The Eterna Solution Read online

  “Come see,” Fred said before turning to Clara. “I know you’ve your limits, Miss Clara, due to your condition, but Reverend Blessing sure could use some help. The poor man hasn’t had a good night’s sleep since this began.”

  “He and I worked hard to settle the dead,” Stevens explained, “then just when we would think it over, one of the patrolmen says another one is shambling across the green again. We don’t know who’s been winding them up and setting them loose.”

  Lord Black steadied Miss Knight, who seemed overwhelmed by what she was sensing from the green. On her other side, Evelyn offered grim guidance.

  “I wish I could say it gets easier to hear them. It doesn’t. All you can do is try to get used to it.” Knight nodded, her lovely face blanched.

  Resolute, the team moved through the campus, turning a corner around a stately neoclassical building to confront a field of four patchwork corpses standing and swaying, draped in ragged, blood- and tar-stained medical gowns.

  Spire let out a quiet curse. Rose put a perfumed handkerchief to her nose to block the overpowering stench of moldering decay, soot, steam, formaldehyde, and other embalming fluids. Clara drew a sharp breath and Bishop placed a steadying hand at her elbow, energizing her with the anchor of his presence.

  The patchwork nature of the bodies was evident in the large, inelegant stitches binding sections of yellowed skin together. The air around them shimmered with bright auras, the spirits of the dead tethered to the parts of their bodies melded in each terrible golem. Their ghostly sparks, the last gasps of their life force, served as the igniting strike of the dread match that powered these beings into shambling momentum.

  But what a champion stood before them.

  * * *

  Clara’s sensitivities were in awe of the sheer power radiating from Reverand Blessing’s body. At the center of the courtyard surrounded by grand buildings surmounted by statues of philosophical greats and quotes of enlightenment stood a brown-skinned man whose tight brown curls were peppered with gray, his black suit coat dusted with ash and smeared with God knows what. His arms were held wide and his voice boomed scripture.

  A dash of dark crimson marred the reverend’s white cleric’s collar but he did not appear to be injured otherwise. Clara took note of the mark to make sure it did not spread.

  Two shambling corpses in bedraggled medical gowns, jaws hanging open in an unnatural scream, shambled toward him. Their banshee wails were horrid death knells seeking to disassemble the mind and to sow the seeds of hopelessness. The Master’s Society had created them for the purposes of supernatural terrorism. They carried ghosts attached to their patchwork parts; the specters’ siren wails a harrowing effect of the system that made the bodies animate.

  The reverend swayed almost in the exact rhythm of the corpses, moving either with the power of the spirit or from sheer exhaustion. His strong arms lifted again into the air as he recited another verse from the Book of Common Prayer in a compelling voice.

  Blessing was a man with a heart as vast as the pain and torture of his ancestors was wide, ever choosing love over bitterness, a man who bore his duties as an exorcist as calmly and efficiently as he supplied his congregations with what suited their diverse needs. For all Eterna’s respective powers, he was as equally armed with faith and fearless conviction.

  A few new shocks of those telling gray hairs were invading around the reverend’s hairline and temples, more than when they’d left for England.

  Evelyn strode up beside him to bolster his work and began admonishing the bodies with renouncements of evil pulled from the Christian scriptures and those of other faiths. As New York was as diverse a city as any in the world, so were its ghosts. Evelyn’s appearance prompted an intense, bright smile from the reverend; his relief was immediately palpable in both face and body. Clara could almost feel his tension ease.

  Clara made for Blessing’s other side but Rose held her back a moment. “Are you breathing?” she asked gently. “Do you have your balance?”

  It was so important she take stock before a supernatural or spiritual battle; Clara lost track of her seizure protocols and countdowns if she didn’t take the moment to center, ground, and shield as Rose was encouraging her to do. The soul energy that connected them as reunited twins was such a vital tether for Clara. She nodded and offered Rose a smile, which she then turned on Bishop, who watched their exchange. With these loved ones near, Clara felt doubly protected.

  “If I were to shoot the bodies—” Spire said, striding forward and withdrawing his pistol.

  “No,” the reverend and Evelyn said together.

  Evelyn explained. “They’re already dead, it won’t affect them. We have to untether the spirits. When we do so, the bodies slow, still, and become inert.”

  “Very well. But them mauling us in the meantime also isn’t an option,” he said, looking around. Spotting an area where some maintenance was being done, he stormed over and returned with a rope in hand. He tied a quick, noose-like knot and slung the loop around the neck of a burly, vacant-eyed man whose arms came from another corpse.

  Moving quickly and avoiding the grasping hands of the shambling dead, he circled the nearest corpses with the rope, gathering them in like a shepherd until they were bound together. Even as the reanimate strained against the rope, Spire tied it off with impressive nautical knots.

  “That does make our task much easier,” Blessing said. “We can direct our energies against them in groups and worry less about being attacked. Thank you, Mr. Spire. Any scrap of attention I can spare is enough to keep me going that much longer.…”

  Pleased, Spire looked around for other useful things; the paranormal nature of this task clearly made him uncomfortable.

  As Clara feared, their presence attracted the specters’ attention. While the banshee wails could unravel any person’s sanity, the ghosts attached to each body also served as a siren call. Another body came around a corner and onto the green.

  “How many are there?” Spire said incredulously, gritting his teeth.

  Clara’s mind swam. With at least five ghosts attendant to each assembled body, the spiritual “noise” was overwhelming. Rose’s and Bishop’s white-knuckled clamp on her arms would only keep her from seizing if she could access their aid.

  She closed her eyes to stay focused. You’re at the center of the storm. Be worthy of the squall.… The voice of the visitor, the ineffable Marlowe, cut through the banshee wail. Thinking of herself as a column of fire, she tried to expand a barrier ring around herself, creating a psychic shield that flew out in all directions, a habit she used to break away from cloying, negative energies.

  As she did, everything went suddenly still and quiet; she could feel time, space, sound, and energy take on a different weight, tone, and density. There was a familiar hum she’d come to know as the sound of the ley lines. Fifth Avenue was just beyond. In that hum was so much life …

  Her past selves began to peel away as if she were shedding layers of clothing, stretching out from her in concentric circles. One by one, pasts floated out like petals escaping the tight bud of a rose.

  If she hadn’t had these dear souls of Rose and Bishop to keep hold of her as anchors for her soul, perhaps she’d have peeled off into time, wafted away into her pasts like a feather taken by a gust and buffeted into another life.

  She stared at her selves. There was a woman in a robe, perhaps druidic, who held her hands up to the sky and seemed to be deep in a prayer or rite. There was an Elizabethan man who pored over maps and charts. An eighteenth-century ship captain was peering through a long telescope. An early nineteenth-century young girl in a white Regency gown had a pen in hand and was feverishly writing as if her very life depended on it.

  All these lives searching, searching, creating, willing this current self into existence. This extension of her soul captured the interest of the ghosts themselves.

  Caught where sound was slow and underwater, Clara heard scripture and holy text from al
l backgrounds, peppered in with what names Evelyn could glean as the gifted medium she was, assisted by Miss Knight, the flamboyant psychic having found her sea legs, the two of them holding hands to magnify their connection as they tried to get as much out of the specters as they possibly could. They encouraged each spirit to uncouple itself from the vile desecration it had been cleaved to.

  The ghosts spoke back, in whispers, in aching pleas. Clara had to block them out, pretend she didn’t hear them as she could feel her body go into its three-minute countdown until a seizure.

  While those in touch with the paranormal were focused on the reanimate, Harold Spire focused on the surroundings. One of the college hall doors a few paces away was open, and he strode toward it. Turning back to Rose, he called out.

  “I’m going in for anything useful,” Spire declared before disappearing under the eaves. Effie and Fred went inside with him.

  The chemist Stevens, undaunted and steadfast in his reformed spirit, had gone to retrieve a box from the chemistry department. He then returned to light a sequence of Wards that he and Blessing had managed to corral for this ongoing task and getting them as close as he could to the bodies, putting some directly in the grass to burn and smoke their power, though the corpses all tried to knock them over or snuff them, clearly averse to the protective nature of the Wards.

  Clara’s lengthening of time allowed for this interchange to go forward with more success.

  Lord Black, interestingly enough, was going around to various flower beds around the grounds and laying bouquets directly on the laps of those bodies that had sunk to the ground, or tucking little makeshift bundles into their ragged clothes. In some cases he placed certain leaves found on the grounds along with the stems.

  This was a curious development, and made Clara wonder, in this mental space where expansive thought was at its most inspired, about the many pots of ivy back in Black’s mansion. His own personal magic of flora and fauna was coming into its own. She would have to ask him about this when they had a quiet moment together.

  Spire returned with Effie and Fred, carrying more material to bind bodies, and they saw to securing those that remained and helping Stevens with Wards. Everything was now within the center of the green and more manageable. Evelyn, Blessing, and Knight stood as a powerful trio around the growing knot of faltering dead, some on their knees, some lying down, others pawing at one another.

  Swiveling her head, trying to catch something in her peripheral vision, she noticed something new.

  To her left and right, there was a gray area, a long rectangular swath where it looked like the world was blotted out in those monolithic sections. She wondered if it was an intrusion of the spirit world, for it had the same kind of colorless quality that ghosts had when they appeared to her eye. There was nothing she could discern within those rectangular swaths, but they stood sentry on the horizon line of her many selves. Perhaps they had been there all along, and as she was becoming accustomed to this ability of hers, she might be noticing details that had always been present but that she’d been too focused on her lives to see. Was she opening herself directly to the spirit world?

  Regardless, she could feel that there were more ghosts on this campus green than she should entertain an audience of, filling up the whole space around them. Her body was well aware of the danger.

  A second wave of seizure symptoms accosted Clara, and she swayed on her feet as her vision went dim and the sounds, muted and faraway as they were in these elongated moments, were cut into abrupt silence. The extension of her lives snapped back into her as if she were slapped, an echoing slamming of a cosmic door that stung all over.

  She could hear Rose cry out and in moments she and Bishop had led Clara to a park bench at the edge of the green, near enough but out of the direct pressure and thrall of the reanimate.

  “Breathe,” Bishop commanded, pressing a hand directly onto her sternum and channeling power through her in a laying on of hands.

  A wrenching gasp tore from Clara’s lungs and she breathed deeply, involuntarily, sucking in the scent of death and preservation. The sharp, disgusting nature of it acted like sick smelling salts and her eyes fluttered open.

  “We’ve turned the tide, Clara,” Bishop insisted. “Thank you for your spell. The very breadth and gravity of you makes all realms open up to us, to our advantage. I don’t know how you do it.”

  “I’m not sure I do either,” Clara murmured, “but I am glad it is useful. I want to hone it.”

  “For the moment, take pride in the powers themselves,” he bid. She nodded. Rose squeezed her shoulder in agreement.

  The reanimated bodies all lay slumped, finally, as if they were asleep. Spire wasted not a moment in making methodical rounds, undaunted by the idea of touching death, straightening each into a peaceful, respectful position, closing their swollen, blackened eyes. Fred and Lord Black followed his lead. Effie hung back, eyes closed, either in prayer or to shut out the horror that had grown too intense.

  Reverend Blessing followed to pray over each body, his patience and energy as boundless as the scope of his heart. While most of his invocations were Christian, he offered Hebraic and Islamic blessings as well, learned from his friends and colleagues of other Abrahamic faiths. Listening to him calmed Clara and made her clenching heart relax. Somehow Miss Knight had managed to scare up candles, which she lit near the bodies in an additional bid for spiritual peace; a spot of gold against a gray day.

  “Reverend, Mr. Spire, everyone, step back,” Evelyn said urgently, grabbing Miss Knight and pushing her toward Clara. “You know what the spirits, collectively, will wish to do.…”

  “Ah, yes,” the reverend said sadly. “Unfortunately I do recall this finale. Everyone, be aware, there’s about to be quite a fire.”

  A vibration crested in the air, culminating in the assembly of bodies bursting into flames. They burned quickly, the embalming fluids acting as accelerant. The stench was overwhelming and everyone had to breathe through kerchiefs for the minutes it took the bodies to become ash. They did not dare leave the scene until all was finished, no matter how gruesome.

  Fred and Effie had retreated to the gate, arm in arm, hands to their mouths and noses. Spire approached Clara, thankfully downwind of the spontaneous pyre of bodies.

  “I assume that at least parts of these bodies were pulled from the Trinity churchyard disruption mentioned in that first telegram for help?” Spire asked

  “I assume so,” Senator Bishop replied. “But not every grave was unearthed; the unsettling there was piecemeal. Here, there are too many disparate parts for Trinity to have been the sole source, I hate to say.”

  “The rest likely came from here,” Spire declared, brandishing a yellow paper marked with a corporate, pyramid logo. “I found this inside on a board.” The billet read:

  ANATOMY AND SURGERY ENTHUSIASTS:

  The Apex Corporation can provide you with a reliable supply of human body parts managed ethically and responsibly. See the wonders of electricity on human tissue when Columbia showcases its first electrical turbine, its power solely for your use. Harness life and death in your hands today. Write to Postbox 99 in this area to request further details. The top of the future’s pyramid begins with you.

  “I’ll investigate that postal box as soon as possible,” Spire stated. Rose caught his eye and nodded her agreement. “But we’re losing light now and those offices will be closed.”

  “To whom do we trust the interring of these ashes?” Lord Black asked.

  “I’ll … I will deal with it,” the reverend replied. “The pastor at Trinity, a fellow Episcopalian, has aided me before and is open-minded about such matters as these.”

  Spire said, “For now, lock the gates again and cover the remains with burlap; it will appear to the casual observer to be renovations until the premises can be fully cleaned.”

  “Considering that posting,” Black began, “where, and who are, the ‘doctors’ that did this?”

  “I
’ll make inquiries,” Stevens offered. “Academics prefer speaking to their own, as this is the chemistry department. Just as soon as I’ve gathered the final ingredients to put out any last troublesome flickers of Lady Liberty’s foul fire.” He smiled at Clara. “Somewhere between magic and science we’ll best these moral offenses once and for all.”

  She tried to return the smile and share in his hope, but her memory was jogged by the chemistry department. Barnard Smith, Louis’s partner in the Eterna Commission, might they both rest in peace. He had once had an office in this building; Clara had visited it, seeking more documentation on the Wards. Was Barnard’s spirit somehow wrapped up in all this? Or was there an instinct for these haunted creatures to remain near already haunted spaces?

  Clara put her hand on Evelyn’s and suggested the medium reach out to his spirit.

  “I will try, when the effects of all this have passed,” Evelyn said, staring at the ghastly assemblage of death. “I understand the Society tempting isolated doctors to this Frankenstein witchcraft, but a whole class of them? This couldn’t have been the work of just one or two lost souls.”

  “It is the greatest lure of all, is it not?” Clara murmured, shifting on the bench, pressing against the stays of her corset so the muscles of her back wouldn’t spasm when she undressed. “To find the cure for death, to resurrect the dead. It was the very start of Eterna, after all, and remains one of mankind’s perpetual desires.”

  No one argued her point.

  * * *

  Evelyn insisted, as they were not far from her home, that she host as many as wished, for an evening refreshment as night was falling. Blessing and Stevens recused themselves to hours of overdue sleep.

  Clara felt like she was walking with leaden feet, but she kept a cheerful face for her compatriots, as every action and battle they faced together made her care all the more for each and every one. Bishop didn’t seem to mind that she leaned on him a bit more than ever before, and in fact he quite encouraged it.