The Eterna Files

by Leanna Renee Hieber

  “How wise,” Moriel cooed. “I truly do have far more at my disposal than I even ask for.” He took a breath. “I can’t sleep for fear of what Tourney might say. Sloppy idiot. Cost us nearly the entire underground. He deserves worse than death. I know”—Moriel sighed—“I promised him if anything happened that I’d spread a net for him. He truly was gifted, but I can’t let him spill anything further, else it becomes him or me.”

  The guard bowed his head. “Yes, Majesty. He is a coward for not taking care of himself already.”

  Moriel murmured a pensive hum of agreement. He tapped the iron bar of his cage with a jagged fingernail. “How many of the names I gave the queen have been purged since she and I spoke?”

  “Nearly half, Majesty,” the guard replied. He reached out a fat hand and quashed a roach crawling up the wall near Moriel’s head, its body falling with the sound of a raindrop into a dank puddle at his feet. “I believe the list is being systematically extinguished, however if you’ll permit my opinion, sir?”

  “Yes, yes.” Moriel waved a bored hand.

  “If we kill them so systematically,” the guard countered, “mightn’t the police suspect the dragon snuffing its own fires and begin to protect them?”

  “Then be careful about it,” Moriel purred. “And start turning more police to our side. If recruits won’t go willingly, convince them with powders. We need to build our army’s ranks, lieutenant.” One hand shot out to clutch the man’s throat; the other fluttered up the round chin and over those deep scars once more. “Tell me. Are the four test bodies prepared?”

  “Yes, sir,” the guard whispered, standing stock still against the iron.

  Moriel smiled. “Good. Ship them soon.”

  They heard a door open, far down the long, narrow hall. Shift change. The guard stepped away so as not to be seen conversing with the prisoner.

  The Majesty shoved his oblong, clammy face against the chains wound around the cell’s hinges. “Make sure Tourney doesn’t survive the night,” he rasped in a saccharine murmur, as if bidding flights of angels to sing his beloved friend to rest.

  The guard bowed his head, retreating into the darkness, leaving him with a soft promise: “All shall be attended to, milord.”

  CHAPTER

  EIGHT

  Aware she was in that precarious place between sleep and waking, Clara didn’t push away the images. They were pleasantly painful, so she indulged them.

  Louis lay with her in his Union Square apartment, spacious lodging provided by his government contact. They were lounging atop the duvet of his bed, as they often did after a tangle of lips and hands. Many times they had gone nearly so far as to take her virtue but always stopped short.

  Clara remembered other lifetimes, when deflowering meant either death or a very inconvenient child. She’d not trifle with it in this one. They both knew that Eterna, among other things, stood in the way of marriage, so the subject was tabled indefinitely. Well versed in pleasure, their desires did not suffer.

  From their conversation, Clara knew she was remembering the night Louis had learned of the death of his foremost idol, Marie Laveau, whose fame as the Queen of New Orleans’ Vodoun community had spread far and wide. While he didn’t always condone the queen’s methods, and certainly not the sensationalized extremes to which outsiders took them, he admired how she had increased the visibility of the faith his mother had passionately instilled in him. His belief system gave him clarity of purpose; he lived in joyful awe of Bondye and the mystères whom he served and sometimes channeled, ever respecting the animus inherent in all life and every being.

  Louis removed an amulet; a bird carved into a bit of quartz crystal, from around his neck. He unclasped the chain to loop it around Clara’s neck, nestling the rock between the curves of her bosom, just visible below the lacy line of her chemise.

  “Mother blessed this for me before her death,” Louis murmured, fondling a lock of her hair where he’d pulled it back to fasten the chain.

  “No, Louis, I can’t,” Clara protested, placing her fingers over his, trying to stop him. “This is too precious.”

  “You are precious,” he said with a smile. “Mother would have loved your brilliant, independent spirit. Take it, so I can share something of her with you and you with her.”

  Clara accepted at his insistence, letting the cool stone warm against the slight tremor of her heartbeat.

  They let tears flow for their ancestors and spiritual leaders, for Queen Marie. They bid the saints be kind and Louis lit candles at his home altar; a colorful, adorned ledge across one wall that filled Clara with a sense of reverence and power.

  In this rich memory, Louis gathered her in his arms, breath glancing off her neck, her undone tresses, the bare skin around her open chemise where hooks and eyes had been parted, the avian amulet flying as free as her spirit as he expounded theory that thrilled her deeply as his touch.

  “The key of Eterna, ma cherie, is to determine the boundaries of meaning. Nothing that may have meaning in terms of life can be overlooked,” Louis said, tracing the line of her arm with his finger. She watched his fingertip, reacting to its course, considering the ever so subtly darker hue of his skin against her own pinkish tones.

  “Until I came to New York, I believed only in my faith. Not in magic. I am no warlock. My prayers are not spells. My mystères are the opposite of demons, whatever popular fetish has warped them into. But I have discovered that magic runs a parallel course, and now believe magic is only a science that has yet to be divulged,” he declared. “Meaning has science. Life has science. And we must tie life to meaning in base materials and in spirit and there must be science to this act. No single chemical will prolong life and prevent death, but a holistic compound might result in immortality. We must look beyond the linear and the known and be intimate with mystery.”

  “The scientist and mystic must live in one heart,” Clara murmured, repeating Louis’s favorite mantra. He tapped her chest, above her heart, with his finger.

  “They must love in one heart, too. Indivisible. Else this project is doomed. I’m onto something, something about the vibrations and meaning of certain places that have life and vivacity that have nothing to do with the body and everything to do with soul.

  “There’s such momentum, my mind hums with a thousand voices urging me forward. I’m doing the great work of the alchemists of old, eternity is within my looking glass.…”

  Suddenly his expression transformed from pleasant to harrowing, his wonder to horror. A chill took her. This was no longer the same memory.

  “You have to keep searching, Clara. Keep searching. What we were doing was not wrong but something went very, very wrong. I don’t want to have died in vain.”

  Face gray, Louis rose and stood at the foot of his bed, his brown trousers rumpled, his white shirt open and undone. His body convulsed and toppled onto her, now stiff and lifeless. She felt the weight of his death.

  Clara woke with a wrenching gasp, the protective amulet swinging like a pendulum from her neck. The dream, like a poker, prodded the smoldering fire of her grief but she refused to sob, lest either the housekeeper Miss Harper or Bishop hear her. Her pain had to remain solely her own, and she stifled it yet again.

  She wanted to deny that the scientist and the mystic were ever in league. She vehemently did not want to do what her dead lover asked: to keep searching.

  After breakfast she dressed in a cream-colored dress of eyelet threaded with ribbon and went to the office, where she found Franklin leaving.

  “I’ll be out,” he stated. “All day. I need to walk, to clear my mind. Too much clutter.”

  She understood. After Franklin used his gifts, he was introspective and moody for several days. He often stated that he needed solitude at such times, and preferred walking to sitting at home. Clara wished him well and went to her desk.

  “Louis,” she said, looking up at the ceiling, “if you are out there, up there, if you care … Can you help sort this
out? For both our sakes?”

  How could she look if she had no idea where to start? She opened one of her desk drawers, hoping to find inspiration in her files. A survey of varying cultural notions of vampirism. Bishop’s notes on why ghosts linger and his feeling that it had to do with the living, not the dead. A paper positing that electrical current prolonged life. The tract repeatedly referenced Nikola Tesla, reflecting what seemed to be obsession on the part of the writer, who seemed as touched as Tesla himself.

  Genius aside, Clara had seen Tesla at a Westinghouse presentation and had sensed he was a bit unhinged. Still, he was far more intriguing than Edison—his rival in the war of the currents—who seemed a bit of an ass. Clara had found Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein compelling; she couldn’t help but believe in a connection between life and current.

  Interviews with mediums and spiritualists she and Bishop deemed legitimate, who were not preying upon the widespread cultural fascination with séances. An odd New York City police case in which a young woman claimed that a young man’s soul had been torn from his body and imprisoned in a painting, leaving the body possessed by another.

  Here Clara paused, tapping her fingers upon the file. The case was related, at least on paper, to Lavinia Kent’s problem with the chemist—and to a series of odd events. Mrs. Evelyn Northe-Stewart and her friends had unveiled a group of experimental madmen bound to a secret society insidious in purpose, though its aim remained unclear. The leader had been executed the year prior, in England. Something about this nagged at her. She thought back to a detail she’d seen at the disaster site, something on the corner of an upstairs floorboard, where lush carpeting had been laid over the wood.…

  Her thoughts were interrupted by Lavinia, who darted upstairs and into the office, bright eyes wide. “Sorry, Clara. It’s … Come see. I don’t want to touch it. Just … come, please.”

  The ladies descended. Lavinia pointed toward her magpie-like nest of the weird and inexplicable. Nestled amid her collection of séance materials was a small chalkboard intended for automatic writing—a tool for communicating with the dead. In shaking script, two words read:

  “C, keep searching…”

  “It wasn’t there an hour ago,” Lavinia whispered, shuddering. “No one but Franklin has been through. He’d have had to reach over me to touch it. I haven’t moved. What does it mean?”

  Clara’s heart went to her throat. Was Louis listening to her pleas after all?

  Lavinia tried to take Clara’s hand. “What aren’t you telling me, dear?”

  “I can’t say, Vin. Someday, maybe, but not today.” Clara fled back upstairs, mind racing. She paced her office and wrung her hands, hating feeling helpless when she was a woman of action. How could she search when she didn’t know where to begin?

  Her eye fell upon the file she’d been considering when Lavinia interrupted her. She thought again about the disaster site. There was something she hadn’t seen. Something she hadn’t had time to see, as she left before she was overcome. Her time might be even more without Bishop and Franklin at her side, but she felt she had no choice. She took the bloody key from the locked cabinet safeguarding items of current import, and stormed out the door. Lavinia called her name but she neither turned nor replied.

  “I’m searching, Louis,” Clara murmured, looking up past brick buildings to blue sky; the breeze of the rivers’ confluence at the tip of Manhattan buffeted the eyelet layers of her summer dress. “Wherever you are, help me.”

  * * *

  “What have I done?” a voice asked ruefully.

  Andre Dupris woke with a start to find his dead twin brother at the foot of his narrow cot. Andre’s vision blurred and he felt dizzy; the riverboat was swaying at one pace and Louis’s transparent, gray form, floating three feet above the floor, was moving at quite another.

  “Go away,” Andre mumbled.

  “I’m sorry my death is so inconvenient for you,” Louis said in the same tone he’d always used to chide Andre when he’d overslept after a night of carousing. Maybe the boat wasn’t swaying after all—Andre had consumed quite a bit of whiskey the night before.

  “I want you to be at peace, brother,” Andre mumbled. “We’re working toward that. We put your sweetheart on the trail. She’ll know something about what happened to you, at least.”

  “Yes, she’s very clever. And she’s the only one I trust. But what if whatever was in that place, whatever killed me and my colleagues, goes after her?”

  “I don’t think the compound has that sort of effect, brother—”

  “I don’t think the compound alone did it. Something intervened. We should never have humored Malachi and moved operations. It made everything unstable. I can’t wrap my brain around it. Here I thought Smith, constantly setting his vials aflame, would be the death of us.”

  Andre snorted despite himself. “I did, too.”

  “I was hoping great mysteries could be solved in the afterlife.” Louis sighed, disappointed. “Maybe in some other place, but not here in this great between. I’m no closer to understanding what happened to me, to our bodies, to that space.…”

  “The ‘magic’ you and your fellows cooked up is not the key to the universe after all, Louis.” Andre sighed. “All I know is that home is what’s ahead. Where I shall endeavor to fix some of your mess.”

  “And what about yours? Spying for England? If Clara is in danger because of you—”

  “Information is all England wants, not your lover,” Andre exclaimed, putting a hand to his throbbing head. “What country would let a cure for death go by without interest? Besides, I was trying to extricate myself. I haven’t given them any information since the incident. They don’t know what happened, or even where, only that I have not reported. When Malachi started acting strangely, I hid your files and all your notes at Smith’s old lab.”

  Louis sighed. “Returning the sacred item I stole from the priestess won’t appease her. She’ll not easily forgive it, she won’t understand. She’ll think you’re me!”

  “Then advise me.” Andre shook his head. “You’re not helping set yourself to rest. It’s like you want to be here.”

  “I’m meant to be here, there’s a difference. To save my soul … and Clara.”

  “She got you into this mess to begin with!” Andre spat. “Her Eterna is the reason you’re dead—”

  Louis shook his transparent head. “That isn’t true, though I’m sure she blames herself—”

  “Go haunt her, then,” Andre begged.

  “I’ve tried to haunt her!” the ghost cried. “I can’t. I’ve gotten near enough to try to talk to her, to touch her, to make her see me, but nothing worked. I tried to leave a message but hadn’t the strength to complete it.” He floated to and fro, making Andre more seasick. “She’s too intense a being. And from spirits, she has to shield, because of her condition. I helped her learn how to do so! And now it’s impossible to get noticed. There are so many other energies around her, I can’t get through.”

  “You and your energies. Even in death—”

  “Energy, life force, it’s all the more present after death. That’s all that’s left of me, a trace of human life left in pulses, vibrations, an electrical spark; I am a mere whisper she cannot hear, talented and sensitive as she is. There’s too much noise around her. So many spirits want to touch her—”

  “That pretty, is she?” Andre asked with a leer.

  Louis bobbed in the air, scowling. “You know, Andre, that you’re being watched.”

  “Yes. A British man has been following me since New York.”

  “What did you do to involve the British, Andre? In trouble again?”

  Andre threw up his hands. “Even dead, you sound like Mother—”

  “Would you like me to go fetch her?” Louis seethed.

  “For the love of God, please don’t fetch Mother,” Andre growled, tossing back the sheet and pulling on the clothes he’d left lying in a messy pool beside the uncomfortable cot. “I
made powerful people in London angry and one of them happens to have an interest in Eterna. It was leverage. I’m a coward, yes. But now I don’t want anyone to have anything to do with it. If I could show them how you died—” Andre’s voice cracked as sorrow struck. “No one would dare…”

  Because Louis’s ghost was ever-present, Andre hadn’t begun to truly grieve. Though Andre had to consider the fact that the horrors he’d seen might have simply cracked his mind open like an egg and that he wasn’t speaking to anyone other than his own inner demons.

  “Dancing with the devil,” Andre muttered as he buttoned his trousers. Louis’s stolen ceremonial dagger was hidden inside, in a scabbard lashed to his belt. He tied the neck of his shirt, threw on a vest, and knotted a loose ascot. “The devil was at work in that house and I don’t even believe in God or any of your saints.

  “I’m going above. Where I can’t be seen talking to you.” He stormed out and onto the foredeck, still working on the buttons of his vest and trousers.

  Of course, the Brit was there, lying back upon a deck chair. Though dark glasses concealed the man’s eyes, Andre could feel the watcher’s gaze as he crossed to the rail and looked out over the river. Home. He just wanted to go home.

  As he imagined once again stalking the familiar lanes and favorite watering holes of New Orleans, a woman materialized beside him as if from thin air. She murmured; “You make a terrible spy.”

  With a start, he turned to stare at her. Beneath a straw bonnet that curved around her face, held in place by a wide ribbon, her light skin bore a dusting of brown freckles; she had slightly rounded nostrils and tight brown curls. Her blue calico dress with lace detailing was perfect for the weather and nicely made. She was lovely, too, he noticed, and gave the appearance of being upper middle class—not the wealthiest on board, not the poorest. A good way to fit in and go unnoticed.

  “You’re right. I make a terrible spy,” Andre said mordantly. “I never wanted to be one.”

  “That British gent has had you uncomfortable since New York,” she said. “Why?”