Seventeen

WHITE FLOWERS. THE smell of lilies, orchids, freesia. Overpowering and oppressive. Sweet decay.

Langton blinked up at a rough timber ceiling, crisscross beams. Firelight flickered up there, orange and yellow twisting among darker shadows. Lethargic, he watched the elongated reflections for a while; the shapes they made reminded him of childhood evenings with his family. The memory comforted him. Even the overwhelming smell of flowers didn’t seem too harsh now. Death didn’t seem too bad.

He forced his heavy eyes open. Whatever this was, it was not death. This hurt too much.

Like a drunk unsure and suspicious of his surroundings, he worked outward from his own body: a soft material under him, velvet or plush. Warm. No shackles at his wrists or legs. He shifted position to ease the weight on his hip and side and touched his tender throat. With that came the memory of Reefer Jake, a man already dead. And with that came the name of Doktor Glass.

Langton jerked upright on the couch, eyes wide open, hands ready for attack or defense.

“Inspector. How are you?” Sister Wright, sitting across from him, poured tea into two white china cups. She replaced the pot on the low table separating her and Langton, then offered him a cup. “Milk? Sugar?”

Habit made Langton accept the cup. This had to be a dream or a delusion. It seemed so real; he could feel the heat of the tea through the thin bone china, smell the dark leaves.

Sister Wright saw him wince as he swallowed. “I applied ointment for the bruising and inflammation, but I’m afraid you’ll have to let time take its course.”

Langton had so many questions. How had Sister Wright rescued him? Where was he? How could Jake still walk with the living? All he could manage was, “Where am I?”

“A warehouse on Blundell Street, close to Gladstone Dock,” Sister Wright said, sipping her tea.

The room didn’t match her explanation. Apart from the lack of windows, it could have been a respectable front parlor with its dark dressers and bureau, its rugs, red velvet couch and chairs, its many vases of fresh flowers. But Langton thought he could detect the trace aroma of salt water. Perhaps he imagined it.

Sister Wright could have stepped in here straight from the Infirmary. Starched white apron over navy blue dress; black stockings and flat black shoes; upturned watch and Guild pin at her breast. Smiling slightly, she watched Langton like a nanny with a dim child.

“How did you get me out of the Professor’s house?”

“His mansion lies over a network of old tunnels; in fact, it used to belong to one of Liverpool’s most notorious slavers and smugglers.”

“How…I mean…”

“You’re still a little groggy, Inspector. I asked Jake to be careful, but he really has no idea of his own strength.”

Ice formed in the pit of Langton’s stomach. He set down the teacup as if it might shatter at any moment. He had to concentrate on every movement. “You’re Doktor Glass.”

Sister Wright set her hands on her lap. “I am.”

It made horrible sense: the connections and clues to the Infirmary; her knowledge of the Jar Boys; her work at the encampment giving her ready access to victims. At the center of the investigation. Watching. Waiting.

“But…” Langton still couldn’t believe it. “I thought the Professor…”

“He’s quite innocent,” Sister Wright said. “I respect him completely and I’ve learned so much from him.”

Now Langton remembered Sister Wright watching the Professor at work in the Infirmary. He remembered her intense expression as she’d gazed down on the exposed skull and brain of the injured steeplejack on the operating table below her.

“Why, Sister? You’re a nurse—you save lives.”

She nodded. “With God’s grace.”

“Then how can you involve yourself with the Jar Boys?”

Sister Wright looked into the open fire. She waited perhaps a minute before she said, “It started in the Transvaal. I’d always shown an interest in the medical profession, a tradition in my family; my grandfather had been a missionary physician in India. Naturally I could not hope to become a doctor, since women are barred from the profession, so I joined the nursing sisters. And, in Africa, God granted me a vision of hell.”

Langton remembered battlefields strewn with the dead and dying; limbs and bloody remnants under the baking red sun. Men struggling to breathe as the corrosive green gas swept along the plains and seeped into the trenches, into eyes and throats and finally lungs.

“I tended the sick,” Sister Wright continued, “and believed I was helping. I was part of some plan that I did not yet understand. And I tended the Boers as well as I tended the British boys; I showed no favoritism. I could even sympathize with the Boers’ cause. I didn’t agree with their methods, but I tried to put myself in their position. And that’s what made it so hard to understand…”

She looked up at Langton with wide, glistening eyes and said no more than, “Bloemfontein.”

Langton looked away. He didn’t want to imagine Sister Wright in that place. Not after the stories he’d heard.

The British had left only a score of men to defend the field hospital at Bloemfontein. They said the crudely painted Red Cross on its white tin roof would offer protection. The hundred Boer irregulars had ignored the cross as they’d swept down in the night. The most fortunate soldiers had died quickly. Some had taken days, staked out under the sun, sport for knives and dogs and imaginations fed by years of bloodshed.

Some of the nurses had survived, but their treatment had caused even the Boers’ rebel commanders to disown the Orange Free State Irregulars.

Then Langton remembered the tattoos on the faceless man’s body. “Kepler?”

“He must have been one of them,” Sister Wright said. “I didn’t remember him but I knew those tattoos. And half of the time we were blindfolded while they…Good sport, they called it.”

Langton fought the nausea that rose within him. He’d heard what had happened in that place, but it made it somehow more immediate, more real, to hear it from someone who’d survived.

“I’m sorry,” he said, ashamed of the pitiful emptiness of his words. “How did that drive you to become Doktor Glass?”

“We worked under Doctor Klaustus,” she said. “A brilliant man with extreme ideas. Extreme to his colleagues, that is. At the time I believed that they couldn’t see the extent of his genius, his imagination. I helped him willingly.”

Langton caught the same note in her voice as when she spoke of the Professor.

She continued, “Klaustus had seen so much; he couldn’t believe that human life ended with the decay of simple flesh. The spirit—so complex, so aware—cannot simply disappear. But Klaustus said he could never capture the final essence. Not until he read of the work of Tesla and Marconi.”

Langton had to concentrate on her words. The atmosphere of the room, with the crackling fire and the everyday surroundings, contradicted Sister Wright’s bizarre explanation.

“Even before the war, Klaustus had experimented with glass carboys, then clay, with different aerials and capacitors, different induction coils. The war itself gave him plenty of opportunity to perfect his machine; he called it an attractor.”

When Langton shook his head, Sister Wright leaned forward and stared into his eyes as if willing his belief. “I saw it, Inspector. I did not believe it at first, either, but I watched as Klaustus connected the attractor to a dying soldier in a Natal dressing station. Afterward, I held the jar’s copper connectors and for a brief moment I became that soldier whose body no longer breathed. His spirit lived on. The technique worked, and works still, whether for good or evil.”

His mind whirling, Langton looked into Sister Wright’s open, intense gaze and wondered if she was really insane. He had seen Edith’s essence in that house in Plimsoll Street. He had seen the strange machine, the so-called attractor, and he knew he had to believe, though logic rebelled.

As if sensing this, Sister Wright stood up and said, “Come.”

“Where?”

“You must see,” she said. “And then perhaps you’ll understand.”

Langton followed her to the door. Fatigue or confusion made him light-headed; he stumbled and almost fell. Sister Wright held out her hand, but Langton refused it. She went to speak, then took a lamp from a side table.

The door opened out onto a wide passage. The windowless sitting room’s normality gave way here to the building’s real form. Old wood and bare brick. Creaking floorboards gouged with decades or more of nailed boots and trolley wheels. The smell of the Mersey close by. Langton could believe he was in a warehouse now.

He watched out for Reefer Jake, half expecting the lumbering attacker to shuffle from the darkness. He remembered those blank eyes, the fingers digging into his throat.

To his left and right lay empty rooms, caverns of brick with steel hooks hanging from the ceiling. The temperature dropped. Langton pulled his coat tight and found an empty pocket instead of the Webley. He fought the panic that started deep in his stomach and threatened to overwhelm him. This weird journey through the cold warehouse, with the lamp throwing distorted shadows of Sister Wright against the leaning walls, reminded Langton of nightmares. It had that quality of unreality, of imminent horror. He longed to wake up.

Sister Wright led him down a ramp that ended at a solid steel door that showed no signs of rust. She unlocked the two padlocks and slid back the horizontal locking bars. She turned to Langton for a moment, then pushed open the door and waved him inside.

The lamp threw a semicircle of light into the room, but Langton sensed a much larger void beyond the border. Then he heard the click of a switch behind him.

White electric light flooded the space. Langton shielded his eyes. When he blinked them open he saw a square room at least twelve yards high by fifteen square. Caged electric bulbs hung from the ceiling on chains. The light they threw reflected from white walls, white ceiling, white tiled floor. And row after row of white shelving.

And on every shelf, stretching up to the ceiling, stood glazed clay jars. Langton gave up counting. Six, seven hundred? He pulled his jacket tight against the chill.

“We have to keep the storeroom cold,” Sister Wright said, “for the jars. Have you heard of Brownian motion? It’s the agitation of particles, and the essences within these jars become slower at low temperatures. And that means they survive for longer, since they waste less energy.”

She could have been speaking of a simple case at the Infirmary, not of transient souls caught in cold jars. “How many…”

“Almost a thousand, but not all are here,” Sister Wright said. She brushed past Langton and stood at the zinc table in the room’s center. A single brown glazed jar, as apparently unremarkable as the others, waited on that table. “My own collection stood at over six hundred, but Doctor Redfers added another three.”

Langton nodded. “You killed Redfers.”

“I’m afraid I had no choice,” she said, and her sorrow appeared genuine. “When you asked about him at the Infirmary, I realized that he would lead you back to me, and I wasn’t ready then. Besides, I’d already suspected Redfers of deceit; I thought I’d turned him to my cause, but he had started working again for one of the criminal gangs that used the jars for profit.”

“And that’s quite different from you, I suppose.”

Sister Wright shook her head. “Please don’t say that. I gained nothing from the trade in jars. Every penny from my network was used for research.”

That made Langton pause. “Network?”

“Redfers was only one of several doctors who introduced the…clients to the captured essences. And I was not the only supplier. Fortunately, over the past few weeks, I’ve managed to eliminate most of the criminal gangs.”

And therefore most of the competition, Langton thought. But he still had difficulty picturing Sister Wright as a villain. “If you aren’t in this for profit, then what?”

“The end of suffering,” Sister Wright said, smiling. “It could be even more important than that. Science has now proven the existence of a soul. Instead of fighting against religion, science can bolster it, reinforce it. Science is the tool of God.”

As she said this, her eyes burned just a little brighter. Her hands clasped together almost in prayer.

Carefully, Langton said, “You justify cruelty in the name of God? I suppose you’re not the first.”

For a moment, he thought he’d gone too far: Sister Wright blushed red and her hands tightened into fists. Then she took a breath and let it out slowly. “I can understand your sentiment. I was not happy with the thought of bored old men pawing over the souls of the lost. And then, when I realized that the essences were themselves aware of their condition and of their molesters’ actions…No, I did not enjoy that thought.”

“Then why do it? Why continue?”

“In order to destroy the practice,” she said. “When I have every last jar in my possession, every poor trapped soul, and they have fulfilled their final destiny, I shall release them unto the ether and into His hands.”

Langton recognized the tone of the True Believer. He knew then that Sister Wright would be capable of anything in her pursuit of what she thought right and just. With some, that goal was religious. With her, it was a bizarre mixture of science and theology. But what did she mean by “final destiny”?

Sister Wright continued, “I honestly believed it was our duty to capture their quintessence, their very soul, and relieve their pain.”

The image of Sarah rocked Langton on his heels. He could almost hear her voice. “I can think of nothing more cruel—if it’s possible—than trapping a person’s spirit.”

“I can understand that, Matthew,” Sister Wright said. “In time I came to that same realization. But perhaps we should consider your poor wife’s wishes.”

Langton, almost whispering, said, “She would never have agreed to this…imprisonment.”

Sister Wright smiled and rested a hand on the jar standing on the zinc table. “Why don’t you ask her?”

*  *  *

SURPRISE ROBBED LANGTON of words. He stared at the jar, at Sister Wright. His heart froze, and his throat tightened as if Reefer Jake once again gripped it.

“Redfers had her,” Sister Wright said. “He performed the transfer at the Infirmary. I knew of it then, but I had not yet met you. When I discovered that Redfers had been lending her out, as well as other souls, well…he gave me no choice.”

Langton hardly heard her voice. He took one slow step toward the table, then another. Could that plain earthenware jar really contain Sarah’s essence, her soul?

Sister Wright stepped away from the table. “You simply grasp the two copper connectors, one in each hand.”

He saw the smooth copper connectors jutting from the lid. Some of the wax that sealed the lid had dribbled down the jar’s side and set in place like dried green blood. Langton took another step. He stood at the table’s edge, his hands open at his sides. His heart raced.

Could he do this? For months, he had dreamed about talking to Sarah one last time; he could say all the things he should have said when she was alive. And all the things he would have said as she slipped away from him. He should have been there at the end, instead of Redfers with his apparatus, his machine. Now he had his chance.

Sarah’s passing had left a void that screamed out inside Langton, urging him to grasp those connectors. No more guilt; no more pain; no more loneliness. He would be complete again.

He looked at Sister Wright, still unable to call her Doktor Glass, and saw no outward signs of manipulation. She watched him with a look of sadness, perhaps even of tenderness, like a protective mother prompting her child.

He reached out trembling hands. He could almost feel those smooth, cold connectors. Remembering young Edith’s essence, he imagined the bright mist inside the jar rushing to complete the circuit. The charged particles streaming through the darkness. The surge as they clung to the submerged metal. Sarah’s essence.

His hands moved closer. Closer.

Langton fell to his knees on the cold tiled floor. He wrapped his arms around his body and bowed his head. “I can’t. I can’t do it.”

“It’s all right, Matthew.” Sister Wright stroked his head. “It’s all right. Don’t worry.”

“I’m scared.”

“I know. I know.”

As Sister Wright pressed his head into her skirts, Langton breathed in the comforting Infirmary smells of disinfectant, flowers, freshly laundered clothes. He closed his eyes as tears trickled down his face.

Sister Wright continued stroking his hair, soothing him as she’d probably soothed so many patients. Then, very quietly, she said, “There is another way I can help you…”

Langton pulled away from her and looked up. After so many shocks, so many surprises, he really had no idea what to expect.

“Your wife is not yet lost,” Sister Wright said, smiling. “I can bring her back. A new life, Matthew. A new life in a new body.”

*  *  *

THE COLD OF the jars’ storeroom had eaten into Langton’s bones. He sat huddled in the sitting room before the stoked fire. He watched the flames dancing in the grate, blue and yellow, as Sister Wright calmly spoke of madness.

“You saw it yourself with Reefer Jake,” she said. “We broke a small pane in his cell window and lowered the connectors and a syringe. After he injected the poison, we caught his essence in an attractor and retreated. Later, two of my men took his body from your morgue and brought him here. The transfer was straightforward: Within three hours of his ‘death’ he was sitting in this room.”

Langton started, and almost looked around as if expecting to see Jake lurch from the shadows.

Sister Wright continued, “It seems so long ago, that first crude attempt I witnessed with Klaustus: He stored a soldier’s essence for an hour while the poor man’s lacerated body effectively died. Klaustus repaired the damage and restarted the heart with an electric shock, then transferred the essence back into the host. I saw it myself. Although the poor ruined soldier later told me he wished he had passed away on the table, the procedure itself worked.”

Procedure. Host. Essence. Calm, ordered words disguising absolute madness.

“Jake was not the first,” Sister Wright said. “I know of three people in Liverpool who walk and live and laugh, giving no signs that they once inhabited other bodies. So many die too early, unnecessarily, unfairly.”

Langton stared at her. He wanted to make her stop, but her intense gaze pinned him down like an Indian mongoose with a snake. He didn’t have the energy or the courage to argue with her.

“I can bring her back to you, Langton. Not just for a few days or weeks or months. For a lifetime.”

He managed to whisper, “No.”

Sister Wright leaned forward. “Think of it: your wife, alive again, to hold and touch. In your arms. You could hear her voice—”

“It wouldn’t be her voice.”

“It would be her speaking. You would know. You could look inside the eyes of her new…host, and know. It’s within your reach.”

“And where would you find this poor host?” he said. “Murder some poor girl? Compound Sarah’s death with another crime?”

“There would be no need.” Sister Wright looked away. “The Infirmary has a ward that most people never visit. Patients who will never see the outside world again; patients whose wits have left them. Although physically sound, they stare at the world like poor dumb animals. There is nothing inside. Whether through injury, through disease or dementia, they will forever be no more than vessels. Imperfect, empty vessels.”

Her words spiraled around inside Langton’s head. He curled up on himself, wanting to disappear, to hear no more. The image of Sarah’s body lying in its silk-lined coffin would not leave him.

It wasn’t fair; it wasn’t right. She had been too young. They’d had their whole lives to live.

Still, Sister Wright continued, her voice soft and steady: “Inside the jar, her essence will fade. The particles lose their energy. Eventually, they cease. There is nothing I—or anyone else on this earth—can do then. It will be too late.”

Langton shook his head. He forced out the words, “It’s not right.”

She touched his knee. “Not right? Is it right for an innocent young woman to lie gently rotting in a wooden box while her family grieves?”

“Please…”

“Is it right for fate to choose her rather than the old, the already sick, the criminal, and the insane? You know it isn’t.”

“But…” Langton struggled for arguments. He remembered the crucifix around Sister Wright’s neck. “You believe in God; how can you do this?”

She rested a finger against Langton’s forehead. “Because God gave us intelligence. He gave us knowledge. It is our choice how we use that knowledge. I see no contradiction. Our work bolsters faith in God, since we can now prove the existence of the soul. There is no need for us to continue the use of jars save as temporary refuges. Until a new host comes forward.”

Exhaustion drained Langton. He couldn’t fight her. Was she insane? Or did she speak the truth?

To hold Sarah again. To relieve the utter loneliness, the guilt and pain. To live again.

“I’m a policeman.”

Sister Wright smiled as if she knew she’d won. “You’re also a husband. And your wife needs you. Will you let her down?”

Langton stared into the fire a few moments, then sat straighter on the couch. He smoothed the front of his waistcoat and let out a breath. “What do you want of me?”

“Nothing,” Sister Wright said. “Simply nothing.”

“But—”

“Leave Kepler’s death unsolved,” Sister Wright said, rising and crossing the room to a bureau. “Go through the motions of the inquiry but no more.”

“You killed him.”

“I did, and I would do it again.”

“Why?”

“Because as well as being an Irregular, he discovered certain…Let us say he unearthed too much.”

“About the jars?”

“Perhaps.”

“Then why did you cut off his face?” Langton asked.

“Publicity and distraction,” said Sister Wright. “I had to misdirect attention toward Brother Boer. In the Transvaal, as you know, they did that to their own traitors. And I wanted the British public to remember what such men were capable of.”

Before Langton could continue, Sister Wright returned from the bureau with the Webley in her hand. She held it out to him.

Langton checked the revolver. Every chamber loaded. He rested it across his knee. “I could arrest you. I should arrest you. And not just for Kepler’s murder.”

“I know.” She stood there with her hands crossed in front of her nurse’s apron.

“Then why give this back to me?”

“Because I trust you.”

Because I’m an accomplice now, Langton thought. He stared down at the gun. If I do Sister Wright’s bidding, I might see Sarah again. Or some re-created version of her. Oh God, forgive me.

He pocketed the Webley and stood up.

“You must deflect Major Fallows from me, from our network,” Sister Wright said, and the way she said “our” made Langton wince.

“You know about Fallows?”

“I do. I don’t want him interfering in our work.”

Langton nodded. “I’ll do what I can.”

She rested a hand on his arm for a moment. “I know you will. And I will fulfill my part of the contract. I promise.”

Sister Wright led the way down through the echoing warehouse. On the ground floor, the smell of tobacco drifted from a side room. Langton looked inside and saw three men, two at a table, one lying on a camp bed reading a yellowback novel. Smoke drifted around the bare bulb. As the men at the table saw Sister Wright, they threw down their cards and jumped to their feet.

Sister Wright waved them down. “It’s all right. I’ll see the inspector to the door myself. Where’s Jake?”

“Here, Doctor.”

Langton turned at the deep voice and saw Reefer Jake standing behind him and Sister Wright. The stocky man had made no sound as he’d approached. Langton looked into his eyes and tried to see some sign of the man he’d interrogated in the cells. He saw a brief spark before Jake’s impassive features turned to Sister Wright.

“Inspector Langton has agreed to help us, gentlemen,” she said. “Make sure you look out for him again.”

“Again?” Langton said.

Sister Wright smiled. “My boys here have saved your life at least once. With Redfers’s investigation, you got too close to the criminal jar gangs, or what was left of them. They wanted you removed.”

“Then I suppose I should thank you,” Langton said, but he wondered why Sister Wright had kept him alive then. Had she already accounted for his complicity?

With Jake lumbering after them, she led Langton down to a heavy wooden door bound with iron. “Jake could drive you home.”

“I’d like to walk,” Langton said, reluctant to be the passenger of a man he’d so recently pronounced dead.

The door swung open to allow in the rich, sour smell of the Mersey. Langton stepped out onto a wooden pier and saw the lights of Birkenhead and New Brighton flickering on the opposite shore of the river. In the darkness, warehouses showed as blocky silhouettes against the stars.

“Go left,” Sister Wright said, “and you’ll find stone steps up to the street. Be careful.”

Langton didn’t know what to say in farewell. Thank you? Go to hell? He shook his head and made for the street.

“One final thing, Matthew.”

He turned and saw Sister Wright standing in the wedge of light thrown from the open door.

“Today is the day of the Span’s inauguration,” she said. “Do not attend.”

“Why not?”

“Please do as I ask. If you wish to see your wife again, keep away from the Span.”

Langton ran back, but the door slammed shut. He raised his fist to hammer on it, then drew back. Making for the steps up to the street, he tried to pin down all that he’d learned from Sister Wright, or Doktor Glass. Too much information. Too many surprises. One question stood above the others: Why warn him away from the Span?