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It was budget season at the Samuel Mather Parrington Museum, and Dr. Ainsley was more than usually pleased with himself.
For several months he had been embroiled in a feud with Dr. Wyman in Natural History and Dr. Shapleigh in Medieval over which of them most deserved a funding increase in the coming year, until it was brought to an abrupt and stinging halt by the iron fist of Dr. Starkweather, the museum director, who had refused all claims.
The rest of us in Archaeology had been prepared for an ugly time of it, having survived several clashes between Dr. Ainsley and Dr. Starkweather before. But a week after Dr. Starkweather had declared the matter closed, Dr. Ainsley had received a letter, requesting a dinner meeting, and he arrived the next morning with the announcement that he had secured, from an esteemed private patron, the generous donation of their extensive personal collection, and an even more generous grant funding additional expeditions, with the only obligation to be an exhibit, hosted by the Parrington, of the most prize artifacts of the lot.
Only a few days later the first crates had arrived, labeled for the Parrington and escorted by a crew of sturdy, rather blank-faced moving men to stack them in the middle of the Archaeology offices. At the time it all seemed rather hasty to me, and I said so to Dr. Ainsley. But he only said that Mr. Pellatier had been considering a donation for some time, and being in ill health, he had had no patience to wait once the matter was settled.
I didn’t recognize the name - it wasn’t one of the Twenty, or the satellite of slightly less exalted families that orbited them, and so frequently intersected the sphere of the museum. But Dr. Ainsley said that while his family’s money lay in law, Pellatier was not just a collector but an amateur scholar of antiquities, and considered this his life’s work.
The crates, once opened, certainly revealed a wide-ranging selection of artifacts, so much so that it was our first Herculean task simply to sort out which fell under our department’s purview at all, and which would have to be shared with the other curators - one never knew if the next crate would contain a stack of flat bones covered in Chinese glyphs or a ballgown from the Spanish royal court, fragments of Etruscan terracotta or a medieval saint’s silverwork reliquary, 14th Century manuscripts or 15th Century portraits. While the notes he had provided us detailing provenance and his own research were meticulous, the labeling was haphazard, and the disorder was enough to drive more than one of the junior curators to language usually reserved for the field.
After the collection had been sorted out, and those artifacts that couldn’t be considered archaeological exiled to the proper departments, there began the much greater task of examining the ones that remained, to determine which warranted further study, and which a place in the promised exhibit. It was lucky that the field season was several months away; as it was none of us could be spared for anything else, and it was clear the department would be mired in this for quite awhile.
On our third day of working on Mr. Pellatier’s collection, I found the mirror.
It was at the bottom of a crate of artifacts which had all, according to Pellatier’s notes, been discovered in a pit grave on a building site in Pembrokeshire, before they had found their way to one of his agents. He had tentatively dated them to the 4th Century BC, which wasn’t a bad guess, although I would have said they were a bit older. As examples of the period none of them were terribly remarkable, and while Rogers, who was writing a book on grave goods, would probably find them interesting, I was ready enough to catalogue them and move on to the next, until I got to the mirror.
It was bronze and not very large, and the engraving on the back was scarred and pitted with corrosion. We had several similar pieces in our collection, but for no reason I could name, this one unnerved me. I want to say it was just the hazy, indistinct way it caught my face, and reflected a stranger’s back at me, or what was left of the undulating, oddly organic pattern on the back, which seemed to move when I wasn’t looking at it, but I know that wasn’t it, or not all of it. I might not have Booth’s unfortunate knack for the uncanny, but even to me the mirror felt wrong. Reaching out for it was like reaching into some small, dark space that I knew had snakes in it, and when my fingers touched it, it had a sticky, greasy sheen that made my skin crawl.
I suddenly felt I didn’t want to be anywhere near it. But before I could decide what to do with it - the thought of finding a fire to melt it down in occurred to me, and seemed irrationally appealing in the moment - someone grabbed my wrist.
“What’s this, then, Miss Coburn?” Dr. Ainsley said. I hadn’t noticed him get up, but he was standing right behind me.
I tried to yank my arm back, but his fingers tightened - not enough to bruise, but enough to sting - and he twisted it, studying the mirror with unusual intensity. And then he made a small, satisfied noise and took it out of my hand, and let me go.
“This one certainly belongs in the exhibit, doesn’t it?” he said, but it didn’t feel like he was talking to me.
I bit back a sharp retort. “I don’t think -” I started, but he cut me off.
“And you shouldn’t, if you don’t know enough to know what you’re looking at,” he snapped. He turned and left, taking the mirror with him, back toward the section of the office where we were cataloguing the artifacts that would be placed on display. If anyone else noticed our little exchange, they kept their heads down.
Dr. Ainsley could blow on a bit, but I’d been his assistant for six years, and he’d always trusted my knowledge of our work - more than some of my professors, or the men I’d worked under before I came to the Parrington. And he’d never laid a hand on me like that before.
Given a few more minutes, I might have convinced myself that my reaction to the mirror was nothing but foolishness. But I had seen Dr. Ainsley’s eyes as he turned away from me, and what had been in them had been dark, and ugly, and not very human-looking at all.
And I had noticed one more thing, when he took the mirror away from me - while the engravings on the back of it were worn dull with age, there was another symbol cut over them on the handle, and that one was as sharp and clean as if it had been made this morning.
I took my lunch that day as early as I dared, and headed over to the Department of Rare Books, where I could only hope Booth would be in his office. If I was going to take my suspicions any further, I would need a co-conspirator, and one who was well-read in more esoteric scholarship. And if there was anyone in the museum I could trust to actually listen to me, and try to help as best he could, rather than dismissing it as a case of hysterics, it was certainly Booth.
I must have looked quite grim when I arrived in front of his desk, because he seemed even more startled than usual at being interrupted from his work.
“I - er, is everything all right?” he asked me. And while I wanted very much to say it, I found I very much did not want to say it here. Even with Dr. Ainsley back in our own offices, at the other end of the museum, I couldn’t stop myself from feeling like he might be over my shoulder again.
“Oh, I just wanted to see how you were coming along with Mr. Pellatier’s books,” I said. “If you have time for lunch now, Mr. Booth? I don’t know how long Dr. Ainsley will let me get away from it.”
“I’ll have to get my coat,” he said, but to my relief he didn’t try to argue with me.
There was a cafe a few blocks away that was a little too tucked away for most of the museum staff to bother with; one of the docents had told me about it, when I first started as Dr. Ainsley’s assistant. As we sat down I could see no one I recognized from the museum, and for the first time I felt like I could breathe.
Enough so to realize how abruptly I had abducted poor Booth. While I considered us friends and I thought - I hoped - the feeling was returned, our friendship didn’t usually extend to hauling him bodily out of the museum at a moment’s notice, even on the pretext of work.
“I am sorry for dragging you out like that,” I said. “But I really do need to talk to you about the Pellatier collection.”
I told him everything that had happened, with the mirror and with Dr. Ainsley. Out of the museum, drinking coffee and eating egg sandwiches, it all sounded a bit silly, even to my own ears, the kind of thing your mind invented when you’d been studying tomb inscriptions all day and looked up to realize you were alone after dark. But I tried to hold onto the certainty I had felt in the museum, that something was very wrong.
“So that’s the long and short of it,” I said. “It’s not very much to go on, I’m afraid. I can’t even say anything really happened, except for Dr. Ainsley being...rude.”
“More than rude, I think,” Booth said quietly. And if I hadn’t known how horrified he’d be I would have hugged him, because I could see he believed me. Of course he did - we’d travelled stranger country than this together. But doubt finds a way of creeping in, I suppose, and it was hard not to doubt myself about this.
“I think so, too,” I said. “But it doesn’t get us very far. And of course there was nothing useful in Pellatier’s notes - there was plenty about the grave site and the soil and how much he had to pay for it all, but not a word about...this. Whatever it is.”
Booth frowned. “His notes - was there anything about the symbol? On the - the back of the mirror, that is?”
“Not a tick,” I said. “Which does seems odd. I could plaster half a wing with everything he gave us, and he certainly described the original engravings. One would think a collector like that would notice something so out of place on one of his own artifacts.”
“Yes. Unless there was -” Booth paused, and started again. “Unless there was a reason for it to be hidden. Or a reason for him to hide it.”
It was a very suspicious thought. But it gave voice to another one I had been trying not to have for days: I had never seen Mr. Pellatier. No one had, except for Dr. Ainsley, who had gone alone to dinner that night. Ainsley had handled all of the arrangements around the collection himself; if there had been meetings with Dr. Starkweather, with the trustees, I had never heard it. He had never come to the museum. I didn’t even know his Christian name.
There was no reason to think that the mirror had been sent to us deliberately, that it had some malicious purpose. That Pellatier was anything more than an indiscriminate collector with bad luck and a few gaps in his notes. I didn’t like having a theory with no evidence to support it aside from vague suspicions. But I couldn’t shake the feeling that I had just seen the shape of a trap, ready and waiting to close around us.
“I think,” I said very slowly, “that I would like to know more about our Mr. Pellatier.”
I left Booth with a sketch of what I remembered of the mirror and the symbol on the handle. I didn’t know which books he planned to consult to divine its purpose, and from the look on his face, it seemed better not to ask. Meanwhile, with nothing but his surname the archives seemed unlikely to give up anything we needed about Mr. Pellatier, which meant it was time to turn to the only greater repository of local knowledge than the Parrington - namely, my aunts.
When I had first moved to the city to start work at the Parrington, my aunts had insisted I ought to take up lodging with them - who knew what kind of allowance the museum offered the junior staff, they said, while the townhouse, which had been my grandparents’ until their deaths left it to their two unmarried daughters, had more than enough room to spare. In the end, my stubborn pride had won out, and I had let a room on my own in a boarding house that was, if modest, at least respectable enough for the sensibilities of my family. But I did try to visit as often as I could, when I wasn’t in the field, and the evening after my lunch with Booth, I was expected for dinner.
I let the soup and the usual pleasantries go by. But as the main dish was brought out, I asked Aunt Ferdy if she knew the Pellatier family, as one of them had just given a sizeable gift to the museum.
“Pellatier, Pellatier,” Aunt Ferdy said. “We don’t know any Pellatiers...But that does sound familiar, doesn’t it, Vinnie?”
“Didn’t one of the Montfort boys marry a Pellatier?” Aunt Vinnie said.
“Yes, yes, you’re right, of course. That was Gabriel Montfort, wasn’t it? Old Thurston’s second son, before his brother died, I suppose that’s why he thought he could get away with it.” She leaned forward in her chair, eyes sparkling. “He was going to be married to a Royston, but a week before they announced the engagement he ran off with one of the maids instead. He caused quite the scandal - it must have been fifteen years before any of the Roystons would even be seen on the same side of the street as one of the Montforts or their circle, and Thurston was that close to cutting him out, until Gabriel’s brother fell off his horse and broke his neck. And I do remember now the girl’s name was Pellatier - but I don’t know that she had any family to speak of. Not that anyone knew much about her - they were barely married a year.”
“And that poor child. People said Montfort wasn’t right after she died, but that was a bad business.”
“What happened to the child?” I asked.
“He told everyone it died with her,” said Aunt Ferdy. “No one knew he was lying until his funeral. Some of the cousins made a fuss when the boy showed up saying he was Gabriel Montfort’s son - there was quite a lot of money, of course - but he brought lawyers with him and everything was in order. It came out at the inquest that Montfort had sent him away to live with his relations in Arkham after she died, and spent the next twenty years pretending he’d never had a wife and child. We thought he’d leave once the will was settled - one could hardly blame him - but he kept the Montfort place.”
“Not that he kept anything else. Goodness only knows what he filled the house up with - he certainly never let anyone inside to see, but he was always bringing crates back from abroad.”
And when she said that, I remembered something myself - not society gossip, this time, but a story I had heard from an upperclassman at college, and dismissed at the time as one of those bits of breathless student mythology that becomes attached to every academic institution over the years.
“That wasn’t - Cornelius Montfort, was it?” I asked.
“Named after his great-uncle, I believe,” said Aunt Vinnie.
“Oh,” I said, and hoped they couldn’t hear the wobble in my voice before I quashed it. “There were still stories about him when I was at school. They could never agree why exactly he’d been expelled. Something unorthodox about his research, as I heard it.”
“That was why the Parrington wouldn’t have him either,” said Aunt Ferdy. “Of course they could never prove anything, but that was a few years after Dr. Rookwood, when they couldn’t keep anyone in the job, and just the allegations were enough for the trustees. A steady hand on the ship, and all that. He made a dreadful scene when they told him. And then six months later one of the servants found him in his library.”
And that, it seemed, had been the end of the tragic Cornelius, and of the Montfort line. I begged off the cup of coffee and the slice of cake that Aunt Vinnie offered, and walked the five blocks home to the boarding house, and spent the rest of the night in restless, broken sleep, trying not to dream of what had happened inside the Montfort house.
By the next time I saw Booth, three days later, I had read everything I could find on the notorious career of Cornelius Montfort, and very little of it had been to my liking. That he was dead seemed irrefutable; that he was responsible for our benefactor Mr. Pellatier seemed horribly likely; how he was doing it I would have to hope that Booth could answer.
There had been no further incidents in the Archaeology office. I kept my distance from Dr. Ainsley as best I could, and he left me to my work, although sometimes I felt a prickle on the back of my neck and looked up to see him watching me from across the room. I kept my eye out for any more unusual artifacts. The next few crates held only some unremarkable fragments of Greek marble, but on the third day, when I passed by the mirror, I saw it had been joined on its table by a small round bell, the same symbol scratched in minute detail on its top.
That evening, Booth met me at the door as I left the museum, and stammered out an offer to walk me home. He looked gray and haggard, and I wondered if he had been sleeping in his office, or if he had slept at all.
“I found it,” he blurted out, as soon as we had crossed the street and gotten out of view of the Parrington. We were passing by a park; it nearly dark already, the park mostly empty, but one of the benches was under a streetlamp, and I steered him towards it.
“He left the notes in with the rest of his papers,” Booth said, half collapsing onto the bench. “He - I suppose he thought by the time anyone bothered to read it, there wouldn’t be a way to stop it.”
Booth pulled a sheet of note paper out of his suit pocket and carefully unfolded it, fingers shaking slightly. Surrounded by a scrawl of spidery Latin was a delicately drawn diagram - marked with the symbol from the mirror.
“I think he started with a ritual from the Compendium of Ash,” said Booth. “Some of the formula - but he was making his own changes as he went. He - he wanted to -”
“Come back?” I asked, and told him what my aunts had said about Montfort’s exile from the Parrington - and his death.
Booth shook his head. “He must have been planning it for a very long time. If he was reading the Compendium - Bouchard had some strong ideas about the, er, temporary nature of death. Killing himself would have been just the first step.”
He traced the lines of the diagram with a long finger. “Pellatier is just an - an echo, I think. A fragment he gave enough will to keep carrying out his plan after he was gone. He needed someone to put all the pieces into place for the ritual to work and bring him back. Or - bring something back.” Under the sodium light, Booth’s face was paler than ever. “I - that is, it won’t be - human anymore.”
“Of course not,” I said. “It’s an awful lot of trouble to go to in order to come back as himself, without getting anything new in the bargain. Especially since the Parrington already said no to him as he was. Which in hindsight seems like remarkably good judgment from the trustees, I’d say.”
“Yes,” Booth replied. “I...don’t believe I would like working under Mr. Montfort. Spirit or not.”
I thought of Dr. Ainsley’s hand on my wrist, and shivered. “Nor would I. So how do we stop it, Booth?”
“I, er, I know the kind of spell he used to make Pellatier. It needs a physical anchor, something to... tie it to Ainsley, and the museum, and give it life. If that were destroyed -”
I considered how this mess had started, and I knew what it had to be. “We need to get hold of Pellatier’s letter.”
There was no question of Booth doing it. The Archaeology Department was not large and Booth, with his height and his white hair, was not easily overlooked, as much as it dismayed him. I had keys to Ainsley’s office and a reason to be there, and I knew, as much as it was possible for anyone to know, how to navigate the barely restrained chaos of his desk.
Waiting for the right moment was nearly unbearable. Every time I entered the office I could see the diagram from the book, how the lines would be laid out in the gallery, each artifact in its glass case as if that could keep it safely contained. Booth had told me enough of how the ritual worked to know that it could not.
But I could not steal the letter while Ainsley was there, and he left the museum later and later each night, studying the artifacts that had been laid out on the work tables and sketching in a notebook that he never put down. I had been starting to consider desperate measures when, on Friday, he announced that he had another dinner with Mr. Pellatier. And while I didn’t like the thought of it, I didn’t think I would get a better chance than that.
I stayed at my bench while Ainsley got ready to leave, taking notes on what appeared to be a very dull bag of early Persian coins. By then, the two of us were the last ones left; once he had closed the door behind him, I sat alone for a good quarter hour more, not daring to move in case he came back.
Taking the letter turned out to be simple enough. I unlocked the door to Ainsley’s office and slipped inside, leaving it cracked enough to give me some light to work by. The desk was covered in a heap of papers, journals, excavation maps, and a box full of unsortable bits junior curators had handed over for his more expert opinion. At first I couldn’t see any sign of the letter, and for a moment I feared he might have taken it with him, tucked in a pocket somewhere. But finally I found it locked in a bottom drawer, carefully folded and placed under an odd metal bauble he had found on a dig at a Roman camp in Essex.
I closed the drawer again, and made sure everything else still looked in the same undisturbed state of chaos. I remembered to lock the door behind me before I left, and I will always be grateful for that.
The halls in that part of the Parrington have a strangely echoing quality - from certain rooms, it is possible to hear approaching footsteps for several minutes before any person comes into view. Most of the time, when the museum is busier, it is merely very aggravating; this time, it was the only thing that saved me. I didn’t have time to get away from the office without attracting attention to myself, but the corridors were dimly lit at night, and I was able to conceal myself enough that I couldn’t be seen from the door.
As the footsteps got closer, I could hear a voice - Ainsley’s, murmuring words under his breath too softly for me to understand. I heard the sound of him fumbling with his keys, and the door opening, and as he stepped inside I dared to peek out, to see who - or what - he was talking to.
There are a very few things I have seen in my time at the Parrington that I wish I could strike entirely from my memory. One is the chains that were hanging from the wall in Madeline Stanhope’s tomb in the basement. One I have never told to anyone. And the last was that night, when I saw Dr. Ainsley, and what had called itself Mr. Pellatier.
I waited, holding my breath, for one of them to notice me. But the door shut behind them, and there were no more sounds from inside. And then I broke, and bolted, as quietly but as quickly as I dared, to Booth’s office.
He was still there working, although everyone else had left. I stood there, back pressed against the door as if I could hold it out, until I caught my breath enough to tell him what I had seen, or as much of it as I could describe. And then I showed him the letter.
It was in the same spidery handwriting as the page Booth had torn out of Montfort’s notes. To my surprise, I recognized the seal at the top of the page - it was an older design, but the museum still used the same letterhead for all its official correspondence. He had, it seemed, been very confident of the success of his scheme.
I tried to read it, but after the few words I felt my mind sliding off of it - it gave me the same greasy, noxious sense as the mirror had, and the thought of going any further made my stomach turn. Booth must have felt it as well; he tore off a clean sheet of paper and folded it around the letter before he picked it up again, taking care not to touch it.
It seemed imprudent to try to get rid of the thing inside the museum, especially with Ainsley and Pellatier still there. Booth held onto the letter, and we made our way to the exit.
Just before we reached the front hall, we came around a corner and ran - quite literally, unfortunately - into Dr. Starkweather.
Dr. Starkweather only rocked back on his heels, but Booth, startled, lost his balance and his grip on the letter, which fluttered down to land at Starkweather’s feet.
“Mr. Booth, Miss Coburn,” he snapped. “What on earth -”
“Oh, I’m dreadfully sorry, Dr. Starkweather,” I said quickly. “I stayed later than I meant to working on something for Dr. Ainsley, and Mr. Booth saw me and offered to walk me home, we were just -”
I saw the moment when he noticed the letter on the ground, and I knew suddenly how we could destroy it, and Montfort’s plan.
“- looking for you, before we left,” I finished. I grabbed the letter, and before I could think better of it, I handed it to him. “Someone’s been sending notes to the department heads, pretending to be part of the museum staff. Just someone’s poor idea of a joke, I suppose, but they got their hands on some of your stationery, sir.”
“Hrmph,” he said. He unfolded the letter, face growing darker and more furious as he studied it, until finally he took the letter by both corners and ripped it in two.
“What absolute rot,” he said, crumbling the two halves of the letter up in one large fist. “Thank you for bringing this to my attention, Miss Coburn, I’ll have to have words with Mr Hornsby about who’s been stealing from the offices.”
He stormed off, but at least the maelstrom was no longer directed at us.
I turned to Booth, who was still standing there as wide-eyed as a startled cat. “Was that - did it -”
“Yes,” Booth said distantly. “I, er, I felt it give. When he -”
I could not sleep that night. But when I arrived at the museum in the morning, the Pellatier collection was gone. And Dr. Ainsley made no more mentions that winter of augmenting our budget with any private donors.