Eterna and Omega

by Leanna Renee Hieber

  “Shall I say prayers for you here, Mr. Dupris?”

  “That would be very kind of you, but business first, matters of the spirit later. Leave the lock of hair, which we hope binds me tighter to this world, right here.”

  Evelyn Northe-Stewart had experienced much of death, but at a distance. She dealt with souls, not the sites and circumstances of death. Confronted now with the undeniable evidence of Louis’s demise, she found herself frozen, unable to bend, Clara’s love token dangling from her hand.

  “My dear Madame Medium,” Louis urged, “do not hesitate. I know this is hardly easy. But I am asking—begging—you…”

  If she could have scrubbed the damned spot out, she would have. What a benefit to cleanse the floor and, in doing so, perhaps remove some of the guilt that she assumed dear Bishop and Clara had shouldered, knowing as they did what had occurred here.

  “I would do anything to touch that hair once more…” the ghost said achingly.

  It was too intimate a tone for even a medium to hear. Evelyn shook herself from her paralysis and laid the braided piece upon the floor.

  Immediately, the air around her changed. A sudden breeze glanced off her ear and toyed with the fine hairs about her neck and arms. This specific sensory experience, she knew from opening the spirit world to hungry mortal hearts, was laden with possibility.

  Perhaps, she thought with a surge of hope, the living twin could at last forgive; perhaps Clara could have closure; perhaps Louis could find peace once their duties were done and the devils dispatched.

  The air turned sour. The lantern went out.

  A set of distinct black shadows surrounded her.

  “Get out,” Louis ordered. “Now.”

  “Glad to.” Evelyn ran to the front door and threw it open. She blinked at the sunlight for an instant, wondering at the lazy, sunlit street before them, the peaceful setting so at odds with the terror behind.

  The medium—and the ghost with her—raced across the street and to the corner, where a cluster of carriages turned onto Fifth Avenue. The grand flow of traffic led all carts, carriages, pedestrians, and trolleys down through the Washington Square parade ground. The escapees paused in the shadow of the dark, beautiful Gothic-adorned Church of the Ascension to catch a breath.

  Evelyn spoke firmly after a long moment. “Now. Let’s see if Clara can accept your calling. Reach out only with considered caution, Mr. Dupris,” she said warningly.

  “Always with caution,” he replied. “I know her state as well as any and helped her refine her spectral shielding. I’d like to think I will not trigger the same violences as have been visited upon her by other spirits, though I now share their form. I have never done anything but love her.”

  “Let’s hope that’s enough, Mr. Dupris,” she stated.

  Evelyn and the ghost headed back to her driver on West Eleventh Street. Settling herself inside, she felt a cool draft sweep through the closed door, rustling the fine curtains. The ghost would ride uptown with her.

  “Those terrible silhouettes, Madame Northe-Stewart,” Louis said mournfully. “Here in the spirit realm I can see light around life. And everything has a spark. But those … Devoid entirely. They are a nothingness born from death and live to kill. Is there anything so terrifying in all the world, in anything I have ever known, as that emptiness?”

  The shudders Evelyn had been holding back out of pride and stiff paralysis now flowed freely up and down her corset-braced spine. That which frightens the dead is cause for terror indeed.

  * * *

  Clara had fallen asleep again after Evelyn left, though rest had been fitful since the incident at the Trinity Church graveyard, as full of imagery and of omen as her sensitive person could bear. Whether this was dream or vision was unclear, but the images were vivid, engaging all her senses, which usually signaled that what she was witnessing was real … or would be, in time.

  A house was on fire. It stood at the end of a tree-lined lane. The tall, spindly trees were on fire, too, burning bushes reaching questing, gnarled branches to heaven.

  Standing in shadow was a haunted-looking dark-haired woman in contemporary dress familiar in an old soul, past-life sort of way. Remembering nearly all of her past lives was one of Clara’s gifts; she was sure she knew this woman but could not place her.

  The woman raised one hand. Signaling for help? Or telling Clara to halt? Surely this person was the missing piece that the visitor had made such a fuss over.

  The world was swaying … until Clara realized it was not the ground but her. She was swaying side to side as if her body were a fulcrum, attempting to balance weighty scales.

  Clara looked down at herself. In one hand she held a large compass; the letters N, E, S, W glowed red-hot and the dial spun dizzyingly. In her other hand she held a golden chalice filled with a thick, dark liquid that smelled of pitch and copper. Script emblazoned across the mouth of the goblet read DEATH.

  Murmurs sounded behind her, and Clara craned her neck to try to see what was making the noise. She was at the head of a great fan of her past selves. All were blindfolded and all held a chalice in each hand as if a strange personification of Justice. Each bemoaned choices made and cursed the blindness of Eterna Commission. She couldn’t catch every incarnation’s condemnation of her present life’s focus, but the eighteenth-century ship captain she’d once been, a distinct, fine-featured man nearest her that bore enough of her essence to be clearly Clara but in a time prior said:

  “Eternal life is meaningless if lived out in mankind’s hell. The greater war is the one for the soul of the future.…”

  Each of her was a figure like so many depictions of personified Justice, but on the scales of her own hands lay life and death … The iconography of Justice’s infamous sword was present, too, only in the form of many swords, all broken and scattered at her various feet, iteration after iteration.

  Could so many of her have gotten so much wrong for so long?

  In each life she’d tried to take at least one particular injustice and right it. In the seventeenth century, it had been trying to make maps for safer travel along treacherous passages. In the eighteenth, the sea won again, and that life focused on creating more benevolent commerce than slavery for trade in France.

  In Clara’s present life, at age twelve, the pain of Mary Todd Lincoln, the need to heal the nation after the assassination of the man elected to lead in times of strife, had borne the Eterna Commission from her innocent mouth. Perhaps, however, it had awoken a greater, darker foe instead, happy to take that little girl’s idealism and tear it to bloody shreds, replacing hope with horror.

  If the fates would give her time, then perhaps the battle that needed fighting was just ahead. Each chalice, each body, bent and swayed with increasing violence and momentum until the contents of the cups spilled thick and scarlet onto the gray flagstones below the feet of the representative lives.

  Another rumbling roar, like the shriek of harpies, accompanied a spire of flame that shot up from the ground, marking the boundaries of what looked like a large estate. A wave of acrid heat washed over Clara. Burning debris fell between her and the beckoning woman, and smoke and ash filled the air.

  Clara woke from the nightmare, coughing and gasping for breath.

  Before her hovered a transparent man in an open shirt, suspenders, and breeches. Were he not grayscale and floating an inch above her quilt, she might have thought him ready for work in his laboratory.

  Louis Dupris, her wild chemist and poet-philosopher, whom she’d loved and lost. Her mind fumbled for purchase, even though she had been expecting this manifestation. She had asked for it, given permission, and this was no longer a dream.

  Nothing could have prepared her to see his spirit so clearly. In his hand he held a silver lock of her hair, its color gone to ghostly grayscale, dead material connecting the dead to her. The sight of him was bittersweet, so different from the warm, vibrant man who, in his sure arms, made her feel that magic was not an unsee
n force but one at work in the human heart.

  “Hello, Clara,” he said, his voice still gamesome, but distant, and the sound and the movement of the phantasm’s lips at a delay made for a jarring disconnect. “I’ve missed you.”

  Clara swallowed hard. “And I you, Louis.”

  “Thank you,” he continued, his grayscale face brightening, “for permitting this.”

  “It’s the least I can do to honor you,” Clara said, steeling herself. She sensed ghosts and often heard them, but she saw them rarely, and never so clearly.

  “It was your own forces that held me at bay, and for that I could not complain, as your shielding protects you admirably. But there is the matter of your … noise. You’re very loud. Your aura, your presence—it’s like one of the currents of Edison or Tesla. This made it near impossible for me to haunt you, though it drew me to you just as it did in life.” He chuckled softly. “Even in death, I am not immune to your magnetism. I am so glad the lock of your hair did the trick and allowed me to cross these uncharted distances.”

  Clara blushed at his flattery but felt a wealth of burning questions rise from within. “You’re holding my hair,” she began. “I’m so curious about the physical properties of your world.…”

  “I did not expect to be able to touch your hair, to hold it. But once Mrs. Northe-Stewart set it on the floorboards where I died, it came easily into my hand. We’ll be learning about the strange ways of this world together, you and I…”

  Clara blinked, trying not to think of the place where he died.

  Louis continued as if floodgates of language were opened. “I wasn’t sure it would work, but I’ve made great strides in tactile, localized magic. And here I am.” He stared at her lovingly. “You’re still a bit loud, darling.” He gestured around her, as if to her person, her presence.

  She stared at him, unsure what to say.

  “Don’t worry.” He chuckled softly. “I doubt it’s something you can adjust as if it were repositioning a hairpin. You’re a force of nature, Clara. And I believe in the laboratory we created one. A force of nature. That’s the Eterna Compound. It isn’t what you think. In the end, the compound had nothing to do with immortality.”

  “What, then?”

  “That’s what I’m trying to find out. Something didn’t want us to bring our compound to fruition.”

  “The British—”

  “No. Not the British. Not any one person or government. But entities. Other forces of nature out there, hardly as pretty as you. As I died, I saw dark, terrible things. I wish someone had warned us like they warned Feizer.”

  “Who?”

  “Bartholomew Feizer, his specialty was the mind. He was on leave in France. I never met him, but he sent a note saying hysterical women in his life, upon premonitions of disaster, demanded he not return. Turns out they were correct. Women are accused often of that, when they’re really on to something—”

  “Yes, institutionalized often, just for having intelligence, wisdom, psychic gifts, or, heaven forbid, any kind of romantic appetite.” She growled through clenched teeth. “Where is that note, from Feizer?”

  “Ash in the fireplace,” Louis replied. “No matter, we didn’t have enough time to heed the warning. We were dead within the next hour, at the hands of shadows straight from hell. Inky silhouettes manifested as if in reaction to our work. They struck against our work. Because, if you’ll follow me, I think what we crafted is actually a Ward.”

  At this word, Louis’s excitement built. When alive, he’d have flushed and his hazel eyes would have taken on a glow. But now only an additional breeze burst from his transparent form. “That’s what went wrong, and that’s what you have to reproduce. That’s why the spirits reacted in the Trinity lot; they were trying to tell you not to destroy our work. It’s vital. It will stand as a wall between life and what killed us.”

  “I want to be very sure I understand what you mean by Ward, Louis. We’ve no room for misunderstanding.”

  “We had created a Ward inside a house that had already been tainted: the carvings on the upper floors, the ‘door’ carved into the downstairs wall. The space was neutral once, but not when we died. Goldberg used to be a reasonable man, but something got to him. He’d gone truly mad and we didn’t see it. He let something into that place.”

  “Why couldn’t you see it? None of the carvings? Was the change in him not obvious?” she prompted. Louis shook his incorporeal head.

  “You’ve not been allowed to spend time around scientists, Clara. ‘Mad,’ to a scholar, theorist, scientist, is all relative. We all have—had—our quirks, odd notions and wild, sweeping moods. Goldberg was always a bit paranoid. The escalation, we assumed, was due to the stresses of his particular side of the research, working with living and dead tissue. It was rather gruesome, and at a critical point his mind went off the rails.”

  “Could there have been sabotage somehow?” Clara pressed. “From what I saw on the second floor hidden beneath carpets, the writings and scrawlings on the floor were similar to a case two years prior where a powder, an agent, was used to turn people’s minds.”

  “Oh. Well, then, yes,” Louis said, earnestly contemplative, “that would explain Goldberg’s sudden shift.”

  “How do you know you created a Ward?” Clara continued. “What in the disaster tells you so? Shouldn’t a Ward have stopped the horror, not encouraged it?”

  “The forces that entered the room went right to the material, trying to snuff it out, strangle it, take it apart particle by particle. In a neutral space, the Ward would have the upper hand, but the darkness had it that day, due to the rituals. They took us with them in the exact same way. Strangled and plucked apart from life to dust.”

  Clara fought back tears. She had always had a keen streak of empathic gifts, and she could see and feel what he described as if it was happening to her, before her eyes, in the instant, in a terrible duality. And she still felt responsible, for having the Eterna idea in the first place. Louis knew that look, and he held up a transparent gray hand.

  “No, Clara, I’ll have none of that guilt. Let me rejoice in being here with you, in your bright contrast,” the ghost said lovingly. She nodded, breathed deeply, and regained hawk-like focus on the luminous figure before her. “In life we are faced with profound moments of quiet loneliness,” he stated, hovering at the edge of Clara’s bed. “Those solitary, bleak moments are all the more extreme in death. To escape searing isolation, souls go rushing back into life again for another turn around the globe, bringing elder aches unto the next mewling existence, without any thought to that quiet corridor between life and death. So many souls bumble on, unaware of previous lives, eras, meaning, or purpose.”

  He wafted closer to her, engulfing her in chill. “But, God help us, those of us who know, remember … We dare to take the hand of another who shares the same bruises in the very same tissues of the soul. I don’t know which, in the end, is more lonely—to see life and death alone, or in the company of very old souls. What a thrillingly terrible, inevitable, amazing cycle I see from this vantage point…”

  Clara stared at him. Through him. “Oh, Louis…”

  Before they could muse further, solid and shade, they started at a sudden sound and movement as Senator Bishop flung wide Clara’s bedroom door.

  “Clara Templeton, who the devil are you talking to?” Bishop barked. He spotted Louis’s floating form and cocked his head to the side. “Good God, a ghost. Is that … Mr. Dupris?”

  Louis jumped—wafted—to his feet and bowed. “Senator. I assure you I was in no way disrespecting your ward.”

  Bishop clenched his jaw and pointedly looked away from Clara in her nightdress. “I take it you are here to report to Miss Templeton some matter of import regarding the Eterna disaster? I am sorry for your loss … of yourself.”

  “Thank you for your empathy, sir,” the ghost said earnestly. “I’m very impressed that you can see and speak with me. It is a high caliber of talent indeed t
hat can do such things.”

  “I’m not falsely modest, Mr. Dupris. I know I am very talented, but I’d say this exchange has more to do with your being a high-caliber spirit with a … very strong connection to us. I’ve never seen nor heard one so clearly.”

  “It is true, it is our collective connection. My brother, Andre, can also see and hear me,” Louis said thoughtfully.

  Clara blushed threefold, thinking of Andre, who had kissed her while pretending to be Louis, of her and Louis’s more passionate encounters, and of the senator’s talents, which always had her in a bit of awe.

  The ghost abruptly looked pained, as if something tore at him. “I feel my brother’s call upon me. Perhaps he got himself into trouble again.” The ghost sighed. “If I can come again, I will.…” He stared longingly at Clara in a way that made her blush again.

  He faded into the wall and was gone. Clara rose, went to her wardrobe, and pulled a quilted satin robe on over her nightdress, all the while ordering her thoughts in preparation for the conversation to come. She locked her emotions away, determined to focus on work and mission.

  “Well?” Bishop asked with an edge.

  “There’s another force at work,” she stated. “We’ve a far different enemy than we think.”

  Bishop stepped farther into the room, and she turned to face him. There was a long, tense moment as Clara watched him pour over all the things he could say, then seize upon the one thing he should ask. This decision process was hidden to most, under the veneer of his calm, politicking ways, inscrutable, but Clara had made a habit of cataloging his every expression, especially the ones that he took most care to hide.

  “What happened the night of your last seizure?” he asked. “There are too many secrets here, Clara. I thought we were working on that.”

  “Eterna has always been complicated,” Clara countered.

  “That’s not an answer.”