Chapter 19 - The Shelleys Find Nina
“I’m going to look for Mama,” Adam said, lifting his chin.
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Recap: In the previous chapter, Johann came to his senses in the presence of his wife—only to realize that something was not right. She spoke in a different way, holding herself awkwardly.
It wasn’t long before he realized it was not his wife, but a hateful Elf that had kidnapped her and was attempting to imitate her.
Astrid trapped the Elf in a moth’s form, but that did not answer their question.
Where was Nina?
Marjorie and Adam sat before the parlor hearth, as close to one another as they could be without huddling like frightened children. The silence was so heavy that it hurt Marjorie’s ears; the pain that constricted her heart was a sort she’d never imagined possible.
Mama was gone, and it was not even a natural gone, like the sort that came when a person died of illness. She had vanished, and a horrific monster attempted to morph into her likeness.
The Elf was so wicked, though, that it could never come close to imitating Mrs. Nina Brahms. It was so far from the mark that Papa wasn’t fooled, a fact for which Marjorie was grateful.
Papa chilled her when he said that the Elf had tried to fool him into sending her upstairs. Marjorie would surely have been overpowered, alone with the creature that had not been a raccoon—the creature that had not been a boy, either. She did not want to imagine what it would have done to her.
Marjorie allowed for tears to slide down her face as she stared into the flickering hearth. Adam did not. Instead, he hugged his knees to his chest, as if wishing he could curl up into himself and disappear into thin air.
He should cry, if that is what he thinks he needs, Marjorie thought, as she looked with concern at her brother.
They both loved their mother, but Adam seemed most like her. Perhaps it was because he had little interest in the magical matters that strengthened Marjorie’s bond with Papa.
It was Adam who helped Mama most with household matters, learning her favorite tricks in the kitchen, doing her chores for the motive of pleasing her.
Though Marjorie also worried in Mama’s absence, she knew Adam was experiencing a different sort of pain. The trouble was that he would never express his grief to her. He sat before the fireplace, wrapped in Mama’s favorite throw, and together they listened, wishing.
They wished to hear Mama’s soft footsteps. They even wished that she would come downstairs and scold them. They wished to hear her voice, in any form; no such thing happened.
Aunt Astrid and Papa had gone to the greenhouse in order to concoct a plan. They took with them the jug in which Astrid had trapped the odious creature that wanted to destroy their family.
Marjorie did not consider herself a cruel person, but she hoped Astrid was thinking of a thousand ways in which to make the Elf miserable. She hoped their enemy was regretting the day it had been born. She hoped that they would empty the contents of that jug into a cauldron, so it would boil to death.
But if they do that, they never will find Mama, Marjorie thought, wringing her hands. The Elf must confess to what it has done with her first.
The Fae had countless ways in which to hide a human. Mama could have been left in some Faeland. Those were realms that only a witch like Astrid, with her grimoire and magical training, could enter. In spite of her magic, even Astrid would not be safe in such a place.
Astrid might have been a powerful witch, but that did not mean she was indestructible.
“Margo?” Adam asked, breaking the silence at last.
His voice was small; it reminded her of Adam the child learning to speak, who had formed syllables with a baby’s pitch, following Mama about the house.
“What is it, Adam?”
Marjorie pulled her new shawl tightly around her shoulders, but it didn’t do anything to relieve her of the frigid emptiness she felt in her heart. This home was Mama; the decor, the fragrance of pinecones by the door, the carefully swept floors…all of it was Mama.
Mama was not home, so the house also suffered.
“I’m going to look for Mama,” he said, lifting his chin.
In the glow of the firelight, he looked remarkably like Papa, when their father made a choice and became set on it.
Adam continued: “She can’t have gone far. Astrid says she’s going to help us, but I don’t trust her. She’s the reason all of this happened to begin with. Why should we put any faith in her? I’ll borrow Marmie, and you’ll have her back in the morning.”
Marjorie felt her body rattle with an affectionate, heartbroken laugh. “You cannot go at this time of the night,” she said, placing her hand on his. “You already know that the Elf was planning on taking me next. I’m sure that, if there is another Elf roaming about—and we have no reason to believe there’s only one—they won’t have any scruples about taking you instead. What would Papa do then? What would I do? I don’t think that I’d be able to function if my mother and my brother went missing. Besides, you know Mama wouldn’t want you to go.”
Adam’s lip trembled, but he gathered himself. “Mama takes care of us,” he said, his broken tone matching the fractured heart beating in her chest. “She does everything for us. This can’t be happening.”
“I know,” Marjorie croaked. “It isn’t fair. Nothing that’s happened in the past few days has been fair. It’s too soon to call Astrid a friend, and there’s no denying that she started this. Papa is at his wits end, though, Adam. We have no choice but to hope that her heart is in the right place, and that she intends to make amends. And we cannot make things more difficult for him by disappearing.”
Before Adam could reply, there came a knock at the door.
Miss Fealy, who had been sitting in the kitchen reading a novel, looked up with a question in her eyes.
“I’ll get it,” said Marjorie, for she saw in the young woman’s eyes an understandable fear; she might serve a mistress who regularly practiced magic, but that didn’t mean she would ever be accustomed to it.
Marjorie passed Miss Fealy. She held her breath, inching to the window nearest the door. Pulling the curtains aside, she peered into the night.
Mr. and Mrs. Shelley floated over the top step, bickering in a manner that reminded her of Mama and Papa. They were an old married couple; surely even death could not change a married couple’s disagreements.
Miss Fealy was in for a surprise, then. Perhaps Marjorie should warn her they were expecting visitors from the spirit world.
No, Marjorie decided. She might be afraid, but I have every reason to believe she’s seen stranger things than this.
“Get the door,” she told Adam, who stood behind her. “It is the Shelleys.”
“They knocked?” Adam asked, his surprise notable.
Marjorie only smiled.
Paling a little, Adam approached the door. In spite of the kind conversation that had recently taken place with the Shelleys, he appeared unnerved by the thought of conversing with ghosts.
Adam threw his shoulders back and unlocked the door. As soon as he opened it, Mr. and Mrs. Shelley spilled into the house, forms fluid as water.
Both of them babbled in rapid tones, so Marjorie struggled to discern what they were saying:
“…in our mausoleum,” Mr. Shelley said. “I haven’t the slightest idea of how—”
“…and she’s freezing!” his wife added, her voice anguished with compassion. “You must come at once, and bring blankets; the mausoleum is no place for a living person to be trapped…”
Marjorie cut into their bickering. “What do you mean?” she cried, a seed of hope sprouting in her heart. “Who are you talking about?”
“Your dear mother,” said Mrs. Shelley, with a helpless gesture of her translucent hands. “She is inside of our mausoleum. We don’t know how she came to be there. She must be rescued at once, or she will be sick; I can see that she’s been crying. She has curled up in the corner, as if resigned to her life ending in the place where our bones rest.”
“Mama is claustrophobic!” Adam cried. “Marjorie, you must go to the greenhouse and tell them! Maybe he can figure out a way to get into the mausoleum!”
Marjorie nodded, a knot forming in her throat at the thought of her mother trapped in a cold and dark tomb.
She hurried past the Shelleys and a pale Miss Fealy, stepping outside and into the night. She did not care that the spirits in the graveyard were once more wandering and wailing.
There was someone living that she cared for more.
She broke into a run towards the greenhouse. Once there, she knocked at the flimsy door before pushing her way inside.
Her father and Aunt Astrid sat at the writing-desk, bent over the grimoire. Their postures were relaxed in comparison with their earlier interaction. Perhaps they had finally shared a much-needed conversation.
Near them, Wolfgang sat curled up on a footstool, his black tail swishing lazily from side to side; he was the only person in the family who did not seem to care what was happening, if he knew—and of course he did.
Marjorie knew that there was more to him than a simple cat. However, it was not the time to puzzle over that.
“Quick!” she cried, as brother and sister both stood to greet her. “The Shelleys have showed up at our house, and they say Mama has been locked in their mausoleum! We must go and rescue her!”
Papa launched into movement, as if he had been in a trance, his mind rendered cloudy by the worry that he felt for his wife.
“In the mausoleum?” he cried, lunging forward, placing his hands on Marjorie’s shoulders. “But how on earth did she get in? The Shelleys, I imagine, ensured their final resting-place would be difficult to break into.”
Astrid spoke next, her voice steady: “Perhaps, but an Elf determined to hide his victim will have some way of opening an ancient lock without having touched the key.”
She turned to the desk. There sat the jug containing the fat, blood-spotted moth, placed near a row of flickering candles.
Inside of it, the odious creature flew into the glass once and again. It created an impression of extreme drunkenness. Marjorie would have laughed, had the situation not been so dire.
The so-called Fae prince that kidnapped her mother deserved no sympathy; let it continue to endure the humiliation of an insect’s natural lust for light. As it had once been more cursed into the form of a different creature, it could not harm them.
Marjorie did not know if the Elf-Moth could still reason while crashing into the glass jug. She did not know if it was thinking curses, planning the awful things it would do to them if it ever liberated itself.
The situation was humiliating, but no less than it deserved for harming Mama. Claustrophobic with a fear of the dark, she’d been trapped in a long-dead couple’s tomb for an entire day.
If the Brahms had not befriended the Shelleys, they might never have learned where Mama was sealed away, perhaps to be used as a bribe against her husband the wizard.
“I’ve half a mind to throw you into the stove,” Astrid said to the moth, “jug and all, so that the freshly stoked flames could spare me the trouble of finishing you. I know how much the Fae-folk detest fire. I could pour fragments of iron in that jug and seal it again so that the only thing you feel while the fire does its work is pain of a sort unique to your kind.
“Johann will place you in this magical drawer of his writing-desk. There you will remain, until I decide that it is time to finish you off. Your kind do not deserve to exist; I do not care why you were banished from your kingdom, but your presence is unacceptable. Soon you will find yourself wishing you were dead.”
The moth did not respond. It continued to crash into the glass, trying in vain to close the distance separating it from the flames that fascinated it.
Marjorie hoped Aunt Astrid would throw the jar into the stove; she hoped she could be present to witness it. No one would torture her mama and die an easy death.
She hoped that this hateful Elf would beg for mercy before it breathed its last.
