She sank to her knees, pressing herself against the rock, every inch of bare skin that she had. Her throat was thick.
“Jane?” Augustine called, and he sounded weak, so weak.
“You’re in the cellar of Lindridge Hall,” Jane said, unsure if her voice would carry far enough. “I am working to get you out.”
“It is dark,” Augustine said. “Jane, it’s so dark.”
No gas lighting down there, and all the candles that had been lit before must have burned down to nothing now, puddles of cooled and cracking wax.
But darkness and spirits were not the only dangers, she realized with a sick jolt, her dinner cold and heavy in her belly. He had been down there two days already. Two days without water, without meals. “Augustine, do you have food?” Jane asked, and held her breath.
Augustine did not respond.
If she were in that crypt, if she had been locked away for days in the darkness, she would have screamed. She would have begged, and pounded on the door, and torn at her flesh. She knew well what havoc a night of silent waiting in the dark could do after weeks of it as a child, but she had been able to go up into the light during the day. She’d had her mother with her, had food, had water.
If Augustine was silent …
Then all it meant was that he was not her.
“I need seven days,” she said, louder this time. “Do I have seven days? Will you be all right for seven days?” There were rooms down there she hadn’t explored. There might yet be supplies. Food stores, old but perhaps still viable. Perhaps he’d found them. Perhaps he was not dying.
The silence stretched, and Jane curled in upon herself, shivering. Night had come in full. Perhaps … perhaps this was not Augustine at all.
“I think so,” Augustine said at last. “But it is so dark.”
She closed her eyes, measuring each word. Were they his? Were they vital, alive, proof she had not already failed?
“Jane, what are you doing?”
“Magic,” Jane whispered. She took a deep breath, then said, louder, “I’m getting you out. Just a little longer, Augustine. Wait for me.”
He didn’t respond.
* * *
JANE WALKED THE halls into the darkest part of the night.
She must not sleep. The dictate consumed her, her head already foggy after the vigil she’d sat the night before. The longer she went without the house creaking, without the sound of ghosts or the moaning of her husband, the more unreal her world became. There were instructions she was meant to follow this first night, small workings, small sacrifices: blood upon the hearth stone, inhaling the smoke of three rooster feathers, walking in circles while reciting chants, and all of them felt like games. None felt powerful. None felt useful.
Magic was real. Of that, she had no doubt now. But her intoxication had been tempered, adulterated with a child’s first failures. She had not removed the stone. She had not fed her starving husband.
A few hours before dawn, she found herself in the bedroom she had shared with Augustine. She stared at the mattress, its indentations. For most of its existence, it had held only one body, but she could already see a faint blurring of the edges where two had lain, tangled and sweaty, both desperate to believe a fiction.
“A clear purpose,” she murmured to herself, and turned away. Dr. Nizamiev’s instructions had been specific: she must fix herself upon the work, the work that she wanted to do. Her willpower was great. She could do it, if only she began.
Something moved in her bed.
Confused hope swelled in her, and she froze, unable to turn around and look. Was it Augustine, somehow returned? From behind her came wheezing, rattling breaths. The sheets rustled in the soft sounds of suffering. Weak legs pushed at the sheets, a heavy head tossed and turned upon the pillow.
Jane knew those sounds.
Jane did not want to know those sounds.
Abigail Yew.
A thousand warring impulses leapt to life inside her and left her paralyzed: drop to her knees and cower, or flee, or scream in rage, or ignore the impossible, or take up her chalk and draw a circle. But all she could do was clutch at the wardrobe and whisper, “No, no, no.”
Not Abigail. Not here. She was not dead. Jane remembered the weight of Abigail’s chin as she guided broth to her lips. She remembered her strengthening pulse, and her eyes, gradually focusing on her nurse. But then Jane thought of the room she had not checked at the surgery. A scream built inside her.
These ghosts, these specters, came in the form of failed patients. Dead patients.
Abigail Yew was dead.