as she attempted to comfort me. My transgressions of earlier finally forgotten with the frightful moment. Until moments ago, I shook furiously, but that had finally calmed. Across from us, Vambéry wrote all in his notes. He asked me to describe the trunk, and I did as best I could.
“It was a dark-stained wood with a flat top and silver hinges and locks.”
“Silver? Are you sure of this?”
“They were silver in color, but I cannot be certain as to the actual metal.”
“What about the dimensions? How long and how wide?”
I thought about this question for a minute, my mind picturing Ellen placing a leg inside the trunk, with plenty of room to spare. “At least four feet long and about two feet tall. Probably two feet wide as well.”
“Any identifying marks or labels?”
“Not that I noticed.”
“But there may have been some?”
“Possibly.”
Through all of this, Matilda remained silent. She appeared to be writing in her own diary, but when she held up her sketchbook, I realized she had been drawing instead. “Did it look anything like this?”
She had drawn the trunk in painstaking detail, and when I saw the image, I recognized it immediately. “Exactly like that.”
Vambéry reached for Matilda’s sketchbook. “May I?”
I leaned forward and studied the drawing. “There was an intricate pattern stenciling the trunk, something carved into the wood, the same image repeated over and over again. But only on the outside; its interior was plain, lined with felt or maybe velvet.”
Vambéry made note of this, then returned his gaze to me. “This is important, Bram, so I wish for you to close your eyes and think hard. Think of the interior of the trunk first, since that is your strongest memory; picture it in your mind, every last detail.”
I did as he said and forced my mind to focus on that horrible image: Ellen placing body part after body part within the trunk.
Vambéry went on. “When you see the interior clearly in your mind, I wish for you to turn your attention to the outside of the trunk. The mind is a wonderful instrument, capable of so much more than we understand. You do not have to take in these images as a passive observer; if you concentrate, you can pause them. You can step closer to that trunk, so close that you can touch the wood with your hands and feel the patterns with your fingertips.”
Vambéry’s voice grew melodic, soothing. He spoke to me in a deliberately flat cadence; he would later explain he had subjected me to hypnosis, a phenomenon Professor Dowden had introduced to me at Trinity. When I heard his voice again, he sounded distant. I saw the trunk again, but this time Ellen was frozen, her hands about to place the torso inside, a male torso. She held it there so effortlessly, even though it probably weighed eighty to ninety pounds. I took a step closer to the trunk, then another, until I stood in front. I noticed the weight of its contents caused the trunk to sink slightly in the soft earth, and I couldn’t help but wonder how Ellen would move it from this place. She looked radiant in the moonlight, her face frozen in this memory, framed by her long hair, still wet from the bog. Her eyes were blue on this night, a deep blue, reminding me of the ocean at the moment the sun dipped beneath the horizon and night took hold. This was the Ellen I recalled from childhood, unchanged and vibrant. Concern filled her face, though, an urgency as she went about this business.
“The trunk, Bram, focus on the trunk,” Matilda said, and I suddenly felt her beside me, the warmth of her hand again in mine.
I turned back to the image of the trunk and leaned in hard.
I imagined my fingers slipping over its surface, the engraving feeling as real as if I were kneeling right beside it. The pattern rendered was small and intricate, and I couldn’t decipher it. A series of grooves, really, each no more than half an inch long, one after the other. The entire outside was covered, not a