The Eterna Solution

by Leanna Renee Hieber

  Bach. Toccata and Fugue in D Minor. Of course. Theatrical to the core.

  As the music crested, Nathaniel Veil stepped out from the shadows and strode to the base of the altar, staring down the aisle with searing intensity and a stage presence as tall as the grand church’s beams.

  The dark, rolling music lifted into another fortissimo peak and the sanctuary doors were thrown open to reveal the bride in a gorgeous, royal purple gown. Her black veil was of a wide netting that allowed her face to be seen, a radical departure from the demure bride. This challenging, bold choice would not allow her audience to forget her intensity or that she was as compelling a presence as the man who waited for her at the altar.

  In one hand she held a simple bouquet of deep burgundy roses. In the other she held a censer, its smoking ball exuding the richest, most exquisite frankincense Clara had ever inhaled.

  That a woman would carry an implement of the cloth, meant for preparing a ritual space, was unheard of—that was the province of male clergy alone. The association murmured in titillated approval.

  Lavinia had confided in Clara years ago that she had once wanted to become an Episcopal priest, as the American branch of the Anglican Church at least seemed able to conceive of women in leadership positions, and she held out hope for the future. Perhaps this moment of boldly sanctifying the space was Lavinia’s way of living that dream; Clara knew this was an act of love and faith, with no intent of sacrilege.

  Bishop stepped up to Lavinia’s side, not taking her arm, but simply walking next to her, a show of support to offset the family that had abandoned her when she chose to marry a lower-class actor.

  Admittedly, Clara’s breath was taken away by the sight of her former guardian: Bishop’s striking presence and distinguished features were displayed magnificently by the finest of all-black dress. His gaze went right to her as if he felt her stare, and his smile dazzled her. After they’d stared at one another, captivated, for longer than was proper, Bishop returned his attention to escorting the bride.

  As they processed up the aisle, Bach echoing through the church, Lavinia swinging the censer expertly, Clara noticed with excitement that the Wards at the center of the bouquets glowed more brightly in response.

  Lavinia reached the altar where Reverend Blessing, having refreshed himself and donned a purple stole, glowed with serene happiness, his bright smile wide against his brown skin. Bishop presented Lavinia to Nathaniel and inclined his head to the groom before retreating to the side of the altar.

  Nathaniel stared at Lavinia with transported joy. He was an actor, but this was no act. They were young, barely twenty, but the supernatural trials they’d faced early in their courtship aged them and made them inseparable. Bonds made in spiritual battle were like no other; Clara knew this fact too well.

  The organ music died away to silence. After a moment, Nathaniel once again broke with marital tradition and began to recite, his voice clear and strong. It took Clara a moment before she could place the grand words—and then she smiled in true delight. Nathaniel was speaking stanzas written by Edgar Allan Poe, though substituting his beloved’s name for those in the original text.

  “And we loved with a love that was more than love, me and Lavinia Leigh…”

  Thankfully, he stopped before the poem’s elaborate lines about Annabel’s sepulcher. Clara felt there was only so much morbidity one should bring to a wedding.

  Reverend Blessing now took over, with a simplified yet traditional liturgy. Toward the end of the vows, Clara spotted movement at the corners of her eyes. She blinked, assuming she was just tired, to no avail.

  The shadows were distinctly denser toward the back of the chapel. Her stomach twisted as she wondered if they had missed something during their inspection. From her place toward the back of the sanctuary, she tried to catch Bishop’s eye, but he was focused on the altar.

  Looking cautiously around the space, Clara noted Evelyn’s vigilance: The powerful medium was standing sentry at the front of the other side aisle. Miss Knight sat a few pews ahead with an erect posture; the expression on her face showed that her sensibilities were all alertness.

  It seemed that despite their work in the graveyard and the church itself, Trinity was still a precarious, vulnerable spiritual space, the kind of space that Summoned shadows liked to take advantage of. A pushback against all their Warding.

  Clara edged back toward the entrance foyer, where gas lamps had been turned low for the ceremony. Spire and Rose moved just a beat behind her; they had been watching her closely for the cues that only a Sensitive could give. Miss Knight looked back at Evelyn, then Clara, picking up on a concern. Clara shook her head and pointed to the couple, indicating she should keep focused on them.

  Gesturing to Rose and Spire, Clara slipped under the entrance arch and toward the front door. A moment later they had slipped outside to walk around to the rear without intruding on the ceremony.

  “I thought I saw something—inky shapes—around the ambulatory,” Clara said quietly as they circled the edifice. “It may be a trick of the eyes—”

  “We cannot be too careful,” Rose stated.

  As they crossed the length of the church, a flickering caught the corner of Clara’s eye and she turned to look. A little farther downtown, something was disrupting the intermittent electric lights between here and the Pearl Street dynamos. She had to turn away lest the unnatural blinking affect her epilepsy. Either Mosley was manipulating the grid or the Summoned were responding to their new puppet master.

  The rear of the church had a less grand but still beautiful Gothic arched door. As they approached it, they heard a raucous bout of applause and cheers from inside. The ceremony was done, the couple wed. Everyone would be focusing on the receiving line at the front of the church, hopefully moving away from whatever lurked here.

  Spire strode forward and opened the rear door; a coolness wafted out. This was troublesome; the space, lit with candles and filled with a hundred-some persons, should not have been cooler than this near-Halloween night. And yet.

  The veil between the mortal and spirit worlds was thin these days indeed, and straining at the seams.

  Clara pressed the beaded bodice line at her bosom and felt the combination of talisman and Ward she’d placed there like armor. Her own energetic reserves swelled.

  As she made to step past Spire into the church, he stopped her with a hand on her arm, squinting into the shadows of the eaves.

  There was a candlelit, hanging wrought-iron lantern at the rear steps, and Spire reached out toward the wall just beyond the pool of its light. Something of the stone he put his hand to seemed to be sitting with too much space between the other stones, removed of mortar and revealing a gap.

  Carefully he slid out a brown box about the size of a brick, the same color as the rich brown sandstone of the church. With a grim expression, he drew Clara away from the building, then opened the box. Clara’s hand went to her mouth at the sight of its contents: partially disarticulated fingers, the skin peeled back and bloody runes placed at the knuckles. A Society-styled offering if she’d ever seen one.

  Over Clara’s head the darkening sky went pitch black and the three companions realized it was one of the demonic shadows, perhaps drawn to the box. Spire reeled back and slammed the box shut and cast it away toward a headstone, where it fell half ajar.

  “Mr. Spire, do you have a Ward?” Clara cried. At the sound of her voice, the lightless silhouette whirled toward her.

  “Not on me,” he replied nervously. “Isn’t the church full of them? Isn’t that enough?”

  The pitch-black, lightless shadow took a swipe at her, stretching the vague form of a hand toward her breast. It seemed to strike a barrier, unable to come near, and Clara knew her personal Ward was keeping it at bay.

  “I do,” Rose said, placing herself between Spire and the form, which had begun to advance on him. She thrust one arm toward the vile essence, holding out a glass vial, and the inky abomination shifted bac
k as if onto its haunches.

  Clara ran to one of the disrupted grave areas nearby and plucked a Ward from within the small bouquet left there as protection. After rushing back, she handed it to Spire; as their hands touched, the strength of their energies made the Ward glow.

  Bishop called Clara’s name and rushed toward her out of the dark.

  Something within her shifted like a pendulum. Time seemed to pause and Clara could see something rippling in the night air, spanning the space between her body and Bishop’s, between Spire and Rose.

  A compass. To Clara, it was unmistakable, and from the looks on the others’ faces, she assumed they also saw the odd ripple of the air, like heat off a horizon line or the shimmering of a moonbeam across water.

  Another movement in her peripheral vision had Clara turning to watch as one of her past selves peeled away from her body and floated a few paces away, as if it were a leaf detaching from a tree on a blustery day and hovering in the wind. Androgynous in dark hooded robes, something priest-like, the figure faced Clara, then craned their head as if listening, the hood falling back to reveal long, pale hair. They lifted long-fingered hands to both ears, gesturing that Clara be the one to listen now.

  Wincing, Clara heard a sound that caused the same reflexive reaction as smelling decay. The discordant note in the air was a raw sound, a grinding, screeching sort of noise that echoed faintly off her inner ear, quite separate from the dramatic organ postlude that had begun in celebration of pronouncement; resonant tones emanating into the night.

  “Do you hear that?” Clara asked. Rose and Spire shook their heads.

  “There’s an undercurrent,” Bishop stated. “I can feel it, but I can’t hear it. Like when you know there’s a ghost present but cannot see it. You must be tuning to the sounds of disparate energies as Mosley suggested.”

  Clara glanced back at the life that had manifested itself. The figure had moved to where Spire had discarded the box, holding hands out over the runic abomination in an act of blessing in an ancient, cleansing rite her current self no longer remembered, and then the figure faded. But the grating whine remained.

  “Come with me,” Clara said, remembering the idea for an antidote to discordant currents, and the others rushed after her into the chapel.

  There were shadows lurking behind the altar, waiting. It hadn’t been a trick of her eye after all. Lightless, silhouetted forms dove at the quartet but were repelled by the boundaries of their new compass.

  “Stay close,” she instructed the others. “Between the Wards and our connection, the effects are keeping us shielded.”

  By this time all the guests had left and the organist was winding down the haunting, deep-noted postlude. Reverend Blessing stood alone in the center of the transept, his head cocked to the side.

  “Reverend,” Clara said, “there’s something foul we had to discard out back that needs your tending. Bring friends, please,” she commanded. He nodded and called to Evelyn, who was standing near the front, as Clara led her team up into the choir loft. The four of them tried to keep equidistant spacing even in single file, the wood creaking as they moved quickly.

  The organist, sitting on a padded velvet organ bench, turned to them with a disapproving frown.

  “Friends, you can’t be up here—”

  “I know, but it’s an emergency, sir,” Clara said.

  “Please listen,” Bishop said, bringing his power to bear. The musician’s expression softened.

  The Summoned were rising slowly, a line of tar-black, silhouetted head-like shapes floating in terrifying unison toward them. Rose and Spire shifted closer. The shadows wafted back. Clara forced her eyes away from their mesmerizing abyss, which would derail them if she looked any closer.

  “What’s this note?” Clara asked the organist, then hummed, trying to match the sound wafting in and out of her hearing.

  “An F,” the man replied, matching it on the organ by playing a key with his left hand. He pulled out a stop with his right hand and laid a foot on a pedal, amplifying the sound in the space; it was almost too much for Clara to have it so prominent in her psychic ear and then rattling in her bones as well.

  Her vision swam. Seizure symptoms. She drew a deep breath. Not now, she commanded her body. “Say … there was a discordant note against it,” Clara posited. At this, the organist pressed the next key up the scale, maintaining the F and adding the sharp. Clara grimaced at the unbearable jangle of sound and pressed one hand to her ear. “Could you cancel it out?”

  “I could resolve it,” the organist offered.

  “Resolve it. Yes!” Clara exclaimed. “That is exactly what we need.”

  The organist released the sharp to play an A, creating a harmonious interval, made fuller by his adding a C.

  “Perfect,” she murmured. “Could you hold that chord a bit?”

  “Of course.”

  He pulled out all the stops and doubled the sound into a full chord in a higher octave, sending a magnificent trumpet blast out from gusting pipes that positively shook from the glorious force. The demons wafted back as if suffering a direct blow.

  As Clara watched the buffeted forms trying to re-form their grim line, the density of their opaqueness thinned.

  “I renounce thee,” she spat at them. Rose and Bishop echoed her. The last of their essence faded in snuffed wisps.

  Wind gusted through the chapel, carrying the smell of smoke, signaling that Evelyn and the reverend had found and destroyed the foul box outside.

  The looming seizure vanished and Clara’s breathing was less labored, particularly for Rose putting a hand to her back, invigorating her lungs with their bond. Bishop also reached out to brush her cheek with the soft benediction of his fingertips, and when he did, her clenching muscles released to ease.

  Clara steadied herself, clapped, kissed the organist on the cheek in a burst of effusive thanks, then darted down the choir loft steps, skirts flouncing.

  Bishop grabbed her hand once she dropped her skirts to the floor, and she did not break her stride as she looked about for any other foe, squeezing his hand and pressing his palm against her Ward, their bodies clumsily colliding as they moved, rushing out the back to make sure Blessing and Evelyn didn’t need more help with what had tainted the building.

  Rose and Spire continued to follow, hesitant to break the compass.

  “Banished,” Clara assured Evelyn and the reverend, who were standing by the grim box that now lay charred before an old grave, the reverend’s Bible open in hand. Both colleagues sighed in tired gratitude.

  “Thank you, Mr. Spire,” Clara said, turning and bowing her head toward him in a gesture of deepest respect. “You did not question us and you did not break our corners. I do not know if you could see what we saw—”

  “Something in the light and air changed between the four of us,” Spire said, looking thoughtful. “That was followed by a literal pull upon my body. If there is an element of action and reaction physical enough to believe in, then I will do what it bids. Though I amend my skepticism only on those points.”

  “I’ll never ask for more,” Clara assured him, swaying on her feet. Bishop took her in his arms.

  “Are you in a countdown?” he asked.

  “I was. I believe it has passed. Our collected efforts afforded me the necessary shielding and shelter.”

  “Thank you for keeping everyone safe,” Evelyn said, touching Clara’s cheek with a fond hand. “Your instincts remain unmatched.”

  “I’ll not rest on any laurels, but I’m glad they served us tonight,” Clara said. “But as for us, I’m … at the end of my usefulness. Let’s go home.…” She looked up at Bishop, and his soft smile was the most beautiful welcome to her invitation.

  “Do rest,” Rose bid her gently. “For we’ve no idea what the moving-picture demonstration might bring.”

  “At least I keep learning,” Clara said to Bishop hopefully. “I can indeed hear things, now, and Mosley was right about a tone of cancellation;
resolving a chord. We’ve another weapon in our counter-arsenal, navigating the paths of these dark turns.”

  “I’ll take that as a triumph of the night,” Bishop stated. He glanced back at the altar. “Love triumphed tonight.…”

  Clara could not help but notice their new compass was created between two couples with great care for one another. Perhaps love, though she’d never speak for Spire or Rose in that regard. In all the ways love had triumphed thus far, it still had been decidedly under attack. What the shadows or whoever wielded them likely couldn’t understand was the attacks only strengthened their truths. While her love had never been stronger, and her spirit never so steeled, she had never been so sure that the attacks were about to worsen.

  * * *

  Celeste knelt on the floor of her feminine sanctuary, her boudoir, her favorite place to conduct rituals and divination, dressed in a thin shift hanging low.

  Her arms were outstretched to Collect. She faced east, the better to feel the heartbeat connection of her magic along the transatlantic cable, an essence that snaked into her body with a tingling hand that caressed her heart and pumped her blood with greater pressure. But this had lessened, nearly stopped since Moriel’s death. She’d have to renew her booster boxes set along the cable grounding point on the American and English shores, as something had cut her co-opting line to the quick, likely the same forces that had been pushing back against Moriel’s final displays of doomed might.

  A map of Manhattan lay on her lap, with dried drops of blood marking the places of the most supernatural disruption, places where her operatives were actively involved.

  The night was alive with activity, and she flexed her fingers to direct it more specifically. As if she were pressing against a wall with her palm, there was a pushing back downtown, along Broadway, a direct shove against her measures to open the corridors of the Summoned wider to let more in. Closing her eyes, she could feel the push and pull. Surely, again, the meddlesome Sensitives who had caused so much trouble for Moriel along the way.