by Garth Nix
“Alastair.” She took his hand.
“Amelia.” His word was barely a whisper. She felt for his pulse, but he had none. His chest showed no rise and fall.
“I did it, Amelia.”
“You led them over the top. You saved Bennett. You’re a hero.”
“I didn’t want to be a hero. I simply wanted not to be a coward.”
“You were never that.”
“I’m not dead. I should be dead.” He tried to laugh, but there wasn’t enough air in his lungs. “You made me immortal … with a kiss.”
She stroked a stray lock of hair off his forehead.
“Kiss me again, Amelia.”
“Gil said—”
“I know.”
If Gil really had given her the gift to make Alastair immortal, his twenty-four hours ran out at three. She needed more time. She had to go back, beg Gil for an extension. An extension that would last a lifetime.
“Wait here.”
“Where do you think I’m going?”
She squeezed Alastair’s fingers, let herself out of the French windows, and hurried to the shrubbery. The path was more overgrown than she remembered. By the time she reached the potting shed her arms and face were covered with welts from the whippy branches.
She rapped loudly on the door, but there was no answer.
She hammered with her fists.
Then she tried the door.
It wasn’t even locked. It swung open to reveal nothing more than an old potting shed with an earth floor, swept clean. No steps.
Had it all been a dream?
No, Alastair had remembered.
She ran back. How long had she been away? They’d come looking for her soon, and Dr. Lennox was right, she had a duty to all the wounded, not just to one.
“There you are. Where did you go?”
“To find Gil.”
“He wasn’t there, was he?”
“How did you know?”
“By the look on your face.”
“I’ll think of something. I’ll try to find Gil again. I’ll ask Lennox to operate. If he can fix you before your time runs out—”
“Kiss me again, Amelia.”
“I can’t.”
“I heard what Lennox said. Heart-shot.”
“Are you in very great pain?”
“I was, for a few moments, but not now. I can’t feel anything.”
“Your heart—”
But Lennox was right. It wasn’t beating. No surgeon could fix that.
She held Alastair’s hand. “Can you feel that?”
“Yes.”
But she thought he was lying to comfort her. It should be the other way around.
“Are you so very frightened?”
“Not anymore. I’ve done what I had to do.”
“I don’t want you to go.”
“Dear Amelia. I wish we’d had longer.”
“I wish we’d had a lifetime.”
He smiled. “Kiss me now and let me go.”
She couldn’t, but she had to.
She bent forward and brushed her lips across his, feeling what breath he had left sigh away like a departing spirit.
She closed his eyes and folded his hands across his bloodied chest.
Then she stood and returned to the living.
Author’s Note: The Leeds Pals Regiment was raised in 1914 by volunteers. They trained in Colsterdale, North Yorkshire, and in 1915 deployed to Egypt to guard the Suez Canal against the Turks. They were shipped to France in March 1916 to join the British build-up for the Battle of the Somme. On the first day, the battalion casualties numbered 24 officers and 504 other ranks, of which 15 officers and 233 other ranks were killed. Private A.V. Pearson, a survivor, later said: “We were two years in the making and ten minutes in the destroying.”
Lieutenant Victor Ratcliffe, who has a walk-on role in this story, was a real person, a minor war poet and nephew of Edward Allen Brotherton, Lord Mayor of Leeds in 1913-14, one of those responsible for raising and equipping the Leeds Pals regiment. Victor also died on the first day of the Battle of the Somme, killed in action at Fricourt. He was twenty-nine years old, and left behind a fiancée, Pauline.
Bound By Mortal
Chains No More
William Leisner
New York City, 1929
The guests were led into the small sitting room that had been prepared for the séance. The electric lights had all been extinguished and a trio of candles at the center of the circular table were lit. Lightning flashed outside the windows as the storm clouds came rolling in from across the Hudson and over Central Park. “The perfect spooky weather for a séance, isn’t it?” asked the host, Walter Culyer, with a chuckle.
“Actually, no,” Arthur Ford answered wearily. The medium was only ten years older than his host, his college pals, and their sorority dates, but he carried himself like a man who had lived a much, much longer life. “The electrical discharges tend to disrupt the balance of energies,” he continued as he crossed to the windows and pulled the curtains closed, “and make contact beyond the veil more difficult.”
“You’re not making excuses already, are you?”
Ford turned from the windows. “Excuses?” he asked the young woman Culyer had introduced as his fiancée, Ginny Farrington, a lithe brunette with a pageboy haircut wearing a scandalously short frilled dress.
“In case the spirits are being ‘unresponsive’ or whatnot.” Her lips were curled into a tiny sneer as she pulled the cigarette from her overpainted lips. “I’ve read Houdini’s book,” she added, cocking her head and blowing out a long stream of smoke.
Cheeky little tart, innit she?
Ford ignored that voice from inside his head and held his gaze on Farrington as he moved over to the table. With the candlelight striking him from below, sharpening the contrast of his black tuxedo and white shirt, and flickering shadows over his face and his neatly trimmed van dyke beard, he knew he cut an imposing image. “I was told when you hired my services,” he addressed Culyer, while still maintaining eye contact with the woman, “that this was to be a friendly affair amongst friends. I did not come here to be subjected to some sort of skeptic’s inquest.”
“That’s not what this is,” Culyer tried to placate him. “Ginny here, she’s just cracking wise, ain’t you?”
“Because if any of you are coming into this with your minds already closed and locked that way,” Ford continued, taking in the rest of Culyer’s guests, “then I see little reason for proceeding.”
Finding every set of eyes in the room fixed on her, Farrington sighed and said, “Fine. I won’t make another peep.”
I wouldn’t bet on that, Fletcher silently interjected again as the group settled in their seats around the table and joined hands.
Silence settled over the room, interrupted only by the muffled sounds of wind and rain outside. Ford relaxed his breathing and dropped his chin to his chest so that his deepened voice reverberated through the small room. “O, Spirits! We are gathered to seek you and beseech your wisdom and counsel. Let the veil between the worlds of the living and the dead grow thin, the barriers weaken. Hear us, O, Spirits!”
As he incanted, a vine-like tendril of spiritual essence, invisible to all but Ford himself, stretched out from the center of his chest. It curled like a wisp of smoke over the table, then expanded into the shape of a man’s head. The candles guttered in reaction to the small but sudden dip in ambient temperature, to the gasps of a couple of Culyer’s guests.
Ford raised his head again as the apparition began to speak through him. “My name is Fletcher. I am Mister Ford’s liaison and guide to the spirit world.” Though still Ford’s voice, Fletcher gave it a somewhat reedy tenor, colored by the brogue of his Scottish home village. “The spirits are amongst us and they wish to be heard.”
Ford then took back control of his own tongue. “To whom among the departed do you wish to speak?”
“How about Rudolf Valentino?” asked another
of Culyer’s guests, a freckle-faced girl wearing a sorority sweater. There were titters from around the table, while Ford fought back a weary sigh.
“No, no,” Culyer quickly overruled. “I would like to speak to my grandfather, George Culyer.”
Ford looked to Fletcher. What do you think? he asked in the privacy of their shared thoughts.
A lot more likely than trying Valentino again, Fletcher responded. His spectral eyes closed and threads of spiritual energy distended out from the circle and into the aether. After what seemed like several minutes—although only a couple seconds on the physical plane—Fletcher was joined by a second presence. “George Culyer, is that you?” Fletcher/Ford asked aloud.
“Yes, I am George Culyer.” His words were conducted silently to Fletcher, then to Ford, who gave them voice for the benefit of the rest of the gathered living. They came slow and gravelly, sounding like a bad cliché from some radio horror play. “Who calls upon me?”
Fortunately, Walter Culyer found the voice credible. “Granddad? Is that really you? It’s Walter … Wally.”
“Wally, my boy!” the spirit responded through Ford. “Yes, it’s me, your grandfather.”
Ginny Farrington huffed noisily, but before she had the chance to voice her skepticism, her fiancé asked, “Do you remember the gift you gave me for my thirteenth birthday?”
How in hell am I expected to remember something like that? the late Mr. Culyer asked.
Ford, of course, withheld that profane outburst from the rest of the circle. All the knowledge you ever had in your lifetime is available to you now, Fletcher explained to his fellow spirit. You just need to concentrate a bit …
The old man’s image scowled, but after a moment said, That was the year I gave you my old Bowie knife, wasn’t it?
Ford channeled his words to the circle and the younger Culyer’s face lit up. “Yes! And the note you gave me with it?”
The fucking note, too? What is this?
They can’t see you or hear you, Ford thought at him. They need proof you are who you say you are.
Christ, George Culyer hissed. The note said something like, Wally, today you become a man, don’t let your mama keep treating you like a boy.
“That’s it!” Walter Culyer confirmed with a high-pitched laugh. “That’s exactly right!”
Seems that advice went to waste, the grandfather grumbled.
“Seems that advice went to heart,” Ford amended aloud.
No, I said ‘waste,’ George Culyer told Ford. Look at this milksop, with his Ivy League tie and his clean fingernails. When I was his age, I was using that knife to fight Indians out West, not sitting around playing parlor games like some old biddy!
“Did I ever tell you about how I fought against the Indians out West when I was your age?” Ford said instead. When young Culyer answered no, he continued, “Well, we were out on patrol, heading for Fort Buford …” Everyone in the circle, Miss Farrington included, listened to the unwinding adventure, enraptured.
George Culyer, though, was far less beguiled. I thought you called me here because my grandson wanted to hear from me, not you!
Yes, that’s what he thinks he wants, too, Ford said inside his head. But I’m getting paid to give them what they really want. Aloud, he continued to regale his audience, to their appreciative gasps and cheers. Not a one of them, not even Ford, noticed when George Culyer withdrew in disgust and slid back beyond the veil.
* * *
The rain was pouring down in sheets when Ford emerged from the Culyer’s brownstone. He clutched his overcoat around his neck with one hand and held his silk top hat to his head with the other as he dashed down the steps and across the sidewalk into his flivver. “Well, that was a grand success!” Ford crowed as he cranked the starter and brought the engine to life.
Was it? Fletcher countered.
“You don’t think so?” Ford pulled carefully into the empty street, one hand on the steering wheel while he used the other to crank the windshield wiper back and forth. “Young Mr. Culyer seemed to think so. And that shrewish fiancée of his certainly lost the chip off her shoulder.”
The irony being, you used the same deceptions Houdini filled that book of his with in order to do it.
“Fah, deceptions!” Yes, he had stolen the story of another soldier, one of George Custer’s ill-fated cavalrymen, but that was merely flourish. “I called forth the spirit of the dead—”
Who did?
“Oh, let’s not have that row again,” Ford huffed. “Whomever you credit, Grandfather Culyer’s spirit was present. The trouble is, these juveniles consider spirits the same way they do their movie-house idols: colorless flickers that amuse them for an evening and then are gone as soon as the house lights come back on! So I had to do the lion’s share of the entertaining for Culyer this evening; does that detract from my—our—ability to do what we do?”
Fletcher’s response was lost when a thunderclap boomed overhead and lightning illuminated a trash barrel that had been blown into the street, no more than three feet ahead. Ford tried to swerve around it, but the car skidded and bounced over the flooded cobblestones and the barrel exploded against the engine hood. Ford heard a scream and wasn’t sure if it came from him or Fletcher. The automobile spun in a complete circle, then jolted to a sudden standstill.
The engine was dead, and the only sounds inside the car were from the rain and Ford’s racing heart. Fletcher muttered what Ford recognized as a Gaelic profanity. After a moment to settle his nerves, Ford unlatched the door and stepped out to survey the damage. Both headlamps were shattered and broken slats of what remained of the barrel stuck out from the radiator grille and the front fender. Both right-side wheel rims were bent from where they’d hit the curb, their rubber tires deflated. Ford could do nothing but stare at the wreckage, heedless of the rain continuing to beat down on him.
He was jolted from this stupor when a hard gust knocked the hat off his head and sent it tumbling down the street. He started running after it, but after a block or so realized the effort was futile. He crossed over to the sidewalk, where some shop owner had left his storefront awning open overnight. He unbuttoned his overcoat and tried to flap some of the excess water off, then looked around to regain his bearings. The rain was falling hard enough that he couldn’t even put his eyes on where he’d left his car.
He cursed under his breath again, trying to decide what there was to do next at this hour of the night. As he looked up and down the street, a flicker of light caught the corner of his eye and he turned his head just in time to see two shadows stepping in through a side door in a narrow alleyway across the street.
Ford sprinted across the roadway, reaching the opposite curb just as the last sliver of light disappeared. He found the door latch in the darkness and stepped inside a narrow stairwell leading up to the darkened floors above. To the right of the stairs was a door labeled BASEMENT—KEEP OUT. Ford pulled it open, discovering a faint glow—and what sounded like the muffled buzz of human voices—coming up from below street level. He made his way down to the concrete floor, then toward a thin rectangle of light coming from beyond the boiler room. Only briefly did he question what he was doing—people who hid in basements didn’t tend to welcome visits from strangers, after all—but he continued forward and knocked on the door.
A small slat above Ford’s eye level slid open. He looked up, saw a pair of dark, intense eyes peering down at him from underneath a furrowed brow. “Yeah?” a deep rumbling voice challenged.
Ford cleared his throat. “Um, hello. I was wondering if you have a telephone, and if so—”
“No.”
The opening slid shut with a loud clack. Ford knew he should have simply accepted that dismissal and gone to wait out the storm on the stairs, but something compelled him to try knocking again.
This time the main door swung inward, only far enough so that the man with the dark eyes could reveal the entirety of his imposing self. He stood well over six feet tall, with long
black hair and a thick black beard that twisted into a number of long, wiry fingers. He looked like he’d just stepped out of a poster for some circus freak show, a cross between the World’s Strongest Giant and the Boy Raised By Wolves. “Is there a problem, friend?” he asked, sounding anything but friendly. “This is a members-only establishment on private property. If you haven’t got a good reason for being here—”
“Gil sent me.”
The big man stopped short and raised one black thick eyebrow at Ford. Ford stared directly back at him, while inside his head asking, ‘Gil?’ Who the hell is Gil?
You mean you don’t know, either? Fletcher replied.
Before either could think any further, the doorman said, “You should have said that from the beginning,” and stepped to one side. “Welcome to Connally’s.” Ford stepped past him quickly, avoiding his eyes.
The speakeasy was nothing like what he’d expected. Far from being a sordid, dimly-lit joint, this felt like walking into a friendly neighborhood pub, the type which had gone the way of the dodo once Prohibition became the law of the land. The lights, while not exactly bright, still served to make the space feel like something other than a basement. The dozen or so tables were occupied by nattily dressed men and women chattering away, as carefree as if in their own homes.
But the most impressive feature was the bar itself. Instead of a simple table or makeshift wooden plank one might have expected in an illicit gin club, along the far wall stretched a beautifully-crafted mahogany bar, complete with gleaming brass rails that ran along its full length. The varnished wood almost gave off its own glow, like a well-cared-for piece of fine furniture.
Behind the bar, watching as he approached, stood a round-cheeked redhead wearing a white apron over a simple dress. “Evening,” she said with a cheery, gap-toothed smile. “Aednat Connally, at your service. What can I get you?”
Ford took hold of the rail and pulled himself onto a barstool. “Whiskey neat, please.” The barmaid nodded and turned to pull a bottle from the shelf behind the bar.
