The Brink of Darkness Read online

“You did good,” she said. “Baaaa.”

  FOUR

  Zoe sat by the river when the others had gone. Not even two minutes went by before Ripper came up quietly behind her in the Booty Hunter hat. She must have been nervous—it was such an undramatic entrance.

  “You will come?” said Ripper. “You will help me?”

  “Yes,” said Zoe. “But I have to be back by midnight.”

  Ripper smiled gratefully.

  “And so you shall, Cinderella,” she said.

  Zoe got on her feet.

  “Do you think the lords will really send X for you?” she said.

  “Yes,” said Ripper. “I believe I have demonstrated what a nuisance I can be if they don’t. Dervish, in particular, loathes the idea of us dead people running around up here. He fears we will leave evidence that the Lowlands exist. Now, you have flown with X before, have you not? You know what is involved?”

  “Yes,” said Zoe. “We call it ‘zooming.’ I throw up sometimes.”

  “Lovely,” said Ripper. “Please bear in mind that this is my only dress.”

  Ripper lifted her, and they shot into the sky.

  The sunlight made Zoe’s eyes ache, and the air screamed past her ears. But nothing was as overwhelming as the memory of lying draped, just like this, in X’s arms. She fell asleep as they flew, her senses shutting down. Her last thought was that Ripper was carrying her toward him.

  Zoe woke hours later to the buzzing of her phone.

  Ripper had laid her down beneath a tree in a meadow. She’d even folded her hands on her stomach, which was sweet, though it made Zoe feel like a corpse. Zoe sat up in the grass, so woozy she felt as if she’d been drugged. The afternoon was nearly gone. Ripper stood nearby watching for threats. Zoe couldn’t see her face.

  Texts from Val and Dallas had been multiplying for hours. Dallas had sent five variations on Are you SAFE? Val had sent eight in a row saying, Are you INSANE? Zoe texted them back hurriedly (Safe! Sane!), put the phone away, and rubbed her face.

  The air was warmish and humid, and the meadow showed signs of spring—little flecks of green, like a drawing being colored in. Zoe could see a white church steeple in the distance. A stripe of blue-gray ocean. A handful of sails, tiny as commas.

  “Where are we?” she said.

  “Massachusetts,” Ripper answered, without turning. Her voice sounded troubled. “Near the sea.”

  “You didn’t have to let me sleep,” she said.

  Ripper turned her head a few degrees.

  “I myself can never sleep and I like to watch others at it,” she said. “I am always looking for clues as to how it is done.”

  Zoe walked toward her warily. The dry grass rose nearly to her knees.

  “Why Massachusetts?” she said.

  “Why indeed,” said Ripper. “Twenty-three days after my death, my husband married a horrific American and brought my children to this … this colony.”

  Ripper took the Booty Hunter cap off finally, and flung it away.

  “Did you love your husband?” said Zoe.

  “X asked me the selfsame question once,” said Ripper. “Why is it that people in love need everyone else to be in love—or to at least aspire to the condition?”

  Zoe said nothing, afraid that she’d annoyed her.

  “I most certainly did not love my husband,” Ripper continued. “The fact that I murdered a serving girl with a teakettle speaks to my mood at the time.”

  Ripper stared off at the trees that separated the meadow from the town and the ocean beyond it. Zoe didn’t know whether she should ask another question, whether talking more would help Ripper or hurt her.

  “How do you know what happened to your children,” she said carefully, “if you were already …”

  “Deceased?” said Ripper. “I asked a bounty hunter to investigate the matter. When he returned, he assured me that I did not want to know.” She paused. “Has anyone ever—in the whole history of mankind—been told they didn’t want to know something and not immediately wanted to know it all the more?”

  “You don’t have to tell me what happened,” said Zoe.

  “My son, Alfie, died in a fire,” said Ripper. “In a stable.”

  She explained that the boy had rushed in to save his horse, which was named Equinox. Ripper had obviously told the story many times, but it seemed as though every word was still a thorn in her throat. Alfie managed to rescue Equinox—the horse bolted free—but he himself got trapped under a beam. Belinda ran into the flames to rescue her big brother.

  Zoe could see the muscles in Ripper’s neck tighten.

  “Belinda failed because she was very, very small,” Ripper said. “I suppose X never told you any of this because you were so busy smothering each other with your bodies?”

  Zoe wanted to make Ripper smile, if she could.

  “There might have been some smothering, yes,” she said.

  “My husband’s new wife apparently grew bored of hearing Belinda wail about Alfie,” Ripper went on. “She shipped her off to a place with the ponderous name of The Cropsey Asylum for the Criminally Insane and Others Needful of Rest and Restraint. I know we are close, for there is an unbearable knot in my head. It is nothing supernatural, just a mother’s ache, yet it tells me that …”

  Zoe took out her phone to search for the asylum. Ripper saw what she was doing. She reached out to stop her.

  “It tells me that I do not have the fortitude I imagined,” she said. “You can lie in the grass a while longer, or I can spirit you home. But you need not find Belinda’s grave, for I am too weak to face it.”

  Ripper clenched her jaw to keep from crying. Zoe went to hug her, and felt Ripper’s lean frame tremble in her arms. When they stepped apart, Ripper tugged at her dress to straighten it.

  “I apologize for that display,” she said.

  “You don’t have to apologize,” said Zoe. “I’m famous for my displays. My displays have fans around the world.”

  Someday, she was going to have to figure out if blurting weird stuff in awkward moments was a character flaw.

  They stood a moment, neither knowing what came next. Ripper’s eyes darted around, as if a bounty hunter might suddenly appear from any direction. Zoe remembered her saying that they always came at night. She tried not to hope for X. Despite Ripper’s assurances, the chances of the lords sending him seemed impossibly small.

  “Do you see something?” Zoe asked.

  “No,” said Ripper. “I do not.”

  Zoe wasn’t ready to give up on finding the asylum. Ripper had been there when Zoe confronted her runaway father. She had put an arm around Zoe—whispered to her and consoled her—less than two minutes after they met. Facing her dad had been scary, humiliating, more painful than anything Zoe had ever experienced. But she was glad she had done it. It freed her somehow. It made her heart feel less like a lead weight in her chest.

  She wanted Ripper to know that kind of relief.

  “Look, you met my mom, right?” she said. “Did you notice her fake tattoo? Above her ankle?”

  “I do not recall her ankle, no,” said Ripper.

  “Okay, so she’s obsessed with this tattoo—she has a whole stack of them in a drawer,” said Zoe. “It says, ‘The Only Way Out Is Through.’ I think that applies to this situation. Also to cake.”

  Yeah, the blurting thing probably was a character flaw.

  “Explain,” said Ripper.

  “I think you can do this,” said Zoe. “I think you can see this Cropsey place.”

  “And I assure you I cannot,” said Ripper.

  “Can.”

  “Cannot.”

  “X and I used to argue like this,” said Zoe. “I always wore him down. I’ll wear you down, too.”

  “Will not,” said Ripper.

  But she smiled.

  Zoe looked again at her phone, and found the asylum within seconds.

  “It’s only a mile away—what’s left of it,” she said. “I’m going to
go see Belinda. Are you going to make me go alone?”

  The sun, sinking behind them, lit up Ripper’s ravaged dress. Zoe would never get over how lovely, and unlikely, the woman was. Even now, even in distress, she looked gorgeous, just raw around the eyes.

  “Show me the way, you obstinate thing,” Ripper said finally.

  Zoe beamed. She took off her black button-down sweater and handed it to Ripper.

  “Put this on,” she said. “It’ll make you look less like a crazy dead person.”

  Ripper didn’t want to know anything about Cropsey until they got there, so Zoe read a history of the place to herself as they walked through the trees and toward the ocean. She read about why Cropsey was shut down and about the celebrations in town on the day its doors were closed. She even found—in a graduate student’s thesis—an alphabetical list of every patient who’d ever walked, or been dragged, inside, including nine-year-old Belinda Popplewell-Heath. There were a dozen words about Belinda’s diagnosis, life, and death. Reading them, Zoe felt a chill spread through her. She wished she could protect Ripper from the details forever.

  Zoe checked the map on her phone as they continued. The blue dot representing her and Ripper pulsed like a heartbeat.

  “We’re close,” she said.

  Ripper, trailing behind, breathed in sharply. Zoe saw her peer back through the trees.

  “Do you see something now?” she said.

  “I do not,” said Ripper.

  Zoe and Ripper exited the woods and stopped at the top of a scruffy brown hill, which tumbled down to a busy road. The sky was darkening—turning black, like ink soaking through cloth. The first handful of stars hovered over the ocean.

  They crossed the road to a wide driveway that dipped toward the water. As Zoe led Ripper through a pair of brick columns, she saw the rusty hinges that used to anchor the asylum’s gates, and a faded patch on the brickwork where a sign must have hung. It’d been in the shape of a family crest, as if Cropsey had been a place to be proud of.

  Zoe looked to see if Ripper had noticed the remnants of the asylum. She had. In her nervousness, Ripper had begun tearing at her fingernails again—she’d bloodied the nail on her left ring-finger. Zoe gripped her arm.

  “Don’t,” she said. “You promised Jonah you wouldn’t mess with your nails if he didn’t bite his.”

  Ripper glowered, then nodded reluctantly.

  “I remember,” she said.

  They trudged up the drive in the dark. Hedges loomed like walls on either side, and the silence was so complete that even tiny, incidental sounds, like the crunch of their shoes on the gravel, seemed ominous.

  “Tell me about Belinda,” said Zoe. “Not how she died—how she lived.”

  “Oh, she was a box of fireworks, that girl,” Ripper said. “Plump and mischievous. Curly-haired. Beautiful, though it annoyed her to hear it. She used to say, ‘I’m only beautiful because you are, Mother—and it is very tedious to be complimented for something I had no part in!’ She was always in motion, always up to something. She used to somersault on the carpet, then stagger around dizzily, knocking over vases.”

  “Jonah would have loved her,” said Zoe.

  “Yes,” Ripper said quietly. “They’d have been a pair of bandits.” She paused. “I’ve missed my children for nearly two centuries. If I hadn’t already been dead, it would have killed me. Then—just when I thought I had subdued the pain the tiniest bit—Regent appeared at my cell, and introduced me to a ten-year-old boy.”

  “X,” said Zoe.

  “Yes,” said Ripper.

  Yet again, she looked back to see if they were being followed.

  Zoe wanted to ask what X had been like as a child, but knew it’d be selfish. And truthfully, she could imagine X at ten perfectly: kind, watchful, sad, convinced he must be broken or wicked in some way because he’d been born in the Lowlands. Still, she wondered what he wore, if he ever laughed, if Ripper brushed his hair, even with her fingers. It was hard not to ask.

  “I loved X with all that was left of my heart,” said Ripper. “I still remember him releasing Regent’s hand and reaching his pink palm out to me that very first time. I never told him this, but he awakened such piercing memories of Alfie and Belinda that I cannot claim to have truly slept since.”

  The hedges fell away, and the road arrived at an enormous lawn.

  Ripper squinted into the distance.

  “What, I wonder, is that?” she said.

  A crumbling brick tower stood alone in the grass. Cracks ran down it like veins.

  “That,” said Zoe, “is all that’s left of the Cropsey Asylum for the Whatever and Whatever.”

  Her words floated toward the ocean. She couldn’t think of anything to say that would help Ripper now.

  The tower was lit by a spotlight, which illuminated every fracture in the brick. Ripper motioned for Zoe to stay behind, and went forward alone. Zoe sank into the dead grass.

  Ripper moved slowly. It was as if the tower were pushing back at her, trying to keep her away.

  There was a plaque at the base of the monument.

  Zoe knew roughly what it would say. There was no protecting Ripper from the truth.

  Cropsey had been a horror—a place where patients were neglected, abused, experimented on, left in their own filth. The tower itself had had two purposes. It was used as a chute to drop the bodies of dead patients down and as a chimney for when the orderlies had collected enough corpses to burn.

  Zoe watched as Ripper read the plaque. She watched as her shoulders sagged and as she fell on her knees and cried. All the tears Ripper had been forcing back burst out at once, like windows blasting out of a building. She tore at her gold dress. The spotlight threw her shadow at the tower, five stories tall.

  When Ripper finally staggered back toward Zoe, her hair had fallen loose and spilled down her face. Her eyes looked feral.

  Zoe had never been scared of Ripper.

  She was now.

  “What did your little machine tell you about my Belinda?” Ripper asked, her voice dark and hard.

  “Nothing,” said Zoe.

  “You are lying,” said Ripper. The ocean hissed on the rocks a hundred yards away. A lighthouse beam swept the black water. “I must know everything.”

  Zoe had said the same thing to X about her father.

  “I don’t know very much,” she told Ripper. “Belinda was committed in 1835.”

  “She was a child!” said Ripper. “What did they claim as her demons?”

  “Grief,” said Zoe. Of course Belinda was grieving, she thought—she lost her mom, then her brother burned to death right in front of her. “Grief, hysteria, and something called ‘Gathering in the head.’ ”

  She prayed Ripper wouldn’t ask anything else.

  “And how long was my daughter a prisoner of this place? Dammit, must I drag every detail out of you!”

  Zoe just said it: “Twenty-five years. She froze to death in her bed. She was thirty-five.”

  Ripper stalked off in the direction of the water, then whirled back.

  “And when my Belinda died,” she asked, “they threw her body down this chimney—whereupon it landed atop the corpses of other blameless sons and daughters? Is that correct? And then they consigned the mass of them to flames. Is that correct?”

  Zoe wanted to say something comforting, but what could it possibly be?

  “Yes,” she said. “I think that’s right.”

  “If our positions were reversed,” said Ripper, “what would you do about this hateful monument lurking behind me?”

  “If I had your powers?” said Zoe.

  “Yes, if you had my powers,” said Ripper. “Of course if you had my powers.”

  “I’d tear the thing down.”

  Ripper charged at the tower so suddenly that Zoe didn’t have a chance to step back. She saw a blur of gold—Ripper’s jet trail in the darkness—and heard the boom of impact. The chimney shook. The mortar between the bricks split open
and sent out puffs of dust, but the tower didn’t fall.

  Ripper trotted back to Zoe for a second run. She was sweating and glowing with purpose now. The shoulder of her dress was torn.

  “The tower and I are having a disagreement,” she said. “The tower believes I am incapable of knocking it down. Yet we beg to differ, don’t we?”

  “Yeah we do,” said Zoe.

  She watched Ripper’s second assault. Again, there was a golden blur, a concussive boom, a rush of dirt and wind. Again, the tower refused to fall.

  “Bloody ignorant tower,” said Ripper, readying for her third attempt. “It seems not to know who I am.”

  Zoe laughed.

  “You remind me of Val sometimes,” she said.

  “I am happy to hear it,” said Ripper, checking the damage to her dress. “Val has a fiery spirit and tremendous hair.”

  The blur. The boom. The rush.

  This time, the tower hesitated—then toppled into the grass.

  Ripper emerged from the rubble, coughing and waving away dust. She gave Zoe such a pleased grin that Zoe nearly cried.

  Ripper adjusted her gown, and twisted her wild, raven hair back into a knot. The ritual smoothing-of-the-dress had become one of Zoe’s favorite things about Ripper. The things that ball gown had survived! It was like the flag in “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

  “Thank you for locating that tower—and making me face it,” said Ripper. She picked a brick off the ground, then said the following as if it were an afterthought: “Now, if you can survive my absence a moment, I must go dismember the bounty hunters who have been stalking us these past thirty minutes.”

  “Bounty hunters plural?” said Zoe.

  “I counted three as we passed through the woods,” Ripper said.

  “You said you didn’t see anything!” said Zoe.

  “I didn’t see them,” said Ripper. “I heard them.”

  “I’m coming with you,” said Zoe. “One of them might be X.”

  “Or all three could be deranged samurai,” said Ripper. “You are not coming. You are to stay rooted here.”

  “I’m not good at doing what I’m told,” said Zoe.

  “The same’s been said of me,” said Ripper. “But I forbid you to follow. X would not stalk us from a distance. He would bound into your arms. He is not among them.” Seeing Zoe’s expression, Ripper softened. “I promised you X and you shall have X, even if it is only for a moment. The lords must be in a fury because of my antics, for Dervish is not the only one obsessed with the secrecy of the Lowlands. I will disfigure these hunters. If the lords have not sent X for me by the time I’m through, I will wreak havoc all night. That lighthouse in the bay? It will not live to see the morning.”