The Twisted Tragedy of Miss Natalie Stewart (6 page)

Inside the dim room is a girl in a white dress trimmed with lace, dark hair pinned up but askew, hands folded tightly on a circular table. Her face glitters with tears. The room is freezing cold, wind in the air where there should be no flow.

Wait, I know that girl. That’s Rachel. Rachel Horowitz, my friend from the Connecticut Asylum. She left school to tend to her aunt in the city, and we lost touch…

“Rachel,” I say but then remember to greet her in sign language instead.

“Help,” she signs in return. “Help me. Make it stop.”

Her face distorts with horror, as if she sees something behind me that I cannot. Suddenly I am shoved hard back into the hallway by an unseen hand and the door slams in my face, shutting Rachel away again.

The ghostly shove backs me up against a door. A knob jabs against my corset boning. I turn to the door, put my hand upon the knob—Wait, I know that door. I open it to find Lord Denbury’s study, the study from the painting, and this was the way my dreams always let me in.

But the room of his prison lies in cinders.

His study has been burned to bits, leaving only smoldering beams. The books are all unbound, pages in the air and falling like dead leaves. Where I used to look out of the frame, out onto the world, there is only blackness. The frame itself, the device used to trap and hold Jonathon’s soul, smolders with dying fire, yet the runes carved around the edges burn brightly.

There is a pile of ash on the blackened Persian rug in the middle of the room, a pile of ash where Jonathon would stand. And whispers. So many whispers, the growing sound of chanting that rises in the air like thunder. Words I can’t make out. A rite. A spell, perhaps. The room darkens as searing pain shoots up my arms…

I awoke with a guttural sound in my throat, sitting up in the gently swaying sleeper car, feeling something ugly and ungainly like when I first tried to speak, and I croaked out, “Jonathon,” before blushing and remembering myself. He turned to me, propping himself up on his bunk with one elbow.

“Yes, my dear?”

I hesitated.

“What is it?” he urged.

“Do you think clairvoyance may be contagious?”

Jonathon thought a moment. “You’re dreaming up clues again, aren’t you?”

While trying to reverse Jonathon’s curse, I’d dreamed various clues related to murders the demon had committed. Perhaps I just needed to give in to the fact that I was, at least while dreaming, a bit psychic. The idea didn’t frighten me if it could be useful.

“I dreamed of a friend from school. Someone I haven’t thought of in a while. But I realize, in seeing her, how much I miss her. I think it’s the girl Mrs. Northe mentioned in her telegraph.”

“Well? Tell me about her.”

“Rachel was one of those girls who bore her disability—she can’t speak or hear—so graciously.” I smiled. “It would have been annoying if she wasn’t so darned sweet. Shyness made her seem more fragile than she was. But she noticed
everything
. I told her she’d make the perfect arch-villain. No one would suspect her in a million years. She smiled and blushed at everyone she met, the perfect foil.

“She was greatly amused by the idea of being an arch-villain. I was the first to get her out from under her rock,” I said. “I passed her notes in class that made her laugh. Then one day she confessed that while she couldn’t hear nor speak to the living, she heard the dead. That’s when I knew she was a true friend.”

Jonathon took a sharp breath at that. “We must attract the haunted to us, Natalie.”

I shrugged. “I told her I envied her,” I continued. “I was jealous that she could hear the dead when I had always wondered about Mother. She told me she’d gladly give up the gift and give it to me instead. It was likely more of a burden than she ever let on.”

“I’m sure it was. What were
you
like in school?”

I thought about myself, my friends, my circumstances. “Rachel was fearfully obedient and always watching. Mary was a helpless romantic obsessed with saints. Edith did all our math homework.
I
was a restless prankster. They all kept waiting for the day I’d start speaking, as if my whole time there had been one big stunt. But I really did have a hard time with my voice. It took you for that,” I said, running a hand over his as he smiled. “While I was good at my studies, I preferred changing out Sister Theresa’s communion wine for whiskey.”

Jonathon laughed. “I bet you were the most popular.”

I rolled my eyes. “Winning the popularity contest among the ‘unfortunates’ at the Connecticut Asylum for the deaf and mute isn’t something to write home about. Maggie and her snotty friends sure would have a laugh over that, now wouldn’t they?”

“I’d have still fancied you if I’d been there.”

“You’re just saying that. Now, your turn,” I murmured, suddenly blushing with what I wanted to ask. “Samuel mentioned you hadn’t the time or inclination for a sweetheart. Is that true?” Jonathon raised an eyebrow. “I suppose it’s not ladylike to ask—”

“No, it’s all right,” he said, bemused. “There were a few girls at balls, all of us curious about whether chaperones were really paying attention, a stolen kiss here or there, mostly for sport. Most young ladies found my scientific obsessions boring or frightening. All of them were being pushed to marry, so they preferred talk of courtship over medicine. It wasn’t their fault. I’ve always been free to pursue my interests, but girls your age are forced to appear as though finding a husband is their sole preoccupation.”

“But it isn’t,” I defended. “We’ve other interests.”

“I know that now. And now I’ve finally found a girl who interests me.”

I smiled. He snatched up my arm, kissing me on the open patch of skin between my glove and my sleeve. Where the rune had appeared…I bit my lip. “It’s good you’re going on to England to further break the spell. The dark magic might still be hanging on to me.”

“Why? What happened?”

“A mark. On my wrist there. It faded. Surely I was just seeing things, exhausted—”

“Don’t assume anything is your imagination,” Jonathon said sternly. “Tell Mrs. Northe. She’ll help counter any aftereffects and take care of you until my return.”

I nodded. “If what I just saw in my nightmare is a clue, Rachel is in immediate danger. She’s my first concern upon arrival. Mrs. Northe’s telegram said I was again at the center of the mystery.”

“Mrs. Northe won’t be deterred.”

It had occurred to me too, that all this revolved around Mrs. Northe; she is both a mother and harbinger of doom to us all. She uses us without giving us any proper training as to what we might encounter. And she’s getting closer to my father, maybe Rachel. What might she inadvertently bring upon my friends and family? Did spiritualism bring more than one bargained for, even if one was trying to practice it in the best way possible?

I stared at Jonathon, suddenly terrified for him. “In my dream, I visited your study again, the one from your painting, but you weren’t there and everything was in cinders.”

“That’s a good thing. Of course I wasn’t there. I’m free. I doubt your dreams would operate the same way now that I’m released. I’m glad for the ashes. I wanted to torch that canvas. I would’ve, too, if I hadn’t been worried about burning down the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I don’t want anything left of that horror but dust. You’re dreaming of our vindication, not an omen of worse to come.”

I took his assurances and fell into his arms, and we watched a glorious sun set from one state to the next.

Chapter 5

The Germans have a good word for nightmare, or a nightmare dreamscape.

Schreckensvision
.

The word itself is like shrieking when what enters your vision is too terrible to describe, and a long cry is the only thing to do. But I’ll try to put words to the terrible.

If one could find a profession in nightmares, I’d have quite a career.

The hallway again, all medicinal sharpness and low-trimmed lamps. My every sense alive, I feel the damp moisture of the cool basement humidity on my face and on my arms below the sleeves of my robe. I’m traveling a frightful corridor in my dressing gown. I see a door marked with a word to chill any sane soul: MORGUE.

I
really
needed to stop reading Edgar Allan Poe before bed.

I enter the room, which is gray-white and cold.

There are bodies under sheets, laid on tables. Four of them, vague human shapes below the sheets. They are either being kept for family before transferred to a funeral parlor, or perhaps they’ll be used as cadavers for science. Who knows?

Regardless, the vision was unpleasant. I hadn’t been in a room with a dead body before, much less several, so my mind could only imagine what the stale smell of beginning decay was like. It was an unwelcome detail nonetheless. My dreams are nothing if not thorough.

And then, all at once, the dead bodies sat up.

Their white sheets slid down to reveal bare, gray flesh. With a raspy gasp, their blue mouths fell open.

And as they began to shriek, the bodies turned to me with sightless eyes, and yet they knew I was there or that I would be coming.

And I, like those bodies, shot up upon the train, glad to be alive and not under a morgue sheet myself.

With a gasp, I opened my eyes. I was on the train. With a cup of tea in hand. Jonathon had nodded off to sleep in our compartment shortly after nightfall. I, however, had been too restless for sleep. I’d made my way to the dining car for a calming cup of mint tea. Apparently it had soothed me right into sleep; unfortunately, it hadn’t been able to lull my dreams.

An older woman a table away must have noticed my frightful expression. “Bad dreams?” she queried.

“Always,” I replied.

“I advise you to pray.”

“I do.”

“Good, then.”

I was relieved by the mercy of not being questioned further and excused myself to attend my sleeping “cousin.” The moon had turned wide expanses of cornfields into dark plains of rustling velvet.

Mrs. Northe once told me that the spirit of my deceased mother told her that “the mysterious and wondrous and, yes, the truly terrible” would be laid at my feet. And that it would be best if the world left me to it. She had spoken grandly of a future, but what sort of future was this, veiled in nightmare? Is this what my mother wanted for me?

I’m seventeen. Eighteen in nine months. What match am I against dark forces?

***

There have been such advances since the transcontinental rail was completed more than a decade ago. Some trains reach eighty, nearly a hundred miles an hour on their express routes. It’s nearly inconceivable that the whole of the country is laid open so swiftly.

Ever eastward, the behemoth steam engine roared me home. With every mile the towns grow more populated, the gravity of New York City calling souls from every walk of life. It was as if everyone in the whole world, if they strained to hear it, could feel the heartbeat of New York. Gazing out the windows, I saw the density of the city exploding around us as if we were plunged into a forest of brick and cast iron.

All tracks led to Grand Central Depot. From there, Jonathon and I will part ways. The thought has cast a pall over the entire trip; neither of us has wanted to speak of it.

As if Jonathon could hear my thoughts, he turned to me. “I’ll miss you,” he breathed as he brushed his lips against mine. I caught that tantalizing taste of bergamot from his Earl Grey tea.

This parting was inevitable. The pit of my stomach wrenched. I had to let him go to England alone, but since his welfare had been my personal responsibility since we met, letting him go was not easy. But he was no longer trapped in a painting, and I couldn’t treat him as if he were. “
Promise
you’ll return to New York—” I choked out.

That was my great fear: I’d lose him to London and he’d never come back, as if he were a dream that never really existed after all.

“You’ve got to show me Central Park, remember?” he said. “And all our adventures? At least ten world tours? It’ll take years. We’ve so much to do.”

He pulled me into his arms, as if the tighter he held me, the surer he would be to return. “If you
don’t
come back, Jonathon Whitby, I will hunt you down—”

He drew back with a laugh. “Oh, I know you will. In disguise, no less. Wielding a dagger. I know better than to cross you, Natalie Stewart. You’re too clever for me by half! And I love you for it.”

Love
. I blinked back tears. We gathered our belongings and opened the train car, our last vestige of privacy for a long while. It took everything inside me not to shove him back inside, lock the compartment, and hide us away from the world and everything in it that could harm us. But Jonathon, full of determination, was already heading down the aisle.

“I miss you already, so you’d better write soon,” I warned, watching him move further up the aisle, a hat low over his beautiful face. “And keep a low profile.”

He reached into his breast pocket and pulled out and put on the ridiculous eyeglasses. “Of course, my
Wilhelmina
…”