a spell in silver nitrate

Status: drafting

In an alternative Victorian England where most people think photography is dark magic, eighteen-year-old Iris is sick and tired of working in her uncle’s funeral parlor taking post-mortem memorial pictures. When the villagers accuse her of witchcraft and burn her lab, she decides to travel to the bleak northern moors, where a renowned chemist has established a boarding school dedicated to the science of photography. Iris convinces the chemist to hire her as a teacher’s assistant, but when she discovers he is using dark magic to create alternative dimensions, she must overcome her skepticism before he transports the entire school into a world of his own making.

The vicar plucks a crocus from the roadside. He takes my hand and presses the flower against my sleeve. My dress should be red, my hand peach. My wrists should be crisscrossed with veins of pale blue and purple. But the vivid, yellow blossom reveals the truth. My skin, clothes, and nails are all shades of gray. The vicar’s thumb sinks slightly into the upper surface of my hand, as if I were made of water, and the hand itself is translucent. I can see his fingers, the ones beneath my hand, as if through a vapor of iodine.

“No.” I shake my head. “No.”

“Don’t be afraid, Iris. I’m sure something can be done to…

“Heal me?”

The vicar’s eyes fill with sadness. When he speaks, he uses his mourning voice. A voice for mothers of dead children and old men wasting away of cancer. The voice he used when he eased bread into the flaccid mouth of Amalia Draper, whose soul was stolen by Lord Charnelbrooke.

“I’m sure something could be done to set you free.”

“You mean to exorcise me!” I rip my hand out of his. Tears fall from my eyes. They do not roll down my cheeks, but drop straight down through my body and into the dust. My fingers tighten into fists. “I am not a ghost, Solomon.”

I step backwards. My heart feels like it’s melting. My skin fizzles and burns like a pewter plate etched with acid. I recall how the schoolchildren claimed their fellows had dissolved in the mist around the manor. Separated from Lord Charnelbrooke’s wicked magic, I too am dissolving.