Chapter Text
By the time the clock was striking twelve and heralding in the beginning of Lucy Carlyle’s eighth birthday, she had already been possessed a grand total of thrice in her relatively short life. As time passed and the clock had struck one, she was lamentably in full control of her body and mind once more, unfortunately all too aware of - and at the mercy of - her mother’s wrath.
“Stupid, wretched girl! Couldn’t even keep your bloody talents under control for one evening!” Mrs Carlyle bellowed. Lucy scrambled up the stairs as fast as her little legs could carry her, ducking and narrowly avoiding the swipe at her head.
“I told you, I can’t control it!”
She could still hear the echoing cries of the rich people whose house she’d been brought to for the evening; clamours of “ call the doctor!” , and “ bugger that, call a bleedin’ exorcist! ”, mixed in with screams of terror as Lucy’s eyes had whited over completely as she’d slumped forward in her chair, and a voice that definitely wasn’t her own had bellowed throughout the drawing room, deep and dark and nightmarish.
A sharp slap had been delivered swiftly to her face in an attempt to snap her out of it, and then another, followed by one of the bigger fellows in the room grasping her shoulders and shaking her like a rag doll. It hadn’t done much except leave her with a ruddy mark on her cheek and a rattle in her teeth. The spirits only left her alone when they were good and ready.
Her mother was very much the same.
“Bullshit!” Her mother began to follow her up the stairs, feet thundering on each step, and Lucy tried to flee to the bedroom, naively hoping that if she could put the wood between herself and her mother, she’d be okay. “You had one job, girl, and you can’t even do that right. You’re lucky they didn’t call the bleedin’ constabulary on us! How are we meant to live, if you can’t follow some simple instructions for one evening?”
They’d intended for the evening to proceed as all the others had. Meaning, quite simply, that they’d go along to some rich person’s house after supper, entertain their posh guests with Lucy’s talents at talking to spirits, bring up some family drama, and be paid handsomely for the thrill of it all.
Because that’s all it was meant to be - a scam. The whole concept of Spiritualism was gaining traction and becoming far more popular; especially in the upper classes of society, who were enchanted with this fascinating idea of the supernatural world that they weren’t privy to, and longed to learn more about what might be waiting for them when they left this mortal plane. Mrs Carlyle preyed on that desire. Lucy, it turned out, was rather attuned to these strange wonders, hearing whispers that nobody else could and attracting some more feisty ones who longed to find their way back into the land of the living once more. After the second time young Lucy had found herself under the control of something not of this world (and scared her sisters halfway towards said unknown planes in fear of what was possessing their baby sister), Mrs Carlyle had an idea. Lucy was the cash cow they needed to survive the untimely death of Lucy’s father, who had pissed away whatever meagre savings they’d had down in the local pub, and thankfully never reached out to his youngest daughter afterwards.
Thus began Mrs Carlyle’s grand scheme.
She didn’t care if Lucy fell under the control of a spirit or not, or if she even made any contact at all; only that it was believable enough to scare the silly rich folk for the evening and have them part with their gold. It wasn’t difficult - most of the people who invited them over were well known enough in the community that Lucy and her family already knew about any recent family deaths, and Mrs Carlyle and her eldest daughters caught wind of some of the deeper family secrets when they went to the wash house. The local serving girls were always keen to share the gossip of the families they worked for, too, and anything else came from the snippets and fragmented words she sometimes caught from energy lingering on objects inside the house.
It had all been going well, until Mrs Carlyle got greedy, and sunk her claws into Jacob’s Circus. Soon Lucy was travelling the country with her own Fortune Telling act, whilst Jacobs and her mother took every penny she earned. As the years went on and the circus money simply wasn’t enough for them any more, they turned to more extreme measures, and one wrong attempt at staging an insurance scam led to the destruction of the circus as a whole.
Weeks later, Lucy could still hear the dying screams of her friends, her family , as Jacobs and her mother pinned the lot on her. After hiding at the back of the sixth funeral in as many days that she wasn’t welcome at, she’d packed what little belongings she actually owned, stole some money from her sleeping mother, and snuck on the first train that left the station.
Jacobs’ Circus had never travelled as far south before, so Lucy had never been in a city as quite as large (or as grimy) as London; but as she exited the station and breathed in the smoggy evening air, it tasted more than a little like freedom.
Getting to London had been the easy part, Lucy realised, as she sat on the steps of the cathedral near the station with no idea where to go next. The building stood tall and imposing behind her, looming over her like a wicked shadow. Where most people would see it as a protective shroud, sheltering them from the depravity of the world in a cloak of love and faith; to Lucy it felt like a warning.
She hadn’t set foot in a church in years. The last time was probably at her father’s funeral, and she didn’t much care to remember the fine details of it. Soon after, a spirit took hold of her for the first time, and word had spread about the strangeness of the youngest Carlyle daughter. Parents grabbed their children’s hands and dragged them across the street to avoid crossing her path, and none of them wanted to play with her anymore. Even her sisters’ friends stopped coming round to the house, too afraid to come near weird, loopy Lucy. Instead of putting a stop to it, Mrs Carlyle leaned into it, and their ghostly con had begun soon after.
Little Lucy told herself that the people in the little village would like her again, if only she believed hard enough, if only she was strong enough to silence the voices and the spirits that clawed at the inside of her skull as if they were the walls of a prison.
But the voices never stopped.
As Lucy aged, she got better at letting the voices fade into the background, letting them wash over her as easily as any other conversation she wasn’t part of. If she just didn’t listen , she wouldn’t drive herself mad trying to figure out if the people she was hearing were alive or dead. Unless someone spoke to her directly - tapping her shoulder or using her name or otherwise explicitly desiring her attention - Lucy didn’t respond. Sure, many people thought she was rude, but it was a small price to pay for her sanity. It wasn’t like her reputation could get any worse around her hometown.
The wind whipped past in a chilly breath, and she pulled her shawl tighter around her shoulders, glancing up at the church once more as she shook away the memories. She’d escaped her mother and Jacobs’ clutches. She was free now. She’d made it to London ! She may not have thought much about her plan (if she could even call it a plan) beyond escaping in the early morning whilst her mother slept off whatever hangover she’d drank herself into the night before, but if worse came to the worst, she could sleep in the church… right?
Sure, a pew wouldn’t be the most comfortable (if what she remembered was correct, from the few masses she’d attended before the village had deemed her a devil child and her mother had promptly stopped the family attending church, really not helping her reputation), but it was better than the street. And weren’t there laws about disturbing people praying? They couldn’t arrest her for ‘accidentally’ falling asleep whilst praying. This was all, of course, hinging on the miraculous event that she didn’t burst into flames as soon as she entered - if God even existed and would let her unholy arse get near the threshold.
“Are you alright, love?” A gentle hand on her shoulder startled Lucy out of her thoughts. Her hands instinctively clenched around the strap of her bag, and she leapt to her feet with a habitual apology on her lips. “Waiting for someone? Or are you just off the train? First time in London?”
Lucy took in the woman’s appearance. She was older, with grey hair spilling out of her bun and coiling around her face, and eyes that seemed like they’d seen too much but she still had come out the other end miraculously whole. She had a basket looped through one arm, filled with what looked like a pile of papers nestled in next to a half-loaf of bread. At the sight of it, Lucy suddenly remembered that she hadn’t eaten anything since yesterday evening, and tried to ignore the roiling in her stomach.
Though Lucy was weary and distrustful, the woman seemed kind. Still - old habits die hard, and she found herself weaving a deceptive lie almost instinctively.
“My sister. Said she’d meet me here instead of the station, I’m staying with her and her husband.” The lie slipped easily from her mouth, and she had to bite back a laugh. When was the last time her sisters had extended a hand to help her? When had they done anything except look the other way as their mother stole her childhood, and then live on the spoils of Lucy’s labour?
The look the woman gave her suggested she didn’t quite believe her, taking in her clothes and unbrushed hair, and the hastily stuffed bag that she held in a death grip. “They didn’t offer to meet you off the train? It’s rather late, and London can be dangerous in the evenings.”
“It’s fine. Her husband works late, they’ll be here soon. He’s probably been held up, and she doesn’t like walking alone…” Where were these lies even coming from?
“And yet she’s happy to let you wait alone?”
“I didn’t say she was the world’s best sister.”
The woman pursed her lips and shook her head at the actions of the fabricated sister and her husband that would never arrive. “Well, if you do happen to find yourself in a bit of a pickle, or you need to stay somewhere that isn’t with your… sister,” she paused as if to say I know you’re lying but please understand I just want to help you , “please come and find me,” her features softened into a pitying smile as she pressed a pamphlet into Lucy’s hand, along with a chunk of the bread. Lucy’s hands shook as she took them. “Very little in this world is kind to lonely girls, and London is certainly not one.”
Hope House: Women’s Shelter , the pamphlet read. Maybe she wouldn’t need to risk the wrath of God to get some sleep after all. “Thank you,” she said sincerely.
The woman patted her shoulder again. “I hope your sister arrives soon. Take care.”
“You too,” she mumbled, but by the time she looked up from the paper, the woman had already left. No doubt off to find some other despondent-looking soul to help. Lucy looked around, making sure the woman was entirely out of view, before she tore into the bread with absolutely no decorum. It was dry, heading towards stale, but she wolfed it down anyway. It was gone all too quickly, but it settled some of the gnawing loneliness inside, and she could find some water to wash it down with later.
Now, she had to fix her appearance. Hopping down the steps and walking to the nearest shop window to inspect her reflection, she couldn’t help but wonder what others were seeing in her. Did she really look so bad, that a random stranger had noticed she had nowhere in the world to go? Was the weariness plain on her face, the years of having one foot in the land of the living and one on the land of the dead finally making their mark? As she studied her face in the glass, the dark circles under her eyes began to deepen and twist, her cheeks turning sunken and hollow, and she leapt back with a yelp as she found herself staring face to face with a ghoulish skull.
An echoing cackle danced across the wind, a strong smell of incense and acrid smoke filled her nostrils, and the inside of Lucy’s head throbbed.
She clamped a hand over her mouth, glancing around to see if anyone had witnessed her little embarrassing display, and when she turned back to the window, the skull was gone. She took in the array of items crammed in the window display; books, orbs, feathers, a small corvid skull with various other curiosities, but to her surprise - no humanoid skull. She’d definitely heard the phantom laugh, but that was nothing new to her; it just meant that something in the window display had a spirit latched to it. She didn’t care about that. It was the skull that had scared her. Surely she wasn’t going mad already? Imagining her face melting and her skull appearing? But no, there was nothing that even resembled what she’d seen in her reflection.
Maybe the woman had poisoned the bread. It wouldn’t even surprise her, with the way her luck was going.
She glanced up at the shop’s sign, a deep blue board swaying gently, and watched as the light from the gas lamps caught the shimmer of the gold paint that read ‘Bonnard’s Curios & Ornaments’ in a looping script, before glancing back at the window and - there ! She shuffled from foot to foot, changing the angle of her view and bumping her nose up against the glass. She wasn’t going mad! If she angled her head just right, a skull flickered into view inside the crystal ball resting on top of one of the books. A clever trick, or a reflection from the book underneath, she wasn’t sure, but it had scared her well enough anyway. Though she’d promised herself she wouldn’t think back to her time at Jacobs’, she could almost imagine Norrie’s peal of laughter at Lucy’s scare. Norrie had loved to play tricks, and as much as Lucy loathed the embarrassed flush that crawled up her neck and face after a particularly good scare, she’d loved Norrie’s laugh more.
Norrie would have loved to scare the punters that flitted in and out of Lucy’s fortune tent at Jacobs’ with that orb. Lucy could see herself getting a good laugh too if she bought it, imagining using it on the people who crossed her path. The fake fortune telling gimmick, as much as she hated it, had always been an easy one, and it would certainly be a helpful way to make even a little bit of coin until she got properly on her feet here in London. It was easy to tell people what they wanted to hear.
Well, that settled it . The door had a board in its glass declaring that it was still open despite the late hour, in the same loopy writing as the sign above. Lucy headed in, a bell signalling her entrance as she pushed the door open.
It was not what Lucy expected. The whole place stank , and that was all Lucy could focus on when trying to get a first impression of the shop. And not in the cloying, incense-sweet way she’d expected, but like she’d just stumbled onto the muddy banks of the Thames and gotten her boots stuck. If there were a real skeleton somewhere in the midst of the store, Lucy wouldn’t even be surprised. Her hand flew to her nose in a vain attempt to block out the smell and it made impact with a large pewter bowl on the way, knocking it onto the tiled floor with an ear-ringing crash. She cringed and dove for the bowl, picking it up and wiping the dirt from it as best as she could without heaving into it. Jesus, but why did this place smell so bad?
“You don’t want to hold that too long, sweetheart. It’ll peel the flesh from your skin if you ain’t careful.”
Lucy startled at the voice, whipping round to see a girl who most definitely hadn’t been standing there a moment before. She dropped the bowl back onto the table as if it had burned her.
“Will it really?” She found herself asking. It didn’t look dangerous at all; but Lucy had learned the hard way that looks could be deceiving. Maybe what she was smelling was the remnants of the flesh this bowl had burned away - it certainly would make sense.
“No, but I certainly don’t need to be cleaning your grubby fingerprints off the merchandise I’m trying to sell.”
Lucy frowned and crossed her arms across her chest defensively. “My fingers aren’t grubby ! It’s not like you’re the cleanest looking thing ‘round here, either.”
The girl simply grinned, which ruffled Lucy’s feathers even further. “So, what brings you to my humble emporium? Buying, or selling?”
“Just looking, thanks.”
Emporium certainly was the right word to describe the little ramshackle shop. If she’d thought the window display was busy, nothing could have prepared her for the interior. Wall to ceiling, every available surface was stuffed full with various trinkets, antiques, and gaudy baubles. The table at which the scruffy girl sat was much the same, with bowls of random objects sat out and piles of flyers strewn across it too. She recognised a pile of pamphlets identical to the one the woman had handed her outside the church, others advertising various acts at nearby music halls, and a name she recognised - The Fairfax Carnival. She’d never been; her little village had been too small for a large touring enterprise like Fairfax’s to ever come by, but Jacobs had always talked about the sheer size and scale of it, and had tried to copy some of the acts and shows Fairfax boasted, with varying degrees of success. She and Norrie had always dreamed about running away and joining it, someday.
But despite the sheer volume of items, she found herself drawn still to the crystal ball, sitting innocently on the windowsill as Norrie’s laughter echoed in the back of her skull.
“Is everything here for sale?” Lucy asked the girl. She quirked an eyebrow in response.
“For the right price, it can be. Why, what’s caught your eye?”
Lucy nodded to the window display. “The orb. What do you want for it?”
The girl looked between Lucy and the crystal ball, before letting out a loud, barking laugh. “No offence, sweetheart, but you don’t look like you can even afford your next meal. I can’t see what you’d even be able to offer me in exchange - and I’m not looking to take on any new hires, before you ask. Why d’you want it?”
Twice in an hour now she’d been easily clocked, and it made her bristle. “I have money! I just…” Lucy shrugged. “Dunno. I know it sounds stupid, but it’s like it… looked at me. Like I saw something in it…” Her eyes drifted to the window, her vision blurring as the same smoke-like aura from earlier snaked through the air. The strong smell of incense burned her nose, one that definitely hadn’t been there when she entered the shop.
She shook her head, and the fog cleared. Something in this claustrophobic cupboard held some tendrils of a spirit - a very lonely one, by the chilling feeling of it - but Lucy didn’t intend to hang about and find out what that item was, nor what the entity wanted. The girl alone (never mind the smell) was enough to put her on edge, and Lucy decided she could keep the sad spirit in her window. “Plus, I can start up my bullshit fortune telling thing again to get a bit of coin.” She tried to sound nonchalant and prayed her voice didn’t wobble.
The girl laughed. Well, Lucy hoped it was a laugh - it sounded more like a wounded dog yelping “I do like a good con, I will admit. You almost had me believing you for a second! Tell you what - I’m never lacking for glass baubles like that one. Found it down on the river bank and cleaned it up to dress up the window a bit. Take it - it’ll be one less thing for me to dust.”
“Did you find all of this stuff down by the river?” Well, it certainly solved the mystery of the smell, but Lucy wouldn’t completely rule out her dead flesh theory. “How much for the orb, then?”
As they haggled, Lucy looked back and forth between the crystal ball and the flyer for Fairfax’s Carnival, and a plan began to form in her head. Even if Fairfax wasn’t looking for a Fortune Telling act, it was quickly coming to the height of summer, and there would be plenty of other travelling carnivals passing through London’s many parks. Surely one of them would be looking for an act that she could do?
As if the girl could read her mind, she tapped the Fairfax flyer as Lucy dropped the orb into the safety of her bag. “If you’re planning on going back into the future reading con for real, don’t bother finding a place ‘round here. Every back alley broad is giving it a try, and the pubs and buildings round ‘ere are inundated with idiots swapping coin for the shittest excuse of a glimpse at what the future holds. I know on good authority that the Fairfax Carnival doesn’t currently have an act of that style, and from what I’ve seen, I know you’d be better off there than trying ‘round here.”
“How do you know? Have you been?”
“Nah, not my scene. But a few of my mates work there, and if you speak to the right person, they might be able to help you get a word with Fairfax.”
Lucy couldn’t believe her luck. “Really?”
“Look for a boy with scars on his face. ‘Round his eyes, they are. That’s Danny - tell him Flo Bones sent ya, and he should point you in the right direction. I can’t promise it’ll work out in your favour, but it’s the most I can do.”
“Well, thank you. For the tip, and for the -” she shrugged the shoulder that held the bag containing the ball.
“Yeah, yeah, whatever. Now get going, doll, I want to close up for the night. Good luck with whatever graft you settle on.” She began to shoo Lucy out of the shop, and as the door slammed shut behind her, Lucy had never felt more happy to smell the stinking streets of London. It was certainly preferable to whatever the hell the girl, Flo, had going on inside there. She could only hope that Flo’s companions at the carnival smelled sweeter.
She glanced in the shop window one more time, her eyes sweeping over the now empty space where the orb sat, and tried her best to fix her hair into some form of acceptable sight. Once she’d accepted that it was as good as she was going to get, she pulled out both the Hope House pamphlet and the Fairfax Carnival flyer.
It wasn’t quite late enough that she would need to retire for the evening, and Regent’s Park wasn’t that far away…
Decision made, Lucy hoisted her bag higher on her shoulder, and headed in the direction of the Fairfax Carnival.