Chapter Text
Mary Dulac had a short life, poorly lived. She had made the most foolish of choices, mixed with the most wicked of men and had no option but to commit the most sinful of sins. She had been right to do it - to kill Edmund Bickerstaff and bury him along with his evil Bone Glass. But she still held the knowledge. She knew about the Glass, and the man who’d made it.
They found her wandering, half out of her wits. She admitted to her crime, and accepted her punishment. A mortal sin was a mortal sin and The Lord did not say Thou shalt not kill unless thou hath a very good reason. If they were to hang her, so be it. Death was the punishment. But Mary had no desire to see Hell. There was still time, in between death and judgement, in which she might perhaps make amends and tip the scales. Mary had seen the spirits Bickerstaff used to make his Glass. Mary had looked through the window - she had seen The Other Side and she knew the way there, and all she had to do was simply go in the other direction.
Mary was nineteen years old and she was most certainly not going to let the end of her mortal life be her final judgement day.
As soon as she died, Mary felt the pull. She ignored it. Mary had resisted the pull of the Bone Glass long enough to kill its creator. She had the strength to resist the call to The Other Side. Mary stayed put. After a time, the pull began to lessen. She didn’t get any sense of how much time. All she could understand was now and not now. But when not now became now, the pull went away and Mary found herself able to go where the pull was not pulling her.
The first time Mary haunted, there wasn’t much to be said for it. She went from… whatever it was… to having form again, in some sense. She could see where she was. It was a field, alas. With a high wall along one side and what looked like the prison on the other. Oh. She’d been buried in the prison grounds. Unmarked grave. She couldn’t move. She just hovered there until it started getting light. The light didn’t hurt. She thought it would make her weak or harm her or force her to twinkle away, but it didn’t. She didn’t want to just float around forever either, so she thought very hard about not being there anymore.
Mary got the hang of it. Haunting was easier in the night, but she could manage to stick around in the daytime too, when she wished. She seemed to be composed of a sort of green mist, but she could manipulate her mist into different shapes if she so chose. She didn’t have to just look like Mary. She could even make herself virtually formless, which seemed safer, during the day. She had no wish to cause alarm. She got better at moving, able to go through most of the prison yard and high enough to see over the walls, though at first she was not yet capable of moving far enough to go through them.
She didn’t register the passing of the years but she could tell that it occurred. Over the wall, horses and carriages began to mingle with odd new carriages that needed no horse and then horses were gone altogether. The clothes the prisoners wore changed and so did the way they wore their hair. The women who became guards wore the same trousers and jackets as the men. The trousers were scandalous, and some of the prisoners would not wear their uniform as they ought. They showed their bare arms or even legs! Women started wearing their hair so short. At first scandalised by this too, Mary eventually came to see merit in it. She might have looked nice with some of these hairstyles. She shaped her mist to try some of them out. It passed the years.
They dug her out of the ground. Mary knew it the moment there was no longer earth on top of her. She just felt it. She immediately materialised, into the early evening.
“Tom!”
A dark haired girl was calling to someone, looking up at her, with great excitement.
Then Mary just ceased to be.
The next time Mary materialised, she was stuck. She tried to expand her form and found she was running up against some sort of curved barrier. Walls had never been a problem before. Mary could float right through them. She tried existing in her less corporeal state. She could do so, but she was still stuck in a very small space.
Was that her skull? Someone had separated her skull from her body, which was most ill-mannered. And then to put her skull in some sort of container and trap her in within it? The insolence!
That girl was there. The girl who had dug Mary up. She wasn’t a girl anymore. She was a young woman, a little older than herself. Or at least, older than she had been when she was hanged. Her perpetual age. The woman had an aura about her of great power. Mary sensed a hardness to her.
The woman pushed on some kind of valve or lever on the top of… Mary was forced to think of it as a jar… how mortifying! Then she spoke.
“Do you understand me, Visitor?”
“I understand you,” Mary said. “But you won’t understand me. No one ever can.”
“I assure you, I can,” said the woman. She turned to someone behind her that Mary could not make out. It was dark and she couldn’t stretch any closer to see. The jar was a cursed inconvenience.
“Confirmed Type III,” said the woman.
“Why am I trapped?” Mary demanded. “Let me out at once!”
“I don’t think that’s a very good idea, now is it? I don’t wish to be ghost-touched.”
“To be what?” Mary supposed she was a ghost but she’d never touched anyone.
“Ghost-touched. It kills. Now, let’s get down to business. What was your name?”
It was all a very formal process. The young woman, Marissa Fittes, she called herself, wanted to know everything about Mary’s life and death. Her name, her age, how she had died, as if being in the prison graveyard did not make that fairly obvious. She wanted to know the year that she had died, the circumstances of her life.
Mary had decided not to be overly forthcoming. Her surname was Anders, she decided, after her mother. She didn’t think she ought to mention Bickerstaff or the Bone Glass. This Marissa was far too curious and as well as that aura of power, there was also a cold sense of purpose about her that Mary did not like. It wouldn’t do to have her go looking about in Kensal Green. Who knew what she might do with what lay buried there?
That was how it was after that. Mary was a prisoner again. She sat in her jar, and if she was very lucky, Marissa Fittes might come down and talk to her. She didn’t know how often it was, but she could see Marissa getting older and she thought the gap was much wider each time. Eventually she stopped coming at all.
Then Mary just sat there on a shelf for however long it was. It was difficult enough to determine time, let alone when she was stuck in a jar on a shelf, in a dark room. Occasionally, someone would come in and use the room, some kind of very modern laboratory, for an experiment. Mary could pass the time watching these and try to make out what it was they were attempting to do. If more than one person were there she could listen to them talk to one another and that helped. One scientist alone tended to work quietly and given she had little understanding of what all the tools did, Mary found it harder to follow along.
Sometimes the scientists were women, which fascinated Mary and horrified her at the same time. There were even times when the lady scientists were clearly senior over the gentlemen. Not that they were all gentlemen in the sense Mary knew. Some had very rough, labourer’s accents. Mary began to get the expression that men and ladies, lowborn folk and high, they all mixed together in this building. Everybody at Fittes seemed to have the opportunity to reach any status, and all started at the bottom. A most peculiar arrangement. But then the world had moved on to carriages that required no horse, to ladies wearing trousers or worse skirts above their knees with bare legs beneath. Mary was but a spectral projection and she had almost swooned in any case the first time she saw a young woman in what she understood to be called a “mini-skirt”.
If the world moved on, if life, morals or values changed, Mary knew of it only as it showed within that small laboratory. The whole world was what she could see from her shelf.
A boy came into the room. He had a large bag, the kind that went over the shoulders to rest on the back. He did not turn the lights on, which Mary thought odd. He took off the bag, placed it on a bench and opened it up. It looked almost flat, as if it were empty.
The boy turned away from the bag and began to look at the shelves. Outside, a trolley came rattling past - a common noise. The boy ducked down below the height of the benches.
Was he there to steal something?
When the trolley was gone, the boy got up again. He wore the grey uniform that “agents” wore. Mary knew that agents were young, because only children and youths could see spirits like herself. Except for Marissa Fittes, if she were even living still.
Why was this agent boy there in his own workplace, to steal something? And what did he intend to steal?
He looked at the shelves again and was about to reach for something on one shelf when something else caught his eye.
For goodness sake, he was browsing! Well then, if he did not know what he came for, he had best leave with the greatest prize in the room.
Mary glowed as brightly as she could and formed her ectoplasm (a word she had learned from listening to the scientists) into the shape of her preferred face. She tried to make it look friendly and inviting.
“Well, you’re just beautiful…” said the boy, immediately turning and coming towards her.
This charming young fellow might actually be Mary’s ticket to a change of scenery.
“Take me,” she said, before remembering that even if the valve were open he wouldn’t hear her. He didn’t have the power Marissa had. She could tell that, somehow. She tried just smiling instead.
The boy took two steps backwards, reaching for his bag. He looked down at it. “You’ll fit, but don’t think I’ll get much else in.”
He didn’t need much else. If he took Mary home, she’d make sure he didn’t regret it.
She was left in the bag for what felt like weeks. Mary had a better grasp of time when she could see the light and dark and wherever the bag was, it was getting daylight and darkness.
Sometimes there was murmured conversation in the room or very close by it. Other times there was some shouting. She couldn’t make out much. Someone was upset with someone else about a matter called “getting fired”.
Eventually there was a lot of movement, there was jostling and she was carried in the bag, through the daylight and to some other location.
She was brought out of the bag by the boy who had stolen her, and another boy. The thief boy had brown skin and unruly dark hair. He wore glasses and was very sloppily dressed. Mary knew that clothing styles and fashions were far different than in her day but a young man could still make a bit of an effort. Like the other boy.
He wore a modern sort of suit. It had one of those odd thin stripes of cloth that they called a tie. His hair was tidier than his companion’s. This was a boy who put thought and care into his appearance, like they did back in Mary’s time.
The room was some sort of scullery. Mary had been placed on a big table, which had some chairs around it. There were benches and cupboards, and a sink. Mary recognised a refrigerator. There had been one in the laboratory.
She made sure to smile at the new boy. Whoever he was, it never hurt to make a good first impression.
“It’s a ghost jar,” said the tidy boy.
“Yes it is,” said the thief.
“You stole this from Fittes?” The tidy boy said this with a grin on his face so wide that it was clear that he considered theft as not so much a crime as a virtue.
“How is science to thrive when Fittes and Rotwell hoard all the resources? I redistributed this.”
The tidy boy seemed very happy and patted the thief on the back.
Life with the two boys was not always pleasant but at the very least it varied from day to day. The thief was called George. He was of a scientific mind, which Mary could appreciate. She had an interest in science and the psychical herself. That was what had gotten her into all that trouble with Bickerstaff in the first place. Yes, she could appreciate George’s passion for science. She was less enthused that many of his experiments involved Mary. He was forever putting her in the oven or attaching wires to her jar that zapped the whole of its silver glass surface. She did learn a lot about what she was, and the concept of a ghost jar, though. She was most likely a phantasm, although possibly a shade, according to George. She was certainly a Type II, which was the strongest kind of ghost, he said.
Mary knew this last part to be inaccurate, for Marissa had told her she was a very rare Type III. Very few existed, and they could communicate with Marissa, as Mary did. Marissa also said no other living person was capable of speaking to Mary. It was her incredible Listening talent that gave her that power. Mary had wondered how Marissa could be sure, since she never brought anyone else to try and speak with Mary.
Sometimes George opened the valve, and Mary tried speaking to him then, but clearly he could not hear her. She made faces at him, but all he ever did was write it down. He kept meticulous records.
Increasingly frustrated with his inability to hear her, or even connect her facial expressions with deliberate communication, Mary made herself non-corporeal more and more frequently around him. If he couldn’t see her, he was less inclined to run electricity through her.
Then there was the other boy. A definite gentleman, he was called Anthony, but he preferred to use his family name, Lockwood. Perhaps there was prestige in it. He certainly behaved as if he had wealth and status enough to do whatever he pleased.
Sometimes he bossed poor George about, and Mary could never quite make out if George was a servant or companion. He did all the cooking, and a lot of cleaning. But he also frequently told Lockwood to “get stuffed” which Mary took from his tone to be most impolitic.
Lockwood didn’t put Mary in the oven, but she didn’t care for his manner towards George. He did put her in the oven, so she had mixed feelings about him, but he never reminded her of any of the men who used to go to Bickerstaff’s parties, as Lockwood sometimes did.
Overall, she was not wholly satisfied with either of them as companions, but it was certainly preferable to being forgotten on a shelf.
George moved her from room to room, so her scenery changed daily. There was the kitchen, the parlour (they called it a living room), George’s vile bedroom, the bathroom and downstairs a sort of office space and rapier training area. Lockwood regularly brutalised some straw dummies, which was something interesting to watch at least. He was a fine swordsman, despite being so young.
Sometimes, at night, after George had gone to bed, Lockwood spoke to Mary. Not expecting any kind of an answer. He’d phrase it like a conversation, but then he’d just… drone on.
But it kept Mary informed. She knew about his dead parents and poor dead sister. That story confirmed to her what she had gathered about ghost touch already. Awful, for such a young girl too, even younger than Mary’s Perpetual Age. Sad too, Mary thought, to know that if she could ever manage to get George and Lockwood to let her out of the jar, she’d never be able to touch them. Just to have the physical comfort of touching another person’s hand…
Mary knew what Lockwood hid in the room upstairs that George wasn’t permitted to look into.
She knew about the business. Lockwood and Co., he’d called it. He and George were the only Psychical Agents on his payroll and he could certainly have included George’s name if he’d chosen to. But not Anthony Lockwood. He’d made it all about himself, as usual.
“We need another agent,” he said to her one night, after a solid hour tormenting his straw dummies. “Someone with real Listening talent. George can Listen, but it’s mediocre.”
“All you do is see shiny spots, Sir. Perhaps it’s you that’s mediocre.”
“Not that I mean George is mediocre,” Lockwood went on, almost as if he could hear Mary. “George is wonderful. Incredible, really. Couldn’t live without him. But his Listening talent isn’t as strong as it could be. And a really good Listener gives an edge.”
“Yes but how will you pay for it, silly boy. Business isn’t exactly thriving.”
“Maybe we should advertise for a girl? Girls are better Listeners, in general.”
Mary could not help herself but laugh at that. How true, in life, as in psychical talent. Wasn’t she, even now, a century dead, forced to sit there in her jar and listen to this boy’s problems?
“And they’ll have to get on alright with George. George can be a bit prickly.”
Mary did not scold him for this, as it was true enough.
The boys did advertise for a new female employee. They hoped that by specifying female, they’d get a Listener, but they could get other skills as well. It was a Junior position. Mary was outraged at the prospect. They wanted a girl with a level of skill neither one of them possessed, to improve their capacity to do a good job, and earn greater money. She needed something called a Grade Four Certificate, which apparently made her able to work without an adult on the premises. The same qualification the both of them had.
And that cad Lockwood was going to make this girl a Junior Field Operative. The cheek of it!
On the day of the interviews, Mary was enlisted to help. This was a kind of excitement that she had never seen since dying. Of course, Lockwood didn’t ask her to assist. He’d just carried her into the parlour, sat her on the table and put a cloth over her.
She could hear what was happening when the first girl came in. Her name was Miss Melanie Roper, but Melanie was just fine. How vulgarly overfamiliar of her. She was from Manchester. She was fifteen, had her Grades One through Four and she’d trained with some agency Lockwood had evidently heard of, who were the biggest in town there. She was a good Listener with fair Sight as well.
Lockwood told the girl that her references were good, but he preferred to see talent for himself and he had a few things on the table he’d like her to take a look at.
The first thing he did was to whip the cloth off Mary’s jar. She wanted to see Manchester Melanie, so she morphed into a face on the right side of the jar and Melanie screeched with horror.
George laughed.
“Ugh! It’s awful!” said Melanie. “What is that?”
“You tell me,” Lockwood told her.
“I don’t know! Some kind of ectoplasm in a jar! It’s sick! What is wrong with you?”
Lockwood smiled his nauseatingly calculated charming smile and threw the cloth back over Mary.
“I’m so sorry, Miss Smith, the jar can be alarming, but it’s important that we assess your background knowledge and experience. Now, I know you don’t have any Touch, but will you have a try at Listening to this for me, and tell us what you can hear?”
Melanie heard gunshots from whatever the object was, and from the next object screams. A third and final object was produced and from that she heard nothing but George urged her to try harder. Then she identified running water.
Lockwood immediately thanked her for her time and George escorted her to the door.
“Liar,” said Lockwood, when George’s footsteps came back in.
“Disappointing start,” George said with a sigh. “And she was creeped out by the jar. Like she’s never seen a phantasm before.”
“The next is that girl who quit Bunchurch,” Lockwood said. “Maybe she’ll be better.”
Mary understood her role now, and while she’d prefer to be able to speak to the boys and offer them an opinion on the young women they were interviewing, she relished the opportunity to be able to participate in any capacity whatsoever. So she made sure to be ready whenever Lockwood ripped off the cloth and then she would coalesce into a face as suddenly and alarmingly as possible. Mary was there to test these girls’ mettle and she was going to do a good job. Two girls ran away. Most of them screamed. All were at least startled.
George and Lockwood seemed lukewarm about two of the candidates as the day wore long and they disagreed over how many were left. George thought the girl at the door was the last, but Lockwood was sure there was one more.
George went to get the girl regardless, and she sat down for the interview. As Lockwood was going through the usual pleasantries, the doorbell rang again. Perhaps Lockwood was right and there was one more candidate. Lockwood kept talking and footsteps left the room so presumably George got up to answer the door.
Mary’s cue was coming.
“Okay, take a look at this. Tell me what you think it is.”
He took the cloth off Mary and she materialised and pulled a grotesque face at the poor girl.
“Oh my God!” the girl gasped. “Get that thing away from me!”
Charming! Mary was just sitting in her jar, pulling faces. She wasn’t harming anybody.
The rude little madam got up and bolted out of the parlour towards the door. With a shrug, Lockwood put the cloth back over Mary.
After a minute or so, Mary heard two pairs of feet enter.
“You win. There is one more,” said George.
Lockwood sounded slightly defeated. Perhaps if had advertised for an agent at full status he might have gotten a better quality of candidate.
“No, you win. I checked the list. That was the last one.”
“Then who’s this?” asked George.
There was an immediate change to Lockwood’s tone of voice. She may have been dead a hundred years but Mary still knew a thing or two. She knew what a man sounded like when he’d just seen a girl so pretty it made his head spin.
“Hello. I’m Anthony Lockwood.”
“I’m Lucy Carlyle,” said this girl. “I don’t have an appointment but I saw your advert in the paper and I was in the area.”
She had a rural sort of accent. Mary didn’t know much about accents. She was from somewhere northern perhaps? Or maybe Wales.
“You’ve heard of us?” Lockwood asked.
“No.”
Mary cackled with laughter. She wished she could see Lockwood’s smug little face as this girl took him down a peg. She wanted to see the girl’s face too. What did she look like that Lockwood had that sudden edge of slightly breathless joy in his voice the moment he saw her?
Lockwood was a dark soul. And despite finding him deeply arrogant and obnoxious, Mary did feel compassion for the tragedy he’d been through. Such a lot of loss in his life already. To hear him introduce himself with a smile that went all the way to his heart was a strange thing but certainly a good one.
“My CV,” said this Miss Carlyle.
Mary had figured out that a CV was some sort of written document you gave to the person interviewing you for a job, that told them your skills and where you had worked before and other such matters. She wondered if they had them back when she was alive. Was that how Mrs. Harley chose a new maid?
“Would you like some tea? Or has George already offered?”
Mary could not fault Lockwood on his manners toward guests. He might have been disrespectful to George, but his behaviour to a client, DEPRAC inspector or potential employee in his home was unimpeachable.
George, on the other hand…
“I thought I'd wait until after the first test, see if she's still here. We've wasted enough tea bags today.”
Mortifying behaviour . If one of Mary’s brothers said that, she would never show her face in good society again.
“Let's give her the benefit of the doubt and pop the kettle on,” said Lockwood.
“All right, but I reckon she's a bolter.”
Lockwood offered Miss Carlyle a seat and they chatted about her talent. She was primarily a Listener which would be in her favour, and she had good Touch and some Sight too. Lockwood talked about himself, of course. Then they spoke of her qualifications and training. She was from the north of England (not Wales!), and she’d left her last employer with no reference.
No reference!
All Mary knew about employment came from what her mother and Mrs. Harley said about hiring servants. Someone who came from a previous employer with no reference must have done something terribly bad, like theft, because otherwise you would always write them something , even if the parting was not on the most positive terms. To have no reference at all meant very bad conduct indeed.
“My last employment ended… uh… abruptly. I could tell you the whole story if you want, but it’s just not something I like dwelling on.”
Evidently, Lockwood didn’t believe not having a reference was so very bad as Mary’s mother and Mrs. Harley did. He just said “Some other time, then.”
This girl must have been very pretty.
George came back with the tea and Lockwood announced, as usual, the tests. Miss Carlyle was taken aback by it, but she didn’t have a lot of choice. So Mary made herself ready.
“What do you think…” Lockwood removed the cloth. “…this is.”
Mary made the nastiest face she could think of and the girl was startled, flinching for a moment.
But she was not even half as startled as Mary. Because she could feel something from this girl. A power emanating from her that was so great it penetrated through the silver glass of the jar and Mary didn’t even need the valve open to feel her and understand what she was.
If Lockwood wanted a good Listener, he needed to hire this girl. Because she had the kind of power Mary had only ever felt once before. The same kind of power as Marissa Fittes. And if she could just get her to open the valve, Mary was certain this Lucy Carlyle would be able to Listen to her.