VANISHED part 2

The door looked bleak, situated in a bleak and dark stone building in a decidedly bleak corner of London.

Tippy Ravenscourt took one last drag from her cigarette and stomped on it angrily. She could not believe she let her uncle talk her into doing this. The sky was steel grey, heavy with yet unspilled rain, a storm seemed to be brewing on the horizon.

She checked the time on her wristwatch: ten minutes to ten. It was the earliest appointment she could get away with. Lord Fernsborough would have had her storm in right away, as soon as she said she would try to help. She understood his impatience and anxiety: after all, his daughter’s life was at stake. Yet she had to explain to him that some things worked differently: some things needed their own time, you needed to follow the right path to get to them.

It wasn’t easy, but in the end he was placated by her promise to do it as soon as she could manage. She had to pull her weight quite a bit to be received the following morning. The fact that she had not shown her face there for a couple of months did not help either. In the end, old friendships and the promise of new favours managed to do the trick.

She wasn’t even sure it would work at all; to be quite honest, she was downright skeptical. She warned her uncle of the liability of the method, how it was by no means sure that it would give results straight away, if at all. It could take hours, days, even months… or it could not work at all and leave them empty handed and frustrated.

But Lord Fernsborough would not hear it: for such a hard rational old school sort of man, he was ready to put all his faith in such imprecise practices. He would leave no stone unturned. Once again, given the situation he found himself in, it could be easily understood. A desperate man will cling to anything that even vaguely resembles safety.

She drew a deep breath and rang the doorbell.

She would keep her doubts to herself, for the time being, and give this a try. For Becky’s sake.

The door opened to a rather dark and gloomy looking corridor. Tippy was greeted by a thin and grim old man; he was wearing a faded black suit fraying at the seams and looked displeased by the whole world.

“May I help you?”, he asked her as though helping her was the last thing he wanted to do.

“Good morning. I’m here to see Mr Turnbridge. I have an appointment.”

The man looked at her silently for a couple of seconds, his eyes sharp and inquisitive.

“Your name?”

“Ravenscourt. Catherine Ravenscourt.”

He hummed and seemed quite displeased to find that her appointment was indeed real.

“Come with me.”

He turned around stiffly and never bothered to check if she was actually following or not.

He led her through a number of corridors, through large doors and small rooms, surprising for a house that looked so narrow and simple from the outside. Tippy had been there a handful of times before, but she couldn’t have found her way through that maze of a house alone.

The grim man opened a heavy set of door and announced her name without stepping into the room; he then turned back and walked deeper into the bowels of the house without sparing her a single glance.

Tippy stepped into the room: Mr Turnbridge’s study was just as she remembered it, down to the tiniest details. The gramophone in the corner sill played some generic piano music, the ebony bookshelf still looked about to overflow and spill books all over the thick Persian carpet. The heavy writing desk sill sat, squat and intruding, right in front of the large window.

Sitting in his chair, smoking his pipe and looking at the whole world from a cold distance, was Jacob Turnbridge.

He looked exactly as he had when she had last seen him two months before, exactly as he had when she had first met him two years before; if she came back in ten years’ time, she was sure he would look exactly the same still. He was one of those rare people that resemble rocks more than animal beings: hard set, unchangeable, fixed, cold and unmovable by human toil.

She had once harboured immense respect for that man, perhaps even love of some kind, but to him those and most other feelings were completely irrelevant. His star could never be influenced by the human heart.

“Catherine Ravenscourt, my oh my. I did not think I would ever see you on my doorstep again, you really caught me by surprise this time.”

He smiled at her, he seemed genuinely amused and curious. As a fox can be amused and curious to see where the hen tries to run and hide before the inevitable is consumed, Tippy thought.

“Jack Turnbridge. You never change, do you?”

His smile widened into a full blown grin.

“I wouldn’t know how. To what do I owe the pleasure?”

He did not invite her to sit down, he did nothing at all to make her feel at ease: he simply stared at her, direct and unflinching, studied her, one could say.

She knew him well enough to know niceties and social conventions meant nothing to him. It wasn’t because he did not understand them or approve of them: he simply was not interested.

She shrugged off her coat and threw it on the back of the chair, sat down in front of him and lit up a cigarette.

For a minute, they simply sat there one in front of the other, smoking and observing each other, like chess players in the middle of a tense game.

Finally Tippy was the one to break the silence, her voice slightly thickened by the smoke.

“I need your help, or rather, your services, or however you want to call it. It’s a delicate matter.”

She went back to her cigarette, offering nothing else.

Your move now.

Jack Turnbridge arched an eyebrow, vaguely intrigued.

“And why would you come to me with a delicate personal matter?”

“I didn’t say it was personal.”

He huffed, his eyes positively shining with mirth.

“With you it always is, my darling Catherine.”

He had always enjoyed toying with her, as well as with anyone else who was foolish enough to ask for his help.

She cocked her head to the side.

“I came to you because if there is a chance something can be done, you’re my best bet. You know I only bet when I’m sure the odds are in my favour.”

That was a lie and they both knew it.

He chose not to remark on it.

“You know other people with talents, shall we say, similar to mine. People you have not developed such a strong and visceral distaste for as you have for me. I know I went sour in your mouth a long time ago.”

She shrugged. “So what? It’s not like you care whether I like you or not.”

He nodded. “I don’t care. But why come to me? That’s what I want to know.”

She rolled her eyes. He really wanted to make her spell it out clearly; that would be the payment: the feeding of his ego through her humiliation.

She didn’t want to give him the satisfaction; at the same time, she knew that dragging it out would only amuse him more.

She thought of Becky and swallowed her pride. About one thing he was absolutely right: with her it was always personal.

“I came to you because you are the best at what you do; I know other Seers, it’s true, but they lack your precision. And it is very important for me that this job gets done properly and quickly.”

He set down his pipe and joined his fingertips together underneath his chin; his eyes looked bright and black, two infinite pools of cold knowledge.

“What do you need me to see, Catherine Ravenscourt?” he asked, soft and dream-like.

It wasn’t easy for her to explain; on the taxi drive there she had gone over her speech a hundred times. Yet she had known all along that once she found herself in front of him, she would grasp at words and forget half of what she had planned.

She had met Jack Turnbridge years before, at a mutual friend’s dinner party. He had just begun to build his fame as an occult practitioner, a Seer, as he was fond of calling himself: his specialization was unlocking hidden truths, forbidden desires and buried memories. He claimed he could look into a person’s soul and read it plainly as though it were clearly printed black on white. When she heard of it, Tippy had been skeptical but amused. She got her friends to introduce her to Turnbridge, and they spent the rest of the night lost deep in conversation with each other.

His coldness had fascinated her back then; he was certainly different than the people she was used to hanging around with. To her, it made him desirable. She even believed somehow that they were kindred spirits, the two of them.

Back then, he was organizing his first seminar, in which he intended to demonstrate his techniques, present some general knowledge about his methods, and teach the basics of what he called mind expansion.

He was often unintentionally poetic in his definitions, which Tippy found very amusing, considering how he lived and behaved as the most matter-of-fact and uninspired human being.

He had invited her to join his seminar straight away that night he had told her that she was gifted, without any kind of ceremony, and he had seemed earnest about it.

Of course, curious and bored as she was, she had accepted straight away. Slowly she was sucked into that world of hidden meanings, flights of fancy and endless possibilities. On closer acquaintance, Jack Turnbridge seemed to improve and worsen at the same time. His mind was a wonder: ever sharp, ever ready, a true gem polished to perfection by years of constant study and exercise; but the closer she got to him, the less sure she was of where his heart really lay. His relentless drive to know everything and ignore nothing, she found it questionable both in concept and in methods, sometimes downright upsetting and cruel.

Her breaking point had arrived when she realized their conversations and explorations were touching on something she did not want touched.

The very thing she now had to lay bare in front of his talons: her childhood.

She looked straight into those blackened eyes and tried not to flinch; she would be concise and straightforward, there was no need to beat around the bush.

Just say it.

“I need to continue...I need to unblock some memories in my past. I need to know what happened twenty years ago.”

Jack Turnbridge inhaled sharply, excitement morphed into his angular features.

“You want to see it then, that part of your mind you were guarding so closely. You never let me near it, not even once, ever since I met you.”

“And you always wanted to push my boundaries and uncover it… Why are you so interested in my childhood memories anyway, creep?”

He shook his head, his fingers drumming on the wooden desk.

“There is a mark on those sealed memories, that part of you… I’m not even sure it belongs to you entirely, truth be told. I don’t know what it is, but it’s fascinating and I’ve never seen anything like it.”

Tippy shuddered at the thought of becoming one of Turnbridge’s case studies; she could not believe she was about to give that man access to her mind once again, and yet there she was.

“Why did you change your mind about it now?”

She flashed him a fiery look, wishing she could physically burn him.

“That’s none of your business. It’s bad enough that I have to do this. Take your notes on me, consider me your lab rat, but do not ask any questions that do not pertain directly to the work we need to do. You will know nothing else about me, and once we’re done you will never see me again. Clear?”

He grinned and lifted his hands in mock surrender.

“Crystal.”

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Part 1

Part 3 coming soon!

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Thank you,

Vera F.