by Mary Bowers
“In what way?” she asked, elbows coming down on the table as she leaned forward.
“Oh, it’s a long, sordid story,” Ed said wearily.
“You’re right,” Maryellen breathed. “I am interested. Go on.”
“Teddy Force was once engaged to be married to our production assistant Lily Parsons. It was a terrible match, and Lily came to her senses in time, broke off the engagement and quit the show and Teddy at the same time. Well, now she’s back.” Ed gazed ahead disapprovingly, as if that were the end of the story.
Maryellen fluttered her eyelashes suggestively. “And . . . ?”
“And now we find ourselves with a flirtatious, scantily-clad innkeeper who openly admires Teddy and his bulging muscles. Lily still wants nothing to do with him, but Arielle is always hanging around him, panting and trembling. It’s most distracting.”
“Teddy is fooling around with Arielle?” I asked.
“No,” Ed said as if I were obtuse. “Teddy is using Arielle to try to make Lily jealous, if I’m reading the situation right. These things are outside my area of expertise, but they’re being so obvious, anybody could figure it out. Even me.”
“Is it working?” Maryellen asked.
“I don’t think so. Lily isn’t a fool. But the result of all these shenanigans is that I seem to be the only one working, or even thinking about work. And now Arielle is having fights with her relatives in front of her guests. Really, if I weren’t such a strongly focused person, I’d find the working environment impossible. That’s why,” he said, looking at Maryellen and fending off the questions she was obviously bubbling over with, “I’m so grateful to you for allowing me access to the object under investigation without Oswald, Teddy, Arielle, or anybody else interfering.”
“Just don’t touch it,” Maryellen said. “I loved watching you taking readings with your instruments, but for right now I don’t want it moved.”
Ed looked dismayed. “You too? If you think the cup can kill you, why do you have it in your house.”
“I don’t think that – that’s not it at all. You can touch it all you want after I’m finished painting it. Good grief, why is everybody obsessed with touching the stupid cup? Ozzie’s right; people just can’t keep their hands off things. I’ve got my values – the lights and darks – right where I want them, and I don’t want you moving it.”
“What kind of readings were you taking?” I asked Ed. “Did you get anything?”
“I followed the normal protocols, of course. EMF meter, EVP recorder, infrared, and a few little toys of my own invention.”
“The Full-Color Goggles thing?” I asked, remembering the last “little toy” he’d shown me.
“The Full-Spectrum Clarifier, yes, although I invented it to search for what I like to call ‘the spirit zone’ – the exact location in the light spectrum where paranormal entities might be visible to the living eye. In this application, of course, I was looking for smaller manifestations, since a full-body occupation would be impossible in a teacup.”
I was watching everyone, Maryellen in particular, for signs that they were amusing themselves at Ed’s expense. When I saw Maryellen reaching for her pencil cup, I caught her eye and imperceptibly shook my head. No writing down jargon just so she could lard up her book with it.
While I was keeping Maryellen in line, The Professor asked, “What kind of manifestations?”
Ed shrugged. “Ball light, energy spikes, even materializations of small physical details. Eyes. A moving mouth. Things like that.”
“Fascinating,” The Professor said.
I started to glare at The Professor, but I suddenly realized that he actually was fascinated. He wasn’t watching Ed with a badly-controlled smirk, as Maryellen was.
“I suppose it’s no great loss that you won’t let me touch it,” Ed finally said. “I have no psychometric abilities, like Taylor, here. I cannot read an object by simply handling it.”
I didn’t bother to protest.
“Fate seems to be conspiring against us there, Taylor,” he added. “How do you interpret that? Does the cup itself not want to be touched?”
“I was able to grab it out of the cabinet all right.”
“True, but it was during a chaotic moment, when all of us, possibly even the entity inhabiting the cup, might have been unsuspecting.”
“Nobody knew that I was going to do that,” I said, putting it into English.
“Or perhaps you were responding to an exercise of will,” The Professor said. “I’m putting it badly, of course, but perhaps the entity possessing the cup wanted to escape the cabinet, and it used you to accomplish that.”
Ed seemed intrigued by the concept. Before it could go any farther, I quickly asked Ed, “Did you get any results from your tests?”
He hesitated.
“With the usual disclaimers,” I said, “what did you get? A spike in electrical energy?” That’s the most common thing he gets from his instruments.
“I wasn’t looking at the EMF at the time.”
“So there might have been a spike,” I prodded. “You saw something? When you were looking through the Full-Spectrum thing?”
His head began to nod, seemingly without his brain’s permission. Finally, he said, “Something . . . was there.”
I glanced around the table and the others looked back at me. “Eyes?” I asked, since he’d mentioned them earlier.
“A . . . .” He was working hard against it, expecting to be disbelieved. Finally, he disgorged it. “A face. Small, distorted . . . moving. When I fixed on it, it seemed to realize it. There was a moment of, oh, what’s the word? Disconcertedness. It then dissipated. Not a sudden winking out, as with the ball lights, when you see them. All this happened in a split-second, you understand. Afterwards, one asks oneself if it really happened. But it did, I’m sure of it. Staring eyes followed by a fading out, with an expression such as you’d expect from a woman you’d suddenly caught in the nude.”
“It was a woman?” I asked.
“I . . . .” He turned to me in surprise. “Why, yes. It didn’t register at the time, I was so jolted by it. Even now I have those moments of disbelief which eat up critical time for observation when there is a materialization, but I believe it was a woman.”
Maryellen punctured the chill of the moment by acidly injecting, “Sounds more like Marnie than Lydia.” She looked around brightly. “Could the cup be catching them and keeping them trapped?”
Ed looked horrified.
“Is that even possible?” I asked him. “I mean, you’re the expert. Have you ever heard of anything like that happening?”
“Of course,” he said in a gravelly voice. He stopped, cleared his throat and went on. “I’ve heard of such things; all paranormal investigators have. It’s rare, though. In all depends on the malice of the entity originally inhabiting the object. Or the depravity.”
“Lydia was crazy, all right,” Maryellen said matter-of-factly.
“I . . . may I take another reading?” Ed said, suddenly twitchy.
“Knock yourself out,” Maryellen said with a sweeping gesture toward the dining room. “Just don’t touch it.”
Chapter 12
Ed got up and hurried to the hall beside the dining room, where he’d left his equipment satchel. He went down on his knees and began digging into the bag.
The Professor turned to me and quietly asked, “Do we remain in our seats and try not to be distracting, or do you think he’d object if I went over to observe?”
“I don’t think he’d mind.” I turned in my seat to ask. “Ed, do you mind if The Professor comes over and watches?”
Startled, Ed poked his head up like a bird. “If he won’t move around or ask questions until I’m finished, I don’t mind.”
“Agreed.” The Professor got up and went quietly into the dining room as Ed approached the painting set-up with a tricked-out helmet/goggles combination between his hands. Once he was in position over the teacup, he caref
ully settled the apparatus onto his head and over his eyes.
Maryellen sat shaking her head at them. Then she yelled, “And remember, don’t touch it!” She’d been deliberately loud, and I gave her an exasperated look.
“You believe in all this crap?” she asked me, lowering her voice.
“Ed does,” I told her. “And I respect his beliefs.”
She gazed at me a moment, then said, “Touché.”
Michael, Maryellen and I watched silently from the breakfast nook as Ed settled and became statue-like. After a moment, he began to move his head with a tiny scanning motion, hitting all the angles over the teacup. Then he stopped, gave his head a little shake, bore down slightly and began to make tiny adjustments to some controls at the sides of the helmet. It looked as if he were carefully scratching his ears, but no one seemed amused by it. The Professor watched silently, his face serious, glancing from the cup to Ed and back again.
I had a very definite impression, watching The Professor. I would have expected him to be taking mental notes for an article, but what I saw was genuine interest, along with a hint of trepidation. When Ed relaxed, apparently finished, and lifted the device off, The Professor said, “May I have a go?”
Ed looked surprised, but after a brief hesitation, he agreed. He adjusted the thing on The Professor’s head and showed him how to move the tuning dials, once he had the thing on.
“Now he’s going to be seeing things,” Maryellen murmured.
I turned to her. “Is he the suggestible type?”
She gave me a shrug and looked back into the dining room until The Professor asked Ed to take the device off him. Neither man commented on his experience, or even spoke, but they seemed very sober. They didn’t look at one another. Ed packed the device away and both men came back to the breakfast table without speaking. They sat down, not looking at anybody.
“Well, guys?” I asked at last.
Ed addressed The Professor. “Your impressions, sir? You go first, if you will.”
The Professor’s voice came out on a gust of breath. “I saw her.”
I was stunned, for some reason, and I could see Michael was too. He’d been so dismissive earlier in the day. Maryellen’s amusement began to seem forced, but it was still there.
“Eyes. Mostly eyes,” The Professor went on, “but that mouth. She was waiting for us this time. I believe that I am truly sorry I looked. She saw me.”
“Holy cow,” Maryellen said broadly. “You might be next instead of me!”
The Professor shot a look at her and she subsided.
“Who was it that you saw?” I asked. “Could you tell?”
“Lydia,” he said. “And Maryellen is right. I believe the woman is insane. Those eyes . . . .”
He seemed truly distressed, and I took the focus to Ed to give The Professor a moment to compose himself.
“Ed? What did you see.”
“As The Professor said, she was waiting for me this time,” he said calmly. “I’m quite thrilled, really very pleased. It’s the first time I’ve gotten results with the Clarifier. It’s always gratifying to have your theories put into practical use, and then have them yield results.”
He sounded stunned, not thrilled. Turning to me suddenly, he said, “You’re here for observation too. I should have offered the device to you. Would you like to have a look?”
My mouth went dry.
Then I mentally gave myself a shake. I’d taken the long drive to Key West, doubting all the way, trying to have it both ways. Telling myself I was only doing this for Ed, telling myself I wasn’t one of those people and I was only taking the trip for Michael’s sake. It made me see what a hypocrite I was being, but how do you keep your balance when you want to have an open mind but you’re afraid of what you might see? That fear closes your mind, shuts you down.
I wasn’t going to shut down.
“Sure,” I said, standing up.
“You don’t have to do this, Taylor,” Michael said. “After all, you’re a spirit medium, not a scientist, like Ed. It’s different, what he does, from what you do.”
“She doesn’t really know what she is yet,” Ed said. “She won’t open herself up to it.”
“I’m open already,” I said shortly. “Let’s do this.”
* * * * *
I tend to get seasick. I suppose that’s why my first look through those goggles made me feel nauseous. But I steadied my head and it was better after that. You have to stand absolutely still, I realized. Try not to breathe.
We’d gone to stand over the set-up before I’d let Ed put the thing on me, and suddenly I was all alone inside it. It’s funny how dependent we are on sight and sound. My ears were covered and I couldn’t tell if anybody was talking or not. The air around me had stopped. How odd to think that we can hear the air, but I was suddenly intensely aware its absence, now that I couldn’t. And sight. It wasn’t as if I had suddenly gone blind; it was more like I was suddenly looking through the eyes of an alien. Everything was different. Colors were vibrating around the edges of things, and if I moved my head even slightly, there was wholesale distortion, as if somebody had given the edge of the world a spin.
I mastered it as best I could and found myself staring at a fancy scallop at the edge of the doily, contemplating the beauty of the soft green crochet thread against the pinky-purple of the cup. Everything was enormous: the crochet threads were ropes; the cup was a porcelain fortress. When I felt ready, I moved my sightline over the saucer’s edge and into the well of the cup.
Yes, I told myself calmly, there is a face there. Is it mine? With those goggles and that headgear on, I’d look pretty monstrous, especially reflected inside a curving surface. Fun-house stuff. A stretched-out mouth doing fish bubbles, big roundy eyes that didn’t blink, a misshapen head. White hair, messy curls, a cotton-mouthed voice coming through a partition, yelling at me. Trying to tell me something. A warning? A threat? The sound of it was linked with the vision, coming up out of the same hole in the universe. A woman’s voice. Angry. Or terrified. I couldn’t tell.
I tried stretching my mouth wide to see if the image in the cup would do the same. It didn’t. It continued making fish bubbles, out of sync with me.
Curls. My hair is straight.
I tried to look hard, hold my head very still and look very hard, but the white hair was still moving, snapping like snakes, stretching and contracting inside the curve of the cup. Maybe I wasn’t holding my head still enough after all. I couldn’t tell anymore. I didn’t know if I was standing still and the earth was moving or I was floating around inside a space capsule, or I was standing on a ladder and it suddenly gave way and in that moment in time I was falling, everything moving away and avoiding me as I groped through empty air for something to save myself. I began to fall.
I threw the thing off my head in a jerking motion and the world was so normal it disoriented me again. I couldn’t get back to the planet. That was funny, and I giggled.
Ed was taking the helmet-goggles away from me and I slurred, “Sorry, I shouldn’t have yanked it off like that. Did I break it?”
“Of course not,” he said soothingly. He was gently guiding me to a nearby chair which he’d pulled out, and people were standing around me.
Maryellen wasn’t laughing anymore.
I looked around, empty-headed, and somebody asked, “What did you see?”
It was The Professor, and he looked grim.
I looked at him as if he genuinely intrigued me. What had I seen?
“She’s angry about something,” I commented, almost to myself.
“Lydia?” Maryellen asked eagerly.
I looked at her and frowned.
“Did you say Camille found him at the foot of a ladder?” I asked.
“What?” she said, surprised. “What ladder? Oh! Yes, Camille found him at the foot of a ladder. He’d been changing a battery in a smoke alarm, remember?”
“Did the ladder tip over?”
“No. It was
upright.”
“No it wasn’t,” I said definitely. “It fell, and he fell with it.”
Puzzled, they were all looking around at one another, and Michael said, “What’s she talking about?”
I lifted my hands, as I had (literally?) when I’d been looking into the cup. Not my hands, his hands.
“He was reaching for something to catch onto, to keep himself from falling, and there was nothing there.”
“She’s talking about Ferdie,” Maryellen said steadily. “Ferdie was the first victim. He fell off a ladder.”
“No he didn’t,” I said. “The ladder fell off him.”
There was a moment of consternation, and then Maryellen said, “Come along, dear, I’ll make you a cup of tea. Can you get up?”
I could hear the men murmuring together behind me as she guided me away from them and back to the breakfast table.
I had a headache. Sudden, hammering. I missed a lot of what was said as they all came back and settled tentatively at the table.
I didn’t rejoin them, so to speak, until I heard Ed say to Maryellen, “Can you estimate how long it will take you to finish your painting? I think it’s more important than ever now. When, if I may ask, will Taylor have psychometric access to the cup?”
I was happy to realize that Maryellen wasn’t being flippant anymore. “I can’t work on the painting again until tomorrow, early afternoon. The light won’t be right again until then. I’ll probably do my third statement tomorrow, and that’s all I usually do. But I like to take a couple of days to pick at it afterwards.”
“Two or three days?” Ed said, agonized. “Our time in Key West will nearly be up by then. We have to begin shooting by the day after tomorrow, and so far, all we have is a premise. I’ve made a decision,” he declared suddenly. “We’re going with the cup. Nobody else is even scouting for a story, and I simply refuse to run amok in yet another cemetery when we’ve done no preliminary research on the interred. We’re going with the cup, and we need to firm up a narrative so we can work out a sequence for the shoot. Professor.”
