Except for the gaping wound in the world that knelt on the other side.
Why was Elodie gone? It was too early for Augustine to have done his working. She lived. She was happy, and loved, and hale.
And if Elodie was not here, if there was only this blankness in her place, where had she gone?
The nothingness rose up to full height and stepped forward, crossing the boundary. It slid into the pattern on the floor, and set the whole thing pitching, rocking. Nothingness reached out and grasped a blade that was offered to it.
Nothingness dripped down like blood, eating away the floor.
And then there was only the sound of afternoon crickets, the glow of sunlight, the swirl of dust around her. Distant footsteps in the hall. She was still in the library, surrounded by empty shelves. She lurched forward, heart pounding, and cast aside the book in her lap. A nightmare. It had been a nightmare. Had she slept? Had she ruined the ritual, set herself back an entire day?
But no, in her left hand, she still clutched the candlestick.
What, then, had she seen?
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
AS SOON AS the servants were gone, Jane went in search of Elodie.
She looked in every darkening window, every mirror. She shouted Elodie’s name. She retrieved Elodie’s journal, still where she had left it tucked in the couch, and read every page aloud, hoping, hoping. Elodie had written of the day Jane had witnessed, her “initiation into the mysteries” at the hands of her families. She had been nervous, delighted, bewitched. There had been no magic, none that Elodie could say for certain had been real, but she had been ready to hope. She had believed.
Jane looked as well for any sign of blankness, but Elodie’s name remained in the journal. It remained in Augustine’s notes on the resurrection ritual. She suspected that if she had them at hand, his ledger would also still contain her name. There was no gaping hole where Elodie should have been, beyond the normal absence that death left in its wake. When Jane looked in empty windows, she saw herself, or darkness outside, or the reflection of gas sconces. Her eyes didn’t slide away. She didn’t feel a writhing wrongness.
And yet she was certain that the blankness had meant something.
Why had Elodie been gone in that vision, but there in full, horrific agony in the vision Hunt’s games had bestowed on Jane? There with her red eyes in the window before? There with her blood-soaked gown in the cellar?
“She’s trapped,” Jane whispered to herself, staring at her smudged circle in the library.
But Augustine had said he’d never seen her. It all connected, but Jane was missing some crucial variable, some indispensable operation.
She made herself breathe and draw the circle anew. She knelt in the center of the library. This progression, this ritual deprivation, it offered knowledge. This vision might not be the last. There might be more to come, more context, more explanation.
“Elodie,” she said to the creaking darkness of Lindridge Hall at night, “I will find you. I will solve this. I will fix this.”
In answer, the dusk working ran smoothly. At its conclusion, she rocked back onto her heels, feeling drunk and dazed. She reached for the magical texts. Even in her addled mind, the illogic of the haphazard scholarship refused to coalesce, but certain phrases burned bright to her. She found a half-used journal in Augustine’s library and set to writing down her observations, her experiences, her theories.
The circle is the thing.
She had observed that the presence of an invoked circle could stop a ghost’s approach and make it leave her. It could not cross the boundary, and it did not linger as a hungry wolf circling wounded prey. It was the purest form of magic she had yet discovered. She must press its mysteries.
She had paper and ink up in the library, but not much, and she quickly exhausted it by drawing circles and laying out every geometric theorem she remembered. She spent long hours following deep trails of logic, wishing for more than her book on fringe mathematical theories, wishing for a blackboard. But what she had was ink-filled paper and the floor beneath. She grabbed her stick of chalk and continued to draw. When that wore down to almost nothing, she took her pen to the wood itself. Her eyes ached and burned behind her glasses.
She felt so close to something, so close to a solution. She sketched out equations, including childish attempts at using zero in strange new ways. Zero, which could also be written as a circle. Was there a connection there?
A scream pierced the silence of the house.
It came from the lower floors, both muffled by the distance and amplified by its echoing in the cavernous foyer.