The Shadow Cabinet

by Maureen Johnson

  The three ascended the darkened stairs together, to the room at the top of the house. This room faced the street. This was the library—quiet and padded with overlapping Persian carpets and tapestries. The incense and smoke had woven into every fiber and every page. Every surface aside from the shelves had a patina of candle wax and ash. And the books—the precious books that Sid and Sadie had so carefully gathered from every corner of the earth, these were stored lovingly. They were fragile, many hand-copied, and most had no duplicate anywhere.

  Sadie went to the window and pulled open the curtains, releasing a visible cloud of dust and filling the room with a delicate moonlit glow.

  “Must you, darling?” Sid asked. He stood at the round table in the middle of the room that held a bottle and a metal goblet.

  “We need moonlight,” Sadie said. “It’s proper, if not strictly necessary.”

  “I suppose, but those nosy old dears from across the way will probably look in. You know what they’re like.”

  “Let them.”

  Sid held up the wineglass of blood and examined it in the moonlight.

  “The blood in the light,” he said.

  Sadie smiled and came over to join him.

  “Blessed Demeter,” she said, picking up the bottle.

  “Fab, fab, fab Demeter.”

  “Oh, Sid. Show a little respect.”

  “She knows I love her.”

  At the same time, they poured the contents of their respective containers into the goblet—the blood flowing more slowly than the barley liquid. When the cup was full, Sadie picked up a curved blade, similar to the ones from downstairs, and gently stirred the substances together. When this was done, she wiped the blade carefully with a white cloth and set them both down. They had never looked more wonderful to Jane than they did at that moment in the moonlight, over that cup. They were like an image off a tarot card.

  “Well?” Sadie asked.

  “Well indeed, dear sister.”

  “Do you feel ready?” she asked.

  “I always feel ready. The worst we can be is wrong.”

  “We’re not wrong,” Sadie said. But there was a touch of a question in her voice. Sadie was wavering. Jane was transfixed. She’d never seen either of them hesitate before.

  “It hardly matters at this point,” Sid replied calmly. “There’s no going back now, is there?”

  “I suppose not.”

  “And if we’re right, which we are, it’s worth the risk. You don’t get everything without risking something. We’re not meant to grow old, dear sister. We’re not meant to die.”

  He ran his finger along the side of his sister’s face, tipping up her chin. She broke into a smile.

  “You’re right,” she said. “Of course.”

  The touch of nerves passed away, as quick as that. They turned to Jane.

  “Thank you, Jane,” Sadie said. “We will see you soon.”

  “Very soon,” Sid said.

  “I know,” said Jane.

  Sid and Sadie faced each other again. They were alone, lost in their own company, smiling. They reached for their necklaces and opened the lockets. Each contained a small, dirty bit of diamond.

  “We have performed the work,” Sadie said.

  “And we have, in our own inimitable fashion, replaced the kalathos,” Sid replied.

  They both put a hand on the goblet.

  “Do I look good?” Sid asked. “I want to look good.”

  “You look wonderful,” Sadie replied.

  “Well,” Sid said, “as Oscar Wilde said, ‘Either the wallpaper goes, or I do.’”

  “Oh, Sid. Really.”

  “Those are fine last words. Can you improve upon them?”

  “I can,” Sadie said. “Here are mine: surprise me.”

  Sadie drank first, with Sid supporting the goblet when she spasmed and fell back. He put it to his own lips. A few seconds later, the cup fell free and struck the table, spilling the dark red liquid before bouncing to the floor. The dose of poison they had taken was much more concentrated than the one from downstairs. It would go faster.

  It wasn’t fast enough for Jane’s liking.

  She had to watch. It was her duty. She would keep watching for as long as it took to work.

  The night is darkening round me

  The wild winds coldly blow

  But a tyrant spell has bound me

  And I cannot, cannot go

  —Emily Brontë,

  “Spellbound”

  1

  THE ROOM WAS FULL OF A SOFT DECEMBER-MORNING LIGHT, a kind of gentle dove-gray color. Stephen was on the bed. Glasses off. Peaceful. Outside, London rumbled by as it always did and presumably always would.

  “Rory, are you sure?” Thorpe said. “Are you sure it worked?”

  It was just me, Boo, and Thorpe now. Thorpe was our overseer from MI5, someone I knew very little about except that he was young with white hair. Stephen had always been the one to deal with Thorpe, and Thorpe would make things happen. Security systems would be shut down, records altered, CCTV footage obtained, door opened. But Thorpe did not have our ability, our sight, and there was nothing he could do about what was happening now, in this hospital room.

  Callum was gone—he had stormed out when he realized what I had done. Or, what I thought I’d done. It wasn’t like I’d made a choice. There had simply been no time to think of what it all meant.

  Stephen had been dead for four minutes.

  “I know he’s here,” Boo was saying. “We need to start looking. We do the hospital. We do the flat, both the old one and the new one. And if that fails, we come back here and we do it again. Yeah?”

  I’d grabbed Stephen’s hand and hadn’t let go. I was a terminus, and if my theory was right, I had the power to pull him back—not to stop him from dying, but to make him a ghost.

  “I mean . . .” Boo paced the side of the bed by the door, unable to remain still. “When Jo woke up, she woke up where she died. Most of them, we find them where they died. Not all of them, but most of them. A lot of them, anyway. Maybe we need to stay here. Or at least look around the hospital. But here? He’d probably come here? I mean, I think it can take a while sometimes?”

  No one was listening to Boo.

  “Do you know anything?” she asked me, her voice pitching high. “Did you feel something, or . . .”

  It took me a moment to shake myself out of my haze and realize I was supposed to answer.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “Rory, try. Try.”

  “Is that a thing?” Thorpe asked. “Can you . . . feel them?”

  “Rory,” Boo said.

  She had broken the seal on my calm, and I felt a surge run through me. I saw it coming, like a big, flat wave off the shoreline, a wall of water about to crash down and take me away forever. I was not going to let that happen.

  “Shut up!” I yelled across the bed. “Let me think.”

  I had no idea what I was doing. I tried to remember what it was like in those last moments, when they’d told me he was dying, when I’d closed my eyes like this and taken his hand. So I did that. I grabbed his hand, which was warm, but not as warm as it should have been. It was Stephen’s hand, the one I had felt on my face last night, on the space under my shirt, along my belly where my scar was.

  When we had kissed. My eyes were closed then too.

  No muscle movement. His hand was an inanimate object. I squeezed harder. I tightened my eyes until starbursts appeared behind them.

  Stephen. Where are you? Where are you? Where are you?

  He had sighed into my mouth when we kissed.

  Where are you where are you where are you . . .

  There was no answer, no clear echo in my head, no hand gripping mine. I went harder, pushing into my own mind, reca
lling the very moments before, when it had all happened and his life support had been turned off. There was the whiteness, the rushing feeling, a pushing and a pulling, and a feeling of falling—

  Suddenly, in my mind, I was back in Louisiana, standing in my uncle Bick’s bird shop, A Bird in Hand. I was imagining this, of course, but my mind had landed there quite naturally. Uncle Bick was behind the counter in his Tulane baseball cap, sorting a bunch of bird toys. I could smell birdseed.

  The birds were allowed to fly free in the shop (he had a series of three doors you came through to make sure they were safe), so there was always a chance that a bird would land on your head. Or, more likely, bird poop would land on your head. I was always a little nervous in there. It never fazed Uncle Bick. Birds almost never pooped on him.

  “Here’s the thing,” said the Uncle Bick in my head, “they actually want to be found. They’re not designed for the wild.”

  He was talking about parakeets. Uncle Bick had a passion for finding the ones that were lost or released by callous college students, who regarded them as a school-year pet. They sat in the local trees, deeply confused by their situation. My uncle Bick drove around in his truck and rescued them (and got labeled a possible predator by the university security department for lingering by dorm room windows).

  Except of course this wasn’t about parakeets. My brain was filtering information, and this was the format it had chosen.

  “So how do I find him?” I asked Imaginary Uncle Bick. He pushed the box aside and adjusted his baseball cap.

  “Parakeets never go far,” he said. “They’re not used to long flights or heights. They stick close to home. They never meant to leave.”

  “I’m honestly not sure if I should be talking to you,” I said to my imaginary uncle. “I’m trying to find Stephen.”

  “And I’m not your uncle,” said my imaginary uncle. “I’m your own head, telling you what you already know.”

  “What does that mean? I don’t know anything.”

  “Oh,” said my own brain, “you do.”

  Someone was shaking me. I opened my eyes to find Boo next to me, pointing wildly. The lights on Stephen’s machine all came on at once. The pulse monitor flashed to triple zeros and then started flicking through random digits, going up and down wildly before becoming a blur. The line that had flattened when Stephen had—well, that line was now a frantic mountain range, jagging and peaking and speeding itself into nonsense. The machine was alive.

  Thorpe seemed to fly across the room. He grabbed Stephen’s other hand and put his fingers on the pulse point in the wrist.

  “I don’t feel . . .”

  The machine began to emit a loud hum, then the lights in the ceiling dimmed to a brownish glow, then to a high, uncomfortable brightness. Then the bulb shorted out and the room went dark, including the machine. There was a yell from out in the hall. Then another. Then a chorus of panicked calls. Thorpe opened the door to reveal that the entire hall had gone dark. Things were being knocked over; nurses and doctors ran past with bags and tubes.

  “Rory . . .” Thorpe looked past me. I heard a tinkling sound and turned to watch the window of the room frost over—at least, it looked like frost creeping up from the bottom of the pane. What it was actually, we realized a moment later, was a spidery, spreading fracture. It climbed and climbed, and when it hit the top of the frame, the window whited out and burst in a cloud of glass dust, some of it blowing back in on the cold December wind.

  The power flooded back on. The machine flashed and went quiet. The yelling continued in the hall.

  “I don’t know if that is the backup generator,” Thorpe said. “I don’t know anything at this point except that you are leaving this building. Now.”

  He didn’t grab me, exactly, but he approached me with intent. He would move me if he had to.

  “I’ll look for Stephen,” Boo said. “I’ll meet you. Go.”

  I gave Stephen one final look before leaving the room with Thorpe. His dark hair stood out against the pale blue hospital pillow and the white and blue gown they’d dressed him in. His mouth had eased into a soft smile, and his face lost some of its angular sharpness. I reminded myself that this look wouldn’t be my last. This was a temporary good-bye, that was all.

  In the hall, there was a residual air of alarm, even though the power in general seemed to be back on. People were saying they’d lost coverage on their cell phones. Security waved us away from the elevators. Thorpe smoothly ushered me down the hall. None of this was real. Stephen would appear at any time. He would be there, in his uniform and looking mildly perturbed by the turn of events. I glanced into the open rooms we passed, expecting to see his tall figure in every doorway.

  I almost walked into the nurse. She was standing directly in the middle of the hallway, unmoved by the quickly flowing foot traffic around her. She wasn’t wearing scrubs—instead, she had on a long blue dress and a white apron with a large red cross over the chest. On her head was something that looked like a nun’s veil, white, spreading to either side of her head like wings. She was older; her hair was gray, what I could see of it.

  Some ghosts were like an image being poorly projected at a wall. Not the nurse. She seemed to be made of light and color, the blue of her dress bleeding into the air of the hallway, the white like a halo around her head, the cross throbbing on her chest. I skidded to a halt, making Thorpe stumble a bit. He tried to move me on, but when I froze, he followed my lead. It must have been very confusing to him. He couldn’t see what I did.

  “You look lost,” the nurse said. “The stairs are that way.”

  She pointed in the direction we had been moving.

  “My friend,” I said. “He . . . he was down the hall. He”—I was not ready to say the word, but this was no time to look for another way to phrase it—“died. Just a few minutes ago. But I think he’s here.”

  She folded her hands by her waist and said nothing.

  “Did you hear me?” I said. “My friend. His name is Stephen. He’s tall, he’s got dark brown hair, he’s . . .”

  Someone stopped for a second to watch me talk to an empty space in the middle of the hall. Thorpe wheeled around a bit and ended up standing next to the nurse. Someone else bumped us and told us to move to the side.

  “My friend,” I said again. “Did you see him?”

  “The stairs are this way.” She indicated the direction once again.

  I was in no mood to deal with this ghost. Not now. I put my hand in front of her face.

  “Listen to me. This . . .” I pointed to the ceiling to indicate the general chaos. “I did this. If I touch you, you go away. Now, tell me if you saw my friend.”

  Thorpe’s brow wrinkled, but the nurse didn’t change expression. She didn’t so much as glance at my hand.

  “I am here for the dying,” she said. “You don’t belong here. You will go.”

  “I’ll leave when you tell me . . .”

  “You’ll leave now,” she said. “You do not belong here.”

  Everything about her went kind of blurry—like I was seeing her through a fuzzy lens. She was color and an expanding area of light, something terrible and strong. I backed up quickly, and Thorpe took a few steps toward me to try to follow this strange dance. I didn’t know if I had anything to fear from her. I didn’t know if I could destroy her, but I had no intention of doing that. This was her hospital, and she seemed to understand something about me that I didn’t know. I dropped my hand and felt all will ebbing away from me.

  I was scared. I wanted to go home. I wanted Stephen back. It was too much to cry about, so I didn’t.

  Thorpe, sensing the encounter had to end, scooped me under the armpits and started moving down the hall again.

  “I wouldn’t have hurt her,” I said, partially to Thorpe, maybe to her, maybe to myself.

  “Stop talking,” he sai
d.

  We walked out of the hospital, which faced Paddington station. There was a post-rush-hour crush of people still pouring out onto the streets. I got a heavy lungful of London air, which was flecked with damp crystals that felt like glass when you breathed them in. The streetlamps were on, even though it was day. We waited at the crowded intersection for the traffic light to change.

  “Where are we going?” I asked Thorpe.

  “My car is in the car park across the road.”

  “But . . .”

  “Just walk,” Thorpe said.

  There was anger in his voice. Maybe he thought this was my fault. Maybe he was right. Somehow, this madness, the crash, and the events of this morning had all started with me getting expelled. Somehow, this had happened because I couldn’t manage all of this bullshit and “further maths.” I’d been chased by the Ripper ghost and stabbed and turned into a terminus, but oh, no. In the end, math. Maths. That was the butterfly that caused the earthquake on the other side of the world.

  Thorpe’s car was a sedate black Mercedes. He unlocked it and told me to get in. As I did, he got behind the wheel. He didn’t put the key into the ignition. We sat there in silence and shivered in our respective seats for a few moments. I looked over at him once or twice, at his youngish face and unexpectedly pure-white hair. Thorpe had that kind of greyhound profile of someone who did marathons and actually cared about soluble fiber and stuff like that. Not in a vain way—more in the way of someone who had to be professionally fit and functional. There was something in his expression and posture that suggested huge calculations were going on inside his mind.

  “I need to understand what is happening,” he finally said. “No details left out. You’ll tell me everything. The basics, as I understand them, are as follows. About thirty-six hours ago, you left Wexford after being told you were expelled.”

  I was pretty sure my heartbeat was audible. I considered fainting. That would at least make everything go away.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “And you then proceeded to Jane Quaint’s house? Your therapist? And you spent the night there.”