Elodie looked at the pen, then lifted it up in the reflection. On Jane’s side it did not move. She stared as Elodie took up the journal as well and opened to a clean, fresh page. The world around her fell away, and there was only the young woman, bloodied and alone. Elodie was still, save for the trembling in her fingers.
Jane felt so very like her that she wanted to weep. She wished they could have met some other way, in some other life. She wished she understood what had made the woman attack her, what had made them set themselves against each other. Elodie had helped her, the night that Orren came. Elodie had never appeared to Augustine. Something connected her to Jane, something unknown. Perhaps unknowable.
Elodie began to write.
She did not write much. A few words that Jane could not make out. She blew upon the ink, then carefully closed the notebook, pen inside the pages to mark the sheet. She set it down where Jane had placed it, and Jane was careful not to look beside her. She had not looked at her own notebook since the moment Elodie had touched it, in the reflection.
Elodie nodded.
Jane mastered her breathing, then closed her eyes and picked up the notebook by touch alone. She slid her thumb along the shaft of the pen. Not daring to hope, because to hope was not to know, she opened the journal and her eyes. Elodie had written only four words:
Ghosts are not real.
Jane stared, then looked sharply up at the mirror. But the mirror held only her own reflection, even as she stood, even as she rushed forward and grasped the molded edges. “I don’t understand!” she cried, shaking it as if she held Elodie herself by the shoulders. “Come back, I need more! I can’t understand this!”
Ghosts are not real. The words echoed inside her head. They collided with the stone she had seen beneath Mrs. Cunningham’s skin, and the glide of statues in the hallway, Dr. Nizamiev’s explanation of death and resurrection, and her own theories about how much Augustine might have changed the world. The Cunninghams appearing, even though the chance that they had both died was so low, even though she felt no responsibility for their unknown deaths.
If ghosts were not real, what were the things wearing the faces of the Cunninghams, tormenting her, pulling thoughts straight from her mind?
If ghosts were not real, what had she lain with, if not Augustine?
If ghosts were not real, how could she be certain Augustine was dead?
The creatures down below followed certain rules. They came after dark. They disappeared at sunrise. They could not cross her circle. Whatever had come to her in Augustine’s form had not been them, and had not been his spirit.
Augustine might yet live.
“Come back!” she cried, falling to her knees before the mirror. Her fingers pressed so hard against the glass that spidering cracks began to spread across its surface, but Elodie was gone. “Tell me he is alive. Tell me he is suffering, if only so that I know he still breathes.” If he was alive, if she hadn’t failed—if she knew now how to call a wall, and how to summon the visage of an impossible dead woman—
She could bring the crypt wall down. She could save him.
CHAPTER FORTY
THE CUNNINGHAMS WERE mere feet from the bedroom when Jane emerged to face them. They stood together, with the dour-faced concern they usually only showed for the matters of Mr. Cunningham’s worse-off clients. Jane’s heart pounded in her throat, and she tried to see a way past them.
There was none. They filled the hallway.
Jane fell back a step, and then another.
“Jane, please,” Mrs. Cunningham said. “Come here, darling.” She held out her age-spotted hands, her knuckles thickened, her wrists plump.
Jane retreated.
The anger in her breast, the righteous fury and the fear—she kept it all tempered, banked inside her, though it made her hands tremble until she fisted them in her skirts. She had to be calm, and clever, and focused. She had to be everything Augustine was in the throes of surgery. A life depended on her.
But she was exhausted, and as she backpedaled, her ankle twisted. She stumbled, nearly falling—and then she looked down and saw them: all the circles she had drawn, all her experiments, covering almost every inch of the floor.
She could use this.
Drawing up to her full height, Jane made herself reach out and take Mrs. Cunningham’s hands. Her stomach twisted in revulsion at how solid and comforting they felt. Ghosts are not real, she told herself, and then buried the thought, because she could not let herself feel horror. Not now, not yet.
“It’s always been easier to run,” she made herself say.
Mrs. Cunningham—the thing that wore her face—smiled at that, and gave Jane’s hand a squeeze. “Come, let us begin again,” she said. She glanced at Mr. Cunningham.