Wildwood Imperium (Wildwood Chronicles 3)

Elsie started to feel very sorry for the man. “You can make things better, Mr. Unthank. You can help us. You can help us get our friends back. You can stop being crazy just for a bit and stop crying and stop singing and do your part to help us. Do you think you could do that? And then, maybe. Maybe then we’d all just get a little closer to maybe forgiving you. What do you think of that, Mr. Unthank?”

The man nodded, tears now streaming down his cheeks. He’d stopped his mumbling. He was holding the index cards firmly in his hands; they were crinkling under the pressure. Elsie heard a voice sound from behind her: It was Jacques.

“Easy, Elsie,” he said. “The man’s under a lot of pressure. He’s got a lot to get ready for.”

“Sorry,” said Elsie. “I just wanted to talk to him. He just seemed so sad.”

Jacques nodded gravely, turning to Unthank. “How’s the practice going?”

Unthank brought one freshly scrubbed knuckle to his eyes and proceeded to wipe it free of tears. A steely look of determination had emerged from somewhere, deep inside that lumpy sweater-vested frame of his, and he wrinkled his brow in concentration. He dropped the index cards to the ground and said, “I’m ready.”

The little dish, the dish of her mother’s, the little brass bowl on top of her dresser, now contained two things: a mottled eagle feather and a smooth white pebble. Zita placed this last thing in it as she settled in for the evening, with her father turning the damper down on the woodstove just outside her room and the light of the day’s dimming sun having seeped away through the veil of trees.

She climbed into her bed and waited, listening for the gas man turning on the lamps on the street outside, for her father to pad softly down the hall toward his bedroom. She watched the mirror on her dresser, waited for the mist to come. She wanted to find out more about this Verdant Empress; she suspected that the spirit was not the one that was whispered about in the schoolyard, the one whose son had been murdered. She suspected that the stories got the details wrong. This was no ghost called forth from the time of the Ancients. This spirit was someone else. And she had an idea who it was.

The moment in Wildwood, when she’d stumbled onto the Plinth, all surrounded by the bed of ivy, lingered in her mind. She’d felt something there, a kind of electricity running through the forest that seemed to connect her and the pebble to that white, fluted pedestal. It had confirmed her suspicions, that she was not simply calling some long-sleeping specter back from the dead for a kind of sideshow séance. She was implicated in something much bigger. It had been the eagle, the one that had kindly donated the first of her requested items, that had planted the seed: What did this thing want from the land of the living?

The night descended; Zita waited.

The moon climbed in a slow, shallow curve across the horizon; it shone into her bedroom window.

She must’ve dozed off, there in her bed, because the very next moment she opened her eyes and heard the clock in the hall chime midnight, and she’d toppled sidelong into her pillow. She pulled herself upright and smoothed back her hair—for what, she didn’t know. For some reason, tonight she wanted to make herself presentable to the spirit. She wanted to be seen.

The clock ticked in the hall; her father snored in his bed. The mist came and clouded the glass. Zita’s heart rate quickened.

GOOD, wrote the spirit.

“I know who you are,” said Zita.

The glass remained unchanged.

“You’re the old Governess. The one whose kid died. The one who went crazy.”

The glass clouded again. Zita waited. Still: nothing.

“Is that right? Is that you?”

A breeze rippled through the room; she could feel the chill.

Zita spoke again: “It’s okay. I’ll still get the things for you. I just wanted to say that I know who you are. I know what happened to you. And that I guess I understand.” She felt calmed, like she was speaking to an old friend. The words came quickly. “My dad told me about you. I wasn’t even born yet. He said you were a great woman. He said that you went through the worst thing that anyone could ever go through, that you lost your son. He said that you maybe were a little extreme, afterward, but it was to be expected and that any parent of a child would understand. That’s what he said.”

Quiet; fog on the mirror.

“And while I’m not a parent of a kid, I’m just a teenager, I think I kind of get it.” She paused here, drumming up the courage to say the next words. “The opposite happened to me. My mom died. About seven months ago now.” She laughed a little, saying, “Funny. I haven’t really talked to anyone about it. You’re the first person—I mean, whatever you are. She was really sweet, my mom. She liked playing guitar and gardening. She was a really good singer, too. She was just a good person, you know? Just good. And then she got sick and she died. Just like that. Like, you think only bad people get punished and have to die in awful ways, but she was really good, my mom, and she just slipped away. So fast. Like, you’d never in a million years imagine that that sort of thing could happen to you and then it does and your whole world is just crushed, right?”

The mirror gave no response.

“I’m just saying, I know how you feel. I know why you did what you did. And maybe in some way my helping you is me just trying to help myself, you know? Does that even make any sense?”

A breeze rustled the curtains. The word YES scrawled across the mirror’s glass.

Zita beamed. “You hear me! So is that you, the old Governess?”

YES.

“What’s your name?”

The glass fogged. Then, the sound of a finger against a windowpane as ALEXANDRA appeared on the mirror.