The Woman in the Coffin

by Nathan Long

  All this she noticed by the by, for her eyes—indeed, her whole soul—were focused on Aurora in her coffin, and she tiptoed toward her in both anticipation and dread. Would she be awake? Asleep? Would she even be there at all? Would it be the wax figure instead?

  To her great relief, it was Aurora in the flesh—asleep. Nellie could see her broad breast rise and fall through the cameo opening.

  Nellie’s heart leapt to see Aurora’s beautiful face again—and so close now! Still, she hesitated, uncertain what was best to do. She wanted more than anything to wake her, but how? And what would happen if she did? It had appeared that Malignita had some sort of control of her. Could he see through Aurora’s eyes the way it seemed that she could see through his when she read the borrowed books and papers he held during their act? If Nellie woke Aurora, would it be Malignita seeing her when her eyes opened?

  She had to risk it. She hadn’t gone to the trouble of sneaking into Malignita’s room just to look on the object of her desire and leave again—not after she had “heard” Aurora’s plea. She had to make an attempt.

  Nellie reached a hand through the cameo opening and shook Aurora’s shoulder.

  “Aurora,” she whispered. “Aurora, I’m here.”

  There was no change in Aurora’s countenance. Her eyes remained closed, her expression blank and placid. Nellie shook her harder and raised her voice.

  “Aurora! Wake up! You asked me to wake you.”

  Still nothing, but Nellie feared to do more—pinching Aurora’s cheek, sticking her with a pin. This was not how she wanted to wake the woman that made her heart soar. She had to think of something else.

  She turned and paced the narrow spaces of the room, frustrated to be so close to her “sleeping beauty” and unable to wake her. Wait. Hadn’t the prince in the old fairy tale awakened Sleeping Beauty with a kiss? Or was that Snow White? Whichever it might have been, her heart pounded at the romance of the idea. Yes! She would—

  A familiar face in a photograph lying on the bedside lamp stand arrested her as she turned toward Aurora. She turned back. It was a small framed portrait of a husband and wife—she sitting in a brocade chair, he standing behind her by a potted plant, and it was she that Nellie had recognized. She was the mysterious woman who had visited Malignita in his dressing room earlier that night, the woman he had only recently left this room to meet.

  The man looked familiar too, though Nellie couldn’t at first place him. Then she had it, for the picture rested upon a folded newspaper—a copy of the same edition she had read over lunch—and below a blaring headline was an engraved portrait of the same man. The headline read, Famed Poet Algernon Unwin Found Dead.

  Nellie moaned in horror as she added all she knew together. Malignita was currently having an assignation with the wife of a man murdered the previous evening. Malignita had a portrait of the woman and her husband, and a copy of a newspaper mentioning his murder, and the murder had been committed by someone entering through a high window. Malignita had sent Aurora out through his dressing room window on the night of the murder, and Nellie had seen her climbing to the rooftops with ease. All her earlier fears for Aurora’s actions on that evening came back a thousandfold. The love of her life could not be a murderer, could she? She couldn’t—

  A groan from the coffin froze Nellie’s heart, and she turned slowly. A pale hand was reaching up through the opening, then it dropped again.

  “A-Aurora?” whispered Nellie.

  “Who...?” The voice seemed parched and long unused. “Who is there?”

  Nellie stepped to the coffin and found herself once again looking into Aurora’s deep, searching eyes. There was fear there for a moment, but then it faded, and she managed a faint smile.

  “My...my angel has come.” she said. “I did not dare hope.”

  He voice had the same eastern European burr to it that it did on stage, but now it was alive with emotion.

  Nellie’s heart constricted with hope. “Me? An angel?”

  “You looked down on me from above.”

  Ha! Caught as a peeping tom. Nellie flushed. She changed the subject. “But how have you woke up? I tried—”

  Aurora shuddered, frowning. “He... He is having his way with her. In his ecstasy, he loses control again.”

  “You mean we’re only talking because he’s—” Nellie gagged. “That’s horrible!”

  “He is horrible,” said Aurora.

  Nellie started clawing at the latch of the coffin. “Come on. Can you walk? We’ve got to get you out of here.”

  Aurora shook her head. “I cannot. I am shackled, and he has the key.”

  Nellie got the lid up and saw it was true. An iron, leather-lined ankle cuff was fixed to the floor of the coffin by a heavy chain. She smirked. “I’ve already picked one lock tonight. I can—”

  “No,” said Aurora. “Even if you were to free me, he will take control of me again as soon as he recovers himself. Then I will no longer be me. I will be him. And I may do horrible things to you. I may—”

  A sudden sob escaped her, and she turned her head as tears flooded her eyes.

  “Aurora!” cried Nellie. “Aurora, what’s wrong?”

  “I— I have done terrible things, angel. Terrible—”

  Nellie caught her hand and gripped it tight.

  “But y’never will again,” she said. “I promise ye. I promise. I’ll... I’ll...”

  Aurora looked up at her. “You should not have come.”

  “But... But you asked me to.”

  “I asked too much. There is only one thing that will free me from Malignita, and that is to sever the connection between us. I know nothing of how to do this. I cannot ask you to—”

  “I’ll find a way,” insisted Nellie. “I swear I will.”

  “You are brave, angel,” said Aurora. “Too brave. He is a dangerous man. I should never have asked. Now go. Please. Before I am again not myself.”

  Nellie’s heart lurched. She gripped Aurora’s hand tighter. “I don’t want to leave.”

  “You must.”

  “All right. All right.” Nellie let go and backed toward the door. “But I’ll be back. I’ll find a way.”

  “No, angel. I fear for you. I would not see you hurt.”

  Nellie paused at that. She returned to the coffin.

  “Listen, uh, Aurora. I don’t know if y’can tell, but behind all this clobber, I...I’m a gal, and.... Well, I just didn’t want you to think I was tryin’ t’trick—”

  Aurora smiled and lowered her eyes. “I know what you are, angel. I did not see your clothes when I first ‘saw’ you, remember?”

  Nellie laughed. “That’s true. I hadn’t—”

  Aurora looked up again. “I saw your heart.”

  Nellie stared at her, dumbfounded. “And... And you didn’t... You don’t mind that—”

  Aurora winced and spasmed, her whole body going rigid. She pulled her hand from Nellie’s.

  “H-His attention is returning to me. You must flee!”

  Nellie edged back. “I...”

  “Now!”

  Nellie turned and fled the room, heart pounding with fear but also... hope.

  7

  The Puppet and the Master

  Nellie downed a glass of Winford’s Finest Russet Ale all in one swallow, then poured another from the pitcher.

  “Strewth,” said Mary. “You needed that, I guess.”

  “I need to climb in the barrel and drown,” said Nellie.

  She leaned back and let out a deep sigh. She was sitting with her friends from the Alhambra at their table at the Garrick, an actors’ saloon just off Piccadilly, where she had run immediately after escaping the Clarendon.

  “Troubles?” asked Davey.

  “Romantical troubles?” asked Abomah.

  “If it was only that simple.”

  She took a sip from her second glass as they all waited for her to elaborate. Finally, she set it down and looked around at them all. “I know ye’ll
be thinkin’ me mad, but... I don’t suppose any of ye know any magicians.”

  “A dozen at least,” said Davey. “And so do you.”

  “Not stage magicians,” said Nellie. “True magicians. Sorcerers. Warlocks. Witches. Them that can cast spells or, better yet, break ’em.”

  Davey laughed. “It’s all bunk, Nell. Any prestidigitator will tell you that. Mediums, spiritualists, occultists, they’re all doin’ the same tricks we do on stage, only in yer parlor, with the lights out.”

  “I know a gypsy woman in Wapping,” said Mary. “Can read yer fortune from yer palm. Been going to her fer years. She ain’t never been wrong yet.”

  “I know a voodoo woman back in the Carolinas can make the dead speak,” said Abomah. “Nobody here, though.”

  Nellie sighed again. “If only Ghost and Skull were real. They could help me.”

  Davey laughed. “The ones from the penny dreads? You might as well go to 221 Baker Street and ask after Mr. Holmes.”

  Nellie shook her head. “I ain’t sure he could help me.”

  ***

  The next night, still no closer to finding a true magician, yet unwilling to leave well enough alone despite doubting she could do anything useful, Nellie once again spied on Dr. Malignita and Aurora from the closet above their dressing room, and this time, to both her fascination and her horror, she saw Aurora stripping out of her white stage costume and donning the black. Though her lechery urged her to stay and watch the show, Nellie so feared what would happen next that instead she raced down to the stage door and out to the alley to wait.

  She did not have to wait long. With a slither and a slap, Malignita’s rope uncoiled from above, and only a second later, Nellie watched Aurora’s ankles, legs, and powerful posterior slip out the window, followed by the rest of her, before she caught the rope with her hands and lowered herself down the Alhambra’s flank with confident strength.

  Nellie drew back into the shadows, staring at Aurora’s unnerving eyeless mask as she drew her black cape close around herself. Nellie desperately wanted to stop her, to shake her until she woke, but knew from her experience of the previous evening that it wouldn’t work, and that it might also expose her to the doctor’s attention through his connection with Aurora. Instead, for want of anything better to do, she followed as Aurora walked toward the back of the Alhambra, then to the left along the rear alley to a side street.

  There she hailed a hansom cab and, ignoring the cabbie’s curious look at her mask, got in and gave him instructions too low for Nellie to hear. Nellie was undeterred. Scrambling over rooftops might be beyond her, but no former street urchin worth her scratch would let a cab escape her. Nellie scurried after it and caught the cross-braces under the driver’s seat, then pulled her legs up to rest on the luggage board.

  She held her breath a moment, waiting to see if the driver would complain, but heard nothing. “The benefits,” said Nellie to herself, “of bein’ the runt o’ the litter.”

  ***

  A short while later, the cab passed the iron gates of the British Museum, then continued around it to the great granite edifices of the University of London. There it stopped, and Aurora paid the driver and got out.

  Nellie stayed where she was until the cab drove on again, then let herself down as it turned into a side street and watched from the corner as Aurora strode onto the grounds. She followed at a distance, slipping from shadow to shadow and praying Aurora would stay earthbound.

  Sadly, it was not to be. As she reached a tall, porticoed building with a sign out front that read College of Antiquities, Aurora pulled herself onto the cornerstone, then began to climb the decorative stonework above it toward a high ledge. Light shone from a window along the ledge—the only sign of life in the otherwise dark building.

  Nellie wasn’t about to try any such acrobatics, so instead she ran for a door on the shadowed side of the building. It was locked, but once again her deplorable childhood stood her in good stead and she had it open only a moment later.

  As soon as she was inside, she looked for a way to the upper stories. The ledge and the lighted window had been two floors up, so she hurried as quietly as she could along the marble hallways until she found a central stair, then trotted up it.

  All was dark when she reached the correct floor, and she tried to work out where she was in relation to the window she had seen outside. With fingers crossed, she took a left out of the stairwell and was rewarded, as she reached a cross corridor, with a sliver of light glowing beneath a door halfway along to the right.

  She crept to it, straining her ears, and heard soft strugglings and whisperings coming from behind it. She put an ear to a panel.

  “The rope,” came Aurora’s voice. “Put it around your neck.”

  “Please,” a man answered. “I beg you. I don’t want to die.”

  “Your sins have found you out, Jonathan Tomlinson,” intoned Aurora. “And soon the world will know of them.”

  To Nellie’s horror, she realized that while the accent was Aurora’s, the inflection was Malignita’s. He was speaking through her! Perhaps her every action was his!

  “I don’t know what you mean,” said the man. “I am a simple professor of history. A translator of ancient texts. I—”

  “When they find you hanged,” continued Aurora, “they will also find your photographs. The secret ones of you and your harlots, cavorting in Roman dress. And those of you as a naked slave, being reprimanded by amazons.”

  “No!” cried the man. “I have a wife! A family! You—”

  “The noose or the knife, Jonathan Tomlinson.”

  There was the sound of motion, then Aurora spoke again.

  “Now tie the end to that table leg, then step up into the window.”

  Outside the door, Nellie swallowed, paralyzed with fear. If she didn’t act, the man would die, and worse, Aurora would have committed murder. If she did act, Aurora might kill her, and Malignita would surely see her, and she had no illusions about her ability to best a real-life sorcerer with nothing but a half-weight shillelagh.

  She heard a strained step within the room, and the man’s voice again. “Please. Have mercy.”

  “Before you hang yourself, Jonathan Tomlinson,” said Aurora, “you must know the reason why. Do you remember that night in Oxford, when the girl cut her own throat?”

  The man gasped. “No! Not— Are... Are you her ghost?”

  Aurora snorted. “You fear the girl? Who did you truly wrong that night? Who did you betray? Who did your actions force to leave the country?”

  “M-M-Marwood?” came the stuttered reply. “Is that... Is this how the others...”

  “One by one I am destroying you all,” said Aurora. “And taking my vengeance upon you. All the fame and fortune you five won after casting me to the wolves, it will be mine. The love of your wives, mistresses, children, also mine. Everything that you denied me, mine.”

  “My god, Marwood,” cried the man. “It was the others. They forced me to it. I didn’t—”

  “Step back, Jonathan Tomlinson,” spoke Aurora. “One final step.”

  Nellie could hesitate no longer. She threw open the door and charged in.

  “Aurora! No!”

  Aurora turned from the tall window, where she had held a long stiletto to the breast of a middle-aged man with whiskers and a balding head who perched, quivering, on the sill. Before Aurora could do more, Nellie caught her about the knees and toppled her to the floor, which nearly upset the man. He grabbed for the window’s edges with an undignified shriek, then threw off the noose and leapt over Nellie and Aurora for the open door.

  “Guards!” he called. “Harrington! Buckley! Where are you? I am assaulted!”

  Aurora kicked Nellie away and her eyeless mask turned her way.

  “The Irish singer?” she said. “Fool boy, you meddle where you shouldn’t.”

  Nellie yelped and rolled under a heavy, book-burdened table as Aurora raised her stiletto. The long blade missed
her retreating legs and stabbed into the rug instead. Nellie scrambled to the far side and got to her feet.

  “Wake up, Aurora!” she cried. “Don’t let him use you so.”

  “So, you know,” said Aurora as she rose too. “Then I am afraid you will have to die.”

  She started around the table, but Nellie kept it between them.

  “Aurora, please!” she begged. “Put him out of your head.”

  Running footsteps echoed from the corridor, clattering closer.

  Then, Tomlinson’s voice: “This way! Hurry!”

  Aurora’s mask twitched toward the door. She backed to the window. “Find me at the theatre, boy. Let us talk.”

  And with that, she hopped to the sill, then vanished along the ledge just as Tomlinson burst into the room with two uniformed men right behind.

  8

  The Knife of the Past

  The guards stuck their heads out the window and craned their necks left and right, then turned and ran out the door again, on the hunt. Nellie considered running after them but knew it would be pointless. Aurora would vanish into the night again, just as she had before. Instead, she leaned against the table, trying to catch her breath.

  After locking the window, Tomlinson did the same, collapsing in a chair beside the book-piled table and breathing hard. After a moment, he looked up.

  “Thank you for saving my life, young man,” he said, then he frowned and looked more closely at her. “Are you a young man?”