The Shock Box

by Jill Harris

  She should pull away, but she couldn't.

  There was a moment when it seemed as though time stopped. Adeline wondered if her heart had begun to beat in time with his. She moved her hands up his back, flattened them on the taut outline of his shoulder blades.

  He lowered his head, lightly kissing the skin of her neck. The flame of her forbidden desire, rushed upwards to the place where he had kissed her.

  She pulled away, wanting to feel anger at such a blatant flouting of his advantage. She was after all, a woman in distress. Although most of those feelings had passed during the long, timeless embrace, and she was filled instead with sensations of sublime comfort as well as a tantalising desire to go further, to kiss him and touch the skin of his shoulders as she ripped off his shirt... Which she definitely must not do.

  Her hands dropped from his waist.

  He sat back, looked down at her night gown. It was tied in a bow at the neckline with a green ribbon, the length of which had loosened during the commotion, yet was still almost tied.

  Captain Hughes took one end of the ribbon in his large hand, and threw her a questioning look. She did not smile encouragement. Nor did she slap his hand away or chide him for his insolence.

  Branwell watched as pale green spheres of joy floated around Miss Winslow. This was all beyond the bounds of decorum and yet this was no ordinary night and she was no ordinary woman. His heart quickened.

  He pulled the ribbon. Looked at her again.

  This time she smiled. "How dare you. I'm a servant girl and you're my master. This is outrageous," she said. More bubbles of pleasure.

  "Do you want me to stop?" he said, pausing.

  "I want to know I'm outraged."

  Branwell held the ribbon taut. "As am I. I shall severely reprimand myself in the morning."

  "The morning will arrive shortly."

  "I had better go then."

  "Not until you've finished what you've begun," Adeline said, looking down at the ribbon and then back up at him, her eyebrows raised in a question.

  The knot came undone.

  At that moment, Adeline wondered if she might too, be coming undone. In some profound, yet scientifically measurable way that is. This behaviour was possibly the worst a woman of her station could indulge in and yet it felt so right, intimate, and good. Her blood pounded in her veins.

  The Captain ran a finger down the smocking of her gown, tugging at the ribbons enough to make it hang open and loose. He pushed the sleeves of her gown down to her shoulders where it hung, exposing her throat, and the milky skin of her shoulders.

  The cold air made her skin prickle although Adeline was filled with a blazing heat. She moved further away from him, but the movement only shrugged the gown lower so that the half moons of her breasts were exposed to the first rays of dawn as they shone through a gap in the drapes, sweeping light across the floor, and onto the bed.

  The Captain looked away, as if he could not bear to see her. But not for long. He turned back as if some invisible force was driving his gaze downwards to her décolleté.

  Adeline inhaled deeply and the gown slipped lower, resting only on the taut buds of her nipples.

  The Captain made an odd choking sound, and blinked. The muscles of his jaw were tight, rigid almost. She could hear the Captain's breathing speed up as he observed her, although his features were a carefully guarded mask.

  Whatever he thought of her she did not know. She tossed her head, enjoying the feeling of her hair moving like silk across her back and shoulders. He must almost certainly be thinking very badly of her indeed. Yet, for a brief moment, she allowed herself not to care.

  One slight shake of her arms, and the gown would slide to her waist.

  His lips parted, as if he might say something. Or more. She wanted him to kiss her then, and if he'd leaned a little closer she would have tilted her head up to him, offering herself like Venus to Eros. There was no denying her attraction now in this stolen moment between night and day.

  Her breath hitched and took all her power of her will to keep from reaching up to take his face in her hands, and pull him to her.

  But this would not do.

  The moment had passed. It was up to her to gather the remains of her reputation, and piece it back together again. And this was not the way to go about it.

  Adeline glanced up at him as she adjusted her gown so that it came right up to her neck once more.

  The Captain nodded, and retreated, standing up awkwardly as his bad leg almost gave way. "I need to ask your advice about something, Miss Winslow."

  "What is it?"

  "Not now. I must go. It was improper of me to stay so long." He bowed his head, took his cane from where it leaned against the doorframe, and left her to her churning thoughts.

  Chapter 27

  "Storm'd at with shot and shell,

  Boldly they rode and well,

  Into the jaws of Death,

  Into the mouth of Hell

  Rode the six hundred."

  --Alfred Lord Tennyson

  After he left her bedchamber, Branwell Henry Fortescue Hughes limped back to his own room in the east wing consumed with self-loathing. How could he have made such a fool of himself in front of Miss Winslow? Her mind had shot out streams of orange bubbles when he'd touched her ribbons, proving that he'd agitated her. When she was in distress.

  What the hell was he thinking?

  Adeline Winslow had been attacked by the infernal demon. She had been afraid, and he had turned it into something else. Something beyond his control. The worst of it was that she had such a profound effect on his iron self-discipline. He could not deny it. He was drawn to her like a wolf to the moon. But he had to pull himself together. Finding her like that, wide-eyed, dishevelled, and surrounded by red triangles of fear, had set something off in him.

  He'd felt his heart soften. She was so delightful. And her ribbons seemed so frivolous, not to mention those pale green bubbles dancing round her. Bubbles of desire, of pleasure. It was a long time since there had been ribbons in the Captain"s house. In his life. Not to mention green bubbles of pleasure.

  He gave up whores when he left the Crimea.

  Yet Miss Winslow had set something off in him. Something dark. A desire which had reared its ugly head and filled him with a notion. The notion that he wanted to hold her. To kiss her. He'd almost tried. All that held him back was the fear of humiliation.

  Did she want to kiss him?

  Of course not.

  She would have laughed in his face. Told him he was a brute. An ugly, scarred, crippled monster of a man. And he would have agreed with her.

  She had enchanted him. Perhaps she really was a witch.

  He opened the door of his room, and considered throwing himself on the bed. If there was a chance at sleep, he would have done so but it was pointless. He swerved away from his room, convinced it was better to got back downstairs. There he could smoke his pipe and think until he could find some solution to the situation presenting itself. He had to fight the demon with skill, not with swords. It was impervious to the latter. He knew. He'd tried.

  He stomped downstairs to the library, thumping his cane on the creaking stairs.

  Worse than his inadequacies and deformities, he was the one haunted by this thing. The demon which could become a moth. The fact that it had entered his guest's bedroom, and attempted to crush the life out of her stirred a deep anger within him. She was so small. It was grotesquely unfair.

  Perhaps the thing had hoped she'd die of fright. At that thought, he felt the corners of his mouth twitch. The very idea of Miss Winslow allowing fright to kill her was almost amusing, for she was such a strong-willed little person. But as he clomped down the stairs, his false leg dug into the flesh of his withered knee and his anger flowed hot in his blood. He hated that the demon had sent the robust Miss Winslow almost delirious with fear when it came to her. He hated the idea of anyone or anything threatening her in any way.

  Branwell felt a
bead of sweat run down his nose, dripping onto his top lip. The demon came to him each night, spreading its stinking wings, each decorated with a human skull. The talons had ripped his own shirt a few night ago when he cursed it, and threw salt at it until it withdrew. Another time, he'd seen the thing turn from a moth to a horse. It happened outside in the courtyard, a year ago on midsummer's eve when the fires were lit on the Black Dog Hills, and the coven went up to light candles at the Dancing Maidens.

  People gathered at Sea Witch Cove to light fires there too, and he remembered how the smell of roasting boar had filtered up from the beach, and blown down from the hills.

  The demon followed him out of the door as he went to look over the wall at the town towards the sea, and the hills beyond. It rose up, made a noise like a great oak felled in the forest, and when he turned to look, there it stood. A moth and then a horse-shaped thing. A great lumbering beast, half rotting, covered with slime, its red eyes rolling, its yellow teeth cracking as it let out the devil of a sound. It frothed at the mouth, rearing up as if it might batter him to death.

  For some reason though, it refused to kill him, although he begged it to, and from that night on, he had the distinct impression that it liked to cling to him, sucking away any joy, any goodness he might once have had.

  When it was clinging to him, matching the blackness of his own soul, that was one thing.

  He reached the bottom of the stairs, paused, and shook his fist at the shadows. This time it had gone too far. Miss Winslow was out of bounds. She was under his protection.

  He could not, would not let it harm her.

  Chapter 28

  When Branwell shut the library door behind him, he immediately began to browse the shelves for his father's diary. In particular, the one from 1835, when his father had been investigating the exorcism of a demon of his own. His attempts had failed, yet there might be something useful there.

  After a search through several volumes of his father's spidery handwriting, Branwell found the one he was looking for. He sat down at his desk, thumbing through the hefty, leather-bound volume. There was one entry about a time when a local physician had witnessed a skeletal creature skulking through the gates of Raven"s Nest.

  His father wrote: "Now it has been seen by another, I know it to be real. This means that I am in a position to request the help of the local clergy. My wish is that they can help me send it back to the filthy pit from whence it came..."

  For his father, the priest had failed.

  But there had to be a way. A power the creature would bend to. Branwell put his finger to his lips. The fact that Miss Winslow could see the demon might be useful. She was the only other person, apart from himself, who could. His father was right, if someone else saw it, then they might bring it down. People would believe the sensible nurse, even if they did't take him at his word.

  Perhaps there was some way he might persuade the vicar of All Saints church to send the thing back to the pit of chaos from which it had crawled. To that end, he scrawled a letter to the man, begging him for help. Not that Branwell ever begged. Still. He was left with no choice.

  He glanced up at the window. Pale light, filtered through a heavy fog. The night was over and he had work to do. Yet he might have thrown away any chance of asking her to help him. He had toyed with her ribbons as if she was a tavern tart. He grimaced. And she had pulled away from him.

  He repulsed her.

  Added to that, he'd insulted her. Her efforts to build a new life after some rake had used her and thrown her away could be dashed in a moment if anyone ever knew what had just happened. In her bedchamber. With a known philanderer. He slapped his forehead.

  Adeline Winslow was not the sort of woman to take such an affront lightly.

  Only a bounder would have taken advantage of her situation. She was almost certainly packing her trunk right at this very moment.

  But the worst part of him didn't regret a moment of it. Because not only did she have an extraordinary effect on him, Miss Winslow had also shown herself to be someone of an intelligence at least equal to his own in the few hours he had known her. Her wit at dinner had held his attention, unlike most women whose chatter he simply ignored. Which confused him to the point of distraction.

  Branwell combed his mind, hoping to find some flaw in her. There was a large gap between two of her front teeth. She was aloof. She was very small.

  The scent of her skin lingered with him. Branwell closed his eyes, unable to stop thinking of how lovely it would be to see her without her gown, her dark curls spilling over her face.

  He couldn't quite believe he'd kissed her hair. It smelled of rosewater, a scent he remembered his mother using when she was preparing to greet guests.

  From now until she left his house, though, Miss Winslow was bound to hate him and he wouldn't blame her for that. Hatred was what he deserved. Worse than that, he'd seen distrust in her eyes. She was a woman who'd only allow a man to trespass on her dignity once, he was certain of that.

  It was time to focus his mind away from ideas of kissing Miss Winslow, and confront the enemy. His mind was filled with plans, but first he was intent on finding out if there were any cases of exorcism in the county of Dorset in the last fifty years or so.

  She-Who-Dwells was back. Her gaunt, semi-transparent figure stood there, arms folded, waiting for him. He ignored her and went over to the bookshelf looking for his father's notes on the occult in West Country.

  "You made a fool of yoursen with that nurse upstairs," She-Who-Dwells said, combing her ghostly hair with her skeletal fingers, poking her thoughts into his head.

  "I don't need you to tell me that," he said out loud.

  "The way you looked at her. Disgusting. That's what I call it."

  In his mind he ignored her.

  She persisted, pushing her thoughts unbidden into his skull. "Call yourself a gentleman? And what about her? Ha! She's no better than a harlot."

  His resolve to pretend she wasn't there dissolved. "Go away," he roared.

  She laughed in a mocking, high-pitched way. "You'll have to do better than that to get rid of me. And him. He's got you by the balls."

  Branwell stood, glowering at her, making the sign of a cross within a circle with his finger in the air between them. Sometimes it worked.

  At first, he didn't think it had.

  But then, she turned towards the window, and back to him, her face distorted, her lips pulled into an oval, her eyes wide with what looked like fear.

  "Don't let her in," Her voice pleaded in his head.

  "Don't let who in?"

  "She's coming. She's coming, and she wants to break him. To break the curse and all the good it does me."

  "Who is coming? Speak plainly woman."

  A mental image of the demon, as it appeared when it took the form of a man, came into Branwell's head. The demon stood over by the window, whirling its cane tipped with a silver skull. Its face was impassive, its eyes burning red.

  Branwell narrowed his eyes at She-Who-Dwells. "Is Adeline the one who can rid me of this curse?"

  She reached out with her mind, yet no words came. She shimmered, her tattered garments turning yellow. The demon went over to her, touched her head with his cane. She-Who-Dwells fell forward, clutching at him with her bony hands. No sound came when she hit the ground, just the wind in the eaves.

  All that was left of She-Who-Dwells, was a whirling cloud of dust motes dancing in a beam of grey light.

  Chapter 29

  The next morning, the storm had gone leaving behind it the sound of dripping from the eaves overhanging the window to the rocks below Adeline's room.

  Adeline woke early as she always did, bolting out of bed. She grabbed the dressing gown. Standing on the rug, digging her feet into the weave, she arched her back and touched her toes twenty times to warm up as best she could in the icy room. The muscles around her neck were stiff, probably due to the rock-like pillow. She went over to the window, threw open the curtains -
only to be greeted with such a thick sea mist it was impossible to observe anything other than the cobwebs of frost on the inside of the glass.

  She shivered and stepped away from the window as if by looking out she risked seeing something awful emerging from the miasma. As if something really was waiting out there for her, waiting to catch her unawares.

  The sound of waves surging against the cliff seemed muted, muffled by the fog. The storm had passed, yet the low cloud had an oppressive feel to it. Even though all appeared calm, she couldn't shake off a kind of cold dread clutching at her heart. As if something truly malign really had broken into not just her room, but the whole of Raven"s Nest last night.

  Her throat was dry. She went over to the jug on her nightstand, poured a tumbler of fresh water from the jug, and drank it quickly. Her palate had always been highly developed, and the local water had a crisp, mineral taste, which was most pleasing. She poured another glass, drinking the second one more slowly.

  After that, she got out of her nightgown, and pulled on clean undergarments, a chemise, stockings and drawers. Her fingers, almost numb with cold, worked hard to button the petticoat-bodice over that. Finally, when all the layers were complete, she pulled on a warm bombazine dress in her favourite colour, light grey. It suited her dark eyes and pale complexion, and made her look sophisticated, professional. She could easily roll up the sleeves to attend to her duties. Because today, she was going to dress the Captain's wound whether he liked it or not.

  Around her shoulders she wrapped a dark red woollen shawl, one that she had bought whilst on a trip to India visiting temples with Aunt Theodora. It smelled of her Aunt, and for a moment, she fought back a dark inner cloud of homesickness. What would her Aunt say about the horror which invaded her room last night?

  Adeline considered all the mediums she had watched during seances at her Aunt's house. Most of them were frauds of course. Everyone knew it. Even Theodora, who longed to contact her dead husband, the only man she'd ever truly loved. Sometimes, a medium with a taste for high drama would produce clouds of ectoplasm from her mouth. This ethereal stuff would take on the appearance of some dead relative or other to the wonderment of the audience, yet Adeline knew it was often lengths of scrunched up fabric, or gas. In fact, there was always a trick of some kind involved.