The Death of Jane Lawrence(82)

But she restrained herself. She made herself look at the picture of the hanging magician, and felt the throbbing in her veins lessen, her skin lose its hot flush. She recalled Dr. Nizamiev’s instructions, her admonition to keep a clear focus in mind.

Augustine. She must never lose sight of him. It was for his salvation that she pursued the impossible, not for herself. This house was his prison; she would break down the walls.

Would it really take all seven days to free him, though?

She had raised circles. She had repelled ghosts. She could feel the power within her breast. What else could she do? What else could she shatter?

She made herself clean up the dishes. It was safer, she lectured herself, to follow the instructions. Seven days. But the seven days were not to free a man, they were to reach an awakening.

Jane gathered the chilling photographs and locked them away in the sitting room desk. Then she went to the hallway.

Settling her hands upon the impossible stone slab, Jane fixed the image of a door in her mind. The wood—what had it felt like? She remembered it jerking against her shoulder, but nothing of the texture. What shade of gray had the padlock been? What shape the escutcheon? She struggled to recall the details, and felt a burgeoning press within her, below her diaphragm, heaving, shuddering. If she could only conjure them up, they might be real once more.

Or …

Did it matter what the details had been, if she could conjure new ones in vibrant reality?

She remembered a door in the magistrate’s building, the one she had stared at, waiting for the wedding to begin. It had been made of old, old oak, with rose head nails and wrought-iron hinges, and it had been beautiful, and ancient, and possessed of an almost mystical quality. But she could not recall how it felt beneath her hands. She wasn’t sure she had even touched it. She cast the image aside and thought instead of the door to her bedroom at the Cunninghams’. She had felt it so recently, and the details came to her in crystal clarity, down to the beveling and the odd joints where the pieces had not quite fit together. The oak had been worn smooth where people had pushed it open for generations, before fashions changed and the doorknob had been installed.

She missed that door with a feverish pain. She knew every inch of it in a fullness of detail that surprised her. It was as if she could feel it there, as if all she had to do was turn the knob.

But when she opened her eyes, the stone slab stood as before. Her heart fell, her eager confidence punctured, deflated.

It was not as simple as willing the world to be different from what it was. Dr. Nizamiev had been quite clear; the ritual was the thing, the rails upon which the magician’s mind ran. The steps of the proof, to be followed conjecture by conjecture until a final logic was arrived at. This door would not move for her.

“Jane?”

She went still as a sighted mouse at Augustine’s voice. It came from the other side of the wall, soft and weak. She was certain it was his.

“Augustine, I am here.” She waited for the bursting of pipes or the rocking of the foundation that had accompanied his thundering cries of anguish a day before.

Neither came. Instead, Augustine let out a broken, muffled, distant sob. “Jane, where am I?”

Oh, Augustine. She could almost see him, huddled on the stairs. Confused. Afraid.

She sank to her knees, pressing herself against the rock, every inch of bare skin that she had. Her throat was thick.

“Jane?” Augustine called, and he sounded weak, so weak.

“You’re in the cellar of Lindridge Hall,” Jane said, unsure if her voice would carry far enough. “I am working to get you out.”

“It is dark,” Augustine said. “Jane, it’s so dark.”

No gas lighting down there, and all the candles that had been lit before must have burned down to nothing now, puddles of cooled and cracking wax.

But darkness and spirits were not the only dangers, she realized with a sick jolt, her dinner cold and heavy in her belly. He had been down there two days already. Two days without water, without meals. “Augustine, do you have food?” Jane asked, and held her breath.

Augustine did not respond.

If she were in that crypt, if she had been locked away for days in the darkness, she would have screamed. She would have begged, and pounded on the door, and torn at her flesh. She knew well what havoc a night of silent waiting in the dark could do after weeks of it as a child, but she had been able to go up into the light during the day. She’d had her mother with her, had food, had water.

If Augustine was silent …

Then all it meant was that he was not her.

“I need seven days,” she said, louder this time. “Do I have seven days? Will you be all right for seven days?” There were rooms down there she hadn’t explored. There might yet be supplies. Food stores, old but perhaps still viable. Perhaps he’d found them. Perhaps he was not dying.

The silence stretched, and Jane curled in upon herself, shivering. Night had come in full. Perhaps … perhaps this was not Augustine at all.

“I think so,” Augustine said at last. “But it is so dark.”

She closed her eyes, measuring each word. Were they his? Were they vital, alive, proof she had not already failed?

“Jane, what are you doing?”

“Magic,” Jane whispered. She took a deep breath, then said, louder, “I’m getting you out. Just a little longer, Augustine. Wait for me.”