The Twisted Tragedy of Miss Natalie Stewart (24 page)

And then, before any of us could respond or react further, the guard’s body started moving. Fast. It was being dragged by unseen hands swiftly, inhumanly down the hall. A basement door flew open on its own, and we winced as we heard the thud of a body down a flight of stairs.

“Oh my God,” I said, my body lurching from still to shaking with fear. I wanted to run but couldn’t move. Did the spirits just kill that man?

“‘Make it stop,’ they say,” Rachel signed to me. “They want us to end this.”

“Ask the spirits if they will end us. We can’t help them if they’ll do
that
…” Jonathon gestured to where the guard had disappeared, “to us.”

“If they kill us, they won’t be set free,” Blessing said. He withdrew a silver wand-like apparatus from a pocket of his bag and shook it in four directions, then at each of our heads. Droplets of liquid flicked down upon our hair and foreheads. Mr. Smith scrunched up his face and wiped his eye.

“Only holy water, Mr. Smith,” Blessing assured with a smile. “Harmless. Unless you’re a demon too.”

Mr. Smith snorted a laugh. Blessing placed the silver dispenser in his breast pocket. He turned to Rachel and waited for her eyes to settle upon him. “The spirits are leading us to the basement, yes?”

Rachel nodded.

“Mr. Smith, while we may be preoccupied with spirits, I’d like it if someone kept an eye out for Dr. Preston,” Jonathon said, trying to keep his voice steady.

If Smith was frightened he did not show it, but I thought his pale face lost what little color it had as he took up the rear. Jonathon took out his gun, and I heard the click of the safety. At that click, the door to Preston’s office swung wide open. Again, by unseen hands. Doors here seemed to be under the spirits’ control. No one was inside.

Trying to master my shaking, I strode forward to Preston’s desk. There was a note scrawled in a dark red pen. I couldn’t help but assume that it wasn’t actually ink at all. The note read:

I’m sorry. Make it stop. Room 01.

Beside the note lay a key. Beside the key lay a scalpel.

“Well, then,” Jonathon said. “At least we know where to go.”

I snatched up the key. Rachel signed the room number with a questioning look.

“Rachel,” I assured her, “you don’t have to—”

She nodded vigorously, signing, “I must see this through.”

It wasn’t as if any of us could volunteer or bow out. It was simply a fact that we were drawn into this and had to see how it would play out.

Inexorably we moved down the hall. I glanced at Blessing. His dark skin had a sheen of moisture despite the dropping temperature, but his expression was calm as he removed his ascot, revealing his cleric’s collar, and took a small wooden cross from his pocket.

Halfway down the tight stairwell, I paused.

It was
that
basement, of course, the one from my dreams. I gasped in recognition, and Jonathon turned to me, his hand immediately reaching out to steady me.

“I’ve seen this place,” I said.

The long corridor with all the dim rooms. The yellowed hand slamming against the glass. Rachel, the boxes, the body parts. My dream images flashed before my eyes. Would we open a door to a pile of dead, dismembered pieces? Each with a ghost trailing its detached limb or appendage, a most cruel and unnatural tether to this world? I didn’t know if the reality we found would be better or worse than that theory.

Room 01 was at the end of the hallway. In my dreams, the end of the hall was where things grew most dire, where I was most startled, where I would be attacked…

Rachel swooned suddenly, and Mr. Smith caught her by one arm. The cold in the corridor dropped another few degrees. “She is most
certainly
not welcome here,” Blessing said, gesturing that Mr. Smith should continue to support her. He complied while the rest of us pressed on.

“Where’s the guard?” I asked. Jonathon kept his gun raised.

Just then
all
the doors flew open at once of their own accord.

We couldn’t help but jump. Jonathon smoothly swept the gun from side to side. But no one came out of the rooms. On both sides of us, the rooms were empty and unlit except for the occasional lantern trimmed low. One of the rooms would have been Rachel’s “office,” I presumed. Still,
something
had thrown open the doors. Was it better to see that something or not?

Room 01 was ahead of us on the right. The room marked “Morgue” was on our left. The morgue door was open. Room 01 was not.

Which way should we look, and what terrible sight would we see?

I took a deep breath and tried to no avail to keep my dream of the rising dead out of my mind.

Something flew out at us in a flurry of red and white. I’m sure I made some sort of noise, but it was lost in the crack of the gun firing.

The next moment, a bloody sheet lay crumpled on the floor with a bullet hole somewhere in it. The spirits were
certainly
proving themselves active.

We slowly turned to our left. Inside the morgue a body lay on the metal table. It was Roth, his bright suit of an obnoxious pattern ripped open, the golden fabric of his cravat streaming down to the floor, and his head hanging at an odd angle. Perhaps the fall had broken his neck. The fact that the spirits, or whatever they’d become, had enough power or anger to hoist his body up on the table was a feat I considered with terrified wonder.

“Poor sot,” Jonathon said, calmly approaching the body to feel for a pulse. He shook his head. As Jonathon stared down at the sternum, he drew back, repulsed. I came closer.

Glancing down, I saw that Roth’s sternum and breastbone had been carved. Marked with runes.

Where then was the demon that had inhabited the body? Was it still trapped within or was it a danger? Jonathon and I stepped back as Smith stepped forward, letting Rachel go for a moment. She steadied herself on the doorframe as Smith came closer and looked down at the body with a satisfied smile.

The movement was swift and fast, but before I knew what had happened, Smith flew across the room and Roth’s fist fell back lifeless once more against the table. It would seem Smith’s punch had come back to haunt him. Shaking off the pain and wiping his split lip, Smith staggered forward, drawing out his long-barreled pistol and aiming it at Roth’s body, which was now twitching in a most unnatural way. “Son of a—”

“No.” Blessing cautioned Smith with an outstretched hand. The reverend set down his bag, his cross in one hand and a small, worn, red Bible in the other. “We can’t treat this like a human body any longer. Any further anger or violence might encourage it to take you as its next host. It must be banished to the abyss.” Blessing began reading a passage of Scripture.

The body shook and black fluid bubbled from Roth’s mouth. I heard low, chanting whispers as an undercurrent beneath Blessing’s words. Familiar from my dreams, those whispers, insidious and maddening. Jonathon had moved into the hall, examining the sheet that had been projected at us. I stood at the threshold, supporting Rachel and trying to pay attention, but the whispers were very distracting.

“This may take a moment.” Blessing turned to us between Scriptures. The body might have convulsed off the table had Smith not held down the feet, hatred burning in his eyes, his lip still bleeding. “But when I’m finished,” Blessing continued, “we’ll have to leave the body here. Bodies are the stuff of the police. Souls are our business. We must determine what the spirits want. We must be willing to see and listen.”

“I think what they have to say is fairly clear,” Jonathon said grimly, opening the death shroud to reveal a bloody message, written messily:

Make it stop.

I shuddered and turned to face Room 01.

“Rachel will have to help you there. There’s nothing you can do here,” Blessing said. He closed the morgue door on himself, the demon, and Smith as his assistant. There were growls and shouts. I winced and moved to the door, but Rachel urged me back toward Room 01.

“No more waiting,” she signed.

Its number was marked in small black script. The door was locked, a sullen yellow light emanating from behind the frosted glass. We moved to it, from one dreaded door to the next.

Jonathon moved ahead of me. “I’m sure this won’t be a sight for a lady.”

“Oh, I
know
it won’t be,” I said. I took out the key, unlocked the door, and swung it wide.

We were met by a sharp medicinal smell with an underlying scent of decay. That I knew well from my dreams.

Nothing leaped out at us. Nothing moved. Not at first.

Within Room 01 was a body-shaped mass beneath a white sheet, surrounded by trays of equipment and surgery tools. Upon a nearby cabinet were glass bottles filled with fluids and marked with letters and chemical words I did not recognize. And wires. Wires were everywhere. The room was
dreadfully
cold.

What had my dreams foretold?

“Oh, yes, that’s right.” I murmured to myself. “This is the part where the body sits up.”

Jonathon raised an eyebrow. “Excuse me?”

“Be careful,” I said as Jonathon approached the body. “If it moves. It…it might move. Just…to warn you.”

At least there wasn’t a room
full
of bodies, as there had been in my nightmare.

“Do we dare?” Jonathon asked, one hand on the sheet, pistol in the other.

There was no argument either way, so he drew back the sheet to reveal a tall body of yellowed flesh and a good bit of stitching.

Fine work, really. Smooth and delicate, a steady hand had done up a properly articulated human body, not a rough-hewn rag doll. Patchwork, yes, but it was—it had
been
human. I couldn’t really tell if it was male or female. The face was large but somewhat graceful in its yellowed state, almost as if it had been pickled.

The smell of astringent medical fluids was nauseating, and I supposed it was something funerary—embalming fluid, perhaps.

Jonathon set the safety and tucked the pistol in his breast pocket.

I moved to the corpse. There was a small tag on the base of the metal table and a clipboard and notebook hanging from a metal chain. I turned the tag to read it in the dim light, bruised feet with jagged toenails a few inches from my knuckles.

Laura
.

“Oh,” I said with regret rather than surprise. “Laura.”

“That was the name of Dr. Preston’s dead wife, wasn’t it?”

“Yes,” I replied. “Tell me, Laura,” I asked the body, “does the Society prey upon lost loved ones, feeding into a sad man’s grief so he makes experiments out of the dead? Is that what’s going on here, and in other places? Is that what’s happening to Samuel?”

“
Why
would someone do this?”

That was the question for which none of us had an answer, other than perhaps for some remembrance of Laura…. And then I remembered the Society’s avenues of experimentation: Soul splitting. Pharmacology.
Reanimation
.

Rachel just stood there staring in horror. I took her hand, but she didn’t even acknowledge me.

Jonathon was examining every inch of the wires and equipment, writing notes on a small pad with the stub of a pencil. I was suddenly overwhelmed with sadness for that poor creature, a patchwork of human parts, a collection of souls but no true self. An abomination, surely, but that wasn’t its fault. And what made the difference? Between living and dead flesh?

I should have been disgusted by the foul thing made of death. Yet when I’d read
Frankenstein
, I’d been more disgusted with the doctor and the mob than with the actions of the monster. Mary Shelley had written
Frankenstein
when she was about my age. Now fiction found life as the Society turned nightmares into reality, leaving a fine line between a terrible dream and a terrible day…

I shivered—we all did, as the room became even colder. Though I could not see them, there must have been at least as many spirits here as gathered body parts. It was terribly frightening—not seeing the ghosts, yet knowing they were there. At any moment they could grab us like they’d done Roth. Could they understand that we were here to help?

How did it work, though? There were trays of strange machinery around the body, with wires that attached to various parts and then threaded up into a grid around the ceiling. What was the source, the engine that woke this being?

Then I saw the markings. Fine, bloodless but specific markings across the flesh. Runes again. These ancient letters, stolen and repurposed, had to mean something of life and death for this poor thing…

Rachel startled me by jumping forward and grabbing the creature’s hand.

And that’s when the creature moved, a hand shoving Rachel aside. I caught her.

With a horrible sound that I’ll never
ever
forget, the body lurched and tried to sit up. Wires flew, popping off the body from where they’d been attached around the head and torso, black fluid dribbling out from the wounds. A flash of light rippled over the body, perhaps sparks, perhaps magic…but the scored markings of runes were suddenly red, emblazoning the body with bloody tattoos.