What Moves the Dead (35)

I would have burned my last bottle of livrit in such a just cause, but fortunately Denton had his own brandy. His rooms did not look much different than mine, although he had no man to help him.

“Roderick called me in a month ago,” he said, collapsing into a chair. It sent up a puff of dust and probably mold spores, but really, what was one more set at this point?

“For the catalepsy.”

“Not exactly.” He took a swig of brandy. “It was the madness that concerned him.”

“What madness was that?”

Denton groaned, got up, and fished through his belongings until he came up with a battered envelope. “Here. No sense in playing twenty questions when you can just read it.”

I recognized Roderick’s spidery handwriting as I unfolded the letter. He wasted no time on salutations.

Denton—

I need your help. There’s something desperately wrong with Madeline, more than just the catalepsy that has afflicted her for some years. Since her near-drowning, she has fallen under the spell of a strange madness, one that leaves her speaking in ways entirely unlike herself. She will be entirely herself one morning, and then by afternoon, I will find her speaking to the servants as if she is a small child. She points at things and asks for their names and seems astonished. Her voice is very strange. When I confront her, she will revert immediately to her old self, but she acts very strange and sly, saying that it was merely a moment of muddle-headedness.

What she is doing is frightening the servants. Worst of all, I have heard someone speak this way before, but it was Alice, her maid, who spoke in such fashion. I would overhear them sometimes in Madeline’s room. At the time, I thought Alice was doing impressions to make her laugh.

You will think me quite deluded, Denton, but when I hear this voice she speaks in, I begin to think of stories of demonic possession, not of illness. It is very terrible to witness.

I know that you are a man of reason, and I strive to be, though this dreadful estate has acted badly on my nerves. Please, I beg of you, if there is any kindness in your heart left for either of us, come and help me.

The signature was Roderick’s. I read the letter twice, remembering the strange way that Madeline had spoken that night I found her sleepwalking, the way that she had counted. Not Maddy, she’d said.

If she wasn’t Maddy, who was she?

“You don’t believe in possession, of course,” I said, looking up.

“‘There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio’ … but no, I don’t believe in that particular one.” He paused, then said, very quietly, “Didn’t believe in that particular one.”

“And now?”

Denton shook his head. “I don’t know what I believe anymore. When I spoke to Madeline, she was exactly as she had always been. Until she wasn’t.”

“Explain.”

“I can’t. Not rationally. She seemed to undergo some kind of mental shift, and then her speech changed. Not like anything I’ve seen before.” He stared at the ceiling. “Slurred speech with aphasia, which is about as useful a diagnosis as catalepsy. Most of us get that when we’re drunk, for God’s sake. I’m a cut-rate surgeon, Easton, I chop off limbs. I’m not an alienist.” He scowled. “I told you that she almost drowned, yes?” I nodded and he continued. “Roderick thought—and I begin to agree—that there was nothing almost about it. He told me that she had been in the water for hours when he found her.”

I stared at him, willing the words to make sense, and couldn’t. “What?”

“I thought he’d lost it,” said Denton bluntly. “Time slows when you panic, of course. He pulled her out and thought that it was much too late. So he took her down to the crypt and sobbed over her for half the night.”

I swallowed. “And?”

“And she woke up. And began speaking to him in that voice he found so upsetting.”

“How is that possible? Could she really have drowned?” I didn’t know why I was asking, when I had seen the hare twitching, but hares are not the same as humans, are they?

Denton shook his head. “Drowning is strange,” he admitted. “People come back sometimes, long after you’d think they were gone, particularly when they’ve been in cold water. That’s what I told Roderick, anyway, when he insisted she had been in the water more than a few minutes.” He sank back into the chair. “And I went on believing that Madeline was just groggy from waking up after a fright, and Roderick had panicked and believed she was in the water far longer than she was.”

“And it was after this that she began to manifest this … this otherness.”

Denton nodded again. “I thought the drowning had little to do with it. It seemed more likely that it was a result of the suicide of her maid. They were close. Perhaps she was trying to keep a game they had played alive somehow.”

“And now?”

He snorted. “Now it’s obvious, isn’t it? It’s this fungus. It’s causing this altered state somehow. First in the maid, then in Madeline. Perhaps it’s a hallucinogenic effect of some sort, or perhaps simple poisoning.”

“Why kill her?” It was a measure of how far I had come that I could ask the question without any particular condemnation.

“Roderick says he didn’t mean to kill her, but the thing that had taken over her body.”