by Sara Beaman
“I... I’m not really sure.”
She looked down at the corpse, horrified. Oh, God, it’s started already. “Who is she? What happened?”
I gave her a blank look.
“Adam, you can tell me,” she said. Lie to me if you have to. Say it was just a botched feeding attempt or something.
“It’s not what you’re thinking.”
“I won’t tell Julian if you ask me not to.” Ask me not to. If you don’t—
“Aya, listen, I didn’t kill her! Not even by accident. I found her like this.”
She forced herself to stifle a dismissive laugh. Sure you did. “I—I’m sorry. She works in the seraglio, so I thought—“
“She does? Who is she?”
“I’m sorry. I don’t know her name. I don’t usually spend time with the women.” She looked both ways. “We really shouldn’t talk about this out in the open. If the staff hears about it, they’ll panic. We’re close to your quarters. We should take her there for the time being.”
I nodded and followed her through a few quick turns of the maze to the door to my suite. I carried the anonymous woman into the sitting room, set her down as gently as possible on a couch, and pulled her eyelids shut.
“So,” Aya said, closing the door behind her, “if you didn’t kill her, what happened?”
I frowned. I didn’t want to discuss the hallucination—it was too personal, too strange. I rolled the corpse onto her stomach instead, brushing her hair to the side to reveal the spiral brand at the nape of her neck.
It was enough. Aya grabbed my shoulders. “You didn’t drink her blood, did you?”
“No. I didn’t. At least I don’t think I did—“
“What do you mean, 'you don’t think'? How can you not know?”
“Well, I, uh, I got lost in the labyrinth, and I had this elaborate hallucination, and then I passed out,” I said. “I have no idea what really happened.”
Aya groaned.
“I didn’t drink anyone’s blood in the hallucination,” I offered.
“You need to go see Julian right now,” she said. “I’ll call Haruko and tell her what Mirabel did.”
I followed her into the office.
She rushed to the desk and grabbed the phone off the cradle. “He’s waiting for you out in the forest. Use the card with the stone doors—the card with the archway in the trees. You’ll know it when you see it,” she said, starting to dial.
I reached into my pocket and shuffled through the deck, looking for the sepulcher card, but I didn’t see it. Frowning, I threw the cards onto the desk and spread them out with my hands, pawing through them, searching for the stone archway. It was gone.
“I must have dropped it,” I said, shaking my head, “or...”
Or Haruko stole it, I thought to myself.
The expression drained from Aya’s face. She hung up the phone.
///
I hurried outside after Aya, both of us walking at a brisk clip. I was both furious and mortified. In hindsight it was patently obvious that Haruko had seduced me, and for no apparent reason. No wonder she’d been so cold to me afterward. It was all to get the stupid card. But why? What did the Wardens want out in the sepulcher? I didn’t know enough about revenant politics to guess.
The night air was unseasonably cold, and darker than usual; the moon was hiding behind heavy clouds. When Aya and I reached the rolling hills beyond the gardens, she broke out into a run. I followed, looking down at my feet with every third step, afraid I’d trip and fall face-first into the grass.
Soon we reached the edge of the forest. The trees swirled frenetically with shadowy patterns too erratic to be the result of the shifting clouds overhead. Aya pulled out a card from a pocket in the seam of her skirt, and the dancing shadows calmed for a moment, parting just enough to reveal a narrow path in the dirt.
Aya didn’t hesitate. She plunged immediately into the ocean of trees, and I followed after her.
The overgrown trail beneath our feet altered its form constantly, its paths truncating, bifurcating and coupling with startling alacrity. I worried that, even with the assistance of the card, we could become lost, trapped out here waiting for the sun to claim us. Nevertheless, after about a half hour of running though the shifting trails, we arrived at the same stone doors I’d seen in my dream. They stood slightly ajar, open just enough for us to squeeze through one at a time.
I gestured for Aya to enter first. She shook her head.
“I can’t,” she said. “I’ll wait here.”
I felt another pang of anxiety at the idea of being left alone with Julian. “Why not?”
“This wasn’t always a grave site. It used to be a locus of power for Mnemosyne, back before Master Julian took control of your House. She used a number of terrible rituals to enchant this place, to make sure initiates of other Houses couldn’t try to invade. Some of them have worn off over the years, but Master Julian says it’s still not safe for outsiders to enter.”
I frowned, swallowing hard.
“Go,” she said. “We can’t waste any time.”
I slipped between the doors and into the sepulcher.
The stone stairs descended in slow increments counter-clockwise around the circumference of the enormous pit. I ran my hand against the bare earth of the wall as I climbed down the stairs, cold soil caking on my palm. I could only barely make out Julian’s dim silhouette hunched between the two twin pools; the center of the pit was nearly pitch black.
As I stepped off the final stair, he raised his head and acknowledged me with a glance. His hair and clothing were soaked, as if he’d just gone swimming fully-clothed, and he was carrying something in his left hand, something concealed beneath a dripping shroud. He removed it, revealing a woman’s head with pale skin and stringy white-blonde hair. He walked to the central tomb along the far edge of the pit and placed the head in the circular depression he’d filled with his blood in my dream.
He drywashed his hands. “Not exactly a scene which inspires one’s trust, I imagine. My apologies.”
“What are you doing with that?”
“This is the head of Mnemosyne. The head of our mother. I came out here when you went missing, thinking I’d seek her counsel. But here you are.” He wrung out the hem of his shirt. “Where have you been?”
“I don’t really know. I had a hallucination. I think Mirabel induced it—“
“What? What on earth happened?”
“I...” I didn’t want to talk about it with him. “I was walking through the labyrinth in the basement and... I got stuck somehow, closed off in a loop of four hallways with no doors. I was trapped there for a while. Then a door appeared along one of the walls—the door to the seraglio.”
He frowned, pushing a dripping strand of hair out of his eyes. “Go on.”
“I went inside,” I said, my chest tightening. “It was almost completely empty. There was only one person inside. Someone I knew from before.”
“Who?”
“It was a... it was some vision of an ex-girlfriend of mine. She was terrified. Her memory had been erased.” I took a breath and forced myself to steady my voice. “I tried to talk to her. I told her I’d help her escape.”
“Hold on. At any point during this interaction, did you—“ Julian’s mouth puckered in distaste—“bite her?”
“No,” I said, disgusted. “I’m capable of controlling myself.”
“I don’t mean any offense,” he said. “What happened next?”
“I passed out,” I said, omitting the part with the spectral woman. “Later, I woke up in a storage closet. There was a corpse next to me on the floor—“
“Did it have the mark? The spiral? Or didn’t you notice?”
“Yes. On the back of her neck.” I shuddered, thinking about the dead woman, how we’d just left her lying in the sitting room. “Aya told me she worked in the seraglio.”
“That’s terrible. Who was it?”
“I don’t know. Aya
didn’t know her name.”
Julian looked away, clenching his hands into fists.
“Isn’t there anything we can do?” I said. “Can’t we revive her? You know, initiate her?”
He shook his head. “I’ve resolved never to do it again.”
“But what about Aya? Or me? Can’t one of us do it?”
“Aya can’t use her blood. The Wardens have sealed her from doing so. It would be up to you.” He sighed. “But you’re so young. You’d have an extremely slim chance of reviving her.”
I grit my teeth.
“Adam... this brings me to something I’ve been meaning to tell you,” he said, looking down into the pool of water to my right. “I’m afraid I’ve lied to you, and I’ve allowed you to suffer under more than one misunderstanding. I may have inadvertently enabled Mirabel to manipulate you in the way she did.”
“Lied to me about what?”
“Well, to begin with, I lied by omission while discussing how you died.”
“I know I didn’t die in the car crash, but...”
“You didn’t remember your death upon your revival. I wasn’t sure how to tell you what really happened. I was afraid...” He paused, bringing a hand to his mouth. “I was afraid you’d try to kill yourself again.”
“I committed suicide?”
“You hung yourself.”
My eyes lost focus. I brought a hand to my neck, ran my fingertips across my throat.
“Believe me, I understand the impulse,” he said, his tone bittersweet. “I have more to tell you, unfortunately. You may want to have a seat. It’s a long story.”
I sat down on the last step of the spiral staircase. Julian began to speak, pacing back and forth across the pit, his hands clasped behind his back.
“I never wanted to initiate Mirabel. I only did so at the request of a friend—the telepath I told you about, my mentor Lucien. He was in love with her, you see, but our mother had forbidden him from initiating her himself.
“I fully intended to leave Mirabel in his care after I raised her from the dead. I had no interest in tutoring her myself. But once Mnemosyne discovered what we had done, she...” He took a breath. “Well, I’ve already told you how she murdered him.
“I was left with Mirabel as my charge. I didn’t want her, but I couldn’t just abandon her. She wasn’t the same then as she is now. She used to be a sweet girl, really, an actress and a singer with an artist’s soul. While I can’t say I ever loved her—at least, not in the way Lucien did—in the beginning I was quite fond of her.
“But after a few years, her personality started to change. It went rotten, like fruit. Her sweetness went vile. She became someone I dreaded to associate with.
“It’s said that those of us with the power to command the will of others eventually become... insensitive. Narcissistic. Sometimes even sadistic. I’ve done my best to stave off this tendency, myself, but Mirabel was not so vigilant.” His mouth flattened. “She has always been—how can I put this politely?—a scientific mind, driven to... experimentation.
“She was never satisfied with the limited range of abilities she was able to manifest. She was constantly devising ways to expand her powers. She was especially interested in using the written word as a vehicle for manifested compulsion.”
I frowned, confused.
“Mind control, in other words.”
“Ah.”
He looked down into the deeper of the two pools. “Some time after the American Civil War, she became involved with a psychologist at a college near the Warden enclave where we were staying. She had no interest in him, really; she only wanted access to adult test subjects for her research.
“When the Wardens found out, they were furious. At that time they were still bothered by such blatant violations of the Consensus. They implored me to put an end to it or to tell her to leave.
“I tried asking her to stop, then... well, I compelled her to. I thought it would be better than abandonment.
“For years I thought I’d been successful. The compulsion seemed to reverse some of the changes in her personality and behavior. I was convinced she’d turned her genius to nobler pursuits.” He shakes his head. “Of course, I was wrong.
“I later discovered she was in the habit of visiting a local orphanage on a regular basis—first twice, maybe three times a month, then eventually up to five times a week.
“I was foolish, but not foolish enough to trust that her motives were pure. So one night, I disguised myself and followed her there.
“I didn’t need to observe her for long to understand what she was doing. She was altering the primers the children used in their lessons. Apparently my orders had not been sufficiently restrictive, or perhaps she’d never been under my control to begin with.
“I was so ashamed of my naiveté, my inability to prevent this lapse, that I confronted her immediately and told her never to return to the enclave.
“That was the year 1883—one decade before the year I lost.
“The Wardens were glad to see her gone. Relieved. So when I finally came to my senses after Mnemosyne’s beheading, only to discover that Mirabel had suddenly become intimately acquainted with the President of the Watchers of the Americas—well, that was the first sign that something significant had happened in the time I’d lost, something that they were keeping from me.”
“Wait,” I said, interrupting Julian. “The President?”
“The Watchers are a true democracy,” Julian said. “In fact, in that very year, they underwent a regime change. A friend of mine—Desmond Schuster, Haruko’s uncle—was voted out of office.
“In any case, I was surprised—and unnerved—when the Wardens wanted me to take over our House. But when I learned that the next candidate in line was Mirabel, I accepted immediately. They set me up here, right next to the remains of the only major outpost Mnemosyne had bothered to establish in North America, perhaps hoping that by stuffing my pockets with cash they could pacify me, and by sending me into these backwoods they could collapse my sphere of influence. I cooperated with them. I wasn’t sure what else I could do.
“For years I watched Mirabel’s descent into madness from afar, at a loss for how I might intervene. The Wardens seemed determined to ignore her sociopathic behavior—whether because they feared incurring her wrath, or because they had come to find her talents useful, I can’t say. They couldn’t possibly have been blind to how her experiments progressed—how she learned to adapt her manifestations to accommodate each new form of mass media as it was invented. That kind of innovation doesn’t happen by accident. People paid with their minds and souls for the techniques she created.
“And yet, even though they must know the full nature of her depravity—perhaps even more intimately than I do—to this day they still allow her free reign over the collective human consciousness of the Americas. She has become indispensable to them; she is at liberty to do whatever she pleases, so long as she remains a faithful cog in their machine.”
I stood up slowly, looking at Julian askance. “I understand that Mirabel is a problem, but what about—what about your other... children? Markus and the others?”
“Ah. Of course. Allow me to explain.
“The only reason I initiated the ten that came after Mirabel was in the hope that one of them might inherit the ability to restore memories. Although I can’t do it myself, these things sometimes skip generations, so to speak. Of course, none of this would be necessary if anyone in our family would be willing to help me, but Mnemosyne compelled the elders among them not to, and, in turn, they’ve compelled their modern heirs as well.
“Every single one of my ten heirs came out tainted, their souls perverted by the same essential flaw I see in Mirabel. The best of them only took their violent tendencies out on me. The others... I cannot—I will not tell you how many of the people in my employ suffered at their hands.” He chewed on a cuticle. “It’s one thing to drink the blood of someone who’s agreed to provide for you in a wri
tten contract. Someone you’re paying. This is not the kind of insult I am speaking of. I do not think you want me to bear witness to the details.
“At first I imagined that I could rehabilitate my errant children, that I could use my abilities to compel them towards moral neutrality, if not moral righteousness. My previous experience with Mirabel should have shown me otherwise, but...” He shook his head. “Any success I made in those attempts was short-lived. Eventually they would revert to their original state—in some cases, they ended up worse for my effort.
“Markus was the last of the ten. In his mortal life, he’d been an activist for the cause of nuclear disarmament. I hoped that by initiating someone on the merit of their strong moral character, I could somehow avoid transferring to them the taint inherent in my blood.
“At first I thought my plan had succeeded. His personality seemed to remain stable over the three years he spent here at the estate. He was perfectly civil to my staff; he didn’t display any aggression towards me or towards Aya. He was not a particularly apt pupil, it seemed; he showed difficulty producing even the most basic manifestations, but after all my other initiates had put me through, I was willing to overlook his shortcomings.
“However, even in Markus, I was eventually confronted with a critical and unforgivable flaw,” he said, his voice growing thin. “I take my guardianship of Aya very seriously, you see. I notice variations in her behavior that others would certainly overlook. Perhaps six months after Markus’ initiation, she began acting oddly.
“At first, she was simply less talkative than she’d been for years, less cheerful. Her demeanor slowly reverted back to what it had been when the Wardens first brought her here. She began avoiding me whenever possible. The few times I saw the two of them together, I sensed profound injury behind her eyes.
“I confronted her about her strange behavior, but she wouldn’t speak to me about it. I—I regret that I had to force her to tell me the truth, but that was the depth of the shame he’d inflicted on her. He had violated her physically, then used the powers he’d inherited from me to compel her to silence.” He inhaled sharply through his nose. “It turns out he had learned more from our lessons than I’d realized.”
