by Ellen Datlow
“I daresay you remember her room, a big ordinary drawing room, with a terrific lot of Indian stuff about it, in Queen Anne’s Mansions. Not in the least bogeyfied as far as the house went; but of course there was that disagreeable skeleton of the old West Indian Obi worker in front of the fireplace. And there were other unpleasant things in the room, though I’ve rather forgotten what they were. I daresay South rather liked to have them about. They increased the feeling of mystery.
“Well, the meeting began about four. There might have been twenty of us. General Sir Neville Beville himself tied South into the ordinary bentwood American chair. South wasn’t looking at all well that day. Extraordinarily pale he was, and with his eyes unusually big.
“The general tied and tied, and then South winced, and said: ‘Hi! I can’t stand that.’ The old general said, ‘Ah! I thought you wouldn’t be able to. That was a knot I used for tying up some of those Yogi fellows that did the murders in the Deccan.’
“ ‘But confound it,’ South exclaimed, ‘I’m not a murderer. There’s no need to tie the ropes until they eat into the flesh right through my skin. Damn it, you untie them!’
“The general grumbled a good deal; then he undid the knot, and South began to shake his hands and slap them together. They were perfectly blue. He began to explain to the general that he could not be expected to make any manifestations when he was in acute pain; he wouldn’t be able to keep his mind on the subject. And then he asked whether the general hadn’t brought the pair of police handcuffs that he had suggested using. The general went and got the handcuffs. They were put on South’s wrists behind the chair. Then the general took a piece of rope and tied it, from the cuffs, under the seat of the chair, to the front legs and around and around South’s legs and arms and body in all sorts of ways.
“South said he didn’t mind that, but he still complained that his hands hurt him, and he really appeared to be extraordinarily irritable.
“It came out most when the general began to press him to make a demonstration in open daylight. You understand the general was an absolute novice at the sort of thing. He had never been to a séance of any kind before, and he was one of those chaps who say they have an absolutely open mind. Usually South refused to answer many questions of that sort. He used to say he needed the darkness in order to be able to concentrate his mind. If he looked at any other objects they took his thoughts away. And usually that was taken to be sufficient. But the general went on pressing him and pressing him.
“ ‘Can’t you give an exhibition in the daylight?’ he kept on saying. ‘Can’t you? Can’t you?’
“And the South exclaimed with exasperation—almost in a sort of scream: ‘By God, I can!’
“He must have been in a really extraordinary state of irritation; indeed, he looked as if he might be going mad. Almost positively epileptic. He sat leaning forward on the ropes that tied him to the chair, and glared furiously at the general.
“ ‘Well, then, do it!’ the general said.
“Then fell a singular silence on us all. You see, we all believed in South. We all believed that he could make manifestations in the daylight, and we began to think he was going to do it then. It was decidedly the most unpleasant thing I’ve ever been in. The room, as I’ve pointed out, was quite commonplace. We could hear the rumble of the Underground if we listened carefully, and a chap a long way down below crying daffodils, and, occasionally, a muffin-bell, as one of the windows was open.
“I forgot to tell you what we really had come there for was to get a manifestation of the spirit of Anne Boleyn. She was an ancestress of General Neville Beville, and he was always talking about her. South kept staring at the general, and the general kept quiet. He explained afterwards that he didn’t want to interfere with the chap, who he supposed was praying or something.
“I daresay South was a good deal upset, if only because he had to find the forty thousand next day, or it would mean seven years for him. I’ve no doubt, swindler that he was, he was praying for a miracle as hard as he could go. After all, his whole life was in the balance, and I daresay his whole life was as important to him as anyone else’s is to anyone else. At any rate, no doubt he was willing it as hard as he could.
“One of the bones of the old skeleton in front of the fireplace—it was decorated with bits of brass wire and scarlet flannel—creaked in the oddest possible manner. There was nothing very mysterious about that. South used to insist on its being stood in front of the fire whenever he was going to manifest, though it usually stood in the corner of the room. When it got near the heat, of course, the wood it was hung on used to give a little, and so the bones moved. I’ve seen them move a dozen times.
“But South’s condition was so strained that he really gave a high squeak.
“Then the tambourine at South’s elbow moved. It jumped up and down perfectly plainly and visibly before all our eyes. It jingled and thumped, and South’s jaw just hung open, and he just gazed at it. It began to hop about the table from edge to edge. Then it fell over onto the floor, and jingled away towards the skeleton.
“South said in a husky voice, ‘Who’s doing that?’
“His face was towards the window, and all our backs were to it. Then he screamed—the most agonised beastly scream that I’ve ever heard outside of a lunatic asylum. Our eyes all followed his—a hand was coming in at the open window. You remember it was Anne Boleyn that we’d come there to meet. Well, this was Anne Boleyn’s hand. There was a distinct rudimentary, extra little finger. Anne Boleyn had six fingers on her right hand. That was why she was always drawn with her hands folded. She was very much ashamed of the defect.
“And the hand just came in at the window. It was dark against the light at first, then it looked white enough. It passed close to old Lady Arundale Maxwell’s face, and she exclaimed:
“ ‘How cold! How extraordinarily cold!’
“We weren’t any of us particularly moved—not extra moved. We’d all of us been to a good many séances, and had felt cold hands passing near our faces. But, of course, it was a sufficiently exciting thing to have it happen in broad daylight.
“But South’s mouth was hanging open; his eyes were starting out of his head, and there was perspiration all over his forehead. It was really most disagreeable to look at him.
“The hand stopped just beside General Neville Beville, at about a level with his chest. It was pointing towards South, with the first finger stretched out as if the person behind it were addressing him. He shrank back right against the back of his chair, huddling into it. The general slowly, and with a timidity that was singular in him, raised his own hand and just touched the other with his little finger. He drew his hand back sharply, as if he had had an electric shock. The hand began very slowly to move towards South. Then the medium screamed; he screamed very highly, and then exclaimed:
“ ‘Cut me loose! For God’s sake cut me loose. I shall go mad if it touches me.’
“It shows the state of agitation that he must have been in in that he made no attempt whatever to wriggle himself out of the handcuffs. In ordinary circumstances he could have done that as easily as you or I could take our waistcoats off. He went on imploring the general personally to let him loose. He abjured him, by his braveness as a soldier, to cut the ropes. I daresay it only took a moment or so, but this thing seemed to last for hours.
“The general certainly started towards the medium; he put his hand into his pocket to take out a penknife. Then the hand moved right across the general’s chest as if to bar his progress. He lifted up his left arm to push the hand away. And then we didn’t see any more of the general. I don’t mean to say that he disappeared in a flash, but it was as if we had forgotten him. You understand, he wasn’t there.
“He was found that afternoon wandering about Putney without a hat. He didn’t remember how he got there; he didn’t even remember who he was. It was a case of complete failure of the memory. The only thing that he could remember at the moment w
as Anne Boleyn’s hand; and he didn’t want to talk about that for fear of being laughed at. He never has talked about it except just once to me. The police took him home all right, of course, because he had his card case in his pocket, and he was all right again in a month or so.
“As for the hand, it just got nearer and nearer to the medium, and he continued screaming until it touched him. Then he became dead silent, and, after the contact, he exclaimed, ‘Cold! cold!’
“That’s all he’s ever done from that day to this. He walks about the grounds of a private lunatic asylum in Chiswick, shivering pitifully; but he will never be cured.”
“And what do you make of it all?” Charles Fowler asked.
“I don’t make anything at all,” Edward White answered. “Perhaps it was only the Grace of God. I mean that his collapse certainly saved quite a number of poor people from ruin, and possibly it saved me from becoming the accomplice—the quite unwitting accomplice, of course—of an atrocious charlatan. On the other hand, there’s the other possible view—the view that spiritualists are trying to make fashionable today—that mediums who are perfectly genuine sometimes have their days of failure, and reinforce themselves with bits of fishing line and inflatable rubber gloves.
“But for myself I’m perfectly convinced that the poor beast was a swindler just at the end of his tether, and that, in his agony, his will, which he didn’t really believe in, suddenly worked. He didn’t in the least believe in ghosts; he had to pretend that he did. And then suddenly the ghost came. That was why he was so horribly afraid. I think some of these chaps wouldn’t go on playing these tricks if they knew what it might let them in for.”
A Shade of Dusk
Indrapramit Das
I first learned to write in the dark when I was a little girl, scribbling secrets under my blanket (or just under the mosquito net, during summer) after the hurricane lamps were blown out. Electricity didn’t flow like water back then.
I took pages from my flimsy school notebook to make up this diary. My sister, Pouloma, gave me some from her notebook too. I hid the pages under our mattress. I wrote how much I hated the schoolmaster with his whip-thin cane and prickly temper, about how much my father shouted at my mother, about how I gave away bits of my lunch to the ducks, foxes, and dogs by the road on the way home from school. My parents threw out the diary when they found it. They didn’t want me keeping secrets in my room, never mind that a room and a girl will keep secrets even without pages to store them. My reward for observing my parents’ tyranny—and for destroying perfectly good notebooks—was a sore bottom from my father’s stiff, cigarette-scented palm. Much later, I would keep a diary when I went to university, to ward off the loneliness of foreign winters. After lights out I would sometimes keep writing in the dark, guided by the memory of home, where my sister was. Then I would mail her those pages as letters. She would write me back across the continents, but once she got married and pregnant, her telegrams came as rarely as new seasons.
• • •
This diary is fresh. My niece, Charu, gave it to me as a birthday present because I told her that story of writing in the dark. She calls it a journal. She thinks I’m forgetting things more often now. I hate to admit it, but she might be right. She came by yesterday with my grandnephew, who turned nine recently. I call him Potol because he likes when I make potoler dolma and send it over to their house, but I couldn’t remember his real name. I felt embarrassed to ask Charu. I remember her other boy’s real name—Sanjay. He’s a teenager now, so he doesn’t come over often, always off doing homework or spending time with his school friends.
While Potol watched cartoons on the TV, Charu went to the kitchen and bustled around there like she does. I heard her telling Kalpana, who was making dinner, to empty the garbage bags from the trash can more often because of the stench. When she came back to the table her nose was wrinkled. “Lokhi-Mashi, it smells bad in here. You should open the windows more often,” she said. I couldn’t smell anything but the frying cumin from the kitchen mingling unpleasantly with the smoke from the mosquito coil burning in one corner of the living room. I said I opened the windows all the time. She patted my hand and asked me if I needed anything. She was wearing a salwaar kameez. Charu always wears a salwaar kameez when she comes by to visit. It makes me wonder if she ever wears sarees anymore. She looks so much like her mother it feels strange, like seeing a modern version of Pampi (I do still remember that her real name is Pouloma), seeing her young again. But Pampi would never wear a salwaar kameez.
“Are you writing in your new journal? Are you able to?” Charu asked me.
I told her of course I was able to, I wasn’t entirely decrepit. I told her writing during power cuts in the evening made me feel like a little girl again, because I could tell that’s what she wanted to hear.
She smiled. Such a lovely smile. No wonder she found a good man like Bijoy. Pretty like her mother. But she smiles too much around me.
I told her not to tell her mother that I was writing a diary again, because she’d want to read it. I asked why Pampi was still in her room, anyway, why she was still sleeping so late into the evening. Charu flinched like I had hit her when I said that. She stopped meeting my eyes. I know that look. Something was wrong. Maybe they’d had a fight over the phone. Pampi never did get over her children selling our family house after their father died, the place she’d lived all her life before this little flat. I let it go. We drank our tea and watched the TV along with Potol in silence. My nephew, Pratik, bought this set for me—it’s small, but colour. On the screen, there was a laughing cartoon skeleton in a hood, with thick blue arms. I suppose he must have been Death, of a sort. I don’t know what kind of things they let children watch these days.
• • •
“You’re so ugly,” Pampi would say to me sometimes at night when we were children, to scare me, because older siblings love scaring the younger. That is just the way of the world. Boys and girls will take power wherever they can find it. So will men and women. “You’ll never get married. You’ll never have any babies because you need a husband to have babies,” she would say. She said it in a rasping voice, like a horrible creature. I would whimper in the moonlight at this terrible prophecy. If I screamed and complained to our parents, she would twist my ear later in revenge, her own cheek sore from my father’s hand. But during the day, she would hold my hand on the walk back from school, and shout at anyone who dared tease me, using her pretty looks and loud voice to stun them into submission.
• • •
Six decades since writing in the dark of my childhood bedroom, and Calcutta still has power cuts for hours. “Load shedding,” Pratik always announces when I bring it up. “Because of all the people getting air conditioners nowadays in summer,” he explains, sounding very much like his father, Chandrasekhar, who also used to tell me obvious things in that professorial tone. So I write in the dark again. Now I have no parents to find this diary. I have Pratik and Charu, who are not children anymore. And I have my sister. They won’t read this until I’m dead, if I have my way.
I like writing in the dark, like before. These days I forget things, so it’s good to put down my thoughts somewhere where they can’t go away. It’s like meditation, like Chandrasekhar used to do cross-legged on the floor on his mat. It gives me something do to during the load sheddings. I feel like a student again, writing in my diary (or papers) into the night, in my mother’s knitted sweater, quilt wrapped around my shoulders against the Oxford chill frosting the window of my tiny room. Of course, now my stiff fingers aren’t because of the damp cold of English weather, but because of arthritis. I need to take breaks often, but thank god I can still write. My knees, on the other hand, are like the ends of two chicken bones after someone’s bitten off the cartilage (Charu always chides me when she sees me doing that at mealtimes, saying it’ll pop out my false teeth, but it never does). I can barely bend my legs anymore. What can you do but think of the ways in which your body is breaking do
wn, in these silent hours of sweating.
When the ceiling fan goes off and the air in the flat becomes still, I can smell something off, like Charu was saying. Kalpana takes out the garbage regularly. I’ve seen her do it. Maybe a lizard died in some corner. I’ll have to tell her to look carefully for any sneaky corpses.
• • •
I write when the power goes because there’s no TV to watch my Bangla soaps or cricket matches, no light to read the newspapers and Reader’s Digests by. It’s something of a relief when it happens, except for the heat (that’s why I sit by the window or the verandah, to catch the evening breeze). It all gets too much for me nowadays; televisions and stereos everywhere, all these channels. I like my soaps, but the news channels—every time I turn to one they’re talking about this Gulf War. I wonder why we need to hear nonstop about Americans dropping bombs on these people in the Middle East all the way here in India. There was a time we didn’t need a TV to show us we were at war—sometimes we’d turn on the radio and make bets about whether or not we’d be ruled by the Nazis or the Japanese instead of the Brits, but other times the only reminder we needed were the air-raid drills, sirens calling across the sky like widows when the Pakistanis or the Chinese crossed our borders. I was studying in England during the Blitz, where it was more than just drills, though I was never under the planes. We never actually got bombed either in Calcutta or Oxford, but we knew it was a possibility. Now we’re in peacetime, but the TV news wants to show us every war everywhere. It ruins my day every time, thinking how lucky I am to have lived this long.
It was a mere stroke that took away Chandrasekhar. A blood clot in the brain, sending the heart into a tailspin. Not a bomb dropped in a city. The rest of us are still alive instead of scattered across rubble in pieces. Some of us, anyway. I’ve seen many of my oldest acquaintances and relatives turn into obituaries in recent years, of course. I check the paper every day, just to make sure I still have the family I used to have. There is a phone in the flat, which I use to talk to family and old acquaintances sometimes. I can’t go out of the flat to go visit people, or see a movie in the theatres, or go out to eat, very often, because of my knees. So the phone is a lifeline. But even as I long for it to ring every day, to have someone to talk to, I hate the splinters of pity in all their voices when they ask how I’m doing. The secret gladness that they’re not a spinster like me, the smug certainty that anyone with this fate must have done something to deserve it. At least we get to march towards death with our spouses safely by our side, and our sons and daughters two steps behind, I hear them not say.
