by Anthology
I think I do.
"I won't forget you," I say, "or your brothers."
Perhaps I'm wrong and he only wanted to wish me well in the freedom I can escape to that he cannot. Or perhaps he knows what Finagor and I have done today, or even what is yet to happen, and wished to advise me. But I choose to take this as a sign that our plans will succeed.
His paw pushes down hard on my shoulder for balance as he steps back and drops again to all fours. On impulse, I reach forward and touch the great head, though I have never seen a tetrarch or a handler so familiar. My hand strokes back, over the thick fur and to the chain at his neck. It is tight to the point that I cannot slip even a finger beneath it.
"I will unchain you myself if I can," I tell him.
He looks up at me and gives another soft grunt. Then he turns and disappears in the shadows of the cross hall. When I hear the drag of the chain no more I walk out the doors of the palace, lower than the lowest servant, for the last time. From the vantage of the palace I can see beyond the eastern wall, and the sight swells my heart.
Echoes(Short story)
by Liz Colter
First published in Urban Fantasy Magazine (August, 2015), edited by Katrina Forest
Edward opened a side gate and followed the stone path to the servants' entrance at the rear of the house. Samuel lagged behind, staring with the wonder of an eight-year old at the hedges clipped into fantastic shapes. The house was less palatial than the homes on nearby St. James Square, but still the grandest that Edward had yet been invited to visit. He knocked at the back door and a man in the immaculate clothes of a head servant led them to a finely appointed sitting room.
Mrs. Winston remained seated as he and Samuel were announced. She was a stout woman in her middle years, with a large wig of brown hair, a heavily powdered face, and a stern countenance that dispelled Edward’s hope of an easy love potion. He felt for echoes in the room, but emotions usually changed as rapidly as thought and he found no clues to what she might be seeking.
“Mr. Ferris. Thank you for coming,” she said, when the manservant left. Her eyes blew a cold breeze over Samuel. “Perhaps your son would play in the back garden while you and I talk.” She rang a small silver bell without giving Edward a chance to reply. A young housemaid appeared. Her dark eyes swept the newcomers.
“Simone,” Mrs. Winston said, “take Master Samuel to the garden and entertain him while I speak with Mr. Ferris.”
“Yes, ma’am.” A subtle French accent colored the maid’s words.
Simone smiled at Samuel and her crooked teeth gave her a sweetness that tugged unexpectedly at Edward. He watched the swish of her narrow skirts as she moved, the bounce of her brown curls, her thin arm as she reached for his son. A kindness in her face, a vulnerability that followed her like a shadow, reminded him of his Mary. Memories of his wife drifted up from their hiding place, the happy recollections followed inevitably by the sad.
Samuel looked to see if he should go with her, and Edward nodded. He preferred Samuel to watch and learn, but not at the risk of displeasing a client.
At a gesture from Mrs. Winston, Edward took a seat. Coffee had been set out and Mrs. Winston poured for them both. Few of her station would have addressed him by his surname, much less offered him refreshment, but his skills provided him a unique status. He’d been inside many homes that would never have allowed him beyond the kitchen or coal cellar under normal circumstances.
Mrs. Winston wasted no time on pleasantries. “I believe you have something I need, Mr. Ferris.” She stirred her coffee with a tiny silver spoon and rested it in the cradle of the saucer.
“I have the means to get potions,” he said, equally cryptic, “as what some folks need.” In truth, what he sold weren’t potions at all, but clients preferred to think of them as such. Of course, the ripples that rolled from strong emotions weren’t echoes either, but that was what Edward had called them since childhood.
“I see.” She took a sip from her cup. “My needs, Mr. Ferris, are to drive a man to suicide.”
Edward nearly dropped his coffee. He started to protest, but she cut him off.
“Perhaps I should start from the beginning.” Mrs. Winston set her cup down and sat back in her chair. She laced her hands together in her lap like one large fist, crushing one of the bows running down the front of her dress. The frills seemed as out of place on her as they would on a man.
“My husband was a successful banker until he met a man named William Waltham. Mr. Waltham convinced my husband to invest in the construction of a new textile mill, then promptly disappeared with the money.” Her voice was level, her delivery matter-of-fact. “My husband was left with nothing. He drowned himself in the Thames three weeks ago.”
“Mrs. Winston, I’m right sorry for your loss, but…”
“Spare me your sympathies, Mr. Ferris. I tell you this only to convince you my reasons for wanting such a potion are just. I have located Mr. Waltham but he never delivered the promised copy of the contract to my husband, and so I have no proof of the crime. The penalty for grand larceny is death, but without proof the courts will not even investigate my charges, leaving Mr. Waltham free to do to another family what he has done to mine. I wish only to see justice served, one way or another.”
She unknotted her hands and placed them on the curved arms of her chair, like a queen giving audience from her throne. “I have some family money still, not enough to stay in this home, but enough to pay you well for your services.” Lifting her cup again, she watched him over the rim as she took a sip, defying him to deny her this justice.
He had never liked providing clients with echoes for revenge, but this…
Mrs. Winston noted his hesitation. “Mr. Ferris, I have made myself familiar with these potions that you supply. What I ask is little more. Sorrow and regret are close cousins to despair, are they not? Love potions make the paying party happy, but how have you affected the lover? You alter people’s lives all the time.”
Edward flinched at the truth in her words.
"I realize my ultimate goal may not be met," she continued. "If Mr. Waltham lives out his miserable life feeling only half the despondency my husband experienced, I must be content with that. Word of mouth, however, has given me much faith in the efficacy of your potions."
He tried again. “Mrs. Winston, the way this works is I have to find me someone of the mindset I need. Someone as has the exact right emotions.” He had never divulged his methods to a client before, but hoped this small revelation would dissuade her. “I don’t know how I’d start for somewhat like this.”
That wasn’t entirely true. Images of his mother flowed like tendrils of mist into his thoughts.
“I see.” Mrs. Winston heaved herself out of her chair and walked to a small box decorated with mother-of-pearl. Removing something from the box, she returned to her chair. “If my situation does not move you to aid me, Mr. Ferris, perhaps this will.”
She leaned forward and placed five gold sovereigns on the table in front of him. “There will be that much again on delivery of the potion. Perhaps that will help you to find what it is that you need.”
The most he had ever charged a client was one pound. She offered him ten. He and Samuel could live for a year on that much. The threat of eviction he received earlier this month could be resolved by this evening; the worry that he and Samuel would be turned out into the street, gone. More important than anything, though, the money could be used to ensure that Samuel learned a proper trade. His son could be spared the need to work with echoes.
He picked the coins up, felt the weight of them in his palm.
“I take it that’s a yes?” she said.
“Yes,” he whispered.
***
“Was she wanting a love potion?” Samuel asked on the way home. He picked up a stick lying in the street and tapped the cobbles as he walked. Edward didn’t answer and Samuel changed the subject. “Miss Simone stayed outside with me the whole time. She showed
me the garden an’ we played with a white cat named Bangles. Miss Simone had a son, but he died little an’ her husband died too.”
Simone. She had offered them tea before their walk home and, uncharacteristically, Edward had accepted. She and the cook had chatted with them in the kitchen, yet she never asked why someone of his station had been entertained by her employer. Simone ruffled Samuel’s hair, smiled her crooked smile, and watched Edward with her chocolate brown eyes. It had affected him in a way that nothing else had in a long while. It was all foolishness, though. God had not allowed him to keep Mary and, with his strange life, he was not like to have another wife.
“Did you use a love potion on mother?” Samuel asked.
The question startled Edward from his thoughts. Samuel rarely asked about the mother who had taken her last breath as he breathed his first. Edward shook his head. “I didn’t figure how to make potions until after she passed. I didn’t need none for her anyhow.”
They turned onto Thames Street. Edward reached down and took Samuel’s hand as they entered the bustling crowds of central London. The smells of hot sausages and fresh bread wafted from stalls on the bridge, competing with the sour smell of raw sewage in the Thames. Out of habit, Edward scanned the myriad faces they passed, looking for donors; someone hinting at deep, obsessive emotions, someone he could shadow for days or weeks until the emotion was as ripe as a summer pear and the echoes from it strong enough to harvest. Samuel was quicker, though. Just past the bridge he squeezed Edward’s hand and nodded.
“He fancies her.”
Edward looked where Samuel indicated, to a trio of people standing at a carriage just ahead. A footman was holding the door as a gentleman helped a much younger woman up to the seat. Edward felt nothing from the man. They were nearly past the group when it struck Edward, the faint waves of yearning rolling from the footman.
“Did you see or feel it?” Edward asked Samuel, when they were beyond the carriage.
“I felt it,” Samuel said, swishing his stick at a rat in the gutter.
A chill skittered across Edward’s bones. He wondered, not for the first time, just how strongly their strange family trait ran in his son. For Samuel’s sake he prayed that it would not be too strong for him to bear.
“When’ll I get to harvest echoes?” Samuel asked, looking up at him.
“I’ve told you afore, not for a long time. Emotions is powerful things.” Echoes he had harvested and carried in his breast came to life again in his memories—powerful lust, painful yearning, crushing sorrow and regret. Gathering them did nothing to the donor, like absorbing heat from the rays of the sun did nothing to the sun, but the thought of Samuel filling his small body with the intensity of those obsessive emotions was horrific.
***
The lamplighters were firing the oil wicks in the streetlamps by the time Edward and Samuel arrived at their narrow row house in the East End. Edward took his coat off and hung it on a nail by the door then held out his hand for Samuel’s coat. Samuel fished a canning jar out of the pocket before handing it to him.
“What’s that, then?” Edward asked.
Samuel looked guilty. “Miss Simone said I could keep it.” He held up the jar for his father to inspect the contents: a green rock and a black cricket.
“O’course you can keep it,” he said, handing it back.
Samuel grinned and ran for the kitchen. He set the jar on their small table and threw an armful of wood on the coals of the kitchen fire. He swung the iron kettle over the flames for tea and set out plates and salt cod for dinner. Edward sat at the table, careful not to rock the uneven legs and tip Samuel’s jar.
It had been hard raising Samuel alone, but at least he was a better father than his own had been. His father’s violence had been hard enough, but the echoes had made it so much worse. Both Edward and his mother had relived the anger and fear of each event over and over, sometimes for days before the echoes dispelled. Over the years, his mother became increasingly withdrawn, though she refused to leave her husband. Edward hadn’t seen her for nearly a year now, not since she’d tried to hang herself.
He wracked his brain for any donor for Mrs. Winston’s potion other than his mother. Harvesting echoes had no ill effect on the donor—no more than collecting their tears or bottling their breath would—but the cost to Edward would be dear. Feeling the echoes of his mother’s hopelessness when he was young had been heartbreaking; to absorb the depth of her current despair into his own body would be hellish. Donors weren’t easy to find though, even for love potions. The emotions had to be strong enough to do the job. It could take months to find someone just right for this. Someone else, at least.
***
The following morning Edward opened the under-stair cupboard and pulled a wooden box from its recesses. Two blue phials containing love and a single green phial holding sorrow were all that remained of his potions. Not only were they challenging to collect, but he didn't dare sell them frequently enough to attract the attention of the law. Among the empty containers in the box were some clear phials for the occasional odd request but, in general, few people sought anything other than love or revenge.
Edward placed an empty phial in his pocket and left Samuel in the care of a neighbor, then stopped at his landlord’s and paid the surprised man a year’s rent in advance before beginning his journey. He weighed again the personal cost, body and soul, to collect this potion against his and Samuel's need for the money. Again the scales favored need.
An hour later he crossed Moorfields and the outline of Bethlem Royal Hospital appeared beyond the open fields. Bedlam—as most folk called it—loomed heavy and foreboding, like a pale, stone monster unable to move for the sheer mass of victims it had gorged upon. Multiple eyes of black barred windows dotted the walls, and the shrieks and moans drifting from those windows sounded like nothing human. Somewhere within the bowels of that monster lay his mother.
Edward had never been able to bring himself to visit and dreaded doing so now. The judge had ruled her suicide attempt a moral insanity. He hadn’t believed she was mad then, but she surely would be now—locked for months in this wretched place with the echoes of lunatics all around her.
The front door was open, but just beyond the forecourt stood a metal gate. The smell wafting through the bars was a potent mix of unwashed bodies and human waste, feathered over the odor of dirt and mold that clung to the walls of the old building. Edward stood at the gate, watching the lunatics in the long gallery cavort and cry. There were only men that he could see, but he could hear women’s voices off to his right. Peering that way, he made out a set of bars dividing the inmates by gender into east and west wings.
The echoes drove into his brain like iron spikes. Anger. Fear. Despair. Hate. They pounded on his body like hammers. The inmates were obsessed with their private hells, and the echoes of their emotions filled the long gallery, reverberating again and again off the thick walls. The urge to run from the asylum nearly overwhelmed him. Instead, he rang a small bell hanging at the upper corner of the gate.
The man who approached wore a dirty linen shirt with no coat. His long trousers of faded blue had the look of old sailor’s clothing. Even Edward’s worn black coat and wash-water grey stockings were in better repair.
“Visitors come ‘round Tuesdays and Sundays, mate,” the guard said. “You can watch the lunatics anytime for a penny, though, if that’s what you’re after.”
If he left now, Edward wasn’t sure he would ever return.
“I’m of a need to see someone today. Etta Ferris.” He reached into his coat pocket and pulled out a shilling. “This for your trouble of letting me in on an off day.” He pushed the silver coin through the bars, glad he had thought to bring it.
The guard grinned a wolfish smile. He lifted a hand that was truncated to a thumb and the first two fingers, angling from the second knuckle to the wrist in a long, puckered scar. Grabbing the small coin awkwardly, he slipped it into a pocket and pulled a key from
under his shirt to open the barred gate.
At the squeal of the hinges, an inmate in the center of the room stopped pacing and stared. He was silver-haired but sturdy. Suddenly he was moving, grunting wordlessly, legs pumping as he rushed for the gate. Edward stepped back, alarmed. A burly man, another guard judging by the keys he carried, hit the lunatic in the chin with his elbow and the old man crumpled.
“Is she curable or incurable?” Edward’s guard asked, turning back to him from the commotion.
Edward stared at the old man on the floor. Waves of frustration radiated from the inmate as he rolled into a ball and sobbed. “Incurable,” Edward said faintly. That had been the doctor’s diagnosis on her admission.
“Right, then, I think I know her.”
The guard led Edward across the room and unlocked a door just in front of the bars to the women’s side. Edward followed him up a set of stairs, through another locked door to the right, and into the incurable women’s ward.
The smell hit him like a fist, sour and far stronger than below. Some women were chained to the walls or the floor, others were loose. Sores were untreated, feces was smeared about, and Edward’s shoes peeled from the sticky floor with a crackling sound. The echoes beat on his mind and his nerves until he thought he would begin raving as well. He wondered if even ten sovereigns could be worth this hell.
The guard walked ahead, oblivious to Edward’s torment. “Here y’are, mate.” He stopped and pointed. The woman was not chained but lay on her side on the filthy floor, unmoving, eyes wide. She was skeletal. “‘Fraid she won’t last much longer, she won’t eat no more.”
Tears stung Edward’s eyes as he took in the familiar pattern on the torn and faded dress that had once been her best, the brownish-blonde hair unwashed and matted with dirt, the narrow back that had cringed at echoes, but had been straight and strong when protecting him from his father’s drunken outbursts. He crouched down next to her, wondering if Bedlam would be his fate as well someday. He smothered the thought before it turned to Samuel and what his future might hold.