Resonance Page 19

  After a moment, the girl backed out into the open, her hands empty, her face ablaze with candlelit tears. Her mouth opened and closed, speaking, but Cornelius only heard a faint sound, akin to the distant cry of gulls heard from below deck.

  The girl scrabbled at the small of her back, attempting in vain to undo the rows of tiny buttons that held her into the dress. There was a flare of light as her foot toppled a lit candle, and the darkness below the piano was banished, the creature there illuminated. The girl spoke to it again, her hand out. Then she rose in a flurry of brilliance and was gone.

  The toppled candle’s flame guttered and shrank, and in the fading light, the thing beneath the piano seemed to meet Cornelius’ eye. He became aware of Raquel’s feet, heavy in his lap, and of the slow shush of Vincent’s sleeping breath. They would not like to see that thing. He did not want them to see it.

  Carefully, his movements languorous, Cornelius pushed Raquel’s feet from his lap. She was dreaming, the sweet love. Vincent, too. Neither of them was as used to the Angel’s power as he. They would dream for hours.

  Cornelius dropped to his knees by their side. Gently, he wiped a line of spittle from Raquel’s slack mouth. Her eyes were bright lines beneath dark lashes, and he pressed gently down on her eyelids, shutting them entirely. Sophie was on the floor. Cornelius lifted her and placed her in the crook of Raquel’s arm.

  Sophie, cradled by Raquel, cradled by Vincent. Cornelius’ perfect family.

  Vincent’s head was thrown back against the high arm of the sofa, his cravat undone as ever, his dark throat exposed. For a while, Cornelius watched the small beat of pulse in his neck. Then, abruptly, and with almost no thought at all, he kneeled up, leaned over, and brought his face close to Vincent’s.

  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

  AF 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.

  Bravissimo

  RUNNING FRANTICALLY ACROSS the lawn, Cornelius howled as his dog disappeared from sight. The children did not even look up, so entranced were they by their deed. They simply crouched in the place where the vase had been, watching, enraptured, as the great flat head of Cornelius’ dog came bursting to the choppy surface below. They smiled as the poor creature battered the water, fighting for purchase on the edge of the ice.

  With another cry, Cornelius shrugged out of his coat and crashed through the brittle wall of rushes. The children turned their attention on him then, and to his horror Cornelius felt the Angel latch on to him and begin to feed. It was an awful, crippling sensation. Cornelius battled though it, falling to his knees on the treacherous ice, crawling to where his dog fought the water.

  ‘Here, Beauty!’ he gasped. ‘Here, girl!’

  The dog’s white-rimmed eyes rolled to him. Cornelius flung the end of his coat to her, yelling at her to ‘hold’. Somewhere in the terrified recesses of her brain the poor creature must have recognised the old order, and her strong jaws closed around the twisted fabric as they had used to close around the tarred ropes of the boarding boats. She grabbed hold and almost immediately went under again, sucked below by the strange currents that ran through the pond.

  Cornelius scrambled backwards on the water-slicked ice, heaving on the sodden coat. ‘Hold, Beauty!’ he yelled. ‘Hold, girl!’

  The dog broke the surface again, her jaws still clamped around the fabric, and Cornelius laughed in horror and relief. ‘Come on, girl!’ he yelled, bracing himself against the pillar of the bridge. ‘Try.’ And she did, struggling valiantly as he heaved, her massive paws scrabbling.

  Eventually, incredibly, the animal managed to haul her drenched body over the crumbling edge of the ice. Cornelius dropped back to his knees. The dog staggered to his side, and he put an arm around her dripping neck. Overhead, one of th
e children gave a short, sleepy round of applause.

  ‘Bravo, Pap,’ they murmured. ‘Bravissimo.’

  They were lying on the central plinth where the vase had been, curled around each other like kittens. He could see the bright gleam of their eyes as they transferred their attention to the hole in the ice, their focus back on the water as they squeezed everything they could from the notion of the American boy down there, dead or dying in the frigid dark.

  The Angel was feeding through them. Cornelius had felt it. His anguish, his pain, had been an entertainment to them – and thus, the Angel had fed.

  This was an horrific thought. Horrific. These revolting children – these awful, awful mistakes that he regretted so very much … their cruelty nourished the Angel just as easily as any ecstasy of happiness or awe. Luke had been right all along.

  The name ‘Matthew’ whispered soft and sly in his mind.

  Cornelius groaned and turned away.

  Normally, such a slip of memory would be enough to send him running for the tunnels. But even as the horror rose within him, Cornelius felt it drift away – unimportant, easily dismissed. The Angel’s bliss was so strong now. Bolstered by the children’s glee, enhanced by his own recent wonder, it almost instantly soothed any strong emotion. He allowed it to embrace him as he staggered to his feet; felt it gift him its smooth, dreamy detachment.

  The water in the hole was still now, mirror-like, a brittle crust of ice already beginning to form over its surface. Cornelius swayed slightly as he stared down into its darkness.

  ‘You were a brief thing, American, but at least your ending served a purpose. It’s not everyone can say their demise fed an instrument of God.’

  He turned his attention to the dog, who still cowered, trembling, by the pillar. The memory of her rescue was a distant thing, from years ago – something from another life. He waved her away.

  ‘Go to the house, Beauty. Go find King.’

  She whined, as if reluctant to leave, but Cornelius was already turning away. Without further thought of her, or the children, or the drowned American boy, he staggered out into the fog, heading for the centre of the lake and the green light that still burned there like a beacon beneath the ice.