The Missing: The Curious Cases of Will Winchester and the Black Cross

by Jerico Lenk

I sucked in a stuttering breath, eyes rolling open to the fog and the startling glow of a streetlamp overhead.

  Thin wire spectacles dropped to his nose, the Quinn fellow hovered beside me. I didn’t really care that he’d hit me; I clutched his thick arm as I struggled against shocked tears and the lingering feel of cold, filthy ghost water in my throat.

  But I was again myself—I was real, and I was safe.

  I lifted a shaking hand to my freshly throbbing cheek, the one without the scrape, and croaked, “Well, at least you’ve evened things out for me, haven’t you?”

  “What did you see?” The nervous-looking one was far too spirited for my comfort, words bobbing and dipping with his Irish accent as he crowded me impatiently, clutching a scrap of paper as though he wished to write down what I said. I shrank away, face twisted.

  “O’Brien!” the one my age hissed. “Give him some room, man, for Christ’s sake.”

  Daphne. Athena. They needed to get home. And Kitty …

  “Where’s Kitty?” I choked out, turning roughly against Quinn’s hard shoulder. “Where’d the bloody wench go?”

  O’Brien’s face pinched. “Kitty?” he said.

  “The Wraith,” I snapped, as if they could have known that. “The Wraith at Waterloo.”

  “Yes!” Clement cried, then seemed to realise his genuine smile and promptly shook it off as I wrenched free of Quinn’s hands. Stumbling over Daphne’s shoes, I threw myself against the stone to vomit off the side of the bridge.

  The foul, black water gawked back up at me. I spit once, twice, until the unpleasant tang of vomit was mostly gone.

  What did they think of me, these unfortunate strangers, after an episode like that? That I was mentally unwell, surely, suffering from neurosis or a rare but obvious hysteria. Kitty. Her memories. That eerie gust of wind and hellish loss of control. Dreaming while still awake, it had felt. Or a … collision of realities. And yet the nervous one had asked, What did you see? as they all looked at me, as though they knew something I did not.

  They did, though, didn’t they? I turned slowly around, eyes wide and cold with the weak tears that sprang up when one became ill.

  “What was that … just now?” I asked.

  “A mild possession,” Quinn muttered.

  A possession. Like a ghost conjurer, or a medium. I squinted at him, incredulously and not entirely kindly. Clement’s eyes blazed into me. “What was her full name? Could you discern the year? Recall any details whatsoever?”

  “Mild possession?” I repeated, eyes darting from Clement to Quinn and back.

  Clement uttered a tart sigh. “Yes, reliving the spirit’s memories.”

  The Missing could change the feel of an empty room. Move things that ought to remain stationary. Open and close doors, blow out candles, let their voices and footsteps echo cool and bodiless, but never in my life had I even imagined it was possible to experience their … memories.

  “You’re Spiritualists?” I whispered, in a daze.

  Yes, dazed, or breathlessly bewitched.

  “What did you see?” Clement tried again.

  “Kittredge Ann McGowell,” I reported hoarsely, and the most frightening part was that I hadn’t had to think about it. Wiping my mouth with the back of my sleeve one last time, I just knew the name. And I felt so very violated by the knowledge. “From Bethnal Green. I saw it all. She jumped.”

  “Suicides.” Quinn nodded. “Malevolent echo. The ambience compass is going mad, you see?”

  My eyes veered off to this ambience compass in which they were so interested. In Quinn’s big hand, it looked like a regular compass, but its little arrow stuttered and jerked as if North were constantly on the move.

  Never mind that. They believed me.

  “What’s going on?” I asked again, warily. “You saw her? The ghost?”

  Quinn’s hand closed on my shoulder as he ordered, “You’re staying until we collect your testimony.”

  “What?” I sputtered. “Testimony? I can’t—I must get Daphne and Athena home. Are you from the press?”

  “Kingsley shall return them home.” Clement gestured to the young man about my age. “Won’t you, Kingsley?”

  Kingsley’s face pinched. “Ah, I suppose … ”

  “A malevolent enigma,” O’Brien said to himself as he wrote it down.

  “Malevolent echo,” Quinn corrected gruffly.

  They’d seen the spirit. Mild possession. They spoke as though they’d been searching for it. “Excuse me … ” I almost swallowed my question at all their curt glances. “What does that mean?”

  “It’s the type of haunt,” Kingsley answered as Quinn ignored me once again and Clement’s lip curled at my partisan ignorance.

  Oh, I knew different ghosts behaved in different ways. But a classification?

  “Of course it’s a malevolent echo. Just my favourite.” Clement heaved a dissatisfied sigh.

  “What are we to do?” owl-eyed Kingsley urged as a miserable coach rattled by. “Mr. Zayne’s, Clement?”

  “Yes. Zayne’s it is.”

  “Stop!” I cried.

  All four of them halted and looked at me as though they’d briefly forgotten I was there. I was shaking. But I was also terribly turned on to the whole affair. What were they doing? How did they know all of this?

  I met Clement’s narrowed eyes, standing my ground. My heart thundered to be so bold but I was loath to leave.

  “I must insist I will not be giving you any testimony, whatever you need it for, unless you take me along to see what you’re doing,” I said. I wanted to know. I needed to know. “Oh.” My brow knotted. “But first I must return Daphne and Athena home safely.”

  The other three all looked to Clement. Clement gawked at me. Then his jaw tightened and, clearly resentful of my unnegotiable conditions, he conceded, “Fine. Shall we go, then?”

  I thought they’d part ways with Daphne, Athena, and me the moment we weren’t looking, but the men from Waterloo truly did follow us back to Julien’s-off-the-Strand. The night’s reception still spun along as if nothing out of the ordinary had occurred at all.

  “Will, what are you doing?” Daphne hissed as I returned her shoes to her on the stoop. There was a strange wide-eyed calmness about her now, as though she were at peace with almost fulfilling her threats. Almost jumping. Almost dying. “Your father will not be happy. You don’t know those men. You can’t … ”

  “You don’t understand,” I said, urging her and Athena to the door. “This is something I must do for myself.”

  “But Will—”

  “I think you owe it to me after tonight, don’t you, Daphne?”

  Daphne’s face hardened. Curls all broken up and windblown about her brow, she said, “Abandon your high horse, Will Winchester. We all have our demons.”

  What was I to do or say? That finally I saw the opportunity to speak one-on-one with Spiritualists who might believe what I said, who seemed more truth than fraud? A chance to discover others who bore witness to the dead, and what might become of someone with a curse like that?

  I didn’t even know if I could speak those words with the dreadful lump in my throat.

  “What am I to tell your father, then?” Daphne asked wearily, shivering and looking far too fragile for my liking.

  “Tell him nothing.” I shrugged. I kissed her cold cheek. And then I strode briskly down the block to where the men from the bridge waited with a coach.

  ***

  It was off to Fleet Street, apparently.

  Once seated, Quinn offered me a splash of cognac from an ornate silver flask to calm my nerves.

  “So, you’re Will,” said Assistant O’Brien, the gangly one, after my delayed introduction, his face bright and eyes brighter as the coach rattled on. The one my size was Inspector Cain Kingsley, young Earl of the old Kingsley family.

  “Oh—yes!” I’d sputtered sheepishly as if I’d remembered Cain all along. I knew of the large noble family; no wonder he’d felt vague
ly familiar to me. The Kingsleys were notorious around London for all sorts of glamour and sensation. A small handful of them were deep into London’s Spiritualist scene, too.

  And now that I could think a bit straighter, I realised with a hot blush to be in Kingsley’s company in such an embarrassingly unpresentable state that I’d even seen him not very long ago, when Daphne and I had slipped out to that planchettist party. How could I not have remembered the moment I saw the milky lack of pigment scarring his left eye, the same that I’d noticed it through shoulders and elbows in the moving crowd of the ghost conjuring party, Daphne’s hand in mine, as Kingsley had sat surrounded by companions not on a chair, but perched gracefully on the edge of a billiards table, a real center of conversation as everyone waited for the private medium to arrive with her jewels and crystal ball?

  “Still can’t believe he’s been decorated Earl before he’s even twenty-one,” Daphne had whispered. And then we’d both forgotten all about it, fading into the audience as in the candlelight the medium called on this spirit or another.

  I leaned forward to shake O’Brien’s reaching hand, offering a poor excuse of a smile and too flustered to meet Kingsley’s gaze in the dark of the coach.

  “You must be shaken, still,” O’Brien murmured. “Apologies again for all this mess—Lord, you’re so young, too.”

  “I’m not terribly young,” I assured him, hesitantly. For just a breath or two, I doubted the whole thing. But then the words came tumbling forth. “I’m not terribly shaken, either. I’m actually rather impatient to see what comes next because I’ve observed them, myself, when others couldn’t all my life. The dead. Spirits. So … ”

  “I knew it by the look in your eyes.” A small but triumphant smile broke across Kingsley’s face. “You possess the talent.”

  “I don’t know that I’d call it talent.” Quinn took the words right out of my mouth, in that rough baritone of his, cramped in a shadowy corner of the cab. I felt very small next to him, never mind the cold, curt glances of appraisal he thought I didn’t notice.

  “Don’t mind Quinn,” Kingsley insisted with a gentle smirk that made half-moons out of his eyes. “He wants you to believe he’s frightening—old habits die hard for a former Yard detective—but he’s our gentle giant now.”

  Quinn sighed.

  It was just after midnight and Fleet Street was the usual circus. Clement waved me on impatiently as I followed O’Brien out of the coach. “Come on then, if you’re so bent on being involved.”

  The four of them strode down past a cabman’s shelter towards what appeared to be a menagerist’s shop, but in the streaked front windows, easily missed between lurid displays of stuffed alligator heads and off-kilter bird skeletons in rusty cages, an unassertive sign read: STYGIAN SOCIETY – WEST LONDON BURIAL CLUB.

  “This can’t be open now, can it?” I protested weakly. Nobody seemed to hear.

  The doorstep bowed underfoot; the place was thick with the odour of chemicals, smoke, and mould. To my surprise, a group of men was situated inside with gin and cigarettes. I could hardly see them at first for lack of light and looming mountains of acquired … stuff.

  All manner of objects from the curious to the funereal piled around. Books, furniture, dusty graphoscopes, broken mirrors, bottled specimens parading alongside bizarre taxidermy displays. An ancient magic lantern sat squat and bulky, draped half in grimy velvet; forests of fat old candles were planted in heaps of wax atop stacked coffins.

  We’d walked in on something of a party. The men were in the middle of charades, one of them wearing a ridiculous feather boa and a bejeweled belt surely snatched from some playhouse. They recognised their visitors almost immediately, and startled laughter trickled round the room until the man in the fabulous garb cried:

  “Clement! Good to see you. You look in a bind, per usual.”

  “Pleasure’s all mine, Zayne,” Clement grumbled. “Now, listen, this is urgent.”

  “It’s always urgent with you! You never call just to chat anymore, chum. Always expecting favours and never paying your gratitude … ” Mr. Zayne affected an injured frown. Rough, suggestive laughter chorused from his companions.

  Clement looked far from amused. “You’ll be paid, and handsomely. You know that, Zayne.”

  “Ah, hold on, now! Is that a threat or a promise? Come now, my man; won’t you honour me with dinner first?”

  Mr. Zayne gave a saucy wink and there was another eruption of laughter. My man, this scruffy fellow in the feather boa called Clement, puffing on his cigarette and looking maybe one drink too far into that bottle of gin.

  “We’ve got work for you.” The ghost of a smirk waited at Clement’s mouth as if for the moment to be right.

  “And what’s that?” Mr. Zayne countered, tapping cigarette ash into one of the other men’s drinks. The other man didn’t notice.

  “You know,” Clement said.

  The tension in the air sharpened to a point; the men at the table quieted. Mr. Zayne discarded the obnoxious studded belt and peered at Clement with round, bright eyes, either drastically serious or deeply thrilled. Maybe both.

  “A body?” Mr. Zayne raised his brows. He didn’t wait for confirmation. He climbed over an examination table, which apparently served as a front desk of sorts, and then he began digging through a cabinet with a pitch pine infant-sized casket on its highest shelf.

  I looked to O’Brien, and then Quinn, and then Kingsley. None offered any explanation. Only Kingsley at least returned the glance.

  “Who’s the newest pretty boy?” one of Mr. Zayne’s grubbier company called from the back of the table, eyeing me with a gin grin.

  “A witness.” Clement didn’t miss a beat. It might have been mildly protective. Or maybe he was just exasperated.

  “Where the hell’d you grab the likes of him? Cleveland Street?”

  There was another uproar amongst Mr. Zayne’s men with the pounding of fists on the table and peals of laughter. A scrawnier man lit a pipe.

  Last year on Cleveland Street, in Fitzrovia, there had been discovered a brothel which served as part-time work for a number of boys also employed by the London Central Telegraph Office. The place had received solicitations mainly from aristocrats; most scandalous of all was the mention of Prince Albert Victor in association. My neck was hot under my collar. And in my state of uncertainty, the paths became all crossed in me between wit and simple spite as I sputtered, “Oh, I see! As though I am a telegraph boy. How perfectly clever. While you certainly don’t look the type to be more intimate than I with the whole Cleveland Street event last year, I’m sure—”

  “That’s enough, gentlemen!” Clement had moved off deeper into the shop to loom expectantly over the exam table with Mr. Zayne, who finally discovered what he’d been rummaging for: a massive, swollen, stained and mouldering book, through which he presently thumbed at a rapid pace. Clement threw me a sharp glance, though he still addressed the others. “As you might see, it has been a hell of a night.”

  Mr. Zayne’s men glared at me, and I glared back at them. After I shrank behind Quinn a bit, of course.

  A small collection of clocks ticked away, off rhythm with one another. Clement spoke in a tiny humming tone with Mr. Zayne as Mr. Zayne pushed aside the book to search a second just like it. I peeked around Quinn’s side. The pages were crammed corner to corner with faded handwritten lines, in some vague semblance of order.

  “McGowell!” Mr. Zayne finally cried with a jab of the finger to the book. “See, here. Miss Kittredge Ann McGowell. From the Green. Cause of death, ‘drowned, suicide.’ Born 1829, died 1852. Ah, lucky you, Clement! She just barely missed the Stiffs’ Express!”

  Kitty.

  “Amazing,” Clement murmured. He slid me a glance that only lasted long enough for him to realise I’d seen it. Then he crossed his arms on the exam table and grinned up at his friend Mr. Zayne.

  “So,” he said, “where is she buried, then?”

  ***

 
The churchyard of the parish to which Kitty McGowell had once belonged was not exactly the kind of late-night stop I’d ever be wont to make, but the streets felt vaguely familiar to me. I didn’t recognise them; it was just a shimmering, lingering sense of having walked them before. Sordid alleys, beggars and jakesmen, rattling shutters. Lanterns bobbed in the wind. St. Matthew loomed against the nighttime sky.

  With the ambience compass out, Quinn and O’Brien manoeuvred through what crumbling monument stones were left above ground in the cramped cemetery. The parish watch house was dark. No one in these parts seemed to care about trespassers.

  “I hope we won’t have to dig more than twice,” Clement grumbled, holding a lamp outstretched before us as Kingsley and I followed him through the nippy dark.

  “She’s a very active one,” Kingsley muttered back. “The compass won’t have any trouble finding her.”

  “Here,” Quinn said suddenly, and not very enthusiastically. With their spades and shovels, Mr. Zayne and his men swarmed the small stretch of ground to which he pointed, and apparently to which their odd little compass had led.

  Clement heaved a sigh. “We’ll see,” he said to Kingsley.

  Peeking around the edge of the pit as Quinn directed Mr. Zayne and his men to dig, the sight of disintegrated coffins and not-so-freshly-buried corpses probably should have been more disturbing to me. But it was a very mortal thing to be so engrossed by the morbid, I’d been thinking lately.

  “Don’t worry about that light, now!” eccentric Mr. Zayne called from the shallow hole. “We’ve done this plenty of times in pitch dark, my man!”

  Maybe Mr. Zayne and his crew were body snatchers, then. Crunch! Soft, worm-filled coffin wood gave way under the blade of a shovel. Instead of a name, it was marked with a number that matched the one for Kitty McGowell in Mr. Zayne’s mouldy index of burials.

  How terrible, to be discarded as a number when you died.

  I regretted not having grabbed my coat earlier; the night was just chilly enough to make me grit my teeth against their chattering, fingers tingling and shoulders bunched up—