The Wages of Sin [The Mysterious] (13 page)

Mist filled the room, spreading in strange spirals, chill and wet on Charles’ face. He took a shaky, wary step towards George and as he set down his heel the whole house shuddered beneath him. Doors burst open. The frame of the window snatched itself from George’s grip and slammed itself shut so violently that every pane shattered. George yelped with fury and pain, leapt away. He scrambled to Charles’ side, holding his wrist. Blood dripped with a patter like rain from the fingers of both hands, and he looked at it wide eyed. Unbelieving. “This thing means to kill us.”

“Yes.” Charles didn’t say “it means to kill
you,
” but an unworthy part of him thought it; thought of running away, leaving George alone to face a fate he well merited. But George was
his
brother, damn his eyes, and he had lost enough already. “Sir Henry drove the charioteer away by…”

He ran to the mantelpiece where his father’s least favourite pair of pistols hung crossed over the fire, wrenched them down and tossed one to his brother. George caught it in slippery fingers, some of the roguish sparkle returning to his eye.

“We need…”
“In the desk drawer.”
Two little paper cartridges of black powder met his questing

fingers as he rummaged about in the odds and ends of the library desk, but no shot. Charles combed the bookshelves, turned back in defeat to discover George ripping the diamond and silver beads from the embroidery of his waistcoat. They poured a fortune down the barrel of their guns, and tamped it down with wads of silk. Then, with a final glance at one another for courage, they ran out of the room, towards the threat.

She stood half way down the grand flight of stairs, a shroud shaped patch of white barely thicker than the fog that continued to pour in through every gaping door and window. At the top of the stairs, behind and above her, Elizabeth crept from her room with a fire-poker held like a sword in her hand, her other hand clamped about her mouth as if to keep in the scream.

The white shape drifted slowly forward, oozed down a step, a suggestion of fluttering at its base. Charles lifted an arm that felt heavy as a continent, levelled his pistol at the place where it should have a face, and with a weightless unhurried drift it turned towards him, looked straight at him.

He pulled the trigger. He thought he did. He meant to. But as in nightmare, the link between body and soul had been severed. Command and rage and weep with frustration as he might, he could not move, his blood congealed, his muscles clamped in death's rigor.

Another step down, and she was clearer now, swathed in a long veil from toe to crown, white as quicklime. Dust pattered on the stairs as she passed.

Opposite the portrait of Sir Henry she stopped. His yellow hair was as ghostly as she in the fog, and his painted dark eyes seemed to glitter. The shrouded shape bulged in the middle, and then finger bones like white spiders crept out from beneath the fabric of the veil.

Terror was delicate as the bones as it skated up Charles' spine. He didn't want to see her face. He didn't want to see! But the shroud lifted, spiralling away into the fog.

But George was as trapped as he, pinned like a butterfly to its board.
Outside the main door thunder rolled down the drive like flying hooves. The ghost opened her eyes. Dust packed them, spilled out over her cheeks like tears. Dry plaster and dirt trickled from the corners of her mouth.

Her shoulders lifted as if she tried to breathe in, but he realized with a lurch of sick sympathy that she could not. Every part of her face was stoppered tight. For the last century and a half she must have spent every moment struggling to breathe. Pity added a strange soft colour to the edges of his terror. He felt poised unbearably on a point like the moment before one vomits; the need to do it, and the sickness, and the inability an exquisite, maddening torment. Was that what she felt like? Was that what she had felt for the past hundred years?

He breathed in, conscious of the drag of air down his throat, whooping with relief, just as the bottom of her jaw unhinged. It dropped to her waist, her face stretching like a rubber sheet, dust tumbling out of it. Black clots of debris and a fine flying black cloud of dust and hair spewed out of her lips. It looked almost as though she turned herself inside out, boiling up from the feet, bursting out of that grotesque distended mouth in a thick organic fog that mixed with the mist inside the house and flew straight into George’s face.

Released from the spell of terror, Charles dropped his aching arm and spun. He could see nothing of his brother, engulfed by the jagged-edged rubbed out nothingness of the ghost. But he knew what it felt like. This was the thing that had come upon him the night of his father's death. This was the creature that had left its bony handprint on the faces of his family. He dared not shoot for fear of hitting George, but taking a deep breath like a diver he ran hard as he could into the centre of it, shoving with all his might against anything he found there.

His shoulder collided with silk. George reeled out of the edge of the cloud, collapsed onto hands and knees, spitting out plaster, his sides labouring. And then the darkness closed around Charles. Cobwebs, thick and sticky, smeared across his face. Something pried at his closed mouth.

Sudden red, shocking pain slammed into his shoulder. The slice of agony made his hand open. The pistol fell from his grip, skittered across the marble floor and away out of his sight. He gasped with pain, and webs swarmed inside his mouth. His throat began to fill with sand and ash.

The thrown fire poker bounced from his shoulder and clattered away. As he collapsed to his knees, fighting to cough, the cloud thinned enough for him to see Elizabeth above, apologetic and horrified, George curled into a foetus like ball, arms around his head. He coughed, and in the spasm after breathed in more dirt. Dust reached down into his lungs, withering him from the inside. His ribs ached from being forced in and out like a creaky set of bellows. His eyes streamed. The ash turned his tears into acid.

“Exorcizo te, omnis spiritus immunde, in nomine Dei Patris omnipotentis, et in noimine Jesu Christi Filii ejus, Domini et Judicis nostri, et in virtute Spiritus Sancti.”

Jasper swept through the open doors like a storm wind, still in his rough travelling clothes, his hair tangled and pointed by the rain. Water streamed from the skirts of his greatcoat, and his hand clenched tight around the crucifix at his throat. His voice, clear and confident, rang with all the authority of a cathedral bell.
“Ut descedas ab hoc plasmate Dei Caroli, quod Dominus noster ad templum sanctum suum vocare dignatus est, ut fiat templum Dei vivi, et Spiritus Sanctus habitet in eo.”

The fog lifted and drew away from Charles, beaching him, letting him hack up the muck from his throat and spit it out in long filthy strings. Clouds drew together, retreating back to the stairs, and in the centre of it there glimmered again the pale, almost radiant form of what had once been a beautiful woman.

Dizzy as he was with breathlessness, his lungs rubbed raw, Charles forgot everything in a rush of possessive awe. If there had been hints of power before in Jasper's mystery, here was the full glory of it unveiled. He looked like a wild man burst in from the rain, but his eyes, those extraordinary clear russet eyes, shone with certainty; so completely unafraid he seemed scarcely human. Alexander the Great must have looked like this when he conquered the world, if Alexander the Great had been known for his kindness.

"Margaret," Jasper said firmly, "remember yourself. Can't you hear your child crying? I can give you both comfort, let you sleep, if you will have it. No more pain. No more hatred. No more endless dying, choked and suffering for all time. You were more sinned against than sinning. Let it go, Margaret, and be at peace."

The ghost’s desiccated skin cracked as she frowned. She leaned forward and peered at Jasper with her blind, crumbling eyes. And as she did so, the glass over Sir Henry’s portrait shivered to pieces. She ripped off his painted face strip by strip. The shards drove in a twinkling blast at George, who curled tighter around his pistol, shielding the firing pan and his face with the skirts of his coat.

“I know.” Jasper smiled, held out both hands, palm up, as if offering himself to the ghost’s examination. “Believe me, I do understand. But is Sir Henry worth tying yourself to this prison for eternity, when you might forget him and move on?” He laughed, and Charles felt a surge of new admiration for anyone who could laugh so naturally—no hint of hysteria—while a murdering, animated corpse hung over his head.

“Going on to happiness despite him may be the worst thing you could do to him. He’d be flattered, I think, that you think him worth hating so much.”

The white lady turned away. Her shroud went whispering up two stairs. When she turned back a suggestion of living eyes glimmered in the sockets of her face, grotesque and pitiable, indigo blue. She tried to speak, but only lime plaster, burning dry, spilled out of her lips. Charles watched, afraid to move, to disturb whatever process of decision teetered there between revenge and resignation. But as he stared at the ghost’s mummified face, something black, like the shadow of a woman, lurched from the kitchen corridor and scrabbled on the floor.

The ghost thinned on the air. Her face softened a little, the cracks closing as the skin grew supple as flesh. She looked over her shoulder, up towards the nursery, and for a moment she seemed nothing more horrific than a painting of a woman held up to the light. A slight, dark haired lady in a green velvet dress with a wide lace collar.

She looked so sad, so fair, that even George stood up. Elizabeth came out from behind the landing curtains. Jasper smiled and began gently to say the service for the burial of the dead, "I am the resurrection and the life, saith the Lord: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live…”

“No!” A dark figure rose up out of the archway to the kitchen. There was a hiss and deep throated boom, a plume of fire the length of an arm, and Jasper’s voice broke off mid sentence with a cry of pain. Mary, black with soot, dropped Charles’ discarded pistol, clenched her fists and shouted “You ain’t making her go away! She’s my friend. She’s going to make things right for me.”

Charles scrambled to his feet, his legs shaking. He looked between the girl and Jasper and as he did so a little rose of blood opened on Jasper’s chest, soaking slowly through his shirt. Then another, and a third.

“That George is going to marry me whether he likes it or not.”
“Fucking little bitch!” George raised his pistol, took aim.
Charles ripped off his neckcloth and pressed it to Jasper’s wounds. Jasper leaned heavily on his shoulder, head bent, taking deep breaths. As he supported the weight Charles’ fear transmuted into eviscerating rage.
Kill her, George! Shoot her down!
Mary’s eyes widened, emeralds tossed in a blanket of dirt, as the flaring mouth of the pistol steadied on her face. The ghost disappeared once more into a swirling gritty murk of cloud. And then there was a click, and a hiss, as the pistol’s firing hammer came down and the powder in the pan lit. Cloud coalesced about the barrel, dust pattering into it, forcing its way in, clogging it. George’s mouth rounded in surprise. It was possible to see the impulse to let go travelling down his arm. His hand loosened. And the pistol exploded in his grip.

Hot iron thrummed through the air. George screamed as the flesh and bones of his hand splattered after it. The stock of the gun burst into splinters and drove into his face. He crumpled forward, a thick crimson rain falling from the gash beneath his eye, his cheek laid open to the bone and falling forward down over his chin.

Mary broke out into a peal of delighted laughter, interrupted by a deeper
boom
! She jerked sideways as if shoved. Blood pumped from between her ribs, gushed over the hand she pressed to her side. Tripping over her feet, she went sprawling, twitched twice and then lay still. In the sudden silence after, the smell of black powder settled like sulphur over all, and Charles looked up into Elizabeth’s blank, shocked face as she set her father’s rifle back in its place with the air of one backing away from a dangerous beast.

Jasper’s hands tightened about Charles’ shoulders, his thumbs moving in a secret caress along the collarbone. With only a slight wince, he straightened up and looked the ghost in the eye. “It is best for people like us not to touch this family. Best for us to walk away, if we can, and be at peace. Will you go? Before your revenge kills any more of your friends, will you go?”

The words struck Charles’ raw heart like a betrayal. He shook off the comforting hands and knelt by his brother. Tearing the tail off his shirt he wrapped the mangled hand tight. He lifted the hanging flap of face and pushed it gently back into the gaping hole from which it had been torn. George held it there silently, while threads of blood worked down between his fingers.

She had a voice like an oboe. Hoarse, rough and musical. At the sound of it the mist that filled the house began to pour away, sucking away out of the windows until nothing was left but a faint oval of light floating about five feet above the stairs. Then, with a rushing sensation, even that vanished. The chandeliers swung and tinkled. The pat of blood on stone ticked twice. And a roaring, grumbling thunder came from upstairs. The frame of the house groaned.

Charles and Jasper looked at one another and as one broke for the stairs. Charles faster, but Jasper’s long legs taking him up three at a time, his wide mouth set in pain. They reached the landing just as Elizabeth burst from the nursery. “She’s not there! God in heaven it’s taken my baby!”

A slice of horror like a scalpel through Charles’ viscera. He stumbled, held himself up by the wall. The sound of a baby crying seeped out into his palm. He almost stepped away, swung and punched the house, bursting his knuckles on the cursed plaster, but something… something different stopped him. A note of life, perhaps, the aural resonance of a beating heart. “Do you hear that?”