by Jerico Lenk
“Of course, if that’s how she defines a semi-conscious enigma,” Clement said, sounding bored. “They’re generally childish by nature.”
“Do you think it’s really the late Mr. Nichols?”
“Can’t say yet.”
O’Brien paused his note-taking to lean close to me and whisper, “An enigma is a semi-intelligent phantom that does not manifest as a full apparition, as a residual echo can.”
I regarded him mutely in return, not giving away how intimidating this cataloguing of spirits was. Because it was, a little, and I felt keenly the distinction between us though no one else seemed to care that I was clueless as to how the night would proceed. Perhaps Westwood had failed to notify them he’d waived my training. I’d never expected such an art—a way to find ghosts as opposed to being found by them myself.
“Did they lend us the thermospecs or St. Peter’s Arrows tonight?” Quinn asked.
Clement veritably pouted. “No, of course not.”
O’Brien’s glance snapped my way quickly, eyes wide and mouth pursed. Startled, I froze. But then I understood.
“What are those?” I whispered, so as not to interrupt Clement and Quinn’s discussion.
“Ah,” O’Brien gasped, excitedly, as if he hadn’t clearly been waiting for me to ask, “the St. Peter’s Arrows are modified weather vanes that use lodestones to locate changes of Electro-Static pressure within a ten-foot radius. And the thermospecs … ”
“All right, then.” Clement cleared his throat. “I want the bells posted within a quarter of an hour.”
The air in the Nichols house was gloomy and vaguely unwelcoming. I stuck to O’Brien’s side.
“Very similar to the Arrows,” he explained proudly, showing me the ambience compass. “The quartz mechanism and thermometer inside follow shifts in ambient charge like a regular compass follows North.”
“Ambient charge?” I echoed.
“Spiritual aura.” O’Brien’s hands slipped through the dark, fingers waving. “Electro-Static energy, all around us.”
“Don’t stamp these down, now,” Clement chided over his shoulder as they set up with their fine, tautly tied strings those same little bells from Waterloo. I laughed meekly. He didn’t. Perhaps he hadn’t been teasing. He reached over and plucked Quinn’s pocket watch out to check the time. Quinn didn’t seem bothered by it. “Hmm. Ready for invalidation?”
I tried to stay out of the way, trailing after them from room to room.
“O’Brien, take note,” Clement muttered now and again. “Natural shadow play in the east parlour due to angle of streetlamps and street activity.”
“Door’s crooked on its hinges,” Quinn said, demonstrating the way the nursery door would not stay closed unless fully latched.
As we moved up to the third floor, I caught O’Brien staring at me again in the bobbing light of our lamp. Once more, he waited to explain.
“What’s invalidation?” I prompted, only half an hour or so late.
“Invalidation is the first phase of inspection,” he began, but he shut up with a snap of the teeth as Quinn stopped and turned to us.
“I fear you both may not have heard,” he said coarsely, not without a bit of sarcasm. Behind him, Clement stood with arms crossed, frowning at us with a little lift of one brow. Quinn went on, obviously speaking for him, “We’re testing sound carriage now. Winchester, you remain on this floor. O’Brien, below. Clement and I shall be one flight down.”
Noises echoed now and again from outside the townhouse, down on the street. But O’Brien’s voice was very clear, drifting up from the second-floor landing of the stairs. “Invalidation,” he resumed explaining. “You mustn’t ever begin inspection without first attempting to discredit natural causes for claimed activity. Tricks of the eye, plays of light or … You saw Quinn testing the doors near open windows, in case of drafts—oh! Quinn says please walk along the hall regularly, Will!”
I followed the instruction, wandering away from the stairs and back again.
“Jump now, please!” O’Brien delivered the following directions. “And stamp around!”
I did so, feeling rather silly storming around in the dark for no reason. My pounding footsteps, the creak of the floor here and there. An oval-shaped wall hanging rattled each time I passed it, as did the glass of an unlit lamp.
“Thank you!” O’Brien called. Then down below, he did the same; I stood at the top of the stairs, loosely hugging the banister as I listened. His voice moved back and forth as he traveled. “You mustn’t ever assume the impossibility of drafts causing doors to move on their own, or peripheral lights creating wholly natural but unexpected shadows, mistakenly reported as ghostly appearances. Or the carriage of sounds throughout the building being the source of unexplainable knocks, bangs, dis-embodied voices—”
“If only we could test the sound without the contamination of conversation!” came Clement’s shout, strained to carry two floors up. “Damn it, O’Brien!”
“What now?” I whispered, stepping lightly after O’Brien on the stairs once Quinn called us back down.
“Now,” O’Brien murmured, handing two tiny handheld lamps to Clement, who struck matches to light them both, “we douse the lights, close the windows, and investigate.”
Quinn went around darkening all the rooms. I didn’t have to ask why the inspection called for it; ghosts seemed most comfortable to come and go in places with little light.
“We won’t split up,” Clement announced in a low voice as all our eyes finally adjusted to the dark. “I want Winchester observing all he can.”
I perked up. Well, finally he remembered. “You may just call me Will,” I murmured.
Clement stared at me, unmoved either way. Then he looked to Quinn.
“Shall we start with this floor?” he husked.
The house was full of shadows, empty, and all ours—free reign in someone else’s home, every secret nook and cranny, and whatever Missing kept to them.
For some reason, I’d expected to be relatively unbothered by foreign hauntings. It was just the dark, and it wasn’t as though I didn’t know what might drift about in it. I’d expected wrong. This wasn’t the dark I knew. It wasn’t the thought of encountering an unfamiliar apparition that set me ill at ease; that had happened plenty of times before. As inconvenient accidents, of course, and admittedly with a minor startle. But never because I purposefully searched for them. This was someone—something—else’s dark, and we were only visitors.
We moved slowly into one room and Clement promptly turned the lamps down as low as they’d go without fading out completely. O’Brien had the dowsing rods out, eyes glued to them, waiting for the smallest of twitches; Quinn held the ambience compass loosely in one hand, the other in his pocket. I just tried not to be obvious in the way I fell in close to O’Brien’s side, eyes jumping all around. What would I see, hear? What did we do in someone else’s dark?
“Is there anyone here with us?” Clement said. I jumped, startled; his words felt so much louder in the tight quiet.
“Hello,” Quinn greeted the dark blandly. “We don’t mean any trouble.”
“We’ll wait for you for just a moment, if you’d like to join us.” Leaning back against the wall near a house plant, arms crossed, Clement had become a different person. Patient, and focused, his voice very careful and pure. His eyes slid over my way. Hurrying not to be caught watching him, I looked to O’Brien.
O’Brien didn’t notice for a moment. Then he lit up, grinning like a proud little boy. “This is the antiphonary session,” he explained in that companionable whisper of his. “Like music, ‘antiphony.’ We call out, and … hope the spirits answer.”
“Ah.” I nodded.
“It’s best to have next to no contamination of the inspection’s silence so as not to compromise call-and-answer.” O’Brien’s smile went a bit sheepish; it was clear we both thought about the sound carriage evaluation earlier. Self-consciously, he lowered his whisper until I had
to lean very close to catch the shape of the words. “Call-and-answer is always used, but we’re often allowed an assortment of instruments to verify the spiritual aura, the Electro-Static … ”
“Yes, the energy. Clement told me about that.”
“Oh. Well, we’ve a limited selection, unfortunately. The Officers lend them out as they see fit, and it’s such a tedious process to formally request so … we make do. I mean, who really needs Franklin meters and thermospecs, yeah? We’re content with our ambience gauges!”
O’Brien laughed meekly, as if still unconvinced himself that the tools allocated were satisfactory.
“So, what does all that mean about my being able to see them?” I whispered. “The Electro-Static … ambience?”
O’Brien’s smile faded quickly. “Ah … well … ” His face pinched in deep embarrassment. “That, we don’t know.”
Quinn cleared his throat, peeking out the door and down the unlit hall. “We’re from the Black Cross,” he called out. “An altruistic organisation invited by Mr. Nichols. To determine why you’re here. Do you have a message for him you wish us to convey? What is your name?”
“It’s hiding. It’s not sure of us yet.” Clement sighed. My eyes veered over to him. How did he know that? Was that his being an empath—did he encounter the Missing in different ways than me?
Clement pushed away from the wall. “On to the next!”
In the dining room, Quinn and Clement took seats at the table and laid out the sentimental items Mr. Nichols had lent us—the photograph, an old pipe, a scarf, and fat golden rings. Quinn removed his spectacles and wearily massaged his eyes. “Who is here?” he asked. “Do not be afraid. We just want the answers to our questions. Mrs. Nichols believes she’s seen you in this room … is this you, in this photograph?”
“What’s the point of it all?” I whispered as O’Brien and I moved slowly along the wall.
“The goal is to make contact.” O’Brien paused to examine his dowsing rods, intently. One slightly angled, the other straight. I didn’t feel anything in the quiet yet. Nothing other than my anxious alertness.
“There are two ways to effectively work a haunting once contact is made,” O’Brien said. “To remove the ghost from the premises by ‘trapping’ it in a Solomon’s bottle, or ‘purging’ it by burning a piece of remains from the deceased, anything to which it might be connected … ”
“Like Kitty,” I said, and almost stumbled into a sideboard near the door. So did O’Brien.
“Like Kitty.” He smiled just a tiny bit. “Purging banishes the spirit completely by destroying its place of attachment. Think like a ship’s anchor. See, if it really is a matter of some spiritual electricity, that electricity must have grounding somewhere or else it should scatter into nothingness, shouldn’t it? Well … the Cross is still researching that.”
What is a soul, anyway?
“There weren’t any tragedies mentioned in the initial interview, were there?” Quinn grumbled to Clement.
“Nothing more tragic than regular family deaths. Oh, but—the file notes the previous tenant, a Mr. Ollens … drank himself into an early grave with a bottle of laudanum after losing his wife and both children within twenty-two hours of one another.”
“How?”
Clement waved a hand. “O’Brien, come here, let me see the papers. The woman miscarried one babe, and in hysterics, smothered the other. It could be any of these souls in here.”
“What do you mean when you say, ‘when contact is made?’” I prompted timidly when O’Brien returned to our little corner, picking up our conversation again.
“Interaction. Acquiring evidence of the haunting is our first task. If we can’t identify the spirit, we can’t bottle or purge, can we?” O’Brien thought about it for a moment. “Mild possession is the standard contact. It seems to be the easiest, anyway.”
I cut my eyes back over to him. The Wraith at Waterloo. Mild possession. All of this was so routine to them. And yet I was desperately spellbound.
“Mild possession,” I repeated.
“As opposed to daemonic possession,” O’Brian explained, more flippantly than I’d have expected. I gawked at him. He didn’t seem to notice my surprise. He sighed. “Always and at the very least,” he went on, “we advise the living on how to coexist with the dead. That is the more supreme goal of the Spectral Department—or it’s supposed to be—ah!”
I jumped as he broke off into a short, choppy stuttering of excitable sounds that didn’t quite make words before he finally spit out, “Movement! Real movement! Ambience changing!”
Heart leaping, I looked down. The dowsing rods had slowly crossed one over the other, perpendicular as if a crucifix. A chill zipped down my spine, tingled in my fingertips as my pulse quickened.
“Note, there was no wind nor draft to move the rods.”
“Noted,” Quinn grunted in reply, expertly scribbling in a little book in the low lamplight.
“Quinn … ” Clement slouched idly into one arm at the dining table. “What did Danforth say about the Waterloo report?”
“Denied. It needs to be rewritten.”
“Of course it does! They’ll just send us again, you wait and see.”
A sharp thud interrupted the casual conversation, as if something had fallen over out in the hallway. I flinched back near O’Brien, who flinched himself back to the wall. Almost immediately after came the dainty chime of a bell.
Clement shot up from his chair. “Quinn, was that a bell in the hall, or … ?”
“Not certain.”
“Yes,” I spoke up. “It was.” Quinn and Clement glanced at me; I stood firm instead of shying away behind O’Brien.
Nothing followed but an eerie, vigilant silence. My ears rang. I couldn’t breathe for a moment, defenselessly intrigued.
Quietly, Clement said, “Note, we are the only visible trespassers in the house.” Quinn scribbled away. “Was that you, spirit?” Clement went on. “Apologies, do you feel left out? Listen, I was only chatting with my friend, here … can you do that again? Old Mr. Nichols? Mrs. Ollens?”
The vague feeling of being unwelcome thickened. Quinn and Clement reverted to low, private whispers. Someone opened a door down the hall with a scrape and a whine.
The door.
“Shh!” Clement smacked at Quinn’s shoulder. “Did you hear that? Was that the door? It seems to respond to Ollens, not Nichols.”
“Documenting!” O’Brien abandoned the dowsing rods to scribble away in Quinn’s notebook as Quinn moved very carefully to the doorway, peering down the hall.
“Drawing room door,” he confirmed. Its door.
“Hello!” Clement called. “Have you come out from your room?” Leaning with hands planted firmly on the table, he turned to O’Brien and muttered, “Where did the Ollens woman kill the child?”
There was nothing but the whisper of pages as O’Brien hurried through the case file, close to one of the lamps. “Doesn’t say,” he replied finally.
“I would place bets it is that room,” Clement murmured through the brittle hush.
Quinn turned around with a shift of his leather overcoat and said in a husky voice, “My stomach is all in knots, men. I believe it’s here.”
As if taking that as a cue, the shadowy outline of a man passed by in the hall behind Quinn, too swift and too dark for me to see much more save for the flash of low lamplight in one wide eye.
But I saw it. Slinking by as if surveying us, and quickly. Something Missing.
“There—in the hall—” I almost choked on the words, my resolve buckling in the moment and leaving the whisper frail on my lips.
O’Brien and Quinn both looked sharply to Clement. I blushed furiously, heart in my throat, hoping I hadn’t derailed some manner of procedure or anything else.
Clement’s eyes burned into me. Quinn’s sparked off my glance as his jaw tightened. But it was not out of cruelty; in fact, it seemed like he strained against a pleased smile as he gestured
for me to follow him.
“Well,” he gritted out in a low, almost cooperative tone, “come on, then.”
I hurried clumsily after him into the hall, feeling a little less like a useless neophyte. The floorboards creaked underfoot and the light deprivation made all my other senses wild. Everything I touched startled me; everything I heard raised the hair on my arms. Surely if someone struck a match, they’d have found me bug-eyed and mad-looking, stripped of distraction and whittled to instinct.
The drawing room door was an intimidating shape in the dark—hanging open, a threshold into blackness. And a looming shadow beside me, bristled and ready for action like a hunting hound, Quinn grunted, “What did you see and where, boy?”
I pointed up the hall. “It … an apparition, moving that way.”
A bell sounded from one of the upper floors, a cold, demanding ringing like glass breaking over and over.
Clement was beside us quickly. “Here we are!” he cried below his breath, triumphant, as he took off fast and fearless up the stairs to where the bell sounded.
Quinn sighed and retreated to fetch O’Brien. Deliberating for only a breath or two, I hurried up the stairs after Clement, clutching the banister and trying not to trip in the dark. It felt as though I couldn’t catch my breath for the sharp excitement. I still could not believe I was here, with them, in pursuit of a spirit I did not know or need to know. I nearly felt possessive over it. My discovery. With my talent.
And it was exhilarating to serve some purpose other than serving drinks and other things to men whose purpose was to pay for the company of young ladies who owed them nothing.
I reached the top of the stairs and jerked back with a start; a shadow in the nursery door caught me entirely unprepared. But it was just Clement.
“Christ,” I gasped, fist pressed to my chest as if it might really coax my pounding heart out of my throat and back in its place.
Clement simply stood there, peering into the room. Without looking my direction—without moving at all—he said very slowly, “Winchester. Is Quinn on his way up?”
