Eve recognized the souls, hovering at the threshold. They were three of the children that Eve had interacted with during Dupont’s fetish. Eve recognized the boy of around ten or eleven at the fore; he had appeared in her office during a séance to glean information about Dupont’s activities and the thefts of tokens from corpses.
“Hello young man,” Eve said in a welcoming tone. “Giacomo, isn’t it?” At this, the little boy brightened, nodded, beaming that he’d been remembered, and he and the dark-haired little girl beside him in a pale pinafore shared a smile. “I remember you were trying to get justice for your sister during the remainder of your too-short life and then, even after death. And is that you?” She turned to the girl.
“Yes, thank you, ma’am,” the boy said. “This is Magdalena.”
One of the reasons the dead so often cooperated with Eve and wanted her to listen was that she tried to make them feel important and recollected in a world that had often discarded them.
“I hope you two were able to find some peace, knowing Mr. Dupont had been arraigned.”
“Yes, ma’am, but if you’re here, then you know not everything’s done with. And now that I’m here, I remember,” the boy said ominously. “Not like this house would let me forget…” Eve took a moment to explain what she was seeing and hearing to the detective. The spirit pointed to the red door.
Horowitz approached, looked at Eve, and withdrew the six keys again, peering at the ornate double lock. He tried one of the remaining keys that didn’t go to the front doors; eventually the slenderest key unlocked the base of the hefty iron lock and a second key above undid another latch, and the wooden door swung open on soundless, well-oiled hinges.
The room was triangular, one large window with a thick red curtain drawn aside, the view looking out over the shingles of the next rooftop, edges of the trees along the street coming into view beyond a small window ledge.
Inside were what looked like stage sets, which would explain the hefty red window drape as a stage curtain. Folded to the side were painted screens with various landscapes of field, sea, or forest. A mixture of props peppered one wall, a mixture of fantastical and liturgical things, a castle footing, a spear, a taxidermized peacock. An open trunk with a bunch of costumes spilling out. A small bookshelf held children’s books with gilded spines.
A Bavarian scene was set at the fore, a crook, prop sheep, and large metal bell set to the side.
Vera pointed to it. “That’s how Maggie described what her children looked like who asked for her help, little Grimm’s fairy-tale children.”
“Where is Maggie?” Eve asked Vera, who could only shrug, a sunbeam cutting through her silvery form, a contrast of luminosity, the sun highlighting dust motes floating amid the edges of the spirit’s skirts. “I wish she were here to help make sense of this.”
“This must be where Dupont did his private, postmortem photography,” Horowitz mused. “Posing the bodies that had been left in his care?”
“This is likely all the staging for the collection that ended up in the Prenze mansion.” Eve turned to the little boy and his sister. “Were you photographed as well as stolen from?”
The girl nodded, and gestured to her hair, indicating a lock taken at some point during the funerary process.
A third spirit that had hung back in the hall now wafted close to Eve, a wide-eyed child in a long robe with wispy hair. “This is how we were posed, so many of us,” the child murmured. “Before we were laid out. Freshly dropped off. Barely dead a day in some cases. Before the stink could really set in.”
“Art above everything,” Giacomo muttered bitterly.
“Arte Uber Alles?” Eve asked. The children nodded. “Dupont spoke about a ‘great experiment.’ Were you a part of that?”
The three spirits nodded in unison. “There was testing,” the waifish, robed child said, ominously pointing toward the wall.
Along both sides of the wall hung a sequence of long copper wires. Some were attached to discs like what had been placed on Gran’s temples.
“Monitoring, or testing dead bodies? I don’t understand.”
Giacomo looked at his sister; she shook her head. The little brother spoke for her. “The process started here and then was perfected at the other parlor.”
“What process?” Eve asked.
The boy sighed, as if trying to figure out how to explain it. “To try to block any of us ghosts. Some of us lingered on to see what he was doing with our bodies. He didn’t want to be bothered; neither of them did.”
“Who?” Eve pressed.
“Dupont and the partner. The shadow man. He helped with the devices. There’s something behind the wall. Do you hear the hum? It goes up to the roof, to a wind device that powers the drum.”
“There is a low note in the air, now that the spirits mention it,” Eve said, bidding Horowitz listen.
“A low drone.” He peered closely at the thin slats of stained wood along the narrow side of the room. Walking over to a seam in the wall, he fished out a curved metal hook from between the wood panels, and a panel slid out to reveal metal plates on the wall behind. The ghosts came close, peering too.
“It’s all been about getting us to go away.” Magdalena’s voice was tiny and sad.
“Dupont’s been mucking about with photographs for a long time,” Giacomo offered, “but the experiments, all this wire and the metal and such, that’s been about three years. Since the shadow man. We’ve been asking any spirit we see these questions. We know you need answers. We’re trying to help you piece it together.”
“Thank you, dear children,” Eve said earnestly, looking at each spirit. “You’re so helpful. You’re right, we need answers, and proof. Each moment we’re getting closer.”
Vera’s generally kind, warm expression was fixed in consternation. “These men.” She shook her head. “If you don’t want to be haunted, why act in a way that angers the dead?” Vera, floating in the doorway, asked the absent tenants, echoing the rhetorical question of this case.
“I’ll let Bills know about this development,” Horowitz said. “Those postmortem photos can be evidence, if we can ever recover them from Prenze’s clutches.”
They descended again to the main floor, and Eve peered at the only thing that had been left in the hall: a grandfather clock against the wall of the entrance hall that faced toward the open parlor arch.
“I can see why Mrs. Dupont didn’t want to take this with her,” Eve said, grimacing. The face of the grandfather clock was an eerie, smiling half-moon that looked more like a sneering caricature of a clown than a celestial body. She peered closer at it, seeing that there were smaller clocks in each corner that were set to other cities around the globe. Each of those small hands were spinning in an unnatural manner.
A cold dread crept over Eve at this sight, and it seemed the tall, carved wood sides of the large fixture trembled. The face of the clock suddenly careened close to hers, and strong arms seized her and swung her by the waist away from the clock and toward the other end of the hall, papers from the file scattering everywhere.
Jacob had moved, deft and nimble to swing her out of harm’s way, covering her in a protective embrace as the clock crashed behind them against the balustrade and then to the floor in a terrible noise of clattering chimes and springing clockwork.
Looking up at the rear door window at a flurry of movement, Eve glimpsed a man in a black hat and a long black cloak leering for a moment before vanishing.
Prenze again and his blasted projection. The most unwelcome haunt, and now, able to manifest objects with force.
Jacob