Page 2 of Now Comes the Mist

“And I’ve missed you, my child.” He sits up in the coffin, his broad shoulders and heavy body shifting the dust around him. His wide, dark blue eyes crinkle at me. “Why have you not come sooner? I’ve been waiting for you.”

I kneel beside his coffin. “Waiting?”

“This is where you belong. What wonderful talks we will have, you and I. We have so much to discuss and all the time in the world to do it.” Papa studies me affectionately. “You get prettier every time I see you. You have my grandmother Vanessa’s eyes, you know. The same color and shape. It feels like she’s looking out at me.”

The longing in his voice is palpable. My father had been close to his grandmother and had learned much at her knee: respect for elders, a passion for the spices of her home country, and even her language, though hespoke it only in the safe confines of his home and never in the smoking rooms or parlors of refined English society. All of this, he had taught to me in turn.

“My beloved Papa,” I say, pressing a kiss to his fingers. The inside of the tomb feels bright and warm when he is with me, and I imagine us sitting here side by side. I am safe and happy and cherished, no longer plagued by dreams full of shadows. The worst has come and gone—Death has sought me, and I have answered, and the world will go on outside.

The world outside…

I see sunlight filtering in through high windows. I see Mamma weeping alone in our great house. I see Mina in her wedding dress, her face sorrowful beneath her veil. I see all the men I have ever known, all the men I have danced with, all the men who might have married me and shown me a side of life no woman can ever properly tell me about, but for which I long with every fiber of my aching, untouched body to know.

“What is it, Lucy? What’s wrong?” Papa asks, concerned.

Behind me, I hear the scraping of a stone lid as my grandparents awaken. They sit up in their coffin, like Papa, but they look nothing like him. They are shreds of decomposed flesh clinging to bone, their gaping mouths stretched in fossilized smiles. A smell of rot sweeps the chamber. A fat pink worm slips from my grandmother’s nostril.

“What’s wrong, Lucy?”

“Stay with us, Lucy, forever.”

I turn back, horrified, to see that my father is covered in great black beetles. They devour his skin with razor-sharp pincers, tearing the meat like paper, stripping off layers of bloodied sinew and pulsing muscle. His hand is a cage of cold chalk bone around my fingers.

“Your place is here, Lucy,” he says lovingly as a beetle plunges its pincers into the soft wet jelly of his right eye.

And even as I scream, I feel myself clinging to his hand with all the strength I have left in me. Some force is separating us. Some voice speaks in my ear.

“Lucy. Lucy! Wake up!”

I am kneeling in the snow. Splatters of blood surround me like paint on a bone-white wall. My fingers are bleeding. I have been clawing at the door of our family tomb.

“Oh, Lucy, why? Why does this keep happening?” Mamma moans. She is the image of a woman who left her bed in a hurry. Her hair is coming loose from its plait, and the hem of her nightdress flutters beneath herheavy woolen robe. She has brought my own robe for me, as she always does, and hastily wraps it around my shoulders.

Only then do I realize how cold I am. I am wearing only my nightgown, the white lawn material so thin I can see my whole body through it in the light of the lantern carried by Harriet, my maid. She places a pair of slippers on the snow beside my bare feet, which are also bleeding—I must have cut them walking from our house to the churchyard—and so numb with the cold that she has to help me lift them into the slippers.

“What time is it?” I ask, my teeth chattering.

“Half past midnight,” Mamma says wearily, steering me away from the tomb. Harriet leads us out of the churchyard, lighting the way. “If only you sleepwalked during decent hours. An afternoon nap, perhaps. Though I suppose I ought to be grateful that you don’t.” She glances at my bare legs, which are clearly visible through my thin nightgown. Had I wandered in my dreams in daylight, all of respectable London would have seen every inch of my body. “Let us go home. Harriet will draw a warm bath, and I’ll have Agatha heat some broth for you.”

I shiver uncontrollably as we pass through the gates. “I … I saw Papa.”

Mamma gives me a sharp glance. “This must stop, Lucy.”

“I can’t help it. The doctor …”

She waves away my words impatiently. “I do not speak of your condition. Your father also sleepwalked, as did his father and grandmother before him. I am speaking of this”—she gestures to the graves in the snow—“this unnatural, unhealthy obsession with death and loss.”

I grip my robe tightly around my shoulders.

“It has been five years since Papa died.” In the light of Harriet’s lantern, Mamma looks much older than she is. “You must let him go.”

We stand for a moment in the snow, looking at each other, our breath emerging on the frigid air like ribbons of mist. Finally, my mother sighs and continues leading me down the street, and I obey without a word. What can I possibly say?

How can I tell her that I will never let go of Papa, or my grandparents, or anyone I have ever lost? How can I tell her that they … thatDeath, will not allow it?

And so I remain silent, and we walk home beneath the winter sky.

CHAPTER TWO

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