Shadows Gray (32 page)

We find a closet quickly enough and a chair that can be wedged under the knob, effectively keeping him contained.  Israel shoves him in with force while I keep the pistol trained on Luke.

“You’re nothing, Dawes,” Is says.

Luke spits in his face.  The door is slammed, the chair is wedged, and the pistol is pocketed in my skirts.  God forbid I need it in the future.

********************

The next day passes with no events to mark it; it is only the day that we mourn Emme and that grieving is the very essence of all we do.  Dad has come up with enough money – whether through honest work or honest thievery we’ll never know and I don’t care – to pay for a burial and we are forced to plan it quickly.  Normally, the people here would wait at least a few days to make sure the deceased really is dead and not in a coma but we don’t have the luxury of observing that tradition.  And we all know Emme isn’t coming back. 

Prue had arrived at Bea’s when we were with Luke and had gotten Emme’s body ready; then we laid her on the bed in her good pink dress.  Joe has taken the news to her death like most small children do; he alternates between confusion and a clear understanding with a fair amount of normal activity in between.   Bea is stoic and silent, while Dad’s eyes are red rimmed and puffy enough for the both of them.  He seems to have stopped drinking these past couple of days, but I fear he is only saving it up for a real fall off the wagon eventually.  Even Prue seems to have aged, if such a thing is possible for someone as old as the hills already, and we all seem older and wiser in ways that we wish we weren’t.  I have not seen Luke or Rose at all and I do not do them the misplaced courtesy of wasting thoughts on them; my thoughts are full of Emme.

A letter to Inspector Andrews has been written and rewritten several times.  Nothing we can say makes any sense.  Emme’s death has caused little to no stir in a community where violence is the norm.  It will take several more to grip the populace with fear, several more before they will be on their guard and lock their doors at night.  No one knows what is coming and no one will believe us when we warn them.  The letter will most likely lie on some inspector’s secretary’s desk somewhere, gathering dust, never heeded, and never taken seriously. If it’s read at all.

The day of Emme’s burial it snows.  Big, fluffy balls of white that drift lazily to the ground and transform it from gray and brown puddles to picturesque accumulations of sparkling sugar.  I think of the frosting on the shoe shaped cookie and it seems appropriate somehow.  Emme would like frosting on the world the day we say goodbye to her.

The curtains, both at Bea’s and at Dr. Smythe’s have been drawn, the clocks stopped, and the mirrors covered with black crepe.  Emme’s body has been carried out feet first, as custom dictates, so that her lonesome spirit will not look back and beckon anyone left in the house to follow her in death. 

Lu has helped Bea and I with mourning clothing and the black dress is too short; my boots stick out from the bottom, but it’s the best we can do with short notice and little money.  I find it apt that my fashion will be as disastrous as ever and if Emme’s spirit is there, I think it will laugh at me and the spectacle I make in my veil and yards and yards of ebony fabric.

The cemetery is silent and still, even more so by the soft blanket of snow falling from the sky.  It turns our black clothing white and settles on my veil.  In the middle of the dreadful preacher’s dreadful soliloquy, Joe turns his face up to the heavens and sticks out his tongue to catch the snowflakes and the mood is transformed from something dark and dreadful to something sweet and magical.  Everyone, with the exception of the preacher, titters behind their hands and then laughs out loud; Dad with his chuckle I haven’t heard in ages, Bea’s soft giggle, Prue’s snort, Israel’s soft laughter by my side, and my own.   I fling my veil back like a triumphant bride who is eager for her husband’s kiss and turn my face to the sky, letting the flakes fall on my eyelashes, my cheeks, my lips. Death will not have the victory, not today, not yet.  We will remember Emme as she was; full of life and joy, the closest thing to a sister I have ever had, or will ever have. 

Wherever Rose Gray is, she will not be redeemed.  Not by me.  Not by Luke, I fear.  We will leave this place and vanish.  There will be no records that we were ever here, that we ever existed, that we ever loved or lived or died.  We will not be remembered, but we will never be forgotten either. 

We will travel and we will live and we will love and someday when I am old and full of years I will tell my children the story of their mother and father and their legacy.

“Once upon a time,” I will say. “Hundreds and hundreds of years ago, I was born…”

The end.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to my family, from the parents to the in-laws to the sisters and brothers, nieces and nephews.  You always believe in everything I do.  Except for the detective agency. 

Thanks to my sweet kids, Cora, Anna and Gianni.  I love the chaos you surround me with.

Thanks to my other kids:  Peter, Eddie, Marie, Calvin, Nate, Vic, and Konah, just because you taught me so much about myself and about teenagers.  I hope I got some of it right.

Thanks to my fabulous Teen Forum, all two of them:  Lauren and Joe.  I love you guys and if you didn’t live a billion miles apart I would have to play match maker with you.

Thanks to my Slave Editors:  Kelly, JJ, Heather and Heather, Mandy, and Michelle.  Any mistakes are definitely theirs.  Haha!  I totally owe you; put it on my tab.

Thanks to Genesis for the most wonderful cover art ever.  I love my artsy friend.  You come in ever so handy.

Most of all thanks to my husband who loved me first in over-alls.

By Melyssa Williams

Prologue:

From the diary of Rose Gray

Death came to me in a cornflower blue dress.

1

The diary came to me in 1931 after most of the patients at Bethlem Royal Hospital had been transferred.  It had been tucked behind a crumbling bit of stone in one of the bedrooms, and there was nothing but the plain red ribbon bookmarker trailing out, like a saucy child’s tongue stuck in the wall, teasing me.  Thumbing through rather quickly, as my supervisor, Miss Helmes, would be along shortly to berate me for dawdling, I saw entries made in pencil, scrawled in uneven, childlike handwriting.  There were no dates to place the journal, though the papers inside the red binding were yellowed, perhaps with age, and I was nearly afraid to handle it, and only the name on front to say who the author might be.  I had never heard of the woman, Rose Gray. My curiosity at the diary could not be denied (I have always been woefully curious), and I pocketed it in my apron.

Would that I had not.

The nurses say, and so does Luke, that it is good for my mind to journal my thoughts or write pretty pieces of poetry and nursery stories, as a good little girl ought to do. Plus, my mind seems to be going and they think this will help. They are foolish and speak of things they do not know. I hate the writing, and I have no interest in penning my memoir, yet the boredom in this place makes one do things they promised themselves not to. Take old Louis, who is belting out raunchy rhymes in a terribly bad operatic voice as he wanders the halls in his ship captain’s tri-cornered hat. I certainly think had he paused to think in his early, saner days, he would have declared that to never be.

Ah, love and hate and sleep and tedium, they make us do the strangest things. Eventually, even the strange becomes mundane in this place.

And I suppose my life has been interesting enough. More interesting than most.

Just the first few lines penned draw me in like a moth to a flame. And like a moth, I feel like I may not know what I’m getting myself into. Will I look back someday, years and years from now, and say, “Had I known then what I know now, I would have returned the diary to its place in the wall, or perhaps burned it?” Once opened, will it become a Pandora’s box to a teenage nursing student with too much time on her hands and too much inquisitiveness to spare? I am being dramatic again.

The scrawling penmanship is at odds with the sophisticated wording, and I cannot keep myself from reading further about this strange woman. Why had she been at Bethlem Royal Hospital, more commonly known as Bedlam? I wondered. How long ago did she roam these halls? Was she among the patients transferred to the countryside during this very transition or had she been a patient here long, long ago?

My apron pocket secrets Rose and her stories for the time being as I clean and tidy and collect necessities from the asylum. There are many things to distract me as I move from room to room, and I move quickly indeed, not wanting to linger in these rooms of madness and death. Though I am extremely interested in the things of the medical world, insanity is not particularly an area in which I feel compelled to study further. Beyond, of course, the common and vulgar nosiness that we all feel in such subjects (though I hate to admit such a curiosity), I think the mad to be quite sad and sorrowful, and I do not entertain any lofty thoughts of rescuing them from their demons. That is beyond my capabilities as someone with knowledge of herbs and tinctures and remedies and the occasional setting of a broken limb or the delivery of a babe. The brain is an area of which I have very little knowledge, and I am more engrossed in the rest of our physical parts.

No, being at Bedlam is a direct order from a supervisor, a low position that no one important in the medical world would stoop to, one that a mere girl my age, an orphan with an insatiable desire for education (particularly of the medicinal kind) would jump at. My supervisor is something of a legend among my peers (not that there are many peers in my field, mostly young men and old men and well, just men), and I will, I admit, do whatever he asks of me. This packing and moving is, quite frankly, last on my list. In my schoolgirl fantasies, I suppose, he would ask me to be his personal assistant or need my help in a difficult surgery, but sadly for me, all he desires is my grunt work, which any errand boy of eleven could easily do. In fact, this hospital would run more smoothly had we more errand boys, which probably explains why I am treated as such.

So I collect the instruments he needs for the relocation of Bedlam: the tiny, delicate things that look like something in a mother’s sewing basket (though I never had a mother, so I speak of things I do not know), the frightening, larger things that are dull and could only be compared to a saw, the notes, the medicines, the drugs. Mostly things that were left behind as they deserted this building, nothing particularly interesting in the grand scheme of things. There are still a few patients here: the particularly frail and old, a lady expecting a baby soon, a couple that is supposed to be collected by their family as their term here is coming to a close and they are deemed “cured.” I know them all by name, but I know no Rose Gray.

There is nothing overly appealing here but the diary, and it I keep. It feels heavy in my apron as I move about, the same way my red lipstick feels heavy on my lips. The lipstick was a gift from my girlfriend, Mina, and I am still getting used to the feel of it, though I reapply the thick, matte stuff every couple of hours when I know Miss Helmes isn’t peering at me with her eagle eyes.  The woman is a master spy if you ask me, and I wouldn’t be surprised to hear her start speaking with a suspicious accent and begin flying the wrong flag from her considerable bosom.

“Put those back immediately!” Miss Helmes’ high pitched voice breaks through my thoughts like a scythe through soft wheat. Speak of the devil.

I sigh and plop a stack of documents I had been idling rifling through back onto the dusty desk where I had found them.

“They looked important, Miss,” I argue, half heartedly, though I’ve no mind to lug them back down the endless flights of stairs of Bedlam anyway. “Don’t you think the doctor might want them? For his records, I mean?”

Miss Helmes snatches them out of my hands and nearly snaps my wrist in the process. Gentleness is not this spinster’s specialty.

“You’re here for other reasons, Lizzie, and it’s not for smartin’ off with me and forgettin’ your place. Don’t touch anything you weren’t told to, girl. Why must I always be telling you that? Off with you now.” Miss Helmes is gone as quickly as she had appeared - the rotten apparition that she is.

Of all the hospital staff, Miss Helmes is the worst. She looks like an eagle, with an unfortunate beaked nose, and is as skinny as a rail, except for her rather well endowed bosom, which I know I mentioned before. Really, she has the figure of a Gibson Girl, but the personality of the Wicked Witch of the West, a recent book I am rather fond of. Well, not recent exactly, but finding books after war time and especially when you’re an orphan, leaves you pathetically behind the times when it comes to modern culture. Had I chosen my birth I would have picked someplace glamorous like New York City, where my mother would wear the finest perfume and heels, and my father would work in a fabulous bank and come home each night to embrace his daughter. We’d eat steak and cake and sip cocktails like everyone in the magazines do, and when I’d find my Mr. Right, Father would shake his hand and sternly tell him to take care of the love of his life. Also, I’d have one of those fabulous bobs all the American girls are sporting, and I’d wear long strands of necklaces. Once again with the drama.