It wasn’t many blocks from Gran’s townhouse to the mansion at the center of the conflict. Maggie floated just above the low stone wall of Central Park, letting the brush and young tree branches tickle the hem of her skirts, passing through as if she were running a hand slowly over soft, supple grass. There was no friction in the spirit world, only movement, air, whispers, and a peculiar sense of time. She had to be at her most alert. A distracted soul in life, easily captivated by pretty things and pretty people, Maggie the magpie was even worse about it in death.
The formidable brownstone block that was the Vanderbilt mansion meant she had gone too far downtown, but she allowed herself a moment to stare in the windows of a second-floor room. A child swathed in silk and bows screamed at the sight of her. The mischief maker in Maggie giggled.
The earnest part of Maggie yearned for the type of experience she’d found with Reverend Coronado, an experience that she was still ruminating about, one that changed her profoundly. She’d tasted life again, and it was so very tantalizing. Now she’d cherish it again inside Arielle Prenze, someone only just older than her when she died. For a moment she might feel like herself again. But that wasn’t the task. She needed access to Arielle, not her own missed opportunities and sentimentalism. The danger of ghosts was that they could grow too fond.…
The Prenze mansion loomed ahead, its lights dimmed. If she wasn’t mistaken, she saw tiny, sparking eyes watching from between the small bank of hedgerows the family had managed to wedge in. Around them every property line was exchanging greenery for granite and grandeur, expanding until there was hardly any breath from one mansion to the next.
“Auntie?” Maggie called.
A figure in a black gown and veil tapped a cane against the flagstones. There she was, just across the street and south a quarter block, like a haunt in reverse, trading luminosity for shadow. Aunt Evelyn would be presumed as a mere passerby; she would give Mosley a sign to trip all the wires, and whatever secondary generator the Prenze prison had in place.
“You’re sure,” Aunt Evelyn murmured.
“As anything,” Maggie responded confidently.
Further up the block, a driver waited with the largest carriage. Antonia and Jenny had insisted upon coming and waited inside. Clara Bishop had returned home to Tarrytown to keep a spiritual ear tuned to the spectral dynamics of the area. Prenze hadn’t been lurking outside of Sanctuary for nothing.
Maggie stared at the mansion. This place had done her harm, torn her apart, split her soul into pieces, and thrown it all into darkness before Sanctuary repaired her again. The thought that she might be ripped asunder again occurred to her, but like little Zofia, who appeared suddenly by her side even though she’d been told to stay with Eve, she couldn’t let her own trauma keep her from the task at hand.
“Olga and Vera are with Eve. I’m not losing you again, sister,” she said, reaching toward Maggie. Maggie patted her companion on the head, every touch an echo of its former power, a phantom comfort.
“But if I give you a message, you have to listen to me. If all goes to plan, I’ll not be free to come and go in and out of Arielle’s body. You’re the best of us at a relay.”
“All right,” the little girl agreed, beaming with pride at the compliment about her spectral acuity in vanishing and reappearing in the right places.
Maggie nodded toward her aunt. “It’s time.”
Three sharp raps of the steel-tipped cane upon the slate stone outside the mansion gate. The cue.
From within the branches of the evergreens came a growl, then a hiss, then a sizzle, then a roar.
“Float back,” a nervous voice insisted, waving at the ghost from between the hedges. Maggie turned toward Mr. Mosley. She’d heard Auntie Evelyn speak of this “man of current” in uneasy terms, reluctant to call upon the favors of an unpredictable soul. But Evelyn Northe-Stewart kept a motley crew of associates at the ready, specialists perfectly suited for the types of peculiar situations Eve and her family seemed destined to fall into.
“Back,” he repeated before Maggie realized he could see and was talking to her and Zofia. The small, wiry man’s eyes were wide and the Tesla coils within them sparked the brightest she’d yet seen. “Float back from the direct line of it.”
Maggie didn’t understand, but she didn’t protest and she drew Zofia away and into the street just as a carriage passed through them: another tickle of tactile object through vaporous mass, only this one smacked rather than elided, a denser mass than the caress of leaves. The horses gave a whinny of dismay at the ghosts, the carriage veering away and the driver cracking the whip to regain order.
Sparks flew up around a wooden pole on the street outside the Prenze mansion where countless wires converged.
A hum rose in the air, and though Maggie didn’t have tactile hair to raise, her spectral hair stood on end, as did Zofia’s, flying out all around them as if in a gust of static wind.
Another pop, bang, and reverberate thunderclap. Fireworks of sparks erupted all around the Prenze mansion, a whole bay erupting in particular from the cellar level, glass shattering and the wrought iron rattling.
In immediate response, the glow of spirits on the dark lower levels of the house brightened and blossomed to luminous silvery life from within the Prenze walls. Spirits flew from the basement in a secondary explosion of life force. A collective cry went up from the house: the distinct sound of a soul’s freedom, repressed life uncorked and bursting forth. Just as the spirits began to rise to upper floors, Maggie’s gaze followed, noting a haunted face.
Arielle, tired and lost, looked out her bedroom window. Perhaps she heard the cries of the freed spirits because she whirled around, eyes wide in terror, shivers wracking her frail body.
Maggie floated through the window as the whine of the electrical malfunctions died down. “I’m here to help your family.”
Inside the house was pure chaos, the freed spirits darting in wild abandon. Arielle Prenze dove to hide under the covers of her bed.
Two familiar faces appeared before Maggie: children dressed in Bavarian garb as if from a folk tale. She recognized them as the brother and sister who had drawn her into the Prenze mansion in the first place; she’d been responding to their call for help.
“You freed us! Thank you!” The little boy said. “His terrible walls finally broke!”
“Who are you,” Maggie asked, “and why were you imprisoned here?”
“Lab animals. The first successful test subjects,” the little girl said.
“In trapping spirits,” the brother clarified. “We haunted the photos after our death. Our spirits came with the photos the mortician brought, the photos you launched downstairs.”
“Oh, I remember,” Maggie replied mordantly, recalling what got her into all this: the day she found herself in the Prenze parlor, looking at these children. Prenze—now she knew it was Albert masquerading as his brother—had ushered everyone out and turned up his device so high she felt torn apart, like the burning or tearing away of skin, but when there was no skin, it only flayed the soul....
“We’re sorry you got hurt; you were just the first soul to hear us. We didn’t mean to trap you too,” the little girl said, wringing phantom hands. “But you got out. Something got you out but left the rest of us there. Thank you for coming back for us. Thank you for not forgetting us!”
Sanctuary had heard Maggie’s plea, but it hadn’t been able to rescue anyone else from the darkness below. Maggie only had a slight recollection of the experience; it was all a spiritual murk.
“Of course. Get out while you can,” Maggie said, ushering the children to the window. “Anything you can share that will incriminate our torturer, any proof, any papers, anything we can use, bring that information to the Ghost Precinct, care of Eve Whitby, you hear?”
The children nodded and floated out the window, the boy so happy about his freedom he did an aerial flip before diving away, his sister grabbing onto his hand. “He keeps a diary of his deeds!” the boy called. “You’ll find everything you need in his old study upstairs, the one his brother thinks is always kept locked! Go there!”
Maggie’s heart leapt at this. Tactile proof! Now to get her hands on it. She whirled to Arielle, advancing on the shuddering form beneath the covers. But before she could manifest poltergeist energy to tear back the covers and confront the woman, there came an ungodly, wretched sound, the likes of which Maggie had never heard.
Up from the floor below came a terrible scream of rage and frustration, keening sounds of misery. This is how one became a banshee, Maggie thought—a soul, tortured long enough to have lost language, and nothing else remained but pain, retaining only the capacity for wailing. Following the sound was a form, erupting up from the floorboards.
An intense face with the piercing gaze Maggie recognized as the tintype Eve found stared at Maggie, puzzled a moment, before whirling onto Arielle.
Mrs. Prenze. The dread matriarch her son hated so deeply as to despise all spirits. A tattered, bony shipwreck of a spirit.
In a violent gust, the ghost managed to throw back the covers her daughter hid under, and Arielle cried out.
“Mama?” she squeaked, the sound of a terrified toddler, not a grown woman.
“WHAT HAVE YOU DONE?” the ghost screamed, hovering over the bed like a predatory creature, white hair floating wild around her furious face like snakes in water.
“Oh no…no, no, no…” Arielle murmured, tears streaming down her flushed face. “Please, no…”
The severe spirit swooped around the room, searching, before she whirled back on Arielle, hand raised in the air like a claw, a talon ready to shred. “WHAT HAS HE DONE?”
Arielle turned to Maggie, tears in her eyes. “Help me.”
Without hesitation, Maggie dove in.
The physical sensation of merging soul into body for possession was impossible to describe, and as this was only Maggie’s second attempt at wholly overtaking another’s body and staying put for results, she hoped she’d get less clumsy about it if it became routine.
A roaring sound then tearing pain, a sinking, falling feeling. She found her body, but as she did, Arielle spasmed on the bed, kicking the satin duvet. Maggie had been seasick once as a child, and this approximated the feeling, churning and shifting discomfort. Her incorporeal body was merging with another layer, like a heavy coat, but it wasn’t a garment—it was another person.
Maggie saw through another’s eyes.
“What is wrong with you?” the old woman cried, looming down on Maggie and Arielle as their visages merged. Mrs. Prenze’s surprise was quickly masked by a venomous anger, grey eyes flashing. “What abomination is happening now?”
Maggie wasn’t able to place Arielle’s thoughts at the foreground of her own, but she did have the strong inclination to throw herself out of the bed and run for her life. Arielle’s entire person could not be conveyed to Maggie, but she could sense her most base terrors and a crushing feeling of being trapped, as if Arielle were a woman buried alive before she’d even died.
The doors to the next room flew open.
Upon sight of the man at the threshold, the ghost of Mrs. Prenze unleashed another banshee scream.
Staring into the transparent eyes of his deceased mother, Albert Prenze’s face went from controlled to horrified to furious in one malevolent swoop. His mouth fell open, and he screamed back.
Man and ghost, mother and son, screaming at one another in primal rage.
The pain was palpable. The virulence was incoherent, impossible to put into words. That these entities were enemies was undeniable.
Arielle quailed again, her thin frame wracked with a shudder, terrified of the exchange. Maggie winced within her and didn’t fight the physical recoil.
“I’ll be rid of you once and for all!” Prenze finally shouted.
Mrs. Prenze just kept screaming.
A fresh wail of anguish came from the next room. Another voice. Mrs. Prenze stopped abruptly at the sound and flew forward through the closed set of doors.
“Yes, yes, run to your precious baby,” Albert sneered. “The only one you ever loved.”
Mrs. Prenze flew out of the room, and in her wake, the rest of the ghosts that had been prisoners in the house took up where Mrs. Prenze had left off, swirling around Albert in a tornado of rage. His breath clouded around him in an icy fog.
“All right, then,” Albert cried, as if he were rallying troops. “If the animals are all out of the zoo, then it’s time we commence with the cleansing!”
“The cleansing…” Maggie repeated, and Arielle lumbered through the syllables.
“The next phase of the plan has been hastened by this electrical outage. I didn’t plan for the prisoners to be let loose. All of it’s been compounded by that stupid girl’s challenge in the papers,” Albert spat, glancing to the side.
The spirits stopped whirling and hovered, tense, worried, ascertaining the next moves.
Albert Prenze swiped at the air. “Go on, get out! I’ll rid myself of you soon enough!”
The remaining spirits flew away, many with curses on their lips, several with prayers. Maggie thought they’d all need both.
Maggie directed Arielle’s gaze to follow in the same direction of her brother’s eyes, and she saw a model sitting on a corner desk, a cardboard diorama like a designer would craft for a stage production as an instruction for dimensional designers and carpenters.
At the center of the model were small figures standing on a familiar replica of two great Gothic arches and a vast span across a river. To the side was a small, thin wire and another simple arch that put her in mind of Sanctuary and the entrance to that spiritual enclave.
“Out from under the great arches, oblivion will fly.” Maggie recalled the cryptic message they’d received during Dr. Font’s séance.
Whatever was about to happen, it was about to happen on the Brooklyn Bridge, with another wire going off into the ether to Sanctuary’s gate. If they hoped to wage a counterattack, it would have to be waged in both locations.
A bridge to burn, severing two sides of a world. Maggie threw Arielle’s arm forward, pointing at the model, turning toward Zofia’s ghostly form, an indication that the girl needed to relate what was shown there.
“Go,” Maggie murmured hoarsely through Arielle’s parched throat. “Tell all our allies. Out from under the great arches, oblivion will fly. Protect and intercept both places.”
Zofia nodded, eyes wide yet defiant. “Then let it be so.”
Maggie felt a shudder of fear that came most certainly from Arielle, for Zofia’s defiance bolstered Maggie. Whatever Arielle knew about what was to come, the idea that the spirit world wouldn’t be passive but would fight back wasn’t something that Arielle felt prepared for. A life of being submissive to men seemed to have narrowed Arielle’s sense of possibility.
Albert grabbed Arielle, peering deeply into her eyes. “What’s gotten into you?”
At this, Maggie just giggled, wanting to yell, “Me!” but her laugh only caused a burble from Arielle’s numb lips. The maniac must have drugged the woman. Coronado was a smooth and elegant joining. This was like a marionette with tangled strings and jumbled limbs.
“I can’t rely on you in this state,” he growled. “I’ll have to lay you down with Alfred.”
“No!” Arielle and Maggie joined forces to speak, indignant. “This state is your fault.”
“I thought you’d fare better with all the fireworks against the spirits if sedated,” Albert countered, “but you’re not acting like yourself.”
Maggie could feel Arielle’s panic, wanting to say what had happened, but Maggie didn’t allow for it, her spirit stronger. Arielle had been weakened by control Prenze had lorded over her for too long.
* * * *
After the spiritual melee had overtaken the Prenze mansion, Antonia rushed out from the carriage that Gran had left for them all, an escape vehicle if there was danger.
“Gran,” she said breathlessly. “I just had another vision. The forest again. I recognize it now. The arch. It’s Sanctuary. And I saw you there, and all around you a great light.” Antonia blinked back tears. “What I saw is beautiful and terrible in equal measure.…”
Zofia appeared on the street.
“There are two attack sites, all wired up,” the little girl explained. “One is Sanctuary!”
Antonia and Gran looked at one another, Jenny watching from the carriage window.
“You’re tied to Sanctuary, Gran,” Antonia said. “If that’s a place spirits consider safe, it needs all the protection it can get.”
“What about Eve?” Gran asked worriedly. “She’s still conducting a séance from my house, yes? While guarded?” Gran asked.
Zofia nodded. “I’m going to tell Cora and the detective too, all hands on deck.”
* * * *
From within the Prenze mansion, another man stepped quietly into view as if he’d been lurking at the threshold just beyond, listening. Sergeant Mahoney. Maggie remembered Eve saying he’d initially given her trouble but then saw sense. Whether he would prove ally or hindrance was yet to be seen.
“Let me take care of her, then, if she’s not seeming herself,” the officer said. “Why don’t you go and do whatever it is you plan to do and I’ll look after them.”
“Keep them here,” Prenze growled. “If you need to sedate them—” Prenze plucked out a tonic bottle from his breast pocket.
Suddenly, at a lumbering run from the next room, another body flew forward.
Alfred Prenze, greying hair mussed and distressed, hair askew and jaw slack, came running at Albert and knocked him over, the bottle flying to the side of the room and shattering in a green splatter across the champagne wallpaper and oozing down the lower wood paneling.
Mrs. Prenze the ghost followed Alfred and flew around her now tussling sons who wrestled on the parquet wood floor. The leaner, sharper Albert quickly got the better of his incapacitated twin. Mahoney tried in vain to pry Albert off but couldn’t keep a grip.
“Leave my best boy alone, Bert!” the old woman cried. “We were better off when you were dead!” At this, Albert Prenze snarled and threw his brother aside, where he groaned against the floor.
“Now, now,” Mahoney said, helping Alfred up. He stumbled back, brushing himself off. The sergeant turned to Arielle. “Are you all right, Miss Prenze?”
All Arielle could seem to do was blink at the officer. The only words Arielle could manage were “I’m scared.” Maggie prompted Arielle to more. “I want to know what’s going on.”
Albert Prenze was brushing off his suit coat, muttering. “Don’t play stupid. You’ve been as supportive of ending ghosts as I am. And it’s overdue.” He stormed out, and Maggie forced Arielle to stand and try to follow. Mahoney tried to block her, but she stumbled past him. She caught her balance at the threshold, gripping onto the wall.
“All right, Eve Whitby, queen of the dead!” Albert called from the landing as he charged down the stairs. “I’m coming for your reign.”