A Deadly Fortune

by Stacie Murphy

  “I’ve never had a dream that vivid.” She took a deep breath and brushed sticky strands of hair off her face. Her hands were trembling.

  “Do you want to talk it through? Do you think… was it—”

  “No!” She shuddered and softened her tone. “No, I— It was just a nightmare. I’m fine. Go back to bed.”

  With a doubtful look, but without comment, he left.

  In the light of the next day, it was possible to believe it had been only a dream. There’d been the excitement with Tommy’s mother. And the strange coincidence with the Tower card the night before. She was worried about her job, about Jonas. It had influenced her, caused her mind to create that thing. Everyone had bad dreams sometimes. It meant nothing.

  But it came again the next night. And the next. And each night thereafter.

  The details changed. Once Jonas was the man falling, trailing fire as she screamed his name. Once the lurching monster had her own face, distorted but recognizable. Each time Jonas woke her. Each time she refused to talk about it.

  For the first few days, they pretended nothing was happening. Every morning, Amelia sat and drank coffee as Jonas read the paper, relaying bits of news out loud and adding commentary to items he found interesting.

  “There’s a smallpox outbreak at the almshouse in Jersey City. ‘Health authorities were thrown into a state of alarm’.… I should say so.… A former congressman is divorcing his wife and asking for $50,000 in damages from her lover—apparently she’s been carrying on with a banker.… The London Times liked President Cleveland’s inaugural address.… The Princess of Wales and her children had an audience with the Pope.… The body of a young doctor was found in the river.… Lily Post has taken over the role of Gianetta in The Gondoliers. I like her. We should try to see that.”

  This relentless pursuit of normalcy soothed them both, for a time.

  But the nightmare was always waiting, as vivid and terrible each time as if it were new. As the days passed, the strain began to tell on both of them. Sleep became difficult, Amelia lying awake in her room and Jonas in his, both dreading what they knew would happen when she closed her eyes.

  Jonas stopped chattering over the paper in the mornings, instead clenching its edges in whitened fists and casting furtive glances at Amelia over the top of the page when he thought she wasn’t looking. There was something speculative in his gaze.

  Three more times that week, he brought her the cards and nagged her into drawing. Each time the Tower fairly leapt from the deck.

  They became snappish with each other. Amelia withdrew, ignoring all but direct inquiries and answering in monosyllables. Jonas stopped going out and began to find increasingly pallid excuses not to leave her alone. Their apartment took on the choking atmosphere of a city under siege.

  She refused to draw a card the fourth time he offered them, waving them away with a scowl. He muttered something under his breath as he put them away. Their tempers frayed, each of them spent the rest of the day brooding, looking away whenever their eyes met.

  On the ninth day, a package arrived for Jonas: two books, one a beautifully bound copy of Leaves of Grass. The other, Amelia saw before he hastily covered the front, was a popular traveler’s guide to Paris. He read the note it contained, then shoved it in his pocket, glancing at Amelia as if to gauge whether she’d noticed. She made a point of averting her gaze, her jaw clenched against the words threatening to spill from her mouth. The air between them darkened.

  That afternoon, Jonas offered her the cards once more.

  “No,” she snapped, knocking his hand away and spilling the deck to the floor. “I’m not drawing again. It means nothing! And you’ve got to stop this damned hovering. Everything is fine. Nothing has happened. Nothing is going to happen. I’m recovered. You should go and tell Sabine we’re ready to come back to work.”

  “I will do no such thing. None of this is fine,” Jonas spat, gesturing at the scattered cards. “This thing with the Tower, it’s important. And you know it. That’s why you won’t talk about it—because it’s scaring you. All of it—Mrs. Franklin, and the cards, and that god-damned nightmare.” He nearly shouted the last. “And you are not recovered. You’re thin as a rail and pale as milk, except for those black circles under your eyes. I doubt you could make it all the way out to the street without falling over, let alone work a full night. You’re exhausted. You can’t—”

  “I can do whatever I damned well want,” Amelia shot back. “I want to get back to work. I want things to get back to normal, and that isn’t going to happen until—”

  “It isn’t going to happen at all,” he cried. “Don’t you see? Things are different now. You are different.”

  “Nothing is different. It’s just a dream. It’s just a stupid dream, and this,” she said, plucking up the Tower card, where it had fallen face up at her feet, “is just paper.” She ripped it in half and flung the pieces at him.

  Jonas scoffed. “You know better than that.” He shoved her seer’s crystal across the table at her. “I’ll bet if you tried, you’d see something in it now. But you won’t, because you’re terrified I’m right. Something’s happened to you, Amelia. Lying to yourself about it won’t help anything.”

  She batted the crystal back at him. “I’m not the one who’s lying.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “You think I don’t know? About the gifts, and the poetry, and Paris?” The last word was a sneer. “Are you a fool? You’re his toy, and when he’s tired of you, he’ll drop you.”

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about. You’ve never even met him, for god’s sake, you don’t know—”

  “I know enough. I know he wants you to leave with him. And you’re thinking about it, aren’t you?”

  He hesitated for an instant, and the pause was answer enough. Rage swept over her.

  “What’s happened to you? I never thought you’d be content to be nothing but someone’s whore!” She hurled the last word like a knife.

  Jonas looked as stunned as if she’d slapped him. His face flushed red. Without a word, he turned, stalked out of the apartment, and slammed the door behind him. Amelia seized the crystal and heaved it after him. It shattered against the doorjamb. She kicked the table’s leg, earning herself nothing but a bruised foot. “Damn it,” she hissed, rubbing the injury.

  She threw herself down into a chair, let out a shuddering breath, and buried her face in her hands. Her anger drained away, replaced by a searing mixture of guilt and shame. Her barbed words still echoed through the empty room, pricking her anew with each reverberation. She felt as if she might climb out of her own skin.

  Enough. She had to get out of here. She stood, snatched up her new cloak—still hanging on the hook by the door since the night of the brawl—and tied it on as she made her way down the stairs.

  Amelia was winded by the time she reached the bottom. She swore again with more force, irritated anew that Jonas had been right. She looked up at their door but couldn’t bear the thought of sitting alone in the oppressive silence.

  I’ll go for a walk, she thought, squaring her shoulders. It will be good for me. If I tire myself out, then maybe tonight I won’t— She cut herself off, her mind skittering away from the subject of her dream.

  She crossed the yard and started down the alley. As she passed the spot where she’d been injured, regret for the things she’d said to Jonas stabbed through her. She’d gone too far. He worried about her. He didn’t deserve the way she’d spoken. As she reached the street, she promised herself she would apologize as soon as he returned.

  The resolution made, she set off feeling if not unburdened, then at least lighter. The season had begun to change while she’d been stuck inside, and the air held a faint hint of spring, though the breeze was still chilly enough to make her glad of the cloak. At her favorite café, she bought a sausage on a soft roll and a cup of cider. She sat at one of the outdoor tables facing the park, watching the passersby and enj
oying the salty meat and the mild alcoholic bite of the cider. She finished her meal and turned her face up to the sun.

  The green expanse of the park beckoned, and she stood, surprised and amused to find the drink had gone to her head. She crossed the street and wandered along a graveled path, crossing a wooden bridge over a rocky spot where a trickle of water flowed. The sounds of the city faded, replaced by birdsong.

  Inattentive, she was only steps away when she saw it: people drifting off the path up ahead, flowing around a roundish, empty space like water around a rock in the middle of a river. Amelia stepped closer, the air pressing in on her, every sound magnified until there was nothing but a roar in her ears. She focused on the empty spot and froze.

  The space wasn’t empty at all. Something gray and translucent swirled in the air. It began to take shape even as Amelia blinked in disbelief. Within a moment, a young woman, no older than Amelia herself, stood in the spot. Her features were sharp, although she remained oddly faint and colorless. She wore a shapeless dress and a round cap in a style fifty years out of date and shabby even for a servant. Around her neck was a knotted rope, its ragged end trailing on the ground.

  Amelia gasped. The woman’s head turned with a jerk. Her eyes widened as they locked on to Amelia’s. Startled recognition swept over her face, followed an instant later by an expression of eager anticipation. An itch began somewhere behind Amelia’s breastbone, and the girl began to move toward her. Or rather, she must have moved, though it seemed more as if the space between them simply contracted.

  The itch grew. Intensified. Within moments it felt hideously like something was boring through Amelia’s chest, tugging at her sternum from behind. She knew, with an awful certainty, that something terrible would happen when the apparition touched her.

  Amelia ordered herself to move, to turn and run, but her legs refused to obey. It was as if she were rooted to the spot. Amelia tried to ward the thing away, but her arms remained locked at her sides. The girl reached out a hand, and an alien, suffocating presence enveloped her. Something clenched around Amelia’s neck, and her breathing became a desperate wheeze.

  The world tilted. The cold ground pressed against her back. The shade drifted toward her, the gray hand still reaching. Amelia felt a frozen touch on her cheek, and then she was gone.

  3

  Amelia thrashed in the space between dream and waking, drowning in the void, unable to fight her way to the surface. Awareness faded and sharpened in ragged beats. Snatches of conversation stitched themselves together, the pattern incomprehensible.

  —found her in the park—

  —drunk? Smells like she—

  —fought like a wildcat. Screaming about how she never meant to burn them up—

  —scratched the hell out of Hanlon when—

  —Put her in a cell. Maybe someone—

  —the hell is she still here?! We can’t keep every stray—

  —here today? Have him take a look. Maybe he can—

  —raving when she came in. Still hasn’t spoken any sense—

  A thumb lifting her eyelid.

  —Miss Casey, can you hear me? Carolina?—

  —my count, gentlemen. One, two—

  A jolting motion, a sickening weightlessness, a swaying. She fell away again.

  4

  Amelia returned to herself a sense at a time.

  First a woman’s voice, brusque and echoing: “This way please, gentlemen. Set her down, thank you. We’ll take her from here.”

  Throbbing pain filling her head to bursting. Mewling with it, clutching her temples with her hands. A foul taste in her mouth and a stench in her nostrils that she dimly recognized as coming from herself. Filth and bile and rust. Slow, shallow breaths. Slitted eyes opening against piercing light.

  She blinked slowly, orienting herself. She was lying on the floor—on a stretcher—in a large, tiled washroom. And she was not alone. Three women wearing identical brown-striped dresses and stern expressions looked back at her. One opened the folder she held and looked down, making notes with a pencil. The scritching sound was as loud as a scream in the echoing room. The second held a cloth bundle and a limp canvas sack. The third stepped forward.

  “Good. You’re awake. Do you understand me?”

  Amelia tried to speak but found her voice wouldn’t obey. She managed a shadow of a nod.

  “Do you know where you are?”

  Shaking her head was beyond her capacity. She closed her eyes again. Frowned.

  “This is the city lunatic asylum at Blackwell’s Island.”

  Shock forced Amelia’s eyes wide open. The light assaulted her, sent a bolt of pain through her head, forced a strangled groan from her throat. Her stomach heaved, but it was empty, and all she did was retch pitifully.

  “None of that. We’ll not be cleaning up after you.”

  One of the others spoke. “Let’s get her seen to.”

  Hands pulled her upright, and the room whirled sickeningly. Amelia closed her eyes again.

  One of the women probed at her head, yanked at her tender scalp. “What on earth have you done to your hair?”

  Amelia reached up with a trembling hand. Felt coils of hair, stiff with filth.

  “I’m not going to waste all day trying to get this mess cleaned and combed out. We’re going to have to cut it off.” The speaker nodded to the one with the folder. “Make a note: there was an infestation of lice.”

  Amelia ignored their chuckles as the woman reached into her pocket and produced a pair of scissors. Clumps of hair fell to the floor.

  “There. Let’s get her cleaned up.” Two of them held her on her feet while the third stripped her, grumbling over the muck caked on her clothes. Naked, she was lifted into an enormous tub. The water was cold.

  “In with you,” one of them muttered, prodding her hard in the back.

  Amelia’s feet slipped out from under her, and the frigid water closed over her head. Her breath went out in a rush. She came up sputtering, the chill already seeping into her bones.

  But it brought her further back to herself. She took more note of her surroundings as she was scrubbed with stinging soap and a coarse brush. Her hands and feet were blue with cold when the women finally lifted her out of the tub. She shuddered as they dried her with a length of rough toweling. They dressed her in a coarse linen shift and shapeless calico dress made for someone much taller. There was writing along the hem, illegible from her vantage point. A white cap and a pair of thin slippers completed her new wardrobe. Amelia’s own clothes disappeared into the sack, probably fit only to be burned.

  “Now then,” the one with the folder said. “Carolina Casey, found in fits in a public park, possibly drunk, uncommunicative.” She tutted. “No known family or friends, adjudged destitute, committed by judicial order until such time as the asylum superintendent finds her fit to be released.”

  Carolina. Who was…?

  “Lina,” she muttered. The cloak Jonas had saved for her. It had Lina’s name in it.

  “Lina,” one of the nurses repeated, scratching something in the file.

  Amelia opened her mouth to protest, to tell them her real name, to insist they let her go. Then some practical part of her mind, awake now for the first time since the park, realized how it would sound—half the women here must insist all those things with their every breath. No one would believe her; anything she said would be only further evidence of her madness. And Lina had no further need of her cloak or her name. She was gone to California. Amelia stilled, keeping an iron grip on the terror beating its wings against her chest. Her name didn’t matter. She could be Lina for now.

  She was compliant as they led her from the washroom, feigning continued confusion. But though she kept her head lowered and her steps tentative, she darted glances in every direction, taking in as much as she could. One nurse led the way while the other two supported her as she stumbled down the long stone hallway. Amelia squinted against the noonday light coming in through the high
, narrow windows lining one side. It penetrated only weakly into the barred cells along the opposite wall, painting the occupants in graded shadows. Some were nothing more than dark forms huddled away from the doors, despair wafting through the bars. Others pressed themselves forward, hands outthrust and imploring.

  One woman flung herself at the door as they passed, hands clawed and digging bloody furrows down her own arms. “A knife. Please, a knife. They’re under my skin. You have to help me,” she begged.

  The nurse in the lead chided her. “You’ll have to go back into the jacket if you don’t stop that.” They walked on.

  “My baby, my beautiful boy. I want my baby.”

  There were repeated thuds as one woman rocked on the floor, her hands over her face, her body thumping hard against the wall of the cell. “Hilf mir. Hilf mir. Bitte!”

  Another shouted. “Water! Water, for the love of God, I’ll burn up!”

  The nurses ignored her.

  “I want to go home. Please let me go home.”

  Women shrieked. They moaned. They sobbed and swore and gibbered. They sat in frozen silence and glared with murderous intent.

  One caught Amelia’s look as she passed. With a growl, the woman flung herself at the door. “You cunt. You dare to look at me? I’ll rip your eyes from your face. I’ll open your chest and tear out your heart.” Her threats followed them as she faded from view.

  A few more steps and there came a low, pleading voice.

  “I have to get home to my cat. She’ll wonder where I’ve gone, my sweet little kitty. She needs me.”

  The next cell stood open. Waiting. Wild laughter echoed from farther down the narrow hallway. The nurses guided Amelia into the empty cell, then turned away without a word.

  The hinges screamed, and the door swung closed with a crash. It was the most final-sounding thing Amelia had ever heard.

  5

  Andrew Cavanaugh stood at the ferry’s bow as it drew toward the island’s northern dock. He’d been asked to arrive by eleven o’clock and assured someone would meet him, but the area around the weathered wooden structure was empty. It looked as though he would have to find his own way to the asylum.