4. An Apparition
Chapter 4
An Apparition
Magic. Magic had never left my mind: even in my sleep, it haunted my senses like a lingering ghost. After the physical unease of the conclusion to my eavesdropping I slept fitfully, my body too exhausted and my mind too feverishly alive; at last I settled enough in my small bed to sleep more than an hour, only to awaken with a fearful start.
Day’s wan light already glowed at the edges of the dusty curtains that covered the lone window.
The air of the little guest chamber was terribly cold.
And in its darkest corner loomed a silent, black figure, impossibly tall, the blood-red flicker of an unseen fire breaking across its cruel steel mask.
He was here.
He was watching me.
“Victor,” I ventured a breathless whisper, but there was no reply, and the sound of my quavering voice seemed to hang in the air.
He was utterly still. A chill sense of dread crept up my spine.
And then, far worse, he began to drift slowly, inexorably toward my bed.
The sudden clench of every muscle in my body stole away the sound of my own gasp; the frame of my bed groaned and scraped against the floor as I sat up at once and thrust myself backward to its edge, clutching the bedclothes to my heaving breasts—I forced myself to blink, to blink again?—
And then the apparition was gone, and in the corner I saw only the unfamiliar shadows of a first morning in new room.
In time, my hesitant hands relaxed on the twisted bedclothes. The faint thrill of a sensation I did not entirely understand still shivered in my nerves—but I was alone.
I was alone.
I laid myself back down, watching the cobwebs that hung in the far corner of the ceiling, waiting for my heart to slow.
It suited me to take my breakfast late, if it meant that I could eat by myself. Not for any lack of interest in the beginning of my new life in the Order—not at all—but rather the opposite: to afford myself the time to first consider my new situation with as clear a head as could be managed after my strange night and unsettling morning, independent of all influence save my own.
Having no change of clothes with me, I was obliged to wear the same black bombazine dress and the same underclothes as I had on my adventure of the night before (though all had dried suitably), yet chose to forego the cap and veil. I was indoors, in a place that was now to be my home—and a year was more than long enough to bow to the custom of wearing such things.
I sat down to a cup of lukewarm tea and the small serving of cold ham that someone had set aside for me, the little sounds of my fork tines against the plate almost loud for the silence of Hargrave’s dining room. A stately old place, I thought, albeit one that had seen better days. There was nothing overtly magical about it—not even a shelf of the small idols and artifacts my husband used to unsubtly discuss at dinner in hopes of impressing guests—and yet still I felt a vague unease. Only my own excited anticipation, I supposed, combined with a night’s unrest.
The dining room felt nothing like that bend in the world that surged through me last night.
If Victor were indeed a sorcerer, as Hargrave and Karvonen had called him, I sensed no sorcery now.
I gazed out the great windows, past the strange shapes of the shadows cast by the immense oak and yew trees of Hargrave’s rambling grounds. The old mansion in which I now resided (I must tell myself this again, I thought, unbelievable as it was) was set atop a mild hill with a path down to the road at the foot of its slope, and I watched idly as a small coach rolled past Hargrave’s gate: a forbidding structure, barred with iron, guarded by the weather-worn sculptures of lions atop its posts.
This will be a good life , I told myself, and I had no cause to think it untrue. If Hargrave held to his side of the bargain, I would not want for money, nor food, nor shelter now, and beyond all else I would be granted my wildest dream of magic—and all for the mere price of an Egyptian amulet.
The Talisman of Thoth, as I overheard Victor call it.
I wondered at that. The name of Thoth was to me no stranger: from what I had surreptitiously gleaned from my husband’s accounts of his expeditions in the tombs, I knew the ibis god Thoth to be one of the great deities of old Egypt, master of writing and magic. But an amulet bearing his image was not unusual, surely. Why this one? Why did it matter so?—
“Charles?”
That was Hargrave’s voice at the dining room door, followed by a knock. I said nothing at first, but I took a last sip of tea and then set down my breakfast things to walk to him.
“Elizabeth Buckingham,” I said as I turned the knob and opened the door. “Lord Hargrave, good morning, belated though it is.”
I could not help but notice that he looked past me, over my shoulder and into the dining room, before offering a greeting.
“Mrs. Buckingham,” he smiled. “I trust you spent a restful evening, to be so leisurely to rise?”
“To the contrary, sir. But I have no complaints—though I do have a question.”
“Oh?”
I did not know whether what I meant to ask would be considered rude or forward to an occultist, but I saw no advantage to being indirect when I had still the excuse of my innocence, so long as I could yet claim it: “Is this house haunted?”
“Haunted,” Hargrave repeated, and I saw a subtle twist of his mouth between his white mustache and long white beard which I did not mistake for a second smile. “Quite. Most places are haunted, one way or another, once you grow more accustomed to the sense of it. But if you will excuse me, I have pressing Order business to attend?—”
“Wait. Please.”
He had turned to leave, but at my voice he turned back, and I thought that I saw a look of vague displeasure on his face before he corrected it to a blandly benign countenance. “Yes, Mrs. Buckingham?”
“I’m sorry. It’s just that, well—what do I do in the Order, sir? How do I go about learning magic, and when do I begin? If there is a school here, are there any classes I can begin today?”
“Not today.” He shook his head, then cleared his throat. “It is of utmost importance that all new members be formally initiated into the mysteries the Magisophists before becoming privy to the hidden knowledge we teach, and regretfully we do not have another initiation scheduled until after Midwinter. I am afraid you have seen already, Mrs. Buckingham, how one is likely to turn out when such knowledge is gained outside of its correct time and course.” I needed not ask whether he referred to Victor to be certain that it was so. “It is fortunate for you,” Hargrave continued, “that you did not feel how the very atmosphere of such an individual becomes an assault to the higher senses (once they are properly trained and directed), or I imagine you would have fled rather than endure that unwholesome and wholly corrupting sensation?—”
“But I did feel something, sir.”
He stopped immediately, and by the change in his eyes I felt as if I were watching him think.
“Some kind of uncanny darkness,” I continued. “A shadow like a black tide in the moonlight.”
Behind me, I heard the sound of a domestic clearing my place.
“Haunted,” Hargrave muttered to himself again, looking at me with a long, considering glance, as if in the course of our brief acquaintance I was becoming to him gradually more a stranger, not less. “Did you encounter some manner of apparition?”
“That, or a dream. I cannot be certain which.”
“And how would you describe the specter?”
“A figure in a black cloak.” A suitably common description, I imagined: in that moment I found that I did not wish to offer him more detail. But from the way his expression darkened, I knew that he needed no more at all.
Then he nodded, and I knew that he meant to look sagely and stern. “No classes today, Mrs. Buckingham. But you may begin tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow?” I exclaimed in relief and surprise before I could curb myself. “But—the initiation?—”
Hargrave held up his palm as if to wave the notion away. “Your circumstances warrant an exception. You may attend the general Novice classes for now—ten o’clock sharp, in the parlor—and I will expect your presence at the Midwinter Gathering, particularly the Selection Ceremony, so that you may better understand the structure of our Order, your place in it, and what your path as a Magisophist will entail: a careful, balanced, and measured rise through the degrees of knowledge, eventually a specialization in a particular branch of esoteric wisdom—and should you prove yourself among the most learned and dedicated of students, perhaps someday one of the professors will select you for his apprentice, and guide you toward the mastery of your chosen art. After the Midwinter Gathering, we will see about your initiation.
“But for today,” he continued, “there is the matter of the haunting . I recommend you do nothing that could be construed as inviting or encouraging the phantom’s return—such apparitions generally have far less power when not invited in—and should it trouble you again, I encourage you to attempt to dispel it. You may consider it your first assignment, if you wish.”
“Dispel it?” I asked just as he turned to leave again. “I should like to learn how, if?—”
“—I am regrettably short of time, but there is a library adjacent to your chamber, Mrs. Buckingham, as you know, and I cordially invite you to make use of it. Farewell, for now!”
And then he was gone, striding away down the hall with a nervous haste I thought peculiarly unbecoming for a man of his station and age, and I could not help but wonder at the oddity of our exchange.
But after all, I told myself, he is the leader of what seemed clearly to be a secret society of the occult, and I ought not to be surprised that such a character would incline toward eccentricity.
The newly lighted candle on my nightstand flickered for my frustrated sigh.
The hazy sun had set by the time I returned to my little guest room. With a last glance to the mighty oaks and the yew trees beyond my window, greying in the gathering dusk, I drew the curtains closed; such was the churning exhaustion of my mind that I neglected to start a fire in the small hearth before I sat down heavily on the mattress with a familiar book in my hand, half-shivering for the cold.
There is a strange futility in being given free use of an occult library, and yet being confounded half by its cornucopia of unrelated answers and half by the poor understanding of one’s own question. Perhaps that, simply, was Hargrave’s purpose in sending me to his library: to impress upon me that I needed instruction. That I had plunged into a new world of danger and possibility with no hope to untangle its mysteries alone. In my frustrated state it seemed to me a cruel game to tease a sincere curiosity so, and yet to trust in the superiority of Hargrave’s wisdom was, I supposed, foundational to naming oneself a Magisophist.
I thought of my odd exchange with Hargrave that morning, and I sighed again.
Karvonen, however, had come through on his word to retrieve my things for me from my husband’s house: at some point during my absence from my chamber, my own books had joined those present already on the little room’s bookshelf, and before the shelf was a box of my clothes.
It was one of those books of my own that I held in my hand now: a collection of the poems of Coleridge, the gilt letters on its spine rubbed almost entirely away by frequent handling. In my quest to discover how to dispel a phantom, the Order library had failed me—in the hours I spent, I found nothing there which I could tell pertained to either the practical banishment or the summoning of such beings, and much that seemed merely theoretical, or designed for some manner of moral instruction—and so I reminded myself not to let such early disappointments color too deeply my new life of learning magic, and turned to poetry to revive my spirit and ease my mind.
But ease them it did not. I turned first to a favorite, Kubla Khan , and found instead my mind set into motion, my spirit rekindled in the strange fire of its vision, and by the time I reached its last four lines I felt my heart stirred by an uncanny sense that I had found on my own some clue to the mystery which all day I had sought:
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread,
For he on honey-dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise.