The White Forest (38 page)

The white apes in the trees shuddered at the presence of the dead boy. I searched him, trying to find some sign of what had happened or what was happening within the wall. In his pocket was a miniature painting of a girl. She was dressed in colorless chiffon—a foolish child of nobility like this Fetch. There was nothing else. He was an empty boy, a vessel shattered.

It was near the discarded body that I finally found an indentation in the wall—a faint lip, which might indicate a doorway. I thrilled at the feeling of it. It was the opening I needed, and I’d already begun working my fingers around the indentation when someone whispered my name.

I nearly fell against the door and turned to see Pascal emerging from the tree line. He stood between two of the god-apes, oblivious to them. Pascal looked so small and fragile. He didn’t belong in this cold place. He could not see the creatures, and that was all the better. I did not want him to have to suffer such distortions.

“Pascal,” I said, so glad to know he was alive.

“Jane, I saw him,” he replied, voice thick with emotion. I thought
he meant he’d seen Alexander, lying brutalized and wounded. But continuing, he said, “Nathan Ashe, Jane. I’ve seen Nathan Ashe in the forest.”

For a moment, the world around me collapsed to a single point. “Tell me,” I said. “Where did you see him? How is he?”

“I awoke among the trees,” he said. “I didn’t know where I was and there was no one with me. I began calling for you because I thought you must be near, but there was no answer. I began to walk, thinking I would find someone, and then I saw a man ahead in the distance. He was shambling along through the forest, and at first I thought he was a Fetch, as he wore a tattered red coat. His hair was unkempt, and he looked terribly thin—a near skeleton. Then I saw the fur mantle, the one Alexander said they’d placed upon Nathan’s shoulders when he’d played a stag in the provocation. I knew it had to be Nathan, yet I didn’t call to him. His figure frightened me, Jane. It was as though I was looking not at my friend, but at a thin specter, a remnant. I followed, trying to remain as quiet as I could.

“Nathan walked until he reached a wide river, and I must say it was the most curious river I’ve ever seen. The whitish water did not flow. In fact, it was not water at all but some solid matter that only looked like water from a distance. Nathan knelt beside the river and tried to dip one frail cupped hand into the water to no avail. The river had a hard surface, just as I suspected. He grew angry at the stream, banging a fist against it. Then he stood to walk along the river and I followed. At a parting of the trees, Nathan entered the forest again. I did not have to walk far before I saw where he was going.”

“And where was that?” I asked, barely able to breathe. It was difficult to think of our Nathan walking in this tomb of a place alone for nearly two months. What had he eaten? Surely he must have known enough about the strange hard water in the stream by this time to avoid it. Or had he fallen further into madness? Did he walk about and perpetually repeat these same activities in this pure place? I felt a terrible guilt again hearing what a wreck he was, and I remembered the pain I’d experienced at Mary-Thomas’s séance—pain in my own stomach when she’d called to her son. There were the visions of the
stag being devoured by the Red Goddess too. What happened on the night of Nathan’s disappearance was now clear to me. It should have been clear all along. I was the Red Goddess and Nathan Ashe was the stag. Ariston Day said I’d pulled Nathan into the Empyrean, but in actuality, it was more like I’d devoured him. The soul of the Red Goddess had eaten the soul of the stag. Nathan had been the one to transmit the images of the goddess and the stag to me. For he had been concealed inside my own body all along.

“I can barely describe what happened next,” Pascal said. “It was so awful. I’m having some difficulty
seeing
in this place, Jane. It’s as if nothing here has substance. Things waver before my eyes like this is the ghost of a world.”

“What do you believe you saw?” I asked.

“Nathan had built a sort of shelter among the trees, using the shirt he’d been wearing when he disappeared and the belt from his trousers. It was no sort of protection really, but one wouldn’t need shelter here. Nathan sat in his tent and took out his pocket watch, opened it, and stared down at the clock face, as if the watch was some inscrutable puzzle to him. I must have shifted my weight, making a noise, because Nathan looked up—and Jane, his face was nearly unrecognizable. Nathan was deformed. His skin was partly white, and his brow was covered in white hair. He showed his teeth like some animal. I think he
was
part animal. Thank God he didn’t see me. I ran from there as fast as I could, knowing I had to find you, knowing you would know what to do.”

During Pascal’s telling, I’d clenched my hands so tightly that I had to consciously work to unfasten my fingers from my palms. In the Empyrean, Nathan had started to become the white ape that inhabited him on Malta—the rider on his soul that had once punished Theodore de Baras. I had opened Nathan to such an experience, made such a horror possible. I wondered what widespread infection would come to earth if Day was able to complete his plan.

“Do you want me to take you to Nathan?” Pascal asked.

“I want you to stand back,” I said, resolved. “I have something to take care of first.”

Pascal did so without further question, and I put my hands against the smooth surface of the wall, feeling for the indentation and finding it again. I heard the white apes rustle behind me as I touched the outline of the door. The creatures willed me forward, as the objects in Mother’s dressing room had once willed me to open her wardrobe. I wondered for a moment if the apes were excited or if they sought to warn me. Perhaps, on some level, Pascal heard them too because he said, “Jane, is it growing colder here? Is there a wind?”

I slid my hands along the edges of the door, looking for a latch. But there was nothing. And it was then that I realized I shouldn’t be searching with my hands. I’d used my talent to find the wall; I needed to use it again to open the door. I closed my eyes, allowing my senses to slide along the surface. And then, yes, there was a handle on the door, as invisible to the naked eye as the god-apes in the forest were invisible to Pascal. I grasped the handle and turned it.

A passage opened, and Pascal moaned behind me. I tensed, fearing that Ariston Day might spring out, but there was only the cool dark ahead.

“What is it, Jane? Where does it lead?” Pascal asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “But there’s something I have to do in here.”

Pascal followed me into the wall—good friend that he was—and I thought of Maddy in the forest, hoping she was still asleep and that she would not attempt to find me.

We found ourselves in what appeared to be a long hallway, so high that no ceiling was visible. It was an eerie place, filled with wooden machines from another time. Hand-twined rope connected the hulking contraptions to one another. Dust was thick on the machines, as if they had not been used in ages.

“Machines?” Pascal said. “But who put them here, Jane?”

“If I had to guess, I’d say these are no more machines than the forest out there is actually a forest. We’re in the belly of a goddess,” I said, not adding that I believed it to be my own belly. “I can’t even begin to comprehend what they might mean.”

The dark machines ran the length of the hall, falling away into
shadow. To move around them, one had to skirt the perimeter, trying not to catch one’s clothing on the odd edges. As we made our way deeper into the catacomb, I heard a subtle hissing, a quiet sound of pain.

“Where is that noise coming from?” I asked.

Pascal pointed toward a rather frightening machine covered in glistening hooks, and lying inside the contraption was a body in a red coat, chin against his breast. It looked like Nathan himself at first, crushed. The youth had a similar nose and long poet’s hair, streaked with gore. The boy stared at me, still half-alive.

It wasn’t Nathan, of course. It was the cruel-looking Fetch who’d brought the initial letter from Ariston Day to Stoke Morrow. He’d become another of Day’s blood sacrifices. Looking at his body, mangled in the machine, I knew that this boy
was
Nathan as much as we were all Nathan. All of us had disappeared under the thrall of Day’s will and been transformed by it.

The Fetch’s blood had run into the gears of the machine, greasing them. Pascal and I watched as he closed his eyes and breathed his last breath.

“You won’t be able to stop Ariston Day,” Pascal said. “If he’s committed such atrocities as this, he’s so obviously mad. He’ll harm you, Jane. I know he will.”

“Go back into the woods, Pascal,” I said firmly. “Find Maddy. She’s sleeping beneath a tree not far from here. Keep her safe. And don’t tell her about Nathan, not yet. I need to see what state he’s in first.”

“But what about you—in here all alone?”

“You don’t need to worry about me,” I said. “I’m the Doorway, remember?”

“No you’re not,” he said. “You’re Jane Silverlake, a good friend of mine.”

I hugged him to me. “Thank you, Pascal.” But even as I said this, I could feel my power spinning outward, caressing the machines. I was so much more than the Doorway. I was all of this—the Empyrean itself. I was the cold goddess. If my friends hadn’t come into my
life, perhaps I would have remained that melancholy creature who walked in shadows, keeping balance between earth and aether merely by existing. But being drawn out of Stoke Morrow had changed me. The flesh and blood part of me had grown strong. I’d learned to love the world, to love the people around me. I’d become almost human for a time.

“Pascal,” I called out. “I want you to do something more.”

He turned back.

“When you find yourself in London again, you’ll go to Stoke Morrow and tell my father that all is well. His daughter had to go, but she’s fine.”

“But, Jane—”

“You’ll tell him I love him and that his house isn’t haunted anymore. He won’t ask questions. He’ll understand.”

Pascal bowed his head. “Of course, Saint Jane.”

“Go to Maddy now. Help her find her way home and take care of her. She’s going to need you.”

As he left me, I gathered my strength, looking at the complex system of machines and thinking of the Psychomatic Dispensary in Piccadilly. I’d broken that dispensary and ended the show. Maybe I could break these machines too before it was too late.

I
walked on alone inside the wall and finally found Ariston Day there in a bleak alcove, fine suit wet with blood, hands stained with gore. He’d wiped his brow, smearing himself with the stuff, as he hovered over one of the wet machines. The body of the last Fetch lay at his feet, and I saw that it was Rafferty, poor Rafferty who’d been kind to me, who’d kissed me gently and asked to take me to dinner. Day had cut him open at the neck. The yellow-white of his clavicle was laid bare.

Day made a terrible keening sound as he worked at the machine, trying to move its frozen parts. He didn’t notice me until I was nearly upon him. Perhaps it was my shadow that drew his attention, a moving image cast by the torches that he’d lit. Day looked up, and there was confusion on his long face, as if I could not possibly have come before he was finished with his work.

“Jane, my dear,” he said—a ridiculous greeting considering he was covered in the blood of his minions. His ugly lips looked wet in the torchlight. Had he been drinking the blood? Did he imagine that such an act would satisfy the gods? He stepped away from the machine, resting his back against the smooth wall and sliding down into a kind of squat, hands held limp before him. His boot tip touched the head of dead Rafferty.

“What have you done?” I asked.

His expression was curious, a clenching of the jaw that tried to be a smile. “Failed,” he said, “I suppose I have failed, and now I shall never give the world a Paradise.”

“Can you really call this Paradise, even now that you can see it?” I said. “It certainly can’t be the place you imagined. There might be a Paradise, Ariston, but it is elsewhere. This is a place of silence, never meant to be touched.”

“It’s a good place,” he said. “It’s the Garden.”

“It only looks like a garden,” I replied. “It’s full of things that, should they come into contact with London, would destroy it.”

He furrowed his brow. “I never meant to destroy anything. I meant to heal it.”

“There’s no return to the Garden,” I said. “And there’s something you’ve been too foolish to realize in all your research and experiments. Something I’ve known for a long time but could not quite articulate. I am the Red Goddess, Ariston. You were right about that. But what I know now is that the Red Goddess and the Empyrean are not distinct from one another. I am not the Doorway to this place. I am one with it. I am the Empyrean, and we are all inside of me, in the silent landscape of my heart.”

Day watched me carefully as I spoke, calculating.

“What could you hope to achieve here?” I asked. “How could you hope to control this place when it so clearly belongs to me entirely? The only way to dissolve the walls would be—” I stopped myself, realizing what I was about to reveal. The only way to dissolve the Empyrean was to dissolve the goddess. My own flesh was the membrane—the wall.