The Missing: The Curious Cases of Will Winchester and the Black Cross Read online

  “There are no ghosts in this house,” my father reproved, appalled. “There are no ghosts anywhere, at all!”

  I told Charlie and Colette to leave the others alone, but the lady and her children still quit the place not long after. I got older, the parties lost their illusions, and the way my father looked at me … began to change. As though I were a troublesome, mischievous thing. As though I’d committed some crimes against him.

  As though he were slightly afraid of me.

  A few times, gentlemen refused to return because someone had grabbed at their ankles from under a bed, or thrown open doors on rooms in which they’d sought privacy with a companion. Naturally, ladies came and went as employees, but in as many years four girls who’d boarded with us fled in straits.

  “Frightened,” the other girls said after Miss Valérie turned up her nose and demanded I ask what concerns they’d expressed to her. As if to shame me for already knowing, being in her eyes the one at fault. “The house is haunted.”

  “Haunted!” My father coughed out the word in contempt. “You are far too old to be keeping up this nonsense. Are you jealous, then? Do you think it noble to drive out mine and Miss Valérie’s friends?”

  It was a game, I convinced Charlie and Colette. “Only the three of us may know about one another,” I said, sitting with them in the rear drawing room one afternoon. “I’ll be helping Daddy with his parties now, and you must be good while I am. If someone notices you, you’ve lost the game.”

  They listened to me, of course. Most of the time. They’re children; it can’t be helped.

  “We know.” Miss Daphne had peeked into my room one night with a candle in hand and Agatha wide-eyed behind her, shortly after the two of them had taken up board down the hall from me. “There’s something ghostly in the house and we know you’re aware of it.”

  I had just nodded, gawking at them from my bed feeling quite guilty and sad, as if it really were my fault Charlie and Colette were there in the first place. Now when anything out of the ordinary happened, Daphne or Agatha came to me to put a stop to it. Nobody questioned why. They just … knew that I could and I would.

  It wasn’t Charlie or Colette for which my father scorned me anymore; he was in deep denial of them, I’d swear it. Now it was just my interest in the metaphysical he hated.

  “Rubbish!” he chastised. “All penny dreadfuls and parlour tricks!”

  Miss Zelda, the longtime family housekeeper and thus as good as my governess over the years, didn’t lecture me, but when she caught me with books on Spiritualism and the occult, or found me slipping out with Daphne to see West End spirit photography and ghost conjuring galas, the worried shadow on her face was enough to guilt me into obedience.

  “I don’t even engage,” I insisted. Not as much as I wished to, anyway. Daphne and I would simply watch from the background, from the safer shadows against the wall.

  “Too dangerous,” Zelda always said, and I could never figure out if she believed in Charlie and Colette, or not. “Please. Listen to your father.”

  But … how could I not be interested in it all? It was my ghastly cross to bear, though for what sins, I was never totally positive.

  In my bedroom, I sighed and leaned back against the door.

  “Be good and don’t cause any more ruckus tonight,” I said to Charlie and Colette, if they were even there to listen anymore. “I mean it.”

  Voices muffled and thin, as though they hid somewhere full of mischief yet, they chimed, “Yes, Will!”

  “What’s the matter, Will?” my father asked as I came down from the attic.

  “Nothing, of course,” I said, letting him tousle my hair and give a loving pat to my shoulder, reminders of fatherly affection that came easily to him after a few drinks but were never enough to distract from his duties as business host and man of the house.

  He went off towards the front drawing room and I hurried back to where I’d left Agatha and the others—but just as I stepped through the doorway, a hand closed on my arm. I halted, looking around in dismay. God, but if it was that spying man from earlier …

  It was only Miss Athena, another of my father’s girls—sweet, baby-faced Athena. Something wasn’t right.

  Her lower lip quivered and a veneer of tears made her eyes shine like crystal. The last time she’d looked at me like that, confused and cold, Charlie had chased her down the stairs sometime after midnight, laughing and tugging at the ribbons on her dress.

  Yet somehow, I knew even before she opened her mouth that it had nothing to do with ghostly children’s pranks.

  “It’s Daphne,” she said. “Daphne’s left, Will! She said she’s really through with it all, can’t even bear the rest of the night, and she’s off to Waterloo, I’m sure—”

  My heart dropped fast.

  I shook loose of Athena’s grip so suddenly, I almost knocked the cigarette out of some gentleman’s hand as he passed by.

  “She really means it tonight?” I demanded, so very tired of fearing the worst.

  “I watched her leave.” Athena struggled against the tears. “Will, I don’t think she’s coming back!”

  As I shoved my way out of the party, hardly even noticing those with whom I collided, Miss Calico simpered from where she had been eavesdropping nearby, “There he goes, little Romeo, after his precious Juliet … ”

  But she did not understand. Daphne was my best friend. She was my favourite, to be honest. Daphne, who tip-toed to my room on the quiet nights to read Fun and Tales of the Dead. Daphne, who was like a sister to me—who never complained and never said bad things about others, and who hid a terrible aching sadness behind her lovely smile. In Miss Daphne, I wanted to trust not just my petty secrets, but my real secrets, because she trusted me with hers, too.

  I didn’t think to grab my coat. I just flew out the door with Athena on my heels, and the temporary attention of the house’s crowd rippling in our wake.

  Daphne was about to do something unspeakable, and I couldn’t let her. So, it was straight to the Strand with Athena’s clammy hand tight in mine as we darted up the sidewalk and stole a hansom cab from a group of distracted gentlemen, apologising around the side as we rattled off.

  My heart was a glass prism waiting to shatter into a million pieces if Daphne really were to jump from the bridge tonight.

  “I can’t!” Athena moaned as the cab shuddered to a stop at the great arch of Waterloo Bridge, which was particularly inhospitable and glum in the night’s thick fog, almost enough to wholly shroud the occasional coughing passerby or jerking coach.

  “I’m scared, Will!” Athena said. “Haven’t you heard about the Wraith at Waterloo?”

  Of course, I’d heard the gossip of a ghost haunting the bridge. Who hadn’t? It was some of the most popular Spiritualist parlour talk. All through the night, a white figure wandering the bridge, following pedestrians, there and gone again in the blink of an eye. But even if I weren’t already well-acquainted with the dead, my fear of Daphne’s demise was greater than the fear of some paltry, rumoured specter.

  “It’s all right, Athena,” I promised, already out and on the road. “You wait here for me. I’ll be back with Daphne.”

  I hoped.

  Athena stayed with the cab as I hurried up the bridge, which was strangely vacant, except for a few men in overcoats huddled under a streetlamp. The slap of water and the nighttime fog distorted the echo of the city around me. Horses, music, voices, so far away, it felt.

  “Daphne!” I called. “Daphne!”

  “I’m sorry!” The distant sound of Athena sobbing bounced off the stone of the bridge. “I’m sorry I told him when I promised not to, Daphne, but I couldn’t let you do it, I couldn’t!”

  There she was—Daphne, just a silhouette, leaning at the side of the bridge. The burst of relief left me numb. She hadn’t jumped. Thank God, she hadn’t even climbed up yet. She just stood looking down into the water, courting unthinkable things.

  I staggered to a hal
t.

  No … there she was, on the other side of the road. Up on the ledge peeking down at the Thames below. Midnight wind tugged and yanked at her thin coat. Had she not heard us cry out for her?

  I dashed forth. I’d never forgive myself if I watched her jump, too late to grab her.

  “Bloody—”

  My foot caught against a tightly-stretched twine and I hit the cobbles hard with a choke of a gasp, whilst a series of bells, apparently attached to the string, rang to announce my gracelessness.

  Palms raw and cheek burning from the bite of the stone, I scraped myself up off the pavement. A whole web of strings and bells on little rods caught lamplight in pale sparks through the fog. What was this about … ?

  Daphne.

  I looked up, panicked. Daphne was still on the ledge, skirts dancing about her naked ankles. Her slippers sat discarded at the base of the lamppost.

  Bells ringing shrilly, I stamped down twine to clear my path and bounded across the bridge. My face throbbed; blood stained my sleeve as I wiped at the apple of my cheek. God knew how badly I’d scraped it.

  I pulled Daphne off the ledge by the wind-chilled wrist, tumbling down with her all flaring petticoat and pearls to hit the ground a second time.

  “Oh!” she gasped, wrestling against me not to break free but to meet me face-to-face, wide-eyed with shock as if I’d yanked her from some sleepwalking dream. And then a dark sort of guilt eclipsed her, stubborn and unapologetic.

  “Will!” she cried. “What are you doing here?”

  “What are you doing?” I retorted.

  Daphne’s eyes jumped around; her face pinched. “I … ” She wriggled again, trembling hands pressed to the cobbles as she sat up on her own. “I almost did it,” she said, in a daze.

  “But you didn’t,” I said, “and you’re coming home with Athena and me now!”

  Perhaps it was selfish to feel so wounded, so angry beyond the relief. But it was unfair, that she might have gone to end her life without saying good-bye to me. How could someone smile and laugh so freely but still be so unhappy?

  “Will, your face! What happened to your face?” Daphne’s fingers drifted along my cheek.

  “Damn it, Daphne—”

  The men who’d been clustered a few lampposts down suddenly hovered over us, two of them casting scowls and the other pair looking torn between curiosity and obligation amid the crisis.

  “You’re interfering with our inspection!” one of them roared, a baby of a bachelor with messy hair and a tetchy countenance that ruined his handsome face.

  “Are you two all right? That was quite the fall!” sputtered another, this one about my size and probably not much older, and I would have answered him had I not been immediately distracted by the two different colours of his eyes. One a lovely clear blue; the other, grey and clouded like there was no colour to it at all. Something about him felt rather familiar, but then some people just possessed such charisma.

  How utterly humiliating, for these strangers to have witnessed the entire thing.

  “You ruined all our bells!” the angry one went on. “Do you know how long it took to set those up?”

  “Clement, the ambience compass is going wild.” The third man was all worked up and out of breath, a nervous-looking thing with a knapsack and prominent ears, and that awkward course of motion that befell long gangly people.

  The last—a taller, more muscular fellow whose square jaw and sharp mutton chops made him look what I imagine it might if a wolf were a man, still fierce even with tiny spectacles perched atop his head—helped Daphne and me off the ground. He met my eyes and held them, unperturbed.

  “Be a gentleman,” he instructed. “Take your lady home now that she’s safe. We’re in the middle of something.”

  “All our bells, God damn it!”

  “Please, go,” the bespectacled man urged again, gruffly. “You’re only in the way now, boy.”

  Boy.

  “Daphne!” Athena called from the junction archway in a ragged sob of relief. Daphne pulled away from me and dashed down the bridge, colliding with her in a tangle of tears and messy curls.

  My head spun. “You set up those bells?” I blurted. Daphne was safe. The panic should have retreated. But it just coiled in on itself and sharpened into fury. Real gentlemen wouldn’t have dared turn someone else’s almost-crisis into a slight on their behalf. But maybe they weren’t real gentlemen. Not that my impression of gentlemen wasn’t perhaps a bit skewed by my father’s line of work.

  I hissed, “Those wires could kill a man who doesn’t know they’re there. I tripped on them!”

  “Well, you’re not dead, are you?” The petulant one uttered a sound somewhere between scoff and laugh.

  “Clement, the ambience compass … ”

  “Oh, did you know you’re bleeding?” the one my size interjected, face dimpled in concern. But the look he shot at their irascible associate was surprisingly feisty. “Quinn, tell Clement to let it alone. It is our fault, after all.”

  Somewhere beyond, noise echoed from crepuscular crowds. The hair rose on the back of my neck and a faint ringing shivered in my ears. The silhouette of the other girl was there again, only a few lamps up the bridge. Staring at us, it seemed. Well, weren’t we putting on quite the show?

  Ah, but …

  That peculiar ladylike shadow was not alive. It was the Wraith at Waterloo.

  There was something deeply unsettling about running into ghosts outside my attic. I backed away from the arguing men, brow knotting. “There’s something here,” I blurted, flustered and uneasy. Never mind the quarrel. I’d see myself off with Daphne and Athena. “I’m sorry, I … well, you know, you’ve heard the tales, I’m sure, about … ”

  I didn’t have a chance to explain and they didn’t have a chance to question me, because up from the ground sprang that ghostly silhouette, right there between us and blocking my view of the loudmouthed one the other men had called Clement.

  Wide-eyed, fixed stare and sunken cheeks, hair flowing about her face as lusciously and unnaturally as a drop of ink in water, the Missing woman looked right into my eyes, curiously, ominously, as if I had trespassed somehow. A wave of dread rolled through me. I wanted off this bridge. I wanted away from this thing. Why did they always come to me?

  A horrid wheezing sound brushed up against my ear—she was to speak, perhaps.

  But the apparition just suddenly slunk away as fast as it had come and left me staring right at that Clement fellow, who gawked back at me equally as stunned.

  Had they witnessed it, too, then? Or did I seem a madman, distracted by things unseen to them?

  “I’m sorry,” I sputtered, mouth chalky with the taste of embarrassment. “I’ll be going—”

  A freezing gust that reeked of the Thames struck me hard and dissolved into fingers around my neck. I staggered back, coughing with the blow as if I’d been punched in the throat.

  The whole world veered violently to one side, seemed to blur all together into only colours and lights. I couldn’t breathe. My throat and chest were full of water. Oh God, I thought, I’ve fallen into the river! Sadness and fear crashed heavy through me, but quite unfamiliar, as if the weight of them came from beyond my own body. And then everything just … stopped.

  ***

  I pried my eyes open and found myself seated on a crooked bed in a dingy, cluttered room.

  Others spoke nearby, beyond the closed door. I could hear them, but the conversation was incomprehensible and warped as though I were small again, submerged in bath water and listening to my mother and Zelda have words somewhere above my head. Count how long I hold my breath, Mamma!

  I must have fainted, I decided, and been brought somewhere by the dubious foursome on the bridge to recover. And yet … somehow, I knew that was not so.

  It wasn’t so, as I wasn’t me anymore.

  There was a smudged little looking-glass on a wash stand not far away. I forced myself to look. Not at my reflection, no …


  Her reflection.

  It was the Wraith’s, and her name was Kitty. But how did I know that … ?

  In some inharmonious rush of colours and smells and muffled sounds, this was Kitty’s life. And I knew because I was Kitty.

  Hunger. Poverty. Too many siblings and not enough love. Mother pitied me. Father despised me. Shiver of cold desperation slicing through my … her soul. Forget the factories. Squalid street after street, man after man, and the business of the bed, lying flat on my back, the air cold on bare skin. The business of the bed, why always the business of the bed? Every sane bit of me wailed for release. No, no, no, this was a nightmare! What was this? Where was this, and how was I to escape—

  Darcy James and his morphine dreams. Darcy James’ touch made my heart swell as Kitty’s heart swelled. As Kitty vomited everything she ate into a rusty pail in the corner, I vomited everything I ate into that same rusty pail. Help! I tried to scream, but it hurt; my voice was trapped in my throat and went nowhere, and there was such a pressure in my head, I feared it might burst … Bethnal Green, dress houses, Darcy James, whore, whore, whore!

  The stone of Waterloo Bridge, icy and slick below my bare feet. I leaned out until there was nothing to hold me, and I fell into the Thames, taking deep breaths of the dirty water because I wanted to die, because Darcy James stopped coming because he was married now. He’d moved to the suburbs. There were so many voices, buzzing, whispering, closing in on me.

  The towering wolf-man the strangers on the bridge called Quinn slapped me across the face, and the trance-like stream of visions careened to a halt.