ES Chapter 10

Ayesha wrapped both hands around her hot teacup and leaned forward.

It was time to hear why he had summoned a medium.

"How much do you know about beings that do not die?"

The first words out of his mouth were not what she had expected.

"...Beings that do not die?"

Her mind ran immediately to works of imagination—things assembled from human inventiveness, characters born from someone's creative hand. But whatever he had called a medium to discuss could hardly be a novel or a painting.

She sorted through the miscellaneous knowledge she had collected across her reporting work, drawing on whatever had lodged somewhere she could reach.

"There are a few figures that appear in history. The Comte de Saint-Germain, for instance—sighted across several centuries. Or the Wandering Jew from the scriptures of a distant country. And Utnapishtim in the epics of an ancient civilization—he survived the great flood sent as divine punishment and was granted eternal life."

"Their stories are interesting enough in their own right. However, the being I mean is not a person." A pause—one beat longer than the sentence required. "We are, it seems, speaking of something rather different."

Something that existed, but was not human.

A ghost.

Irrational—outside any framework she could accept on its own terms—and yet also precisely the material she needed to shape into a sufficiently interesting article and carry back to the magazine. It had walked right up to her.

Ayesha held his gaze and spoke in a tone she had flattened to careful neutrality. Whatever her mind was clamouring, the surface had to hold.

"No—I understand. It is that."

That.

The most she could manage when she knew nothing at all.

Cyrix nodded.

"Ayesha. That circles around me. It holds its position and watches—waiting for the precise moment it requires."

...What? What does that mean?

She caught herself half-turning to look around the room—reoriented, sat straighter. Showing bewilderment plainly would mark her as an amateur at once.

She checked the dining room covertly with a sideways glance instead. However carefully she looked, there was nothing she could identify as suspicious.

"I call it the evil spirit."

Cyrix's voice dropped. There was a quality to it—a stillness, a weight carefully controlled—that made the listener's breathing go shallow. She found herself following it, her own breath going tight.

"The evil spirit," she repeated.

Not a supernatural phenomenon. Not the common word—ghost—but evil spirit.

Evil spirit...

Setting aside for the moment whether such a thing actually existed—had something happened that warranted naming it evil? And what precisely did watching his body mean?

"Are you speaking of possession?"

Listening was her profession; at its edges she had picked up similar rumours, at various removes. Someone a few degrees of separation from someone she knew had been possessed, or so the story went—had come to a point of not recognising their own parents and siblings. The specifics had gone hazy with time, but that had been roughly the shape of it.

What had she said? Check his debts. And she'd been right. Someone unable to repay what they'd borrowed, feigning madness to escape—caught out. She'd heard the conclusion and thought: obviously.

The heir to House Etheldore, however, was not in any position requiring him to feign anything. He had vast lands. This manor. Above all, a fortune accumulated across his line—substantial enough that the surrounding land was, in its entirety, the family's property. And leaving aside the staggering topic of evil spirits, Cyrix Etheldore was, in every other respect, not merely a normal man but a distinguished one.

"It is not simple possession."

And so each time words like evil spirit and possession emerged from his mouth, something in her flinched.

That mouth. Those words want the future of nations and the management of vast estates to debate them. Not this.

"Then?"

"It wants me." The formal architecture continued. The sentence sealed without pause. "More precisely—it wants everything that belongs to Etheldore."

His eyes held on her. Blazing. Steady. The gaze of someone who has long since stopped being startled by what they are saying.

She wanted to ask why he thought so. What had made him certain. But she could not—not without risking exactly the exposure she had to avoid. A medium who asked what a medium was supposed already to know.

"...Above all else, you must first keep your resolve firm."

She couldn't find the right thread to pull. She bought herself time with the most generic encouragement she had available.

"I know. I am endeavouring to do so. It is not, I will admit, easy."

A deep sigh pressed against her ears, settling.

"Ayesha. The evil spirit will take possession of my body, in the end." He continued in exactly the same register—matter-of-fact, the delivery of someone describing a persistent problem with the estate's west wing. "When I am careless. When I have grown weak past a certain point. When I have lost control of what is mine to control. When that moment arrives, the creature will not fail to seize it. It will crawl inside me."

That word.

Creature. In that sentence. From that mouth.

She had no category for it.

At the corners of his face, beneath the even delivery, fear was surfacing briefly and pulling back. At the jaw, mainly. In the quality of certain silences.

"It is possible that the evil spirit will endeavour to manufacture its own opportunity to take the body. Given the fixity of its obsession with me—I suspect that is, in all likelihood, precisely what it intends."

The more she heard, the more impossible it sounded. And yet she was required to receive all of it seriously.

Who sees spirits and hears them. The man sitting across from her, that's who. He's the one with the medium's gifts. So what exactly did he need her for.

Or—is he having hallucinations. Delusions. Could this be the family condition, presenting properly at last.

His grandfather had deteriorated past the point of distinguishing his own son from an enemy. Attacked him. Was killed by him in self-defense. And Cyrix sat here, of the same lineage, no barrier between him and the same inheritance. At some point he might lose the distinction between real and invented entirely. Precisely as his grandfather had lost it—the man who had forgotten his own wife and the son he had raised from birth, and come to pieces regardless.

"That is precisely why I require your assistance, Ayesha. And I confess I am relieved that you arrived at this manor when you did. As a medium, you will know the methods for managing an evil spirit."

As if she knew any such method.

He would have been better served calling a doctor.

"I find my mind considerably more settled for having met the person I have been waiting for. Thank you for coming, Ayesha."

"Not at all. I'm the one who should be asking for your patience."

She forced the smile into place.

Everything else remained uncertain. One thing was clear.

Cyrix believed it. Genuinely. That an evil spirit circled him and intended to take his body.

Ayesha looked at the man across the table.

Cyrix Etheldore.

What she knew of him was still not much. A bloodline from some royal house that had long since ceased to exist. A fortune accumulated across generations, large enough that the land surrounding this manor was, in its entirety, the family's property.

And—

He was the most beautiful madman she had ever met.

~~A bloody and cruel history of a distinguished family. Here, a father without natural feeling—one who raised his hand against his own wife and child.~~

But with mental illness as the motive, without natural feeling was the wrong word.

~~Here, a son who killed his father—who severed the bonds of blood with his own hands.~~

The servants who had rushed to the scene at the sound of the struggle had found the son's face already covered in blood. There was room for self-defense to weigh against it.

She read back through the lines. Drew through them, heavily, until they were gone.

Stayed on the page, though. The lines underneath the crossing-out.

The editor would have found them printable regardless. As he had with the arson piece.

'Ayesha, why is the focus of this arson article like this?'

'That? When I looked into the situation, it was pitiful. The parents were ill. The younger siblings had been hurt in an accident and there was no money for treatment. So I suppose they decided to set fire to the house and die together. But the fire happened to engulf the neighboring house.'

'And the result—five people in the neighboring family died. That's a fact, isn't it?'

'In terms of results—yes. That's the fact.'

'So what's the problem?'