“You were right, wise spirit,” I tell her. “I should’ve listened to your warning.”
Her brows draw together. “You know me?”
“Of course,” I say slowly. “You told me not to go to the house.”
This shakes her in a way I can’t understand. Do spirits not remember their own actions? But then something resolves. Her mouth presses into a straight, serious line. She breathes deeply, her exhalation quivering. “All right. Is there something you wanted to tell me? Is there some message?”
Now it’s my turn to be shaken.
Chime folk are rare, and my gift is rarer still. Everything I know about spirits comes from hand-me-down talk, filtered through a dozen mouths. A woman from a village called Hale, some dozen miles from Liverpool’s docks, was said to see the dead, and the crux of her parting advice which finally found its way to me was this: Listen to them. Let them impart their wisdom or last words so they can rest.
They don’t ask us for messages.
“I don’t understand you, spirit,” I say, letting go of her hands. “It’s usually the other way around.”
“Is it?”
“Don’t you have a message for me? Another warning? I’ll heed you this time.” I step back and take her in, the thrill of making contact giving way to sober clarity. Her accent, her clothes, are alien. I can’t place her lack of corset, her narrow skirt, the lumpy spencer that extends down to her waist. Her hair, tawny as a barn owl’s hood, escapes from pins set above her ears. “When did you die?”
Her eyes widen. “I’m not dead! I’m . . . I’m on my honeymoon. Today is the twenty-second of October, 1938. I saw it on a newspaper someone was reading at breakfast.”
I find myself on the floor, such as it is in this place, knees bent inward like a child. 1938. An incomprehensible date. The future. I must be seeing the future. I’m snatching glimpses of people not yet born, tasting champagne made from grapes that are yet to grow. Suddenly, I understand why history hasn’t recorded the incidents I see—they haven’t come to pass. The spirits never speak to me because they don’t even know I’m there.
But if this woman can see me . . .
“Oh God, do I die here?” I cover my eyes. “Don’t tell me, I don’t want to know.”
“I’m sorry,” she whispers, and she’s at my level, prizing my hands from my face. “All I know is that I’ve seen dreadful things all my life. I thought I was mad. I think I still am mad.” She laughs weakly. “But I saw you in the parlor at Rannings today, and on the moor. You were intact and . . . simply perfect. For the first time, I wasn’t scared.” She smiles again giddily, her left eyelid taut. “I’m not scared.”
I’m younger than her, but I feel a tug of responsibility. I palm her cheek and fix her with a steadying look. “There is nothing to fear from the dead. They may frighten you, they may come when you want to be alone, but they won’t harm you.” I draw our foreheads together. Benjamin did this for me, when my gift first manifested and I couldn’t sleep. It’s my dearest memory of him. Tears drip into our laps. I can’t tell which are mine.
“So,” I say, and we draw apart, “what else did you see in the house, besides me?” She describes as best she can the flayed boy. The girl in the cell, who can only be Martha, clawing her fingernails off trying to escape. As she speaks, I feel the resonance of the bell fading. Our time grows short. “Did you see a boy? Scrawny and tall, with a limp? He doesn’t heal completely—he might have other scars, too.”
“A boy—?”
“In 1938, is there any record of him,” I push, “of us being held against our will?”
“I don't know.” She hides her face in her hands. “After Rannings was sold, there was some talk of legal trouble, and I think the receptionist said the asylum was shut down about a hundred years ago, which would be—”
“Now,” I finish viciously. “Tell me, was the doctor tried? The missing children, the flayed boy—were they found?”
“No, no, I don’t know . . .”
I close my eyes, holding my anger in. The doctor targets poor, hungry families, mothers like Benjamin’s, like Martha’s, who can’t afford to turn down money even at the expense of a child. He trusts that the world will turn without stopping for them. Sickeningly, he’s right: There will be no accounting for this in his lifetime.
“What is it now, the house?” I ask bitterly.
“It’s a hotel. A very expensive hotel.”
A hotel! I can’t help but laugh, but there’s no joy in it. “Mark me: Children have died here far from home, and they deserve justice. My friend, Benjamin, deserves justice. God knows what he’s been through. I don’t know the limits of his gift; perhaps the doctor has already found a way to break him.” I grip her arm and she flinches. “Avenge us. That is what the spirits want. That’s what I want, if I’m to die here.”
“I will, I promise,” she says, her voice faint.
“Good-bye. God bless you.” I kiss her cheeks as they turn translucent. Even if I survive this night, my bones will be dust by the time she walks the Earth. I don’t even know her name.
I’m released slowly back to my senses, as if recovering from a faint. Barely a second has passed. Martha is crying my name. She’s heard me collapse, convulsing, and her terror has attracted the matron’s attention. Those are the soles of her slippers I hear, flapping against the steps.
Martha’s crying falters when she hears me stir, but I grunt at her to keep going as I prop myself up. I tear at my bodice and the damp silk parts easily—fashionable clothes, like fashionable people, aren’t made to withstand much of anything at all. My fingers fumble at the laces of my corset as the matron barks from outside our cells, “What’s going on in there?”
The laces slither free. I wait behind the door where it’s darkest, wrapping them around my fists into a makeshift garrote. Martha’s listening. She’s not stupid. “There’s summat wrong with Mary,” she wails. “She won’t wake up!”
Keys jingle. The matron enters, holding a candle aloft. I don’t give her time to clock the bare floor: I throw my crossed hands over her neck and jerk them home. She drops the candle and flails, gurgling. Her elbow drives into my side, cracks a rib, drawing a gasp. But I’m a Belfast girl raised in Liverpool; I can give as good as I get, and right now I’ve got nothing to lose.
One more squeeze of the garrote and she goes down with a thud.
Her keys are still dangling from my door. I unlock Martha’s cell and she flies to me, burying her face in my soft belly. “Ah,” I gasp, “not too hard.” Every breath burns and my back aches now without the support of my stays. Unlaced for the first time since I was a young child, my middle’s as cold as a shucked mollusk.
I stare down the corridor. For a moment, the path to Benjamin is clear. But I can’t draw a painless breath deep enough to shout his name, and anyway, Martha’s shaking her head at me desperately, unsure of her gift, and the matron’s storming toward us, her purple face twisted with rage. I mustn’t have held on long enough. I’ve never tried to strangle anyone before.
“Get back here, you little bitch!”
Martha shoves her, giving us room to sprint past and up the stairs, to lock her in behind us. The matron’s ham-sized fists batter the door, but it holds.
“What now?” Martha says, clinging to me.
“We get out of here,” I reply, stroking her head, “but I need something first. A letter that I brought with me. Is it still on the doctor’s desk?”
She nods.
My heels left twin trails in the dust where the matron dragged me. We follow them to their source, the keys jutting between my fingers to make a spiked fist. The doctor’s door is ajar and the room is still. He must have retired for the night. But even here, a faint banging makes its way up from the basement, and even now he may be descending the stairs to investigate.
I snatch up Missus Walchop’s letter and rifle through the files in his desk, my hands shaking so much I almost can’t pinch out the one I want.
Martha flinches. The doctor’s blocking the doorway. The barrel of a revolver’s pointing at her head. I pull her behind me as he fires, blasting a hole in the paneling. As precious as we are to him, he’d kill us to cover his tracks? Selfish coward! I grit my teeth and lunge, ready for the bullet to punch through me if it means sparing Martha, but my unexpected offensive sends his second shot wide, the third jams, and by then I’m close enough for a right hook that would make my mother proud. One key skewers his cheek. Another lodges in his eye. The revolver, and the doctor with it, falls to the floor.
I stand over him, wheezing, with one hand pressed to my rib. His unscathed eye rolls in agony, and when it settles on me I hunker down, baring my teeth in a grin. “You wanted to know what I can do, Doctor? I can see what is yet to pass, and I’ve seen the future for this place—for you. Your work will come to nothing. No one will remember your name. And these”—I hold up the file, the letter—“will ruin you, I’ll make sure of that.” He whimpers. I straighten and take Martha’s hand, and together we leave.
Where the crunching drive gives way to soft moss, I hear light footsteps ahead and hold my breath, but it’s only James, praise God. I can smell the grouse and lamp oil on him. He must sense more than see the ruin of my bodice and corset, revealing the thin, secret shift beneath, because he passes me his coat without comment, tells me instead how my cries for help echoed over the moor and that he couldn’t bear to go home still hearing them.
And of Martha, he says, “Who’s this?”
“That can wait.” I groan, leaning heavily against him. “Take me to the magistrate. Or the nearest lawman who’ll hear me out.”
Martha turns her face up to mine. “What’re you gunna do?”
Missus Walchop’s letter and a broken contract press against my side. I look up at the dark bulk of Rannings. My employer, if she’ll still be my employer after this, with all her hollow frivolities, will have to damn well wait.
If you’re still in there, Benjamin, you better hold on.
“I’m going to tear it down. Tear it all down.”
• • • •
“Good God.” Broad hands stroked her face, wiped away strands of wet hair. “You rang the bell, didn’t you? Good girl, clever girl, I heard you, I’m here now.” Merritt tried to rub warmth into her numb legs, her feet, so rough it hurt.
“Stop,” Anne mumbled. She’d seen a hypothermic man die from such rubbing. “Your coat.”
“Easy, easy. All right.” He wrapped her in his coat, damp but still warm from his body and better than nothing. He scooped her up with a grunt and carried her out of the bell tower.
“There’s . . . something . . . something I need to tell you—”
“Whatever it is can wait, darling. Over here! I’ve got her!”
The groundsman’s cart pulled up outside the church, escorted by police in shimmering waterproof cloaks. Merritt laid her inside and wrapped her in dry blankets, tried to pour warm tea into her mouth. She spluttered when the cart began to move.
“I can see ghosts,” she told him while he mopped her chin.
“Don’t talk nonsense,” he said.
“It’s true. My parents thought I had a—a nervous disorder. When we met, I’d just come back from the hospital. Shock treatment. It didn’t help. Nothing does.” She had his full attention. She licked her lips. “Penshawe must have seemed a pretty sort of place to you, but for me it was a prison. The more anxious I felt, the more I hallucinated. I thought it would stop when we left, but it’s been worse.”
There it was, the look of disgust she’d been so afraid of. She reached for his hand but he wrenched it away. “It’s dead people I see, Merritt, dying people, all the time. I think they’re ghosts. They have messages for me, things they want me to do—”
“Stop,” he snapped. “If you want to be free of me, just say so.”
“Telephone my parents, they’ll tell you everything.”
He glared at her. Anne gripped the blankets. The moment was slipping its tracks in a way she hadn’t expected.
“Are you trying to get back at me for this morning? Am I not the husband you hoped for, after that? Can you not stand a little real life?”
“Says the man who drinks because he can’t bear his own grief!” Too late, the words were said. She could see she’d hurt him.
The cart jolted and suddenly the dark pit in her stomach opened, the gorge rising in her throat. They were approaching the foundations of Rannings, where everything felt rotten. Anne flung off the blankets and jumped out of the cart before Merritt or the policemen could stop her. She ran through the rain and mud until she found the epicenter, the ugly heart of it all. There, she began digging with her hands. The arms of the dead pushed up around her like daisies. “I know,” she told them, “it’ll be over soon.”
“Stop, Anne! Stop this!” Merritt shouted as he jogged toward her, lost his footing. “You’ll catch your death!”
“Will you just listen to me for once?” she flung back. “Dig, for God’s sake!”
Merritt watched helplessly as she scraped out great clots of mud. Policemen surged past him, hands reaching out to grab her, when her fingernails broke against something hard. She’d uncovered a crescent of discolored bone, a tiny pelvis. They hauled her away, but the bone lay stark against the black sludge, glowing in the light from the crisscrossing torch beams.
• • • •
Seventeen skeletons in total. The deepest at eight feet, the shallowest at just three.
Rannings was forced to close immediately, so they settled the bill and drove north to Middlesbrough that night, before the press descended upon the area to seek out her photograph. Anne stayed briefly at the hospital. The nurses said she was lucky to be alive.
Merritt sat by her bedside, and when she had the strength to sit up, they talked frankly at last. Neither had married for love. They’d symbolized something to each other—escape for her, lost time for him—and they hadn’t looked any deeper than that because there was nothing more they wanted to find.
“Was this a mistake?” he asked.
At a loss, she turned her palm upward and he grasped it gently.
He looked so broken, though there was no alcohol on his breath. She bit her lip and twisted her wedding band, still loose. It came off readily with only the slightest resistance at the knuckle, and she held it out to him, scuff marks and all.
They looked at each other for a long time, the bustle of the ward filling the silence. “It’s either divorce or annulment,” he said at length. “Both options leave you high and dry. I assume you don’t want to go back to Kent?”
“Never,” she whispered.
They watched the nurses on their rounds for a while. Somewhere, a voice on the wireless was relaying every gory detail of the unfolding scandal. Anne requested it be turned off, but the silence was somehow worse.
“I wondered . . . Have you—could you—my brothers?”
She smiled sadly, expecting the question. The hope. “Perhaps. Truly, I don’t understand how this works.”
Merritt rubbed his cheeks. “I can’t promise to be a good husband, Anne, but I can listen, I can do that. We rushed into this, but we needn’t rush out of it. And maybe someday, we’ll understand it together.”
The hospital discharged her the next day. Anne waited on a bench while Merritt brought the motorcar around, the breeze blowing her hair into her eyes. She tucked it behind her ear and caught the eye of an old man across the street. He nodded to her and crossed the road, the morning newspaper tucked under his arm. He favored his right leg.
Without the Rannings’ uniform, she hardly knew him. The porter.
When he reached her, he smiled with more gums than teeth. “You look just like Mary said you would. I’m sorry if I gave you a scare, before.”
Anne stood to meet him, her jaw slack. Of course. A boy with a limp. “Are you—?”
“She found me, in the end, like. Well, Martha di
d. That was her gift.”
In a daze, Anne extended her hand and he shook it warmly. “How is this possible? You must be over a hundred years old.” With a glance at his bad leg, she said, “I suppose it can’t be a war wound, then?”
He patted his thigh. “Not from the war you’re thinking of, but I got plenty of those, too. I fit right in.” He untucked the newspaper and showed her the front page. The headline declared Rannings’ reputation to be in tatters. “Mary would’ve wanted me to thank you for this in person, like. We tried our best, but it couldn’t happen yet because you hadn't happened yet, or something; she always explained it better. After she died, I had to come back and see it through by myself, hard as it was. Thank God it’s done.”
“She died?”
“Aye, as do we all, I hope,” he said, and then laughed at her shock. “But don’t worry: She held on a bloody long time. Saw in the new century. You must’ve just missed each other.”
He handed her a small photograph, folded so much that the very center had worn away. In it, an elderly woman reclined on a sunbed, caught in a blurry roar of laughter. Her bathing suit and style of her hair placed her sometime in the early twenties, and the beach could have been anywhere, but Anne liked to think it was Kent.
The motorcar came purring around the corner and stopped at the curb. Merritt slung his arm across the back of the seat. “Anne, is this chap bothering you?”
Benjamin flipped the photograph over. There was an address written on the back. “Look me up next time you’re in Bootle,” he said with a wink, then he turned up his collar and walked on. Anne watched him go, quite breathless, until Merritt tooted the horn and made her jump. She strode to the motorcar and got in. “He wasn’t a journalist, you know.”
“Can’t be too careful.” He pulled into the traffic. “Well, shall we start over?”
The Long List Anthology Volume 6 Page 36
