The World of The Gateway Boxset

by E. E. Holmes

  I blinked. “Right. Yes. Good point. By all means, defile the corpse.”

  Finn reached his hand forward, but then stopped suddenly.

  “I can’t.”

  “What?”

  “I can’t defile the corpse.”

  “You picked a really weird moment to have a crisis of conscience, Finn,” I said.

  “No, I mean a literally can’t. Look.” He thrust his hand forward as hard as he could but is seemed to meet with some kind of invisible resistance. “My hand won’t go any closer than this. It must be some kind of Casting.”

  I threw my hands up in the air. “Well, now what the hell are we supposed to do?”

  Finn withdrew his hand, brow furrowed with concentration. Finally, he said. “You try it.”

  I stared at him. “Me?”

  “Yes, you. Who else would I be talking to!”

  “But why would I be able to do it, if you can’t?” I asked, fighting back an urge to be sick. I did not want to stick my hand in that coffin. I did not want to touch that body.

  “I have no idea. I have no idea what this Casting is. But whoever put this book here obviously wanted to protect it. They may have wanted to keep in out of certain hands.”

  “I would think burying it in someone’s cold dead hands would be a pretty effective way of doing that,” I hissed.

  “Yes, but it apparently wasn’t enough. Perhaps this Casting ensures that only a Durupinen can remove it? We won’t know unless you try!” Finn growled.

  “Okay, okay!” I cried. I tried to take a deep breath to steady my nerves, but the air didn’t make it past my throat. I shuffled forward on legs that were protesting the responsibility of keeping me upright until I was leaning right up against the edge of the coffin. I took what little breath I could in though my mouth, in a desperate attempt to avoid the smell of death that was permeating the room. Very slowly, I stretched out a violently shaking hand, careful to keep my eyes just on the book and nothing else. My hand moved closer and closer without meeting any resistance until, finally, I was able to brush the fabric of the shroud with my forefinger.

  “I can touch it!” I cried, snatching my hand back out of the coffin as though it had been burned, and barely repressing the impulse to turn and run right out of the mausoleum.

  “Brilliant!” Finn said. “So, go on, then. Take it.”

  I looked at him, and I knew there was a plea in my face, but he ignored it, as we both knew he had to. And so, I swallowed back the horror rising in my throat and extended my hand once more into the coffin. I pinched the gossamer fabric of the shroud and peeled it gently back from Harriet’s form, until the little book lay exposed in her hands, ready for the taking. Then I closed my fingers around the book, which was shockingly cold, and pulled experimentally. It didn’t budge. I tugged a little harder. Still nothing.

  “Oh God, the corpse doesn’t want to let go of it!” I cried. My voice was shrill with blind horror.

  “Just yank it out of there!” Finn cried, his voice sharp with the same taint of hysteria I was drowning in. He didn’t like this any more than I did.

  I grabbed onto the book with both hands and, with a thrill of absolute dread, pulled with all my might. There was a dull cracking sound, and the book came free in my hands. I stumbled into Finn and we both fell backward onto the floor, where we lay utterly still for one long, horrified moment.

  “Finn.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Look down at the book I’m holding and please tell me there aren’t corpse fingers still attached to it,” I whispered in a strangled voice.

  Finn actually laughed, easing the deep tension of what we had just done. “No. Corpse finger free, I promise you.”

  I sat up and opened my eyes, looking down at last upon the “little book,” and wondering what I would find within its pages.

  As though he read my mind, Finn said, “Now, just what do you suppose we’re going to find in there?”

  “Only one way to find out,” I replied.

  And by the quivering beam of the flashlight, we peeled open the damp, moldy pages and began to read.

  Eleanora: 21 July 1864

  21 July 1864

  Dearest Little Book,

  I must write quickly, for fear they will discover that I have you. I have kept you hidden in a crack between the stones, and that alone, I believe, has kept you safe from being burned.

  I am alone now. My mother has refused to see me. She has sent me a letter, in which she begs me to understand why I must be imprisoned “for the greater good of the Durupinen.” She has chosen her position and her power here over her own daughter. She has bent to the will of the Council as easily as a blade of grass to the wind. And poor Hattie was so overcome at my imprisonment, that she fell terribly ill. She lingered for days while I begged to see her, to show her that I was alright. But even as her life hung in the balance, the Council never relented. They could not risk me being reunited with the other half of my Gateway, could not fathom that I could refrain from wreaking ultimate destruction upon them, when all I wanted was to see my sister. Now it is too late. She is gone.

  Tomorrow, my sister’s funeral will commence without me. It will be lavish, a black silk-draped confection of an affair. The mourners will have been hired by the dozens, and the coach will be a bower of blooms in which to bear my sister home from London to our mausoleum at Fairhaven. I wonder how my family will account for my absence. Perhaps they will instruct one of the mourners to take my place in the family pew, draped in a thick black veil and too devastated to speak to anyone. After that, they will explain me away with some elaborate tale: I am so overcome with grief that I have gone mad and must be confined to my room. Or else, eager to find a fresh start away from the sorrowful memory of my sister’s death, I have been sent abroad to further my studies in music, or else to wed a foreign nobleman. Yes, mother would love to spin out that story. I can just see her now, waving around a stack of forged letters detailing my lavish European lifestyle, trips to exotic locations, and a manor house too large and full of visiting dignitaries to spare me for even a short visit back home. She may even start to believe the stories herself, as she weaves them into her own reality. Perhaps that is how she will be able to live with herself, and to forget the hand she played in the demise of her own daughter. I shall be erased from the world with a lie, my truth lost forever to all that knew me.

  I have been allowed this single moment only: to stare down upon the mortal shell of my beloved sister before it is taken away. I am expected to say goodbye to a soul that has already fled this world. How cruel, knowing what they know of spirits. I am ashamed to say that I have shed no tears for Hattie. My heart aches with a pain beyond description, but I have no tears left in me. I have had no tears for a long time.

  I do not know for sure what will become of me. For the foreseeable future, I am to be imprisoned at the príosún on the Isle of Skye under a multitude of Castings, kept under the watchful eye of the Caomhnóir so that they can be sure I will not bloom into the terrible threat the Council fears I shall become. If they decide that even those walls cannot contain my danger… no, I dare not speak the words, let alone record them upon these pages. It would make the possibility too real—and therefore too dreadful—to fathom. But one thing is for certain; the Durupinen will never allow me, in body or spirit, to tell my story.

  But you can. You are my truth. You are the last recorded testament of what has become of me. My true thoughts, my hopes, my dreams: they all live in you. I hide you in the coffin of my beloved sister in the hope that, someday, when the irrational fear of the present has subsided, I can lead someone to you, and all shall be revealed. It will surely be too late for me, but perhaps my story can save another Caller from the strangling clutches of this fear.

  Tell them, Little Book. Tell them I was Eleanora Larkin. Tell them I did no harm to anyone. I had so much to give of myself to the world.

  And the Durupinen destroyed me.

  Eleanora
/>   44

  Naming Eleanora

  I FINISHED READING BEFORE FINN DID, and so I had a full minute to let the horror of what I’d just read wash over me like a tide.

  “So, this is it. This is her. The Shattered spirit,” Finn said, somewhat breathlessly.

  I nodded.

  “But this is brilliant!” he said, and leapt up, book in hand. “We can end this!”

  Fiona appeared in the doorway. “What is it? Did you find something in there?” she asked. Her teeth were chattering.

  “We’ve got it. A name. Eleanora Larkin.”

  And even as he said it aloud, the name rang a bell in my mind, a bell that struck just the right note, just the right frequency, to send a shivering sensation down into my fingers, which twitched with the truth of it all.

  The terrible, terrible truth.

  “Oh, at bloody last!” Fiona said, and she looked absolutely weak with relief. She reached out a hand for the book, and Finn gave it to her.

  “Let’s get this up to the castle. The sooner the Council see this, the sooner the Shards can be expelled.”

  “And what about Hannah? What does this mean for her?” I asked, standing up.

  Fiona shook her head. “I don’t know yet. We won’t know, until we get this spirit patched back together. She should be able to communicate better then, and we will finally get to the bottom of what she’s after.”

  Eleanora.

  This was the name of the ghost, the spirit who had turned Fairhaven upside down for the last few days. She wasn’t just a spate of Shattered fragments—a scourge of which we needed to be cleansed. She was a person. A girl with a heart and a mind and a will to live and love and make her mark in the world.

  And the Durupinen had destroyed her. They sacrificed this poor girl on the altar of their own terror—terror of a Prophecy they could not escape, no matter who they flung into its waiting jaws to satiate it. Just as they sacrificed The Silent Child. Just like they sacrificed my mother.

  Just like they had nearly sacrificed Hannah and me.

  When would this damn Prophecy release its hold on us? When would we be finished cleaning up its messes and sidestepping its horrific consequences? Wasn’t fulfilling it enough to be free of it? Would it seriously follow us forever, dogging our footsteps, forcing us to wade through the shadows of the travesties it left behind?

  “Well,” Finn said, and I knew he was swallowing back many things he wanted to say, “We’ve got a name, here, haven’t we?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Yes, we have.”

  “That’s it, then. If we’ve got a name, we can begin the expulsion,” he said quietly.

  “Yes, I suppose we can,”

  “You don’t sound very happy about it,”

  I looked at him. His expression was set. “Are you happy about it?”

  “I understand what you mean. This,” and he tapped a finger on the book, “is terrible, and no mistake. But what can we do? She’s got to be expelled.”

  “I know. I just… what happened to her…”

  “I know.”

  Every heavy, anxious, desperate feeling I had welled up inside of me at once. “Finn, I’m sorry about what I—”

  But Finn shook his head. “Don’t. We don’t need to do this right now. There will be time for that later. Use your connection to let Hannah and Milo know what we’ve found, and then help me get Catriona back up to the castle, will you? The Council will be going spare if she’s missing too long.”

  I swallowed all of those feelings, pushing them right back down where they belonged. “Yeah, okay. Let’s go.”

  §

  We struggled back toward the castle with Catriona draped between us, barely conscious. Fiona marched several yards ahead of us, leading the charge. We’d made it about halfway across the open stretch of lawn leading to the front doors when a shout stopped us in our tracks.

  “There they are! They have her!”

  We turned to see Seamus and Braxton jogging up the path that led to the barracks. “What’s happened?” Seamus called as they reached us. “What’s happened to her?”

  “She’s fine,” Finn said. “Just weak.”

  In one deft movement, Seamus hefted Catriona over his back in a fireman’s carry. “Where did you find her?” he asked.

  “She led us down into the graveyard,” I said. “She wanted us to open one of the mausoleums so we could find that.” I pointed to the book in Fiona’s hands.

  “A book?” Seamus asked, incredulous. “She leapt out the window and braved these temperatures just for a book?”

  “It’s a very important book,” Fiona said testily. “It’s given us the spirit’s name. We can expel her now. That is, if we don’t all freeze to death while we stand out here and explain it to you.”

  Seamus narrowed his eyes at Fiona, but stopped asking questions. He turned to Braxton. “Alert the Council and tell them to meet us at the hospital ward. Make sure that Mrs. Mistlemoore accompanies them.”

  Braxton saluted and ran for the castle doors. We all followed him in shivering silence.

  §

  Waiting outside the hospital ward doors while the Council examined the diary was excruciating. I paced in the same tight circle so many times that I was surprised not to see a whole in the floor beneath my feet.

  “Jess, you’ve got to calm down,” Finn said at last.

  “Finn, never in the history of the world have the words ‘calm down’ ever made anyone feel calmer,” I snapped.

  He almost smiled. “Fair enough.”

  “I just don’t understand why they couldn’t let us in there!” I said for at least the fifth time. “We are the ones who found the diary! I’m the one who drew the pictures! I’m the one the spirit tried to communicate with!”

  “The Council values its privilege,” Finn said, shaking his head.

  “The only thing they value about their privilege is abusing it,” I grumbled. “I should be in there, I could help. I mean, did you see the way they looked at me when they walked in there? They were all glaring at me like I’d done something wrong—well, besides lying, breaking Catriona out, and robbing a sacred Durupinen burial ground.”

  “Imagine them not inviting you in there, after all that,” Finn said with a chuckle. “I’m surprised they even allowed Fiona in, quite frankly.”

  “What do you think it meant?” I asked. “Eleanora’s message about the Caller betraying her?”

  Finn shrugged. “I can’t say. She was a Caller, after all. Maybe she meant that being a Caller is what led to her betrayal?”

  I considered this. “That’s possible. She didn’t mention any other Callers in that diary.”

  “Don’t fret about that now,” Finn said. “When the Council unites the Shards, they’ll be able to ask Eleanora what she meant, and then they’ll know at last that Hannah had nothing to do with it.”

  I shook my head. “They still blame her. Hannah was the victim, not the enemy, but they still blame her for everything to do with the Prophecy. They were just salivating for a reason to punish her for something.”

  “Fear is a powerful thing. People think hatred fuels the great wars and feuds of the world, but it’s simply not true. It’s fear at the root of that hatred. It’s always been fear first,” Finn said. “The men who wreak their destruction upon the world have always been utter cowards at heart.”

  I took a moment to digest this. “Speaking of fear, I didn’t see anything that would have explained the fear she seems to have of fire. Did you?”

  “No,” Finn said, “although that diary ended just as she was being arrested. Whatever happened with the fire may have happened after she stashed that book with her sister.”

  Unbidden, I imagined staring down at Hannah’s body, and desperately hiding the only honest evidence of my existence in her cold, dead hands. I choked back a sob. Emotion flooded over me so quickly that, for a moment, I thought I must be having an Empathic episode.

  “Are you quite alright?” Fin
n asked.

  I shook my head. “I’m trying to separate myself, but it’s just too awful. Hannah and I came very close to a fate like that. I just hate that these echoes of the Prophecy are still reverberating through the spirit world. It’s like the damage will never be done, even though it’s over.”

  The door to the hospital ward burst open and Fiona marched out, followed by Braxton. Fiona made a beeline right for me, but Braxton marched past as though I did not exist and disappeared around the corner.

  “What? What is it? What’s going on?” I asked swiftly.

  “They’re setting up the Circle now,” she said, and she looked relieved. “I don’t know whether they believe our story about Catriona escaping on her own, but it doesn’t matter at this point; they can’t prove otherwise, and we’ve handed them exactly what they needed to name the spirit and end this fecking nightmare.”

  I let out a sigh of relief I didn’t even realize I was holding. “So, this is it, then. They’re going to expel her?”

  “Seems like it. But they want you and your sister in there,” Fiona said.

  “Us? Why?” I asked.

  “Well, you were the first one the spirit made contact with, through those sketches. They feel that Eleanora might be more likely to talk if she sees you, because she reached out to you before. As for Hannah… well, the Council wants to clarify that Caller comment, so they think she should be present as well.”

  I shook my head. “This is ridiculous. Okay, should we go get Hannah?”

  “No, that’s what Braxton’s just gone to do,” Fiona said, pointing up the hallway after his retreating form. “The Council isn’t trusting you to go fetch anyone after our little jaunt into the Larkin mausoleum.”