Sheer Madness

by Laura Strickland

  “Do you sense anything in this room? I think one of Father’s spirits may have escaped him again.”

  “Ah.” The expression on Sapphire’s quick, clever face changed, stilled, and became intent as if he listened without using his ears.

  As offspring of one of the greatest mediums of their time and certainly the most controversial in Western New York, they might well expect to have inherited a measure of the man’s other-worldly talents. In truth the household made no fit place to grow up. Their four older siblings had fled as soon as practicable for good reason, and it might be said neither Topaz nor Sapphire fit the parameters of “normal.”

  Bad enough to have a father who possessed the ability to contact the spirits of the dead; Frederick Hathor, embracing the advances of his time, also experimented with the summoning, trapping, and “reassigning” of spirits, as he called it. A client with enough money and a sufficient weight of grief could seek to have the spirit of a departed loved one implanted in a custom-built steam unit, a specially constructed automaton, or even the body of an animal.

  Adored by some, feared by many, and reviled by most, he’d been dubbed the Spirit Master. Buffalo’s religious leaders denounced him and predicted he’d end up in hell. He’d survived two assassination attempts, and his family members had endured many attempted abductions by those who thought they could force either money or compliance from him. Last year someone had tried to burn his mansion down, but a sympathetic spirit had warned him in time.

  Topaz and Sapphire, who both loathed their father’s spiritual practices, did not like admitting they too could sense the presence of spirits. Sapphire treated his ability with a dismissiveness in line with his general attitude. Topaz never acknowledged—even to her brother or herself—how acute her own sense had become. She shrank instinctively from making contact with the lost spirits who haunted the place, flinched from their yearning, fear, and vulnerability—far more than she could bear.

  Now she held her breath while Sapphire’s dark eyes became opaque as onyx. She knew darned well there was a spirit in this room, but she wanted his confirmation.

  “Well?” she prompted after a moment.

  Sapphire’s long, slender fingers tensed and then relaxed again. “I do sense something. Faint. Not like the spirits he usually attracts.”

  “Yes.” Topaz drew the dressing gown more closely about her body and shivered. “It’s been coming and going for the past two days. But it doesn’t feel quite like the others.”

  From time to time spirits did escape the big room downstairs where Frederick Hathor did his work. As a child, long before she’d learned how a strayed spirit’s grief could weigh her down, Topaz had spent weeks playing with the ghost of a dead pirate, and all the Hathor children had learned early not to look under their beds.

  Sapphire shrugged. The mist cleared from his eyes. “So tell him. He’ll clean up the vibrations and recall it.”

  Topaz nodded, but she still felt uneasy. “What’s different about it, though? Can you tell?”

  “No, sister dear.” Sapphire gave her a significant look. “Maybe it escaped from the cellar.”

  Their father had a workshop in the cellar of the mansion on Humboldt Parkway, the door of which was always kept locked. Even Frederick’s children weren’t permitted to know what went on there, and only certain of the steam servants closest to him had leave to enter.

  She leaned closer to her brother. “What do you think’s down there?”

  “I try not to think about those kinds of things, when Father is concerned. And I stopped wanting to know what he gets up to a long time ago. One thing you can bet—it will involve money. There are a lot of wealthy people in this city, and Father is out to fleece them all.”

  “He doesn’t fleece them, though, exactly. In all fairness, he gives them what they want—the spirits of those they love returned to them in some form, even if it’s mechanical.”

  Sapphire’s gaze met hers once more with surprising frankness. “But there’s no mercy in it, is there? I think that’s what bothers me most. He’s possessed of this very great ability he professes to use in order to alleviate the grief of the bereaved—which he will do only if they hand over great rafts of money.” Sapphire frowned, his expression now completely serious. “I meet poor people every day who’ve lost someone, and their grief is as valid as that of the tycoons with whom Father deals.”

  Topaz knew her brother routinely haunted some of the lowest dives on Buffalo’s waterfront. He’d learned his fighting skills—the same he’d taught Topaz—after being jumped there numerous times. She sometimes wondered if he might someday disappear into that dark underbelly and simply stop being Frederick Hathor’s son.

  She asked, “So why don’t you help those people? Set up your own service for free.”

  Sapphire shuddered. “I’d rather off myself. Besides, I don’t have the talent, only mere whispers of it. Too much of Mother’s blood in my veins. But you”—his gaze moved over Topaz again—“you even look like him. I’ve often wondered how much ability you inherited.”

  Topaz shook her head in denial. Like her brother, she didn’t want to know.

  “And now, sister mine, I must leave you.” Sapphire got to his feet and moved her aside gently. “I have a warm bed and even warmer kisses waiting for me.”

  He gave her a mischievous look. “You should try that sometime. One of the human footmen, perhaps—that Gerald might give you a tumble. Trust me, it burns off some of those troubling energies.”

  Topaz considered it. Gerald, six feet tall and with flaming red hair, might well make a fine choice. But she didn’t need the complication.

  She laid her hand on her brother’s arm. “Just don’t end up hurting Carlotta, all right?”

  “Would I do that?”

  “You always wind up hurting them.”

  “Well, I won’t this time.”

  And why should this time be any different?

  Sapphire moved to the door, where he paused to survey the room. “Oh, and Sister, about your trapped spirit?”

  “Yes?”

  “If you want to identify it, I can think of one way.”

  “Yes?” Topaz repeated, and he leaned toward her in a conspiratorial fashion.

  “Ask it,” he whispered.

  Chapter Three

  “Romney Marsh.” He repeated the words over again as he had already a hundred times. His name. He had to hold on to it lest the last threads defying separation break and he forget who he was. How long could a spirit retain its identity after being banished from the flesh?

  He didn’t know; nor could he be sure how many other cases like his had occurred. Most spirits parted from their bodies only at the moment of death.

  His body lived yet.

  And, damn it, he needed to get back to it, but not where it lay now in a dim room at the asylum, nothing more than a drooling husk with a beating heart.

  He couldn’t—he wouldn’t!—go back there.

  Romney Marsh, Romney Marsh. The words echoed in the indistinct swirl of energy that now passed for his mind. He had become the thought rather than the thinker, the spark that endured all.

  Cut adrift, he had fled the terrible place his body lay and followed a call, faint at first but increasing in power, that drew his spirit as a magnet pulled at iron filings. Two days ago that had been—two days and a night, for he’d drifted through the dark streets of this city, streets all limed in hard frost, the way an elusive tune twines through a memory. To his surprise, he could see—not the way a body sees but in misty color, like images viewed through droplets of water. He’d seen the large elaborate mansion from whence the calling issued. He’d hovered in the street, not feeling the cold, and observed other spirits flocking around the place and passing in.

  So many spirits. He recognized them for what they were, being insubstantial as they. Incandescent clusters of light, they streamed and floated, clung to the outer walls and even the turret at the top of the house. Whatever called
from within drew them powerfully and irresistibly.

  He too had entered the mansion, seeping through the wall like blood through a bandage. Inside he could see it all—the lofty proportions and lush furnishings of the house, the humans and steam units inside, and all the spirits streaming to one of the larger downstairs rooms.

  And he could feel everything, the steam servants’ artificial intelligences and the calling which stemmed from not one but three places: the room into which most of his fellow spirits flowed, the cellar below it, and a single room upstairs.

  When he concentrated, he could tell the sources differed in both degree and color: the call from the parlor sure and powerful—this had reached out into the city; that from the cellar dark and terrifying; that from upstairs fainter, but delicious.

  The source in the parlor demanded, that in the cellar repelled, that from upstairs promised. Just like the three bears, he told himself ironically, and wondered from whence that thought had sprung. A bit surprising to discover a disembodied spirit kept its sense of humor.

  He wished he could remember more of what must be contained in his mind. Romney Marsh, Romney Marsh.

  Holding hard to what little he possessed, he parted from the other spirits, which seemed unaware of him, and floated upstairs. He had to see what—who—attracted him.

  And it proved to be a woman. He gathered himself in the corner of the room she inhabited—her bedroom—and watched half dazed as she changed her clothes for dinner, stripped off rough blouse and skirt and donned the dress spread on the bed. The soft yellow lights of the room caressed her naked flesh, and he, coalesced much like the raindrops on the window glass, could only stare in appreciation.

  No slender miss, this. She had a body of generous proportions, wide at the shoulders and hips and supple with muscle. She also had skin of pure milk-white, straight black hair that hung down her back all the way to her generous, tempting derriere, and, when she turned, a pair of breasts in which a man might lose himself. Her eyes, set slightly atilt in a heavily-boned face, were an unexpected and startling shade of tawny gold.

  Shock sent him hurtling backward through the wall, unable to tell whether when she turned those eyes she caught a glimpse of him. He fought to recapture himself, to remember who he was—Romney Marsh—but after that he could return to no energy but hers.

  He haunted her room. Of course, she did not spend all her time there. She sometimes went to a big chamber on the ground floor where she worked her body in a routine of fighting with her fists, a knife, or even a sword. He followed her helplessly and even watched her while she slept, the conviction forming that he must make her see him.

  Could she help him resolve his dilemma? Or did he want her to see him for another reason, because she was quite simply the most fascinating woman he’d ever encountered?

  After that he tried twice more to manifest himself within the confines of her room—once upon her rising and once after she put on an incredible display and chased two intruders from the place—no shrinking maiden, this. But concentrate his energy as he might, he couldn’t quite materialize, though he felt sure she caught glimpses of him.

  She had some affinity for spirits, he sensed. She definitely had some attraction for him. And he felt sure she’d heard him when he congratulated her following the fight late that night—undertaken in the nude on her part.

  What man, corporeal or otherwise, could fail to admire that?

  He observed as, clad only in a silken dressing gown, she spoke at length with a dark-haired man—discussing him.

  And when the dark-haired man—her brother?—went out, leaving the two of them alone, seen and unseen, he knew it would be now or never.

  Concentrating with unprecedented intensity, he hovered beside her bed, pictured himself as he knew he appeared when in his body, and did his best to make himself look solid.

  She turned. Her unusual golden eyes widened, and she saw him.

  About bloody time, he thought with a victorious rush. And now what? Could they communicate?

  “Who are you?” she breathed in a low, husky voice that should have raised his pulse—did, for all he knew, back where his body lay.

  “You can see me?” he asked, projecting the word-thoughts into her mind the way he had projected his image.

  “Of course I can see you. Why else would I ask who you are?”

  “Romney Marsh,” he supplied the name to which he clung so hard.

  Her eyebrows, like two black slashes above those incredible eyes, twitched. “Well, Mr. Romney Marsh, you’ve strayed to the wrong place.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “The party’s downstairs in the solarium, where my father’s summoning the souls of the dearly departed. You must have taken a wrong turn at the stairs.”

  “No. I don’t want him. I want you.” Abruptly he realized it for truth: he wanted her as only a man possessed of flesh could—and surging flesh, at that. It made no sense, yet he couldn’t deny it.

  She shifted slightly on the balls of her feet the way she had just before she took on the two thugs who’d come through the window. Did she, then, think she needed to fight him off?

  He said quickly, “I’m not here to harm you. Rather, I need your help.”

  She tipped her head. The black hair slid over one shoulder to caress a generous breast. His nonexistent fingers itched.

  “I’m not able to help you.” She waved a hand in the air. “Be gone, spirit, to the next realm.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Of course you can.” She leaned toward him, and her gaze moved over him with considerable interest. “Do not partake in my father’s mischief. Spare yourself that. Move on and embrace peace. I dismiss—”

  “No.” He moved closer, and her eyes widened again. “Don’t do that. Don’t send me away.”

  She drew herself up to her considerable height, which had he possessed his body must nearly match his. “But, Mr. Marsh, it’s where you belong.”

  “It isn’t.”

  “Give me one good reason why,” she challenged.

  He could give her the very best of reasons. “I’m not dead.”

  Chapter Four

  “Not dead?” Topaz sank onto the edge of her bed, never taking her gaze from the spirit that hovered just in front of her.

  A good-looking spirit, she had to admit. And she’d seen her share from the time she reached an age to understand what the gossamer, semi-transparent entities were that flocked about her father like butterflies to nectar.

  She’d never seen one to match Romney Marsh, who might have come straight out of some lurid dream. Indeed, had she imagined a man feature by feature for the sake of perfection, he’d look no different.

  She blinked, trying to look at and not through him, for he was sheer as a fine net curtain.

  He stood—or hovered—about five foot ten, with a build just the way she liked a man, broad shoulders and narrow hips, muscular but not bulky. Fair hair, well-mussed, tumbled over a noble brow, and he had a set of features at once expressive and handsome—a slightly hooked nose, lean cheeks, and the kind of lips she could only imagine pressed against hers.

  Maybe this was a dream. She could have created it all—the fight, the conversation with Sapphire, and this, a fevered product of her brain. She shook her head in an effort to clear it of insanity. “Of course you’re dead. You’re a spirit.”

  He frowned. Curiously, that made him even more attractive. “I’m not, though. My body’s still alive. I’ve just been booted out of it.”

  Topaz considered it. Possible, she supposed. People suffered accidents and fell into comas. Did their spirits then wander? Some spiritual practitioners could also project themselves from their corporeal bodies and travel the astral plane. Might he be a powerful spiritualist?

  But he said booted out, which implied force. Despite herself she felt her curiosity stir. Not much piqued her interest anymore after twenty odd—very odd—years under her father’s roof. But Romney Marsh did.
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  “Tell me,” she bade him.

  “I’m not sure I can.” He writhed in the air as if seeking to control his image. “This takes a great deal of concentration and control. Can you help?”

  “Me?” Topaz experienced a wave of reluctance. She’d never once employed the ability she knew lurked inside like a store of ammunition.

  On the other hand, she quite suddenly didn’t want Romney Marsh to depart. She wondered what color his eyes were when they weren’t transparent. Fine eyes, level and intelligent. Devastating.

  She shifted where she stood, unconsciously marshalling her forces. She didn’t miss the way his attention slid to her breasts, tactile as a touch, before inspecting the rest of her body.

  He’d seen her fighting her would-be abductors. That meant he’d seen all of her. Ruefully she wondered if he too considered her a “hefty lass.”

  Which had nothing to do with the matter at hand. Reluctantly, she reached inside herself and captured the affinity that already stretched involuntarily to him. If she unfurled it and connected with his energy, would she be able to sever the bond later? She didn’t know. Wisdom argued she shouldn’t try—this was murky and dangerous ground.

  But she often ignored the dictates of wisdom. She did so now. Tipping her chin up so her black hair slid down her back, she captured his eyes with hers.

  “Concentrate on me.”

  She felt his attention focus the way one sometimes could feel another person staring from a crowd. Her spine tingled, and all at once emotion rose inside.

  She beat it back. She knew enough to remember her father stayed always calm, even detached, during such encounters.

  She felt anything but detached.

  “I’ve never done this before.”

  She could no longer look away from him. Quite suddenly instinct took over, precisely the way it might during a sexual encounter. The untried ability within her rose of its own accord, reached for him, and connected in an unstoppable rush.

  And it was…magnificent, strong, and yes, almost sexual in its energy. In fact, Topaz felt her body leap to arousal; her nipples tightened inside the soft, silk robe.