The Death of Jane Lawrence(55)

JEREMIAH LAWRENCE





1714–1769


She checked the others. Most had names inscribed upon them, all members of Augustine’s lineage, and one, the one she stopped at, was carved with the name Elodie Lawrence. Two years dead now, at only twenty-four.

At the far edge of the room, she saw a faint movement in the shadows. She froze, eyes widening, free hand reaching out to steady herself on Elodie’s chair. Augustine? The servants?

Or worse—the strange figures from the other night?

Her eyes darted around the room, frantic to find where the first figure would come from, looking for the elongated bodies, the unnaturally shaped heads. Instead, a human-sized shadow stepped out of the gloom. Jane’s chest heaved in sputtering gasps, and she clutched the chair and candelabra more tightly. For one wild moment, she felt sure it was Augustine, scalpel in hand, but the silhouette was too curved.

Elodie.

She could see the waving outline of her floor-length nightgown, could smell the iron tang of blood. Jane staggered back, knuckles white on the candelabra, staring as Elodie emerged from the blackness, passing by the table that was now red and slick. It shone wetly in the candlelight, pocks of flesh distorting the shadows. It looked more like the operating table in the surgery than a monument now.

Crying out, Jane looked over her shoulder and moved the candelabra toward the doorway.

It wasn’t there.

The wall was smooth and unmarked, but she was certain it was the way she had come through. She pressed her free hand to the stone, searching, searching. There was no indentation, no hint of a corner, no indication a door had ever stood there. She let out another wretched sob, running along the wall, feeling desperately for some mark, some symbol.

Nothing.

She reached the corner and pressed her burning forehead to it, too afraid to look behind her. There were no footsteps, no rustle of fabric, no wheezing, rattling breath of the etherized or dying. Impossible, that a dead woman was behind her. Impossible for the dead to walk at all. A hallucination, a vision; that was all it was.

But without sound, she couldn’t tell how close the impossible dead woman might be. Jane’s pulse pounded in her ears, counting down until she was certain Elodie was close enough to touch her. She jerked and turned, helpless against her panic.

Elodie was only inches away. Even this close, the lines of her face seemed to waver and shift, as if she were reflected in uneven glass; but her cheeks were hollow, her lips blue and cracked. Her eyes were red, red as the blood that soaked the front of her gown, that poured from the ragged edges of her skin and muscle and bone.

Slowly, Jane sank to her knees.

She needed to speak. She needed to understand. If Elodie truly stood before her, if Elodie was bleeding all over this cellar floor, then Jane had to save her. She had to rush to her, as surely as Augustine had rushed to Mr. Renton’s side. She could not hesitate.

She could not be the monster.

“What do I do?” she whispered, reaching out to touch the hem of Elodie’s stained gown with her free hand, the other still clutching tight to the candelabra. “What do you need from me? Tell me, please, what he did, and I will make it right.”

Elodie looked down at her, face pained, opening and closing her mouth without sound. She was still. Her chest did not rise or fall, and Jane felt sickly grateful, because if it had, the ribs would have spread and blood would have drained faster still from the wound.

“Tell me,” Jane begged. “They said you died before he ever returned, and that he only called your spirit forth, but what I saw—what I saw last night—is it true?”

Elodie grimaced, then reached down and seized Jane by the hair.

Jane swung the candelabra instinctively, its limbs striking the ghost’s shoulder. It rebounded, Elodie as immovable as stone. The candles tumbled from their iron holders, guttering, going dark, all but one that glowed feebly by their feet.

Her hand stung from the impact. The candelabra slipped from her grasp as she reached up, hooking her fingers around Elodie’s cold fist. Elodie moved, shifting her grip to cup Jane’s chin, thumb against her cheek. She bowed low over Jane’s prostrate form, and her eyes bored into Jane’s, the fine lacework of vessels within burst in a hundred places.

Her fingers slipped lower. They pressed hard to Jane’s pulse; there was no kindness in her touch.

Jane struggled but could gain no purchase. Her knees slid on the blood spreading beneath the both of them, her legs tangling in the fabric of her dress, tearing it. Her vision swam, and she remembered the burn of gas in her nose, the creeping darkness that had pressed in on her in the cellar of her mother’s house. She was going to die down here. Heavens protect her, but she was going to die. Would she be put in one of those chairs? Had Elodie…?

Her head pounded as her heart beat double-time. If Augustine found her down here, would he simply shrug? Or would he suffer? Would he miss her? Would he realize he had done this?

She felt a desperate kindling in her gut, a horrible certainty that she could not die, that she would not die. It was like a mass, pressing upon her stomach, her diaphragm. It forced a scream up out of her throat, and she surged upward, grabbing Elodie by the hips. She pulled herself along the spectral form, soft now, like rotten fruit beneath her fingers.

The pressure against her throat released. Jane shouted and threw Elodie from her, then scrabbled for the candle. It was almost dead, and she scooped it up, her frantic motions making the faint light flicker out for a moment before it blazed again. She brandished it before her with shaking hands.