Shadows Falling: The Lost #2

by Melyssa Williams

  I make my way on cautious feet, and then in a burst of rebellion toward the old place and to my rapidly beating heart, I thump my way along defiantly. Let the ghosts and the spirits and the darkness hear me coming; I’m not afraid.

  Slightly nervous maybe, perhaps a touch concerned for my life, but not afraid.

  The wing that I hate has all its doors open, which is somewhat creepier, I think, than having them shut. Instead of seeing nothing in their depths, I see partial things, and that is worse than seeing all, because there are shadows and shapes that my imagination is only too happy to provide bodies for. I move along quickly, my torch a beacon in the night, as is the full moon that shines through the windows at me, a friendly, winking pal, guiding me through the halls. I fixate on it, with a ridiculous fear that the moon will go out like a torch, flicker, and leave me in the ebony darkness of the asylum.

  The old doctor’s (I’ve forgotten his name now, though he’s only been gone but a month or two) office is just as I’ve left it, and though I try not to, I exhale a breath of relief at having reached my destination all in one piece. No goblins or bogey men or stray, forgotten inmates have ground my bones for bread or flossed their teeth with my hair. Success, Lizzie!

  My success continues as I find the red journal exactly where I had left it on the desk during my surprise visit from the mysterious and enigmatic Mr. Connelly. Had he not jostled my thoughts so, I would never have left it behind. Bloody man. This is definitely his fault. If I make it through my adventure unscathed, I am going to give him a piece of my mind. I’ll knock the sparkle right out of those beautiful eyes.

  I pick the diary up quickly and am startled by the sound of a soft breath, just to my left, so close I nearly feel my hair lift with the whoosh of air the sound made, an exhale of sorts, like the one I just let out myself seconds before, but it can’t be from me, for I am holding my breath yet again. I stiffen, and though some people’s resolve and instinct may be, in such a situation, to whirl around, I do not. I stand very still, very quiet. I do not breathe. I have had practice at the orphanage at faking sleep and at sneaking out. I wish now for our old warden of the orphanage, Mrs. Temple. I had never welcomed her presence in the middle of the night before, but I do now. I feel as though my heart does not even beat, and my blood is frozen and still in my veins, so silent am I. The only thing that moves along at a furious pace is my thoughts.

  What did I hear?

  Is it still here, in this room with me?

  What do I do?

  I cannot stay motionless and breathless for the rest of my life, and my first entrance into the land of the living once again, is a swallow. It seems loud in the stillness. Without moving my feet, I turn my body and search the spot where my torch cuts through the blackness. I do not see anything, but I feel something as real and as warm and as alive as my own body. I feel something there, something that searches me as I search it.

  I do feel afraid, but not yet terrified. How strange that I should so suddenly know the difference.

  My alarm is heightened, however, when I feel the diary torn from my hands. With a force that makes me cry out—this time in terror—it is dashed against the wall and knocks over a statue of a horseman there. The statue topples to the floor near the diary.

  My heart is racing, and it is the loudest sound in the room. No longer can I control my fear, yet I do not dart away. Whatever is in this room with me is supernatural and therefore cannot be outrun; my logical mind says this is so, though it may be an odd contradiction to think of logic and supernatural in the same breath. So, I stand, and I wait.

  I wait for what seems like ages. The place is quiet. No one breathes in a disconcerting fashion against my neck again. I do not feel the same presence I felt before, though my wariness and suspicion and fear block what may be left of my reasoning skills.

  “Are you finished then, ghoul of Bedlam? May I go now?” I speak, and my voice sounds unbearably quiet and small, but it’s the best I can do under the circumstances. Circumstances of course, being utterly ridiculous and ludicrous.

  No one answers me, and I order my feet to take me to the diary. I pick it up, where it is sprawled like a wounded bird, and open it. I flip through the pages quickly and see all the strange, fascinating handwriting still present and accounted for. I feel vaguely relieved somehow. I had had an odd premonition that it would be completely empty and my journey with Rose would be over, but no, the diary was full and waiting for me.

  I pocket it, and where I had felt no persuasion to run before, I do now, and so I run. Back the way I had come, past the dreaded rooms that always gave me unpleasant feelings (now I would associated those feelings with Dr. Whatshisname’s office for the rest of time), thunder down the stairs, with a lack of grace that would appall Miss Helmes, and towards the open window. The only thing that slows me down is that damnable stain on the wall. Again, I am pulled there as if by unseen forces. Desperately not wanting to but not able to stop myself, I halt and shine my torch (which flickers now in a sad death march of low batteries) upon the burgundy colored bit of stone.

  The stain, of course, is still there, still ugly and menacing, still not stew.

  Something else is there as well. A single word, written in familiar, childlike script.

  ROSE.

  5

  Along with my pink skirt, ribboned ballet shoes that criss-crossed up my legs, and golden sparkles on my skin, I wore a crown of ivy leaves during my stay with the gypsy sideshow. It made me appear even younger than my eight years and like a pixie child. Mothers cooed over me, fathers smiled fondly, and little girls tried to befriend me. This newly acquired popularity had come too late; I had no interest in friends any longer, and children bored me. They were too easily frightened and too dull. My senses were more advanced than theirs, and their babyish games only served to annoy me. Adults weren’t much better in my book—the book of Rose—but at least they didn’t bother me.

  The adults in the show were mostly gypsies, a crew of odd, mismatched puzzle pieces, put together in a fashion so that our edges stuck out and nothing quite fit. There were ten of us, if I recall everyone correctly, and we were extreme opposites of one another. There was Bertha, who was as large as three men put together and wore patchwork skirts so huge I used to steal her extra one off the line on washing day to play circus tent with. The opposite of her was Dell, who was skinny as a pole and with the same personality. He was the only pale skinned person (besides me), and wore a top hat. Dell had the appearance of an undertaker, if you could pigeonhole an undertaker’s appearance. His face was stretched tight over his bones so you could visualize his skeleton quite easily. Indeed, he looked more like a skeleton or a corpse than he did a living, breathing person. He was not fearsome though in character, only in his bony exterior. They billed themselves as Jack Sprat and His Wife, though they were not married in real life.

  Another twosome that really drew the crowds were Gertie and Lulu, Siamese twins, conjoined at the shoulders. Gertie was nice and even-tempered; Lulu was snappish and persnickety. They weren’t real gypsies, not by blood, but they laid out in the sun all the time, achieving darker skin that tanned like leather, and dyed their blonde hair black. They had been with circuses before but were tired of all the “politicing,” they said. They liked the traveling gypsy life better. Every time I smell tobacco smoke now, I think of those two. Solomon said Gertie was a parasitic twin, and she was only nice because she wasn’t entirely capable of being any other way. She didn’t talk really—sometimes smiled in a lopsided fashion or made a strange noise that we all took for laughter—and was just an extra head and arm for Lulu.

  Solomon was our doctor, not a real doctor, of course, but a con man, a charlatan, a wolf in sheep’s clothing. He had the voice of an angel when he called those crowds in to us, mesmerizing his prey with his pretty words and his beautiful brown eyes with long lashes, but he had all the moral fortitude of the devil himself. He’d take candy from a babe, the last coin from a widow, morsels of fo
od from a starving man. He didn’t apologize for it either: instead, he’d laugh and say, “Stupid is as stupid does.” We got along fine, we did. His name was Solomon, and a better father I never had.

  That does explain some lack of… what did she call it? ‘moral fortitude’ in Rose’s personality. Raised by a pack of thieves and left to our own devices, would we all be nothing but the devil’s minions?

  Then again, I never had a father either, and I don’t go pinning ladies hands to the wall with scissors, not even in my very worst mood.

  “Judge not, yet ye be judged,” Miss Helmes’ voice rings through my head, and I obligingly banish my unkind thoughts.

  Solomon was an expert at all things devious and shifty, and it was from him— though at first I only learned from afar, by watching—that I discovered how to be two-faced in order to get something I wanted. I had never tried to be someone I wasn’t, so this playacting, this façade, was new to me. He was one way with one customer, even adopting a different accent to go with his different personalities, and entirely different with another. The outcome though, the outcome was the same, and this was the prize! People handed over their money to him as if under his spell, and I watched in my little pink tutu as he manipulated them, left and right. I didn’t know Solomon’s true personality myself, no one did, and his moods changed as quickly as the weather. After a few weeks of my eyes on him, he began to notice my interest, and my training began in earnest.

  I wasn’t really lured by the thought of getting rich the way he was. No, it was the illusions and lives he created for himself, and the manipulations of people I found so fascinating. That was his trick I longed to study. The power he had over them, the spell he cast, that was what I was after. His world was the strangest place in the wide, wide universe, and I was happy to be a part of it while I could.

  While I could.

  The damning prologue and epilogue of my whole life. Everything has its seasons, but mine are always unfairly shorter than others.

  I knew now what I was, at least in part, and I knew some morning I would wake to a new place and new people, no Solomon, no gypsy wagon, no sideshow crowds, no crown of ivy leaves twisted in my yellow hair. The knowledge gave me more intensity to learn what I could from Solomon, as quickly as I could, before I would be forced to leave him forever. He called me his “odd little goose,” then “little goose,” then just “Goose.”

  “Goose,” he’d say. “People are like sheep. And you and me? We’re the big, bad wolves. And that’s nothing to be ashamed of, now is it?”

  I’d shake my head obediently. My ivy drooped into my eyes and I pushed it back onto my head. I needed a mother to properly pin my hair, but I had no mother. Bertha wouldn’t come near me, and Gertie had no gift for beautifying anyone. And Solomon was just an overgrown boy.

  “Cuz some people have to be the sheep, and some have to be the wolves, and Goose, wouldn’t you rather be the one who has all the power? I know I would. I would indeed.”

  “I would indeed, too,” I answered. “Anyway, I like wolves better.”

  I ran home last night, pell-mell, through the darkness, though I felt like a fool for doing so. Yes, I could not explain the diary suddenly leaving my hands and hurling through the air; neither could I explain the message left on the wall, but my analytical and scientific mind simply could not process what I had experienced this night. I was not ready to believe in ghosts, and, more to the point, I was not eager to prove myself wrong. I only knew I would never tell a soul what went on there that night, or they might lock me up, too.

  So, I try not to think of it at all and lose myself in Rose’s accounts of her strange, sad life. I am not prepared to believe every fantastic word she writes—a mind as disturbed as hers must have been, cannot be trusted—but it is certainly addictive reading at its finest, especially when the only other book I have is a medical dictionary. Not riveting midnight reading that, even to a nurse like me. So, though my gooseflesh has not yet dissipated, I read on and am shocked when the sunlight streams through my window. I have only read but a few pages! Had my nighttime adventure taken so long that I have missed sleep altogether?

  This is shockingly bad news for me, as I have a huge load of work for me at the new hospital.

  I really am a nitwit.

  ********************

  My work day dawns as full of doom as I thought it might. I am completely exhausted, really dead to the world, and my limbs feel like week-old porridge. I yawn constantly and don’t even bother to hide it, and Miss Helmes simply stares at me with her pursed lip way, and frowns, as though I am a great burden to her, her Christian cross to bear.

  The new hospital is grand, and everything, of course, shines. Naturally, it does, as the inmates (patients, I mean) haven’t had the time to mess it all up. There is new staff as well, and they are just as shiny and polished. I can’t help rolling my eyes at their naiveté. “Wait till the first one vomits on you or grabs you by your hair,” I think. “You won’t be so chipper then.”

  Mina is there, cheeks flushed, eyes bright, full of energy. Well, of course she is; she didn’t go traipsing through London at midnight, breaking into buildings and having odd supernatural adventures. She probably went to bed at a decent hour and slept like a baby all night long. I really must try to be more like Mina, ladylike and dear and wonderful. I wonder what she would do with the diary—most likely hand it over to Miss Helmes, I suppose—and I’m quite sure she’d never feel the compulsion to read it. I don’t want to read it either, not exactly, but I feel I must.

  Mr. Limpet is very excited to see me again, and he goes on and on about dancing and parties. The poor man has been here off and on for many, many years. Just when his family thinks he’s doing well at home, wham bam, here comes another bout of what they like to call his “spells,” and he’s back wandering the halls in his creaky wheelchair. This has been going on for most of his sorry life, I gather. He eats a biscuit slowly, and while he talks to me and follows me around while I’m working, the crumbs and spittle fall down into his lap. So, I try to keep my eyes on my task, changing the bed sheets in all the rooms, like a maid. Oh, how I long for a good, gory surgery or a broken bone or some suturing!

  “And during the war we didn’t have no sugar,” he went on, and I hear him chewing behind me. He passes to swallow noisily. “Remember when everyone threw the pie at each other because it tasted so awful? Do you remember, girl?”

  “No, Mr. Limpet, I wasn’t alive during the war. I’m not yet eighteen,” I sigh, but then I feel bad for being so peevish, and I turn to smile gently at him.

  “Oh.” His face falls. “Oh.”

  “But that sounds like a lovely memory. What kind of pie was it?”

  “It was berry,” he mumbles, and I hear his chair creak as he turns to leave me at last. “It was a berry pie. Tart them berries were. Needed sugar.” His voice begins to fade as he turns the corner. “They didn’t put no sugar in our pie. Don’t know why you don’t remember. Hard to forget a pie like that.” The last think I hear from him is his barking laugh echoing down the hall, and then, mercifully, he is gone.

  I tuck in the last corner as tight as possible and flip the thin blanket up in the air. Orphanage living taught me excellent bed making skills and you could bounce a coin off my smooth beds. Up in the air, billowing down, up in the air, crack go my wrists as I yank it down, and it settles perfectly into place.

  At the end of that year, we grew into something more than a magic show, potion peddlers, and freak exhibits, and began to advertise ourselves as something of a circus sideshow, albeit the world’s smallest. Not enough to draw large crowds and not enough to make plenty of money, but we still honed our skills as bizarre and stupendous and miraculous and not to be missed. Our tent would go up—with a crack of our wrists—on our tiny stage, and suddenly we weren’t just a strange band of misfits, but a professional group of entertainers. We had no name, we had no reputation, we had no expectations, and therefore, we had freedom.
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br />   Solomon stuck to his potions and gimmicks, and I stuck by Solomon. The others could do their tricks and their performances, their silly shows, their oddities of bodies, but we… we were the ones not to be missed on those hot summer nights.

  I did not know the exact date then, and I do not know it now, looking back. I didn’t care. What did it matter anyway?

  Time meant little to me then, and it means even less to me now. A ridiculous institution, time. It’s beneath me.

  Solomon began to take an interest in me, finally, as I’ve already said. He taught me to distract an audience and how to turn their eyes towards something unimportant so that I could slip jewelry from their necks or money from their pockets. I could palm a lady’s hairpiece away in an instant, and she’d be never the wiser until she returned home and took up her brush before bed. I could lift a pocket watch easily and so quickly that the gentleman would never even miss it for hours.

  All this of course, was petty thievery. But it was a good way to make a living, better than most.

  Somewhere along the way, we had acquired a bear. A silly thing, mild mannered, old as Methuselah, a reject from some circus where he had once ridden unicycles in all his glory or some such idiotic contradiction. His fur smelled, and his claws were long and black, and all in all, he was frail, not fearsome. Still, he was a bear, and some odd perversion of nature requires mankind to revere, love, and finally dominate a wild thing. It knew stupid tricks and performed for fish. I had no respect for him, but the tiny crowds we drew loved him and indeed, so did the others in our troupe.