Just that. My name. Not even my first name. It was a caution, a stumbling block. “Yeah,” I sighed. “Yeah.” I withdrew, moving back against the other arm of the settee. Another bright flash made us wince, the thunder racing on the heels of the lightning. “Storm’s overhead.”
“The storm’s the size of a small city,” he muttered. “It’s got nowhere else to be but overhead.” He stretched, his legs brushing mine. He took his time moving back. “So it’s a dark and stormy night—”
“Afternoon,” I corrected. “It’s not even four yet.”
“Fine, fine. It’s a dark and stormy afternoon. Though that doesn’t really have the same gravitas, does it? In the spirit—ha— of things, let’s tell stories. You go first. Why aren’t you still at the university? Jacob said you were looking for a job.”
“I had one,” I grumbled. “I was a long term sub at a fancy-ass prep school.”
“A sub, hm? That’s not the usual thing for a young PhD.”
“You’re not very good at this fishing expedition.”
“Let’s play a different game then, if stories in the dark are too difficult for you. It’s called Three Truths and a Lie.”
“Or,” I suggested, unable to keep myself from touching his arm in the dark, my fingers skimming over the fine hairs there. “You could just ask me what you want to know.”
“I did. And you diverted.”
“I have been told I’m quite diverting when given the opportunity.”
“You know, I’m not sure how to break it to you but I don’t think that was the compliment you think it was.”
I laughed then, unable to stop myself. “How about this instead… It’s called Tedious But Necessary.”
“Oooooh, office work kink. Thanks, I hate it, as the kids say.”
“Kids? You’re…what? Twenty two?”
“Twenty six,” he replied primly, though even in the dark I could see a change had come over him. “Wait, how old did you think I was?”
“Early twenties,” I said. “The one bit of a clip of your show, I thought you looked far younger but in person? Definitely twenty one or twenty two.”
“Better than what I usually hear,” he sighed. “Alright, question me.” He waved an imperious hand at me. “Do your worst.”
He let me ask a scad of boring questions. Where was he born, what’s his favorite food, preferred airline, best book in the past five years. His answers were all pat and bored. Finally, I asked, “Were you always a medium?”
“Mmm. No. When I was a child, I was a small.” He widened his eyes at me, waiting.
“Did you just...”
“Mmmhmm.”
“Oh my god...” I buried my face in my hands and groaned. “That was awful.”
“It’s all part of my old world charm,” he informed me in lofty tones. “That and my ability to parallel park.”
Fellowes had gone still and for a moment I wondered if he was going to have another episode as he had upstairs, but after a few long breaths, he melted back against the arm of the sofa, a soft and warm shape I was itching to touch, skin against skin. “I’ve been doing this over half of my life,” he finally said. “My grandmother was quite the showperson. She traded heavily on my appearance. We, ah… We have a family tradition of mediumship.” There was just enough light to see he was giving me a challenging look. Waiting for me to cut him with words. When I just nodded, he sighed and pressed on. “For as far back as we know, everyone on both sides of the family had the Gift.”
“Both sides?” The anthropologist in me sat up. Metaphorically, anyway. The rest of me was still lazing comfortably. “That’s rather extraordinary, to trace something like that back more than a generation or two on both sides of a family.”
“You confuse me,” he said plaintively. “You’re supposed to tell me I’m a liar and a con man, not extraordinary.”
He sounded so befuddled, so off balance, that it tugged at something inside me. I wanted to reach for him but hesitated, instead nudging his leg with my foot in a poor substitute. “I… I want to apologize for being an ass. You didn’t deserve the Mark Thomas treatment.” He scoffed at that. “Skeptic just means ‘inclined to question,’ not ‘be an asshole’. And besides, I’m not talking about your skill set as anything other than a cultural belief. I don’t have the numbers in front of me, obviously, but finding a family group where a particular attribute such as mediumship can be traced bi-lineally and—”
“And,” he chuckled, “do you want me to finish my tragic back story or not?”
“Is it? Tragic, I mean” I shifted, leaning close again. “You don’t have to tell me.”
“This isn’t entirely altruistic,” he admitted, moving just a tiny bit towards me. Close enough that I could feel the tickle of his breath on my arm when he sighed. “I’m showing you mine so you can show me yours.” One eye opened, catching the lamplight and shining like some unseelie prince in the dark. “My grandmother wasn’t as strong as some of the others in the family. In fact, the Gift had been fading for a few generations. They’d been worried my mother didn’t have it since it didn’t appear until she was well into her teens. Well, enter me. Oscar Fellowes, child prodigy. Except instead of piano or math, it was talking to dead people.”
I had a sick knot in my stomach. He’d already let slip enough that I knew where this story was going even before he got to the worst part. “Fellowes…”
“When my grandmother started raising me after my mother died, she saw a way to turn things around.”
“Selling your talents to the high bidder.”
“You make it sound far more tragic than it was. We did the dame and poodle circuit, going to posh house parties and the like. They’d pay her a ridiculous sum to hold a theatrical seance, trading on the family name of course. Then, as the grand finale, out I’d trot, relaying messages in a little lispy voice in my dungarees. Or, if it was late in the evening, my pajamas.”
“You sound like you hated it.”
“I did.” He’d moved an infinitesimal bit closer while he’d talked and now our thighs were touching. “But it became our one source of income once she realized she could make more at that than she could running her tea shop.” He didn’t move away but I felt him withdraw. He scrubbed his hands over his face and groaned in that way people do when they’re feeling awkward and tired and frustrated all at once. “She died a few years ago, before Ezra and I started Bump in the Night, and I kept doing the private seances to make ends meet. I started pulling back when the series became, to sound mercenary about it, profitable and I didn’t have to pin my livelihood on people hoping to hear from great aunt Nipsy about where she hid her good pearls.” He sighed, melting in on himself a bit. “When we started getting calls about interviews and going on talk shows, Ezra stepped up and became our spokesperson and my de facto agent. He’s the one who arranged the testing with Stanford and handled the… Well. There was an incident with a skeptic some time back that could have gone very poorly for people involved.” I was glad his eyes were closed because I was sure my face would show too much just then. He stretched, opening one eye. “So. Tag. You’re it.”
“All the all the outs in free,” I singsonged under my breath, making him smile again, just a little. “Nothing major. Just… fucked up royal at work, lost my job, got blacklisted from other colleges and universities which isn’t really saying much since jobs in my field are hard to come by, got a shitty job as a sub at a private school, and they declined to renew my contract for next year so…” I spread my hands and tried for nonchalant. I must have missed by miles because he was staring at me with a look of concerned pity. I pressed on. “Cec called me the other morning, harassed me into a dinner meeting with Jacob, long story short, here I am.” It was the very bare bones but it was all I was willing to share.
“Being a professional skeptic.”
“Go to grad school, get a PhD, and you, too, can end up on a reality show,” I said in an enthusiastic announcer voice. “Could be wor
se,” I added. “Jacob was thinking about making us do this naked.” Fellowes sputtered, folding forward as he choked on air, torn between laughing and shouting. “We’d have been the very first naked ghost hunters,” I said, coaxing a coughing laugh out of him. “Maybe we could cover our bait and tackle with well-placed orbs.”
“Oh my, God,” he wheezed. “Stop, stop!”
He’d fallen forward, still giggling, against my shoulder. I decided I wouldn’t move him, even if the house was on fire. He sigh-laughed and, rather than moving away, turned his head so he could peer up at me with one eye. “How’s your head?”
Fellowes smiled slowly, eyes closed again. “Never had any complaints,” he said, repeating the old Elvira: Mistress of the Dark line.
“Holy shit,” I snickered. “That was so bad.”
“Mmm.” He closed his eyes again and his smile faded. Pushing away from me, he returned to his spot on the other side of the settee. “Did you get much of a chance to look at the diary?”
The conversational whiplash was disorienting for a moment. I could practically hear the steel doors slamming shut over his good humor. And, frankly, mine. “Just a few pages. Enough to tell whoever wrote it didn’t put their name in it anywhere.” I told him of my theory regarding the diarist being an educated, likely wealthy, woman of the house and not one of the servants.
He tipped his head to one side, considering. “I think… Perhaps later, I can ask someone for some information, see what she knows.” He caught his lower lip between his teeth, nibbling delicately at the plump flesh. “I’ve been giving some thought to the deaths, the original string of them and then Paul Lacroix-ne-Hendricks decades later. I won’t know for sure unless I can get the right people to talk to me, but I have a very strong feeling Paul’s death was unintentional.”
For a moment, just a tiny one, I thought he meant people at the historical society when he referred to getting the right people to speak with him. Or maybe some old fashioned murder enthusiast, one of those weird podcast types who had The Truth Is Out There posters unironically. “You’re going to ask a ghost.” The words were flat, landing heavy between us.
“Well, that is why I’m here, isn’t it?” The cheerfulness rang false, a thin veneer over something already cracked.
“Right.” I was thankful when, a moment later, Jacob’s voice boomed out of the front hall, calling for me and Oscar to ‘get our shit together’ and ‘show up.’ “Sounds like our break’s over and we’re back on shift.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
Oscar
A generator rumbled, lending a low and constant thrum of anxiety to the afternoon. Since the call with Xavier was off for the time being, Jacob decided it was interview time. Promo would start rolling out in earnest in just a few days and, save for some pre-fab type stuff Jacob’s staff had engineered, we were seriously lacking in anything to send to media outlets or even post on UnReality’s website. The library had been reset, the stereotypical atmospheric skull and lantern decor removed for the time being and the space flooded with light courtesy of the little generator that could and a lighting rig being babied along by two of the burlier crew members. Julian and I watched from the doorway as Stella ordered minute tweaks to the lighting and Jacob huddled over his phone.
“Bless their hearts,” he muttered. “This is like watching a bunch of ants.”
“Were you aware that sometimes you slip into very Southern speech patterns? Most of the time you’re sort of… neutral.” And it does weird things to my stomach when you drop the non-accent accent, I wanted to add but I knew better.
A corner of his mouth lifted in a half-smile. “Habit I got into as an undergrad. I was a TA for one of the sociology professors and some students kept referring to me as a hick and worse, so I started making an effort to speak in a more neutral accent.” He looked a bit embarrassed, a flush of red on his throat and darting glances in my direction as he added, “When I started teaching at the university level, I made every effort to ensure I sounded as bland as possible when it came to my speech patterns and accent.”
“That’s too bad,” I said, settling more comfortably on the chaise lounge. “I rather like it when you sound all cowboy.”
“Cowboy?” he gasped in mock (at least I assumed it was mock) offense, thickening his accent to a distinctly Deep South drawl. “Why, I never!”
“Maybe you should,” I muttered. It startled a laugh out of him, a burst of raucous sound that startled several crew members and, I noticed, CeCe. She’d been propped on one of the low sofas, her leg elevated as she tapped away on her laptop. Weems’ laugh had made her look up, though, wide-eyed and wondering as she stared at her brother who had just split the air with his cackling laughter. “I have to ask--”
“You have to?”
“I can tell you’re a professor. You do that pedantic thing when someone uses colloquial phrasing.”
“All part of my charm.” Did he wink at me? Did he wink at me or is he having a stroke? “So what do you have to ask, then?”
“Jules,” CeCe called. “A moment?”
“It’ll have to wait,” I said, shrugging apologetically. He looked as if he begged to differ, but his sister made an impatient noise. “Go on. Not like you won’t be able to find me later.”
He sighed gustily and trotted over to his sister’s side, dropping into a crouch next to the sofa. I absolutely did not pause a moment to admire the things that did for his backside in those jeans. It was two moments.
“Since Doctor Weems is occupied,” Stella announced in a brittle voice, “we’ll start with you, Mr. Fellowes. The first set is going to be just a brief rundown of your background as a medium and a bit about Bump in the Night and why you chose to bring it to UnReality.”
Ezra loomed up beside me, shifting from his spot near the buffet table to glare at Stella. “Guess telling them it was because of all the zeroes on that check wouldn’t work?”
Stella made a low, impatient noise. “Gentlemen, we have a limited amount of time with the generators. We need to get these recordings done now.”
Ezra elbowed me none too gently and we took up our marked spots on the black pleather settee someone had dragged from god knows where for the shoot. “I hope they can edit out the fart noises this thing makes,” Ezra muttered. Stella’s glare intensified to lethal levels.
“Let’s get this over with,” I whispered. “Before she ruptures something.”
The filming took less than twenty minutes for our bit. It was all pat answers, glowing praise of UnReality scripted by Jacob most likely, blather about wanting to be able to share our investigations with a wider audience so they know they are ‘not alone with their experiences’ and ‘have nothing to fear.’ By the end of it, I could feel the vibrations in the air, the weird sensation of expectation that came when spirits were near. None were showing themselves or seeking attention yet, but I could feel them clustering around us. Curious, watchful, and not a little annoyed. It was impossible for me to parse them into individual entities but I knew there were several present, and at least one of them was anxious enough to cause Ezra to mirror the emotion. He was nervously tweaking at a cuticle, his breathing coming faster than at the start of our recording. We wrapped just as Jacob strode in from the foyer, deep in consultation with Ernest about access to some part of the house or other. Stella darted to his side, all smiles and effusive praise for how well things were going so far.
“Is she on the same show as us?” Ezra murmured shakily. “Christ, I need a smoke.”
“You quit three years ago,” I reminded him. “How about some tea instead?”
“Could you be more English?” he groused, but followed me to the snack table in the foyer anyway. A large, old fashioned urn had been set up with hot water boiled on a camp stove. Beside it was a wooden tea chest with an assortment of bagged and loose choices, a rather nice collection of china tea cups, and several trays of fruit and sliced vegetables. Ezra sighed and set about making himself a cup of Earl Grey. “Do
n’t smirk at me.”
“Just…you picked the most English tea you could find.”
“Wotcher, guv,” he drawled, saluting me with his cup of steeping tea. “Looks like your boyfriend is up next.”
“Oh, for the love of…” I grabbed a random bag from the chest and poured myself some hot water. “Seriously?”
“I’m off my game,” Ezra admitted. “I usually would have just jumped straight to the pervy comments about how he ate that peach earlier.”
“I know!” I leaned back a bit to see into the library. Weems was glaring at the camera, lips pressed into a thin line. “Ugh. I think he’s sexy even when he’s making that face.” To be fair, he was absolutely giving off that stern professor vibe. His slightly too long dark hair flopped over one eye, just barely brow-length but in that sexy, slightly disheveled way, and the whole tie and button up thing was just… Well. It was doing it for me. And Ezra was smirking. A lot. “Shut up.”
“I’m just saying, a man who eats a peach like that?” He shook his head. “Go to his room when things happen. We share a wall and I do not need to know what he sounds like when he cums.”
“Drink your tea,” I muttered. He laughed, saluting me with his cup, before taking a sip.
“Stop.”
Ezra and I both looked up and ‘round at that. It was a clear, firm voice, distinctly feminine, very close. Close enough to sound as if the speaker were standing between us. Our gazes met, Ezra’s brows furrowing. “I heard too,” he said, a tinge of awe in his voice. “I’ve never…”
“Just a second. We have to…” I glanced around at the foyer. We were nearly alone. Just one of the assistant camera operators lingering by the library door, and that PA with the long, red ponytail sitting halfway down the steps, fiddling with her phone. They were both neither paying us any mind. The cold vibration of the ghost was strong, though. Singular. If they’d been with the others in the library, they were alone now. Alone and strong enough to be heard aloud.
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