil to corrupt a holy man! Mum, no. Mum, I didn’t start it! The little room behind the bookcase, tall enough for me to stand full young man height and throw myself at the locked door, pounding, clawing, shouting. Let me out, let me go, I’ll leave, let me out!
The door flew open, and a stranger caught me. I knew his type. I don’t know how Jude knew his type. But his was a dirty, cold-blooded type, and his fingers bruised, almost gagged me when he covered my mouth to keep me quiet. Buggerer! Buggerer! Confusion like a bright, cold light. I grasped for freedom, but I was pinioned to the floor by this unknown man. Knew the headmistress had found him, just for me, and his bloodshot eyes and maniacal sneer of triumph were the last things I saw before he smothered me with a feather-down pillow.
Breathe! Breathe? Couldn’t move! I screamed but I couldn’t hear Jude screaming. Scared, so scared, everything dark, spinning, body twitching, let me go! Let me go! Hands around my throat, yanked me up then slammed my head down against the floor—
The pillow ripped away from my face and I gulped a desperate breath as I tried to roll away as fast as I could.
But there was no pillow. The face in my swimming vision was not the murderous fiend’s. It was Clement’s, looking down at me in wide-eyed and bewildered worry, and it was the most comforting sight in the world. I clung to him in a perfect terror. He was solid and human and there, drawing me up off the floor, and I was safe and alive.
“O’Brien!” he shouted. “Dorland!”
I felt I couldn’t breathe enough to make up for the vision. My hands shook as the vast, black, helpless sense of doom loomed over me as real and daunting as one of the shadows in the room.
It was the nightmarishly clear sensation that I had just been murdered.
Before anyone else in the girls’ school morning room could seize the silence, I said in a rough whisper, “Get your notebook, O’Brien.”
Clement took me by the chin and gestured for Dorland to come closer with the lamp. “Let me see your eyes,” he snapped. “To check the dilation of your pupils. Quinn’s not here to do so.”
Weakly, I swatted at his hands. “I’m fine,” I croaked. “O’Brien, his name is Jude. Fourteen years of age. The former Father and his wife hired a man to kill him, because … ”
The Father with his hand on Jude’s head, on Jude’s shoulders, parting the Church man’s frock coat and moving for his trousers—
“Well, it doesn’t matter, does it?” I hissed, stomach lurching. “O’Brien, did you write all that?”
“Was it concussion?” Dorland pressed, turtle chin quivering and beady eyes skittering for mine.
“What?” I couldn’t think straight yet. “No, he was suffocated. Actually, yes; I believe he hit his head very hard.”
Dorland set the lamp down and turned O’Brien about so he could rummage for supplies in the knapsack as I pulled away from Clement and ran for the girls’ dormitory, where I promptly scraped an empty pail out from under the nearest bed and retched in a hard, silent way, to no effect other than the way it momentarily seized up my entire frame.
Such a monstrous secret! The boy—Jude—the Father. The way it had felt to jerk about below that cutthroat, the crippling chill and iron grip of unjust finality.
Murder.
I could never express the rottenness left over from the hollow trance. The guilt for simply … still being alive.
Clement flopped a handkerchief down across my shoulder. He’d followed me. I blushed, miserable and embarrassed. But I took the kerchief and wiped saliva from the corner of my open mouth.
“The work we do will get easier,” he said.
I spit into the pail to clear my mouth anyway. Lecturing me was one thing; trying to comfort me was another with which he didn’t seem entirely confident. I didn’t know what to say.
In the morning room, Dorland had shoved things out of the way with vicious scrapes and rattles, taking a thick stick of red chalk to the open floor in the light of the lamp. His hand moved fast as he drew a circle, with a diameter only perhaps the length of my forearm. A smaller circle within it. Slashed two overlapping triangles inside that, scribbled a few jagged symbols at each intersecting corner, and dragged the lines of a cross through the center.
I halted in the doorway, rearing back.
Hadn’t there been a hellish diagram like that in my mother’s room?
Clement watched on, his arms crossed and face set in a detached sort of observation. Dazed, I trudged over and sank down to sit on the little stool near the table, draped my arms about my knees and watched with a dark and circumspect frown.
Dorland snatched one of the obituaries from the case file. Scanned
it. “Concussion,” he whispered, turtle throat shivering. He lit the obituary with a taper. Hurriedly, he set it in the center of the circle and began to scrawl words around it as the paper curled in slow little flames.
O’Brien leapt up to help, spreading red brick dust along the outside of the circle, opening a glass flacon and juggling it with the holy water flask.
“Deus, in nomine … ”
The air swirled like a channel above the circle and the ghost boy flickered into being at the center. Pale, almost all colourless, just thin enough for me to see O’Brien through him and just vivid enough to catch the pinch of tragic confusion to his face. Under his feet, Dorland had written around the burning obituary, Judas Gideon Hombrey.
“ … Spiritum, hic ligare … ”
The apparition went foggy, then suddenly vanished as did a sigh on a snowy day, coiling like a stream of smoke right up and into the open flacon in O’Brien’s hand. I didn’t want to watch. But I couldn’t rip my eyes away.
“Amen!” Dorland said in that overzealous way of his.
In the flacon was a silky, stormy grey, a swirling and shivering … something. As though it were possible to bottle a raincloud. It was the Missing boy. It was Jude.
“Where does it go?” I demanded.
“Where does what go?” Dorland said.
My jaw tightened. “The ghost. The flask.”
“Asphodel Meadows.” He shortly realised I didn’t understand beyond basic knowledge of Greek mythology. “Under Hermes Hall,” he amended, smoothing his suitcoat down and smiling thinly as if uncomfortable with my ignorance. “The room in which we store the bottled specters. ‘Asphodel Meadows.’”
“But where do they go while they are in the glass?”
Dorland just squinted at me with that affected perk of the mouth and his uneven brow furrowed. O’Brien blinked a few times, smiling nervously. “Well … nowhere, I suppose,” O’Brien said for him. “They’re to be studied.”
“That’s unnerving,” I whispered, profoundly displeased by the answer though I’d suspected it was coming.