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

by Jerico Lenk

  “And what sort of heartache has so disillusioned you?” The words scraped from the back of my throat bitter and defiant. Clement’s eyes veered over as if the question had flown like an arrow and pierced something secret and suffering.

  And I, of course, was flustered and instantly guilty for how hurtful I’d been. I didn’t wish to be so cruel to him. It was just that … A tragedy like the rest of us, Cain had said that night in his room.

  Clement’s mouth hung just gently open as if his voice failed him. But then he cleared his throat and leaned back against the brick wall, tapping one foot behind the other.

  “What happened with the Triviats … ” He began to roll another cigarette, speaking flatly and quietly. “I realise that was a difficult assignment for you. I shouldn’t have made a scene as I did. But you must understand the precarious role we play, our obligations as spectral inspectors in a world such as this. We may ask all the questions we please. You’re right, we have not learned everything yet. But would you want to be condemned to the ‘in-between’ forever? Nothing but a shadow figure in a room full of feeling, breathing, living souls, to whom you no longer matter?”

  My heart fell swiftly.

  His eyes slid back to me burning bright in a way so achingly innocent and meaningful, I feared it would haunt me. It was his conscience, I realised.

  “I’ve experienced my small psychosensitive share of possessions on sundry other cases,” he said. “Do you think I’ve not undergone the same war between right and wrong in what we do? Do you really believe me so heartless?”

  My voice strayed. “No,” I managed to whisper, finally.

  “I’ve learned you can’t feel too much, or you can’t do what you need to do.” Clement lit his next cigarette. His eyes settled elsewhere as he waved out the match. “And here you come, reminding me of everything about which I endeavour not to think, and now we’re both … angry with each other for the same bloody thing.”

  I wilted in guilt, feeling quite undeserving of his guidance and wishing he would look at me again so he might see that what he said meant so much to me. A young and wild half-gentleman like him shouldn’t have been so full of wisdom already, righteous and cynical as it was.

  I finished my cigarette and rolled the stub of it between thumb and forefinger, grinding out the last bits of unburned tobacco. Hunching into my coat, I took a deep breath to let out slowly, and take all the bad with it.

  Merciless, I’d said. But he wasn’t. He was just stubbornly pragmatic and perhaps, somewhere, I’d already known all that.

  “I’m sorry,” I murmured, heartfelt and penitent. “For calling you merciless. I … trust you. Please don’t doubt that.”

  How was it fair to hold any sort of grudge against him when he clearly had a secret self to which he feared the world would not be kind?

  Just as I did.

  For a moment, I thought Clement wouldn’t reply, but then he uttered the timid remains of a laugh. “Good. I’m one of the most trustworthy fellows you’ll ever meet, after all.”

  There it was, his dastardly charm. Relief rolled through me and I smiled gently as, with only a breath of hesitation, I cast him a playful glance. “Unfortunately.”

  Clement sighed. “I fear you simply do not yet know me well enough.”

  I gestured behind us, to Ladd’s Court. “I’d like to, but apparently trustworthy fellows are also greatly secretive.”

  “We prefer mysterious.”

  “ ‘We?’ ”

  “Myself and the other few trustworthy fellows left in the world.” Clement issued a shy smirk like such battles of wit reinvigorated him, seeming entirely unconscious to how the smile made him adorable again. He gave my cap a little tug, something with all the sentiments of a hair ruffle, and let his hand drift down for a brotherly touch to the back as he brushed past me. He was, after all, barely a grown man yet—all that uncouth and uncooperative deportment as if trying to reject his own innocence, lest anyone use it against him. I understood that, absolutely.

  Clement struck off towards the crowd of hungry people, adjusting his apron as the nighttime wind combed through his hair. Somewhere nearby, a church bell rang for the half hour. And I felt, for some reason, that I was extraordinarily lucky to know him.

  In the fieldwork office, the case coordinator said with a tight little frown of remonstration, “The case has been inaptly written off as closed too many times now.”

  Clement puffed on a small giltwood pipe of tobacco at the open window overlooking Portland Place, seated half on the sill with one leg hugged to his chest in all his usual grace—braces hanging, patterned waistcoat half-buttoned, striped sleeves rolled up over the long sleeves of his undershirt. He uttered a curt scoff, eyes narrowed.

  “It’s the damn Bridge of Sighs,” he tried to reason, wholly uninterested in deference to superiors in that charmingly recalcitrant way of his. “More and more hopeless souls are left there every year, full of anguish and shame. In fact, we’ve just been there! Last week, Will and I witnessed the discovery of a body. Waterloo will never be properly closed. Might as well write it off like that Berkeley Square. Undecided. Unresolved.”

  “ ‘Inconclusive,’ ” Miss Jessica corrected with a lofty sniff.

  Clement pointed to her with the mouthpiece of his pipe as if to say, There. “I won’t accept that case. Give it to someone else.”

  O’Brien tried to exchange an amused glance with me where he, Miss Jessica, and I waited patiently near the office door for the case summaries. But I was far from amused by the possibility of returning to Waterloo. Again.

  In a short impasse, the coordinator stared at Clement as if he wanted to disbelieve the impertinence but really had no reason to, while Clement stared back at him, daringly calm.

  The coordinator gave up with a long sigh, drooping back into his chair and covering half his face with a sun-spotted hand. “Fine,” he conceded, wheezy and defeated per usual. “I shall switch the case for the Starlight Theater. Furthermore, we are awaiting a response as far as your police escort, though we’ve stressed to the Yard we’d like to proceed with the inspection tonight.”

  “What’s Quinn doing today?” Clement asked.

  The case coordinator didn’t even turn to face him. “Inspector Quinn has no assignments tonight,” he said, slowly, as if waiting for Clement to cut in again. Clement readily did.

  “Then I’ll talk to him, and he’ll come along. Problem solved.”

  “Clement, that entails a request for replacement inspector, first of all … ”

  “I shall take care of the paperwork so you don’t have to. He’ll come along, of course.”

  The coordinator heaved one last weary sigh. We all knew very well Clement was going to get his way, and so did the coordinator. The temptation of less paperwork, in the end, proved too much. “All right, then,” he said. “If you won’t even allow your fellow man a night off, so be it.”

  Starlight Theater, Proprietors and patrons troubled, Multifarious Apparitions and Dis-embodied Sounds. The other team’s names had been scratched out and replaced by ours: Lead Inspector Clement, Medium in Training Dubois, Scouting Inspector Winchester, Assistant O’Brien, Inspector Quinn (Police Escort).

  And yet, when the clocks around London struck three hours before midnight and we were on our way to the theater—it was sans police escort.

  “And Quinn?” Miss Jessica asked. Clement waved a hand and rolled his eyes.

  “I’m bending the rules tonight,” he said, only mildly reproachful. “Who’s ever really required an escort on investigation?”

  Miss Jessica raised her brows. “A fortnight ago, Inspectors Perbley, Priggs, and I did, when we encountered a fraudulent case.”

  We climbed from the cab under the dazzling façade of the playhouse. This part of the city crawled with them, but the Starlight was hard to miss thanks to the large, chipped and peeling mermaid floating above the front doors, salvaged from the stern of some long-ago ship. Playbills made a collage acro
ss the windows.

  It was a small theater, all dressed-up in a very French style. The manager met us nervously in the reception room, shaking our hands and saying, “Pleasure, it’s a pleasure, let’s hurry as I have a reservation with colleagues, I didn’t know if you’d be coming tonight for this alleged ‘grey lady’ … ”

  He gave us the tour. Dressing rooms, business office, waxworks display, main stage.

  “And what sort of action do you wish to result from our inspection?” Clement asked on a sigh, picking absently at his thumb with the nail of his middle finger.

  “Honestly,” the tiny-faced manager snapped, “guests come more for the ghoul than our shows and I will not have Starlight immortalised as a haunted house before it’s immortalised for the most marvelous classical productions this side of the palace!”

  “Duly noted,” Clement said, and he didn’t have to look at me for me to know he still paid close heed to my response to our clients’ wishes.

  Inside, once through with invalidation, we gathered before the stage. The thick velvet curtains hung open, golden tassels dancing above the floor; still suspended against the backdrop was a monstrous wooden moon, prop scenery. Its painted toothy grin made it look hungry, its fat black eyes crazed.

  “Disturbing,” Clement said, then pulled over our equipment case to unpack. “What have we got tonight?” he hummed to himself. “Bells, a working Franklin meter, thank God—oh! That’s right, the thermospecs!”

  “Prototype thermospectacles,” Miss Jessica reminded primly.

  Clement already had the thick multi-lensed things, very similar to miners’ goggles, situated on his head by a leather strap. It was easy to forget, sometimes, that he wasn’t as old as he presented himself. This was not one of those times. He looked up at O’Brien through the bulky thermospectacles. “Oh,” he breathed. “These are very odd. And we’re to see ghostly figures with them?”

  “That’s the hope,” O’Brien said, smiling anxiously as if the goggles frightened him a bit. I didn’t blame him. “The lens holds therm … thermopiles.”

  Clement pushed the goggles up to perch atop his head. “I’m taking these,” he declared, then pointed to Miss Jessica and me. “Walk-through.” And then he dropped the goggles back down to his nose.

  There was something about a dark, haunted theater that was unnerving in a unique way. But the waxworks hall was disturbing in its own right.

  I stepped over the velvet queue rope at the door to the wax displays, stretching out a hand to help Miss Jessica, who had to lift her lovely skirts rather high to place a leg over the rope. She took my fingers with a gentle, “Thank you,” below her breath, and then both of us suddenly remembered how little we liked one another. I pulled my hand back a bit more slowly than she took hers away, lifting her chin in an overly dignified manner as she stepped along with her other foot and smoothed her skirts down.

  We wandered through the modest display of wax figures, arranged in two rooms just opposite the reception room and conjoined at the center by a wide threshold that had once held doors but now only held empty hinges. A number of models and scenes, a few unfinished displays covered by sheets. They weren’t Tussaud by any means, but—here, the beheading of Marie Antoinette and King Louis XVI, their faces stretched in overdramatic looks of fear; there, Her Majesty smiling with dull dark glass eyes placed a little too closely to her prominent nose; against the far wall, the burning of a witch.

  I slowed to a stop.

  The replica of a witch’s pyre was crude and homemade, sparsely-bunched twigs and branches. Tied to it by whiskered rope was the wax figure of a young lady, in simple peasant dress, her arms hanging palm-out and open as if to say, Look at me … A noose dangled about her neck. Iron rivets stuck through her elbows and shoulders like the thorns of a rose. And she peered out straightforward with a calm, secretive smile, looking at something no one else could see—

  A shadow passed by behind me in the shiny glass of her eyes. I turned with a sharp little inhale. But it was just Miss Jessica, stepping in a circle as she looked around.

  “I’m not picking anything up in here,” she complained, using her breathy Medium-in-Training voice. She fell still, blonde hair swaying along her back. “It’s no wonder there are ‘multifarious’ apparition sightings. It’s as if they’re all staring at you, is it not?”

  The shadowy shapes of the wax figures stood sentinel around us, obstructing view in some places and at others catching in the corner of the eye. I let my gaze drift along the crowd of fake people. Like the Missing sometimes, the wax figures were nothing but distinct black masses in the dark, inanimate and empty of innate presence.

  Miss Jessica reached up to start braiding her hair in boredom—then suddenly stopped.

  “What?” I murmured.

  “Did you happen to count, when we entered this room, how many displays were covered in sheets?”

  The hair stood on end along my neck and arms just to imagine why she asked. “Why?” My mouth barely moved around the whisper, my stomach aflutter. “Do you see something odd?”

  Footsteps pounded down the hall. Miss Jessica and I whirled around to watch as O’Brien stumbled to a stop at the door. “Clement would like you two to return promptly,” he gasped, all excitable in his anxious way. “There seems to be much movement upstairs, above the stage.”

  We hurried after him to the stage without looking back, perhaps irresponsibly as inspectors. But I don’t think either of us wanted to confirm or deny whether the number in sheeted figures had somehow changed.

  Clement waited at the edge of the stage, those ghastly thermospectacles abandoned in one of the chairs.

  “Where upstairs?” Miss Jessica asked, pushing past me gently as if determined to appear properly urgent.

  Clement shrugged, gesturing. “Between the scaffolding and the dressing rooms, I’d say.”

  “Was there any other activity while we were gone?”

  “Why do you think I sent O’Brien for you?”

  “Well, I’m just asking.”

  “You were gone for ten minutes—”

  A woman walked by behind them, up on the stage. I went rigid, standing with O’Brien amongst the theater seats.

  She was a spirit, obviously. We were the only ones in the building. And her form was surprisingly natural-looking, if a little soft and shivery—fast, but graceful steps, long hair trailing off her shoulders the way the ribbon of her dress trailed along her skirt, sleeves stretching to little diamond-like points at her dainty knuckles. All in shades of grey.

  She crossed the stage with no sound whatsoever, and disappeared off the right wing towards the dressing room stairs.

  An echo. She had to be. I strode fast and with a purpose to the stage, where I skipped the steps and hoisted myself up between the footlights. And then the real eagerness snapped inside me and I shot forth, hoping to catch up with the Missing woman before she disappeared completely.

  “Will?” Clement called. “Christ … come on, we’ll follow him … ”

  I hurried up the steep, narrow stairs to the dressing rooms, a handful of adjoining nooks each just big enough for a wardrobe, a mirror table, and room to walk in a circle.

  A light shone in the farthest one.

  Soft, golden light, the shifting flame of a tiny lamp on the vanity. The room was stuffed with fanciful costumes and jewelry, posh little stools and stands. I slowed to a stop in the center of it, footsteps bringing hollow thuds as if the floorboards had nothing beneath them.

  “Hello?” I whispered, mouth dry. Beacons of light. If the woman really were an echo, would she still be able to find me?

  I crossed the small room to turn down the lamp until it was just me and my eyes adjusting to the jutting shadows of the furnishings. But …

  On the scuffed floor where the last bit of light from the lamp pooled close to my toes, something in the grain of the wood looked odd. I eased down to my knees, leaning over it.

  It was a symbol, like from the summoni
ng circle used to bottle Jude. Or the numinous, arcane thing in my mother’s room.

  My heart stopped for a moment, then began to race in the pit of my chest. I traced the marking with a mindful finger. Painted there at some point, but scrubbed and scrubbed at except it just couldn’t fully be erased. My eyes jumped about the floor, searching for more, for anything—the faded outline of a pentagram? A larger circle?

  From down the hall near the stairs, Clement said, “Will?”

  Miss Jessica’s shrill voice carried back behind his: “You can’t just take off without explanation!”

  Befuddled, I hovered on my hands and knees over the faint shadow of the marking and looked up to call for them—only to lift my head into the swishing skirts of a woman walking straight into me.

  I squeezed my eyes shut and braced for the taffeta of her dress in my face. But nothing hit except a blast of cold air.

  “STO-O-O-O-O-P!”

  The wrenching shriek was so close yet so far away, as if it were in my head, slicing through all thought like a blade. Someone, a woman, pleading with every fraying thread of her being for someone to cease … what?

  My eyes rolled open. I was on the stage. Walking fast. Layers of a modest gown, drifting about my legs as I moved. Felt very odd to breathe in a corset, worse even than bandages. Was it laced too tight? Lights down; the theater was empty. I’d forgotten some things upstairs.

  Christina Claudette Hughling. Actress. From Brompton. Dover originally. Wavy hair that tickled my fingers as I tucked it behind her ears, as we climbed to the dressing rooms. She, moving; me, seeing. A little song trilled from a phonograph somewhere overhead. Had Joyce forgotten to stop the record? Sighing. Following the wall with one hand, the other pressed to her middle, where something gave a hard, conscious wriggle against the compression of her clothes. Oh—a child. Bastard child, Christina thought, a hiss somewhere deep inside near the angry flutter behind her navel.

  The lamp in the dressing room was aglow. I stopped at the top of the stairs with Christina, confused. She was sure she’d snuffed it out. On the vanity was a note. We eased down to sit and unfolded the little page.