Now Comes the Mist

CHAPTER ONE

I wonder if any of these women have ever imagined their own deaths.

This is the thought that creeps through my mind as I sit on the bench in the old churchyard. My skirts are tucked neatly around me. My ankles are crossed at the hem. My hands are folded in my lap. I appear to be every inch a lady, for anyone who cares to look at my silhouette against the billowing snow—and even in the midst of their deepest mourning, they look. But inside my head, where no one can see, I am sprawled six feet beneath the ground on which their feet tread, my limbs splayed and hair mussed, choking on the frozen dirt. The earth swallows me whole, savoring the taste of my last warm breath.

It is a far more romantic death than lying in a coffin in our family tomb, which will be the likelier fate for me. But there, my skirts would be tucked, my ankles would be crossed, and my hands would be folded—and what is the point of dying exactly as one lived? If I must pass into the arms of Death, I want to do it as no one of my acquaintance would think proper.

Two women approach me, arm in arm, swathed in black bombazine. Both wear heavy crape veils but have folded up the fabric to reveal their faces. I remember how Mamma used to complain about the scratchy material irritating her skin, but she had endured it in public as all widows must, so I am pleased by the boldness of these ladies. They nod in greeting as they pass, and I see that they are not much older than Mina or myself. In fact, they could be a glimpse of us five or six years from now. One is plump and dainty with yellow corn-silk hair, like Mina, and the other is small, slender, and dark, like me. They walk in perfect unison, step for step, and lean confidingly on each other like sisters. Or lovers, I suppose.

They stop at a grave nearby, and the fair-haired woman places a bouquet of white lilies by the headstone. The petals sink into the snow to begin their slow decay, and then the women retrace their steps with a parting nod for me. I imagine them strolling through the churchyard gates, stepping into a carriage, and driving back to a house of bright windows like eyes glad to see them. They would pull off their offending veils and sit down to a cup of fragrant tea, the memory of the grave in the snow and me on the bench already fading from their minds.

Death slips so easily from other women. But on me, it lingers like a perfume, seeping into my skin until every breath I take is a reminder that the grave awaits me. I cannot shake its iron grip, and as I rise trembling from the bench, I am not certain I want to.

In my black silk skirts, I weave through the sleeping-places of the dead. I wonder if they can hear the snow crunching beneath my slippers, and whether the sound makes them jealous. It would make me jealous. I would hate the girl creeping over my grave like a wraith at dusk, her skin winter white against her black, black hair, and her eyes burning with life in a place where life is not welcome. I soften my steps so as not to offend the bereaved unduly.

At the rear of the churchyard, against the iron gate, stand seven tombs of fractured granite. Interspersed by drooping yew trees, they loom over the headstones like lords regarding a sea of peasants. Gladstone is etched into the first, and Taylor on the next. I pass King and Price and Browning , and then, beside Shaw , I see the object of my visit: the seventh tomb, adorned with stone roses. Metal lanterns hang on either side of the door, unlit, but the name Westenra inscribed above seems to glow as though there were flames.

I push open the heavy door and step inside. It should not be bright in here, not in the gloom of a February evening, but somehow I can see everything as clearly as if I held a torch: the cobweb-strewn floor, the remnants of dead flowers, and the cold granite walls carved with the names of every Westenra who lies here in eternal sleep. Stone steps lead into the vault below, where multiple Johns and Henrys and Georges I have never known are interred beside their wives and children. But here, in the main chamber of the tomb, rest the people I have known. The thick, sweet smell of decay fills my nostrils as I move, dreamlike, toward a set of stone coffins. They are rather grand affairs, in keeping with the honor of their occupants.

The first inscription reads: Lord Alexander, 6th Viscount Westenra, and his wife, Vanessa . My great-grandfather had never wanted his title or estate. All he had ever wanted was my great-grandmother, and in order to keep her, his parents had forced him to return to England. No more youthful escapades across the world, no more learning war and bloodshed and domination from his volatile French uncle, a high-ranking minister in the court of the emperor of Vietnam. “Come home,” his parents had commanded, according to family legend. “We will accept your bride as long as you come home and take responsibility.” And he had.

He had died before I was born, but my great-grandmother had lived until I was three. She had been just a slip of a girl when her English husband had stolen her away from the Vietnamese court, and she had remained small and delicate all her life. I remember her feeding me ginger candy and laughing her lilting laugh as she tried to navigate our hard-edged consonants. The month she had taken to her bed forever, I had not understood. “Why do we have to say goodbye?” I had asked, as she lay pale and silent—and sleeping, I thought—on her pillow.

“Because she is going to the old churchyard,” Mamma had explained.

“But she will come back. Won’t she?”

“No, my darling. Never again.”

Still, I had not understood. I had waited by the window day after day, hoping to see her carriage come clattering up to the door. I do not remember when I learned what death was—only that as the years passed, I began to dream endlessly of wandering through the mist, searching for Mamma, screaming for Papa, terrified that one by one, they would go and leave me all alone.

Now, I stoop beside the second coffin, which reads The Honorable Phillip J. Westenra and his wife, Lucy . I run my fingers over the name I share with my grandmother. She gave it to me, along with the smile with which she had captivated London society half a century ago. I had clung to her as a child, frightened that I would lose her, too.

“We all must go sometime,” she had said, hugging me close. “Life cannot go on forever.”

“But it should,” I had told her fiercely. “I’ll make it go on forever.”

That she lies here beside my grandfather is proof of my failure. I press my cheek against the icy stone of their coffin and think of everything I had read in Papa’s library after her death. Volumes about the afterlife and medical treatises, barely decipherable, with complex diagrams of the body after death. When I had exhausted those, I had turned to outright folklore: ghost stories, superstitions surrounding funeral rituals from around the world, and tales of people getting buried alive and walled up inside dark catacombs.

After that, all my dreams were of dying. I drowned in the sea. I clawed at the inside of a coffin until my nails tore off. I plummeted from a castle tower to the river waiting below.

“It’s a defense mechanism,” the doctor had told my concerned parents. “Lucy is learning how to cope with grief. She will grow out of it, I promise you.”

But I never have.

Because here I am, alone in a tomb surrounded by the dead. With my face still resting inches above my grandparents’ skeletons, I turn my eyes to my father’s coffin. Phillip Westenra, Jr. , it reads, with room to add Mamma’s name one day. My gaze moves above the inscription.

There is a hand there.

It hangs over the edge of the coffin, the fingers long and pale and limp. As I watch, the wrist slowly swivels until the palm is upward. The index finger crooks.

Come here .

I rise, and the dust rises with me. I walk toward Papa’s coffin. The lid is gone, so I can see him clearly: jet-black hair, high cheekbones, and pale skin warmed with a touch of gold, all of which I have inherited. His eyes are open, and as I come closer, he turns to look at me.

“Lucy,” he says, pleased. “I knew you would come.”

My heart surges with longing. “Papa,” I say, taking his hand. It is big and warm and steady, and mine disappears within it. “Oh, Papa, I’ve missed you so.”

“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 he spoke 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 her heavy 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 … that Death , will not allow it?

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