by Jerico Lenk
Some case we had. Putting it all together made it seem even more fantastic and useless. Counting Mary Ann, there were five deaths of which we knew, and the only real proof of their connection was intangible and utterly unverifiable. The vision of a ring in clairvoyant possessions. The Yard would fly desperately into action, of course! Hardly.
“Where would records of Dorland’s experimentation applications be found?” Clement asked through another long stretch of his arms.
“I’ll find them,” Cain murmured without looking up.
It felt hopeless to me suddenly—Case No. MDIV, Pink Cameo Ring. Perhaps this was all a mistake. It couldn’t be Dorland; it was too unbelievable. Or too believable.
Ice crept along the window in my room like ivy as I closed it to just a small crack for fresh air, then flopped down on the bed and buried my head into my arms. The wick of the desk lamp whispered inside the little flame. Mary Ann hummed softly somewhere in the corner, a nursery rhyme, and someone knocked three times at my door.
I sat up on my elbows, brow knotting as I glanced at the clock. Ten-thirty at night. Clement probably wouldn’t have knocked; Cain wouldn’t have knocked so heavily. The secretary or maid?
Mary Ann went silent as I answered the call, opening the door halfway and peeking up at … Officer Dorland.
A bass chord of panic strummed through me, thick with dread.
Our prime suspect towered before me, stout and uncomfortably proper, with his prying eyes and turtle chin and a distinctly sweet scent about him. Too much musky cologne. Oh, pray Mary Ann didn’t show herself and make a mess of things—
“Apologies,” Dorland said in that thin, almost wavering way of his, with a gregarious smile. “I do hope it wasn’t presumptuous of me to call so late, but I’ve Christmas plans tomorrow and I know the schedule of our spectral investigators is rather … irregular. I didn’t wish to disturb it any further for you. I’ve tea waiting in Hermes Hall, if you’d join me!”
I gawked up at him, absolutely certain I could not complete my mission. More than that, perhaps I wasn’t ready to hear about my mother.
Gain his confidence.
With a cold sense of danger but an inescapable surge of courage, I swallowed the chalky taste in my mouth and said, “It’s not presumptuous at all. Quite thoughtful, really. Hermes Hall, then?”
He waited in the cramped landing hall for me as I pulled from my satchel the precious photograph of my mother and tucked it into my jacket pocket. From the corner of my eye, I caught him surveying the room absently from the open door; if he at all possessed the predisposition to notice Mary Ann watching wide-eyed from the corner, he hid it expertly.
In the quiet and watchful stillness of Hermes Hall, Dorland had started a fire in the religious file archives, where we’d run into each other the day before. A rosewood tray of tea sat on the table under the window. Outside, on the street, the sweet voices of carolers drifted about with the holiday traffic.
Cautiously, I sat down with him. He seemed attentive to my nervousness, but in a way I was unwilling to consider entirely kind. As he prepared me a cup, I slid forth the little photograph.
“My mother,” I said. “Mrs. Margot Winchester.”
Dorland cleared his throat, shifting around in the plain chair, which seemed a bit too small for his broad build and healthy weight. He crossed one leg over the other and adjusted his suitcoat before reaching down and very respectfully plucking up the calotype as I reached out and shyly dragged my tea over.
Recognition bloomed in his eyes as they roamed the picture, and I fought a cold little grimace. What had my mother been doing with a man like this? Had she known about his diabolical endeavours? How did I sit across from him so coolly when I knew of his maniacal schemes, when I’d witnessed the last memories of his tragic victims?
“Ah, yes, Mrs. Winchester.” Dorland’s beady eyes glittered. His eyes were the worst part about him. They were so intelligent, so alert, and impossible to read. “She was a stunning woman and—well, you’ll pardon my forthright compliments, but she was beautiful inside and out.”
My jaw tightened; disgust pinched in my stomach. “Um. Thank you, sir.”
“You inherited her most striking features, Mr. Winchester!” He sighed in tender reflection. “Those haunting eyes … yes, I do see her so much in you now that I actually sit before you. Is it any wonder I mistook you for her yesterday?”
“Well, perhaps not, unless she made it habit to don waistcoat and trousers,” I mumbled.
Dorland’s smile gave a little twitch and he eyed me sideways as if remembering how little he appreciated my conversation.
“And you were also blessed with the mediumship, weren’t you?” he asked.
“Clairvoyance,” I said, the obsessive need for information at war with the horror to be in his company, down in the pit of my chest where my heart thundered. “I know almost nothing, Dorland. Please just tell me about her.”
His smile deepened, short lashes fringing his eyes in gold. He reached across the table and put a hand on mine. I stiffened. It felt markedly more intimate than it should have. I knew that in my precarious position, especially outside my father’s, I was far from exempt from more twisted attentions. But perhaps I imagined it viler than Dorland truly intended.
“Margot came into the Spiritualist scene early enough to still receive small condemnations for her talents,” he said. “She was something of a private medium, communicating with the dead for those individuals who sought out the supernatural for personal means. Ladies who’d lost soldiers, men who’d lost fathers, parents who’d lost children. She operated alone, and with a false name, for some time before I discovered her. I was delighted by her raw talent and I invited her to gatherings of our metaphysical societies. We wanted her in the Cross, understand. She was knowledgeable on Solomonic circles and blood magic before I even took her on a tour through our libraries.”
I pulled my hand from his to drink my tea, letting the steam curl up to warm my face.
“But she was disinclined to archival work, or even inspection.” Dorland sighed. “She was restless. She turned to criminal witchcraft.”
My heart fell swiftly past my stomach then leapt to my throat as if to choke me. I stared at him, eyes wide.
Dorland nodded and closed his eyes, seemingly so injured by the betrayal. With a sigh, he took my clammy hand again, cradling it in his fingers.
“Would you like to see her file downstairs?” he whispered.
My heart skipped again, to a hollow place.
The locked files, he meant. Criminal witchcraft files. Part of me rejoiced. The other was devastated. What did I say? Would I be in trouble somehow? Would Cain be angry with me … ?
I’d read once, in a novella about vampires, that curiosity was a restless and unscrupulous passion.
And it was true, because the damnably curious side of me whittled everything else away and I whispered back finally, “Yes.”
***
I trailed after Dorland, down away from the religious file archives and through the dimness so characteristic of Hermes Hall, to the door through which Cain and I had gone the night of All Hallows’. Dorland fetched a small lamp from the cupboard beside it.
Perhaps we were mistaken about Dorland. Perhaps Mary Ann really had died of accidental poisoning, and Dorland was just a morally reviling and uncomfortable man by nature, and we simply wanted him to be the suspect for fear we’d never find one.
The swishing shadows of the lower research rooms seemed to follow us as we rounded two corners to the second archive room. CONFIDENTIAL, the plaque read. Dorland withdrew one of those thick old keys, and let us in.
Damp dirt and darkness thickened the freezing air. Clearly another old storeroom, the cold stone floor had some time ago been humbly swept and covered by a faded Oriental rug. Two small tables and their chairs sat along one wall.
“May I look around?” I whispered.
“Of course,” Dorland said warmly.
&nb
sp; I struggled to keep calm and patient, but I was overwhelmed with curiosity. Again, there were odd, jarred things on the shelves, dried herbs and bundled things. Mortars and pestles. Crystals, smooth gleaming stones. Fortune telling cards. An old painting of a woman dancing with a devil. Vellum scrolls and a tangle of rope and feathers with a little sign saying, Witch’s ladder, 1719, Case No. MCMI. Powders, bones, a few faceless dolls made of rags or wood, a set of photographs whose many different subjects had had their eyes scratched out or their heads cut away …
“Mrs. Winchester began dabbling in the darker arts.” Dorland stood with the lamp in the doorway. “Witchcraft, such a pitiful abuse of clairvoyant and psychical sensibilities … She used what we call a ‘jinx’ to deteriorate her aunt’s health, to secure her own father next in line for inheritance from his childless brother—and we were forced to revoke her guest access to the Cross.”
Inheritance? I turned around, eyes wide and wild. “My grandfather, her father. Who was he?”
Dorland squinted as if full of pity for me. “Dear boy, you really haven’t a single inkling as to your own history, have you?”
“The most I ever knew of her was her connection to the Cross.” I shrugged, hopelessly distracted. My fingers smudged through the dust on case file covers as I pulled them down from the shelves, flipped through them, pushed them back. Oh—what if I stumbled upon the Kingsley file?
Dorland set the lamp down on the table and wandered over beside me, dropping a hot, heavy hand on my shoulder. “She was daughter of the fourth Baron Thistle-Clarke’s younger brother,” he said, “that curious state of stunted privilege that is such elegant martyrdom on the right faces.”
“What else?” I prompted, clenching my teeth against their chattering, in the dark underground on a wintry night.
He gave my shoulder a reassuring little squeeze and pointed over at the table, where a thin folio lay near the lamp. “Her file is just there. Though I understand if you feel too ashamed to look through it.”
A silvery sort of urgency rushed through me, at once rotten and exhilarating. My heart pounded. Witchcraft. Her case. Eyes fixed on the file, I turned, brushing away his hand—
Dorland’s arms swooped down from behind, halting me with a coarse cloth twisted tight like a rope and stretched out taut by two fiercely-clenched fists. He yanked, wedging it hard into my mouth like a horse’s bit.
“Ungh—!”
It dragged me staggering back against him, ground my lip into my teeth. A sharp gasp and shocked cry rattled in my throat as I clawed at his thick arms, scratching and pulling. Blast, blast, blast! But for any small bit I managed to budge his arms, Dorland only tugged back harder, the cloth biting at my skin. Every hard breath, gulping in the sweetness of it.
“She and I spent a blissful Season together,” he grunted out as we struggled against one other. He chuckled, with mild difficulty. “I’ll speak to you man-to-man, Will. I did consider courting her to marriage. But she became obsessed with her practice, going on and on about making a far better life for herself and her family than what her father presently had to offer. Criminally, of course!”
I threw back my elbows, desperately, hoping to make impact. Squirming, writhing—Cook’s knife was upstairs in my desk drawer. I should have thought to bring it. I should have … I was a reckless fool … Clement. Cain. God, would that I had told them before going with Dorland!
Dorland’s determined grunts and clenched-teeth sighs of impatience made my stomach lurch. I swung back a heel and landed something, at least. The bastard cried out, lost a bit of leverage. Our legs tangled. Oh God, he’d crush me if he fell on me.
“Truthfully, I adored her audacity!” He laughed, forcing me to my knees by the small of the back. “But she was so enthralled by nonsense. I tried to distract her with research and ideas upon which to expound, tried to kindle her interest in the science of it all, not the madness of old ritual. Magic.” He spat the word as if it tasted bad.
I strained to pull and beat at his arms yet. I dug in my nails. Dorland cried out in startled rage and tightened the choke of the cloth. I tried for his face next but to no avail. He pressed at my back again, flattening me fast and easy to the musty rug. Christ, but I’d really messed this one up, hadn’t I? Sweet, sweet cloth—saltiness. Furious tears and snot smeared across my flushed face.
“For example,” Dorland went on, laboriously, as he clutched the gag at the back of my head one-handed and caught my wrists together in a bruising grip with the other. “Studying the unseen threads that tether the dead’s souls to the earth … yes, you know of what I speak. The Electro-Static currents! Is it left by a natural death? An unnatural death?”
He pinned my arms stretched out before me. Rug, burning my skin. Ears ringing. I couldn’t breathe, crushed under his knee. He’d break a rib if he pressed any harder, I was sure of it. And it was a terrible, terrible thing, to sob and cry out only to have the sound forced back into your own throat.
“That is where our science fails us, you see! I thought, if she and I could solve that mystery, her reputation would be redeemed. Yes, I thought with lovely Margot’s gifts, I’d have no trouble arranging my theory.” Dorland sighed. “She was never interested. You, however—you, Will, are keener on the scientific process. Yes, I’ve read your case reports. Perhaps even more gifted and aware than your own fanciful mother … To know you somehow found your way to me as well, to the Cross and to me, why, it’s got to be fate!”
The world spun. Everything began to fade—I was fading. Dorland’s voice droned on above me and a shape slipped in from the hall … thin little Marius, from the Stygian Society, threadbare coat and patchy cap. He dragged a luggage trunk behind him, eyes bright and slightly skittish in the lamplight.
Breathless with excitement, Dorland was saying, “… and imagine the experiments with your blood, Will … with witch’s blood.”
Oh, I’d made a grave, grave mistake. I hadn’t even stopped to consider Dorland’s next victim might already be in his grasp. And it was me.
Everything went blurry, then whispered away like a ghost flitting off into the dark.
Mary Ann was colourful and full of life.
Shadows swarmed, slithering at the corner of the eye like the tunneling black that hovered just before dizziness became fainting. But Mary Ann was vibrant, pink and apologetic. Her plaits shimmered in some otherworldly glow. Covering her mouth and shaking her head and looking at me with such pain in her wide eyes, she wept.
“I’m sorry,” she whimpered, soft and susurrating. “I was scared to see him again, so scared, Miss or Mr. Inspector!”
Miss or Mr. That made me smile. “Shh, Mary Ann. It’s not your fault.”
It was mine, for waltzing right into Dorland’s clutches. How could I have been so stupid!
I was at sea in the blackness. Up was down. Down was up. I let the darkness swing me to-and-fro, infect me with the delicious swaying. It was nice, suspended there in the ringing peace wherever I was, in whatever plane of existence. A dream.
Oh … was I dead?
Was this the in-between?
“Willow … ”
Who was calling?
“Willow … ”
Suddenly upright, I ran. It was surprisingly easy to run through the gauzy dark. Gradually I realised I was not in nothingness; buildings clustered, neat and tidy townhouses, but they seemed a mockery of the real grandeur with their dismal, faded colours and black windows like drooping frowns.
I heard music.
On the slippery cobbles, I turned around and around. The music came from one of the homes. Laughter echoed with it, tangled up in the dancing notes.
I knew the laughter instantly, shimmering like a golden thread in the dark.
“Mamma!” I cried, ashamed of how my voice sounded so high and tight with fear. The townhouse—No. 9 Mansfield Street.
I darted inside. Nearly too dark to see. I almost tripped over the ends of my gown. Gown? I stopped in the hollow hallway, finge
rs curling in the dress. Very soft under my fingertips. Mirror, was there a mirror? I wanted to see what I looked like, I wanted to know if I looked nice or not. Was this a possession? I felt like myself, but …
I followed the music up the shadowy stairs. Candles burned in a room filled with occult books and oddities, various collections that looked straight out of a dungeon, or Hermes Hall’s storage room, or the spookiest nooks of the Stygian Society.
At a makeshift shrine sat a few children’s books, a knife laid atop them with a handle carved like some winged, naked creature with a goat’s head and feet. Dust and cobwebs blanketed the whole display. But Dorland had lit the candles. Dorland … ?
Dorland stepped away from a Solomon’s circle on the floor below the shrine, in which a young woman lay, and I watched in horror as he fell upon the woman to the deafening music, carving shapes into her wrists while she screamed without a sound because she was gagged.
I fled, tearing at the gown lest it trip me again. My breath ripped from my chest in sharp gasps. There, a mirror. Lit from below as if by some unseen candles, my reflection flickered into the visage of the woman from the floor.
Dark, numinous sort of beauty, hair swept loosely out of her face, up off the long, pale neck. Lace and brooch of a high collar, beetle in amber. Nails painted black. Thick black cloth tied about her delicate temple—a blindfold. In the center of it a white oval with a large black pupil, embroidery in the shape of the All-Seeing Eye. I was locked in place, engrossed and repulsed at once. Someone gasped slow and shrill behind me as the woman in the mirror reached up and untied the blindfold. It was her.
