The Death of Jane Lawrence(89)

The magician and the Work. Chalk and salt found around his body. Augustine’s fears. Here it was, confirmed: Renton had been a magician, and he had paid the price for it. A hysterical laugh threatened to bubble from her throat. What stood before her was an unnatural ghost, but more than that, perhaps. What happened when a magician died? What happened when he came back?

“It isn’t here.” How could she have known he would want it back? How could she have known they could give it back?

But they could have buried him with it at the first, or disposed of it like they had Abigail’s pregnancy.

Abigail. The memory brought with it the feeling of worms beneath her fingers. What had the skull meant? Had Augustine been wrong, that the cause of her affliction had been mundane?

She hugged herself tightly, swaying on her feet.

“You will put me back together,” Renton said. “You will fix this.”

“I—I can’t—”

“Something must be given for what has been taken.”

Her hands dropped to her stomach, which, as if on cue, gave an answering ache, called by the still corpse before her. “I don’t understand.”

“Something that grew out of place.”

A tangled bowel. A dead infant. A magician’s bones, growing wildly after a spell miscast. What might be growing inside of her? “And will you leave me, if I give it to you?” she whispered. “Leave this house, be laid to rest?”

“Make me whole,” Mr. Renton said.

She had no offal to give to him, but she had Augustine’s collection of strange growths, of other things out of place. They were the same. They were all the same.

“I can do this,” she said, though she wanted nothing more than to flee. Augustine’s medical equipment was sealed away with him, but there was needle and thread in the kitchen, for stitching up roasts, and elsewhere, for doing mending.

“The grave loam,” he said. “That as well.”

How did he know she had it? Did he also require the moss? The benzoin? Was this some wicked trick, to drain her supplies?

Or was this the next step of the awakening promised by the ritual?

“Can you move?” she asked, making herself meet his eyes.

He took one step, and then another, a jerking, stiff-legged puppet. But he moved.

Jane recoiled, bile in her throat. “Up to the second floor,” she gasped. “I will meet you on the landing.”

He stepped out of his circle and began to climb.

She retrieved the needle and thread from the kitchen, and tried to breathe, now that she could not see Renton. But she could smell the rot of him, and paused a moment before she returned to the stairs. When he reached the landing ahead of her, he tipped his head back and screamed again. His face remained impassive as she passed him, racing up to retrieve the loam, and, in an abundance of caution, the moss. He watched as she set her things down outside the bedroom, nodded at her selection. Jane ducked her head and slipped into the study.

She stared up at the rows of misshapen skulls, at tight-packed coils of hair, calcified tumors, and other strange things she did not know the name of. What was best? What would fit? The skull in Abigail had not been right, had been out of place. And for Renton, the hair made no sense. But there—a burl of wood, a knot of root that had grown inside some vessel, that had curled back upon itself. That. It looked almost the same as Renton’s bowel.

He waited for her on the landing. The stench of him hit her again in a fresh wave, then faded, transmuted to something heady. Enticing. She smelled benzoin, antiseptic, attar of rose. The scents of a magician, of a surgical patient.

Jane held out the knot of wood in offering. Renton reached out one arm and touched it, a silent blessing.

She led him into her bedroom, then the washroom. The tub was just long enough for him to lay down inside. Jane had only one set of hands, and no retractors to help bare his viscera. The work was messy. But it focused her, shut out the panic and steadied her hands. His abdomen was filled with a wet, dark slurry. His flesh seemed to fade in and out of reality as she worked, heavy and clinging one minute, a doll made of ephemeral silk the next.

She had no water to rinse the wound, so she used brandy left by Hunt, filling her tub with fumes and filth. She placed the knot of wood where the twisted section of bowel had been, then filled the rest of Renton’s abdomen with bog moss and grave loam, saving only a small fraction for herself.

He did not speak until she had taken the needle and begun to stitch him up.

“You are monstrous,” he said.

She flinched and pulled thread through the ragged edge of the torn hole with more force than she intended. It split the delicate flesh. “How so?”

“You do not weep or scream. You did not weep or scream when Augustine Lawrence split me open, either.”

“You are not real,” she said.

“Am I not?”

She looked up at him then, hands still holding his flesh together. “You are not a man.” She hesitated. “Not anymore, at least. Where are you, when you aren’t here?”

He considered, or waited, silent and still. Jane set a few more stitches. Her work was unsteady, childlike. Her hands shook.

“There is a world beyond this one,” he said at last. “Very different, and very far away.”

“The world of the dead?” she asked.