The Eterna Files (18 page)

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The important goings-on inside the vast, white stone Gothic grandeur of the Royal Courts of Justice were all but a ghost, the parading pomp of the day vanished into midnight quietude at the toll of somber bells. The peace was entrusted to external posts—night watchmen at the fore and the corners of the palatial holdings. Deep in the complex's interior, down an abandoned stone alcove, one guard kept watch over the tiny, dank, cold gray stone cell bound and fortified by more chains and locks than might have been deemed necessary for one small man's solitary imprisonment.

This was no ordinary prisoner. That he was, in this singular circumstance, the Majesty, Mr. Moriel deemed a credit to his importance.

“O'Rourke,” Moriel murmured, “come into the light of this tallow flame.”

“Your Majesty?” asked the fleshy, gruff guard. His large body was mostly in shadow but a faint glow from the candle stuck into an iron lantern glanced off deep scars across his broad Irish face.

Moriel deemed the creature who guarded him as unintelligent, an oaf born of the sewers he had once patrolled. Appealing to the man's base nature and promising to provide exactly what the guard wanted—which was to control parts of the city underground—Moriel found the man easily won. The powers of thrall that he had learned from his summoned colleagues had certainly helped tip O'Rourke's allegiance.

Closing the distance between them, the man's barrel chest brushed the bars; then he bent for closer audience with the diminutive prisoner; Moriel reached up, through the bars, and caressed O'Rourke's scarred face. The guard closed his eyes as if deeply pleasured.

“I feel vulnerable,” Moriel whispered.

“How can I help ease you, milord?” the guard asked, restricting his usual booming voice to match the Majesty's volume.

“I need to clean my slates. How many prison guards stand with us?”

“In the city? Perhaps twenty, scattered in various places. Since your lot has all kinds of folk in ‘house arrests' and not in cells at all, the possibility for turning more is always available to you,” the man said.

“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.”

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