Darker Still (16 page)

“Maggie? Natalie?” Mrs. Northe called.

Maggie didn’t look at me again as we rose and wandered out of the parlor, an uneasiness having settled about us again. I suppose I’m not very good at the friendship process. I hadn’t made lasting connections at school. It is hard when all manners of issues and disabilities have brought a group of people together.

Considering the blind, the deaf, and the truly mute, rather than my selective condition, we were in separate sensory worlds. You’d think our disabilities would have made us closer. But not if, at heart, some of us are just lone wolves. Lone wolves who are very particular about things and have strong opinions, who are passionate and perhaps unconventional. While we may want a bosom friend, we don’t always know how best to relate to one.

And yet, how could things with Denbury then feel so easy?

Perhaps because, on some level, I wasn’t registering him as real. Anything can happen in a dream world. I could be my best self, nightmares aside. I could talk. I could be pretty, smart, and witty. The idea of interacting with Denbury in this quiet, “real” world of mine was suddenly as awkward a prospect as the picnic with the girls had turned out to be. But at the end of it all, I didn’t live in that world. I lived in
this
one. And I had to help him make his way home to it.

Father again was all too happy to relax with reading, fine liquor, and tobacco, and he took to the den as if it were his own. It was then that Mrs. Northe ushered Maggie toward the door. Maggie was quick to protest.

“But why do I have to go home if Natalie gets to stay?” she whined.

“Because her father is, thank God, hard at work finishing my late husband’s stash of horrid cigars. They were too damn expensive for me to throw out in good conscience. Not to mention that your mother scolds me if you’re here past nine. She thinks I’m experimenting on you as a medium.”

“But I’d
love
that!” Maggie cried.

“And that’s why your mother hates you coming here, except for the fact that she’d like to make sure I remember your family when I die!” Mrs. Northe retorted. “Bill will see you home. The carriage awaits.” She gestured toward her footman standing down the stoop and kissed Maggie on the head. Maggie looked at me, forlorn, and I offered her a genuine look of sadness. I did want to be her friend. But there would always be secrets between us. Nothing could change that now.

“Now, then!” Mrs. Northe stated brightly once Maggie was gone. She took me by the arm and led me into her library, where she filled a small glass of cordial for us both and lifted her glass. I did the same.

“To the mysteries of the universe.” She lifted her glass, and we clinked the fine crystal.

“I’ve been thinking about the murder in the Five Points,” she began. “I believe it’s the beginning of some ritual. The intruder to my home might not have been trying to steal Denbury at all, perhaps merely to haunt him, as you yourself saw at the Art Association. The demon will likely haunt his likeness again, provided he’s not interrupted. I believe these…
things
are creatures of habit. That is the way with many psychopaths and followers of the foul and vicious. If we could spy upon Denbury’s possessor, we could follow him, having heard his plan, and learn of him. The trick would be how to spy on the creature without it suspecting it may be followed.”

And that was when I began to entertain a whole new brave and foolish notion. But first: “Tell me of the runes, and then I’ll tell you his ‘spell,’” I prompted, using a mixture of signing and writing out words.

“I’ve done the translating already.” Mrs. Northe plucked two books and a piece of paper from her table. “Very modern, this demon. Likes to think he’s an intellectual, playing at culture. It’s not a spell. It translates roughly to a poem. I recognized it as Baudelaire. I’ve the first edition here. But the carvings on the painting have one word missing, in the last line. Here’s the poem in its entirety. It’s from his
Flowers
of
Evil
. A troublesome work. Some critics adore it, but many think it as silly as it seems. The poem is aptly titled ‘The Possessed.’”

I shivered as she set the books and paper in my lap. I looked first at the runic alphabet as translated into our common alphabet and then at a manuscript in French. An odd combination, I thought, but then again, it wasn’t as though this all made a great deal of sense.

LE POSSÉDÉ

Le soleil s’est couvert d’un crêpe. Comme lui,

Ô Lune de ma vie! Emmitoufle-toi d’ombre

Dors ou fume à ton gré; sois muette, sois sombre,

Et plonge tout entière au gouffre de l’Ennui;

Je t’aime ainsi! Pourtant, si tu veux aujourd’hui,

Comme un astre éclipsé qui sort de la pénombre,

Te pavaner aux lieux que la Folie encombre.

C’est bien! Charmant poignard, jaillis de ton étui!

Allume ta prunelle à la flamme des lustres!

Allume le désir dans les regards des rustres!

Tout de toi m’est plaisir, morbide ou pétulant;

Sois ce que tu voudras, nuit noire, rouge aurore;

Il n’est pas une fibre en tout mon corps tremblant

Qui ne crie:
Ô mon cher Belzébuth, je t’adore!

—Charles Baudelaire

Mrs. Northe presented me with another paper. “I’ve done my own translation, with a few liberties, perhaps, but the gist remains.”

THE POSSESSED

The sun in crepe has shrouded his fire.

Moon of my life! Partly shade yourself as he.

Sleep or smoke. Be quiet and be dark,

In the abyss of dullness drown whole;

I love you this way! However, should you care,

Like a brilliant star from eclipse emerging,

To flirt with folly where crowds yet surge—

Gleam, pretty blade, from sheath and stab!

Light your eyes from glass chandeliers!

Illuminate lust-filled looks of louts who pass!

Morbid or petulant, I thrill before you;

Be what you will, black night or red dawn;

No thread of my body drawn tight,

But cries: “Beloved——I adore you!”

Mrs. Northe continued: “There’s a blank space where the word in question should be in the English translation. That was the word missing. As you see in the original French poem, that word is
Belzébuth—
translated, it is Beelzebub…a name for the Devil.”

I stared up at Mrs. Northe, gulping. She concentrated on the poems.

Her subsequent scoffing response amused me. “Really, I’d thought love poems to the Devil would be too low and messy for high magic like this, too dramatic and silly. I’m surprised.”

That made me think of something Denbury had said, and I wrote out his exact phrasing for her: “Artists perceive the world in such peculiar ways. Wonderful ways, but perhaps terrible ways too.” Mrs. Northe nodded, squinting in thought.

“Why do this?” I signed, gesturing at all the runes. Copying out the poem seemed a lot of trouble to go to only to omit the most important part, the dedication.

Mrs. Northe paced the room shaking her head. “Tell me everything else.” We paused as tea was brought in for us, and I took it gratefully, the hot liquid such a comfort. Perhaps my body would get used to shaking; this grim business would likely chill me to the bone for some time to come. “Natalie, tell me everything,” Mrs. Northe demanded gently. “Everything he told you.”

I stared at her, allowing the fear that I felt to register on my face and in my eyes.

She placed her hand on mine, and her expression calmed any doubts. “No matter how mad you fear it sounds.” She was, as I had to be, a true believer in the impossible.

I signed and wrote Denbury’s story as best I could: Crenfall, the den, the French painter, the odd tangents as he worked. We had plenty of shudders between us in the retelling.

Mrs. Northe asked about the mechanics of Denbury’s world, and I attempted to sign explanation: that time passed differently and that his basic human needs were suspended. Outside, my body stood frozen while lifetimes could have passed for us within that dream state, and while in his company, there was neither hunger nor thirst.

“Your spirits exist together there, your minds and souls. Your identities, then, are tactile to each other.”

I thrilled at the idea that our spirits coexisted on some otherworldly plane, but I dared add, “We
share
my dreams. When I visited him today, he knew I’d been there. He was with me in my terrible nightmare all along.”

“Oh? Why, that’s magnificent!” she exclaimed, ignoring my shudder. “It simply goes to prove that minds and spirits have ways to move about the world and that movement is not limited only to the body. It’s a theory I rarely see in practice, but something that proves useful in dealings like these. There is being awake, being asleep, and then…sometimes there’s another type of existence entirely.”

I moved to ask her more about that, but she demanded the particulars of the ritual itself.

I tried to describe the vile act of possession that had cast Denbury’s better self into a painted prison. Mrs. Northe was astute about every detail: the business about the name “John,” the powders, the liquid, the blood, and the symbols.

She took a deep breath. “All spell components,” Mrs. Northe declared. “Oh, Natalie, this is magic
most
foul. I daresay even Shakespeare’s witches couldn’t have dreamed this up.”

Tapping a pen to a notebook, she suddenly drew a symbol. “That circle around the room that Denbury described, with the star inside, I wonder if it was this…” Her drawing was of a five-pointed star with two of the points facing upward.

I raised my eyebrows in query.

“A pentagram,” she explained. “A symbol of protection and goodwill when it’s drawn or worn with a single point upward.” She turned the paper to make it just so. “But inverted…” She turned the symbol on its end again with the two points upraised like horns. “It’s often taken to mean homage to the Devil.”

I shuddered and yet I couldn’t hold back an admiring smile. “You’re not a spiritualist. You’re a scholar,” I signed.

She looked at me. “A woman should be as educated as humanly possible about anything that interests her. And while I’m
not
interested in black forms of magic, I am interested in dispelling, discrediting, and fighting them at all costs.” Mrs. Northe did not linger on this thought. “What else?”

I described how Denbury was bound and trapped and told her about the final Latin words, with the word within that didn’t quite match up.

“That’s the crux of the spell,” Mrs. Northe murmured. “That’s the
sending
part of it.”

Oh, and I’d nearly forgotten. There were so many overwhelming aspects to retain. His arm. I lifted my sleeve, showing her what I had copied of it onto my arm with his pen, and then I replicated it on paper, filling in the lines I’d left blank. “This was on his arm,” I explained, “sizzled into his flesh during the original rite and refreshed during the murder.”

Mrs. Northe considered the runes and checked them against her books. “John. The markings mean ‘John.’ I wonder if those markings on that poor beheaded girl’s wrist mean, similarly, ‘Barbara.’”

This struck me, and I stared at Mrs. Northe in terror. “It must. My dream.” I fumbled to sign. “The corpse with ‘Barbara’ carved on the arm…remember, I foresaw it.”

“Yes, Natalie. And how awful to receive such omens. But it reinforces that you’re entwined in Denbury’s fate. What else?”

I signed about the sparks and light Denbury saw around the demon, as if particular colors were refracted from a prism and seen at times of struggle or when he tested his prison walls, and how he saw my halo colors as opposite.

Mrs. Northe sat back in her finely upholstered chair. “This is powerful stuff indeed,” she said finally. Her brow furrowed. “Are you baptized, child?”

I stared at her. “Who wouldn’t be?” I signed.

“One cannot and should not make assumptions. Otherwise I’d do a different blessing. But a blessing you need, child. I don’t like this one bit.” She gestured at the marks on my arm. “I don’t want these dark things to linger on you any more than they have already.” She eyed me. “Be sure to go to church on Sunday. We need all the blessings we can get. Ritual to combat ritual.”

She took a small vial of clear liquid from a shelf, uncorked it, dabbed a bit on her finger, and marked my forehead with a cross in oil. She laid her hands on my head and murmured a familiar blessing. After noting the marks, she used the same oil and her handkerchief to rub the ink from my arm, while offering another blessing. The marks smeared black and ugly, the ink stubborn.