by Jerico Lenk
The music stopped in a surge of mutilated notes. I froze, eyes wide.
“Good afternoon,” I said, blushing furiously.
Clement squinted at me, nonplussed, until slowly recognition bloomed across his face.
“So, you’ve found your way here after all,” he said, a flat congratulation. “That was quick.”
“Well … yes, I had to come,” I replied timidly, unsure what else he expected me to say. “You gave me the card.”
Clement issued a little sound somewhere between a scoff and a laugh. I decided it was a laugh, judging by the shadow of a smirk that flickered across his mouth. Impatiently, he waved me over. I approached, eyes roaming his patterned sleeves, unbuttoned and rolled up. His braces hung out limp from under his waistcoat, off his shoulders. He was either very bold or very crass to be seen in public looking so casual, no jacket and no hanker-tie. Around his neck, flirting with his collar, was instead a very small chunk of quartz on a short leather cord—like the locket I hid, myself.
“I didn’t expect you’d actually call when I gave you that card,” he muttered. Confused and suddenly very self-conscious, I cut him a startled look. Then why on earth had he given it to me?
“Do you know what a ghost is?” he asked then, wiping a bit of dust off the hinges of the pianoforte. It was like another interview question. I issued a mute shrug, frown deepening. I didn’t know, after all, apart from the base understanding that a ghost was what remained of people who had died, and it was abnormal for others to know the Missing so intimately at all.
“A leftover soul,” Clement answered himself. “Historically, the Cross has called it ‘vis viva.’ Some intangible essence like that which is in you or I. Per working theory, apparitions manifest as some sort of Electro-Static energy, as in their presence that’s what our instruments respond to. But don’t let any of that fool you into thinking the Cross has figured it all out. Just because we know how to find them and how to get rid of them doesn’t mean we know what they are or why they are, just as no one can explain what we are and why we are.” He raked his hands through his hair then dropped them to his lap, slouching at the keyboard. “Our soul. The part that … gets left behind. After all, what is a soul, anyway?”
“I don’t know,” I conceded, completely unprepared for such an existential question.
“Perhaps there are mysteries to which there are no solutions.” Clement cast me a rather catlike look from his side of the pianoforte. Eyes hooded, nonchalant but penetrative. “What’s your burden, then?”
“Pardon?”
“What’s your burden?” he repeated, raising his brows. He was better behaved than the night at Waterloo, but he was still very forward and neglected all the right manners.
“I can see them,” I said, realising finally what he meant. “Ghosts. Spirits. I’ve been able to see them since I was small.”
“A clairvoyant, eh?” Clement hummed. “Thought so, by the way that wraith slipped into you so easily on the bridge.”
Clairvoyant.
He narrowed his eyes in appraisal. “How old are you?”
“Sixteen.”
“Only three years between us.” He was nineteen, then, still not even fully an adult himself. This close to him, it was obvious in the softer shape of his face. “Well,” he said around a sigh, “you must be something, as Westwood doesn’t let just any little witness waltz into our ranks.”
“Well,” I echoed, hands folded neatly atop the pianoforte, “Westwood also said you don’t give just anyone a card, either.”
Clement propped his elbows on the pianoforte with a gentle cascade of off-key chords. “All right,” he said, flustered. “It’s true. And I may have told him about you.”
My gaze veered back to him.
“Listen,” he said. “I have never witnessed something like what happened on the bridge. A bystander interfering with the investigation? Of course. A bystander with such clairvoyant sensibilities that he takes on a mild possession right before my eyes? Never, absolutely never. So of course, I told Westwood about you.”
I was both galvanized to know that and terrified I would not meet anyone’s expectations. “Well, what’s your burden?” I prompted, desperate to move on from talk about me.
Clement waved his hand, dismissively. “Third parameter psychosensitive,” he said.
“I see,” I said pleasantly. But I hadn’t the slightest what that was. Psychical abilities, perhaps? What if he saw right through me? Knew I had not formally applied, knew I wasn’t exactly what I appeared to be …
“I can’t read your mind,” he said, “if that’s what you’re worried for.”
I gawked at him, far from comforted considering I hadn’t spoken the worry aloud.
“Or did I just read your mind, then? Will you ever know?” Clement laughed silently, a little nod of the head and toothy smile. “I can’t read minds,” he said again. “Your eyes just went so wide. Stop fretting. Psychosensitive means ‘empath.’ Clairsentient. Say, what of your lady friends from Waterloo? Your sisters? We left them shaken, hmm?”
“Oh, they aren’t my sisters. They’re my father’s—”
A courier interrupted us, coming at a rapid pace across the music room to shove a wax-sealed packet at Clement.
“From Danforth, sir,” the courier said, then turned on his heel and left. Clement opened the packet. He glanced it over before sliding it my way across the pianoforte. Gingerly, I picked it up to read.
Open Spectral File No. MCDXCIV, the cover page declared. Reported repeated disturbances, Dis-embodied voices, Shadow figures, Owners troubled, To be investigated Wednesday, 24 September, by Lead Inspector Clement, Inspector Quinn (Police Escort), Scouting Inspector Winchester (Clairvoyant), and Assistant O’Brien.
I looked up at Clement, mouth open. “Already?” I said. “Tomorrow?”
Didn’t matter. I had my first assignment as a member of the Black Cross, and it was with the same men from Waterloo.
Clement took the packet back and thumbed through the pages. “They promoted you upon entrance to scouting inspector?” he mused aloud, cocking a brow, then ran a hand through his messy hair again. There was no apology in his voice, nor compromise or validation, just something so casual and yielding as if he’d never been rude to me in the first place. Welsh, the ladies earlier had said. For the most part, he just sounded like a Londoner, but I could hear the Welsh slipping through in the occasional slant of vowel or faded roll of an r.
He glanced up at me with a flicker of his hazel eyes.
“It seems we’ll be working together quite a lot in the future,” he said, and sighed.
***
“Ah! Mr. Winchester, yes?”
Research Inspector d’Pelletier paced around worriedly not far from where I’d waited earlier. He was very blond and seemed too tall and willowy for his round nose and round mouth, breaking into a deeply dimpled smile as I hurried his way.
Mr. I nodded, trying to swallow the chalky taste in my mouth. It was a new thing, to be so damnably anxious and excited at the same time. “Inspector d’Pelletier?” I ventured. His face lit up even brighter.
“Hello!” he cried, with the lilting voice of a proper Frenchman.
“You must have thought yourself mental,” he said as he led the way through the courtyard. “Did you? I did, when I first discovered my sensitivities. It’s nothing to be ashamed of. Communing with spirits and ghosts, it’s all very monstrous if you ask me. But here, working here, makes it worthwhile.”
Monstrous. Perhaps. I’d never really minded it, except for being castigated. I certainly didn’t mind it now that I knew there existed an entire institution of people just like me—and I was part of it.
“Lord, you’re young, too,” d’Pelletier hummed, squinting at me sideways.
“Yes,” I said quietly. Apparently, this was indeed a spectacle.
He stuck out a wide hand, smiling brightly.
“Oh,” I said even more quietly, and handed him my travel c
ase, which he carried for me, swinging it at his side as though it weighed nothing.
“Our chapter has not acquired many youths,” he said as he led the way to the dormitories. “But don’t let that frighten you. You’re not the only young one.”
“Youths such as Lord Kingsley?” I asked.
D’Pelletier glanced at me over his shoulder, brows raised. His smile broadened. “Yes, actually,” he said. “Inspector Kingsley. And a training medium, Miss Dubois.”
The dormitories were in the adjoining brick terrace, once a set of slim, side-by-side townhouses, now lodgings connected by a long lower parlour. Beyond the broad, dark door through which d’Pelletier led, light through painted-glass windows cast throbbing colours on the scuffed floor; black velvet flowers pranced up and down the red paper of the walls. Near the first set of stairs was a dusty tapestry with the same coat of arms from the Black Cross card, flaunting a lion and a raven. Nulli sunt casus was woven beneath.
“The rooms are let out.” D’Pelletier showed me along, tromping up the steep, narrow sets of stairs; at each landing, a handful of doors cramped about the short hall. “I believe about thirteen members reside here in Knight’s Hall. I’m not sure; I board in Scholar’s Hall.” We stopped on the third floor; he led me to an open door just across from the stairs, half around a jutting corner, and gestured for me to look in. “Your lodgings. A little narrow, I apologise, but you’ve a desk, a wardrobe, a window seat … ”
Peeling blue-striped wallpaper. A lamp that smelled like old oil and a damp wick. The ugly rug on the floor. It was perfect and perfectly terrifying. A room. My room. My … home now.
I peeked out the window, down at the courtyard.
“All the usual information is in your folio. But you may ask anyone anything, really. We’re a distracted bunch, but we don’t bite.” D’Pelletier laughed loudly. At my curt glance, the laugh sort of shriveled up in his throat. I don’t think he’d expected to be laughing alone. He stood at the door, an unwitting contender in one of the typical staring matches Daphne said I started quite often. He seemed to be waiting, perhaps for me to say or ask something. I wasn’t going to. I’d expended all the nervous sociability allowed with Clement. Now I needed to focus on myself.
Finally, d’Pelletier wilted a little but grinned again nonetheless. He nodded in farewell, murmuring, “Glad to have you here,” as he drifted out of sight and back through the hall.
Once I could no longer hear his strong steps, I closed the door.
The bed gave a modest little squeak when I flopped down onto it, folio in hand, and looked up at the faded ceiling, smelled the stale scent of the blankets and listened to the noises of a lived-in building, which always to me seemed like oversized rats scraping in the walls.
Yes, my room … and a heavy sense of something akin to homesickness weighing down on me.
If you leave for that place, Zelda had said. Hardly be welcome again …
This was a very new and unfamiliar sort of commitment.
This was change.
I dug through the folio Westwood had given me. There was the Black Cross crest again, heading one of the letters. Written by the secretary in thick, garish script below it were my name and occupation title, which felt a bit theatrical: Black Cross Second Parameter Clairvoyant, Spectral Department, Scouting Inspector.
Two dainty knocks sounded at the door.
I sat up on my elbow, brow knotted. “Ah—who’s calling?”
Nobody called. Nobody came into the room. Someone had probably mistaken my room for another’s. But the quiet suddenly felt a little … less empty. Movement, behind me. Except the door hadn’t opened.
I turned quickly, and immediately caught sight of the tiny girl near the chair.
She was dead, of course.
Just a little Missing waif, with a gaunt face and purple mouth, staring at me. But perhaps she wasn’t the type to speak or even realise I could see her.
“I’ll have to find a new room, I suppose,” she announced then in a frail, treble voice.
I smiled faintly, mildly amused, and nodded and shrugged at the same time in indifferent apology. I missed Charlie and Colette suddenly. But I didn’t have time to converse with dead girls whose rooms I’d taken over, never mind that the Black Cross had ghosts of its own.
When I looked up again, the Missing girl was gone.
I breathed a sigh of relief. Perhaps I would feel at home soon enough.
“Why, it is Will Winchester!” O’Brien cried, tromping down under the Black Cross portico columns and out onto the junction of Portland Place and Park Crest, that leather knapsack bouncing on his knobby shoulders. “I didn’t believe it at first—but here you are!”
“Here he is,” Clement echoed dryly as he lit a cigarette from his silver case, slouched against the damp September evening in a patchwork coat and deep scarlet knit neck-wrap.
Face pinched with a flustered smile, I nodded quickly. I was a tweed-capped bundle of eager nerves; I’d spent the day feeling like a mouse in the kitchen walls, flipping through some of the books left on the shelf in my room by the previous tenant, peeking out the window, now and again slipping around the halls to familiarise myself as unobtrusively as I could. Now it was nine o’clock, Wednesday evening, as the summons had read. My first assignment with the Black Cross.
Inspector Quinn eventually strolled up from around the corner, wearing those tiny spectacles that really did not seem to match his strong jaw and brown leather overcoat. He stared at me for a long moment, then accepted my presence with a short nod.
I was excited, but painfully paranoid to be out and about. Again, I told myself this was a certainty, not a temporary escape, but still in the back of my mind I wondered how long it might be before my father came calling for me—or, God forbid, that I run into him or someone else I knew outside Portland Place.
But at nine o’clock at night, Julien’s-off-the-Strand would be full of people and he, busy with his obligations … and so I tried very hard to discard the distraction as we climbed into two separate horse-drawn cabs. I was in the midst of a Black Cross team. They were strangers, and I couldn’t say I trusted them completely yet, but … with them, I was not alone.
We made our way to the southern reaches of Hampstead, to the modest middle-class residence of Mr. Nichols, a Board of Works chairman. He and his wife greeted us grandly once we arrived; their little old maid took our coats and hats while music echoed from the parlour as if we were important guests to be impressed. The Nichols children stared at me as introductions were made like I was some sort of monster. Perhaps they were curious about my freedom, seeing as I wasn’t entirely an adult. Perhaps they did not trust us. Or perhaps that was simply the way someone looked at the world when they cohabitated with ghosts. Did I look at the world that way?
Mr. Nichols gave us a tour. “That’s its room now.” He pointed to the drawing room. “We keep it shut up. No one dares open it, not even the maid, the poor Mrs. Carrie. But every now and then we find the door ajar, and that’s how we know that … it’s out and about.”
“And what is it you wish to come of our inspection tonight?” Clement asked.
There was a fragile pause. Mr. Nichols drummed his fingers. “I only wish to know what’s here with us,” he finally confessed, brow furrowed and eyes bright with desperation. “And why? Why is it here? Call me a fool, but I hope to discover it’s my father. The problem is that I just don’t know.”
“If given the opportunity, would you wish the spirit banished from your residence?” Clement asked next.
“No!” Mr. Nichols shook his head, ignoring his family’s discomforted glances. “If it is my father, no. Not at all!” He remembered something suddenly and gestured Clement after him. “I have some things for you, to help you conjure, or whatever it is you do. Photographs and other things … used in the séance, too … received a direct response to them, they said.”
Eventually, Clement ushered the Nichols, their grim-eyed children, and the
maid Carrie out the door to a hotel, to stay for the night under Westwood’s tab.
“Are you nervous?” O’Brien elbowed me as we gathered in the parlour, across the hall from “its” room. I grunted, rubbing at my shoulder.
“Not nervous, just curious,” I mumbled.
“Curious? You’re brave!”
I was most certainly nervous. Beyond nervous. I had to impress the Black Cross, after all, being new. That was some great pressure—not to mention how I pressured myself. There was a craving in me to be part of this like nothing I’d ever felt before, and it was strange, and unsettling, and liberating. I wanted to learn how to investigate and I wasn’t sure I’d ever forgive myself if I somehow … couldn’t manage it.
“The complaints seem typical of an enigma,” Clement interrupted. He quieted the family’s gramophone, annoyed. “Objects throughout the house are moved or misplaced. Phantom footfalls are common. The servants’ door locks itself, disturbing knocks and unexplained banging sound at random. Then there’s the matter of ‘its’ room.”
“Don’t forget the shadow-like figure they’ve glimpsed,” I reminded, hesitantly.
All three of my teammates looked my way as though they’d forgotten I was there. Blushing faintly, I stared back. Did they think I hadn’t read the case summary that had come with the summons Clement distributed?
“Who conducted the séance?” Quinn followed gruffly.
“The SPR,” Clement said. “Mr. Nichols wrote them, they held the séance, then passed the case off to us.”
“The outcome?”
“Nothing but knocks and the like,” O’Brien recounted. “The medium didn’t channel a thing. Something childish by nature, she said.”
