The Spectral City. Leanna Renee Hieber

from behind had released their talons ever so slightly. It was a world that wanted to be seen and acknowledged, and that’s why it sought to communicate in such a wide array of methods. Now it was seen in a whole new light and given responsibilities.

      At nineteen years old, when most young women of any kind of title and society were very busy with their ‘seasons’ and hoping for a well-placed marriage, Eve found she had no interest in following the path of her supposed peers in the city. Of course there was the occasional ball she attended due to the pressures of her father’s Lordship, her gran’s high-society dealings, her grandfather’s Metropolitan Museum soirees, the Bishops’ esteemed gatherings. But theirs were generally philanthropic functions that had great purpose, not dances meant to pair up eligible bachelors with debutantes. The former suited her, the latter bored her.

      Her circle attracted a constant parade of ghosts whose chill presence ruined the warmth of a good party. Here at the Players, the fireplaces were roaring as the new electric fixtures were buzzing in a juxtaposition of ancient and modern light and heat, making the room so warm that the ghostly retinue on the margins caused a much-needed draft. But she couldn’t keep ignoring them. If she did, they might start throwing things, and now was hardly the best time for a poltergeist.

      Roosevelt held up his hand, hailing Eve as if he wished to speak with her, but men in tail-coats blocked his path as he took a step forward. As legislators were forever called upon for favors, the veritable inferno of energy that was Roosevelt was immediately beset by an entourage. Eve took this as a chance to slip away, into another room where the ghosts and she could speak freely.

      Glancing around, she moved towards an opening in the crowd, preparing to make her way to whatever empty, dark space she could find in the grand place. But a young detective stepped into her path and she paused with a smile she hoped did not appear strained.

      She recognized the dark-haired, clean-shaven, sharp-featured man with rich brown eyes ringed in blue; a distinct gaze that pierced her right to the core. During a recent case, Eve’s ghosts had bid her examine a crime scene herself, as they were having trouble describing it. While she had not been welcome at the site, and it was assumed she would both be in the way and taint the evidence, this man had quelled the protesting officers on duty. He had found a place for her to stand within view of the exsanguinated body and take notes. It had been grim but her composure was a test that she’d passed.

      “Detective Horowitz, it is good to see you again and I hope you’re well. This is a more pleasant scene than when I last saw you.”

      “Ah, yes.” He grimaced. “That ugly bloodletting.”

      “Have you figured that one out?”

      “How a body could be that drained?” he asked. He shook his head with a humorless laugh. “There were suction marks near the puncture wounds—something drew it out of him.”

      “How odd. I believe in ghosts, but not vampires, detective.”

      “Well that’s reassuring at least.” His face transformed from angular to warm for a moment before cooling again.

      “Thank you for honoring me this evening,” Eve said, bobbing her head.

      “I do have a question for you, if you don’t mind.”

      “Go on,” she said, glancing at Zofia, a ten-year-old in a simple pinafore, bobbing in the air impatiently, gesturing for her to hurry up with this chat.

      “I try, whenever I can, to work in new technologies. Fingerprinting, psychological profiles from alienists, taking exquisite stock of a scene so that not even a hair of evidence is tampered with. In regards to your department . . . Say one were to believe in poltergeists. To be clear, I don’t believe, but if I did, wouldn’t a host of spirits be liable to disrupt and thus corrupt a crime scene by moving objects? Couldn’t any of the various ways the spirit world has been said to commune with mortals potentially foul a scene?”

      She stared at him. It was a valid point.

      “My spirits aren’t ones for moving things,” she began. “They aren’t the poltergeist sort, at least not that I’ve been aware, but it is a cogent point to bring up to them; to be aware of the ways their presences might affect a given environment. To be fair, my ghosts wouldn’t leave any additional fingerprints,” she offered. The young man twisted his lips as if he wanted to smile but was too focused to allow the indulgence.

      “What I have tried, with my contacts, is to cultivate details beyond a crime scene,” Eve explained. “My ghosts and mediums pick up on expansive aspects, specifics of place, people, setting, weather, clothes, and they’re drawn to things the living might find mundane. And they do so in a non-linear manner, so I have to constantly sift for relevance. That’s what was so maddening to me at first, why ghosts kept coming and telling me far too many details about seemingly meaningless things. Until I finally saw a pattern in the noise. These patterns led to the arrests and cases solved that Mister Roosevelt so kindly referenced.”

      “While I am glad of the eventual outcome, how can you be sure all the facts presented to you were real and not just luck?” Horowitz pressed.

      Suddenly Roosevelt was behind him like some bold, pouncing apparition. “Because she has spies!” the man cried, waggling his great moustache. “Her ladies, both living and dead, are everywhere and in everything,” he added delightedly. “And if any man here underestimates a woman’s craftiness, or her ability to pick up a litany of detail so intense as to leave you breathlessly disarmed from argument, well then you’ve never had a single one of them cross with you!”

      This broke a distinct layer of ice. The entourage of fine suits swarmed the Governor again and Eve edged away, Horowitz following a pace behind.

      “When he’s right, he’s right,” Eve said, turning to the detective with a smile. Just as Eve felt that the man was beginning to warm to her, the temperature around her went ice cold. A plummeting of twenty-some degrees wasn’t just a draft; it meant only one thing. A ghost wasn’t just nearby, but directly behind her, toying with a lock of her hair, threatening to lift it up into thin air. She was familiar with the trick to get her attention. Eve smoothed the lock back down again and gave a sideways glare to the spirit.

      “I look forward to your further questions, Detective. But if you’ll excuse me for the moment . . .” she turned away, crossed around the corner of the next threshold and stared into the eyes of the chill directly.

      Her best scout, young Zofia, floated before her in full greyscale, dark hair back in a haphazard bun, in a plain work dress blackened just slightly at the hem; the only reminder of her premature death in a garment district fire. Because the ghosts who communed with Eve were full-consciousness spirits, her burned body wasn’t what became a shade; this was her silvery soul. The agony of death was long shed—souls were a glowing whole while the body’s raw materials returned to dust. Spiritualism’s greatest and most comforting gift was this reassurance.

      “I’m sorry to disturb you, Eve, I really am, but you have to know . . .” she said in a thick Polish accent, her ghostly voice never heard above a whisper, no matter how emphatic. “I know you told us to hang back, to not to talk to you, but . . .”

      Eve turned her head away from the crowd, moving into the shadows of the hall beyond so that she couldn’t be seen talking to thin air.

      “But?” she murmured through clenched teeth.

      “Margaret is gone,” the spirit replied.

      Eve blinked at the spirit. The spirit wavered in the air, blinking back.

      “Gone?” Eve prompted, not entirely sure what Zofia meant. The spirit world was full of comings and goings.

      “Gone, gone,” Zofia insisted. “None of us ghosts have any sense of her. Her candle is out. We’ve tried everything. There is no waking her. There is no summoning her. This world, or the next, we cannot find her. Our Maggie. She’s gone.”

      Eve reeled. What could be worse timing? Just as she was on the cusp of being taken seriously, her best asset was dead.