SL Huang - Up and Coming - Stories by the 2016 Campbell-Eligible Authors

He tried again. “Mrs. Winston, the way this works is I have to find me someone of the mindset I need. Someone as has the exact right emotions.” He had never divulged his methods to a client before, but hoped this small revelation would dissuade her. “I don’t know how I’d start for somewhat like this.”

That wasn’t entirely true. Images of his mother flowed like tendrils of mist into his thoughts.

“I see.” Mrs. Winston heaved herself out of her chair and walked to a small box decorated with mother-of-pearl. Removing something from the box, she returned to her chair. “If my situation does not move you to aid me, Mr. Ferris, perhaps this will.”

She leaned forward and placed five gold sovereigns on the table in front of him. “There will be that much again on delivery of the potion. Perhaps that will help you to find what it is that you need.”

The most he had ever charged a client was one pound. She offered him ten. He and Samuel could live for a year on that much. The threat of eviction he received earlier this month could be resolved by this evening; the worry that he and Samuel would be turned out into the street, gone. More important than anything, though, the money could be used to ensure that Samuel learned a proper trade. His son could be spared the need to work with echoes.

He picked the coins up, felt the weight of them in his palm.

“I take it that’s a yes?” she said.

“Yes,” he whispered.

“Was she wanting a love potion?” Samuel asked on the way home. He picked up a stick lying in the street and tapped the cobbles as he walked. Edward didn’t answer and Samuel changed the subject. “Miss Simone stayed outside with me the whole time. She showed me the garden an’ we played with a white cat named Bangles. Miss Simone had a son, but he died little an’ her husband died too.”

Simone. She had offered them tea before their walk home and, uncharacteristically, Edward had accepted. She and the cook had chatted with them in the kitchen, yet she never asked why someone of his station had been entertained by her employer. Simone ruffled Samuel’s hair, smiled her crooked smile, and watched Edward with her chocolate brown eyes. It had affected him in a way that nothing else had in a long while. It was all foolishness, though. God had not allowed him to keep Mary and, with his strange life, he was not like to have another wife.

“Did you use a love potion on mother?” Samuel asked.

The question startled Edward from his thoughts. Samuel rarely asked about the mother who had taken her last breath as he breathed his first. Edward shook his head. “I didn’t figure how to make potions until after she passed. I didn’t need none for her anyhow.”

They turned onto Thames Street. Edward reached down and took Samuel’s hand as they entered the bustling crowds of central London. The smells of hot sausages and fresh bread wafted from stalls on the bridge, competing with the sour smell of raw sewage in the Thames. Out of habit, Edward scanned the myriad faces they passed, looking for donors; someone hinting at deep, obsessive emotions, someone he could shadow for days or weeks until the emotion was as ripe as a summer pear and the echoes from it strong enough to harvest. Samuel was quicker, though. Just past the bridge he squeezed Edward’s hand and nodded.

“He fancies her.”

Edward looked where Samuel indicated, to a trio of people standing at a carriage just ahead. A footman was holding the door as a gentleman helped a much younger woman up to the seat. Edward felt nothing from the man. They were nearly past the group when it struck Edward, the faint waves of yearning rolling from the footman.

“Did you see or feel it?” Edward asked Samuel, when they were beyond the carriage.

“I felt it,” Samuel said, swishing his stick at a rat in the gutter.

A chill skittered across Edward’s bones. He wondered, not for the first time, just how strongly their strange family trait ran in his son. For Samuel’s sake he prayed that it would not be too strong for him to bear.

“When’ll I get to harvest echoes?” Samuel asked, looking up at him.

“I’ve told you afore, not for a long time. Emotions is powerful things.” Echoes he had harvested and carried in his breast came to life again in his memories—powerful lust, painful yearning, crushing sorrow and regret. Gathering them did nothing to the donor, like absorbing heat from the rays of the sun did nothing to the sun, but the thought of Samuel filling his small body with the intensity of those obsessive emotions was horrific.

The lamplighters were firing the oil wicks in the streetlamps by the time Edward and Samuel arrived at their narrow row house in the East End. Edward took his coat off and hung it on a nail by the door then held out his hand for Samuel’s coat. Samuel fished a canning jar out of the pocket before handing it to him.

“What’s that, then?” Edward asked.

Samuel looked guilty. “Miss Simone said I could keep it.” He held up the jar for his father to inspect the contents: a green rock and a black cricket.

“O’course you can keep it,” he said, handing it back.

Samuel grinned and ran for the kitchen. He set the jar on their small table and threw an armful of wood on the coals of the kitchen fire. He swung the iron kettle over the flames for tea and set out plates and salt cod for dinner. Edward sat at the table, careful not to rock the uneven legs and tip Samuel’s jar.

It had been hard raising Samuel alone, but at least he was a better father than his own had been. His father’s violence had been hard enough, but the echoes had made it so much worse. Both Edward and his mother had relived the anger and fear of each event over and over, sometimes for days before the echoes dispelled. Over the years, his mother became increasingly withdrawn, though she refused to leave her husband. Edward hadn’t seen her for nearly a year now, not since she’d tried to hang herself.

He wracked his brain for any donor for Mrs. Winston’s potion other than his mother. Harvesting echoes had no ill effect on the donor—no more than collecting their tears or bottling their breath would—but the cost to Edward would be dear. Feeling the echoes of his mother’s hopelessness when he was young had been heartbreaking; to absorb the depth of her current despair into his own body would be hellish. Donors weren’t easy to find though, even for love potions. The emotions had to be strong enough to do the job. It could take months to find someone just right for this. Someone else, at least.

The following morning Edward opened the under-stair cupboard and pulled a wooden box from its recesses. Two blue phials containing love and a single green phial holding sorrow were all that remained of his potions. Not only were they challenging to collect, but he didn’t dare sell them frequently enough to attract the attention of the law. Among the empty containers in the box were some clear phials for the occasional odd request but, in general, few people sought anything other than love or revenge.

Edward placed an empty phial in his pocket and left Samuel in the care of a neighbor, then stopped at his landlord’s and paid the surprised man a year’s rent in advance before beginning his journey. He weighed again the personal cost, body and soul, to collect this potion against his and Samuel’s need for the money. Again the scales favored need.

An hour later he crossed Moorfields and the outline of Bethlem Royal Hospital appeared beyond the open fields. Bedlam—as most folk called it—loomed heavy and foreboding, like a pale, stone monster unable to move for the sheer mass of victims it had gorged upon. Multiple eyes of black barred windows dotted the walls, and the shrieks and moans drifting from those windows sounded like nothing human. Somewhere within the bowels of that monster lay his mother.