Page 10 of Of Faith and Fangs

I wanted to ask what had happened. I wanted to say I had seen something, that I believed someone had come in the night and stolen Mercy away, that death was not a thing that happened in a vacuum but had to be caused by something, or someone. But I heard myself say only, “She was alive at midnight. I heard her breathing.”

He looked at me with professional boredom. “The disease is not kind. Sometimes it’s sudden.”

Miss Hartwell moved to the bed, hands deft and efficient. She folded Mercy’s arms across her chest, brushed the hair from her brow, and closed her eyes. Then she stripped the sheets, rolling them into a tight bundle as if she were making a bed for a new arrival.

The doctor made a final note and left without another word. I watched him go, feeling a tremor in my chest that I recognized as something close to rage, or maybe terror.

Miss Hartwell turned to me. “Would you like a few moments alone?”

I nodded. I could not look at her. I could not look at anything.

When she was gone, I reached out and touched Mercy’s hand. It was cold, yes, but not rigid. The skin was soft, almost warm in the crook of her fingers. There was no rigor mortis, no sign of the slack-jawed horror I’d seen in other corpses. Instead, Mercy’s lips were curved in a faint smile, as if she’d finally remembered the punchline to a joke she’d been chasing her whole life.

I stared at her for a long time, searching for the boundary between life and death, but found only a blur. I wanted to pray, but the words would not come. My hand shook as I picked up the Bible from the nightstand, but it slipped from my grip and landed on the floor with a thud that sounded final.

In the hallway, I heard the rumble of the laundry cart. Soon they would come to take Mercy away, to wrap her in a sheet and consign her to the cold earth. I wanted to weep, but my eyes were dry.

The nurse returned with a pair of orderlies. They wheeled in a gurney, lifted Mercy onto it with practiced care, and rolled her out without ceremony. Her diary was left behind. I picked it up, thumbed through the pages, trying to make sense of the words and drawings. None of it meant anything. Or maybe it meant everything, and I was just too blind to see it.

The room felt larger with Mercy gone, but emptier, too. The air was stale. The cross, my Bible, the handful of things I’d brought with me—none of them seemed to matter in the face of what had happened here.

I sat on my bed, staring at the blank wall across from me. I tried to pray, but the silence was so deep it drowned out even my thoughts. All I could do was listen to the wind rattling the window and wonder whether Mercy’s soul had gone anywhere at all.

Soon, my father would pick me up, I was sure. But that was no consolation. What was that man—the one who took Mercy’s life? He seemed a man, but something more. Was it the devil himself? Had Mercy fallen so far into Satan’s clutches that the fallen angel arrived himself to usher her into hell? I didn’t even know what to think, much less if I could tell anyone what had happened. Who would believe me if I did?

Chapter 4

I came back from the sanatorium with a fever in my head. It wasn’t a real fever—I didn’t feel ill—but it baked behind my eyes and set my hands to trembling if I let them rest too long. My father said it was grief and overexertion, and that I’d soon recover with sleep and prayer. He’d never known the kind of nights that waited behind the closed doors of a place like that. He didn’t know what I’d seen.

A part of me blamed him for sending me there. But this was a mission—and if the apostles could risk their lives to save souls, boldly accepting their own deaths, how could I cower in fear? What I’d seen hadn’t come for me. That man, that thing, had come for her.

He tried to give me two days of peace, but even the parsonage seemed hollowed out, as if the cold from the sanatorium had followed me home and taken up residence in our walls. My room, which I’d once found comfortingly small, now seemed like a cage. I paced the boards until I wore a line in the floor, then knelt at my bed and pressed my forehead to the faded quilt. I prayed for Mercy Brown, for her soul, for her family. I prayed for myself that the memory of what I’d seen would scab over and heal, or at the very least dull to a bearable throb.

I always believed in the devil. I was certain of the existence of demons. Even in an era of so much progress, where many believed that humanity had become its own salvation, I saw evil everywhere, waiting in the shadows, ready to pounce when we least expected it. I’d never actually expected to encounter evil that way, not a demon in the flesh. What else could it have been, that creature that ended Mercy’s life? And why had it done it? Had she summoned it with her witchcraft, with her strange drawings? Had she bidden it to take her out, a merciful death for a girl ironically named?

Sleep did not come. The dark outside my window was too perfect. In the stillness, I heard every sound: the shifting of the foundation, the shiver of trees in the wind, the hush of my own blood in my ears. I prayed harder. When my lips became numb from softly chanting psalms, I recited them silently in my mind, allowing the rhythm of the words to soothe me like the ebb and flow of the tide.

I woke from a trance—I don’t remember falling asleep, but I must have—when a pounding at the front door echoed up through the house. My father’s voice, gruff with sleep, cut through the silence. He was not a man easily startled, but this was not a time of night for callers. His footsteps moved quickly down the hall, the floorboards creaking in staccato. I drew my shawl tight and pressed myself against the door, listening.

The voices in the parlor were hushed and urgent. My father, and another man. I recognized the other voice by its quiver: George Brown.

They did not come upstairs right away. There was a scraping of chairs, the hush of glass on wood, a faint clinking as my father poured something—a comfort, perhaps, or the illusion of one. I pressed my ear to the cold pane of my window and saw nothing but darkness, and in the darkness, nothing but a growing dread.

When at last my father knocked at my door, I was already standing beside it. I opened it and found him there, the old lines in his face set deeper by worry.

“Mr. Brown is here,” he said. “He needs to speak with you.”

“Now?” I said. My voice was so thin it nearly vanished in the corridor.

He nodded, and the look he gave me was strange—a warning and a plea all at once.

Mr. Brown was waiting for me in the sitting room. His clothes were rumpled and mismatched, as if he’d dressed by feel in a room with no light. His hair, always combed so flat it shone, stood up in tufts. His hands trembled, but not from cold; the tremor came from somewhere deeper. He rose as I entered, but did not offer a greeting.

“Miss Bladewell,” he said. Then, more softly: “Alice.”

He looked older than his years, and more than that—he looked like someone who’d literally gone to hell and back.

I nodded, unsure if it was proper to speak.

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