Читать книгу The Spectral City - Leanna Renee Hieber - Страница 7

Prologue

Manhattan dinner parties in the gilded 1890s had become a studied spectacle in opulence for the ruling class of the country’s wealthiest city. The bustling, ever striving, never sleeping metropolis’s class of most fashionable, up-to-date, technologically accessorized, bejeweled and beholden to no one but themselves were the kinds of company that the Prenze family kept, curating people and their statuses like one might think of assembling a stock portfolio.

That’s how it appeared to Margaret Hathorn as she floated into the parlor for light aperitifs and a bit of music and chatter before dinner. She knew the types, their predilections, and their concerns. Margaret had been born into wealth, and during her young life she’d been quite enamored of high society’s trappings, dalliances and luxuries, their petty dramas and the consequential ways their decisions affected the city. From her vantage point, she could see the full scope.

She had seen and learned much since those days of carefree and impetuous youth. Not only had she come to understand the tired adage of money not buying happiness, but she realized that Poe had been on to something with The Masque of the Red Death. There were dangers in being too shielded, too gilded, too able to make up one’s own rules for life, too easily sheltered away from the horrors and cares of the world. She could feel a sense of dread here, as if the Red Death were lurking in the hallway just beyond. Maybe it was, clad in some beautiful House of Worth gown or some finely tailored frock coat with satin lapels.

It should be noted that Margaret Hathorn, herself, was dead. Her perspective was one of two worlds, and for nearly two decades, she had floated between the living and the dead. Once, on the heels of her untimely and harrowing murder, she had nearly decided to seek out the light and go unto that great, sweet Summerland that the legitimate Spiritualists spoke of. Heaven. Peace. Almost . . . The corridor of light had opened before her and she had almost sought out forgiveness in the oblivion of some great and unknowable thing.

But the spectral city kept drawing her back. New York was a body she felt destined to orbit; an otherworldly magnet. There was so much to do. There was so much to learn. There was so much to fix, to reveal, to fight for that she now knew had deep meaning; meaning that had been lost to her in a life looking into gilded frames and too many mirrors in which she’d primped lustrous curls.

Looking into the mirror here, gazing into the center of its wide gold frame and etched glass detailing, as she floated in this gaudy and ostentatious mansion she’d been drawn into, she saw a wisp of herself. Nearly entirely transparent, there was just a slight contouring of the air where her figure floated. She was nothing but a slight shade of glowing lines delineating features frozen in youth.

She had agreed to stay a consistent New York City haunt because of the living. Her ongoing work with family and friends gave her a purpose and mission she’d never had as an admittedly vapid socialite whose ill-advised curiosity had killed her like the most inelegant of cats.

But to say she had full command over her immortal coil would be a lie. Take this evening, for example. She’d been drawn into a stranger’s mansion and found herself floating about a fine parlor bedecked in marble, velvet, and seemingly unending gold trim, with no idea why.

Spiritualists, as the uniquely American version of the sect had been born of Quakers, would often utter that they spoke “as the spirits moved.” Sometimes the spirits too, were moved. By unseen forces and unfathomable hands. She had been moved here for reasons she hoped would reveal themselves. Surveying the room, floating along behind the present company at a sufficient distance so as not to strike up complaints of drafts or chills, offered Maggie the clues of family name and fortune. A few framed images on the parlor walls featured images of beautiful women in frothy day-dresses holding decorative bottles trimmed with golden filigree, boasting the great calming and healing powers of Prenze Tonics.

This is where she was. The Prenze mansion. This family had been on her mind. Something wasn’t right about this place. About this family. And the spirit world knew it.

Maggie had followed a series of incidences and instincts to this mansion, all in a rush. There were secrets to be exposed. She now floated by a mantelpiece littered with objects d’art from around the world, and watched the festivities unfold.

There was a medium present, or at least she was costumed as such, with an embroidered set of robes, a turban, and too much eye makeup. The most theatrical ones who appropriated religious aspects of other cultures and muddied the meaning right out of them with fetishistic Orientalism tended to be the most fraudulent ones, so Maggie was certain it wasn’t the medium who had summoned her directly into this space.

No. Fellow ghosts had drawn her in. Two of them, children, one dressed in traditional garb of a skirt and vest, and the other in shorts with shoulder straps, straight out of a Bavarian folk tale. Fellow ghosts appeared to Maggie’s eyes as fully greyscale figures, their features more solid and clear than any reflections she could see in mirrors.

The Grimm storybook children pointed to the mantel, towards a specific object. There, between a set of candelabras, sat a simple box with a latch; an etching in the wood proclaimed it to be something of smoking supplies.

“Open it,” the little girl begged.

“You’re a potent spirit,” the boy, likely her brother, added hopefully.

“We’ve been weakened here and nothing responds to our touch. Open it. Show everyone. Throw it. This family can’t keep hurting all of us.”

Maggie knew from working with ghost colleagues and mediums on a spate of recent mysteries that living subjects under possible investigation react in vastly different ways to poltergeist activity. She had no idea what she was about to set in motion, but she also didn’t have anything to lose.

Dear Eve, the young lady to whom Maggie had pledged the work and gifts of her spirit, would be cross with her for acting on a hunch without informing her. “There are protocols, paperwork, one can’t just barge in and begin levitating family belongings,” she’d chide gently as if she were a bemused mother and not a nineteen-year-old taskmaster; a brisk old soul in a youthful body.

But every time Maggie had an instinct about this mansion and the people in it, results eluded her. It’s why she’d never brought the Prenze name to Eve’s attention. She wasn’t going to send Eve’s new Precinct on a wild goose chase when she was trying to prove herself. Here was the opportunity to engage with an actual object that might be hard evidence and not conjecture. No detective could work with conjecture—she’d learned it was their least favorite word and a liability they couldn’t afford.

It was clear that none of the living people in the room saw the three spirits, as there were no indications, no shudders, no looking around as if suddenly unsettled, no brushing down the hackle of small hairs up the backs of their bejeweled or satin-swathed necks. A poltergeist would prove the most surprising, unsettling, and least expected event of the night. The fact that the ‘medium’ didn’t look around or sense any presences when Maggie or the children appeared revealed the woman as a fraud.

The trick would be mustering the energy, the momentum, to move an object. She’d long since forgotten what being corporeal felt like, and that had always been the easiest way, to simply interact with an object just like you would have done in life, feeling a phantom limb in reverse.

Overthinking it was also a curse, so she just allowed herself to rifle through a memory box of every time she’d been humiliated or patronized at an event like this during her corporeal life. Just because she’d been in high society didn’t mean it had ever been kind to her. It treated young, eligible women as pretty cattle sold to the highest bidder in the marketplace of social climbing. This surge of frustration was enough. She swatted a weightless hand at the metal box. It went flying and landed in the center of a floral Persian rug, opening and spilling its contents—a stack of photographic images.

Cries went up, everyone, all eight adults in the room, reacted with a jump or a vocal start at the crash of the box. Bodies leaned in, but no one approached the box or its contents—they simply stared.

The photographs were recent, by their finish and the lack of yellowing around the edges.

Maggie took a moment to stare at the pictures she’d revealed to the company. Something bothered her deeply about their nature. They were all posed, with props and scenery, costumes and crowns or halos. There was something too stilted about the figures, something eerie about their features.

Postmortem photography. When it was so common, one learned to tell the difference between images of the living and the photographs of the dead. Often a photograph of a dead loved one was the only picture a family had of them. But these were more elaborately staged than Maggie had ever seen. Far more than was any sort of custom.

Maggie stared at the ghosts of the two young children—six, perhaps seven years old—who had fierce, defiant looks on their faces as they took in the horrified expressions of the living. She saw a photograph lying there of the two of them, in their Bavarian garb, posed with a shepherd’s crook and a prop sheep. Their eyes were closed but their eyelids had been painted with eyes as if they were open.

A tall, thin, dour-looking man in a fine umber brown suitcoat strode forward, his long face elongated in a frown, his auburn hair greying at the temples. The man scooped up the strewn images with an irritated sigh, glaring in the direction of Maggie, but not directly at her. This man, she determined, must be a Prenze patriarch.

“What . . . what were those . . .?” a young woman sitting on a velvet settee asked, leaning forward curiously, her blue silk gown pooling around her.

Everyone stared at their host, who offered a thin-lipped smile. “Confiscated property from a recent wayward friend. I have been known to minister to those among my station who are lost. This is a friend’s collection. What an unfortunate fetish; to covet deceased who are not his kin. I took them away, lest he be haunted. Perhaps I have brought a haunt upon us instead. What an ungodly thing. Isn’t that right, Madame Nightstar?”

Maggie nearly snorted at the unoriginal stage name.

The man turned to the medium, who was white as a sheet. “Oh . . . of course . . . Mr. Prenze. Of course.”

Maggie wanted to interject that there was nothing inherently ‘ungodly’ about a spirit in the least, but the man ushered everyone out of the room to go on to dinner, saying he would be right with them all. They did so, looking warily at the upturned box, at their host, and at the ‘medium’ before obeying and filing out to a feast.

Once the parlor door had closed behind the last guest, the towering man closed the distance between himself and Maggie in two easy strides.

“Ah, naughty girl,” the man clucked his tongue, staring at Maggie directly, eye to eye. That answered whether or not she could be seen by him. He hadn’t given her any clue before. Wily. “How did you get in?” he pressed.

Maggie turned toward the children. They were gone.

“Just passing by,” Maggie replied, unsure if he could hear her.

“Well, now that you’re here, stay indefinitely—” the man said with a leering grin. He moved to the door, to a switch along the wall that surely controlled the lighting. She had assumed from the opulence of the home that the lighting was electric; it was too bright and had a harsher quality, and the man made it only more so as he turned a knob and the lights grew even brighter. Impossibly so. The room grew blinding. Maggie squinted, raising an incorporeal arm over her eyes as if she could shield herself.

Along with the bright light came a hum, a rising, whining, whirring, grating noise like a mechanical roar. The sound hurt. The light burned. She felt as though she were being torn apart . . . she opened her mouth to scream . . .

And then . . . utter darkness.