Sensation

by Thea Devine

  It scared her half to death—it would swallow her whole, and no one would ever know where she'd gone.

  She grabbed on to the iron fence that fronted the house to have something real and substantial in her hand. She sensed that if she let go, she'd be letting go of everything that had anything to do with who she had been, and everything to do with him. She'd never be able to find her way back here again. She didn't know the street, the number of the house, the section of London, didn't know his name . ..

  Didn't even know if this episode was real or a dream. If Wroth was a bogeyman she'd invented. Maybe she was still back in her featherbed in the house in Georgia.

  Maybe this had been a nightmare, and she would wake up, a virgin again . . .

  No, this was too real. She could feel the rusted iron biting into her palms as she held on to the fence like a lifeline. This was real: everything else—the brothel, their escape, the vanishing coach­man, her stupid attempt to try to seduce him into marrying her, every last wrenching moment of her orgasms, the feel, the touch, the heft and the presence of him deep inside her—all of that was as amorphous as the fog and just as evanescent.

  It felt like a fog of death, and she was alone, and she would be consumed by it if she didn't move.

  Where to move? Hang on to the fence. Hope something pre­sented itself. As she had waited in the shadows of the hallway, she had begun to methodically figure out each next step: She'd need money; she extracted some banknotes from the lining of her skirt. She'd need transportation. That was random, on the street. She'd need to look as if she were a traveler, because a lady would never approach a hotel without luggage, a maid, and a chaperone.

  She didn't have the chaperone or the maid, but she certainly could have a trunk and story about her people arriving later.

  She needed to find a department store and outfit herself ac­cordingly.

  She needed to find out where she was and how to get where she needed to be. She didn't need the most expensive hotel in the

  city. And probably, they were booked full with all the husband-seeking heiresses her father had told her swarmed all over London.

  And actually, she didn't need a hotel at all: a nice, respectable rooming house would do, since she planned to stay in one place for a fair amount of time. Someplace her father would never think to look.

  His rooms would have been perfect...

  She banished the thought. What could he have done for her otherwise? She could have stayed there and spread her legs for him for months, wallowing in the pleasure, and then what? Would her father have given up the hunt for her, or Wroth given up the quest to obtain what had been promised him?

  She didn't think so.

  No. She had to forget the libertine prince and his bull of a penis, solve the problem, divorce the solution, and finally get her life in order.

  This wasn't a very promising way to begin, hanging on to a fence and walking hand over hand into oblivion. But this was all she could do right now, so this she would do.

  She was nothing if not determined.

  And the rest she'd figure out later.

  It was a city of ghosts, stupefied, walking ghosts, sliding in and out of the fog, followed by sibilant whispers that floated in the air like ashes.

  .. .He's gone ...

  Grave robbers. Desecraters. Infidels. Curse them, damn them send them to hell—

  No, he never died...

  He died. They murdered him, and they took him from us ...

  No, don't you see—it was a plot, a plan; he's alive, he's been waiting, he's coming back ...

  Kyger heard the buzzing whispers, almost as if they were im­printed on his consciousness and not the slivers of conversation floating around him as he made his way among the human stat­ues huddling publicly in shock and horror.

  He's gone.

  We have to find who did this . ..

  He's alive—

  Sobs, murmurs of consolation, anger —

  He's—

  . . . don't say it . . .

  . . . we know, we're waiting . . .

  Rabble-rousing, rage, fury, and then calm voices in the fog toning down the hotheads, the voices of reason, the voices of Tony Venable's followers reassuring those who loved him that the miscreants, the defilers, the murderers would be caught, pun­ished, drawn and quartered and hung in the Tower.

  . . . don't say it , . .

  Kyger was chilled to the bone. They were saying it without saying it. Resurrection. Return. Secrets and lies. That Tony Venable had faked his death and he was coming back to them —

  They hadn't seen his bloody body; at the funeral all those weeks ago, they had seen the sanitized, living-in-death body, cleaned up, dressed up, theatrically made up, perfect, as if he were sleeping, suspended in life.

  Of course they thought revivification was possible, they thought he was testing them, they thought he could do anything, even re­turn from the dead.

  The buzzing whispers grew louder; he felt as though he needed armor to protect himself from the anguish and turmoil. The city was in agony; the fog wept because it could not.

  He felt as if he were the only one moving, the only one with a purpose, but in actuality the fog had slowed everything down to movements in increments.

  And not everyone was devastated. Not when you looked closely. Not everyone was feeling fraught and lost. It just seemed that way.

  But as Kyger moved away from the bridge, the knots of peo­ple, and the clotted traffic, the pall in the air, and the sense of doom and denial that seemed concurrent with the menace of the hovering fog dissipated bit by bit.

  It wasn't that the fog was any thinner. It was that there were fewer people clustered together, because those who mourned had chosen for some reason to congregate nearby the bridge, and so the atmosphere of grief and denial wasn't so cloying here.

  Good. He needed a fresh breath of air. He needed to get to Shoreditch, which was to the east. He headed toward Aldgate, asking directions as he went until a kind passerby pointed him to-

  ward Liverpool Street Station and the Shoreditch Road, where he would find what he was seeking—Seven Sisters Park.

  It was faster to walk at this point. The oppressive fog and slow movement of the passersby and traffic only heightened his sense of urgency. And yet, it was the kind of day where no one would go to a park, least of all his putative Good Samaritan.

  He wondered how he expected to find any of the answers he sought when he didn't know the questions. It didn't seem to mat­ter. His instinct was to go, and he was not far away now. He'd passed the railroad station, and moments later, he came to Shore-ditch Road, at the intersection of Bethnel Green. Suddenly the fog swirled away, and there was the park.

  He couldn't see much of it: just low stone walls, interspersed with tall stone pillars, two of them supporting a tall iron gate with ornate triangular designs all over it. It was closed tight, surely a sign no one could possibly be within.

  But then suddenly, the gate swung wide open as if it were inviting him in, one elongated triangle just at chest level notice­ably dividing into what looked like the number seven on the right, and its mirror image on the left.

  No. Yes. He wasn't imagining it. It definitely was a seven. Two sevens, one reversed. No other place on the fence did the triangles divide in just that way. But when you looked, there were sevens. Part of every triangular shape on that fence.

  Hellfire.

  And there was nothing beyond the threshold of the park but ominous gray rolling fog. Sevens and fog. Symbols of—what? He felt as if a biding evil was reaching out to him, teasing him, play­ing with him, toying with him, goading him to come in.

  Sevens.

  Enter the park and you enter the abyss. He could see nothing beyond the fog, and it pulsed like a living thing, waiting for him, watching him.

  Watching, always watching.

  He shook himself. This was crazy.

  It knows what I'm thinking. ,.

  Crazy.

&nbs
p; It knows about the sevens ...

  Insane.

  But he couldn't make himself take the first step over the threshold of the gate with the reverse sevens.

  I'm waiting ...

  He knew it was waiting. He felt it in his gut, in his craw. Some­thing evil was in the park, and if he put one foot past that gate ...

  Better to leave. Get out. Fast. And forget it. There was nothing beyond the gate that he needed to know. No clues. No answers.

  He turned abruptly, and pitched right into a man who was standing directly behind him. A man he hadn't seen, heard, or been aware of.

  A man he recognized instantly despite the fact he'd been half dead when the man came to his rescue.

  The Samaritan. "Well, it's about time you got here," he mur­mured.

  "Why is that?" Kyger couldn't keep the grit out of his voice.

  "Because you said you would."

  He was so tense he thought he'd explode. "I did, didn't I?" There was something so preternatural about the Samaritan, and yet there was nothing distinctive about him at all.

  What could he have to do with the supernatural fog, or the de­sign of the sevens in the gate?

  "We like a man who keeps his word," the Samaritan said smoothly. "We've been waiting. Come."

  We? We . .. Who was we? And come where? Into the gate with the mirror-image sevens? Into the fog? Into oblivion?

  The Samaritan took his arm and propelled him forward force­fully. Past the gate with the sevens, into the fog.

  And as they seemed to be swallowed up into the smoky gray, it suddenly opened up, and they were in a clearing around which were seven statues, and some small stone tables and benches.

  "The Seven Sisters," the Samaritan said, gesturing.

  It was like a little Stonehenge—the statues were shapeless, faceless. They could have been anything, gods, men, monsters, symbols. Or they could be nothing. They just were, tall, formless, and menacing, and they dominated the space.

  Kyger whirled on him. "The coachman."

  "There's no coachman," the Samaritan said from behind him.

  Kyger whipped around. "The coachman who came right after you found me ... where is he?"

  "There was no coachman," the Samaritan reiterated, and now he sounded as if he had moved farther away.

  Kyger whirled again. The Samaritan was nowhere to be seen. He heard the sound of hoofbeats, the rumbling of a carriage. He saw the shadow of a coach moving behind the fog, coming at him and at him—the face of the coachman, the face of death, coming at him relentlessly—close, close, close—running him down—God almighty—

  He fell forward as the death sound of coach wheels rumbled over his head ...

  The fog closed in around him, swarming with fizzy whispers.

  SSSSSSSS. ..

  ...seven . ..

  .. . seek seven ...

  ... dead and alive—

  SSSSSSS—

  Sacred... sssssss—

  . .. sacrosanct... sacrilege .. . sacrifice ... sacrament.. .

  Sacred...

  Seven—

  Buzzing bees of sound swarming around his head, infiltrating his consciousness. He didn't know where he was—he was on the ground, the death's head coachman was coming ... coming— what? Sacred seven .. . again—?

  Bzzz, bzz, bzz. • . hissing sevens ... zzzz's like bees, like sev­ens upside down, right side up ... all in his ears. He couldn't get rid of the sound of the bees in his ears ...

  And then he was rolling on the ground, as if he'd been tossed down an incline. All the way down, no way to stop, no way to save himself ... no end, into a void, into the fog—

  And when he awakened, he was outside of the park, with the gates emphatically closed, the sevens integrated back into the decorative iron triangles in the fence so that no one would ever know there were sevens everywhere, with an opaque fog rolling around him, curious, thick and slow.

  Money was the elixir of life. If you had it, you could drink from the fountain of all possibilities. If you didn't, you'd die of thirst. Her father had taught her that; in America, they had lived like that—everything of the best: the biggest house, the best sur­roundings, imported furniture, important paintings, clothes from Paris designers, obsequious servants who tended to everything with the smooth efficiency of an oiled machine. That was how Zabel expected to live, what he expected his money to buy. What he had worked for all his life, what he had hoped would pave over his hardscrabble past.

  And his daughter expected no less. It was how she was raised, what she knew, how life had always been.

  But now, she discovered, money was finite. She had taken all the money she had found in the hotel room, a fairly substantial sum to have been lying around like that to be sure, but it was a set amount, and it wouldn't go far enough for her to accomplish her plan unless she was prudent.

  She didn't know how to be prudent. Having the best of every­thing meant you didn't count the cost. She didn't know how to count the cost or how to judge the relative value of anything out­side the purview of the wealthy.

  She knew how to call in a dressmaker to replicate the latest fashions from the rue de la Paix. She knew how to host a dinner party and how to create a menu. She knew how to be charming and engage disparate people in a cohesive, all-inclusive conversa­tion. She knew how to flirt, how to make people feel important and cosseted.

  And she surely knew how to pass the bills on to her father.

  But—the cost of a hansom cab. The price of a dress at Harrod's. Where to find the best rooms. How to engage a chaper-one. Never had she done these things, and she felt like a tiny fish floundering around in a great big ocean, with sharks waiting to devour her.

  Never mind that. It must be done. She would just take each point one at a time, one foot in front of the other, and she would be fine.

  So first she had to find a hansom to take her back into the city, which took no little time as she hung on fences and traversed un­known streets until one happened by. And then, finally she could relax for a few minutes and parcel out the details, while someone else dealt with the fog.

  God, it was thick. But it wasn't so much the fog as the feeling of dissonance in the air. As they got closer to the heart of the city, as the coachman fought his way over the bridge near Parliament through the clotted traffic toward Bond Street, she felt an over­whelming sense of heaviness closing in on her.

  It was the people milling in the street with haunted eyes; it was her self-imposed and daunting task of finding someone in this misbegotten town that she could stand to be married to for more than an hour. It was her huge disappointment that it would not ever be the bull. And her unexamined fear she didn't really have enough money after all, and would be forced to return to her fa­ther and Wroth in defeat.

  But that was to be thought about later. For now, she had enough, and she was on her way. A dress, a trunk, some toiletries, a newspaper would help. The best boardinghouse, or the most re­spectable affordable hotel, perhaps.

  Everything was perhaps now, when her life had been so cer­tain before. But before there hadn't been a Wroth, or a dissolute bull who looked like a gentleman, patronized brothels and lived like a bohemian.

  Not to think about that either.

  If only he'd said yes ...

  But he hadn't. And she'd been naive, and she was well rid of him, and she could do all of this on her own, without him, with­out her father, without help, without guilt.

  What did he have, really? When he totted up the whole expe­rience the following day, there was nothing that sounded con­crete, even to him.

  Sevens and circles, a dead demagogue whose body was miss­ing, a brothel with moving walls, secret entrances, grown men playing boys' games with secret symbols and hooded robes, mys­terious coachmen gone missing, foggy parks, seances with un­earthly messages, a vanishing vestal..... .

  God, it sounded like a piece of sensational fiction.

  He couldn't go to Wyland with it. Whatever he had was as in­su
bstantial as the fog, and there wasn't a thing there that would bring down the incipient movement to canonize Tony Venable.

  He heard it everywhere the next day. Whispered in the streets. Talked about in pubs. Proselytized on street corners. It was over­whelming. It clogged the air, as thick and opaque as the fog.

  It sounded like the fizzing buzz of bees in his ears.

  He had to get away from it, to clear his head in clean air away from the transsubstantial fog of mourning and exaltation.

  It was time to go home. Time to put some of this on Lujan, since it had been his suggestion that he pursue it. Maybe Lujan— and it was rather hard to even think this—would have another perspective.

  Or some answers?

  Lujan?

  Well, at the least, he'd be away from London, away from the smoky fog.

  And then—there would be Jancie.

  And maybe that was the real objective: maybe he just needed to see Jancie.

  ... Maybe it was a bad idea. Seeing Jancie made the schism within him that much deeper. Because as he entered the house, he was stunned that he could also see his voracious virgin equally at home in the drawing room at Waybury, and that was something he didn't expect.

  "Well, brother mine," Lujan greeted him, clapping his shoul­der, and moving him into the parlor with barely a pause. He was very good at it. When had he become so good at it? "What's to do?"

  "That's the question, old man. What is the to-do of the day?"

  "Ahhh ..." Lujan poured the wine. "The Venable thing. They're making him into a saint."

  Kyger took a deep, mouth-filling sip. "And apparently he was one. I haven't found a thing"—small lie, he'd found a lot, just nothing that made sense—"I can take to Wyland."

  "Then you'll have to look deeper," Lujan said, not tasting from his goblet. "People like Venable, they bury their sins all the way to China. There won't be anything on the surface you could dredge up easily. Nothing as incriminating as Wyland would like to see, and no one expects you could have found anything like that in a month's time in any event. Come, it's dinnertime. Jancie's up with the tot who's been cranky all day. We can talk."

  They sat close together at right angles at the foot of the table