Resonance (22 page)

Mouth over mouth, eyes over eyes, only inches between them, Cornelius looked down into Vincent’s sleeping face. He had never been so close. He could feel the gentle ebb and flow of Vincent’s breath against his lips. He smelled coriander and apples. For the briefest of moments, Cornelius dared to lay his hand on the crown of Vincent’s head. Very gently, he closed his fingers in the soft and yielding mass of Vincent’s hair. Then he let go.

He staggered to the piano. The thing in the shadows said,
‘Muu muu muu
,’ as he knelt and reached for it.

‘Shhhh now,’ he murmured. ‘Don’t worry yourself.’

He had not planned to use anyone up tonight. It had been his intention only to sip from the girl: to enjoy, as he had said, an hors d’oeuvre before getting down to the business of the séance. But this poor, foolish creature, it had given them everything. It had poured its all into the performance, and had simply been unable to stop, as they had been unable to break away.

Ah well
, thought Cornelius. ‘Better than the degradation of decline you previously faced.’

No heavier now than the weight of its clothes, the thing rustled as he hauled it from beneath the piano. Something fell from its hand, and Cornelius recognised the ring that the
old woman had slipped onto her finger in the bedroom. He picked it up from the floor and chuckled when he saw that it was an abolitionist’s ring. He held it to the light, examining the symbol of a slave in chains, the phrase ‘Am I not a man and a brother?’

The thing’s eyes followed the movement, no doubt attracted by the bright metal.

‘Did you hope to impress him with this?’ Cornelius asked, twirling the ring for it to see. ‘Let him see how enlightened you were? How well you
knew
him?’ Cornelius huffed. ‘How dare you,’ he said mildly. ‘You do not know him. Only
I
know him.’

He tucked the ring into his pocket and pulled the dry remnants of the creature into his arms. It mewed up at him as he strode for the stairs, its wizened hands curling against its chest.

Cornelius thought of the old woman asking if Vincent was a king’s son, or the offspring of a family slave, and his amusement grew. Vincent could not simply have been a man like any other. He could not simply have been the usual flesh and bone and will, conducting his business and living as he saw fit. Oh no, he must be a
symbol
. He must be a
burden
or a
challenge
.

‘You think he wouldn’t have seen through you? You and your ring. He was nothing but a colour to you, madam. You did not even know his name.’

The creature mewled again, and squirmed, its eyes overflowing, and Cornelius realised, to his amazement, that it was frightened. ‘There now,’ he said. ‘Hush.’

He jiggled the thing in his arms, like a baby, and tried to recall what it was he had called it in its former life. He could remember nothing, only ‘crone’, only ‘old woman’ or
‘harridan’. So he just smiled reassuringly down at it, and tried to be gentle as he made his way up the stairs.

The sighs and moans from the attic were audible from the first floor, very soft, almost sleepy. The creature’s glittering eyes travelled up towards the sound.

‘Do not worry,’ crooned Cornelius. ‘Those are your new friends. I have every confidence that you shall like them.’

The creature drew its hands in under its chin, staring at the ceiling far above.

By the picture window, the moonlight drew Cornelius’ attention to the gardens. The fog had lifted somewhat, and the pond was quite visible through its gauzy veil. Cornelius stopped dead, staring.

There was a light burning down there. Deep in the frozen heart of the pond, it pulsed like green fire beneath the ice.

Cornelius dropped the creature in a dry heap at his feet and leaned on the sill. A movement by the trees near the bridge caught his eye. Someone short and stocky, their hair a wild frizz, was walking fast across the dew-laden silver of the grass, heading for the pond. Cornelius realised with a jolt of anger that it was the boy – Vincent’s damned American boy.

He turned with a curse and stumbled back down the stairs, leaving the whisperers to their sighs, and the discarded creature to mew and rustle by the wall.

Plummet

A
F TER LUKE HAD
left, Harry had paced the terrace, clutching his head and trying to get his thoughts straight. He told himself that this was a scam – these people were working a scam. He just had to stay calm until he figured it out. He mustn’t let himself be scared.

Don’t be scared? They made a man melt his own fingers together, Ehrich! They made a grown man drown himself in a trough
.

‘Shut up,’ he murmured. ‘Shut up and think.’

Mesmeric suggestion, ventriloquism,
phosphorous-coated
muslin and sleight of hand – they were your ghosts, they were your spectres and your mind-readers and your—

Come
on,
Ehrich, you’ve seen all that, you’ve done all that. No phosphorus-soaked muslin is gonna make a man’s eyes glow in the dark. No ventriloquist can throw his voice right inside your head – and no mesmerist is gonna make a guy plunge his face into a fire and leave it there until his eye melts
.

He looked behind him at the ink-black shadows leading to the stable buildings.
Those kids made you lie there while 
they got a pitchfork. They made you lie there, Ehrich, while they talked about cutting you up
.

Harry shook his head. There had to be an explanation. Behind every phenomenon, there was always some grubby little man scraping for a dime. But what could these people possibly want with Tina and with Joe and with that sad old end-of-her-days actress? What had they to
gain
?

It doesn’t matter. Get the women away from here, Ehrich. Figure a way out
. Yes. Harry clenched his fists around his fear.
Go to the stables, face those damned kids. Get a horse
.

Perhaps if he blocked his ears with cotton? If he couldn’t hear the little bastards talk …

A movement on the lawn drew his attention. There was something coming towards him through the dappled shadows of the trees, something low and broad – an animal. Harry took a few crunching steps onto the gravel, trying to get a better look, and immediately regretted it as one of Lord Wolcroft’s dogs slunk into sight. Something in the way the big animal froze at the sight of him made Harry stand his ground. The poor thing seemed terrified.

‘Hey boy,’ he whispered. ‘Hey.’

The dog seemed to decide that he was no threat and crept towards him across the lawn. Harry thought there was an air of beaten shame to the way it pressed its trembling body to his legs. A length of thick rope dangled from its neck. The end of the rope was chewed and ragged, and it trailed on the ground, leaving a snake-like shadow in the moonlit brightness of the dewy grass. Following this trail with his eyes, Harry saw that the dog’s footprints led to the lake.

The dog whined as Harry stroked its head and stared towards the water. There was something down there. Barely
perceptible, it gave off a dim green light. Harry would have dismissed it as nothing but an
irrlicht
, only that it pulsed slow and sure and steady, and it stayed in the same place.

‘What
is
that?’ he whispered. The dog drew away. ‘Say,’ whispered Harry. ‘Stick with me. We can protect each other.’

As if in reply, the huge animal sank its head between its shoulders. With another whine, it turned its back and, staying close to the walls of the house, slunk away, low and beaten and afraid, into the shadows.

The night wrapped Harry in silence as he followed the dog’s tracks to the lake. He was used to the hoot and bustle of city nights, the honky-tonks and cabs, the sprawling brawl of street life. The silence of this countryside settled on him like a baleful glare.

The closer he came to the lake, the colder it became. Soon the ground crunched with each new step, and Harry looked down to find he was walking on frozen grass, each blade glittering in the frigid light of the moon.

The edge of the lake was fringed in bulrushes. Harry shoved his way through their poker-like stems and stepped out onto creaking ice. The lake’s frozen surface stretched away from him, flat and glittering as Central Park Lake in December.

How could this be? Up at the house, Harry had been watching bats flutter through rose-scented air.

Far ahead of him, dim within the fog, that light pulsed, steady and sure. Harry chanced moving towards it. The surface of the lake was slippery, his footing treacherous, and he took a moment to steady himself. What he wouldn’t give for his skates.

What? Are you going to skate home?
he thought.
This isn’t getting you out of here
.

But he just wanted to see … He wanted to understand exactly what was going on.

About ten or so yards to his left lay an ornate bridge, across which Harry assumed the carriage road passed. A small noise there made him pause. It took a moment to register the trail of paw marks and accompanying straggle of child-sized boot prints leading across the frost-speckled surface of the ice and into the darkness under the bridge.

A flicker drew his eye to the central arch, and there within its shadows he caught a brief, hopeless flurry of movement. Something whimpered – a sound so full of helplessness and fear that Harry could never have considered ignoring it.

Carefully, his eyes scanning the shadows and the lake and the banks, Harry crossed the ice and made his way into the darkness at the base of the bridge’s central pillar. Wolcroft’s other dog cowered in the shadows there. Someone – Harry did not have a hard time imagining who – had hammered a metal spike into the ice and tied the dog to it with a rope. Another spike jutted only feet from where it lay, the chewed end of a rope trailing from it. Plate-like paw prints tracked a desperate circle around the tethered dog and then led away under the bridge.

‘Your pal left you, huh?’ whispered Harry, crouching by the dog’s side. ‘You can hardly blame him.’

The rope around this dog’s neck was too short to allow it to stand, and the poor thing lay motionless, gazing up at him. Harry reached out tentatively. The huge creature allowed him to touch it. Emboldened, Harry scratched its ragged ears. It licked his hand.

‘That’s some wicked set of brats Wolcroft has,’ whispered Harry. ‘What was the plan? That you’d freeze to death?
Here, let me see what I can do with this rope. Don’t bite me now, will yah? It’d cramp my act a bit to have only one arm … Good dog. Sheesh, I’ll give those kids their due, they know their knots. Gosh darn it, my fingers are cold.’

Beneath his hands, the dog stiffened, and Harry froze in response to the sudden surge of renewed tension in its body.

A hushed giggle drew his attention up to the bridge, the wall of which arced twenty or so feet overhead. There was nothing to be seen there, but a movement drew his eye further out onto the ice where the moonlight was cut by the sharp black sweep of the bridge’s shadow. He waited. Again, a giggle came from above. Then a flicker of movement at the edge of the shadow became the silhouette of a boy hoisting himself into sight. The shadow straightened, its hands on its hips, and Harry watched the shadow-boy lean against the silhouette of the large stone urn that decorated the centre of the bridge.

A second figure appeared on the bridge: the crisp, black shadow of a little girl. Its shape unmistakable in crinoline and bows, the girl-shadow rose to stand on the opposite side of the urn from the boy, arms out for balance.

A giggle drifted down once again from the bridge above, and Harry looked up – dumbly, stupidly, still not understanding the game.

The children, white-faced and black-eyed in the moonlight, were gazing down at him from atop the bridge. The sky was behind them, the whole panoply of stars their backdrop.

‘Oh,’ said the little girl. ‘It is our stick-man.’

She rested her small hands on one side of the stone urn, and her brother solemnly rested his on the other. Harry
scrambled and slipped on the ice, suddenly aware of their intent.

‘Don’t!’ he screamed, slipping and falling. ‘Don’t do it.’

But they pushed in unison, and the huge stone vase toppled from its perch, and in a glittering cascade of frost smashed through the ice between him and the dog.

Water sprayed up in a great black geyser, the ground fell out beneath him, and Harry was sucked down in a roar and a gush of bubbles.

He was briefly aware of the dog and the urn, plummeting, then something grabbed him, some great cold hand, and he was pulled sideways into darkness, snatched into wicked cold, tumbled and racing, part of the churning universe below.