These Fleeting Shadows

by Kate Alice Marshall

a strangely colorless man, with thin hair and papery skin that made him seem like a pale copy of a person.

There are no ghosts at Harrow.

There was a pattern here. A strange sameness to the turns, like the same shape rotated in different arrangements. That sameness made it impossible to tell where in the pattern you were. Walking through the house felt like a recurring dream. Like you knew you’d been here before and something dreadful waited just ahead, but you couldn’t stop yourself from walking toward it.

Haunt was a good word for him. He didn’t seem much more alive than a ghost. I’d never met someone with so little presence. It was like he was a tissue paper tracing of a man. Colorless and thin, with a care to his movements, like he thought he might snag on something and rip if he moved too quickly.

It stood on turned-in feet, one knee knocked inward, the other leg bending once and then again, an extra joint at the center of its thigh. Its neck was long and twisted to and fro as it searched the hall—and then it saw me.

He raised his hands in surrender. “All right. I’m leaving you here to google ‘how to get a spooky forest lady to like me,’ and I’m going to go do real work. Like translating obscure nineteenth-century ciphers about interdimensional space gods.”

And then from her lips came a susurrus of sound. Syllables twined and tumbled and nipped at each other as they flooded from her lips in impossible configurations. She straightened, eyes wide with wonder. The sound skittered across my skin and scrabbled at my skull, calling to some deep part of me. And still Bryony spoke, until the sound wrapped around the shadows, and turned to silence.

“Henbane, angelica, wormwood. Onyx. Snake’s teeth. This is a nasty bit of magic. Trust a Vaughan to play dirty.”

“Not much—on its own,” she said. She turned back to the table and emptied the contents of the jar. She took a wooden spoon from a hook on the wall and scattered them, flicking the ingredients away from each other. “It’s to keep people from finding something. Makes them sick if they get too close.”

I craned to look. It was a jaw—a human mandible. Too small to belong to an adult. I tried to rise but fell. “Give it to me,”

Yes. I had it, and that was good. The teeth bit into my palms, but I didn’t care. I squeezed my eyes shut. Tears leaked down my cheeks. “Thank you,” I whispered. My body ordered itself. Joints slid back into place. Bones grew solid; blood flowed. Helen Vaughan. I am Helen Vaughan, I thought, and it felt true again.

“Bryony, there’s more. We have to find them.”

The bones were cold and smooth beneath my fingertips. They sang to me, but I couldn’t understand the song. It wasn’t the simple bone-song of the fox or the fawn, but something stranger, more alien still.

They scatter us. This must be what they mean. They take the bones and scatter them, and it makes the dark soul weak. Makes it broken.” “And because I’m still linked, scattering these bones—it hurt me?” I asked. I shuddered. “This is why Leopold brought me here. To murder me and cut me up and bury my bones in the woods. And Eli or Iris are in on it, and—”

Roman hung in the trees. The shadows had taken him apart like a puzzle box. Joints severed, bones extracted, tendons left tangled like string among the branches.

she makes her own playmates, strange half-real children, who move sometimes naturally and sometimes like a ragdoll jerked to and fro.

She began to whisper softly. Not words that I could recognize—it was, somehow, the sound of moss growing over stone, rain striking the shivering surface of a pond, a deadfall blooming with mushrooms.

gap in the roof at the buckshot stars that gleamed above us. “You are the night sky, Helen. Dark and wondrous and vast. We can only see part of it, but you can’t carve a sliver of it out and carry it in your pocket. You cannot cut part of yourself free.”

Come, I thought. It’s all right. “Come to me,” I whispered. “Our body. Our mind. Our soul. We are one. Let us be whole.”

We flowed into each other, Helen and the dark soul, until

there was no difference. No shadow blotting out the stars. We were whole, and we were one, and we had walked this spiral willingly. I found the heart of Harrow, and the thing at its center was me. We opened our eyes.

“I have stayed on the grounds for a full year. I have made an offering of my own flesh—my hand. I have marked your face with blood. I have stood with my three witnesses and shared a communion of spirits and of secrets. I have placed your ring in the heart of Harrow to draw you here, and I have spoken the names of Harrow’s daughters. You cannot claim me, Caleb. I claim myself.

I claim the dark soul.

A breath escaped my lips, and for an instant, the figment teetered toward reality, and her fingertips, now solid, brushed against Bryony’s outstretched hand. Of all the things that clamored in my fresh-woken soul, my love for her blazed brightest. But I wasn’t Helen. Not anymore. I cast aside the image of that girl and left Bryony there, beyond my reach.

I was born at Harrowstone Hall, and I was reborn in its ruins. I am not human, but I am whole. I am free. And I am loved. My name is Helen Vaughan.