The Empty Grave

by Jonathan Stroud

  “Oh, he read that, did he?” the woman said. She tapped her fingers on her knee.

  I nodded. “Your ‘elixir of youth,’ Marissa. We know you’ve made your body young again. We know you faked the life of Penelope Fittes to explain your reappearance. And we’ve seen the nets you use on the Other Side to get the plasm, the cylinders you store it in….The only thing we haven’t figured out is what you do with the plasm once you’ve got it. Do you drink it, breathe it in, rub it on your backside like an ointment? What?”

  “Drink it,” the woman said. “Or that’s the theory.”

  “How unutterably foul.” I raised my sword in the direction of the floating spirit. It was perfectly still, except for the golden rays that flickered gently at Marissa’s back. Two dark gold eyes watched me from the center of its radiance. “George told us about your advisor, too,” I said. “He told us about Ezekiel.”

  At this, the spirit stirred; the rays flexed and brightened. A strong breeze rippled out across the room. It lifted the edges of the papers on the desk, and riffled the corners of magazines on the far tables. A soft and velvet voice, somehow golden like the light, came from the shape. It said: “Is this the girl?”

  The woman looked up at her companion; there was adoration in her face, but also wariness, even fear. “It is, Ezekiel.”

  “She is stubborn. Intractable.”

  “She has the gift.”

  “Maybe so. But how does she use it? See the kind of spirits she consorts with.” A ray of light stabbed out and prodded the ghost-jar under my arm. “This monstrosity, this coarse and loathsome thing…”

  The skull gave a cry. “What? Come in here and say that! I’ll wipe my feet on your ectoplasm! I’ll tear you up and use you for toilet paper! Coarse? How dare you!”

  The woman was sitting upright in her chair. She looked pensive; she toyed with a bracelet of green stones hanging from one wrist. “She has the gift,” she said again.

  “Then make her the offer, but be quick. We have work to do downstairs.”

  I stepped forward. “I want no offer from you.”

  “Even so,” Marissa Fittes said, “I’m going to give you one.” She stood suddenly; she was taller than me, and very beautiful. In the luminous golden other-light, she looked like a fairy-tale queen. She was smiling now, and the aurora playing on her hair shone as bright as diamonds. “Lucy,” she said, “we are very much alike, you and me.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “We both talk with spirits. We both seek out the mysteries of the dead. We have both walked on the Other Side and seen things forbidden to mortal eyes. Your Talent is as great as mine. We share it—and could share so much more.” The smile broadened. “Eternal life, Lucy, can be yours, if you join yourself to me.”

  I noticed that though she had left her chair and walked toward me, away from her floating companion, she was still tied to its radiance. Golden rays clung about her like a wreath of chains. Suddenly I thought of Charley Budd. I said, “That’s a nice offer, but I’m not sure I like the look of that glowing thing by your side.”

  The woman smiled; she played with a lock of her long dark hair. “You have your Type Three to guide you. I have mine. See? We are alike.”

  “Except that Lucy’s got good taste,” the skull put in. “You don’t remember, lady, but I talked to you years ago. I gave you my words of wisdom, had quite a civilized chat. Then what happens? I stay stewing in this jar, while you shack up with golden boy here. However you call it, that’s just plain wrong.”

  “Silence, Wisp!” The luminous spirit flared majestically. “Do not interrupt Marissa when she’s—”

  “Sorry, I do interrupt quite often, don’t I? Oops, clumsy me! Just did it again.”

  There was a growl of irritation. “If you weren’t in that jar,” the golden voice said, “I’d grind your plasm into dust.”

  “Yeah? And whose army?”

  Marissa’s eyes narrowed. She glanced down at the ghost-jar for the first time. “It so happens that I do remember you, vile spirit. I thought you evasive, cheeky, and lacking in intelligence.”

  The face in the jar frowned. “Really? Sure that wasn’t some other skull?”

  “No, she remembers you all right,” I said.

  “Charming.”

  “This obnoxious skull held no interest to me, Lucy,” Marissa said. “Its many deficiencies aside, I already had my beloved Ezekiel. Since I found him as a little child, he has shown me wondrous things. He has guided me in all my works. He led me and Tom Rotwell to experiment with Sources; it was his insights that enabled us to first explore the Other Side.”

  She held up her arm on which the jade bracelet twinkled, and Ezekiel’s golden rays moved to twine about her fingers playfully. Marissa laughed; there was wildness in the sound. Slowly, imperceptibly, I stepped a little nearer. I was gauging her distance from me, estimating the jump I’d need to make to strike her down. I wanted her close. Even so, she unnerved me. There was a darkness in the laughing eyes, as if something moved inside them, came separately to the surface to gaze at me. Now the golden aura on her hair looked like a crown, like the tiara worn by La Belle Dame Sans Merci.

  She reminded me of La Belle Dame in other ways, too.

  “Tom was slow and held me back,” Marissa went on. “He could not listen to Ezekiel, could not understand the deeper truths. But you can, Lucy. You can. There has been no one else who could sit beside me with honor all these years.”

  “She does gabble on, doesn’t she, Lucy?” the skull said. “I reckon you’d be bored to tears if you started hanging out with her.”

  “Yes,” I said. “I would.” With that I leaped forward, swung the rapier with all my strength at the woman’s side. It didn’t seem to go quite where I wanted. It slowed, slowed, came to a sickening halt a couple of feet from her neck. I tried to wrestle it nearer, but the air was gluey.

  “Let us remove temptation from you,” the woman said. “Ezekiel?”

  The golden figure raised an arm. A buffet of air slammed me backward. I hit the side of the wooden cabinet standing by the wall; the force of it drove the breath from my lungs, sent me crashing to the carpet. I dropped the ghost-jar and the sword. Another buffet caught the rapier, sent it speeding across the floor.

  Panting, cursing, I struggled to my feet. My whole body ached. The woman stood watching me.

  “Why do you think you came here tonight, Lucy?” she said softly. “Why come up here on your own? And no”—there had been a snort of outrage from the floor—“I don’t include that Lurker in the jar. Why come without your friends? Without your charming Lockwood, above all? It can’t be because you truly think you’ll destroy me. No, it’s for a deeper reason. You’re lonely, Lucy—you need companionship. You need someone who can understand and share your deep desires. Your friends are valuable, of course, as far as they go. I don’t deny it. But they’re not enough. They don’t understand your fear of death. Indeed, they worsen it! You know full well that Lockwood’s recklessness is practically suicidal—that his emotional emptiness will drive him to the grave. But how would it be, Lucy, if you had in your power ways to save his life—to keep him with you always? To keep him—and you—forever young, like me?”

  I wiped a trace of blood from my lips; my body still trembled with the impact against the wood. At my back, the cabinet door had opened; it swung slightly ajar. And now the golden figure came drifting near, and the woman was stepping close, too. Her fragrance almost overpowered me.

  “We need to finish this,” the spirit said, “one way or another.”

  “Well, Lucy?” Marissa smiled. “You’ve heard my offer. What do you say?”

  I looked for my rapier; no, too far away. There was the ghost-jar on the floor, with the skull upside down, rolling its eyes at me. I had no other weapons. What could I do? Perhaps the cabinet held something in it—guns, bombs, equipment for the Other Side…I could think of nothing else.

  I said, “So you would give me the elixir of
life? And Lockwood, too?”

  The dark-haired woman shrugged. “You have no need of it yet, of course. Not for years. But I would share its secrets with you. You would live here. We would rule London.”

  “And the Orpheus Society? And the men and women who also cross to the Other Side?”

  She shook her head. “They are fools, scrabblers in the dark. None of them know the full truth. You would know everything. Ezekiel would cradle you with his light. But what is your answer, Lucy?”

  I drew myself up to my full height, every aching bit of my (almost) five feet six inches. I pushed white fronds of hair back from my face. “Marissa,” I said, “I appreciate the offer. But even if you presented it to me gift-wrapped and accompanied by my body weight in jewels, it wouldn’t be enough.”

  The woman’s face darkened. Black lines like forks of lightning flickered through the spirit’s golden light.

  “I told you,” Ezekiel said. “She’s stubborn. So then…”

  “It wouldn’t be enough,” I said. “It wouldn’t balance out the countless lives ruined by the Problem, the agents killed fighting against ghosts. And it wouldn’t balance out the suffering you’ve inflicted on the spirits bottled up on the Other Side. No wonder so many are driven to return to this world instead! I’ve seen all this; I’ve seen my friends wounded, I’ve seen them almost dying! So thanks, Marissa, but no. There’s no power on earth that would make me join you, and if it costs me my life, that’s a penalty I’ll willingly accept.”

  With that, I spun on my heels, and threw the cabinet doors open.

  Guns? Swords? Weapons of any kind?

  No.

  But the cabinet wasn’t empty, and what I saw there made me scream.

  It was a body.

  Don’t get me wrong. I’ve seen a lot of bodies, of all shapes and sizes, in all conditions. That’s part of the job, and though it doesn’t thrill me, it doesn’t freak me out. And screaming? That’s definitely not my thing. But this? It was shocking in part because it was so unexpected, in part because it was so horrible, and in part because it undermined everything I thought I knew.

  The corpse was fixed upright on a sort of golden stand inside the cabinet. It was supported along its length by many golden rods and clamps that prevented sections of its black and shriveled flesh from falling to the floor. Even so, it was in a pretty shoddy condition, starting with the head. Some of this was gone—the left eye, for starters, and most of the cheek, jaw, and cranium on that side. Elsewhere, a black and rubbery rind of skin still maintained the vestiges of a face. There were sprouts of long black hair, and a bony neck like that of a plucked turkey. Below that, the torso was in a bad way, too, all dried and thin and twisted like one of those horrid roasted vegetable things Holly preferred to honest chips. The surface was as hard and black as cooled lava, and a couple of ribs poked through splits in the skin. The arms and legs were little more than bones encased in a loose and papery sheath. In places, screws had been driven through them to keep them in position. The thing was pierced, fixed, hung, and clamped. It was a parody of a body. The yellowed teeth grinned at me and the eye socket reflected no light.

  None of that was what really threw me, though.

  Here’s what did. It was Marissa.

  It was Marissa Fittes. Even though half the head was gone, I recognized her at once. The beaky nose; the jaw and forehead; the sweep of hair—it was the face from all the statues, books, and stamps. In fact it was roughly what I had expected to find in the crypt below the mausoleum, if everything had been natural and as it should be; if the dead had stayed in their proper places and the living in theirs.

  “Oh,” the skull said. The ghost’s face was craning upward from where it lay in the jar beside my feet, trying to get a decent view. Its voice sounded as hesitant as I’d ever heard it. “That’s…unexpected.”

  “Are you surprised?” The woman behind me gave a husky little laugh. “Poor Lucy. You had everything so nearly right, as well. Turn around and look at me.”

  I twisted away from the horror in the cabinet, back to the two horrors standing with me in that smart and stylish penthouse room. The spirit, Ezekiel, had drifted closer; it no longer had quite such a golden radiance, but was a darker man-shaped form. Flashes of black laced the rays that rippled out and darted around the woman’s body, shadowing the contours of her face. But she was smiling.

  “I was very young, Lucy,” she said, “when I wrote Occult Theories. Very young, like you. From dear Ezekiel’s teachings, I had learned that the essence of the departed would help to sustain life. I thought that it would rejuvenate my body and keep it fair and youthful—and with this in mind, I began traveling to the Other Side. You have seen some of the techniques I use to gather the plasm that I need. I soon discovered that Ezekiel was right—by absorbing the essence I did replenish my own strength. And my spirit grew powerful.” Her black eyes searched mine. “But there was a catch!”

  “Of course there was,” I said. “The catch being that what you were doing was both wrong and mad. What is this Ezekiel, anyway? What sort of ghost is it? Where did you pick it up?”

  The woman raised her arm, tapped the jade bracelet on her wrist. “I found him, buried in the earth near an ancient grave. He is old, Lucy, and wiser than you’ll ever know. He has seen kingdoms rise and fall. He has turned away from death. He rejects it. I reject it, too.”

  The golden shape drifted nearer to me. Its seeping cold blazed on my skin. “Enough talk,” its deep voice said. “This girl is not like us. She defies the mysteries. She wants death. She has said as much. We must give it to her.”

  “No,” the woman said. “First I want her to understand. You see, Lucy, though my spirit grew stronger, my body was weakened by my visits to the Other Side, becoming prematurely aged. I began to need the help of others to venture across instead of me. My friends at the Orpheus Society were the first, and they have proved most reliable over many years. They are inspired by the same dreams as me, and carry out many of the experiments going on downstairs.” Her smile thinned. “It is right that they do so. After all, the Problem funds their businesses and keeps them rich. But they are old and growing desperate. They seek immortality as I once did, trying to keep their bodies young. They do not understand that this is not the answer.”

  “So what is?” I said. The radiant spirit was so close now; I could feel its power thrumming against me, fixing me where I stood. Yet while the woman spoke, I kept my mind free of ghost-lock. My brain was racing, assessing my position, my options for attack and escape. “What is the answer?”

  “It’s going to be nasty,” the skull said. “Take it from me.”

  Marissa leaned toward me. “Here’s what I learned,” she said. “A mortal body always fails you. A mortal body always lets you down. But if your spirit is sufficiently strong…” She touched my face with her ice-cold hand and stepped away. “There are other options.”

  And now a strange thing happened to her; it was like watching the face of a clay doll being stretched to the side by the motion of a giant thumb. Her nose, mouth, eyes, and cheekbones—all her features, were, for a second, smudged and distorted as something started pulling clear of them. Then they snapped back into position and a second face began to break free alongside the first. She had two faces—one solid, the other faint and see-through! At first they were almost entirely superimposed upon each other, then simply overlapping; finally the translucent, ghostly head emerged like a midnight insect from a chrysalis and hung independently beside the other. It was hard to say which was the more terrible: the malevolent glimmer of intelligence in the eyes of the spirit, or the sudden deadness in the eyes of the living.

  The face of the woman known as Penelope Fittes hung slack and stupid, her breathing newly loud and ragged. And the face alongside? There were family resemblances, that much was true. The shape of the jaw and chin, the hairline on the forehead…Otherwise the spirit of Marissa Fittes had precisely the hooklike nose, the ravaged lines, and the haughtily
imperious expression of the bust in the mausoleum or the engraving at the front of our Fittes Manuals. It was the same face as the one that was kept, decayed and ravaged, in the cabinet behind me.

  “Stone me,” the skull said, from the jar on the floor. “I didn’t expect that.”

  I swore under my breath. Instinctively, as one does when faced by something repulsive and unnatural, I moved back a pace.

  “I always knew she was Marissa,” the skull went on. “But I just go by what’s on the inside. I told you that, right? I call it as I see it. If I see Marissa’s spirit, I assume the body’s hers as well! I didn’t realize she was squatting in someone else.”

  A faint blur beneath the spirit-head showed where its neck and shoulders disappeared inside Penelope Fittes’s motionless body. Marissa’s mouth moved; a voice came, faint and crackling, like something heard down a bad phone line. “Squatting?” it said. “It’s a much closer, more perfect bond than that! See? I want to raise my hand”—Penelope’s left arm rose, and gave us a cheery wave—“I do so. I want to move my feet”—the long legs made adjustments; the hand smoothed down the skirt—“I can. I inhabit dear Penelope just as snugly as one could wish. We are the same.” The ghost head grinned at us. Alongside it, the solid head lolled sideways like an unloved doll’s.

  “So…so Penelope was a real person?” I said.

  “Penelope was my granddaughter, yes.”

  “We thought you’d faked her life.”

  “Not at all.”

  I spoke harshly. “She was living, and you killed her.”

  The spirit-head clicked its tongue. “Tsk, tsk. I killed the spirit, by driving it out. The body is alive and flourishing, as you can very well see. It’s been an extremely practical solution to my problem and should last me a good many more years. Now, excuse me a moment. I should put this back on.”