The Twisted Tragedy of Miss Natalie Stewart Read online

  “Why man does any unnatural thing,” Blessing replied. “He was driven by love, hate, or fear. What makes this so terrible is that I think this was originally love.”

  “Why would reanimation be useful to the Master’s Society?” I asked. “I’m sure the Majesty is hardly lovesick for some dead princess—”

  “Did you see the effect the body had?” Jonathon said. “Not only was it flesh that they might command, but it knocked us all out. It also affected a whole floor above us, and I hardly think that was at full capacity. Let’s hope they’re not on an industrial scale with their experiments.” Surely he thought of Samuel and that Preston had mentioned other doctors. What terrible acts of love and grief may result in scenes like this elsewhere? “A creature like this could wreak havoc in a town, entirely overturning the natural order of things.”

  On its own, the door to Room 01 opened again, reminding us we were not finished here.

  “Not to mention the poltergeists,” Blessing murmured, staring ahead into the room. Everything inside—the sheet, the equipment, the bottles, the wires, all of it—floated.

  “What now?” Jonathon asked wearily.

  “Ghosts can affect objects to get our attention,” Blessing explained. “It’s our attention they want, not the room or you, Miss Horowitz. Their bodies were used for ill, and their spirits pulled from rest. They’re scared and confused. We must bury their ashes in consecrated ground. Miss Horowitz…” He turned to her, and I gestured for her to look up at him. “I do not wish to make assumptions, but are you Jewish?”

  Rachel nodded.

  “The spirits,” he said. “Do you have a sense of their faiths?”

  “Some Yiddish,” Rachel signed. I translated aloud. “The rest, I sense, Christian.”

  “So for our Jewish friends,” Blessing continued, “may they rest in peace, as we move about our tasks. Miss Horowitz, please add anything from your faith you deem appropriate. The more prayers the better, and the more tailored to the needs of the spirit—”

  Rachel nodded. She stood straighter, her dazed eyes becoming more focused. I remembered the same shift in Jonathon. When he’d solved a piece of his own puzzle and had a task to do, he was less oppressed by his condition and more empowered, more alive, more effective.

  Mr. Smith entered with a box of glass jars. Blessing beamed at him. “Mr. Smith, you read my mind.”

  Blessing moved to each of us, anointing our foreheads with oil. He offered Rachel blessing in what I assumed was Hebrew. She clasped onto the Star of David tucked beneath the lace of her dress. I pressed my own talisman, a small silver cross gifted to me by the Immanuel congregation at first communion that I often wore against my skin.

  As Blessing began to murmur benedictions to calm the spirits, Jonathon winced and hissed, suddenly shielding his face and giving me a start. “Sorry,” he said. “You’re all glowing.”

  There was a pause. “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “The light again. I see it when someone is about to affect something or become important. Natalie, you’ve a trace of your colors again. It’s beautiful, really.”

  “You see the truth of the matter, Lord Denbury, the true spirit of things,” Blessing said, smiling suddenly. “Well, then, let there be light!”

  There came a terrible crash as the metal table overturned. Ash flew everywhere, and we all clapped our hands to our mouths and fumbled for handkerchiefs. None of us desired to breathe in the dead. The surrounding equipment shook and buzzed. Sparks flew from whatever still carried a charge. A few bottles of chemicals crashed and shattered against the wall, making our jobs infinitely more difficult.

  Mr. Smith had hardly said a word, eerie in and of itself, but he made himself useful by taking all objects that could be projectiles out of the room. The ash was settling enough for us to not breathe it in.

  Blessing calmly repeated the Lord’s Prayer, then Psalm 23, the verse apropos:

  “Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death…”

  And we fell in with him as we all gathered ash into the jars. Rachel had steeled herself, and even though she shook and was surely receiving an onslaught of anger, she remained upright and forced her eyes to focus. She kept pressing the corners of her embroidered handkerchief with symbols on the edges.

  She glanced over at me, seeing me squinting at the symbols, and she signed to me: “Hebrew. It means life.” And she continued breathing in, through life, filtering out the ash of death.

  As I continued sifting ash into bottles, I repeated the Lord’s Prayer as many times as I could. Rachel had tied her handkerchief around her mouth and was signing rapidly. I couldn’t make out any of it, so I assumed she was spelling out words relative to the spirits who shared her faith.

  “Release your anger and be done with it. Be done with this world,” Blessing cried, flipping open his Common Book of Prayer to bestow rites. He ducked out of the way of an airborne bottle Mr. Smith had missed.

  It was probably only a few minutes in that godforsaken room, but it felt like an hour. The bulk of the ash contained, Blessing ushered us back out. He kept the door open and dispersed holy water. He spoke a message of good news and benedictions of peace in a soothing voice that was not banishing devils but in fact begging for tranquility.

  “I go now to take your ashes to hallowed ground, restless souls. Permit us to give you respect.”

  After a long moment the table stopped shuddering on the ground, the equipment stopped shaking on its hinges, wires stopped swaying. There was silence. No more screaming upstairs. Peace.

  No, not silence. Not entirely. There it was again, the whispering, the low, droning chant. It had been there all along; we were just too distracted by everything else. Did the wind pick up? Was there a storm outside? I couldn’t tell if I was hearing it in my own ears, like sounds underwater, or if it was external, like thunder. But it was familiar.

  “Do you hear that?” I asked, a hand out to steady myself on the doorframe. It was the same noise from my dreams.

  “Hear what?” Jonathon asked.

  “The murmuring. Whispers. Chanting? It’s getting louder. Don’t you hear anything?”

  “No, why—”

  A jolt of pain ripped through my body and I screamed. It felt like someone was peeling my skin from my arms. I dropped to my knees as everyone stared at me in horror. No one else was affected. I saw Jonathon dive for me, and that’s the last thing I could remember.

  Chapter 22

  Some part of me knew I was unconscious as I saw the corridor.

  It was the recurring corridor of my dreams. This time it was marked with light and shadowy threads. Thin sparkling vertical lines, thousands of them, each shaded differently. I’d seen this in a dream before with Jonathon, but this time I was on my own. The corridor went on indefinitely, but before I could explore I heard a whisper. Not a maddening cluster, but just one. One soft, kind, loving Whisper.

  The Whisper, the one from my mother. This time I heard her clearly. She said, “Hold on.”

  On each side of the hallway were open doors. Countless doors with windows onto the world, so many choices, thousands of diverging courses. Here a meadow with children running. There a battlefield. Here a family dinner. There a first kiss. Here a brawl. There a last breath. Deep darkness lay ahead of me and darkness lay behind me.

  I watched the entities around me, dizzying flickering lines. Each thread was like a spirit or its own force of nature, weaving in and out around one another and pulsing at these doorways. Then at once they all converged on me, light and shadow.

  “Hold on, I’m here,” I heard the Whisper say. I didn’t want to leave that voice. I didn’t want to leave her…

  A deep breath of something sharp and pungent roused me with a coughing choke.

  My eyes opened to see Jonathon before me, only this time he held a fancy bottle of ladies’ smelling salts beneath my nose, not some random hospital compound. I was in a boudoir I recognized: upstairs in Mrs. Northe’s home.


  “Thank you,” I murmured and took stock of my body. “My arms hurt.” I glanced down at my blue blouse. No obvious damage, but my skin tingled strangely, my arms burning as if wounded under the surface. “What was that about?”

  “I don’t know. Everything was finally quiet at the hospital, resolved, really, but then you heard chanting and blacked out. Maybe everything we’ve been through built up like a toxin in your body, all the magic and ritual. Since you’d been subjected to so much already, perhaps your body and consciousness was at a breaking point—”

  I grimaced. “Maybe I wasn’t fully rid of it before throwing myself back in the center. That must be why a dream could wound me, why magic could reach up like a surging tide to drag me under.”

  Jonathon kissed my forehead. “I’ll never let it take you.”

  “Where are Reverend Blessing and Rachel? Mr. Smith?”

  “Smith helped me bring you here, drove while I held you. Now he’s keeping watch on the house. Remind me to ask Mrs. Northe where on earth she picked him up. I still don’t know what to think about him.”

  “Useful, though I think that’s why he’s around.”

  “Blessing and Rachel have gone to place the ashes in consecrated ground. He mentioned visiting a rabbi friend of his as well. I imagine that will take up most of their day. How are you feeling?”

  I nuzzled against him, kissing his cheek softly with a thankful prayer. He always reminded me of what was good and true in the world against such dark, draining magic. Surely not all magic was dark, though. Love was magic.

  “Do you remember anything?” Jonathon asked. “You were murmuring, like chanting, but I couldn’t make any of it out.”

  I told him about what I’d just seen, about Mother’s voice, about the entities that turned to swarm over me.

  “As you fainted,” Jonathon said carefully. “I saw red and gold fire surround you, signs of the dark magic.”

  I clutched at Jonathon’s lapels. “Could the demon still be active? How do you really kill a thing like that? And why am I in such pain if I’m not bleeding?” I asked, itching at my forearm. I spoke too soon.

  My fingernail came away bloody, a dark splotch pooling upon the light blue linen.

  “Oh, God,” I moaned. “Jonathon…what’s…”

  “I can hazard a guess,” he said grimly. I knew it too. He tore my sleeves open.

  Runes. So many of them. Carved into my arm lightly, on the surface but bloodier than before. It had happened to Jonathon during his curse, and now it was happening to me. And this, this wasn’t just a few characters. This was the whole message. It began with the same few runes but now took up both of my forearms. He dashed into the hall.

  “Make it stop,” I cried, reaching out for him. From the bathroom I heard the rummaging of glass.

  Make it stop. I saw those words, saw Rachel signing them to me, saw them emblazoned upon the desk, upon the downstairs sheet all in blood. It’s all we wanted, all of us drawn into this mad quest. Just stop…It was enough to drive someone mad ten times over.

  Evil was inflicted upon me, manifest by forces I couldn’t see, forces that wanted to drag me to the depths rather than let me live in the light. I couldn’t even bat the tears from my eyes, too scared to bring the bloody markings closer to me. Jonathon was upon me again in the instant, mixing an ointment with a clear fluid on a ball of cotton.

  “This will sting,” he said calmly, taking my arms and laving them with the swab. The pain of his tincture wasn’t any worse than the pain of the wounds, and I was so grateful for his touch, to have him taking care of me, that I didn’t mind.

  He kissed my palms. “Come now, Natalie. What did we say to your nightmares? What do we say to devils?”

  “I renounce thee,” I said. He said it with me.

  The markings immediately began to recede. Jonathon turned over the swab that should have been bloody but wasn’t.

  “Quick, Jonathon, write down the markings before they’re gone,” I insisted.

  We were in a woman’s sphere, so the boudoir had a lush Turkish suite made surely for love letters, with cards and a fountain pen. Jonathon snatched up a paper and wrote out the sequence of the runic letters on one arm, then the other. Hardly a love note.

  “I renounce thee,” I said again to the magic. My breath fell over the letters. With a shimmer of red light, the demons’ calling card, the markings, faded entirely as if I’d dreamed them up. I peered closer at my now smooth forearm. I glanced up at Jonathon sheepishly. “Tell me you saw them—”

  He held up the paper of markings to prove it.

  I threw my arms around him. “Thank you for taking care of me.”

  “It is my greatest pleasure.” He eased me back onto the divan so he could gaze down at me, stroking my hair with one hand as I kept hold of the other and kissed it. “Care for tea or coffee?”

  “Earl Grey, please,” I said. “You’ve made me a fan.” I drew him toward me, breathing him in. “It smells of you, and I cannot get enough…”

  He leaned in, kissed me tenderly.

  “Were you left alone to tend to me?” I breathed in his ear. “We’ve no chaperone.” I nibbled down his neck, loosening his cravat so that I might trail kisses lower. He moaned softly. “Someday we won’t have to steal moments like these—”

  We were interrupted by a familiar cry from downstairs. “Will someone tell me where on earth my daughter has gone? Again?” came the exasperated cry of my father.

  “Hello, Mr. Stewart,” I heard Mary say. “She’s here. She had a nasty fall. Lost consciousness. Lord Denbury is looking after her.”

  “I’ll bet he is.”

  “Oh, but he’s a doctor, sir.”

  “Where’s Evelyn?”

  “Gone to Chicago. On emergency. Her friend Florence—”

  “Is ailing. Yes, I know. Oh, that’s a shame. I’d have gone with her,” he said quietly. He sounded lost. “May I see my daughter, please?”

  “Have you woken our fair sleeping beauty, Prince Denbury?” Mary called at the top of the stair.

  “Sleeping Beauty was awoken with a kiss,” I murmured and drew him down to give me one.

  “Yes,” Jonathon called finally. “I think I’ve roused her.”

  “I’ll say,” I teased.

  “Naughty,” he whispered.

  “It’s your fault,” I countered.

  Looking up from the divan, I saw my father in the doorway, arms folded. “Well then, what was that about?”

  “Did you say there was tea for us, Lord Denbury?” I asked, bouncing to my feet. “Hello, Father!” I kissed him on the cheek and descended to Mrs. Northe’s library.

  “I see the good doctor took quite good care of her,” my father said wearily, as if he’d given up on us being found in “proper” conditions. He followed behind me, Jonathon in step behind him.

  “I’d give my life for her, sir,” he replied.

  “Oh, come now. Don’t be overdramatic,” my father said. “Natalie, what happened? You lost consciousness?”

  “Do you want the truth or a lie?”

  “The…truth,” Father responded, but clearly he wasn’t sure what he wanted.

  “Lord Denbury, please sit with Father and tell him what happened today while I decipher what the demon carved on my arms.”

  A sound of shock squeaked from my father’s mouth. “Maybe I don’t want to know,” he said as Jonathon led him into the parlor.

  Most New York citizens of fair breeding sat in their parlors and talked about the weather or perhaps a play they might have seen or the new exhibits at our lovely Metropolitan or whether there would indeed be a subway system and whether they would do something about the noise and all the steam. Instead, we talk about omens and possessions as if they were sports teams. Poor Father, I’m sure he went green.

  In the library, the volume of runes was lying out for me, as if Mrs. Northe had known I’d need it. I stared at the book and the correlating alphabet, then back at the note
card with the message. Dread slithered in my stomach like a snake uncoiling to stalk prey. Roughly, the phantom carvings on my arm translated to: I am coming for you.

  The book fell from my hands, and I tried not to faint. Twice in one day was already trying enough.

  The demon wanted to make sure it was unmistakable. This was separate from the business with Preston and Rachel; this was an earlier vendetta. All the rest was a distraction, deadly for certain, but not as personal. This danger I had no idea how to fight. Was it in my mind, manifesting outward? To destroy it, did I have to destroy myself? I needed water. I needed to sit.

  As I entered the parlor with this warning, Jonathon was explaining to my father. “I think it was a message,” he stated, trying to put meaning to what had taken me under. “A warning. The demon we bested might still attempt revenge. Natalie awoke with…markings on her arm. Like what was carved into the arms of the victims.”

  I held up the note card, my shaky translation written below.

  “‘I am coming for you,’” I said, trying to keep my voice from breaking. “That’s what my arms said.”

  Father stood as if he couldn’t bear any more of this. I stared at him. Perhaps my face was haunted. Or calm. Or uncanny. Something about me made him sit again.

  “Something’s still out there,” I stated. “And it’s angry with me.”

  “Wire Evelyn. Get that priest back here,” Father choked. “I want you under constant guard.”

  “The forces the Master’s Society called upon aren’t necessarily corporeal,” I said with a shrug. “Hard to know what to guard.”

  “Why?” my father asked, trying to process. “Why do what that doctor did? And why this?” He gestured to me, to the ominous message. “Such devilish things. Unseen enemies that defy rational explanation.”

  “The people who…attacked me,” Jonathon explained, “were interested in gaining power over me and my estate, yes, but also in the unnatural limits of what they could do. The darkest science is their aim. To what end we can’t say.”

  There was a strained pause.

  “This isn’t over for you.” Father stared at me in awe and pity. “What’s coming for you, Natalie?”