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Chapter Text

The second-worst part of her mother's parties, Helena thought, was that she never got to wear what she wanted. It was never her old dresses, no matter how well-kept and carefully-stored; it was always something new and unfamiliar, without the comfort of worn-in seams and fabric made unstiff through wear. Summer was all right. Summer was smocked Liberty lawn or embroidered voile, pale colors to best offset Helena's near-black hair and dark eyes. They made her appear spectral, otherwordly, even before her abilities were displayed.

Now, however, it was winter, early December in London, snowfall heavy on the windowsills and falling in gentle spirals against the dark. The cold seeped in despite the house's smart central heating and the fire her mother had lit to enhance the museum quality of their sitting-room, to best show it off for those who were coming now to see it. It, and the artifacts on display, filling the air with their dusty whispers. The cold meant the fabrics changed, turned stiff, scratchy. Tonight's dress was new, delivered that day. While Helena had gone twice to fittings in the weeks before she had not yet worn the finished garment until now.

She stood in front of the mirror, her reflection staring back at her with a squinched face that did not go with the dress. It was velvet, berry-red, caught at the waist with a ribbon and flaring out into a full skirt. The gloves matched, soft burgundy suede clasped with little velvet buttons. Her shoes were patent leather, new, too, and they pinched. She'd have much preferred her green silk dress from October's party, or the pink and black striped from August. She'd gotten used to how they felt, and how she felt in them.

But her mother had insisted, in her way. And when her mother insisted, the decision was already made.

“Darling, think,” she'd said, when the long pink box had arrived from the dressmakers' that afternoon. “My guests, they come because they are searching. For truth, for answers, for an end to their suffering, or the suffering of those they love. I'm here to provide those answers, to create for them the world in which the truth they seek is revealed. You are part of that world, and for them to gain understanding the world must be complete.”

She'd put out a slender hand and stroked Helena's hair, her face a perfect moue of sympathy. “I know it's not comfortable, darling, I'm sorry.”

Helena turned one way, another. The velvet rustled against the skirt's crinoline. She believed her mother, of course she did. She was impossible not to believe. But the fact remained her shoes still pinched, and the dress still itched.

Even so, these new clothes were not the worst part of evenings like this. The worst part was having to deal with Arthur.

“Helena?”

He was there, in the mirror, behind her. She hadn't heard him come in. She rarely did. They were twins, as alike as if Helena's reflection had doubled itself in the glass, the two of them tall for their age, black-haired, with their mother's uptilted dark eyes and olive skin and long, high-bridged nose. On their mother it looked elegant, otherworldly. On Helena and Arthur, it just looked gawky, too big for their thin, peaky faces.

Helena whirled round. “What are you doing in my room?”

“You sounded upset.”

Helena had not said a word for a while. It was not her voice, after all, he'd been listening to. “I'm not. I hate my dress.”

“You always hate your dress.”

“Why were you listening to me?”

“I can't help it.” A small smile twitched on his mouth. “You're so loud.”

Helena swiped her hand over her skirt, as if that might stop it from being so scratchy, then turned from the mirror. Arthur sat cross-legged on the foot of Helena's bed, clutching a pillow to his stomach. He, too, was dressed for the evening, his short trousers and jumper in shades of deep red and cream, to match Helena. She studied him, brow furrowed.

“Is it bad, tonight?” she said.

He nodded. “It's hard to concentrate. My head hurts.”

“All the new people, I expect. Mum said she had some special guests. Have you tried the trick she showed you?”

Arthur closed his eyes, a crease between his eyebrows. He began to hum under his breath, began to murmur.

...I know you belong to somebody new...

...Although we’re apart, you’re a part of my heart…

Helena recognized both words and tune. Tonight You Belong To Me by Patience and Prudence. Not a song Helena would've chosen. The humming trailed off and he opened his eyes.

“Better?” Helena asked, voice flat.

Arthur shook his head. “It feels worse. Worse than last time.”

“Did you tell Mum?”

“No.” He paused. “I didn't want to worry her. She's been so anxious.”

“She's not anxious.”

“She is. She doesn't show it. But she can't hide it from me.”

“That's-”

“It's not stupid.”

“Stop that.”

“Stop what?”

“Listening to me,” Helena hissed. “I don't like it. I don't like you being in my head. It's rude and it's-” She searched for a strong enough word, came up empty-handed. “I hate it.”

“More than your dress?”

“Yes. A lot more than my dress.”

“I'm sorry,” Arthur mumbled, but as Helena faced the mirror again, adjusting her long braid, the ribbon tied round its end, she saw Arthur watching her, unblinking, no regret in his eyes.

Voices drifted from below. The door was half-open- likely how Arthur had gotten in unnoticed- and as Helena lowered her hands from her hair a wave of laughter rose up the stairs- pleasant, cultured, followed by a lower gabble of what sounded like pleasant conversation. Glasses clinked; wood floors creaked. Even without Arthur's sensitivity, Helena detected the spark and crackle of excitement in the air, a low hum that was a constant vibration in the back of her mind. She had been exercising control over it, so she would not be affected, so she might one day drown it out, but now it seeped into her blood and made her pulse quicken, made her nearly forget her physical discomfort in favor of that warm frisson of anticipation building below.

She glanced at Arthur; he looked at her, and, without words, they darted for the door as one, leaving Helena's bedroom under the eaves for the upper landing of the house. It was dim, the glass sconces on the walls turned low, the walls papered in genteel Morris print, the wood all ruddy-gold. The air smelt of beeswax, of perfume from below, amber light from the ground floor pooling up the long staircase and over the floorboards. Shadows moved over the walls, the black and white chessboard tile of the entryway below; the voices were louder, now, more distinct. Unfamiliar ones, and that of their mother, smoky and melodic, with that trace of her Hungarian accent which she had never lost.

Helena leaned over the banister, peering down at the group. Three men and two women, shucking furs, revealing the gleam of silk or brocade. Jewels glittered at wrist or earlobe; heels clicked on the tiled floor. Amidst them, unmistakable, moved their mother. Her hair gleamed in the lamplight like wet ink, clad in a fantastical dress of beaded green shot silk. She wore no jewels, but Helena thought, as she always thought, she outshone the rest. Her movements, maybe, or her laugh, rich and mysterious, drawing one in.

“Are those the special guests, do you think?” Arthur whispered. He leaned alongside her, drinking in the newcomers with wide eyes.

“I don't know. I don't recognize them.”

“Me neither. Who's that?”

He pointed to one of the women, trailing a little behind the others as they were ushered deeper into the house. She did not wear gemstone colors, like the rest, but deep gray, glossy as the inside of a shell. Her hair gleamed white-blonde as she stood for a moment in the entryway. Helena stared down at her, at the top of her head, the glimpse of one pale cheekbone visible behind a curl. She was different, too, like their mother. She drew the eye- not just physically but some glow, some warm aura that made Helena want to look at her and keep looking, to never, ever stop.

The lady looked up, then, her face as pale as her hair, and smiled. Helena and Arthur ducked behind the banister. Helena's face flamed. She heard soft laughter from below, then the click of heels, and the next time she looked down the stranger was gone.

“Who was that?” she breathed.

Arthur shook his head. “I asked you.”

“How am I supposed to know? She looked nice.”

Arthur didn't answer. He glanced over the banister again, a faint crease between his eyebrows.

“What?” Helena pressed.

“You didn't hear it?”

“No. Hear what?”

He did not look away. His eyes shone gold in the lamplight. “The buzzing,” he murmured. “The insects, buzzing. Like...flies. Like whispers...”

Footsteps, floorboards. Helena looked up as the door opened at the far end of the hall, as their father emerged from his study, closing, then locking the sturdy wood door behind him. He paused, looking them over, then approached, hands in his trouser pockets. He was tall, solid, sandy-blond silvering to gray, some years older than their mother and not trying to hide it.

Helena had always thought his horn-rim spectacles gave him a glowering look, a quality magnified by the very real look of disapproval he aimed down at them as they crouched like thieves at the top of the stairs.

“What are you two doing?” he said. No greeting, not from him.

“Watching the guests,” Helena snapped.

“Tone,” their father said. Arthur looked down at his shoes. Helena did not. She narrowed her eyes as she straightened.

“What were you doing, anyway?” she said. “We haven't seen you all day.”

“That likely means it wasn't for you to know about, Helena. I don't like your attitude. Adjust it or spend the evening in your room, without supper. Arthur?”

“Hello, Dad,” he mumbled.

“You two should be greeting your mother's guests, not hiding from them. I shouldn't have to tell you what she expects from you.

“Yes, Dad.”

“Helena?”

She stood there, hands in fists.

“Helena.”

“I don't like it.”

“You don't like what?”

“Just having to sit there. I want to help.”

“Help with what, exactly?”

“I can help. With her work. Her seances. I can do things. We both can. We're good, we're really good. And I do a lot of reading, and research, and I've studied-”

“You want to help your mother with her seances?” their father said. His tone was deeply condescending, and a spark of hot rage burst through Helena's nerves like fire. She drew a sharp breath, biting back the worst of her words.

“Yes,” she said firmly. “I do.”

“And you think you can help- how?”

“We can...reach out. Strengthen her connection to the other side-”

“Your mother is the most powerful and accomplished spirit medium Britain has seen in this century,” their father said. He spoke with perfect authority, perfect assurance, unassailable. “You've flicked through a few books, Helena. Had a few concepts...explained to you. But really good? Don't be ridiculous. You've displayed mild extrasensory perception, average psychometric sensitivity. Nothing more. You would only hinder her, I'm afraid.”

He removed a hand from his pocket, glanced at his wristwatch. “Ah, nearly time. I expect you two to follow me. And,” he added, casting a dark look at them both, “I expect proper behavior. Do you understand me?”

“Yes, Dad,” Arthur said.

Helena didn't speak.

“Do you understand me?” their father said again.

“Helena,” Arthur whispered.

She clenched her teeth, swallowed back the heat. “Yes,” she said. “Dad.”

He nodded, hesitated, seemed about to speak, didn’t. Another pause, then he merely said, “Good.”

He brushed past her on his way down, not looking back. Helena didn't turn. She chewed her lip as she listened to his footsteps descending, his voice as he entered the drawing room below. There was pleasant, genteel laughter; there was music, a record placed, perhaps, on their lovely old gramophone. It had belonged to their grandfather, their father's father, etched with his initials on the case. A. C. Blackwood. Alistair Cerdic Blackwood, the same as their father's. This house, too, had belonged to their grandfather, much of the furniture his, that which their mother hadn't swapped out and modernized.

If it wasn't his, it was hers- the décor, the rules, the way things were done. Unassailable. Helena clenched her fists tighter, fingers aching inside their gloves.

“Maybe he's right,” Arthur whispered. “Maybe it's better we only watch.”

“What do you know?” Helena snapped.

“Maybe he's- it's not...it's scary. Sometimes.” Arthur laced his fingers together, then unlaced them. “The things...I see. Deep down. I don't...I don't like it. And there are...dreams, after. Terrible dreams.”

“I don't have dreams like that.”

He laughed, a little, halting and nervous. “Then you're lucky.”
Helena squeezed her eyes shut. No, she thought, I'm not lucky, I'm like he said, I'm weak, I'm average, I'm dull. I'm nothing. And you're something, Arthur. Don't you see that? Don't you see how lucky you are, to be something when you could be nothing?

She didn't speak. She didn't want Arthur to soothe her, to gloss things over, like he always did in his timid way. He didn't understand.

But he reached out and touched her arm. She stiffened at the warmth of his skin against hers, the queasy sensation of human contact. The hum deepened in her mind, becoming stronger, more insistent. Echoes, she called them. Echoes, whispers, down in the dark.

“It's all right,” Arthur murmured. His eyes were wide, fastened on hers. “You're all right. We need to do as he says. It'll be a lot better that way. We need to go downstairs.”

“Don't want to...”

Yes, Arthur said. You do.

Warmth washed through her. Helena exhaled. Her hands opened, shoulders slumping. Arthur exhaled, too, though he did not relax, his entire body tense along the banister, tendons standing out like wires against the back of his hand. Helena blinked, once, then again. Don't want to, she thought, but it was not as hard, as sharp, as before. It receded; it faded. Her pulse thudded in her ears, but...she could go downstairs, she could manage it. At least for a little while. Long enough.

“I don't like it when you do that,” she told Arthur.

“I know,” he said. “But it helps.”

He took his hand from her arm, then glanced downstairs. The music had been turned up, the gabble of guests' voices louder, merrier. He gave a soft sigh, then tilted his head.

“Guess we'd better go,” he said. “Together, then?”

“Together,” Helena agreed. As always.

***

Mingling with their mothers guests was, perhaps, not as bad as Helena made it out to be in her mind. For the most part she and Arthur went unacknowledged amidst the rustle of silk and tulle, the pleasant, plummy timbre of gentlemen’s voices.

The air smelt of perfume, cigar smoke, wine, once dinner was over and all had retreated to the drawing room; the exclamations, when she or Arthur were noticed, were ones of oh, Rebecca, are these your darling children? How sweet! They look so alike... or so, Blackwood, will young Arthur be joining you as an Old Dragon one day, or are you tutoring him at home...? before conversations drifted to other matters, more interesting topics.

There were some fourteen guests, some of whom Helena recognized- the old general, Hanlon-Smythe, with his medals and his beet-red face, accompanied by his spindly wife. They were probably here in the hopes of contacting their son again, as they always were. The son, Helena gathered, had died in the war a decade or so before, and they had devoted their time and fortune to speaking to him one last time, some last few words.

She knew Stuart Wrexley, too, the actor, handsome and debonair and somehow untrustworthy; he had a way of scanning the room slowly with a faint smile on his face, as if seeking and finding wanting. He'd brought another, different, girl tonight, charming, talkative, attracting a small circle of admirers, others from the great and good of London society brought here by exclusive invitation. She recognized the old man with the fine suit and the twisted hands, broken and gnarled, gripping the head of his cane; she'd never caught his name, had never spoken to him beyond a few polite pleasantries.

But, as she wandered the room, hands folded down her front, weaving between small groups of adults, between display cases holding her parents' collection of esteemed psychical artifacts, she didn't recognize the woman in gray. She was impossible to forget, so Helena knew she'd never come to one of her mother's parties before. Poised, straight-spined, her face was youthful, lovely, framed by gentle curls and waves of that improbable platinum hair.

“Who is that?” Helena tried to ask her mother as she breezed across the room, trailing the fringe of her velvet shawl.

“One of my special guests, darling, now run along, won't you?”

“But what's her name?” Helena insisted. Her mother was gone already, approaching Stuart Wrexley, who smiled a dangerous smile at her as she clasped his arm. The girl he'd come with watched from across the room, gaze hard, champagne glass clenched in one manicured hand. Helena watched this tableau for a few seconds, then let out a huff and went to the drinks cart, where small stands of after-dinner morsels were arranged like jewels on the shining antique silver. She took a plate, then began plucking canapes onto it with her fingers instead of the little tongs provided for that purpose, not caring if her father saw her do it.

She shoveled one into her mouth, a miniature blintz with cream-cheese and smoked salmon, then chewed with force as she made her way across the room again, heading toward the arched doorway that led to the library.

Arthur appeared as she made her escape. Unlike her, he looked paler, peakier than ever, again humming under his breath. Helena cast an eye over him.

“Did you eat anything yet?” she said.

“No. I don't feel good. Are you going into the library?”

She pulled open the door. “What's it look like I'm doing?”

They stepped through, down the short hallway, and into the library proper. Instantly, the sounds of conversation were cut to a murmur, muffled through walls and ceiling-high bookshelves. Unlike the jungle-green and Danish modern styling of the sitting room, the library had clearly not been changed since their grandfather's days, paneled in gleaming dark wood, the fireplace flanked by a pair of winged stone lions, coals crackling in the grate. The room smelt of dust no matter how clean, the long drapes half-pulled against the snowy night.

More display cases glimmered in the dim glow of the sconces, containing more artifacts- those less delightful, more horrifying than the Etruscan knives and cursed jewelry arrayed in the sitting room. Helena wandered over to the window, where one such display case was set against the nearby wall. A collection of long, pointed needles, too big for sewing, rested on dark velvet. They were spattered in what looked like rust. Torture implements, the tools of the Essex Eye-Thief, an eighteenth-century murderer; they'd been found amongst his things after his capture, the blood of his victims still crusted on their points.

Not, precisely, what most people wanted to see while sipping aperitifs. Helena glanced at them, then set her plate on the edge of the case, watching the snow fall outside the window. Hampstead was nearly lost behind the curtain of snow, nothing but a glimpse of dark street and darker trees, a single streetlamp haloed in pale gold.

She listened to Arthur's footsteps while she ate another canape, listened to him climb into one of the weighty Victorian armchairs arranged before the fire.

“Is it the party?” she said.

“I don't know. I feel sick.”

“Maybe you've got a flu or something. The milkman was snuffling an awful lot yesterday-”

“No. I don't think so.”

Helena glanced back. Arthur was hunched in the armchair, knees drawn to his thin chest, staring into the fire.

“I had another dream,” he said. “Last night. A bad one.”

“Did you tell Mum?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

He shook his head, mechanically, back and forth. “Like I said. She's anxious.”

“So are you. I can't stand it.”

He didn't reply. Helena reached for a third canape- a miniature quiche, then stopped. She dropped her hand.

“What was it about?” she asked.

Arthur didn't look away from the flames.

“Do you ever feel like something bad is coming?” he said. “Like something terrible is about to happen, and you can't stop it, no matter how you prepare, no matter what you do?”

“Like a curse?”

“Yes.” He paused. “I guess so. But...curses can be broken. This can't be stopped. The only thing to do is be ready for when it comes.”

Helena said nothing. She crossed her arms, then leaned against the case full of the murderer's needles.

“Not really,” she said.

“Not ever?”

“Well.” She chewed her lip again, tasted blood. “There was that time I got a horrid feeling when Mum and I were out shopping, and then that young man accidentally tripped and was nearly run over by a taxi- do you remember that-?”

“I'm not talking about that.”

“Then what are you talking about?”

He turned his eyes on her, his gaze hollow, pleading. “I don't know,” he said. “I don't know, Helena-”

She flinched back. “How am I supposed to help you, then?” she gabbled, too-fast. “You need to talk to Mum, please, Arthur-”

His gaze pulsed. Something there, something dark, drawing her in. Down, endless, a hole, a well, falling forever. “It's something only you can help with, I feel it, I know it-”

“Arthur, stop it, I-”

“Oh, I am sorry.” The voice was unfamiliar, soft and silvery and upper-class. Helena flinched, tearing her eyes from Arthur's. “I didn't realize you two were in here. I'm interrupting, aren't I?”

The woman in gray leaned through the door, glass in hand, limned in light from the hallway behind her. It blanched her hair salt-white.

Helena blinked. Arthur had lowered his head, staring once again at his shoes. “No,” Helena said. “You're not interrupting.”

“Thank goodness.” The woman stepped into the library, closing the door behind her. “You're...Helena, aren't you?”

“Yes,” she said, surprised. “How did-?”

“Your father said there were more artifacts in here, and I couldn't resist a bit of a squint. Cheeky, I know.” She smiled, winked. “But I've always been a bit too curious for my own good, like the proverbial cat. And this must be Arthur. Hello, there.”

He said nothing, just drew his shoulders in more tightly.

“That's Arthur,” Helena said. She moved forward, hiding her half-finished plate behind her. “The stuff in here's pretty gruesome.”

“That's all right. Who doesn't like a bit of gruesome.” The woman began forward, the long pleats of her skirt shimmering as they rustled around her legs. She stopped before the fireplace, examining the painting over the mantel. It was an equestrian portrait of a dour-looking man mounted on a black horse, rendered in heavy oils. “Is this one of your ancestors?”

“Yes. Hector Blackwood. My great-aunt still lives in that house, there, behind the horse. I've only been once, when I was a baby. She never invited us back. She doesn't like our mother much.”

“Really.” The woman lifted her eyebrows, as white as her hair, and took a sip of champagne. “Imagine that!”

“She doesn't approve.” Helena paused. “I've never seen you at one of these before.”

“One of your mumma's seances?” she said. “No. This is my first time. I was as shocked as anyone when I got the invitation.”

Again, she smiled, and Helena felt herself unable to stop from smiling in return. The woman's heart-shaped face seemed to glow, so pale it looked almost unnatural, a faint, pretty blush to her cheeks. Her mouth was lipsticked in berry-red, her eyes wide, long-lashed, clear green. “I think my father once attended her soirees, and when he died, the standing invite passed on to me. I'm not sure. No matter. I'm simply delighted to be here. And to meet you.”

“Meet...me?”

“Of course. Why not? You share your mother's gifts, don't you?”

Helena nodded.

“How old are you? Twelve?”

“Eleven.”

“Astonishing. So young, and already so talented.” Her smile widened, one cheek dimpling. She was so lovely it was impossible to look away from her. “Oh, dear, where are my manners? I know your name but you don't know mine.”

She stuck out one hand. “I'm Irene.”

“Helena,” Helena said without thinking. She winced. “You already know that.”

“Yes,” Irene said, with a hint of amusement. “I do.”

“Sorry.”

“Don't apologize. Never apologize for making sure people know your name. It's the best tool you've got.”

“Do people know your name?”

“They will,” Irene said.

They shook. Irene's eyes dipped to Helena's gloves, but she made no comment. The warm feeling in Helena's stomach intensified. It was rare to meet a new guest without them asking after the gloves she wore around other people.

“So,” Irene said, making an expansive gesture, “you must know your way around this place, mustn't you. Would you mind terribly showing me a thing or two?”

“Like...what?”

“One of the artifacts.” Irene lifted her eyebrows. “Your favorite.”

“My- yeah. Yes.” Helena paused, then threaded through the library toward another display case. “This one. In here.”

Irene stopped before the case and peered inside. Helena stood by, fidgeting. Behind glass, set on dark fabric, was the leathery, mahogany-colored face of a severed head. Its mummified skin was torqued, twisted over the skull beneath, preserved that way by millennia beneath peaty waters, the single twist of hair dyed ginger by the bog. Dried slits remained of its eyes, but Helena had always felt watched by the head, surveyed, as if at any moment those dead eyes might open.

Irene surveyed the head for a long moment, nodding a little. Then she glanced at Helena. 'This is your favorite?”

“Yes.”

“Tell me.”

“Well. It's from Denmark. It was found in 1936 but is a lot older, probably...700 BC. Approximately,” Helena added. Irene nodded again. “Just the head was found. Not the rest of the body. Heads were...powerful. That's what ancient people thought. And this one, they would have thought was especially powerful. It's thought to be from a woman, a druid, sort of. A powerful person. Spiritually.”

“Why is she your favorite?”

Helena paused.

“I want to know,” Irene said.

Helena glanced at her, then looked back at the head.

“When I look at it, at...her, I imagine...what she would be thinking about,” she said. Heat crept up her neck, but she kept talking. “What she saw, when she was alive. What she knew. All those secrets. They're lost now but I think about what it would be like if I could get inside her head and...”

Her eyes flicked to Arthur, slumped in the chair. “...And listen.”

Irene was watching her. Helena looked up and met her glass-green gaze, a slight furrow between her eyebrows.

“I knew you were a bright girl,” she said at last.

“What? Why?”

“Knowledge,” Irene said. “That's what you're searching for.”

“I don't think I'm searching for anything.”

“Everyone's searching for something.”

Helena shrugged. “I suppose. I don't know. It's just what I think about.”

“And what's so wrong with that?” Irene asked.

The door opened. Helena whirled, feeling, unaccountably, guilty, as her mother entered the library in a shimmer of green silk and beads. Tall, slender, black-haired and black-eyed and smiling, she took in Helena and Irene at the glass case.

“My Lady. There you are,” she said. Not to Helena- to Irene. “My husband wondered where you'd gotten off to. I was half-afraid you'd left.”

“Oh, never,” Irene said, with a laugh. “I had to have a look at your library. At all this. Your children were gracious enough to show me around.”

“Enchanting, aren't they.” Her mother approached Helena, smoothed a hand over her hair and down one shoulder, careful to avoid contacting her skin. She smelled of musk and jasmine, heavy and intoxicating. “My lambs. My joy. But!”

She gave Helena's shoulder a little pat. “Now I must steal you away from them.”

Irene stiffened. Her eyes brightened. It was as if her entire body had at once become sharper, more present. “Is it time?”

“That's right. Please, this way.” She stood aside and gestured to the library door. “The séance is about to begin.”

Chapter Text

Winter, again, and Helena Blackwood was numb as a corpse. January had arrived under a cloak of the expiring month's snow, and the Dead Days before the new year were as dark and chill as their name suggested. This late afternoon was no different, new snowfall spiraling from a low, gray sky, the brick walls and streets of Hampstead glowing rust and amber against the clean, unbroken white. Helena tucked her chin into her coat collar as she walked, gloved hands deep in her pockets, each exhale pluming through the snow. It made little difference in this cold. The air smelt of metal, of ice, something quiet and slumbering, waiting beneath the silence.

Hampstead, in North London, had changed little since she'd last been here. Since she'd lived here, she reckoned. Still the high brick walls spilling over with ivy; still the sprawling, grandly-eccentric old houses, with their high spire finials and deeply peaked roofs. It had become, she understood, something of an avant-garde place, with the nearby Heath and its witchy groves of Medieval oaks. A place for artists, intellectual types, progress. A new world, a new 1975, defying the psychic echoes of memory that still lived in the gaps and holes and dark places. Its high street reflected this, bustling, busy even in this weather, full of greengrocers' and cinemas and pubs gutted to make cafes, places for the bright and Bohemian to discuss deep thought amidst espresso steam and cigarette smoke.

Here, though, down these deeper lanes, the hush and lamplight might have taken her back through the years, nearly twenty, now, back in time to when she called this place home.

There were no cars about, no sign of other people besides the glow from illuminated windows, the occasional shadow moving against drapes, but still Helena paused at the upcoming crossroads. The street beyond was lined with yews, their dark green needles gleaming against the skeletal oaks on the far side of the buildings, their red berries bright as drops of blood. They rustled and creaked in the next wind-gust, and Helena shivered at the scatter of ice, snow-fragments stinging her already wooden face. The houses here looked older than those behind, their facades magnificently-shabby, brick and plaster, crested with multiple chimneys and elaborate moldings along their rooftops.

The street, a narrow lane scabbed in places with cobblestones from the original, older, road beneath, meandered off, winding serpentine until she could see it no more, lost behind the big mansion at the corner. Little crowns of snow had heaped atop the bollards, and though a car or two was parked some distance down, swiftly buried in white, Helena found it difficult to imagine such modern conveyances traveling this place.

No, time hadn't passed here; nothing had changed. Why had she come? She still wasn't sure. She knew only that she had to, she had to be in this place. She had to see for herself.

Still, she hesitated, long enough for snow to dust her shoulders and hair, her upturned coat collar, stark white against the dark red wool.

Go on, Blackwood. This is no way to be.

Another gust of wind ruffled her hair. She closed her eyes for a moment, exhaled, drew a steadying breath of the cold. Then she stepped off the curb and onto the street, making deep prints in the clean, unmarked snow.

It was not a long walk from here. She made it in minutes, and slowed, coming to a halt before the last house on the street. It was set apart from the rest by an expansive garden, by high Tudor-styled brick walls, the lawn sloping down into a terraced, flagstoned patio that had, Helena recalled, been hemmed by herb borders, so that when one trod on them with a glass of lemonade and a book, going to curl in one of the wicker chairs set on the stones, they smelt delicious under the sunlight.

There would be no more of that, not in this garden. Its front gates were padlocked tight, though she still made out the ornate briar design worked into the wrought iron. The walls on either side were protected by a row of iron spikes, their bricks blackened under the grime of years. Rosebushes, shriveled, dark, and untended, snarled in thorny thickets over the walls and over the garden, choking the smaller plants that had once grown there in profusion, those which the fire had not immediately killed. More bare trees towered amidst overgrown hedges, the vegetation grown dense and impenetrable around the house itself.

What was left of it, anyway. Helena remembered a stately place, as rambling as the roses. Victorian, three-storied, with bay windows and an ancient wisteria spreading its soft violet canopy over the gleaming black front door. Her room had been in the upper right-hand window; she'd looked out across the rooftops countless times, window propped open, the clean breeze and the calls of crows coming in through the gap. She'd fed those crows, tossed sandwich crusts out to them. Now, that window was gone, that part of the house collapsed in on itself, a landslide of rubble and burnt brick, broken glass and roof tile, leading melted into strange shapes by ferocious heat.

The front steps remained, but the doorway was an empty black hole, the darkness beyond grimy, abandoned. The ragged shapes of crows still circled the single remaining chimney, towering broken against the low clouds, but no one had fed them for a long time, and Helena was sure they'd all but forgotten.

She'd last seen the house in summer, 1958, the height of the Dog Days. The night she destroyed her family and her home, all at once. No one had bought the land, rebuilt the house. It still belonged to her father, she supposed, and he hadn't sold it. Besides, who'd want the place, after what had happened, after everyone thought a young boy had burned to death in the upper study. Even without knowing the full extent of the details it was a miserable thing to look at, a decaying corpse wreathed in hungry, overwhelming plants, the once-stately yew tree in its back garden now nothing more than a pillar of charred wood.

No more garden, no more breeze. No more standing beneath those yew boughs, breathing in the smell of sap and warm herbs. It had never been a happy place, not exactly. But it had been home. It had been her home. And she'd killed it.

Helena moved closer, slowly, as if approaching a wild animal. Nothing moved in the depths of the house, the broken windows. A few scars of graffiti were scrawled in paint over the walls, though for the most part the squatters and trespassers seemed to have kept their distance.

She slid a hand from her pocket and clasped one of the spikes atop the gate. The padlock rattled, locked fast. She didn't have the key. Craning her head, she peered up at the remnants of the house's upper stories, the collapsed staircase that now led to nothing. There was no study to investigate. It had burned completely away in the initial explosion.

Here, she detected the squalid smell of wet ash and rotting wood beneath the cold. Familiar as an old song; she'd smelled ashes for weeks, after. It had been a long time before scrubbing was enough, before she could get the smell out of her hair and off her skin. The memories had remained far longer. The dreams.

Dreams, Arthur had whispered. Terrible dreams.

Of what? His impending doom, maybe. Or had they been too awful to accept, dreams of his own betrayal, of what she, his own sister, would do to him before the year was up. Because she'd betrayed him. She'd lured him to the study, to the Blackwood Board, promising safety, promising they'd protect one another. Maybe she hadn't planned on giving him to the thing on the other side of the Board, the thing that lived in the endless black mirror, not at first, but she'd done it in the end. She'd done it with relief, with a jolt of fever heat that felt something like joy.

At last. At last.

And then she was alone.

At last...

She was alone now, that was for damn certain. Helena let go of the gate spike, hesitated, then tugged off her glove, revealing her long bare fingers, the ragged nails, bitten and chewed. Her hand twitched in the cold. She shuddered, flexed her fingers, then lowered her hand again to the gate and clenched on.

The wind murmured in her ears, lifted her hair. She half-closed her eyes. The hum, the pulse that lived inside all things- she let herself drift, falling into its rhythm. A faint pressure in her ears. The murmur became a whisper, then a faraway whine, a cry into some great dark night.

Please.

It trailed off; it faded. Helena stayed there, holding the gate, listening hard. Far away, a dog began barking, lonely and cold. She listened, now, to the hum of traffic on a roadway through the trees, the muffled music from a nearby wireless. The echo was gone. What was she expecting? There was nothing here, nothing left. The fire had burned it all away.

Please-

“Please, Miss-”

A voice. Behind her.

“-Miss...Blackwood? Are you Helena Blackwood?”

Helena stiffened, then turned. A woman stood at the curb, some distance away. She was middle-aged, round-faced, solid, her short gingery hair streaked with white. She wore a too-big tweed coat and a long skirt, which flapped in the wind; it made her push her hands more deeply into her coat pockets, pulling the shabby garment around herself. She stared at Helena through large spectacles, eyes bright, searching.

“Excuse me?” Helena said.

The woman stepped closer. “I'm...so sorry,” she said. “It's just...I've read about you. The papers. Glaster Hall, and...others...and your mother,” she added. She glanced over Helena's shoulder at the house. “You lived here, didn't you.”

Helena didn't answer.

“I remember,” the woman went on. “Seeing her. Your mother. She was so elegant, her voice, her clothes, the way she walked. I always thought, now there's a lady. I'm- I was a mum myself, see. So I admired her. From afar, anyway. We...didn't travel in the same circles.”

There was something familiar about her, something that sparked at the edges of Helena's mind. She tilted her head, examining the woman's face, trying to place her. “Have we met before?”

“No. I don't think so.” She paused. “I'm Susan Bower.”

Helena exhaled.

“Bower,” she said.

“Yes.”

“Like...Cecily Bower...?”

“Yes.” Another pause. “She's my daughter.”

Cecily Bower. No wonder Helena recognized Mrs. Bower's face. It had been in every newspaper, alongside the faces of the other four parents. The other four children. Cecily Bower had been closest to Helena's age, thirteen, when she'd gone missing, and Helena remembered the photographs, a girl with a round face like her mother's and large front teeth that gave her a cheeky, chipmunk look. Like the others, she'd gone missing one evening when she was supposed to be coming home from school; like the others, she'd turned up a month later in a Whitechapel skip.

Most of her, anyway. The last pieces had never been found. Same as the other children. Their killer, when questioned, never revealed what had happened to them. She'd taken them, as it were, to the grave.

“It's been...sixteen years since Ces,” Mrs. Bower said. “Sixteen years since that-” Her face twisted. “Since Lady Godwin...she got what she deserved. Should have got more. Hanging was too good for her.”

“Can't argue that,” Helena said.

“Look, it's...my friends all think I've gone mad,” she went on. “I think, sometimes, I'm half-mad myself. But- my husband's seen it, too, and he's heard it, and...well, we've caught it on tape-”

She produced a cassette tape from her coat pocket. “-And it's- well, I don't think you'd discount me as mad right off, see, I figure in your line of work-”

“Mrs. Bower,” Helena cut in, “what's this about?”

Susan Bower stopped. Helena saw her throat move as she swallowed, her eyes brighter than ever. The tape quivered in her hand.

“It's Cecily,” she said. “I think she's come back.”

***

The Bower house was on the edge of Hampstead, on Fleet Road, not a grand Victorian mansion but a small brick rowhouse identical to its neighbors. Music thumped from an open car window as Helena followed Mrs. Bower down the pavement and up the narrow, cracked steps. It was a grim facade, rain-stained and icy, but someone had placed a potted geranium in the front window, and with the backlit amber of the interior lamp, its petals glowed vivid red. Mrs. Bower knocked snow off her boots before busying herself with the lock; she glanced back at Helena once or twice, standing at the foot of the steps.

“Sorry,” Mrs. Bower said. “Old lock. Won't be a moment.”

“No bother. When did all this start?”

“About a month back. Round...early December. December the seventh,” she said, as if suddenly remembering. “Because it was the same day as Mrs. McCray’s birthday next door, and her son-” She waved away these unnecessary details. “It was December the seventh.”

Helena lifted her chin, watching the house's narrow windows. Aside from the lit window she presumed belonged to the sitting room, only one other was lit- the upper left-hand window. Its curtains were pale blue lace, old-fashioned and pretty.

“In this house, only?” Helena asked.

“Yes. Nowhere else.” The lock went chunk and the door swung open, revealing a dim entryway, walls painted plum, warmth unfurling over Helena's freezing face. “Now, get along inside, we'll all get frostbite in this.”

The inside of the small house was as comfortable as the exterior suggested- shabby, but scrupulously clean, pictures hung carefully along the walls, rugs still bearing hoover marks. Helena smelled tea, smelled lavender; all was plum, dark pink, brown. She glanced in the sitting room as Mrs. Bower bustled into the kitchen and saw a ginger cat curled on one of the couch cushions, fast asleep.

“That's Nemo,” Mrs. Bower said, behind her. Helena looked round and saw her bearing a tea-kettle, a pinafore tied over her clothes. “I adore cats. Cecily did, too. He's a young one, just took him in last summer. He used to be all over the house, up and down like a maid with a feather duster, but...not anymore. He doesn't go upstairs anymore.”

“Never?”

“No.”

“Since when was this?”

“Since...yes, early December. Now take your coat off, warm up, have some tea...”

She vanished into the kitchen again. Helena shrugged off her coat and hung it on the nearby rack, then stepped into the sitting room proper. Nemo slept on; Helena didn't disturb him. Some animals were sensitive to psychic disturbance, became erratic, spooked, disrupting their normal patterns of behavior. Like people, really; they weren't so different. If he'd been frightened by possible psychic activity, he needed his rest.

Wandering through the room, Helena looked over the bookshelves, the side tables bearing more potted plants, the horticultural magazines stacked on an end table. While many of the pictures were pleasant, bucolic watercolors, the ones over the mantelpiece and along the surrounding walls were all photographs of the same girl at different ages. Her reddish hair had not been captured in the grainy newsprint, but her goblin grin and bright eyes were recognizable enough. A baby swaddled in Easter-egg-colored knits, a young child in plaits and school skirt, a preteen in sunglasses smiling in front of a beach. That was where they ended, the photographs and Cecily not progressing past thirteen, past the faded colors of that long-ago beach, paper-thin and receding into memory.

Helena looked round at the shuffle of carpet slippers. A man had entered the room, balding, stoop-shouldered, thin inside his threadbare cardigan. He glanced at Helena, then stopped.

“Susan found you, then,” he said.

“She did.”

Mr. Bower nodded. Helena recalled he'd been a teacher at a local secondary school until the murder. Helena suspected he had not stayed in the post. His eyes were sunken behind his spectacles, his face gaunt and sallow, his fingers ever fiddling with the hem of his cardigan, with the plasters bandaging his hands.

“That's our Cecily,” he said.

“Yes.”

His eyes wandered over the photographs. Helena recalled, too, that he had been the foremost suspect in the murder before Cecily's body had been found and linked to the other disappearances. Helena could not fathom that kind of suffering, that kind of pain and bewilderment.

“She was a good girl,” Mr. Bower murmured. “The cheek she could give you. But she was good. Under all that. A good heart.”

He shuddered and closed his eyes. Helena did not need to touch him to know what he was thinking. Cecily's chest cavity had been broken open, its contents removed. Her good heart was never recovered.

“Wish she'd come back,” Mr. Bower mumbled. “Proper.”

“I know, dear.” Mrs. Bower bustled back into the room, clasped her husband's shoulders, gave him a kiss on the head. “I know. Miss Blackwood is here to help us. Isn't she?”

Helena nodded.

“You can bring her back?” Mr. Bower lifted his eyes. Their whites were reddened, full of broken blood vessels. “You can bring her back to us?”

“I can't promise that,” Helena said. Mrs. Bower's knuckles paled on her husband's shoulders. “But I can...reach out. If there's psychic energy here, and she's the cause, her...spirit, her presence, then I can try to communicate with her. She may not respond,” Helena added. “They don't, not always. But-”

“We don't care,” Mrs. Bower said.

“-I'll try,” Helena went on. “I can promise you that much.”

The Bowers stared at her for a beat. Then Mrs. Bower nodded, jerky as a wind-up toy. “That's more than we've had for fifteen years,” she said. “We...can't pay you much-”

“No charge,” Helena said. “Consider it a late Christmas present.”

Visible relief eased the tension in Mrs. Bower's shoulders. “Well, then, that's all right. We...we can't thank you enough-”

“Once is plenty,” Helena said. She pointed toward the plaster ceiling. “Now, can I have a look at that first floor of yours?”

***

Stepping onto the landing, Helena knew something was here with her.

Watching her. Listening. The snow, the late hour- all conspired into a profound hush, the rattle of teacups and murmur of voices from the ground floor muffled, Helena's own breathing and the creak of floorboards beneath the carpet made overloud. Sounds in the hush, but below it, within it, a vibration, a tension, a breath held too long. The landing was dim, the hall lights doused. The glow from the ground floor leached up the narrow stairs, and at the end of the hall a streetlamp cast a muzzy amber pool through the curtains, but between them was only darkness. Whether it was empty or not, Helena didn't know.

Not yet. She drew a slow breath. Dust swirled in the still air. She glanced the other way, toward a pair of closed doors. The Bowers' bedroom, they'd told her, and a toilet. No. Not there. She turned instead to the right, facing the window.

Was that-

Helena went still, listening hard. Creaking, fading- the house settling on its foundations? She wasn't sure. And a hum, three notes, descending. She wasn't sure if she'd heard it, or if it had echoed only in her mind. She let her breath go, then shook out her hands, her tense shoulders. Focus.

She moved down the hallway, toward the window and the pool of streetlight.

Another pair of doors waited there. One was slightly open. Helena hesitated, then pressed a finger to the middle of the door. It swung open, silent. Streetlight illuminated this room, too, through pretty lace curtains. They cast strange patterns over the floor, over the made bed against one wall, its blue floral coverlet neatly turned back from the pillow, a crocheted blanket folded over the bed's foot. Pictures cut from magazines plastered the walls- Tommy Steele, Marty Wilde, photos of motor scooters and New York and the Parisian skyline. Books were stacked haphazardly on a desk, and a stuffed bear stared out with glass eyes from the shelf, flanked by framed pictures of family, schoolfriends, a black and white cat.

Helena stepped into the room and paced through it, taking it in. The wardrobe held several jumpers, skirts and dresses, a pair of trousers, all clean and ironed as if awaiting the next school day. A hand-knit scarf was folded in a drawer; in another, a tin box labeled TURNTABLE CASH held a few pound coins. Saving up for a record player, Helena figured, so Cecily might listen to her favorite music.

Fifteen years, and yet Cecily's room looked as if she might walk in any minute, see Helena, ask who she was and what she was doing here.

She wouldn't. She was dead, buried in the frozen earth. Helena, for her gifts, knew no way to do what Cecily's parents most craved, what had driven her own mother to despair and the razor. There was no way to bring back the dead. Echoes of echoes, that was her best. That was all she could do for the Bowers, all she could give them. It wasn't enough. Never enough.

But it was something. She closed the wardrobe and retreated to the bed. The pillow still had a dent in it where a girl's head might rest. Helena sat, slowly, on the edge of the bed, then smoothed her gloved palm over the pillow.

“Want to talk?” she murmured. “Your mum and dad miss you. And you've been making a fuss. Scaring the cat. Poor lad. I don't think you’d want that.”

A shiver; a distant hiss, like an exhale in the corner of the room. Helena lifted her head; cold trickled down her cheek, her nerves, and her hair moved. The air stung her cheek with ice. She held her breath she searched the darkness, looking for the first flit and glow of ectoplasm against the walls, the shadow of a girl gathering itself together in the night...

No. The curtains were moving, too. The window was open a crack, little enough Helena hadn't noticed when she'd entered the bedroom. She got up and went to the window, pulling it shut with a snap.

“Stupid,” she muttered to herself. “Amateur mistake.”

The street beyond was as she'd left it, the double rows of footprints she and Susan Bower had left behind quickly swallowed by falling snow. Helena's reflection was a hazy pale oval in the glass, her eyes dark smudges.

“Come on, Cecily,” she whispered. Her reflection whispered with her, staring back at her, endlessly. “Listen to me. Speak to me. Give me something, a sign. Anything.”

Movement, in the dark, behind her. It blotted out one of the pictures on the walls for a moment, then was gone again. Helena rounded on the empty bedroom. The movement had been next to the photo of the Paris skyline, taped on the wall by the bed. As if a girl had been standing there, behind Helena. Watching her.

Helena waited. Waited. Nothing more. There was no movement, no whisper. The tension remained, but it was muffled now, low. It would need coaxing to return.

“Anything?” said Mrs. Bower.

Helena glanced to the door. She stood there, peering in.

“Anything?” she said again, so hopeful it hurt.

“Not yet.” Helena stepped away from the window. “No...direct communication, anyway. But something's here.”

Mrs. Bower's eyes widened. “Is it her?”

“I can't say for sure. But it could be. There.” She pointed to the bedside. “An apparition, I think. More corporeal than energy.”

Mrs. Bower stared at the bedside, silent.

“What is it?” Helena asked.

“That was the...last place I saw her. Spoke to her.” She didn't look away from the bedside. “She was upset. At me...I didn't want her to go to her friends' after school. Wanted her to come back early, do her homework, help me around the house. But she wanted to listen to a new record, and she went anyway.”

Silence fell again. Helena watched Mrs. Bower, watched her face spasm and wrestle for control.

“I was upset with her, too,” Mrs. Bower said, more quietly. “Called her irresponsible. One of the last things I said to her. Our Ces.”

She made a little sound, a kind of gulping gasp, then glanced at Helena.

“Is it a sign, you think?” she asked.

“I think,” Helena told her, “something's going on in this house, that's for bloody sure. First, we should all have a cup of tea. Then I'll need you and your husband's help. And as many candles as you've got.”

Chapter Text

Candles lit, lamps dimmed, the sitting room of the Bower house became a chamber of weird, moving shadow, flames drawn long by the movement of the three participants in the night's séance. Helena moved from candle to candle, lighting them, placing them on shelves and side tables around the small room. Mrs. Bower removed the largest photograph of Cecily from the wall, holding it for a moment before she propped it in the middle of the circle, its faux-silver frame glimmering in the candlelight.

Mr. Bower huddled in an armchair, watching the flames, rocking back and forth a little as preparations were made.

“All right, dear?” Mrs. Bower asked him as she worked.

“Cecily's close.” He lifted his eyes to hers and nodded, too-fast. “She's close to us, Susan. I can hear her.”

“I know.” She touched his arm, then glanced to Helena. “When can we-?”

“We can start now.” Helena lit the final candle, then, rolling up her shirtsleeves, she returned to the center of the room. They'd pushed aside the armchair, the sofa, the low table with its magazines, clearing a space on the worn rug below. A coal popped in the hearth; beyond the front windows Helena, again, heard a dog howling in the night, though it sounded no closer than before.

She consulted the carriage clock on the mantel. Just after six, and already the street outside was dark as midnight, an orb of streetlight illuminating the whirling snow.

Good. Full dark. When spirits, entities, most easily manifested, when the veil was at its finest. Time to speak to the dead. Time to begin.

Helena picked up her teacup and sipped a fortifying mouthful of the stuff, then set it aside. “Mrs. Bower. Would you sit there, please.”

“Here?” She went to the pile of cushions arranged before the hearth.

“Yes. Thank you. Mr. Bower, you're all right where you are, if you're comfortable.”

“I'm all right. Anything to see my girl,” Mr. Bower said.

A mournful yowl echoed from the kitchen across the hall. Nemo, the cat. He sat in the kitchen doorway, not crossing its threshold, eyes glowing green in the candlelight. His tail twitched by his side, a constant, anxious movement.

“And you,” Helena told him. “Stay there.”

She paced around the circle, watching the candleglow, the shadows rising and falling. There was a gap between candles opposite Mrs. Bower; she stopped there, knelt, placed her hands on her knees. Her gloved hands clenched, unclenched, tension pulling her shoulders taut, her breathing shallow.

“Are you all right?” Mrs. Bower asked.

Helena nodded. “Feels weird. Strong, in this house. I think something's been waiting here a while.”

“Months. Like I said.”

“I'd wager longer than this. There's a lot of buildup. A hell of a psychic charge.”

Mrs. Bower's eyes widened, her face pale.

“Not...dangerous,” Helena amended. “But it could be disturbing.”

“I know that.”

“Cecily, if she appears, might look-”

“We had to...identify her,” Mrs. Bower cut in. “After. When they found her. Nothing can be worse than that.”

Silence fell once again. Helena lifted her eyes to the ring of candlelight, to the darkness beyond. A rush of cold passed through her; she shuddered as the flames drew long, as the hearth dimmed, becoming a pulsing, dull red glow, like a heart.

“Is that-” Mrs. Bower began.

Helena lifted a hand. “Quiet.”

Upstairs, over their heads- a faint tapping sound. Little dry clusters of taps, here and there, through the ceiling. Rhythmic, insistent. It might have been dropped stones, or a small fingertip against a pipe.

The sound faded. Helena's hand was still lifted. She tugged off its glove. Pale, exposed, her hand shone in the candlelight. Her fingers twitched; she thought of the cat's tail. The movement flickered; the flames spat.

“Temperature's dropping,” she murmured. “I'd guess...three to five degrees in the last few minutes...”

“What does that mean?” Susan Bower's voice was dry, but steady. Mr. Bower stared toward the ceiling, eyes shining.

“Means something's sucking the heat from the air. Energy. The entity-” She paused. “The presence needs that energy to manifest.”

“But it's not been cold before, not like this.”

“It wouldn't. You've only had...feelings, right? Heard things, sensed things? It hasn't manifested strong enough to notice the drop in temperature. Not yet.”

Another chorus of tapping sounded through the room, skittering like an animal across the ceiling. Mrs. Bower's gaze shot toward the doorway; so did Helena's. That had been fast, a dart down the upstairs hall, to the landing.

Silence fell. Helena's mind hummed- a wire, a spurt of electricity in the dark. Then a tap, a skitter, a soft, scraping whine, fingernails against plaster.

Shadows flickered on the floor at the foot of the stairs.

“Ces?” Mrs. Bower breathed.

Helena said nothing. Phosphorescent motes drifted in the corners of her vision. Plasm. Something was manifesting, manifesting strong. She shifted in place, pushing to her feet from where she knelt. The candle flames drew longer, longer, their hearts a cold yellow-white. Helena's next exhale was visible.

A thud on the stairs. Wood creaked. Floorboards.

A footstep.
Mrs. Bower made a choking sound, then nothing, her eyes wide, her face locked in a mask of terror, of hope; she grabbed for her husband and he squeezed her hands, her arms, around her shoulders, his entire body shaking. Helena's pulse thudded, liquid in her ears. A blister of pain formed behind her eye, pressure, pushing at her optic nerve, at her brain.

Steady, Blackwood. She breathed in and out, listening to the thrum around her, the gathering pressure in the air-

Another footstep on the stair. Another. Limping, dragging, somehow wet. Chest cavity split open. Ribs broken to get at the meat inside. Helena's breathing sawed at her throat. Her vision blurred, phantom lights glittering through her eyes.

She grabbed the corner of a chair, squeezed hard. It was solid, real, and it brought her back to herself, brought her into her body.

A third dragging footstep. A fourth. They were faster now, limping, stumbling down the stairs. Coming. The shadow stretched over the floor. The pressure built, the cold- it had to be eight degrees down, ten, frigid as the winter streets outside.

A fine rime of ice spread over the photograph of Cecily in the center of the circle. The candleflames stretched impossibly long.

Another thud. Something was there, at the foot of the stairs, just behind the doorway. Helena heard it, over her pulse, over the bloodrush in her ears. Wet, ragged breathing, each exhale ending in a faint rattle.

“Oh, God,” Mrs. Bower screamed, suddenly. “Cecily, come here, it's me, it's Mum, come back, come home-”

A surge of pressure; a crashing bang, breaking glass. Darkness filled the room: the candles had gone out, all at once, and the fireplace, doused as if by a sudden wind. Helena flinched, crouching. She heard muffled sobs, groans, the sharp sounds of glass shattering against the floor. Her body shook, feverish, her vision pounding, but she didn't speak, didn't move away.

A mote of light unfurled in the center of the circle of snuffed candles.

It pulsed, fetal, fledgling. With each pulse it spread, a curled form of that milky silver light, bright as moonlight but illuminating little. It grew, spreading nascent limbs, the impression of ribs, a spine, eye-hollows, until what curled there in midair was the vague form of a child, a girl, vibrating in and out of focus. One moment almost solid, the next translucent, skeletal.

Its knees were pressed to its chest, arms hugged around its legs. Long hair drifted as if underwater. The cold radiated over Helena, numbing her worse than the winter.

Through the ghost, Helena saw the Bowers scramble upright, their eyes wide, shining silver in its light. Mrs. Bower's mouth moved; no sound emerged.

“Cecily,” Helena said.

The ghost twitched. Its whole form lurched, a puppet yanked on a string.

“Cecily Bower,” Helena said. “Do you hear me? Do you know where you are?”

Another lurching spasm. Phantasmal liquid dripped from one toe, hissing into nothingness as it made contact with the floor.

Far away-

A whine filled the darkness. A cry, just past hearing.

Helena stepped forward, into the circle. “Cecily,” she said again. “Are you there?”

The whine became a keen. The Bowers heard it, too- they recoiled, holding one another. Tears slid down their faces.

“Speak to me,” Helena said. Her voice strengthened as she lifted one hand. “Speak to me. Use my heat. Use it to make yourself strong enough to communicate.”

The pulsing light grew brighter. The keen sharpened; in it, a gibber of half-formed words echoed through the dark room. Helena stretched her hand toward the ghost, into the fringes of the ghostlight aura. Cold stung her fingertips. She flinched, but kept her hand outstretched, reaching into the light, the plasm struggling toward becoming corporeal.

Cecily.

Eyes in the dark. Terror unspeakable. A place far from the light, and she knew she would never see the sun again, never see her parents again.

Cecily-

-What are you doing what are you doing oh my God please please please stop just let me go please stop-

-Cecily-

-It hurts, it hurts, it hurts-

-Ces.

Words. Meaning. Weeping, childish, unbearable. The taste of salt, of blood, of sugar on her tongue. Sugared tea, floral and dust. It had made her so tired. For a while.

Please-

“Cecily,” Helena whispered. “Do you know where you are?”

The words drifted from the dark, whispers from the gloom.

Home. Dead. Dead, home.

“Oh-” Mrs. Bower clapped her hands to her mouth.

“Do you know what happened to you?”

The spirit twitched again. Its head, tucked into its arms, shook. Yes.

“Your mum and dad are here.” Helena's hand ached, purple-blue with cold. She didn't lower it. “They miss you. So much. They're so desperate to see you again, talk to you again. Is that why you came back? After all this time?”

The weeping faded.

No...

“What?” Mrs. Bower stood, sudden, face crazed with tears. “Darling, you've got to know how much we love you, how much we miss you, oh, God, we miss you so much.”

“We just want you back,” Mr. Bower murmured.

...No...

-Come back, come back, through the dark...

Helena shook her head. “We know you've come back. We want to know why.”

...the dark and the cold...didn't like it when we cried...said it was a gift we were giving...the best gift of all...

“What?” Helena's pulse thudded in her throat. “What gift? Who?”

You...

...so talented...

The ghost's arm unfurled like the stalk of some pallid plant. Bones flickered through its matter, pulsing in and out, in and out.

It drifted, then- sudden- lashed out. Cold clamped Helena's wrist. She jerked away but her skin burned like a brand, her arm yanked, pinned in midair by a force like muscle, psychic and terrible and burning, burning-

Darkness. And in it, a voice, a girl's whisper of desperation:

...You...

...were...her...

...favorite...

The force vanished. Helena jerked backward, breaking the circle of candles. They toppled, rolled over the carpet. Light dazzled her vision: a lamp was on, illuminating the small sitting room with its homely glow. Her vision throbbed. In and out, like the plasm.

“-All right, Miss Blackwood-?”

She blinked. Mrs. Bower was there, peering up at her. She must have turned the lamp on. Her face was blanched, her eyes dark-ringed, but she seemed all right, seemed well enough. Had she not heard the terrible voice? Helena made herself breathe, slowing her galloping heart.

“You took a funny turn, there” Mrs. Bower said. “Went all still.”

“I'm...fine.” Helena pulled back from her and glanced around the room. The candles were doused, the air thick with their acrid scent. “You...what did you see?”

A faint inhale. “Light,” Mrs. Bower said. Her husband knelt my the hearth; several photographs had fallen, glass broken over the floorboards. “And...whispers. I...I don't know. Was that...?”

She trailed away. Silence hung like the smoke.

“Yeah.” Helena touched her face, feeling her cold fingertips against her skin. Steady. You're here. This is real. “That was her.”

Mrs. Bower made a faint noise. She closed her eyes for a moment, then opened them. They were bright with tears.

“Is she gone, now?” she whispered.

“I think so. I don't feel anything here anymore.” The tension had evaporated, the psychic hum silenced. The house was only a house.

“She wanted to come back. One last time. To let us see her again.” She pressed her hand to her face, her cheek. “Ces, I'm sorry. I'm so sorry.”

She withdrew, approaching Mr. Bower as he gathered the photographs from the floor beneath the mantel. She reached for him. He took her hand, squeezed it, his thin fingers clasping hers. Helena watched them for a moment, brow furrowed.

Back to let us see her again. One last time...

Helena was not so sure.

Something soft hummed by her side. Nemo, the cat. He'd padded to her ankle and was purring like a small engine, rubbing his face and flanks against her trouser leg. Helena hesitated, then leaned down and touched him, slow strokes of his soft ginger fur.

One thing was certain: Cecily Bower was gone, in this world and the next. Helena was a stranger here again, and it was with a final rub of Nemo's small head, she gathered her coat and left, wordless, back into the January night from which she'd come.

***

The snow had deepened since she'd gone into the Bower house, the cold sharper. The last of the gray twilight was gone, the sky dense, black, awhirl with feathery snow. She crunched down the streets, heading back the way she'd come, toward the Belsize Park Tube station, her head down against the wind.

You were her favorite.

What did it mean? Perhaps Cecily's spirit had not meant it for her. Perhaps it had been an echo, something Cecily had heard in her final hours, or minutes. But the dead did not return for trivial matters. Cecily had torn herself from the other side, from the dark night beyond, because those words were her matter, her only thoughts, associated with emotion so strong that they had ripped a hole in the living world. No, it meant something.

But what?

Had she never known-

Had she been a target?

Helena's head ached. She stopped in the snowy street and rubbed her hand over her face, at once unspeakably exhausted. She didn't want to go back to her cold, cramped flat, to her dark attic offices. Maybe there was a takeaway open on her route home, maybe the place across the street would do her a curry, maybe she could get completely soused and call, not for the first time, Toby's flat number and listen to it ring. Or maybe she needed sleep, sleep and no dreams, nothing but silence and rest and oblivion.

Engines rumbled through the hush. Helena looked up as headlights speared the snow: a car approaching from the opposite direction, a dark-colored Ford Cortina. She stood aside to let it pass, but as it approached it slowed, carving runnels in the snow under the tires, and drew up alongside Helena on the curb.

Helena waited, hands in her pockets.

The door opened, disgorging a young man from the drivers' seat. His face shone pale in the backwash from the headlights, round and friendly, with curly brown hair and a crooked nose. He wore a brown trench coat and a turtlenecked jumper, his cheekbones stung pink by the cold. He smiled at Helena over the frame of the door.

“Evening!” he called. He had a pleasant, genial voice, with a middle-class London accent. “You're Helena Blackwood.”

“Well spotted.” Helena carried on walking. “Bye.”

“Wait! Wait.” The man hurried from behind the door. The passengers' side opened, too, and an older man emerged wordlessly, watching them through tortoiseshell spectacles. “Sorry- I- we're from SPR. The Society for-”

“-Psychical Research. I'm quite aware of the acronym.” Helena didn't stop. “You need me, you can drop by my office on business hours. I'm off the clock.”

“Wait, sorry, you're-”

“Bye.”

“Miss Blackwood-”

“Night.”

“Helena,” said the other man.

She stopped. She swayed, a little, where she stood. Her breathing tightened; disbelief numbed her body. She came back to herself, a moment later, and drew a sharp breath before she turned and she looked at the man behind the car.

He stood, quiet, expressionless, watching her. His fair hair had gone completely gray, and he'd grown a short, neat beard, silvery in the headlights, but the rest of him had not much changed. His square-jawed face was dour as ever, his light-colored eyes glinting behind his spectacles. He still wore the same sort of clothes, dark Harris tweeds and sober tie, stolid and traditional. There was no denying, no mistaking him. Not him standing there, not the sound of his voice, one of Helena's oldest and most enduring memories.

“I'm not surprised,” he went on. “That you'd walk away. You were always a contrary girl.”

Helena found her voice.

“You bastard,” she whispered.

“I'm not here to argue with you. Get in the car, please. We have a lot to talk about.”

“No. No. I'm not going anywhere with you.” She moved toward them, sliding her hands from her pockets. Blood pounded in her ears like a ghost was near. The younger man edged nervously out of the way as Helena stepped off the curb. “You had your chance to talk to me. You had your bloody chance, fifteen years ago, when you disappeared, when you left us, left Mum alone to die in that fucking pit-”

He exhaled. “I understand you must be upset, but-”

“Upset?” Her voice rose to a rough snarl. “Yeah. You're right, Dad, I am upset, and if you don't turn yourself around and get the hell away from me I'll show you what that feels like, I'll show you just how upset I am-”

“Were you just at the Bowers' house?” managed the younger man.

Helena cut off. She tore her eyes from her father and looked at the stranger.

“What?” she said.

“Did you just perform a séance at the home of Susan and Philip Bower?”

“I-” Helena faced him. “Yeah.”

“Then you really need to come with us. He's right. Sorry,” the young man said. He scratched his mop of hair, looking apologetic. “It's a bit serious, really.”

“How so?”

“Because if you don't receive our official sign-off on the séance, you'll be acting in violation of the Society,” he said. “And your authority to perform professional psychical investigations might be...well. Revoked.”

Helena glanced at her father. “Blimey. Threatening to ruin my business, too. Glad to see you're still meeting expectations.”

“No no!” the other man said, quickly. “It's not a threat. I swear. It's for your own good. Your own protection if this is as serious as we think it is. Besides, you'll be interested to hear what we have to say.”

“And what, exactly, do you have to say?”

“Lady Irene Godwin.”

Her father stepped forward, around the hood of the car, floodlit by its headlights. “You know the name.”

“Of course I know the name,” Helena snapped. “Serial killer. Toff. Murdered five kids.”

“Including young Cecily Bower, in 1960. The phantasmal remains of whom, if I'm not mistaken, you communicated with less than an hour ago.”

Helena said nothing.

“A séance which we were on our way to accomplish,” he went on.

“Yeah?” Helena scoffed. “You and what psychic?”

The young man waved.

“Mr. St. Clair is an accomplished medium, like yourself,” her father said. “More than capable of communicating with the Bower girl.”

“Right. Well, I got to the case first. What's the bloody issue?”

“I can't discuss it here. Now-”

“No. Tell me what this is about or I walk.”

“Helena, this isn't a playing matter-”

Helena laughed, harsh and humorless. “Isn't it? Your family always was that to you, Dad, we were always second to your great research, your studies, the wonderful and terrible work you devoted your whole bloody life to do-”

“That is not fair.”

“Don't give me that shit.”

“Helena-”

White ringed her vision. “Don't say my name. Don't you bloody say my name like you always did, like I was nothing, like I was shameful. Like I'm still your favorite disappointment. You're- you have nothing to stand on, you- you left me, you left me alone, you vanished and I never knew where you went, never knew why...”

Helena shook her head. Heat stung her eyes. “So you owe me that. You owe me that at least before you even think about asking me to come with you. Trust you. Tell me what this is about. Now. Or I swear to you I will walk away and you'll never see me again.”

She cut off. St. Clair glanced between her and her father. Professor Alistair Blackwood drew a long, slow breath. He didn't move from where he stood, only looked out past the reach of the headlights, into the night.

“There was a death, in London,” he said. “A recent death. A terrible death. And certain markers to the crime, certain elements, give us reason to believe she's back.”

“Who's back?”

“Lady Godwin,” her father said. “She's returned, and she's killed. Again.”

Chapter Text

“You don't have to call me 'Mister St. Clair,' by the way,” Mr. St. Clair said, meeting Helena's gaze in the rearview mirror. “My name's Matthew. Matthew St. Clair. But you can call me Matty. Actually, please call me Matty. My friends all call me Matty.”

“I don't care,” Helena said.

Matty blinked.

“Right-o,” he said.

The car smelled faintly of mint and cigarettes, the heater turned up just past functioning. Outside, London was a blur of darkness, snow, and streetlamps, thoroughfares long rivers of light, reflecting chips of gold off the distant river. Helena glimpsed the embankment, abandoned for the night. The spinal forms of bridges, dark on dark. Her eyes ached; she let them close, let the car rock and creak around her as Matty St. Clair navigated through the city.

She heard her father speak to Matty, a murmur too quiet to hear.

“I don't think so,” Matty replied.

Helena opened her eyes. “What.”

“Nothing for you to hear.” Her father didn't look back, facing front, staring out the windscreen, all smeared in snow.

Helena looked at the back of his head for a moment, then leaned against the pleather seat and exhaled, wordless.

They wound deeper through gloomy streets. Holborn, Helena thought. Buildings of off-white stone and brick rose around them like pale cliffs, the streets wide, flagged, plane trees skeletal. Few windows were illuminated; the streets were devoid of walkers, no living thing about in this cold. The car headed toward a doorway that was lit, steps sunk in a pool of lamplight from twin sconces. The door between them looked like the rest, black with a half-moon transom window.

As the car slowed along the curb, Matty's eyes flickering again to Helena's in the rearview, Helena glimpsed a brass plate set into the middle of the door, and a peculiarly-shaped knocker, unlike those on other buildings.

Matty killed the engine, paused, then got out of the car. He hurried to the door, up the steps, fumbling with a ring of keys from his pocket.

Helena waited. Her father glanced back at her.

“Anything to say?” he asked.

“No.”

An arched brow. “That's not like you.”

“Long time since you knew me.”

“I think we always understood one another perfectly.”

“Is that what you think?”

He sighed a little, shook his head, then disembarked the car, slamming the door behind him. Helena followed a moment later, pushing her hands again deep into her coat pockets. On this street, protected by the stately Portland stone buildings around them, the wind was cut to a murmur, the snow a fine, gossamer haze.

Matty had unlocked the door and pushed it open, waiting. Beyond, Helena made out a slice of darkness tinged with some ruddy light, its source unseen. Faint heat brushed her face, and a smell. Incense, like in a church. She thought of tombs, of ritual-places, of shrines, and shivered. As Matty ushered her in, she read the brass plate on the door:

ACHERON HOUSE

Society for Psychical Research

1885

Below this, a knocker hung, rimed with ice. A serpent, eating its own tail. An ouroboros.

Helena moved past it, over the threshold and into a dim entry hall, its walls papered in deep red silk, the floor lain with Chinese rugs. Oil paintings in heavy frames hung along the hall, leading deeper into the house. Helena got the impression, red walls and vaulted ceiling and the long tongue of rugs, that she had entered the gullet of a creature, a snake, swallowing her down.

“This way,” her father said, pushing past her and Matty, heading deeper.

Helena followed. Despite the opulence of her surroundings, there was a sense of decay, too- a fine rime of dust on the frames, the carpets faded, worn in streaks and patches by decades of footfall. They passed doors, the base of a stairwell, steps curving upwards into gloom. Floorboards creaked overhead, then quieted once more.

As they moved on, another sound became apparent- whispers, consolidating into a chorus of noise. Multiple voices, maybe a dozen, whisper-chanting from somewhere up ahead. Helena looked sideways at Matty. He lifted his eyebrows, but said nothing.

They approached a door at the end of the hallway, dark carved wood like the others, its handle verdigrised with age. Helena's father knocked; the door opened. An impossibly ancient woman peered through the crack, her face gaunt as a mummy's, eyes pinpricks of light beneath her hooded black cloak.

“Professor Blackwood,” she murmured, her voice arch and dry.

He inclined his head. “And guest.”

The woman stepped back, allowing them in. The darkened room on the other side might have been a sitting room, a drawing room, a library; Helena could not tell. It had been draped entirely in black, so that against the backdrop the dozen or so figures grouped around a lamplit table in the center became moving shadows, cloaked like the door-woman in balding black velvet, its Victorian decadence touched by the same rime of decay as the rest of the house.

The faces under the hoods were a myriad of ages, men and women with heads lifted and eyes closed, their hands clasped in a circle around the table, their lips moving as they chanted. The sound washed over Helena, susurrous and strange. Her nerves prickled, her spine. A hum filled the air, the sound, a field of energy, tension.

Helena frowned, then shifted closer, trying to get a better look at the table. Its dark wood surface was glossy as a pond, a collection of items set on a cloth in the center. A teacup with a crack, a bright green apple, a curved rib bone.

“What is this?” Helena whispered.

Her father held up a finger. Silence. Helena knew the signal well.

Whatever the ritual, it was nearly done. A pulse of pressure made Helena wince; one of the chanters cried out, a young woman with long, sleek dishwater hair, eyes rolling back in her skull like wet pearls. The objects began to vibrate, rattling against one another and the tabletop below. Faster, faster, until the vibration was a blur, until the hum tightened to a high whine, almost painful.

Without warning, the teacup cracked, an explosive report like a gunshot. Helena flinched; shards scattered over the tabletop, skittering onto the floor. The other objects jolted away as if kicked. Another gasp; a dragging breath, and one of the other hooded people collapsed over the table. There was murmuring, patting, brandy fetched and distributed in small glasses.

Helena gave her father a look.

“Are they psychics?” she asked.

He shook his head. “Only one of them. Eugenia.” He indicated the woman whose eyes had rolled back. “The others...assist.”

“Telekinesis. Fascinating.”

“Impressed?”

“I've seen worse party tricks.” Seen better, too, Dad. Seen the inside of another world. Seen monsters, real ones. Still, she stared at the broken teacup, the charred circle in the center of the doily, scorching the table beneath. “They...fuel her abilities?”

“Yes. She was discovered when she made stones spontaneously fall from the sky in her family home. As it transpired, apportation was not her sole talent. But it takes other minds, however mundane, to bestow true control.”

“That didn't exactly look like control.”

Her father made a small hm sound, frowning. “All breakthroughs begin somewhere. I suppose you know that. This way.”

They crossed the back of the room, behind the rows of black-draped chairs, and passed through a small door in the corner, hidden by a velvet curtain. This took them down a plainer passageway, linoleum-floored with avocado-colored walls, up a set of stairs, and into a small sitting room, its single rectangular window overlooking the snowy street.

“Anyone want a cuppa?” Matty brandished an electric kettle set on a sidebar.

“Yeah, thanks. Milk, no sugar,” said Helena.

Her father hesitated. “The same for me, St. Clair. Helena, sit.”

He did not say please. Helena did not wait for him to. She'd be waiting til doomsday. She sat, slowly, on the sofa. Her father paced to the window, hands in his trouser pockets.

“So,” Helena said. “This place. You been here long?”

“Not long. The Society has many halls from which it operates, not just Acheron.”

“Ah. Wealthy members.”

“Generous ones.”

“You've been working with them since...when? Before or after you decided we weren't worth your time?”

“Helena.”

“That tone doesn't work on me, Dad. Not ten years old anymore.”

“If you were, perhaps, the situation we find ourselves in would not have come to pass.”

Helena's body went cold. She stared at his back, at the glint of his spectacles against the snowy night.

“You were at the house, weren't you?” her father went on.

“Yes.”

“I can't see why. There's nothing left anymore.”

“Then why haven't you sold it?”

“Maybe-” This was Matty, stepping forward with two teacups in hand. Helena and her father looked at him at once. “Sorry. Maybe this would be a better discussion for...later.”

“Of course.” Helena's father accepted his tea and went to an armchair opposite Helena. Matty gave Helena her own cup, steaming, fragrant, returning some warmth to her numb fingers. “Let's get to the matter at hand, shall we.”

Helena said nothing.

“Irene Godwin,” her father said. “Tell me what you know.”

“She...” Helena thought back. “She was an aristocrat. London-born. Her grandmother was some kind of Russian nobility, escaping the Revolution.” This fact had been emphasized in newspapers, eschewing, perhaps, the notion that a purely English pedigree could be responsible for such atrocities. Much less a titled, beautiful one. “Godwin killed kids. Dumped their mutilated bodies around the city.”

“Yes. In 1960, she was found responsible for the murders of five young people between the ages of nine and fourteen. Each was missing a part of the body. The heart and lungs, the legs at the thigh, the arms, the eyes. The head.”

He slowly sipped his tea, gesturing to Matty. Matty went to a cabinet along the wall, ornately-carved with a motif of angels, unlocked it, and removed an overstuffed file, buff-colored and bound with string. He carried it back to Helena's father.

“These are copies of the original police files,” her father went on.

“How'd the Society manage that?”

“Like I said. Generous friends.” He undid the string and flicked open the file, full of brittle, yellowing papers, typed lines faded with age. “The children.”

He passed Helena a photocopy of five children's' pictures. School photos, most of them. She recognized Cecily instantly. She'd seen the original at the Bower house earlier that evening. The others' names drifted through her mind like echoes, indelibly marked- Bethany, Lauren, Jonathan, Sunil. Sunil Ahmad, who'd been eleven years old when he'd died; Lauren Crowley, the youngest, was only nine. Awkward smiles, plaited hair, glasses too big for their faces. Crying out in the dark, crying for help that never came. Only death, the cruelest kind, bathed in fear and terror and unimaginable pain.

“Lady Godwin,” her father said.

The next photocopy was, too, familiar. A woman gazed through the seamy gray shadows. Her heart-shaped face was undeniably lovely, her lips slightly parted, her near-white hair falling in soft starlet waves down one cheek. Even in this imperfect copy her eyes shone, pinpoints of light in their depths so they seemed to focus on Helena, given strange, false life.

“The missing pieces of her victims were never found, not even after Lady Godwin's capture and conviction. Her home was well searched. There was the theory she'd buried the pieces on the grounds of the ancestral Godwin estate, in Oxfordshire, but after a thorough investigation this was discarded.” Blackwood took another sip of tea. “Still, her confession and circumstantial evidence was enough. She was executed by hanging in March of 1962, aged twenty-nine.”

“No one knows why she did it,” Matty said quietly. He hadn't sat down, but leaned against the far wall, eyes averted, hands in his coat pockets. “She never said. Never gave any sort of explanation.”

Helena gathered the papers and pushed them away. “Yeah. Scary stuff. You said there's been another murder?”

“Yes. Two weeks ago, before Christmas. Hammersmith. A passersby noticed a broken window on a flat. Upon police entry the flat's occupant, a Mrs. Charity Smith, was discovered to have been murdered and gutted on the sitting room floor.”

Helena lifted her eyebrows. “Heart and lungs taken?”

“Precisely.”

“More information from your special friends on the force, I imagine.”

Her father tilted his head a little, glasses glinting.

“Well.” Helena drew a long breath. “That's very interesting. Dunno why it has anything to do with me. Or with you lot, honestly. Some nutter's become obsessed with Godwin, decided to replicate her crimes. Or it's coincidence. It happens.”

“It does,” her father agreed. “Not this time, Helena.”

She met his eyes. Her teacup had become cold in her hand, untouched.

“I think you have some idea why we are interested in this matter,” he went on.

Helena shook her head.

“So she came to one of Mum's meetings,” she said. Matty lifted his head, sudden as a dog with a scent. “Lots of people did. She catered to the rich, curious, and eccentric. I'd say Godwin counts as all of those things.”

“I spoke to her, that night,” her father said. He set aside his teacup. “I remember it very well. It was an...unusual conversation. The séance had not been a particularly impressive one, but...she seemed...”

He stopped, staring off into the corner of the room, his brow furrowed.

“Enchanted,” he said at last. “More than I would have expected. She stayed later than the others, asking questions. Your mother grew bored, I think, and withdrew, but I did not. She asked about what, exactly, we had connected with. Whether it was only a human spirit, or if there were...other things. Entities of nonhuman origin. She was clearly well-versed on the matter. Trained, I might even say, though I learned nothing more at the time.

“She asked, too,” he continued, “about the circle itself.”

“The- circle? The other guests?”

“Yes. Whether Rebecca alone could have established a psychic link to the spirits, or whether or not the circle was necessary. The circle of other minds. The power generated by that psychic connection.”

He interlaced his fingers. “I think she was disappointed by my answers.”

“A psychic...link,” Helena said.

He nodded.

“Like what I saw with Eugenia, just now?”

“Yes.”

“So she...had these ideas, then, years ago? Years before the Society figured out how to make it work, how to amplify a psychic's influence?”

“Yes. That's what I surmise.”

“So...” Helena paused. She could hear the faint whisper of snow against the window, the groan of a pipe in the walls of the old building. “You think these murders- the original ones, and these current ones- were part of some...some ritual? An attempt to...access power?”

“Some people are born with power,” her father said. “They never know anything different, and disregard it. Some can only dream of it. And that dreaming turns dark.”

Again, a sting of cold, a rage and grief down at the heart of her. Helena lowered her eyes, thinking.

“You want me to work with you,” she said at last. It was not a question. “For you.”

“I want you and Matty to take on this matter. The Society is prepared to fund your investigation.”

“The Society turned Mum away when she came to them for help.”

“Your mother's attempts at contact had become foolhardy and dangerous. Their decision to not get involved was strategic.”

“Right.”

“I attempted to help her, Helena. I reached out to her repeatedly. She turned me down each time.”

“And why, Dad, should I believe anything you say?”

Her father stared at her for a few seconds, long enough for the hush to grow excruciating. At last he reached into the file again.

“This was found, on her,” he said. “When she was taken into custody.”

He withdrew a small cellophane bag and handed it to Helena. She took it and looked at the small square photograph within. It was not a photocopy, but the original. A head and shoulders shot of a young boy, gawky, pale, with black hair and wide, dark eyes, staring with intensity back at Helena. Her pulse began to beat. Quicker, harder, little needle stabs.

“This is Arthur,” she said. Her voice was dry.

“Yes.”

Cecily's spirit, her presence in the house...it had been strong, unusually so. Helena's eyes flickered back and forth. Her pulse pounded.

“Cecily Bower had sensitivity,” she murmured. “Maybe...latent, but...yeah. I think she had something, too. And if Godwin had targeted...two psychic kids, then...”

“...Perhaps all of them were psychic.”

She lifted her eyes. “What does this mean?”

Her father smiled, thinly.

“That,” he said, “is precisely what I need you to find out.”

***

Helena left the room, head down, shoulders hunched. She barely noticed Matty at her side until they had reached the entrance hall and he cleared his throat, a small polite cough.

She looked up at him. He stared back at her, his chin tucked into the high cable-knit neck of his Aran jumper.

“So,” he said. “It's- well, it's exciting to work with you, to be honest. I read about Glaster Hall, of course. And your mother's work! Truly groundbreaking, iconic, even-”

“Yeah. Nice to work with you, too. St. Clair.” Helena looked him over, up and down. The resemblance, along with the name, was becoming clear, especially once she'd looked over the photos of Godwin's victims. The eyes were unmistakable, round and nut-brown and utterly gormless. “But I don't think it was my involvement what got you on this case, was it.”

He blinked, then sighed, looking away.

“No,” he said.

“You look a lot like her. Bethany.”

“Beth,” he corrected. “Yes. I know. Everyone used to tell us that as kids. We were only a year and a half apart. Drove me mad, at the time.”

“How old were you?”

“Eleven. She was twelve, almost thirteen.” He paused, long and awful. “Godwin took her eyes. My parents never got them back. I think about that, sometimes. Her, down there, under the earth. Waiting for her body to be whole again. Some cultures believe...if a body is incomplete, the spirit can never rest. It'll wander the world, lost, forever.”

“My mother told me the same.”

He nodded.

“I'd like to find where she put them,” he said. “It's a long shot, but...maybe...” He sighed. “My parents would get some comfort from it. My other siblings. It's been a difficult fifteen years.”

“And she was-?”

“-Gifted? Not so much as me. But yes. She and I would share dreams. When she...when she was gone, I knew. I knew. It was so cold.”

“Did you see anything?”

“Of her death? No.” He smiled a little, sadly. “I guess that was the one mercy. I don't think I'd be able to carry on, now. If I saw it. If I'd watched her die.”

You can, Helena wanted to say. You keep existing, keep carrying on. Your heart keeps beating, sure. But I don't know if you keep living, not really.

She said nothing, just nodded and began toward the door.

“I'll see you tomorrow,” she said. “Late morning, yeah? Need to get my things. Get some rest.”

“Yes, me too- wait, Miss Blackwood, I can give you a lift back, if you want-”

“Nah. Thanks.” She opened the door into the dark. “I'll walk. Night, St. Clair.”

She made her way home, by Tube, then by foot. A bell rang nine by the time she arrived back at her Spitalfields office, a triple-storied brick edifice with an ever-changing retinue of businesses occupying the lower floors. She'd stopped by the takeaway across the street for a curry, and the rich smell of vindaloo accompanied her up the narrow carpet-clad stairs, into the gloomy upper landing, into the office itself.

Cluttered, walled in shelves and cabinets, it had stayed warm during her absence- something to be said for small rooms, she supposed, slinging the takeaway bag onto her desk and switching on the banker's light. Its green glow filled the darkness, illuminating her own filing cabinets, her books and papers, the figurines and rock crystals and ephemera, occult, esoteric, macabre, that littered the shelves and flat surfaces. A record player stood open like a hungry mouth; a set of deer antlers served as a scarf and hat rack, hung with many of both. Helena scrunched up an old receipt and aimed for the wastepaper basket.

She threw. It skittered into the basket. It was not the only sound. From the corner: a small, stifled inhale.

Helena froze. She turned.

“How the hell did you get in?” she snapped. “This place is locked.”

The shadow unfolded itself from the gap between bookshelf and wall: a dark-haired, brown-skinned young boy, dressed in threadbare jeans and too-big sweater and puffy jacket. “Maybe you're bad at locking things,” he mumbled.

“Cheeky. Does anyone know you're here?”

“No.”

“Oh, so you're a sneak as well as a lockpick.”

Sami Malik muttered under his breath.

“What was that?”

“Nothing.”

“No, I'd love to hear.”

“Said...like you care.”

“I do, in fact. There are several valuable objects in this office,” Helena told him.

“Where?”

“You have ten seconds to explain yourself, Sami.”

“I was...”

“Nine.”

“I don't like it at that house,” he burst out. “The other kids there...I don't like them. They...they cry at night.”

He paused. “I cry at night. And I'm hungry. I'm hungry all the time. They don't let us have food between meals.”

“Is that why you learned to pick locks?”

He stared at her for a beat, then nodded.

Helena sighed. She rubbed her forehead.

“Is anyone looking for you, right now?” she asked.

“No. I was quiet. I won't be missed until morning.”

“Right.” Helena went toward the door.

“Where are you going?” Sami said, voice tremulous.

“Keep your socks on, blimey.” She pointed to the takeaway boxes on the desk. “Eat that. I'm gonna go get another curry.”

She returned some minutes later with more curry, naan, poppadoms, a little packet of milk sweets. Sami looked as if the sugar would do him some good. She found him bent over the empty takeaway boxes, shoveling basmati rice into his mouth with his fingers.

Helena set the bag on the desk beside him. “Good?”

His shoulders squinched toward his ears, then dropped.

“Glad to hear it.” She sat at the desk chair, watching him clean up the rice, then tear open the new bag. “Sami.”

He dunked a piece of naan into the fragrant yellow curry and stuffed it into his mouth.

“Sami.”

“Mmph.”

“You can't stay here.”

He didn't say anything, but carried on eating at that alarming pace. Helena eyed his thin wrists, his spindly fingers, the hollows in his cheeks. “It's not just up to me. The police will come and take you back if your foster family doesn't do it first. It's the law.”

“I don't care about the stupid law.”

“Like it or not, I do. I have a business. This-” She gestured around the office. “-is my livelihood. My life. Can't do my work from prison.”

“You don't care.”

“I care.”

He'd finished the curry, most of the naan. He stopped eating, pushed aside the takeaway boxes, and sat for a moment, brow furrowed. How old was he, now? Twelve, that was right. He looked younger.

“So why didn't you take me, back then,” he muttered.

“I don't have room for a rat in here, much less a kid.”

“I don't like it, where I am, it's a bad place, it's awful-”

“I don't love it here, either, but that's what we've got, Sami.”

“Why are you like this?” Sami snapped. “Why are you so useless?”

He got up and stormed for the door. Helena stood, hurrying after him. “Sami.”

“I'm leaving-”

“Sami, you can stay here tonight,” Helena said. Sami froze. “You can sleep in here. I've got a camp bed, somewhere. If you can find it, you can...you can sleep on it. We can talk more in the morning, all right? Look, I've...”

She exhaled. “I've had a long day. A long bloody day.”

His shoulders hunched. He looked round. His large, dark eyes shone, but he didn't cry. He sniffed, wetly, and scrubbed his palm over his nose.

“And tomorrow?” he said.

“Tomorrow,” Helena told him, “is tomorrow. Now eat up all this, before I do, and I'll make us some tea. We both need it.”

Chapter Text

London did not die or hibernate in winter, like other living things. It quieted, it deepened, withdrawing into itself, lamplit and shadowed, preserved in ice. Its stone acquired a glaze of frost, thin as glass; fronds spiraled over windows, and the city's many waterways, the blood through its ancient, haggard flesh, ran black as ink beneath bridges, streets, into the darkness of the sewers below.

Still, light survived, festooning buildings and trees, department stores lit up like cruise ships against the night, roadways a constant blare and blaze. It had become, to Helena, a kind of lullaby: the turning and changing of the seasons, the rhythm of the city, the approach of the long dark after summertime's heat.

The Tube spat her into the morning streets of Hammersmith, in West London; familiar, too, from the gabble of the commercial road to the mud-brown smell of the river, the silt banks lined with brightly-colored longboats and bare trees. Against the snow the shop awnings looked too vivid, the bustle of people streaming down King Street overloud, oversharp. Helena kept her shoulders hunched inside her coat, head lowered into the funnel neck of her jumper, pushing against the crowd-stream until she found the place, a cafe with Formica-topped tables and builders at the counter, good-naturedly jibing at the cooks as they ordered vast platters of bacon and fried tomatoes and mud-colored tea.

Matty St. Clair stuck out amongst them like a soft-eared terrier amongst bulldogs. He stood from the corner table as Helena entered and waved, as if she might miss him. She approached, looking him over. The same brown coat he'd worn the day before was slung over the back of his chair, but he had a different jumper, a Fair Isle knit that looked handmade. He'd had apparently been in the middle of tea and toast when she'd come in.

“Miss Blackwood. Good to see you again.” He set down the toast, brushed crumbs off his front. “Sit down, please, do you want any-?”

“No, thanks. We close to the flat?”

He sighed and nodded. “Around the corner. Not far.”

Helena sat, leaning back in the uncomfortable chair. “So,” she said. “Have you known my dad long, then?”

Matty swallowed a mouthful of toast. “Not...not really. I mean, four years, or so, he...well. He's something of a star, in my field. He was one of the researchers who observed an experiment I was part of, well, a demonstration, I suppose. Of precognition. I'm sure you've seen it- cards with pictures on them, flipped over in a different room, while I'm in the next room with a blindfold. I name the pictures and then they flip the cards, and if the pictures match...”

“Right. And you were accurate?”

“Ninety-nine percent.” He smiled at her, shrugged, a little uncomfortable. “The highest among the test subjects. Your father took an interest.”

“Did he.” Helena drew a slow inhale through her nose. He'd never given her own abilities half that sort of attention. Maybe it was that ninety-nine percent he was so taken by, that measurable accuracy, and not the messy, bizarre art of psychometry, of sorting out the terrors from the truths. That kind of thing, unclear, confusing, emotional, had ever been his antithesis, and what he hadn't understood he immediately discounted as not worth his time. It seemed he hadn't changed much since she'd known him last. “Congratulations, then. What an honor.”

Matty's smile faltered. He set down the toast crust, uneaten, and picked up his mug of tea. “It's not...it doesn't feel like an accomplishment. I mean, it's just something I do. Like breathing. I'm sure you understand.”

“You almost done?”

He nodded, drained the tea, set down his mug. “I am now. Hang on...”

He rose to go pay. Helena stood and left the cafe, standing on the stoop in the bright winter sunlight. A few minutes later Matty joined her, shrugging his coat around his shoulders, squinting down the street.

“This way,” he said, and began off.

Following, Helena headed down the street before she and Matty took a right. The grumble of morning crowds and activity faded to a low hum behind them, the brick buildings leaning in as if listening to their footsteps along the uneven pavement.

A dog-walker smiled at Matty; he grinned back, then pointed ahead to one of the brick buildings, four-storied, with a deeply peaked roof and a collection of overflowing bins out front. A leafless tree creaked in the wind as they approached; there was little other sound, the streets and pavements abandoned.

“That one.” Matty indicated a window on the fourth floor.

“High up,” Helena commented. A wrought-iron fire escape stretched along the building's outer wall, but it would be a tense thing to maneuver off it and into the narrow window. Other than the copper gutter pipe, there were few other easy handholds along the wall.

Matty nodded. “Wait until you see the inside.”

They made their way to the building's entrance. The interior was chill, grimy, with sage-green walls and a chessboard floor. A long, long staircase wound its way up the central well; a hand-written notice on the lift declared it broken. A police constable stood at the banister on the fourth floor, an extremely young dark-skinned woman who smiled at Matty as he crested the stairs, panting a little with exertion.

“Wotcher, Matty,” she said. “All right?”

“All right, Ellie. How're things?”

“Quiet.”

“That's what I like to hear. This is my colleague, Helena Blackwood. We're here to have a look at the flat again, if you don't mind. I think Professor Alistair Blackwood had a word with your superior officer...?”

“Oh, yeah, absolutely.” Ellie gave Helena a wide-eyed look. Unsurprising, considering Helena's stony face and wordless demeanor. “Er- go ahead. Number 407.”

“I remember. Thanks, El.”

Her face pinked. “Don't mention it.”

Flat 407's door looked just like the rest, save for the strip of police tape crossing it- a plain green door, its paint worn, its knob scuffed. Splintered wood had cracked and whiskered around the base of the knob.

“Was this here before?” Helena asked.

“No. That's from the police forcing the door when a neighbor complained of the smell.”

“So it was locked from the inside.”

“That's right.”

Helena nodded. “Carry on.”

Matty unstuck the police tape and pushed open the door. It opened with a faint groan into dim, cool air. Clearly, the heating had been turned off for some time, the radiators cold.

The flat beyond was a homely, overstuffed clutter of cushions, throw pillows, squashy chairs in floral patterns. Pictures of the countryside hung on the walls between embroidered samplers bearing prayers and religious sayings and one about the joys of being a teacher. A cross was hung over a small player piano, its case covered with doilies, vases, and china figurines.

Once, perhaps, those vases had held flowers. Now, they were empty, the air acquiring a stagnant, dusty scent.

“Mrs. Charity Smith,” Matty said as Helena moved deeper into the small flat. “Pensioner. Seventy-one. Lived there for twenty-odd years, after her husband died in an auto accident. She used to be a schoolteacher, apparently. No relatives. No children.”

“Right.” Helena wandered to the wall, next to the piano. A stain darkened the wallpaper there, moldy and unpleasant. Helena swiped a finger over it; a fine black smear clung to the leather. Damp, maybe; this was an old building. She wiped her hand off on her trouser leg.

“Where was she found?” she asked, turning.

“The bedroom. Through there.”

Helena went to the door; it hung open, the gap between door and frame dark as night. She pressed a gloved finger to the chipboard. It swung into the cramped little bedroom, almost entirely taken up by a bed, a nightstand, a single chair in the corner. Daylight shone a pale square onto the bare mattress, the net curtains yellowed with age.

The curtains stirred.

Something shifted in the air. Helena stiffened, held her breath. Watched. Had she imagined it? A trick of the light? She listened, listened hard, but there was nothing, no sound, no underlying hum. A silence, unbroken. Nothing inside it. Nothing here with her.

Helena approached the bed, then turned to the window. The latch was rusted; she pushed it, grit her teeth, finally coaxed it into movement. Cold wind rushed over her face. The gap was no more than six inches or so, scarcely enough to get an arm through, much less a head.

She pulled it shut again and faced the bed. A brown stain had dried into the ticking. Her eyes traveled over the headboard, the wall, the fan of dark liquid flecking the paint, all the way to the ceiling. Arterial spray.

“What state was the body in?” Helena asked.

“Similar to-”

“No. Details.”

Matty blinked. “You...you don't think it's related to Godwin's murders, do you?”

“I think I'd rather look at facts,” Helena said. “Not be carried away by similarities to the crimes of a dead woman fifteen years ago. Our profession is already sensationalized enough without making this into some kind of...'serial killer returns from the dead' scenario.”

Matty drew a quick breath. “Right. Well. The body was on the bed. Obviously. Er-” He gestured. “Arms outspread. Legs straight. Head on a pillow. Her...the rest of her was intact, but...”

He drew an X in midair, over the stain. “...her chest cavity and lower torso were...opened. With a sharp knife, according to our sources at the morgue. Stout knife, too. Ribs were...sawn apart to get at the heart and the lungs.”

“Were they with the body?”

“No.”

“Were they found?”

“No.”

“Lovely.” Helena withdrew her hands from her pockets. Matty stared at her, eyes wide. “Right, then, let's get this over with.”

“You're not going to-”

Helena tugged off one glove, then the other. “Unless you'd like to hang about here all day?”

Matty looked pained, but nodded. “Have at thee.”

Flexing her fingers, Helena drew closer to the bed. Another flicker of shadow. Something moving past the window, she thought. A trick of the light. Steady, Blackwood. Steady.

She smoothed her palm over the mattress, around the edges of the bloodstain. The color of sewage, of river-water, rushing through the dark.

Steady.

The edge of her fingertip brushed the stiff cloth, rigid with dried blood.

There-

Pulse. The world inverted, sucked into the gap between breaths. Nausea rushed through Helena as all feeling drained from her body, as she collapsed into the past- no, stay in control in control- an arc of red over pale paint, matted into hair, into fabric, the wet rhythmic sawing of a knife in flesh-

She pushed. Deeper. Under the crazed blur of agony and blood and organ-glister, under the screech of a blade through bone. Deeper. Show me.

Show me-

Cold filled her chest and lungs, crackling, icy. Absence. She gasped. Blood-mist filled her lungs. Her vision crystallized, pulsing in and out of focus.

Oh, God- hands inside her, fingers and knives digging through her flesh, through her- stay calm stay calm stay calm- she clung onto the echo with all her strength even as she felt things wrenched out of her, felt them leaving her body, nothing but cold and blood to fill the gap-

Blackwood-

-And there, kneeling over her, knees pinning down her arms- a figure, blurred in shadow except for the gloved hands, the knife, its blade long and hooked, slicing down again and again and again, and in it the frenzied jagged saw of the murderer's breathing-

“Blackwood!”

Her eyes jolted open. She was back, all at once, heat and breath and sensation. She had been standing by the bed. Now she half-lay on it, as if she'd begun to climb onto the bloodied mattress, to lay supine like the victim. Dead Charity Smith, seventy-one, who'd had her chest hacked into, who'd felt pieces cut out of her while she clung to the last merciless dregs of life-

Matty was there. He gently pulled her back, off the bed, against the wall. “Blackwood. Are you...oh, God, do you need me to call-”

“No.” Helena's voice was raw and scratchy. “No. Ugh. Shit-” She pressed her knuckles to her mouth. She tasted the blood, raw and yolky. Everywhere. “No. I...I saw it. Saw...who killed her. Not their face but it was a person, I mean, alive, not...not a spirit. Fuck-”

She bolted from the bedroom, into the small toilet opposite the kitchenette, and was sick, violently, scraping the bottom of her guts. Empty, she hung there off the toilet lip, shivering, slicked in sweat, rocking back and forth until the feeling of the memory faded and she was herself again. Her own thoughts, her own body, not the one on the bed, mangled and violated.

After a few minutes, Matty approached the doorway.

“Are you all right?” he asked.

“Would you get me some water. Please.”

He returned with a glass of water. Helena accepted it and drank, then spat, then drank again. Her mouth still tasted of blood, though her stomach had stopped churning. She quivered, closing her eyes, the afterimages of the echo oozing down the insides of her lids.

“Did you see them?” Matty asked quietly, still standing in the doorway. “The killer?”

Helena shook her head.

“They were...hidden,” she said. “Dunno if it means Charity didn't get a proper look, or if they were...hiding themselves. Somehow. I don't know...”

“What else?”

“Huh?”

“Did you see anything else?”

“Yeah. Yeah. The knife. Hang on, you got paper-?”
He produced a notebook and pencil from his trench coat pocket.

“Of course you do,” Helena said.

She flipped to a blank page and sketched out a rough approximation of the knife she'd seen before the details left her, then held it up for his inspection. “Like that. I'm no artist, but it was distinctive. Weird-looking thing.”

Matty stared at the drawing, brow furrowed.

“What?” Helena asked.

He shook his head. “I'm not sure. It's distinctive, yes, but-”

“Have you seen something like it before?”

“Maybe.” He paused. “It'll come to me. Are you sure you're all right?”

“Yeah.” She braced her hand on the edge of the toilet and levered herself upright. Matty watched her all the while. “What.”

“You're very brave, you know.”

Helena blinked. She looked at him.

“Not many would do that,” he went on. “A reading like that. They wouldn't put themselves through it.”

“Right.” She tore the drawing off the pad and folded it into her coat's inner pocket.

“It's admirable. That you want to see it. Feel it. So that you can help people. But...” He paused. “Doesn't it hurt? After a while. Doesn't it get...difficult?”

“Whatever I feel is a fraction as difficult as what people like Charity went through. I get to come out of it. I get to keep on living. She didn't. So, yeah, it's difficult. But I manage.”

“Right,” Matty said.

Helena gave him a look. “But?”

He glanced up at her. “Do you ever think you don't always have to manage?”

“No,” Helena said.

He nodded.

“We good here?”

“Oh.” He stepped out of the way. “Yes. Of course.”

Helena pushed past him and into the flat. The kitchenette looked untouched, teapot cold on its trivet. She moved through the sitting room, then to the windows, the same size as the one in the bedroom. These, too, did not open far, and had not opened for some time, since summer, she gauged, by the amount of corrosion on the latches, the dust on the sills.

She swiped a fingertip through the dust and held it up. No one had touched these for a while, far longer than two weeks.

“No one came in through this way,” she said.

“In or out.”

“Right. The locked door.” Helena faced the door in question. “It was definitely locked?”

“Yeah. Deadbolt thrown. A proper old deadbolt, too. This building's Edwardian.”

“Police told you that?”

“They did.”

“And you believe them?”

“In this scenario, yes.”

“So what are you thinking?”

Matty made a face. “Astral projection?”

“Hard to stab someone when you're non-corporeal.”

He shrugged. “Worth a mention.”

“I don't know what this is. What could be possible, here. I've seen...I've seen things I never would have believed, not until they happened before my eyes.” Helena let out her breath, watching the sunlight fall through the windows. “This isn't enough. We need more. We need to find-”

“-The heart and lungs.”

“Yeah,” Helena said. “The heart and lungs.”

The flat's front door opened. Helena jerked up her head; Matty whirled with a start, as if the killer might have returned, but it was Ellie, the police constable, breathing hard and holding her portable radio.

“Sorry,” she said. “I've got a call. There's been...something's happened. I think you two might be interested-”

“They've found the missing parts?” Helena asked.

“No. Not that. It's...I mean, I'm not stupid. This case, it's just like those other ones. In the Sixties.” She paused. “The kid-killer.”

Neither Helena nor Matty spoke. Helena tilted her head, waiting.

“Well, it's her, again,” Ellie went on.

“Another murder?”

“No.” Another long pause. “Someone's broken into her tomb.”

***

Lady Irene Godwin's trial had been one of Britain's most televised events of 1961, a frenzied, fervent show despite her family's attempts to suppress news coverage, to protect the Godwin name from the unwashed masses. Helena remembered it well, remembered Godwin well, a pale, small figure surrounded by the dark wood and robes of the court.

It had been considered shocking when she had been sentenced to death, then hanged; some were appalled, as if the method of execution was too brutal for a young, beautiful aristocrat. Others believed she got exactly what she deserved. Five children were dead; Helena did not think hanging was such a bad way to go, not after how she'd killed them, how they'd suffered before they died.

No matter the method, nor her crimes, her family was intent on interring her the same way as if she'd lived a long and faultless life. And they hadn't scrimped, Helena observed as she and Matty St. Clair approached the tomb up one of Kensal Green's long gravel walks, now paved in a smooth layer of deep snow. This was a beautiful place, a peaceful one, countless gravestones and Grecian mausoleums placed like pale houses down the long, meandering avenues. Trees grew in abundance, many of them over a hundred years old- horse-chestnuts and black locusts crawling with withered ivy, overgrown hawthorns swallowing memorial obelisks and graves alike.

Once they were through the gates and some distance in, the city around them faded away, the acres of wooded necropolis subsuming all suggestion they were in London at all. An eerie sensation, perhaps, to be so completely surrounded by the dead, but corpses were of no danger, and it was difficult to imagine why someone interred here might be restless in the afterlife.

Irene Godwin's tomb was some rows away from the shining, white Anglican chapel in the cemetery's heart, with its columned pavilions in the Doric style, like a miniature Parthenon. Here, the cemetery's overgrowth was obvious, the trees clustering in: holly bushes, and yew, dark evergreens filling the air with their sappy musk. The graves became Gothic, the mausoleums buttressed and spired, cathedral-like, their front doorways gated off, thoroughly padlocked.

As Helena and Matty moved deeper, she glimpsed faces between the rows of mausoleums, watching them, whispering, cigarette smoke rising in clouds from their midst. Young people, university-age at the oldest, waiting as if in anticipation of a thrill. One girl looked scarcely older than Camilla, her bleach-streaked curls mostly hidden under a jacket hood.

“Fans?” Matty said.

“Ghouls,” Helena muttered.

Matty cast a dark look at the ground. “Godwin was...powerful,” he said. “Unorthodox. I don't think anyone thought a woman was capable of doing what she did. Not until she did it.”

“Blimey. Didn't know she was aspirational.”

“I'm not saying that. God, never. I'm-” He cut off, cleared his throat. His eyes were bright. He pointed up ahead. “Look.”

The dark uniforms of half a dozen coppers stood starkly against the snow, the paler tombs. One of them spoke to Matty, but Helena said nothing, just stepped closer to the mausoleum in their midst, at the end of the avenue of tombs. It was enormous, Gothic like the others, soaring finials and intricate carvings sugared in frost. Two other wings flanked the central structure, the entire mausoleum surrounded by a low wrought-iron fence.

The doorway gaped into musty darkness, impenetrable without the assistance of artificial light, even in this mid-morning winter sun. Once, the iron gate barring the archway must have been a solid thing; now, it looked as if the gate had been crumpled by some gigantic hand, the bars around the lock warped and twisted, padlock dangling from its chain, broken. The gate hung open on a single scrollwork hinge, the other connected by a shred of metal.

Voices. Presence.

“Excuse me-”

Helena drew closer. In her ears- the pulse of her heartbeat? No, no, that was a hum, a crackle, something stirring in the pit of her mind...

“Miss. Stop.”

“It's all right, she-”

“I said stop.”

Helena came back to herself with a shudder. A policeman's mustached face intruded on her sightline. He reached for her arm. She jerked back, giving him a sharp look.

“This is a crime scene, Miss,” he said. “I'll need you to step back, thank you very much.”

“Blackwood,” Matty called.

Helena withdrew, joining Matty outside the group of police. They'd already set up a tape perimeter, constables prodding and muttering at the broken gate. Photographing the scene, too. A bright camera flash lit the snow, illuminated in harsh white light the interior of the mausoleum- damp, dank, a patch of grimy water spreading over the floor.

The corner of the tomb within was lit in the flash, too, though it was gone before Helena could get a better look.

“Bloody hell,” she said. “Wasn't just a break-in, was it.”

“Looks like someone crashed a car into the gate.”

Helena laughed. Matty looked at her, eyes wide. Helena gave him a glance.

“Funny,” she said.

“Me?”

“Er. Yes?”

“Oh.” He blinked, shifted in place, then pointed. “See the padlock, there?”

“Yeah.”

“I've seen- well. Usually when a bloke wants to get through a padlock, he takes bolt-cutters to it. Right?”

“So I've heard.”

“Yes, well- that,” he said, with emphasis, “was not cut. The edge is ragged. Even I can see that. It was broken open. With force.”

“What kind of force?”

“Not bare hands, that's for sure.”

“More things in heaven and Earth, St. Clair.”

“I think we're both Hamlet in this case. Beth-” He cut off, pausing for a moment before he continued. “Beth was a dreamer. She believed in all sorts of things, however fanciful.”

Another pause. “So I'm not going to discount anything. Not until it's proven wrong.”

“Once, I might have argued with you on that.”

“Now?”

Helena gave the mausoleum a long look, the police swarming over it like crows. Real crows circled above, their harsh calls echoing through the clear, cold air.

“Now,” she said, quietly, “I'm thinking we need a closer look in that tomb.”

“What makes you say that?”

“Something's...here. Not strong. Not now. But at night...yeah, might be stronger. I want to know what it is. I want to find its heart.”

“We're not going to do much of that with these coppers here,” Matty said.

“No.” She paused, then dropped her voice until only she and Matty could hear. “They mightn't be here. Not in these numbers. Not later.”

Matty looked at her.

“Can you lay out exactly what you mean, in detail, so I have a more complete understanding of your thought process?” he asked, carefully.

“Of course, St. Clair. I'm thinking we come back to this graveyard in the middle of the night,” Helena said, “so we can break into a tomb already mangled by mysterious force, in order to investigate a killing by looking at the moldering bones of a long-dead murderess.”

Matty drew a sigh, staring at the tomb.

“Yeah,” he said. “That's what I thought you meant.”

Chapter Text

Returning to her office, Helena thought Sami had gone. The cot was empty, the blankets folded at its foot. But when she went upstairs to her flat, a cramped bedsit which had once served as an attic, she found lamps burning, open packets on the counter, and Sami at the table, munching cereal as he read through one of Helena's books.

Helena marched up behind him and snatched it from his hand.

"Oi!" Sami sputtered.

"The hell are you still doing here?"

"Reading. Having some of this cereal-"

"My cereal. Reading my books."

"They aren't limited-use-"

Helena snapped the book shut, brows raised. "Blimey," she said. "They teach you to be this stroppy at that foster home of yours?"

He eyed her, baleful, milk splattered over the tabletop in front of him. "No."

"The foster home you should be going back to, might I add." Helena tossed the book on the counter and set about shoving the cereal packets back on the shelf. "Did you really eat this much cereal? You'll be made of cereal, this rate..."

"I hear them," Sami said, quietly. "In the night."

Helena closed the cupboard. She looked out the single window over her bed, its warped antique glass making a blue-white blur of the sky. It might not be warm, nor ideal, but in this flat she could always see the sky, hear the rain drum on the roof. Reminders of a living world, a physical world. Not one of dreams, of echoes.

"The other kids?" she asked.

"Yeah. Some of them...they don't cry, not in the way anyone can see. But the things in their heads, the things they think about in the dark...it's like the girl. In Dad's shop. Remember? The girl with no face."

Helena nodded. "I remember."

"I don't know how to cope with it. None of it."

"And now what?"

He blinked. "What?"

"Now you're here. Why? Not just 'cause you don't like that home of yours you're in, though I can't fault you, sounds miserable. Why'd you come here? To me?"

"Because."

Helena waited.

"Because," Sami said again, with more strength. "I want to control it. Like you do. I want you to show me how."

Helena snorted. "Right. Because that went so bloody well last time, me interfering-"

"That wasn't your fault-"

"Don't be so stupid, Sami, whose else fault would it be-"

"No one's!" Sami made a jerky movement with his arms. "I should've expected. Nobody ever listens to me. Not Mum and Dad, not Aisha, not anyone. Why should you be different. Everyone's always so wrapped up in themselves they never listen."

He fell silent, then. Helena stood there. Wind whistled beyond the windows. Already, the morning sun had begun to darken, the gloom of afternoon setting in.

"Aisha was your sister's name?" she said at last.

Sami nodded. He sniffed thickly and wiped his nose.

"What was she like?"

"Annoying," Sami mumbled. "She stole all my sweets and said they were hers 'cause she was oldest. And she always hogged the bathroom. She said she had to make herself beautiful and I'd say- I'd say she had a lot of work to do, then, and..."

He trailed off, sniffed again. "And she'd tickle me. Lots. She gave me a stuffed tiger once. She'd won it in a street fair. She was really, really annoying. I miss her a lot."

Helena watched the streets, the gathering dark.

"What did you see?" she asked quietly. "When you were...well. After the fire."

Sami blinked up at her, brow furrowed. He looked down, at his hands.

"I don't remember," he said. "Not exactly. Not...well..." He drew a shaky little breath. "It's like...something's there. In my head. I can see the door but I can't open it. Can't see the other side. But..."

"What?"

His gaze was distant. "I can hear something."

"What do you hear?"

"I...I don't..."

Helena faced the table and knelt, slowly, on the old rug. "Sami," she murmured. She did not touch him. "Is it a voice?"

"No..."

She exhaled. "Is it-"

"It's like music. A song." His eyes had grown dull, unfocused. His hands quivered. "A...song in the dark...far away. I want to listen. I want to hear it..."

"Sami, don't listen to it."

"It's pretty. Feels..." His lips parted. His facial muscles, slackening, all at once. The quiver in his hands grew stronger, a spasming shake. He was in a trance. A dangerous thing for the untrained, the weak and fragile. "...feels good...feels warm-"

Helena pulled off her glove and clasped his hand. "Sami."

"...let me listen..."

"Sami."

"...for a little while-"

"Wake up," Helena said.

He was there. With her. In the tiny flat kitchen, in the half-light. His hand clasped hers, though she still felt his limp arm clenched in her grip. She pulled, and the world righted itself, and his skin warmed under her palm; he blinked, once, twice, and his dull eyes grew bright with involuntary tears. They trickled down his face as he gasped for breath. Spots of color bloomed on his cheeks. He stared at Helena.

"Easy," she murmured. "That's it, Sami. That's it." She drew a slow breath, let it go. "In and out. Feel that in you. Feel your heartbeat. It's all right. That's it."

He struggled to speak; it took him a moment. "What happened?"

"Not sure. Not entirely. But I figure you got close to remembering. And I'm not sure that's so good for you."

"But I want to remember."

"Listen to me-" She cut off, then opened her hand, releasing Sami. There were red marks on his arm where she'd gripped him; he didn't seem to notice. "Listen. You can't live here permanently."

He stared at her.

"But I can help you," Helena said. "I can...strengthen you. The thing that caused the fire, that made you fall into your coma, it wouldn't have had such an easy time of it if you'd been ready. And I think that's my fault. Thinking...thinking I should stay out of it. Thinking I'd only hurt things worse if I interfered."

Tears trickled down his face. "What's wrong with me?"

"Nothing's wrong with you," Helena said, voice hard. "It's the rest of the world what's wrong. Look. Look-" She glanced around. "I've got...things to do-"

Sami perked up. "A job?"

"Never you mind. I won't be here tonight. Don't you even think of kipping on my cot again. Especially don't you think of finding the spare key under the loose floorboard by the front door if you need a wee. Toilet's down the hall."

"You're...when are you coming back?"

"Dunno."

"Can I come with you?"

"No."

He made a face, sniffed wetly, looked around, settled on one of Helena's napkins. Helena found him some wadded-up toilet roll before he got any big ideas.

"Listen to me, Sami," Helena told him. "Don't...listen. All right? Not until we have a chance to talk more, figure out what exactly's going on inside your head. I didn't lie to you. Some echoes aren't dangerous. They're frightening, yeah. They stay with you. A long time."

She paused. "But they pass through you, around you. Like water, or wind."

"The girl with no face was scary," Sami said, nodding. "But she was sad, too. She didn't want to hurt me. She just...she didn't want to be in pain anymore."

"Yeah."

"But...the other ones..."

"The other ones stick," Helena told him. "The other ones devour. I thought they'd devoured you."

"Have you seen it happen before? Someone get all eaten by the echoes. And they don't come back?"

"Yeah."

"Why did I come back?"

"Told you, Sami. I don't know. Maybe you were too strong to get lost in the dark forever."

The kid was no fool. His eyes widened. "Or?"

"Or," Helena told him, "something in the dark let you go."

"Why would it do something like that?"

"You said...you heard music. You remembered a song."

Sami nodded, slowly. Helena straightened. Pigeons flapped outside the window, pecking at the glass. That was it, exactly. Pigeons. Was Sami a messenger pigeon, sent through artillery fire and across dark seas with a message strapped to its leg? Or was Sami the message itself?

Pigeons, messages, ridiculous. Don't be a bloody idiot. He was a kid, a boy, twelve years old and alone. Helena pointed to him; he looked faintly alarmed.

"Remember what I told you," she said. "Don't listen. Don't fall into echoes."

"Toilet's down the hall."

"Exactly."

"Can I have more cereal?"

"Yeah, whatever," she said, heading to her bedroom. "Eat it all. Make yourself sick. What do I care."

She shut the door and exhaled in the hush, then stretched her arms, her spine. Bones popped; she winced. Her entire body was winched taut, like a poorly-strung marionette. If only she could relax the right part of her, if only she could breathe, rest, just rest, then all would be well, all would fall into place.

There was no time for that. She had to prepare. Sleep, and pack what she might need. She didn't go for her satchel, the recording and measuring devices stored in her office below- the tools of her trade, the dispassionate, mechanical eyes and ears that turned what she did from fancy to fact. Instead, she approached the object lain out on the foot of her narrow bed, where it lived, exposed like a nerve, no longer confined to its case, no longer kept enclosed, leashed and muzzled.

The Blackwood Board. A spirit-board, her mother's. This one was an antique, enameled ebony and mother-of-pearl, its letters and numbers gleaming white as teeth against glossy darkness. A border of stars shone in the gloom; they winked as Helena settled alongside the Board, then traced them, cold and smooth under her fingertips.

As ever, there was a shift, a vibration against her senses.

It knew she was there.

"Eager, are we?" she murmured.

No reply, of course. She rubbed her thumb over the corner of the Board, then shook her head. "You're a bit unwieldy for breaking and entering. But..."

She found the velvet pouch containing the planchette, heavy and smooth, shaped like an elongated heart of ebony, pearl, rock-crystal lens, its single winking eye.

"You'll do," Helena told it.

She held it in both hands, lifted it, and looked through the lens. It showed her a blurry view of the world, all things warped out of shape. Helena lowered the planchette and her cramped bedroom was back, taken up almost entirely by bed, small table, a rickety wardrobe pushed into a corner, so battered it looked like the victim of a car crash. Its window opened onto slate roof, pigeons, moss and sky. The living world, full of living people, not the dead, not the monstrous. Lives that went on without the horrors of the past haunting their every moment. What must that be like? What must it be like to live in such glorious silence.

But it was fallacy, really. She should know that by now. In every place, some kind of monster. Toby had said that. Toby Lansbury-Locke, gone since summer's end, since she'd told him the truth of herself, what she'd done. Of course. Why had she expected any different?

Some kind of monster, he'd said, in the rain, his eyes hollow.

He'd trusted her, like Arthur. And she'd broken that trust, destroyed that year of careful friendship, of letting one another through the necessary armor that had made their lives up to that point bearable, that had made living possible. He was her true friend, she knew that now. Her only friend, and these days not even that. When he'd told her the truth about himself she'd seen what a good person he was, how truly kind, how unfailingly loyal. And when she'd done the same, he'd seen what kind of person she was, too.

No. It was better he knew the truth, it was right, after his life of lies and secrets. Wasn't it? But God, she wanted him back. She wanted him here, standing in the window, the light turning his hair to gold. Such a brief respite from loneliness had awoken her longing, once it was gone. And he really was gone.

She didn't think he was ever coming back.

Helena replaced the planchette in its velvet pouch, then went to the window, peering into the lead-gray sky. Already, the spires and weathervanes of London's rooftops were wreathed in mist, fine spirals of ice unfurling over the glass.

She'd best dress warmly tonight. It would snow again.

***

A quarter to midnight, Helena met Matty St. Clair on the pavement outside her office building. He stood on the corner, hunched inside his coat, looking as if he'd quite like some of the curry from the closing-down takeaway across the road, a small crowd from Spitalfields' nearby clubs hanging around its steaming doorway, attacking kebabs like wild animals.

The snow-flurries looked like feathers, down that stung the face and eyes with ice, the streetlights illuminating aureoles of silver. Matty had tucked himself on the stoop, under the stone entryway shadowing the steps, but even so his hair was crusted with snow, his coat collar upturned around his face.

He turned as the door thudded shut behind Helena.

"Wotcher," he said. "They open all night?"

"Thereabouts. I think they decide their hours on the phase of the moon. Why? Fancy a curry?"

"Yeah, I do, actually."

"Well, it'll have to wait." Helena checked her watch. "Did a bit of telephoning around, found out our lads at the cemetery are supposed to switch shifts in an hour. Gives us a bit of time to figure out how we can use it to our advantage."

"Our- our advantage?" He hurried after her as she began down the steps, her satchel slung over one shoulder. She'd kitted herself out tonight- equipment bag packed lightly but thoroughly, thick jumper on, a brown leather jacket buttoned to her neck. "You sound like a crime novel."

"Yeah, I read them for ideas. Speaking of which, you have any for getting into the tomb without being nicked?"

"I'll tell you on the-" He blinked as Helena made a left turn on the pavement. "Hang on, aren't we taking the Tube?"

"Nah. I've got the motor garaged down the street. Costs a fortune, but it's nice on a night like this. Unless you'd rather walk."

The motor was Helena's car, a dark green Hillman Hunter far more worse for wear than it had been when it was new. The summer had seen its flanks scarred by undergrowth and branches, the years scabbing its undercarriage and chrome with rust and grime. Still, its round headlights seemed to smile up at Helena and Matty, its shabby interior comforting in its practical familiarity. After heaving the garage door up, Helena stowed her satchel in the boot and glanced Matty over.

"Bring anything?" she asked.

He shook his head. "I don't use many tools."

"Really." She swung into the drivers' seat, slammed the door, leaned over to open the passenger side. "Never needed to prove yourself, then?"

Matty swallowed, eyes flickering to her as he got in. "I was- well..."

"You were what?"

"Professor Blackwood- your father, I mean- he...had faith in me. Trusted me. And my abilities. I said I preferred my natural gifts, he...agreed."

"Right." She started the engine. Its roar filled the garage like an oncoming train. "Bloody good for you."

It was several minutes until Matty spoke again. They'd joined the night traffic, heading west from Spitalfields, that slow arterial pulse through the veins of London's streets. This time of night, in this weather, the few passersby were reduced to shadows on the snow, tramps taking refuge in doorways, women with brightly-painted faces pulling rabbit coats around themselves against the cold. Even the river was shrouded under mist, its rushing black depths obscured under that thick pelt of silver-gray.

"Are you...is everything all right?" Matty asked, tentative.

"Yeah. Fine." Thoughts of Sami entered her mind; she pushed them away. "Why the hell wouldn't I be?"

"You don't have to sound so cross with me, is all."

"I'm not-"

"Well, you sound extremely cross. I'm not making it up."

"Listen-" She dragged a short breath. "What kind of upbringing did you have, St. Clair? From your accent I'm guessing rowhouse, two parents, dog. Yeah? Middle-class, lots of hugs and kisses from Mum and Dad, birthday parties in the garden. How close am I?"

He was silent for a moment. "Pretty close.”

"Then I think it's pointless to explain why I might be upset to hear about my father's pride in your abilities."

"It was a cat."

"What?"

"A cat, not a dog. A Siamese. Named Bingo."

"I always wanted a cat."

"Why didn't you have one?"

"Dad's allergic."

"Oh," Matty said, blinking. "I didn't know. About- about your relationship with him, I mean, not his allergy to-"

"Yeah, I bloody well realize you don't know,” Helena said. “He's good at that. At seeming- collected, at controlling everything, everyone around him-"

She cut off, giving her head a hard shake, her hands clamped on the wheel. "He's not what you think he is."

"He's the reason I'm here today."

"And you think that's for you? No. It's all for him. All of it-"

"You think that little of me?"

She glanced at him. "No. That's not what I was saying."

He didn't reply. After a few minutes, he drew a short breath. "So," he said. His voice was rougher than before. "What's the plan for when they switch shifts?"

"Get in while they're distracted. Stay out of sight."

"All right."

"You have a better idea?"

Again, Matty paused.

"Maybe," he said.

His voice was soft, his gaze distant. Helena gave him a look, then another. His brown eyes were glazed, dim; his shoulders had slumped, his hands splayed open over his knees. Difficult to tell in the dim car, but she thought his skin had blanched, pallid round the face, darker round the eyes. She faced front again and waited, brow furrowed.

After a moment, his mouth opened; the whistle of an inhale sounded like the first air released into a long-sealed room. Helena removed a hand from the wheel and touched his arm. He flinched; his arm, under the sleeve, felt cold and hard, but as she squeezed his forearm Matty shifted, moving, breathing again.

Helena withdrew. Matty fished a crumpled handkerchief from his pocket and pressed it to his eyes, where a trickle of tears had escaped down his cheek.

"Sorry," he muttered.

"All right?"

"Yes."

"What did you see?"

“A bunch of jackdaws. Swarming, all together, ragged and unkempt. They were attacking...a hawk. Overwhelming it.”

“What does it mean?”

"Possibilities." He gave her a quick smile. "It's rarely literal. I'm never a hundred percent exact, see."

His abilities. Precognition. Messages from the future, echoes traveling not from the past but what was yet to come. Possibly, anyway; it was as confusing an art as any other psychic gift, relying not on sorting through jumbled emotion but determining what outcome was likeliest. Helena had heard it described as being far more precise the closer to the event, though by that point there was often little one could do about the outcome. Little wonder Matty had been able to predict the pictures on the test cards, all those years ago.

Truly, power was not the ultimate determination of a psychic's abilities. The true test was control. Otherwise, far more esoteric gifts- astral projection, bilocation, the generation of energy through psychic means alone- might well kill the practitioner, or not work at all. For a long time, control had been Rebecca Blackwood's greatest gift, and, in the end, the loss of which had been what drove her mad.

What things had Matty seen, in his foresight, in these prophecies and lies? She didn't ask. A crinkling sound distracted her. Matty was busy opening a packet of jelly babies; he ate one, then offered the bag to Helena.

"Sugar helps," he said. "Want one?"

She took one. What the hell. All the help she could get, and so on.

***

She parked the Hunter under an overpass some distance from Kensal Green Cemetery, near one of the massive tangled arteries of railways that served as spinal column to the area. A train rumbled past as she slung her satchel over her shoulder, packed with the evening's necessary equipment; its lights blazed through the night, setting the snowfall on fire, filling the darkness with its scream and thunder.

Matty still looked pale, but smiled at Helena as she slammed the door, locked the Hunter, nodded at him.

"Let's go," she said.

"After you."

They set off down Harrow Road, following the high brick wall that bordered the cemetery. Another train passed, somewhere in the distance. Few other lights illuminated the snowy night. No cars passed; a light burned high in a block of flats, shadowy figures pressed against drawn curtains, but down here on the streets it was all smoky darkness, the smell of ice and metal, pavement and grime. The noise of the train died down and the cemetery's sounds came through, the creak of wind in trees, the faint keen and hiss of it past graves and statues' wings, the omnipresent whisper of snowfall on stone.

"There," Matty whispered.

The high wall dipped ahead, becoming no more than waist-high, a meter and a half drop to the icy bushes on the other side. Helena gave the cemetery beyond a quick look, but nothing stirred. They were far from the gravesite.

"Over and in," Matty said, and with another nod from Helena they clambered over the wall and dropped into the cemetery proper.

"How long have we got?" Matty asked.

Helena checked her watch. "Quarter of an hour. Plenty of time."

Matty nodded. There was a faint crease between his eyebrows.

"What?"

"Just- we need to stay nimble. All right?"

"Sure. Whatever you say."

They began off through the graves, a forest of pale stone growing around them like strange plants, shining through the gloom. As before, within minutes of walking the sounds of the city beyond were gone, subsumed by the hush and chill, the cold wind of the graveyard at night. They made their way deeper, into the heavily wooded section they'd visited earlier. The trees groaned against the wind; Helena's pulse ticked in her wrists, the base of her throat.

Someone there-

-but the graveyard around them was empty, no one watching them from the trees, the endless graves. The only footprints in the snow were their own.

Light glinted.

Helena pulled behind a mausoleum and watched. She heard them now, too, on the cold, clear air- voices, indistinct. Torchlight shone through dense thickets of trees and gleamed off stone, silhouetting angel statues, tomb spires.

"Over there," Helena whispered. "That's Godwin's tomb."

Matty's eyes flickered back and forth. The crease in his brow had deepened. "There's more of them than I thought."

He was right. Not the solitary copper, but a half-dozen of them, torch beams flooding the scene. They illuminated the fluttering tape, the muddy-white snow around the tomb, churned up by patrols. Helena's exhale stung her teeth.

"Shit," she whispered. "It's nearly one in the bloody morning. What's got so many coppers buzzing 'round one single vandalized tomb?"

Matty glanced at her. "Godwin's family?"

"Dunno. But- look, last time the Godwins wanted the story suppressed, remember? They didn't want sensationalism, they wanted silence. Seems if you didn't want it all churned up again you'd smack a chain on the doors, lock the place up again, and have done. Not post multiple guards on the place twenty-four-seven."

"I...can't blame the family for overreacting," Matty said softly. "She was their daughter. Even now."

"Right. Sure." Helena paused. "Or, maybe, this has nothing to do with the family. Maybe someone wants eyes on Irene Godwin's tomb."

"Why would anyone want that?"

"Not sure. But I'd love to find out." She glanced at her watch again. "Right. Coppers or no, the shift change is coming."

"Blackwood, wait-"

"What?"

Matty glanced behind him.

"I have another idea," he said. "A bad one, but- yeah, I think we should do it. I think it's important we do it."

"An idea, or a premonition?"

"The latter."

"Then say no more."

Matty flushed and nodded. "Follow me."

Chapter Text

The Anglican chapel rose from the snow, its Grecian splendor at odds with the wintry night. Its columns looked sugared, its white marble streaked in damp. Its windows stared like empty eyes as Matty and Helena approached, dark and grim, but as Helena examined the chapel's facade, light flared within- firelight, Helena thought, golden and unsteady.

She glanced at Matty, but he didn't slow, his head up, his eyes wide, following the sense of his premonition like a dog with a scent.

Even in the thick snow, the smell of cigarettes and poor-quality skunk filled the air as Helena followed Matty towards the chapel doors. Voices echoed within, a low, murmuring chant; one door was propped open with a brick, its lock circumvented, and upon peering through Helena glimpsed dark figures on the far side, their shadows thrown huge and monstrous on pale stone walls.

Matty's hand grasped the edge of the door; he flung it wide, then blinked, swaying in place as reality seemed to flood him.

"Oh," he muttered.

Helena let out a short laugh. "You lot."

There were a good dozen people in the chapel's lofty, draughty main chamber, all Romanesque vaults and white stone like the exterior save for the dark wood railing, the brass-and-black catafalque in the center of the flagged floor. None looked over the age of seventeen; several shoved to their feet, chains rattling from jackets, necks, wrists. All wore rags, punkish tatters, grimy jumpers studded with safety pins and homemade badges. Several lanterns and candles guttered in the draught from the open doors, the smell of weed stronger than ever in these confines.

The echoes of gasps and mutters shivered off the high vaults, different from the susurrous chant Helena had heard through the doors.

She glanced around, trying to determine its source. "Evening," she said.

"Hello," Matty said, waving.

A yob stepped forward, sixteen or so, workbooted, his short hair fried a peroxide white. "Fuck are you?" he snarled.

"Pigs," a girl said, pushing off from the wall, flicking a switchblade from her leather jacket pocket. "Goose-step out of here if you know what's good for ya-"

"Oh, we're not police, far from it," Matty said quickly.

The blond boy snorted. His skin was colorless, grimy; he was missing a tooth, Helena saw. No one in here looked well; all eyes gleamed too-bright, shadowed, exhausted, faces pinched and lined despite the youth of everyone present.

"You not hear her?" he said. "Get. The fuck-"

"Shut it, Vic, let me get a look at 'em," said a voice from the center of the group.

All eyes turned as a girl pushed off the catafalque, atop which she'd been crouching, and landed with a dusty thud on the flagstones. She was a head shorter than Vic, dressed in an army parka crusted in mud and patches, old boots, a striped muffler tucked up to her chin. Her skin was dark brown, her hair a riot of curls streaked with bleach-yellow. She was, without doubt, the same girl Helena had glimpsed earlier that day, watching them in the graveyard. Though she looked barely fifteen, her round face bristled with piercings, safety pin in the ear, eyeblack running down her cheeks.

Vic stepped back as she approached- first Helena, then Matty, looking them up and down with a cool, steady gaze.

"They're not coppers," she said at last.

"Who the hell else knocks the door down past midnight, Mouser, come on-"

"Mouser, is it?" Helena cut in. The girl's eyes shot to her as she stepped forward, into the ring of candlelight and lanterns arrayed around the catafalque. "Didn't your mummy ever tell you not to play with ghosts?"

Mouser's eyes widened. Light sparked in them. A shift in the air- a drop in pressure, a shiver of unreality- the candleflames wavered as if a cold breeze had passed through the room-

Who are you-

-are you-

-are you-?

The whisper was icy, too, and sang in the backs of Helena's teeth. She saw Matty wince alongside her, but kept her own gaze steady on the girl's.

"Nice trick," she said. "To answer your question, my name is Helena Blackwood." Another shift in the air- now the whispers came from the assembled, heads bending to ears. "This is my colleague, Matthew St. Clair."

Mouser lifted her head. "Blackwood?"

"That's right. Heard the name?"

"Anyone who knows anything's heard the name."

"In certain circles, maybe." Again, Helena took in the chapel. The candles and lanterns were arranged in rough circles round the catafalque, the young people standing or kneeling amidst them. Atop the catafalque's grimy black surface were yet more candles, stuck in place with pools of wax, and a scattering of tarot cards over the stones. The deck was unfamiliar, art style amateurish; it looked handmade.

"Circles I assume you're familiar with," she went on.

She reached out, sudden, plucking one of the girl's badges from her manky parka. Slipping off her glove, she clenched it in her hand. Echoes rose hard and fast-

-the wail and screech of a guitar amp, the roar of a crowd, the rank tang of sweat and body odor. Quick brown hands, nails painted a chipped black, darted into pockets, bags, under jackets. A reflection of her own movement as she tore the badge from a mountainous man's denim vest and thrust it deep into her many layers-

The echoes faded, sinking back into the mire of the past. The badge sat in her palm, quiet once more.

"The Stranglers," she said. "Nice. Shouldn't steal from your scene, though. Bad form." She flicked the badge like a coin; Mouser snatched it from the air.

"You read that?" she said.

"Yeah."

Mouser stared at her for a long moment. Helena could see the movement behind her eyes- weighing, calculating. The necessary business of survival. Something seemed to settle. She lifted her chin, gave a little nod.

“Back in a mo,” she announced to the room. “S'all right, Vic. I've got this.”

“Right,” Vic muttered, casting a dark look at Helena and Matty. He sniffed, spat, then sidled off along with the switchblade girl, settling along the base of a wall some distance away, still watching.

Mouser looked up at Helena.

“C'mon,” she said. “I don't have all night.”

“You lead this group?” Helena asked as Mouser took them to the far side of the chapel, where the floor became steps and a wooden podium where the pastor might give last rites, were the place still in use for that purpose. It had been left to rot, Helena recalled, and looked well in the process of doing just that, plaster peeling from the walls, dust thickly coating the ceiling and pews.

“Lead? Me?” Mouser clambered atop a section of railing and sat, one leg dangling, her back against a column. She produced a cigarette from somewhere inside her voluminous parka and stuck it in her mouth, then commenced rummaging through her pockets. “Nah. No leaders here. I'm just their magic girl, is all.”

“You're a psychic.”

At this, the girl gave Helena a hard smile. “Guess so." She tapped her forehead, between her eyes. "I see what places are safe on what nights. Can peep into people's thoughts, figure out if they're gonna help us or hurt us. Lots out there who'd hurt kids, hurt 'em bad, given the chance. More than you might think.”

“All these kids...” Matty murmured, looking around the room.

“They're all on the streets, I assume?” Helena said.

“Yeah. All of 'em. Most’ve got a drop of the Gift, too. Never did ‘em much good in their lives before. Kicked out, or ran away, or never had anyone to begin with.”

“You included?”

Mouser's hard confidence wavered. She blinked, then sniffed, then shrugged. “'Course.”

“Well. You've picked a hell of a place to not-lead from.”

Mouser glanced around the chapel's heights. “During the night, yeah. No one gives a toss if we're in here. Well. Used to not, anyway.”

She turned her large, black-lined eyes on Helena. “But that's why you're here, innit? The coppers over in the old part. By the witch's tomb.”

“Did you see all that in my head?”

“No. Not really.” Mouser paused. Again, that wavering of her facade, the little tremble of her mouth that betrayed her. “It's not right. Over there. It's...never felt good, round that tomb. But now...now it's worse than ever.”

Helena leaned closer. The candlelight shimmered, the shadows huge on the pale walls. “In what way?”

Mouser drew a short breath.

“Sleeping,” she whispered. Her eyes slid to the side, through the chapel walls, drawn as if by some magnet to the tomb through the snowy night. “Not anymore. Awake, now.”

Ice unfurled through Helena’s nerves, a silver glitter like moonlight, and just as cold.

“You're right,” Matty said gently. He touched Mouser's shoulder; she shivered, looked at him, looked away. “That's why we're here. Did you see why the police came to the tomb? Who might've broken in? It wasn't your lot, was it?”

“No. Had nothing to do with us. But we saw when the coppers showed up. This morning, round nine. I remember 'cause I was coming back from the cafe with a bag of chips for Sibby.” Her eyes flickered to a girl huddled by a lantern, long strawberry-blonde hair glistening in the firelight. “Sibby loves chips.”

Matty glanced at Helena. He must have come to the same conclusion. That had been well before they'd come to the murder scene in Hammersmith, long before they'd been alerted to the break-in. So why the gap? Why hang about for so long before reporting the crime?

“Long shot,” Helena said, facing Mouser again, “but we need a favor if you can spare one.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“We need to get into the tomb. Godwin's tomb,” Helena said. “You know this place a hell of a lot better than we do. Any ideas?”

“You want to get into the witch's tomb?” Mouser said, incredulous.

“That's right.”

Mouser turned her head.

“Vic!” she barked.

He straightened, at once alert. “Yeah?”

“I'm giving these two a tour of the place. Mind the kids, will ya?” She jerked her head at Helena and Matty. “C'mon. Follow me. And this isn't a favor, mind. You owe us.”

“Wouldn't be the first time,” Matty said, but did not explain, just slid his hands in his coat pockets and followed the girl into the shadows of the chapel.

***

Mouser led them through a small door in the back of the chapel, down one of the grand, decaying pavilions that winged out from the main building, and into the ankle-deep snow. The snowfall had grown thicker since they were inside; Mouser's lantern, which she took from the chapel, lit up a scarce meter around them, a hazy golden halo in a world of white and gray and deep black in the shadows of the graves.

No one spoke until a mausoleum swam from the darkness ahead, plain, solid, built of Portland stone, its iron-barred gate bestowed with a scant few curlicues and sculpted ivy. Dense brush overgrew the walls, the surrounding trees forming a thicket that in a few years might swallow the small mausoleum whole. There was no sign of a name or symbol carved on the portico, no indication who the tomb might belong to.

“Here.” Mouser hurried up the steps and set the lantern at the base of the gate. The light pooled over a grimy, icy floor, the crypt within barren, lonely. “Hang on a mo.”

She began fiddling with the padlock and a long, slender piece of metal she drew from her ratty fingerless glove. Helena leaned over her shoulder, peering into the crypt.

“Are you sure you didn't break into Godwin's tomb?” she asked. “You seem to be pretty adept at b-and-e where graves are concerned.”

“This isn't a grave. Blimey. It's like you've never been in a cemetery before.” The padlock popped like a knuckle; chain rattled as the gate swung open, stopped by Mouser's hand. “This here's what I like to call a secret.”

She strode into the tomb, her lug-soled boots squishing through the pool of half-frozen mud on the flagstones. Inside, the mausoleum smelled of damp, of mildew, icy stone and that faint, sinister pall of death that all cemeteries carried, stronger in places like these, where the world of the dead seemed far closer in the dark, the cold, trapped far from all light. For a moment Helena thought the niches in the walls were full of coffins, but- no, they were simply carved recesses, cluttered with a few dry, fussy shapes that might have been mummified flowers, with a few pools of wax from long-extinguished candles.

“Here you go.” Mouser strode toward another gate on the far wall of the tomb, set beneath a small stained-glass panel of dragonflies hunting through roses. This one was more solid than the first, a bolt-studded door. It looked far newer than Helena had expected, the beginnings of rust flaking on its bolts, the hinges gleaming.

Mouser stopped alongside the door. “Your long shot.”

Helena looked it over. “And this is...?”

“Your way in. Apparently the Godwin tomb was so set on by the press and angry public after their latest and greatest interment, the family decided to dig themselves a back entrance down into the catacombs below their family mausoleum. Clever, innit?”

“They made an entire fake tomb just to avoid the press?” Matty gave the crypt around him a wide-eyed look, lingering on the fine stonework, the delicate stained glass of the dragonfly panel above.

Helena caught his eye. He gave her a quick glance, brow furrowed.

“Giving Beth a coffin and a headstone seems a bit cheap in comparison,” he said quietly.

Metal squealed, then shuddered, as Mouser hauled the door open. Damp air washed over Helena, warmer and more stagnant than the night they'd left behind. Mouser hoisted the lantern. Its amber light spilled down narrow stone steps, fading before it reached the wall of darkness at the end of the stairway.

Helena stared into the darkness, listening. Listening. Her nerves flickered, sparked; she drew a long breath of the grimy air and released it, curls of steam dissipating into the gloom. Whispers, the faint scufflings of feet on stone, of hands- and below it all, a vibration, a throbbing hum that rose and fell with Helena's heartbeat, drawing her in, drawing her down. Echoes. She wanted to listen, wanted to sink into that dark sea and drown, but she could not, would not. Not now.

Now she needed to move, to speak.

“Something's down there,” she murmured. “Guess your hunch was right, St. Clair.”

“They usually are,” he said, his voice hushed, hesitant, his face blanched in the unforgiving lanternlight.

She began forward, pulling her torch from her satchel as she went. Her hand brushed the Blackwood Board's planchette as she drew it out, and flinched. The planchette burned through the velvet pouch, not hot but icy-cold.

She fumbled it from the satchel and slipped it from its velvet cover, holding it gingerly by her gloved fingertips.

“Is that a planchette?” Matty whispered.

Mouser frowned. “A what?”

“Yeah. It's...” It gave a pulse of cold; Helena winced, clamping down on it lest she drop it onto the steps. “Bloody hell. It's like it's- like it's reacting to something. It's never done anything like this before...”

Mouser was staring at the planchette, a look of faint horror on her face. “I don't like it,” she said. “I really don't like it. What is that? It's not supposed to be here. Feels...bad.” Her voice dropped. “Feels sick...”

“Stay here,” Matty told her quickly. “With the lantern.”

“No! Why-”

“Please. We need someone to stand guard at the escape route.” He paused. “Give us a signal if someone's coming, all right?”

Mouser scowled, but nodded. Her hands flexed on the lantern handle.

“Yeah, I'll shout,” she conceded at last.

Matty grinned. “That's a sport. Now, let's...Blackwood?”

But Helena was already some steps down. Her footsteps echoed into the gloom ahead. Cobweb drifted like remnants of ectoplasm. In her hand, the planchette's hum strengthened, then faded; its crystal lens glinted beneath the torch beam, a single staring eye.

She heard Matty's footsteps clatter to her side, heard him stop just behind her, a hitch in his breathing.

“What is it?” he whispered.

She shook her head. “Stay close.”

They descended into the darkness. It seemed a long way down, longer than Helena had thought, looking from the top of the stairs. A minute, then two; the air grew thicker, stifling and sour, with a smell like dirty hair. Nearer the entrance the stairway walls had been made of the same pale stone as the fake mausoleum above, but some distance down they became brick, crumbling and rust-colored, streaked with damp.

The original catacombs, Helena thought. She did not touch the walls; she didn't need to. The thrum of energy was strong down here, as if it had pooled like water, collecting in these crevices of the world. Strong enough for her to pick up residue, even by simply breathing the air; whispers rose, then faded, trailing off into a wheedling little laugh that coiled around her ear, then slithered away, withdrawing into the dark.

The tunnel branched ahead. Its arched brick doorway led into a low room, walls filled with niches. These held coffins, fitted with pewter or silver, each sealed. Godwins, every last one. The entire Godwin family, generations buried here, sealed down here under all that cold dirt.

Another side crypt was full of yet more tombs. Phosphorescence shimmered in the corners of Helena's vision.

“Ectoplasm,” she murmured. “No signs of it becoming a manifestation, but- yeah. Definitely there.”

“I see it,” Matty said. “Bright.”

“Not for me.”

He shrugged, brushing away a cobweb. “I've always had fair second-sight. I guess sight's my gift, whether it's the present or the future.”

A tapping sound echoed from the crypt, persistent as a migraine. The plasm danced as if disturbed.

Helena stepped back from the door.

“What's it like?” she asked.

“What?”

“Having reliable gifts.”

“Oh.” Matty blinked. “I don't know. I guess I can't know. I don't have anything to compare them to. Yours are...psychometric, yeah? Picking up emotions, memories?”

“Right.”

“I wish I could experience that.”

Helena looked at him. “Seriously? Blimey. Sure, St. Clair, if you want to feel every which way ten times before breakfast. Sometimes I don't even know which emotions are mine, and which I'm picking up from someone else on accident. It's why I wear these gloves all the time. Not for the fashion statement, I'll tell you that much.”

“But you...you feel the past. You experience what people went through. Their fears, their loves...”

He stopped speaking for a long moment.

“...That's what it's all about,” he went on. “Down at the heart of things. That's proper truth. I only see...pictures. Paths. Not what they mean. Not what they are. I have to figure it out, assign meaning to it all. It's exhausting.”

“You don't know if your visions will help you or hurt you?”

“No. I only know they're important.”

“Have they ever led you wrong?”

Again, he said nothing. Helena glanced at him, but he wasn't looking at her. He stared past her shoulder, into the darkness ahead.

“Up there,” he said.

“What?”

“The plasm. It's illuminating...looks like a way out.”

As they approached, the darkness consolidated into another short flight of steps, another door, this one, like that in the fake mausoleum above, far newer than the rest of the place. It opened into a narrow stairwell leading upward at a steep angle.

Helena met Matty's eyes.

Quiet, she mouthed.

He nodded.

Another faint laugh echoed from the catacombs behind them. Matty turned, sharp, and stared into the dark.

“What is it?” Helena asked.

He drew a short breath.

“What's down there?”

He shook his head. “Nothing. Come on. Let's go.”

They moved up the stairs, Helena balanced on the balls of her feet, quiet, light; she clicked off her torch beam and the darkness flooded back in, solid as a physical weight. As they ascended it became tinged with gray, colder, a faint draught stirring the sludgy atmosphere.

“Stop,” Matty whispered, suddenly. “You'll hit your head.”

Helena lifted her hand. Some six inches above her head she met resistance- the smooth back of a metal door. Now that her eyes had begun to adjust, she saw the slats in it, metal bars through which the breeze and faint light found its way in. She slid her hand sideways and encountered a handle; breath between her teeth, she pushed.

It swung wide, silent, as if on oiled hinges.

“Someone come here often?” Matty whispered, but climbed out after her. Dry echoes plashed and shivered around them. They had emerged into a back chamber of the mausoleum, behind a tortured Victorian statue of an angel, weeping, its face in its hands.

More stained glass glimmered behind its head, forest scenes, the trees rippling with hidden creatures. Serpents, and forked-tongued birds, and strange chimaeric beasts. Lions with eagles' feet, deer with the tails of fishes.

Light swept against it, igniting the glass into jeweled fire: a torch beam from the outside. Helena pressed against the wall as voices rose-

“...Bloody cold, couldn't spring for an urn of something reasonably warm, could they-”

“I know what else would be reasonably warm...”

“...oh, sod off, Letby...”

-And faded again. The light moved on.

“Police,” Matty whispered. “Out there.”

Helena nodded. She lifted a finger to her lips, then pushed from the wall and stood, eyes wide, taking in Godwin's tomb.

Her impression of a cathedral was only amplified here. The carved bas-relief columns, the frescoes beneath stained glass windows, the ornate brass plates set into the walls, behind which were surely entombed the moldering bones of yet more Godwins- splendid, melancholic, and yet- everywhere, oppressive as a hand pressing on the back of her neck, a sense of decay, of grandeur given over to madness.

The planchette burned in her hand, a spike of white-hot cold. She hissed, biting back her cry of pain; Matty was at her side in an instant.

“All right?” he asked.

“I...I think...” Her pulse threaded in her wrists. The planchette hummed in her hands. Motes of plasm danced around it, flickering in and out of focus. “Do you...feel that?”

“Something. Yes. What is it?”

“I don't...” She swung the planchette in a wide arc. The hum bit into the backs of her teeth, a keening whine. God, what was that, it was awful, it was strong; she searched the dark, expecting to see a phantom peel its way from the shadows, the first bloom of ghostlight, but there was nothing, nothing but the planchette, lens glittering between her hands...

“Shit,” Helena breathed. “I'm an idiot.”

“No, you're-” Matty began.

“Hush.” Helena hesitated, then did what she'd never done before. Shouldn't, whispered Arthur, in the back of her head. Dangerous, Helena. Too far. Always too far.

She lifted the planchette to her face, the lens over one eye, so she peered through it and into the world beyond. For a moment she squinted. Her view was a cloudy one, the tomb rendered into a blur of black and gray and dirty white marble. But-

Pressure dropped. Her ears popped; she released a shuddering breath. Matty's presence, warm and living, receded.

The blur did not fade; rather it became translucent, as if the world was smoke, water, and beneath it, within it, there was muscle, meat. A red, pulpy mass that was like blood, ropes of it stretching through the matter of the mausoleum around them, through the air. It pulsed, wet, organic, a drumbeat. A heartbeat.

Helena's own pulse quickened. Her gorge rose; somewhere, distant, her skin broke out in a cold sweat.

“What is it?”

Matty's voice.

“I...” Helena's own voice came to her a beat too late. “...I don't know...there's...residue...but it's...different, it's weird, like it's...”

She stopped. The pulse was stronger ahead, through the vestibule that led to the rest of the mausoleum. A thick, entwined rope of webbing and phantasmal tissue stretched down it, its pulsating movement unceasing.

“It's stronger,” Helena said. “Through here...”

She stepped forward, following the stuff. It thickened as she passed through the vestibule, branching into tendons and capillaries that clung to the walls, the floor and ceiling, like fleshy moss. The planchette juddered in her hands, against her eye. What was this? Not a memory, not an echo, not like she knew. It was as if the psychic residue left behind in this place had, itself, taken form, thickened, curdled.

She thought of powerful entities, ghosts strong enough for their ectoplasm to acquire physical mass. Had a psychic event taken place here, and had it been so strong it left gore splattering the walls of the world?

A flare of torchlight illuminated a stained glass panel, a scene of saints butchered and tortured, overseen by angels, their wings a dizzying thicket of feathers.

“Police,” Matty whispered. His voice rang to Helena, warped and strange. “Whatever you're doing, be quick.”

“Something happened here.” Helena stepped into the main chamber. Ahead, the broken gate clanged mournfully against the lock, chain rattling. Snow gusted into the doorway, painting a frozen streak down the steps down into the mausoleum, over the flagged floor. Grave markers gleamed darkly from the walls, statues in corners all wings and weeping faces, looming from the dark, dripping with spectral gore, wrapped in strands of slick tendon and muscle. The view through the lens wavered, vibrated against itself; for a moment two images of the tomb fought in Helena's vision, superimposed like filmstrips. It coalesced, settled, and she stepped toward the far wall of the crypt.

A shadowed niche gaped there, the stonework around it smashed and crumbled, the grave marker torn away and cast aside. It had been crumpled like a ticket stub, but as Helena stepped over the rubble she glimpsed the name engraved into the metal:

LADY IRENE ANASTASIA SOFIA GODWIN

1933-1962

Pura In Morte

The vault beyond was as empty as night, a ragged black hole in the wall. There was no coffin, no trace remaining- not of the accouterments of burial, nor of the corpse buried therein. The meat-residue pulsated faster, radiating from the robbed grave.

This is the source. The epicenter. The heart. Whatever had happened had done so here.

“Blackwood,” whispered Matty, behind her. His eyes shone in the trace of light, wide in his pale face. “Where's her body?”

“Not here.” The pulse was mesmerizing, sickening; she heard the slither of wet flesh, the hum growing louder as she drew near. Whispers, cries- both fluttered through the dark chamber of her mind, louder than reality. “Not anymore.”

Irene Godwin's corpse was gone. Bones, withered flesh- whatever remained of her was no longer in her grave. Gouges and scrapes surrounded the broken burial vault, dug into as if with immense force. Helena stepped closer, close enough to feel the tremor of the fleshy residue vibrate the air; her hand was clammy in her glove, her grip on the planchette trembling. Strange lights danced in the edges of her vision. The vault itself was a dark, yawning pit, a hole in the world.

“What could have done this?” Helena's own whisper slithered through her mind, twofold and weird. Nausea chased it, rippling from the pit of her stomach. “I've never seen...anything...”

“Blackwood-”

“-Wait, there's...”

“Blackwood, get back from-”

The darkness stretched, an endless abyss. Closer. Closer, Blackwood. Yes, that's it. That's the way. “There's something waiting...something inside-”

“You, there! Stop!”

Torchlight blazed into the tomb; Matty cried out, but it was not thanks to the police, dark silhouettes beyond the dazzle of light-

It erupted from the burial-vault, a cloud of buzzing forms. Helena didn't know. She caught only an instant of countless tiny bodies, clawed, barbed, glistening, spilling into the tomb before they swarmed her in a humming mass and darkness closed around her face.