by E. E. Holmes
“And what do we need Seamus for, other than undressing us with his eyes?” I asked, edging away from him.
“He can undress me with anything he wants,” Milo said.
“Down boy.”
Savvy said, “I started trying to figure out if there was any other way across. I noticed ghosts crossing back and forth all the time, as though the wards didn’t exist. Spirits can cross the wards whenever they want as long as they aren’t hostile. Then, in class, Siobhán told us about corporeal habitation and it came to me. I started to wonder if we could use them to get ourselves across without being detected. And I found Seamus swaggering around the woods here, so I decided to…experiment.”
Milo and I looked at each other. He looked at least as wary as I felt.
“You mean you let Seamus…possess you?”
“Well, it sounds mental when you put it like that!” Savvy said, throwing her hands up in the air.
“It is mental!” I said. “I’ve had the serious displeasure of corporeal habitation, and I really don’t want to repeat the experience, especially not for something stupid like sneaking out for a beer!” A shiver rocked its way through my body as I remembered, all too vividly, that night in the library bathroom, William flying at me, madness in his eyes —the crippling agony that followed as he forced his way inside my body.
“I’m not just doing it for a beer!” Savvy said. “I’m doing it for my freedom! And anyway, I remember you telling us about that, and this isn’t the same thing. That ghost forced his way in and then tried to pry the Gateway open. That’s why it was so painful —it wasn’t a habitation, it was an assault. I’m talking about inviting a spirit in. It’s a completely different experience.”
I hesitated. “Okay, I’m listening.”
“You just have to give them permission, like,” Savvy said. “Just sort of—make room for them, yeah? It’s a bit of a disorienting feeling, but it don’t hurt or nothing. And once the ghost is in there with you, you can just stroll right across the wards, no problem. The ward senses the ghost first, and doesn’t seem to notice the fact that it’s borrowed a body. Problem solved!”
I could still feel all my doubts etched onto my face, and Savvy could see them, because she gestured to Seamus, who came to stand right beside her.
“Watch, I’ll do it first,” she said, and turned to face Seamus. “You ready, then?”
“Oh, yes, if you wish it,” Seamus said, in a much softer voice than I expected. It was like watching a lumberjack open his mouth and sing soprano. Milo stood transfixed, his eyes darting rapidly between the two of them.
Savvy closed her eyes, and stood very still. Seamus strode forward, his expression hungry, and stepped into Savannah like she was an open doorway. She inhaled sharply, and then opened her eyes.
I clapped a hand over my mouth and spoke in a muffled voice from behind it. “Savvy? Are you okay?”
“Yes, I’m fine. It’s still me,” she said, with a trace of impatience. “I could let him speak, if I wanted to, but I’ve got the control. I can hear what he’s thinking though, the cheeky bugger,”
She turned, smirking at whatever Seamus was thinking, and walked purposefully across the ward. The only tiny betrayal of its existence was a hint of an undulation in the air, like the dull shimmer of a heat haze. She stood with her back to us, completely still for a moment, and then Seamus appeared beside her, smiling broadly.
Savvy turned and grinned at me. “See? Piece of cake. Feels a bit funny is all. Go on, then, before the cab gets here.” I looked at Milo, who was still eyeing Seamus with unabashed interest. “I’m supposed to let him do that?”
“I don’t want to be seen in that outfit, it’s against my religion,” Milo said, crossing his arms. “And I don’t want her to know what I’m thinking.”
“I’m sorry, but when have you ever not said exactly what you’re thinking?” I said, rounding on him. “Huh,” Milo said, cocking his head to one side in consideration. “Good point.”
“Look, you don’t have to use him if you don’t want to. Seamus can do it again,” Savvy said.
I took one look at Seamus, who was waggling his eyebrows at me, and turned back to Milo. “Okay, okay, fine, just make it quick.”
I closed my eyes and braced myself. With a thrusting sensation like the undertow in the ocean at high tide, I felt Milo cross my threshold. My head spun with a dizzying sensation as twice as many thoughts as usual flew across it.”
“Whoa. This feels really funky,” Milo’s thought drifted across my brain as though I’d thought it myself.
“No kidding,” I said, opening my eyes. My vision was slightly misted, like squinting through a foggy windshield. “And I really don’t like it, so I’m crossing now.”
“The sooner the better,” Milo said. “I feel like I’m being flattened by a steamroller in here.”
I walked carefully forward. The movement had a dizzy, heavy feeling, as though I’d just woken up from anesthesia. I concentrated all my effort on moving toward the ward without falling on my face. As I did so, a humming started to buzz in my ears.
“Do you mind not humming?” I thought, shaking my head to clear it. “I’m trying to concentrate here.”
“I’m not humming,” came Milo’s voice, as the humming continued softly under it. “I thought that was you.”
“No, it’s not me. Why would I be humming?”
“I don’t know, why would I be humming?”
I stopped walking and listened hard. The voice was soft, and the melody was lilting and familiar.
“Who the hell else is in here? Do we have a stowaway or something?”
“No, it’s just me in here. Well, and you, obviously,” Milo said.
“Hello?” I thought. The humming went on unbroken.
“Who are you?” Milo thought suddenly. His voice echoed inside my head and made it ring like a church bell.
“Shhh!” I thought. “Calm down, it hurts my head when you shout like that!”
“Sorry,” Milo thought, more calmly. “But I don’t see anyone else, and I can still hear it, can you?”
“Yes!”
“Get a move on, Jess, the cab is coming!” Savvy called.
The gentle song still echoing through my head, I shuffled forward the last few steps and felt the ward as I walked through it, wrapping my body with its gentle pressure before twanging away from me like an elastic band.
“Out, out, out!” I thought.
“My pleasure,” Milo thought, and was gone from me in the same instant. The humming stopped at once.
I rubbed my watering eyes as my sight readjusted. “That was… ”
“Bizarre,” Milo finished for me.
“Come on, let’s go!”
I looked up. Savvy was standing next to a taxi, tapping her foot impatiently. The driver was leaning one elbow out of the window, his mouth slightly open as he watched me have a spirited conversation with thin air. I smiled awkwardly at him as I slid into the back seat after Savvy, and tried not to come across as crazy as this guy obviously thought I was.
“London then, please, mate, Queen Victoria Street, as close to Millennium Bridge as you can get,” Savvy said, then slid the plexiglass partition firmly shut before whispering, “What was that all about, then?”
“I have no idea. Milo and I could hear someone else while he was habitating — a girl, I’m pretty sure, who was singing. Any idea what that’s about?”
“Not a clue,” Savvy said, frowning. “I’ve only ever used Seamus, and he’s the only one I’ve ever heard. Mind you, his thoughts are pretty distracting, but I think I would have noticed a totally different voice.”
“Let’s talk about it later,” I murmured, catching the avid gaze of the driver in the rear view mirror.
14
REVELATIONS BY THE THAMES
THE DRIVE TO LONDON TOOK WELL OVER AN HOUR, and at first I had no interest in the bucolic scenery flashing past me on either side of the M11. But as we moved into the outskirts
of the city, the tourist in me couldn’t help but gawk a bit at the sights of a city I’d always wanted to experience. I couldn’t help but geek out over the proximity of British Parliament building, St. Paul’s Cathedral, the Tower of London, and about a dozen other places I’d only ever seen on postcards or movie screens. I was obviously betraying my feelings of awe on my face, because Savvy kept chuckling at me.
“You’d do the same thing if we were in New York,” I said, as I pressed my hands to the window to gape at Buckingham Palace.
“I suppose,” Savvy said, still laughing.
At long last we pulled sharply to the side of the road on Victoria Street, and I looked again at my watch, which I’d been checking obsessively since the moment we’d gotten into the car. It was just after 10:30.
“Is it a long walk from here?” I asked as I handed five crumpled twenty pound notes to the driver.
“No, not at all,” Savvy said, checking her reflection in the dark tinted windows. “We could have had him drive us across the river, but since you’ve never been here before, you’ve got to at least walk across the Millennium Bridge and see London from the Thames.”
I smiled in spite of my mounting nerves, and we set off down the street. The night was balmy, with fewer clouds than usual; just a few feathery ones dotted the darkening sky, through which the stars were beginning to wink shyly. The city was like its own wonderful, anachronistic jumble, at once modern and brimming with history. It was alive and thrumming with that energy that only lives in a cosmopolitan city on a weekend night; we wove our way between knots of late night revelers on their way in and out of pubs, calling loudly to each other and popping in and out of cabs.
“Hang on a minute, Hannah’s calling,” Milo said.
We stopped and pressed ourselves up against the façade of the nearest building, a pub with low-hanging baskets of geraniums dangling outside of it and mellow acoustic guitar music wafting out of the open door. Milo did not pull out a cell phone, of course, but closed his eyes and flickered a bit as he connected with Hannah. His form, so clear moments before, took on a dimmer, washed-out quality while they talked.
“Yes, the ride was fine,” he said, sighing. “Yes, I was good. Not a word, I promise. Yup, she’s right here.” He opened his eyes and rolled them before turning them on me. “Hannah says hi.”
I laughed. “Hi, Hannah,”
“She says hi,” Milo said, closing his eyes again. “Yes, we’re almost there, and then I’m off duty, right? Okay, sweetness, I’ll check in later.” He opened his eyes again and smirked at me. “Mom says to behave ourselves and be careful.”
“Okay, okay,” I said. “Can we keep going, please? I don’t want to be late.”
“You can do whatever you want. I was promised couture window-shopping,” Milo said, crossing his arms and pouting like a small child.
Savvy gave him directions to Sloane Street, and he vanished, his face alight with anticipation. We set out again along Victoria Street for another block and then took a left toward the Millennium Bridge.
The south bank stretched out along the length of the Thames, glittering in the darkness, the London eye rising above it all like a glowing cog in a massive, urban clockwork. We stepped out onto the narrow metal footbridge, Savvy’s heels clinking cacophonously, and the breeze off the Thames caught at our hair, whipping it over our shoulders. I stopped only long enough to gaze back at the shore we’d just left to see the great golden dome of St. Paul’s cathedral, capping the city like a crown, and then continued charging across the bridge to the other bank. Ahead to the left, the thatched roof and whitewashed walls of the Globe Theatre poked out, a fantastic anachronism. I couldn’t believe I was here and couldn’t even take the briefest span of time to just appreciate it.
“The Tate is just there,” Savvy called over her shoulder to me, pointing completely unnecessarily across the water, where the stark brick building dominated the skyline with a single, thrusting tower that didn’t simply draw one’s gaze: it demanded it. My pulse sped up, and so did my pace. I checked my watch. It was ten of eleven.
At last we descended the gently sloping ramp to the pavement and
Savvy turned to me.
“Alright, mate. So you’re here. Do you want me to stay with you a bit, or what?”
I shook my head. “No. You’ve earned a night out in the city. I’ll just wait here for Annabelle, and you go have some fun. I’ll text you when I’m done here and we can meet back up, okay?”
“Brilliant. See you, then,” she said and, with a smile that seemed to radiate to the ends of her curls, turned on her heel and sauntered off down the sidewalk. I watched her go, and just caught the tiny red glow of her cigarette bouncing along before she turned off the walkway and disappeared.
I looked around. The area in front of the Tate Modern was wide open, flanked by an unexpected expanse of green lawn to the right. There were any number of benches Annabelle could have been referring to, but I trusted that she would find me, and settled on the one nearest the water. Almost instantly, Lyle McElroy was sitting beside me. It took every ounce of my self-control not to shriek out loud.
“Lyle, you scared the crap out of me!” I hissed through clenched teeth, uncomfortably aware of the group of girls walking past the bench, giggling and chatting.
“To apologize would insinuate I care,” Lyle said, crossing his arms. “And anyway, I’m not staying. She wants to know if you were followed.”
“She’s here?” I asked, craning my neck for a glimpse of Annabelle’s wild curls. Lyle merely glared at me, so I said, “No, I don’t think so. No one knows we’re here. We were able to sneak out without raising the alarm bells, and I can’t see how they could possibly know where we went.”
“Very well, I’ll tell her,” he said. “And then do me a favor and give her your phone number of something, because I won’t be doing this again, no matter how she threatens me, understand? I can’t leave my flat unattended for any length of time. Somebody might try to clean it out, and I can’t allow that.”
“Sure,” I said. “Uh, thanks.”
Lyle merely heaved a farcical sigh and faded away. A minute later, Annabelle emerged from around the corner of the Tate, walking briskly, her hands thrust deep into the pockets of her jacket and a scarf wrapped around her head.
“Jess, thank God!” she said as she dropped onto the bench beside me and flung her arms around my shoulders.
I froze. My interactions with Annabelle up until this point had been cordial at best, but more often antagonistic bordering on hostile, and the fact that she was now hugging me like a long lost sister was terrifying. I pulled away from her and looked her in the face.
“Annabelle, are you okay? What’s going on? Tia told me about the fire at your shop, and I didn’t know what to think.”
She looked terrible. Her usually fiery eyes were dull and glazed, with bluish rings under them. Her cheekbones jutted sharply over the hollows of her cheeks, as though she’d recently lost a little too much weight. Her lip trembled as she took in my features.
“I’m okay. The fire was…well, it was good excuse to make a quick exit, so I took it. I’ll explain that in a minute, but first, are you absolutely sure you weren’t followed?” she said, her voice quietly urgent.
“As sure as I can be. I wasn’t exactly keeping an eye out for a tail,” I said.
“I’m sorry for all the secrecy, but we need to be careful. I’m glad to see that you’re alright. Lyle was not the ideal way to get a message to you, but I had to try something, and he was the best I could do on such short notice,” Annabelle said.
“Where did you find him?”
“In the flat above mine,” she said, and then clarified at my questioning look. “I’m renting a flat just a few blocks from here, and I found him almost at once. He died a few months ago, but he won’t leave because he’s obsessed with his collections.”
“Collections?”
“Yes. Don’t ask me what he collected, although, I
think it’s more of a hoarding sort of situation than real collecting. He keeps going on about the magazines and how they mustn’t disturb the piles, because they ‘might be worth a lot of money someday’.” She rolled her eyes. “I told him I’d pick the lock into his flat and start throwing his collections away if he didn’t do what I asked.”
“I was wondering why he was so angry. But enough about him, what’s going on? What are you doing here?”
Annabelle dropped her head into her hands. “Oh, Jess, I don’t even know where to begin.”
“Why don’t you start with how the hell you knew I was here,” I said. “How did you find me? No one is supposed to know about Fairhaven Hall.”
She said nothing, but pulled at a loose string on the cuff of her jacket.
“When you found me in the bathroom, after William attacked me,” I said, finding her eyes with mine, “you knew what had happened to me. You started to say words over me, in another language. And when I woke up in the hospital, you knew what I was. You knew that my Aunt Karen would be able to help me. Why did you know all of that?”
Annabelle sighed. “I knew you were trouble the second you walked into my tent; I knew what you were the moment I saw you, although I tried to convince myself otherwise. But after the investigation, there could be no doubting it. I was face to face with a living Gateway, something I’d only ever heard stories about from my grandmother. She learned the stories from her grandmother, who had lived them firsthand.”
I waited in rapt silence for her to continue, listening to the rapid tattoo of my own pulse in my ears.
“You grew up without a clue about your family’s legacy. I grew up immersed in every detail of a family legacy I’ll never get to experience for myself. Generations ago, the women of my family were just like you. We were one of the oldest and most powerful Gateways in the world. Our clan hailed from the mountains of Romania, and at one time we even presided over the Council there. But then my great-great grandmother produced just one daughter, and her sisters none at all. The Gateway could not continue into the next generation and so it was closed. It has remained closed ever since.”