Chapter 21

Jonathon roused me. He placed something pungent and acrid beneath my nose. I sat up with a start, my head pounding. Either my ears were ringing and echoing, or the screaming was farther away. Whatever whispers I’d heard earlier, I couldn’t hear them now over the distant screams that seemed to be shrieking on every pitch of human hearing.

“How long have we been out?” I asked.

“By my watch, about nine minutes,” he replied.

Jonathon moved to rouse Blessing and Smith with the same acrid chemical in a blue bottle, like smelling salts but far more powerful. Once they were upright, he returned to rummage again in the chemicals. “What are you doing?”

“Making chloroform. It subdued the creature before. Well, it isn’t quite right, a bit too much chlorine, surely—”

“You’re amazing,” I said. I looked around. “Where’s Rachel?”

She was nowhere to be seen. Smith jumped to his feet and tried all the downstairs doors. Nothing. He returned to help Blessing to his feet.

“Thank you,” Blessing said, glad for the help as he’d gone down hard. He stood rubbing his back and leg.

“From that godforsaken sound,” Jonathon said as we stumbled into the hall, rubbing our temples. “It’s still in the building. We can’t let it get outside. Look for Preston and for Rachel.” Smith took off ahead of us as we left that dreaded basement behind us.

Ascending to the first floor, we were stopped in our tracks by a trail of blood. It was coming from Preston’s office and down and around the corner, then down another hallway.

“Please God, don’t let that be Rachel’s blood,” I cried softly.

We followed the trail of blood. Jonathon had his pistol in one hand, his chloroform in the other. I took the bottle from him, and he steadied his shaking pistol with both hands. The blood led to another door labeled MENTAL WARD.

The screaming was behind that door, along with a soft, pleading male voice. Blessing flung the door open, a cross in one hand, an open bottle of holy water in the other. He flung a spray of it forward as we took in the sight before us.

Dr. Preston lay on a cot, bleeding from the wrists. The creature, tall and yellowed and now a bit peeling from stitches strained by movement, was standing over him, a yellowed hand awkwardly petting his head.

Beside the cot sat Rachel, her hands bound, tears streaming down her cheeks. Three surgical knives hovered in the air, poised to plunge directly into her heart.

The creature turned to look at us with vacant, milky eyes.

The screaming was farther away, and we realized it wasn’t coming from the creature anymore. But from the floor above us. The upper floors of the hospital were still active. And evidently, everyone on the upper floor was losing their minds. Quite a bedside manner, this creature had.

“Laura, please,” Preston begged, looking up weakly. “Please forgive me.” He looked around him, wildly. “All of you, spirits, forgive me. Take me. Not the girl. I didn’t mean for this to happen.”

Blessing stepped into the room quietly. Jonathon, at his side, lowered his pistol. But Preston pinned Jonathon with bloodshot, wide, and desperate eyes.

“You! Demon!” Preston cried, pointing at Jonathon limply, blood dripping from his wrist. “Leave me be! Tell the Society they can go to hell! Spirits, take out your vengeance on him as you did on Roth. That man is now Society property!” Preston swooned back onto the pillows, pale from loss of blood.

The surgical knives flew toward Jonathon.

I stepped in front of him. The knives stopped short a foot from my flesh.

“Spirits! This is not the man Preston thinks,” I cried, wishing I had somewhere to look other than thin air. “Teresa, Bartholomew, Benedict, Ursula, Maria, Sarah, please,” I begged. “This man is no demon. You saw him below. Spirits, you saw his light. You know he wants what’s best for you, as we all do.” The knives seemed unconvinced. They held their targets. “Please,” I begged, “Don’t kill us. You’ve no longer any enemies here.”

Blessing had moved to Rachel and untied her as Jonathon stepped in front of me, closer to the blades. The furious movement of Rachel’s hands distracted me from the knife points.

“The creature and the spirits are enemies,” Rachel signed to me, approaching us.

It was true, I suppose. While one lived, the others were enslaved. If the spirits were sent to rest, the creature would die. And then Rachel moved to place herself in front of Jonathon, leaning her thin and shaking body against him as if she’d fall over otherwise. I wondered if the screaming was manifest in her mind, too. Was she hearing something the rest of us could not? None of us could make any sudden moves for the knives reacted if we twitched.

“Laura,” Preston said softly, gazing up at the unblinking, parchment face above him. He clung to something once human that resided there and held the discolored hand, his bleeding wrist drenching the yellowed palm and turning it orange. “All I wanted was one more day with you. One more chance to tell you I loved you, a chance I’d been denied. But now, now we must join together and hope that somewhere I may see you again.” He turned his head. “And by divine provenance there is a reverend here so that I might be forgiven. Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. Please bless this creature here, she knows not—”

“I already did, Dr. Preston.” Blessing came close, placed his hands on either side of Preston’s face, and gave him a benediction and his last rites. Everything was still, hesitant. The knives still floated in the air, now directed toward “Laura.” Mr. Smith, a step behind me, tried to pluck a knife from the air, but it moved just out of his reach.

“Please, spirits, take me instead,” Preston said to the air. “Take no lives other than mine. Stand back, Father.”

The surgical knives shifted and dove suddenly into Preston’s heart. We all jumped as Preston shuddered, blood pouring from his mouth, and lay still. In that moment all I could think about was Samuel, and I prayed to God that Mrs. Northe had gotten to him in time to prevent something as terrible as this.

As Preston expired, the creature made a terrible keening sound. There was a pause in the screaming above. Then it began again.

The creature hung its head and ran a clumsy hand over Preston’s hair once more. Then we watched, breaths held, as it slowly left the room with a heavy tread, its thin hospital shift smeared and spattered with Preston’s blood. We quietly followed, and I silently shut the door behind us, keeping an eye out for any stray knives. Mr. Smith moved to shut Preston’s door.

It padded down the hall again into its room. We kept a slight distance behind. It turned and looked at Jonathon, and I could have sworn I saw some sort of pleading look there. Without taking his eyes off “Laura,” Jonathon reached his hand out and I placed the bottle in it.

The creature lay down upon the table, a few stitches popping. It gasped. It fumbled for Jonathon’s hand. Jonathon squeezed it, undeterred by Preston’s blood, and his tear fell onto the cold metal table.

Blessing joined his side, offering additional benedictions as Jonathon doused a cloth with the chloroform and pressed it to the slack mouth.

“Stand back,” Rachel signed to me, urging me toward the door.

“The spirits still need to be put to rest,” Blessing instructed. Rachel ran next to Jonathon, nearly pushing him back, grabbing my hand, and shoving me toward the door. “Back,” she signed, her face panicked, shooing Mr. Smith. Whatever she was hearing from the spirits, it really wanted us out of the room.

The sparks began again down the wires and the equipment again chimed. The body again shuddered, hands smacking against the table, the torso trying to raise, the head straining, knees twitching. The entire grid began to hum with increasing power, emitting a high-pitched whine. The body shook evenly and quickly. The crackling sound and the threads of lightning began weaving between the wires, lifting them as if they were hair…Yes, its hair lifted too.

We were captivated by the sight, rooted to the ground…

Rachel shoved us back further, one by one. A wire near the door came loose from the ceiling and burned the back of her hand where it made contact. At the door I turned to see the body burst into flames.

Thank God, it did not cry, nor did it scream. It only gasped and then was silent. I’d like to think it gave a sound of relief, but that was perhaps my wishful thinking.

It was an immediate, all-consuming incineration of the body, as if it were more combustible by its dead weight. Dead wood ignites all the quicker. The fire did not catch beyond the wires that singed and snapped. The metal table bore a body-length heap of glowing cinders in mere minutes.

In the end, the spirits had their say of what they wanted with it. I wondered if the Master’s Society would ever understand that: the human soul was not something to enslave, not living, not dead.

I wasn’t sure when it had happened, but we’d all taken hands at the threshold, even Smith, forming a chain. While the room was hazy with smoke, it must have been well ventilated, for the room was not completely overcome. But the smell of chemicals and burned flesh was still overwhelming.

Jonathon shut the door. No one should ever have to smell such an odor. I’ll add that to the list of things I will never forget. We stood between two sets of remains behind closed doors.

“Dr. Preston’s life-and-death work,” Jonathon murmured angrily. “All for what? A new age in the new world,” he muttered, words Preston had used when trying to recruit Jonathon as a resurrectionist. “What could drive a man to create such a thing?”

“Why man does any unnatural thing,” Blessing replied. “He was driven by love, hate, or fear. What makes this so terrible is that I think this was originally love.”

“Why would reanimation be useful to the Master’s Society?” I asked. “I’m sure the Majesty is hardly lovesick for some dead princess—”

“Did you see the effect the body had?” Jonathon said. “Not only was it flesh that they might command, but it knocked us all out. It also affected a whole floor above us, and I hardly think that was at full capacity. Let’s hope they’re not on an industrial scale with their experiments.” Surely he thought of Samuel and that Preston had mentioned other doctors. What terrible acts of love and grief may result in scenes like this elsewhere? “A creature like this could wreak havoc in a town, entirely overturning the natural order of things.”

On its own, the door to Room 01 opened again, reminding us we were not finished here.

“Not to mention the poltergeists,” Blessing murmured, staring ahead into the room. Everything inside—the sheet, the equipment, the bottles, the wires, all of it—floated.

“What now?” Jonathon asked wearily.

“Ghosts can affect objects to get our attention,” Blessing explained. “It’s our attention they want, not the room or you, Miss Horowitz. Their bodies were used for ill, and their spirits pulled from rest. They’re scared and confused. We must bury their ashes in consecrated ground. Miss Horowitz…” He turned to her, and I gestured for her to look up at him. “I do not wish to make assumptions, but are you Jewish?”

Rachel nodded.

“The spirits,” he said. “Do you have a sense of their faiths?”

“Some Yiddish,” Rachel signed. I translated aloud. “The rest, I sense, Christian.”

“So for our Jewish friends,” Blessing continued, “may they rest in peace, as we move about our tasks. Miss Horowitz, please add anything from your faith you deem appropriate. The more prayers the better, and the more tailored to the needs of the spirit—”

Rachel nodded. She stood straighter, her dazed eyes becoming more focused. I remembered the same shift in Jonathon. When he’d solved a piece of his own puzzle and had a task to do, he was less oppressed by his condition and more empowered, more alive, more effective.

Mr. Smith entered with a box of glass jars. Blessing beamed at him. “Mr. Smith, you read my mind.”

Blessing moved to each of us, anointing our foreheads with oil. He offered Rachel blessing in what I assumed was Hebrew. She clasped onto the Star of David tucked beneath the lace of her dress. I pressed my own talisman, a small silver cross gifted to me by the Immanuel congregation at first communion that I often wore against my skin.

As Blessing began to murmur benedictions to calm the spirits, Jonathon winced and hissed, suddenly shielding his face and giving me a start. “Sorry,” he said. “You’re all glowing.”

There was a pause. “What do you mean?” I asked.

“The light again. I see it when someone is about to affect something or become important. Natalie, you’ve a trace of your colors again. It’s beautiful, really.”

“You see the truth of the matter, Lord Denbury, the true spirit of things,” Blessing said, smiling suddenly. “Well, then, let there be light!”

There came a terrible crash as the metal table overturned. Ash flew everywhere, and we all clapped our hands to our mouths and fumbled for handkerchiefs. None of us desired to breathe in the dead. The surrounding equipment shook and buzzed. Sparks flew from whatever still carried a charge. A few bottles of chemicals crashed and shattered against the wall, making our jobs infinitely more difficult.

Mr. Smith had hardly said a word, eerie in and of itself, but he made himself useful by taking all objects that could be projectiles out of the room. The ash was settling enough for us to not breathe it in.

Blessing calmly repeated the Lord’s Prayer, then Psalm 23, the verse apropos:

“Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death…”

And we fell in with him as we all gathered ash into the jars. Rachel had steeled herself, and even though she shook and was surely receiving an onslaught of anger, she remained upright and forced her eyes to focus. She kept pressing the corners of her embroidered handkerchief with symbols on the edges.

She glanced over at me, seeing me squinting at the symbols, and she signed to me: “Hebrew. It means life.” And she continued breathing in, through life, filtering out the ash of death.

As I continued sifting ash into bottles, I repeated the Lord’s Prayer as many times as I could. Rachel had tied her handkerchief around her mouth and was signing rapidly. I couldn’t make out any of it, so I assumed she was spelling out words relative to the spirits who shared her faith.

“Release your anger and be done with it. Be done with this world,” Blessing cried, flipping open his Common Book of Prayer to bestow rites. He ducked out of the way of an airborne bottle Mr. Smith had missed.

It was probably only a few minutes in that godforsaken room, but it felt like an hour. The bulk of the ash contained, Blessing ushered us back out. He kept the door open and dispersed holy water. He spoke a message of good news and benedictions of peace in a soothing voice that was not banishing devils but in fact begging for tranquility.

“I go now to take your ashes to hallowed ground, restless souls. Permit us to give you respect.”

After a long moment the table stopped shuddering on the ground, the equipment stopped shaking on its hinges, wires stopped swaying. There was silence. No more screaming upstairs. Peace.

No, not silence. Not entirely. There it was again, the whispering, the low, droning chant. It had been there all along; we were just too distracted by everything else. Did the wind pick up? Was there a storm outside? I couldn’t tell if I was hearing it in my own ears, like sounds underwater, or if it was external, like thunder. But it was familiar.

“Do you hear that?” I asked, a hand out to steady myself on the doorframe. It was the same noise from my dreams.

“Hear what?” Jonathon asked.

“The murmuring. Whispers. Chanting? It’s getting louder. Don’t you hear anything?”

“No, why—”

A jolt of pain ripped through my body and I screamed. It felt like someone was peeling my skin from my arms. I dropped to my knees as everyone stared at me in horror. No one else was affected. I saw Jonathon dive for me, and that’s the last thing I could remember.