Renegade (22 page)

“I have never used it, or heard of using hypnosis, on a psychic patient; I have never used it to enhance psychic abilities. I am concerned about how it might affect you.”

“What do you mean?”

“There are two issues to consider. One, that Max might be sending you false visions.”

“I have already considered this,” I said quickly, cutting him off. “But the stakes are too high for me not to believe him. William might die. Furthermore, all of my visions last autumn were true.”

“Secondly,” Simon continued as if he had not heard me. He came around from the desk and sat beside me. In an oddly intimate gesture, he pushed a lock of hair away from my face. “Memories, thoughts that you might not like, could surface. Become real to you.”

“What are you saying?”

“Abbie … after learning the truth that night at the Conclave’s house, that Max killed your mother, you have had to re-remember her sudden illness as not simply illness, but as murder. You have undoubtedly had to ‘rewrite’ those last days in your mind. Max was there in Dublin during those last days, probably watching you.”

“I have thought some about those days … ” I heard my voice trail off. I swallowed hard, trying to keep my facial muscles composed. Roddy, his death, my rescuer—who I now knew was Max—carrying me home after I’d nearly drowned … Max was the person I’d heard arguing with my mother while I struggled to regain consciousness. He had saved me even as the poison ravaged my mother’s body. And I had lost my friend, my dear friend, Roddy. I had hardly allowed myself to think of that day since coming to London. It had been a chapter closed, sealed away in my mind. Now, fear seized me as I thought that I might somehow revisit it—be brought to that nightmare’s threshold. But nonetheless, William needed me, and although I couldn’t imagine a future with him, I knew that I wanted him to be safe.

Simon paused, then pressed on, gently. “What I am saying is that hypnosis does not come without its risks. Very real risks, Abbie.” He cleared his throat a bit. “I do not want to harm you.”

William. Saving William was paramount. I could not focus upon my own hurts and traumas.

Simon was quiet. I knew he thought William was a sloth, unstable. And I saw, in the layers of Simon’s expression even in the study’s shadows, how Simon still felt about me.

I felt my heart flutter a little.

“But, Simon, if I’m strong enough to handle even those memories, then it is a possibility that hypnosis might heighten my psychic abilities.”

He paused. Shrugged. Then Simon’s expression became agitated, and I saw his eyes rest for a moment upon the ivory elephant on the bookcase. “I’m simply warning you that it could have unanticipated results. I have seen … inexplicable things in the past. There is much we still do not understand about hypnosis, and I feel it is best to be cautious.”

My heart thumped. What was he talking about? What had he seen?

I felt myself, against my will, wring my hands in frustration. “Simon, as my friend, will you please help me? I don’t beg of you often, but now I am begging. If you do not hypnotize me tonight, I’ll find someone else to do it tomorrow. I must try to conjure that vision again, and I am too distressed at the moment to focus and bring it up.” I set my jaw. “You must. This is my decision now, whatever the outcome might be.”

Simon said nothing, but by his expression, I sensed that I had won.

“All right Abbie.” His voice leveled. “But you must do as I say.”

Without a word, Simon drew the drapes tighter around the window behind his desk. Then, after taking a wide candle from his desk and lighting it, he put out the lamp, leaving us in darkness except for the flicker of the candlelight.

In that moment, I suddenly felt inexplicably fearful, on the verge of this new experience. Previously, I had thought that at worst the process would not work or that I would see other visions, unhelpful visions that wouldn’t give me the information I needed to find William. But now, something instinctual, an energy that I didn’t fully understand, recoiled within me. I ignored this surge, telling myself not to be fearful. I told myself that Simon was overly cautious, that hypnosis was regularly used at Whitechapel Hospital without any “unanticipated” results.

“Look at the flame. Focus upon it. Keep your breaths regular and think of nothing other than the candle flame,” he said.

I tried, focused, watching the light flicker in the darkness. But I also felt my heart pounding, racing at the thought that if this worked, I would see William in that terrible position again. Every time I started to feel my breathing, even my system, calm down, at the very moment when I thought I could surrender, my heartbeat would leap and pound, and I was back in the room with Simon and the candle.

“It’s not working … ” I said, frustrated.

I saw relief wash across Simon’s face, and I knew that he would give up soon.

“Is there nothing else we can do?” I asked.

He sighed. “There is one other way.”

Blowing out the candle, he placed it back upon the desk. Then he knelt before me in the dark. I saw him only because of the tiny stream of moonlight seeping through the slit in the drawn curtains. “Look only into my eyes. Think of nothing else but my eye color.”

I stared, noticing in this closeness the icy depths of his eyes. They were glassy blue, with flickers of deeper whitish and turquoise hues. Simon, who always kept his eyes so veiled, was showing them to me, unabashed. I thought of the ocean—not the ocean in summer, shimmering, sun-kissed, but the ocean in winter—lovely, flicked with icy darkness, and yet gray and unyielding. I felt an almost painful hook in my heart, and soon my interest in his expression turned from curiosity to arrest as I plunged into those winter waters, surrendering myself to whatever awaited me there.

I faded away from myself, from my body, from Simon’s study, until I found myself on a speck of land, a treacherous rocky island with sharp peaks and cliffs. I felt, smelled, salty seawater. I moved, drifted phantom-like, into a crevice in one of the rocky places until I found myself in a warmer place, an unusual place—a small, dim, marble hall. The place was too dark to see well in—there were columns, the dull glint of many, many portrait frames on the walls. But the unlit torches lining the marbled walls made discerning my whereabouts difficult.

William. Where’s William?
I channeled my focus, letting myself spiral deeper into the vision.

William, I’m here.

William, where are you?

Then my mind faded and sharpened again, leaving the hall for some sort of elegant bedroom illuminated only by a fireplace. In the firelight, I saw more columns, identical to the ones in the hall, more marbled walls, a large bed—the headboard made of seashells. Pale green curtains, with twists of threaded gold, draped from the high ceiling to hang long and sheer around the bed, while the bed itself remained unmade, its tossed sheets and coverlets the color of sea foam. In spite of the beauty of the place, I sensed an unpleasant dampness in the air, tinged with mildew along with other vague, foul odors—of acid, of rotting meat. Of blood.

Then I saw William. The enormous bed had blocked me from viewing him. As in my previous vision, he lay on the floor, the large shackle around his neck chaining him to a column near the bed as if he were an animal, a pet mastiff. My own terror and fear threatened to overwhelm me, and I had to remind myself that this was a vision—I was not there in flesh and blood and could do nothing to help him in that moment. I worked hard to suppress my emotions, fearing that if they became too strong, the vision might leave me as it had before. I saw him clearer then. His face was bruised, one eye swollen shut, his lips cracked, bleeding. His dark trousers had been ripped in places and were coated almost entirely in dried black blood. His white shirt was nearly shredded, but the remaining fabric pieces were dried with both rust-brown and fresh-red blood. In horror, I saw what seemed like bite marks, deep wounds all over his chest, his neck. Some looked older, scabbed with oozing pus where infection had set in. And William, although breathing, lay quite still.

Dear God.

The vision wavered a bit, like rippling water, and then I steadied my mind.

Who did this to him?

I knew Max was somehow behind it, but those wounds, those bite marks, were deeper than a human could inflict. I thought of the lamia in my visions—because of her tattoo, I knew that she was somehow connected to the Conclave …

With great effort I calmed myself, hoping that the vision wouldn’t leave. I needed to know where this place was. Rocky islands. Cold winds. I searched my mind—this could be anywhere in the British isles. Or elsewhere.

I felt overwhelmed with frustration. Desperate. I refocused on the vision, streamlining it, trying to pull it toward me. I remembered how I had seen street names when I chased the Ripper in my attempt to save Liz and Cate, how I had recognized High Holborn the night I had saved Abberline.

Focus.

I pulled my mind away from the underground bedroom, pulled myself through the marble walls, through the rocky walls again to outside.

Then everything faded and I found myself standing on a thin strip of land surrounded by water, a great expanse of sea to my right and to my left. The land strip stretched ahead of me and behind me for what seemed like miles, disappearing in both directions into a mist of fog. The fog, in fact, moved aggressively around me and out across the water as if alive. I walked ahead a bit, my heart pounding. I did not know this place.

Where was I?

I heard a splash near me, breaking through the eerie si-lence like a gunshot, and I jumped. I looked down into the water surrounding me. Hundreds, indeed probably thousands, of goldfish swam in the waters. I paused. Something seemed odd—I had expected to see only greenish sea depths, but these masses of domesticated goldfish were exactly like the ones I had seen last summer in the ponds around the London zoological gardens, when I had gone there with Grandmother after arriving in London.

The hairs on my neck prickled and I felt a small, breeze, warm and breathlike, upon my neck. It was only then that I noticed that when the shroud of fog thinned a bit, something was unusual about the color of the sky. Instead of regular grayish clouds, lavender puffs billowed out, rippling and rich; cream-colored, lacelike shapes trimmed the edges. In spite of my unease, the sky felt lovely, dreamlike … it reminded me of something.

Mother’s dress! The dress I’d worn to the dinner party at the Conclave’s house when I first started work at Whitechapel Hospital. The sky was like the lavender folds of her dress, and the cream-colored edges like the white lace that trimmed the cuffs and throat. Why would I be seeing it here?

Then the thick fog ahead of me parted. I saw, at the end of the strip of land, the cottage I’d shared with Mother on the Edgeworths’ property. But this cottage was entirely displaced—I was not on the Edgeworths’ land. I was on this narrow strip, surrounded by a sea of goldfish. Nothing fit. Everything seemed out of place. Wrong.

I approached the house, inexplicable fear mounting within me. I felt my body pulse, my ears roar with trepidation. I feared, foolishly, that the cottage would consume me. Once again, I remembered that last terrible day vividly, right after Roddy died, when Mother had died. I had never forgotten it. But I had closed it off, pushed it aside like an undesirable book. But now, I felt intensely all those memories of that day flood over me as if I experienced them again—Roddy’s dead corpse floating above me as I drowned in that pond, Mother wasting away dying; I remembered vividly being pulled from the pond and carried away by Max, I felt viscerally all that information that I had been forced to rewrite in my head after my experience with the Conclave, since knowing that they had given Max her execution order.

Now I had the cottage before me.

I felt my body quake violently and stumbled to the hard ground, unable to open that door. I realized, then, that I was not so much in the vision as somewhere in my own consciousness, somewhere where my own memories mingled. I was meeting up against the place I most feared—that day. Memories of my mother permeated everything, not just the sky color but the wind itself; I smelled the faint scent of her hyacinth perfume. And I felt my own feelings of failure. Of loss.

Then everything around me stilled—the clouds, the mist. The waters became flat as mirrors and I heard a noise; I stared in horror behind me, down the strip of land, as a taloned, webbed hand came up out of the waters, a gold bracelet hanging heavily upon a scaly wrist.

I did not want to open the cottage door, afraid that I would find Mother dead or near death. I felt tears burn my eyes. I could not face it. But the terror of being trapped in my own psyche, unable to move backward or forward, strained upon me.

And now, the lamia. That serpent woman from my nightmares. I was seeing her coming for me.

I felt panicked, and yet I still couldn’t go inside the cottage; I couldn’t move to open the door. I felt suffocated, and realized that I couldn’t breathe. It was as if a hand had been clamped over my mouth.

No.

No.

I felt as if I were dying, and as I fell, sank, to the ground, I prayed that I would wake up. But it didn’t happen. My lungs felt as if they were going to burst, just like they had when I nearly drowned in that pond under Roddy’s body. And I saw, in the distance, the serpent woman, far down the strip, crawling at an agonizing slow pace out of the water. I knew, instinctively, that she was coming for me.