Maggie only had a moment in the Prenze mansion to herself, and while she wanted to use Arielle’s body to try to stop Albert, enough of Arielle’s instinct gave her pause.
The ghosts had flown out. Alfred had lost consciousness again in his room, and his mother’s spirit was fussing over him in a pattern she must have overdone in life.
“I need you to help me, Arielle,” Maggie tried to say, but her voice could only translate to a mumble from Arielle’s tongue. Still, the woman had to hear her. “Please. We don’t want anyone to get hurt anymore.”
The weary, bleary woman only laughed hollowly.
Show me something I can use, Maggie bid her host, one mind to another. I’d like to do this with you willingly, but I’ll force you to move if you won’t. Spirits said something about a study upstairs?
Maggie found herself lurching out of the room and down the end of the hall opposite. A wooden balustrade divided, going up a level or down to the front entrance foyer in a grand, winding slope. Above, golden light shone down from a bay window.
Shaking in mind and body, Arielle was a heady mix of sentiment and fear. Maggie reeled within her as though she were seasick, every step a trial.
What don’t you want to face up there? Maggie asked her.
“Everything,” Arielle replied. A lifetime of regret in one sad, raspy word of confession.
Tears leaked hot onto Arielle’s cheeks. Maggie ached at the feeling. It had been so long since she had felt the warmth of breath, the salty sting and heat of tears. So bittersweet, this blending of life and death. Shame was as heavy as her tread.
He is not a good man, and it has clearly affected you, Maggie continued in Arielle’s mind. You are not to blame for his misdeeds.
“Oh, but I am. We all play our part.…”
At the top of the upper-floor landing a door appeared to be boarded shut at eye level. Arielle was leading now. She fumbled for a key behind the board, unhooked it from a small peg on the underside, and unlocked the keyhole, ducking under the slanted board, the back of her coiffure knocking against the underside, shifting the copper-red braid at the back of her head lopsided, hairs tearing on the rough wood.
Inside, bookshelves were half-empty, covered with dust and cobwebs. Light filtered in from an umber stained-glass window in geometric shapes.
Rather than pressing the woman about what was here or what they would find, Maggie tried to enjoy the sensation of being corporeal again, even if it felt a bit like puppetry.
Shuffling forward, Arielle pressed a lever, and the rear bookcase opened like a wall. Maggie felt her whole being flutter with a thrill of delight at a secret passageway. One benefit of dying young was that things that proved exciting as a child never ceased to enthrall. Maggie might have grown more wary, but simple pleasures of magic and mystery remained.
The room beyond was pitch black, electric lights dashed by Mosley’s interference. Arielle ran her hand along the side of the wood-paneled wall until she found a knob and turned. Fire flickered to life in brazier sconces across the room, the old gas fixtures still working.
“I insisted we keep the old pipes at the ready against unreliable newer technology,” Arielle stated proudly.
Maggie took in the chilling rectangular anteroom, all dark-paneled wood and tortured-looking forms. A sculpture stood at the center of each wall, robed figures with arms reaching upward as if for mercy. Figures in Purgatory or Hell. Maggie could nearly hear them crying out. Perhaps she did. Perhaps the statues were haunted, just like Dupont’s stage production and his chapel of reliquaries, still restless dead to be soothed.
Maggie forced Arielle’s hand to gesture to the figures. What are those?
“The first art Albert ever commissioned from Mr. Dupont. Years ago.”
Before Albert staged his death? Maggie clarified.
“Yes,” Arielle replied. The drugs Albert had administered to sedate and keep her from interfering must be wearing off as she seemed more lucid. She stood before a wax figure of a tortured woman, bare chested, clawing at herself and the sky. “At the beginning of Albert’s macabre interests, he began assembling artists of like mind.”
Arte Uber Alles? You do know the association led to the deaths of many, Maggie replied in Arielle’s mind. She could feel the woman recoil, shame and panic flooding her body. I’m not interested in implicating you, Arielle, if you can help me and my colleagues put a stop to all this.
The part of Arielle interested in self-preservation rallied. She spoke quietly. “I…thought his intentions were entirely pure, that he was concerned with sanctity of spirit, that he wanted spirits to go to Heaven, not lingering here in pain. I understand now he wasn’t interested in healing. But in controlling. That I should have known.”
Still staring at the figures, something chilled Maggie to her core. Those weren’t just statues.
You must understand what we’re dealing with. See what I saw, my new friend, Maggie said to her host, mind to mind, and let her thoughts wander to the stage set in the theatre district when the spirits of children superimposed themselves onto infernal set pieces to show Eve and her team where parts of dead bodies were hidden in each statue of the elaborate set.
Arielle now saw these four bodies in the room not as sculpture, but as they truly were: an active crime scene of desecration. Above the heads of the figures were wisps of eerie light, like old engravings of little fires above the heads of prophets, demarking fire of holy spirit. Only this was the flicker of dying embers. Unlike the souls of children that had recently been set to rest, whatever pieces of life left within these statues belonged to souls that were so long detached and kept away from what unsettled them that they’d begun to entirely fade. Not potent enough to cry out for help.
Arielle choked back a sob and turned her body away. Trembling to the point of her knees nearly buckling out from under her, she ambled toward the smooth-lacquered ebony desk trimmed in gilded, Grecian patterns.
What all happened here? Maggie pressed.
“You’ll hate me if I show you,” Arielle whispered to her possessor, leaning her fair hands on the dark desk’s edge for support.
“I come not to hate, but to help,” Maggie countered, bidding Arielle hear her out loud, hoping if she heard it on her own tongue, she’d believe it.
Behind the desk, in lieu of a fireplace, floor-to-ceiling bricks appeared a fireplace shaft. But the bricks were odd—not clay, but metallic.
“What’s this?” Maggie pressed. Arielle quailed. Maggie forced Arielle’s hand into a fist.
“Before he built the downstairs prison for spirits… Here he began torturing Mother’s spirit, several years ago. Bricked her ghost up behind electrified bricks to keep the spark of her spirit contained. Like Poe’s Fortunato behind Montresor’s mortar. For the love of God.”
Her body sunk heavily into the leather desk chair as Maggie shuddered in her body, recoiling from the description of torture, thinking about how Albert ripped her own soul apart for Sanctuary to piece back together. She opened her mind to the memory and let Arielle see it, feel it. Feel the pain, the darkness, the fear. Maggie kept the memory of Sanctuary to herself.
The woman cried out. “I’m sorry, spirit, I’m sorry,” she begged the spirit within her.
My name is Maggie.
“I’m sorry, Maggie.”
“You may not think of us like the living.” Maggie ground out through Arielle’s clenched teeth. “But we were. We still are, just not in the way the world can comprehend, nor legislate, nor protect.”
“It was, at first, for the love of God,” Arielle explained, fresh tears spilling down her cheeks. “Albert and I were always close. Mother always said too close. I hated how cruel she was to him so I tried to love him enough for all of us. But I guess it wasn’t enough. Like Albert, I did think the persistence of ghosts was unholy, and I tried, with Albert, to stop those women, the ones using ghosts like they were some sort of service.”
My auntie Evelyn, you mean? Maggie pressed. And my best friend Eve? Those gifted women who do so much for the living and the dead?
“I always thought communing with the dead was wrong, evil.”
Do you think I am evil, Arielle? Maggie asked. If I were evil, I’d be here tormenting you, not trying to help. Take a moment. Feel my heart. Search my mind. We’re a lot alike, Arielle, women of privilege blinded by the wrong things. Seduced by dark forces. That’s what killed me. I don’t want it to hurt you too.
In a strange, swirling moment, as if the two women were swept into a waltz through time, scenes were shared of mistakes and missteps, bending to the will of those who held uncanny power over them rather than thinking for themselves on their own terms.
Maggie watched a potent memory: Arielle threw her arms around Albert who had snuck into her rooms to see her in secret, begging her to keep the fact that he hadn’t died a secret. He placed a tonic for sleeplessness by her bedside. Only much later would she realize he was slowly poisoning her to keep her compliant and out of the way as his obsessions escalated.
In turn, Arielle watched as a young Natalie Stewart, a year before Eve would be born, held Maggie in her arms as she died, in a dining room covered in blood, as the dark cabal Maggie had unwittingly assisted fell apart around her. Maggie remembered there’d been so much she’d wanted to say to her friend before her body failed that night.
Maggie’s ghostly tears fed Arielle’s living ones.
“I never hated ghosts,” Arielle murmured in a plea. “I thought we needed to let spirits pass on and go to Heaven to help them, not contact them to linger. Though I doubt Heaven’s where Mother would have gone.” Arielle shifted into her mind again for the next part, looking around as if frightened she’d be overheard. Mother was too hateful, too spiteful for Heaven.
It was as if the mention of her summoned her.
The screaming returned, that terrible banshee wail. The woman’s fine gown had gone to tatters during her imprisonment, along with a floating mess of wild hair and scraps of satin, glistening black pits for eyes bearing down on her daughter and her possessor with brute force and searing cold.
“Get out, get out,” dead Mrs. Prenze shrieked, “get away, get away, you wretched little brat, get OUT.… What good have you done to MY house but squander it?!”
Ducking away from the raging spirit, Arielle fumbled beneath the center desk drawer for something, her fingers closing around a small key and prying it loose.
Your proof, Arielle said internally. In these moments, Maggie was no longer the driving force, and all she could do was offer energy and support as Arielle shied away from the lunges of her mother’s ghost.
Maggie admired her host in this moment. Despite being screamed at by the ghost of Mrs. Prenze who rent the air with icy talons, swiping at Arielle’s hair and face, Arielle managed to open a desk drawer and fumble past papers and glass vials with marks of poison on their labels.
You’ll have to come back for the rest of the papers, they’ll likely be telling. But this…
Arielle finally pulled out a black leather-bound journal. You’ll want this.
Clutching the volume, Arielle ran.
Her body far more responsive than when Maggie dove in, the entwined souls tore down the flights to the ground floor entrance foyer where Mahoney was trying to help Alfred Prenze into a chair, a pool of vomit on the fine rug.
“No, stop, I must get out and follow Albert,” Alfred mumbled. “I have to stop him from hurting more people.… I have to help.…”
“You are in no state to do so, my friend,” Mahoney said gently.
Ignoring them both, Arielle went to the front armoire and threw a russet-brown wool riding coat over her day dress, tucking the leather-bound journal into a deep interior pocket.
“Just where do you think you are going?” Mahoney asked wearily, as if he’d been fighting all day with exhausting children. Maggie could feel Arielle hesitate, so she helped supply the response.
“Where do you think? Help or get out of the way!”
Arielle threw the door open, blinked at the bright light of day, finally free, and kept running.