ES Chapter 12

Her body had stopped moving. Her arms and her legs as if bound at the joints—a condition she had no previous account for—and she stood there, and the standing simply continued.

It felt, precisely, like sleep paralysis.

How long had it been.

Then—

Thunk.

The bathroom door opened.

A servant entered, cleaning tools in both hands.

Something electric ran through her—a charge moving through her whole body at once as the blood returned. Her limbs came back to her. A large breath burst out of her.

All of it, she realized, because the servant had arrived at precisely the right moment.

That was when the servant, finding Ayesha standing in the bathroom blankly, still gathering her breath, turned—alarm seizing her face—and began to run.

Why. What did she see.

She had only just woken from sleep paralysis with her eyes open. There was no time to collect herself. Startled in response, she ran out of the bathroom after her.

As she gave chase, the servant increased her speed.

An unexpected game of tag ensued.

Skirt hem clutched in both fists, Ayesha ran across the large bedroom and barely caught the servant at the door before she could get through it.

"Wait—what just happened? What did you see?"

The questions came out disordered. She had no framework for what had occurred. The servant, for her part, appeared equally at a loss.

The woman apologized—at once, before anything else.

"I'm so sorry!"

"For what?"

"For offending you, miss. I didn't realize you were still in there. There was no sound—I thought you'd gone—and the marble gets water marks quickly if it isn't cleaned right away—"

"Wait."

There was something in that she couldn't simply pass over.

"Why are you being so careful about my every reaction?"

Apologizing for offending her sensibilities—even granted the gap between guest and servant, that posture was too low. She was a passing guest, nothing more. Not a noble. And certainly no relation to the master of the house. Outside Langfield Manor they would have been roughly the same. She had chosen a more unusual occupation. Their standing was not different.

"My experience is limited," the servant said, stumbling slightly over the words. "I'm still learning, you see."

"Why should that matter?"

"We were told—never to speak to you unless necessary, and always to clear the room without fail when you're present..."

"You were given orders?"

The servant nodded.

'Wow. That old butler. Overdoing much?'

Ayesha thought of the elderly butler and glared—privately.

The words had been selected with care to sound like consideration. What the instruction actually said was: do not approach the suspicious guest; do not speak with her; leave her isolated.

So that was why—right from the first meeting, the girl had been so stiff. Nothing but "Yes, miss," and then gone almost before the air had settled.

Yes—from where the girl stood, what else could she do. She accepted this. When you work somewhere for someone, you watch the eyes of whoever is above you. Like herself—who, unable to resist the editor's instructions, had inevitably ended up standing inside Langfield Manor.

In any case—this wasn't what mattered right now.

"Even so—was there any reason to run?"

"Your expression was so severe—I thought you were angry with me."

Of course her expression had been severe. She had been staring down the mirror for however long. And the girl had walked in at precisely that moment and taken it for a glare aimed at her.

What a letdown.

She had spooked herself for nothing, and caused a misunderstanding in the process.

"That's all it was? Nothing else—just my expression alarming you, and you were afraid you'd made some mistake?"

She checked again in case she had missed something. The conclusion held.

"Yes, miss. Because you've come here for important work—we were told to be extremely careful about every word and action in your presence."

That butler. Smooth as something you could never quite get a grip on.

To her face, he had questioned whether she'd come to seduce Cyrix. To the servants, he had announced her as someone here for important work. Wearing the shell of respect, perfectly, on the outside. And underneath it: don't get any ideas; attend only to what you came to do.

The servant bowed her head.

"If there is anything uncomfortable during your stay, please do tell me at once, miss."

"Don't worry. There isn't anything. If something comes up, I'll leave a note."

"Oh—I can't read, miss."

The woman's face went red.

Not particularly a matter for shame. Illiteracy was quite common. And if she had been literate, she could have found work that paid considerably better than service at a manor. In this house, apart from Cyrix, the butler, and herself, those who could read and write would be few.

"Then I'll come back to clean the bathroom a little later."

The servant gathered her tools and left in a hurry.

A commotion that had not quite been a commotion was over. The tension released, and fatigue came flooding in behind it. Ayesha sat on the edge of the bed, working to calm the late-starting thunder of her heart, and looked up at the clock on the wall.

Over an hour had passed.

The exchange with the girl had been only a few words.

How long had she been locked in that bathroom.

She stood there, suddenly at a loss.

At dinner that evening, Ayesha eased the question toward him as if hoping not to be caught asking it.

"When did you first become aware of the evil spirit's existence?"

He took every meal with her. He had only just come into his inheritance and should by rights have been too pressed for time to breathe; somehow he found it regardless. Having a medium in the house was, evidently, a considerable source of support.

Whereas Ayesha—who knew rather less about the matter of spirits than Cyrix did, which was really saying something—found herself in the agonizingly absurd position of not knowing whether to laugh or weep.

"I do not know," he said.

He didn't know?

She stared at him. Her mouth opened. For a moment it produced nothing.

He smiled—bitter, brief—and added:

"Only that it has been a very long time."

"Ah." A pause where a better response might have been. "That is a terrible thing."

Too obvious a response, perhaps.

She moved quickly to find something more.

"I expect you have tried various methods to drive it out."

"Any method worth attempting—I would imagine, by now, I have attempted it." He said it as a man accounting for years that might as well have belonged to someone else. "For instance—there are no mirrors in my bathroom or my bedroom. I had heard that certain spirits face humans through mirrors." A pause. "Is that truly so?"

The world tilted, briefly.

Mirrors. First out of his mouth.

She had only just had a staring contest with one herself.

"Or is that mistaken?"

Her tone had gone slightly off from the startling—evidently enough to alarm him. Ayesha put on composure quickly.

"No—you're right. It has been known to occur."

It was territory she had no knowledge of. But whoever had told him was presumably someone in the spiritualist line, and it was safe enough to agree.

"Another spiritualist once proposed a method involving an animal."

"An animal?"

"The spirit is transferred into the animal's body, and the animal is then killed—this was said to extinguish it." A pause, one beat longer than the sentence required. "Furthermore—the more intimate the bond between the animal and its owner, the greater the effect, I was told."

"Oh."

She hesitated.

Whether that made any sense was beside the point. She hadn't expected a method this strange to have been on the table at all. The more intimate the bond. Which meant an animal raised with affection. A bond deep enough to count for something—

No.

She could not let sympathy show here. Ayesha-the-journalist, with ordinary human feeling, might grieve for the animal. Ayesha-the-medium had a different role.

He had come through a downpour to collect a stranger. To have finally resolved to transfer a spirit into an animal he had raised with affection—that meant years of endurance past what she could quite imagine.

If the evil spirit actually existed, that is.

The more she listened, the more she could feel her mind beginning to blur at the edges. Ayesha shut off the chain of doubts, each biting the tail of the last.

At times like this, thinking nothing at all was the better choice.

"Did that method suc—"