There was a rushing sound through the room, in an ethereal echo, as if a great door had been opened.
“There’s a host of children,” Zofia said, uneasy. “And they’ve been wronged somehow.”
“We are listening,” Cora responded, speaking loudly to the spirit world as a whole but nodding at Zofia to make sure the girl knew she was heard and understood. So often spirits spoke, trying to help the living, and were ignored.
A thousand whispers crested around the mediums like a tidal wave, a jumble of woe, impossible to make out one word over the next. Little Jenny clapped her hands over her ears. Antonia, her tall, wide-shouldered body sitting starkly still and bolt straight, winced. Cora released a held breath carefully, slowly, as if she were lowering a great weight onto her delicate shoulders, untucking a handkerchief from her lace cuff to dab at the moisture that had sprung up on her light brown brow.
There was another sound, a scuttling behind them, though they could see nothing. They felt presences they could not see. Ghosts were unpredictable in the ways in which they manifested. The scurrying sound, accompanied by the same wash of urgent whispers, swept over to the locked file cabinets against their rear wall.
The young women turned their heads very slowly.
Just because one worked with the dead didn’t mean they couldn’t be frightening. Spirits were often creatures of startle and shock.
The precinct file cabinets flew open.
All of the women jumped.
“But we don’t even have all the keys,” Cora said, wondering how the ghosts could possibly have unlocked the dusty old wooden cabinets filled with incomplete and shoddily taken case notes from earlier decades of corruption and disarray.
Below one of the four desks scattered about the long room, the center drawer creaked open of its own accord. Then another desk’s drawer. Then a third. Papers rustled, and a few flew out. Then a few more.
Jenny edged over to the seventeen-year-old Antonia, who held her long arm out for the little girl who had become a surrogate sister, and the child tucked in against her. Antonia kept herself calm and collected, for Jenny’s sake if nothing else. The little girl didn’t need to sign, or write a note to be understood, her small form shook, making Antonia hold her all the tighter. The child didn’t need to have any further traumas added to her condition of selective mutism.
“Spirits, what do you wish to tell us?” Cora demanded, finding her voice.
“And why this display? You’ve never been the sort to give us poltergeists!” Antonia exclaimed.
“Find us…” came a murmur that consolidated from the voices, the words racing around the room in a freezing chill, though no spirits could be seen to have made the declaration. It came from the fabric of the air itself, repeating again, in aching earnest. “Come find what we’ve lost!”
A Summoning of Souls Page 31
