And that, she thought, justifies it all, everything I’ve done and anything I might choose to do tonight. I can’t let them down. They expect too much of me, that I can perform on demand…
With a tremendous effort of will, Helen suppressed her negative thoughts. She had been plagued by self-doubt and guilt since arriving at this remote mansion near the Scottish border. It was as if the house itself knew her secrets. Its ghosts were dark and strange, the spirits seemingly unwilling or unable to make their needs known. She smoothed down her dress, threw back her shoulders, and opened the door. Heads turned, genteel conversation flagged, silence fell.
“Ah, Miss York.”
Sir Henry Haslam, magnificently whiskered and portly, extended a hand. For a moment, Helen thought he wanted to kiss her hand but stopped herself from reaching out just in time. Sir Henry was, in fact, gesturing to the round table set at the center of the room. Around the table, servants had arranged half a dozen chairs. Helen hesitated and checked—yes, there was one more place than there had been the night before.
The small crowd in front of her parted to reveal a stranger. A tall, cadaverous man stepped forward, smiled, and nodded. Helen stood in the doorway, sensing danger. Her unreliable gift—the strange talent that had brought her to this gathering—was warning her. This man was dangerous. And she could guess why.
“Ah, yes,” said Sir Henry. “Let me introduce our new sitter. This is Doctor Palfrey, our family physician, and a good friend of mine. I asked him to attend as he has often expressed an interest in the world of the spirits.”
Palfrey bowed.
“Miss York—I am intrigued by what Sir Henry has told me about you. Truly, you seem to have remarkable gifts.”
Helen gave a little curtsy, noting his use of the word “seem”. Her years as a kitchen maid had given her an instinctive desire to retreat from powerful men, to be self-effacing. As a medium, she had developed a veneer of confidence and tried to assume the airs of a lady. Usually, it worked. During her stay at Haslam House, she had become accustomed to bluff Sir Henry, his wife Lady Haslam, and their daughter Rose. Sir Henry’s older, unmarried sister Marjorie had become quite friendly. But now, the doctor had thrown things out of balance. The women in this group were all deeply committed to their belief in spiritualism. Sir Henry, a kindly man and a good host, went along with it to keep his womenfolk happy. But medical men were notorious skeptics in such matters.
“Doctor,” she said carefully. “A pleasure, I’m sure. Will you be participating in our séance this evening?”
“Of course!” said Palfrey, in a voice that seemed a little too hearty. “I am fascinated by the remarkable popularity of table turning.”
Helen felt her face redden a little. She almost rebuked him for using the frivolous term for her vocation but stopped herself. Everything about Palfrey’s manner put her on her guard. Perhaps it would be best if the spirits simply did not appear this time? She pondered the risks as Sir Henry showed her to her seat.
As the others took their places, Doctor Palfrey walked briskly around the room, turning off the gas lamps. He had clearly been briefed by Sir Henry about the customary preparations. When he had finished, the only light came from a single candle on the center of the table. It cast just enough radiance to faintly illuminate their hands, while the sitters’ faces were mere grayish blurs, ovals of lesser shadow.
The room was plunged into gloom. Some of the shadows moved. That might be the flickering of the flame, but Helen knew better. She tried to ignore the whispering shadows for now. Anyway, darkness was the medium’s friend, allowing Helen to focus on the next world, to call the spirits that wanted to contact the living. She had been in this situation repeatedly and succeeded more often than not. And yet something was different on this occasion, in this strange house.
“Miss York?”
Lady Haslam’s polite voice jerked Helen back to the circle of light. She put her hands on the table then requested that all link hands. It was, in her view, not strictly necessary to form this living chain of bodies. But it was expected, and Helen understood the need for performance and ritual. To her right, shy teenager Rose laid her soft fingers on Helen’s. To the left, Lady Haslam’s grip was tighter. The woman was tense, excited. She yearned for more manifestations. In particular, she longed for another message from Robert, her son who had died, aged six, many years ago.
“We must all close our eyes,” Helen said firmly. “And be totally silent. I can promise nothing, but I feel the spirits are restless tonight. This may herald communication—we can but hope.”
There was a slight snort, which she was sure came from the doctor. Palfrey’s skepticism might well sabotage the séance. It had happened before. Helen did not know whether it was simply because such scornful men—and they were invariably men—radiated some kind of negative energy. She was no scientist, after all. It was just as likely, in her view, that the bad attitude of Palfrey’s kind put mediums off their game. Nobody liked being insulted.
Either way, it did not bode well.
Sometimes, a séance worked. That was the simple truth she clung to. The spirits came simply because Helen wanted them to. It had happened that first time by pure chance. She had been a seventeen-year-old servant, malnourished and pockmarked by acne—a plain girl beneath the notice of almost everyone. It seemed likely she would marry another servant and live out her life in near squalor, breeding more paupers until she died of childbed fever or some other nasty disease.
It was the usual fate of her kind.
But fate had lent a hand to Helen York, a hand that reached to her from the other side of the veil between worlds. Her then employer had become fascinated by the new fad of spiritualism. His approach—not uncommon among the gentry—had been to try and hypnotize a succession of servants to see if they had latent powers. Eventually, even the scared little mouse of a kitchen maid had been summoned.
Helen had almost wet her knickers with fear when her then-master had explained she was to be experimented upon. Her mother had warned her about gentlemen making proposals of any kind. But then, in a mild trance, she had demonstrated her powers, unsuspected and exhilarating. More importantly, she had seen the mixture of wonder and fear in her audience’s eyes. And she had known, at that moment, that poor little Helen York could rise to be much more than a mere kitchen maid.
That had been nearly eight years ago. After the first few experiments, she had quickly learned the trick of self-hypnosis. Now, she could go into a light trance almost at will. But she always sent her thoughts back to that first time when she tried to bring the spirits. She strove to recapture the sense of something wild and strange being unleashed within her, of a door opening to another world.
But what was even more important than her power to contact the spirits was the effect it had on her social betters. The looks on their faces whenever she spoke in another person’s voice—the voice of a child long dead. A voice Sir Henry and his Lady knew! She had achieved that twice so far, out of four attempts. And if she had not been entirely frank about the way she had satisfied their deeply felt needs, well, what they did not know could not hurt them…
The clock outside in the hall struck nine. When the chimes ended, someone broke the silence.
“Are the spirits not coming?”
That was Rose Haslam, a nice but dim-witted girl.
“We must be patient,” Helen said, in gentle rebuke. “The ether is troubled.”
She raised her voice a little.
“Is there any spirit here that wishes to communicate?”
Silence fell once more, apart from the sound of Sir Henry’s slightly labored breathing, and the slight rustling noise as one or two sitters moved restlessly.
“Are we to hear no consolation tonight?” whispered Lady Haslam in a mournful voice.
“I feel one among us is not receptive,” Helen replied.
The whispering shadows were all around, but she still could not understand them. They were pointless, silly
ghosts, she decided. Haslam House was indeed haunted, as everyone said, but not by anything helpful to Helen York’s career.
“I had hoped,” said Palfrey, in a cheerful tone, “that we might be privileged to commune with the late Mr. Dickens. I, for one, would love to know the ending of The Mystery of Edwin Drood. Or perhaps some of the casualties of the recent siege of Paris could be prevailed upon to drop in? I hear they ate the animals in the zoo. What might elephant steak taste like?”
“Do not mock the spirits!” Helen warned, almost losing her composure.
There was no way she could come close to a trance state now. This open mockery from the doctor had rattled her so that now she only had two choices. One was to abandon the séance and bank on Palfrey not being able to attend tomorrow evening. The other was to satisfy her audience by other means. It was always safer, far safer, to simply give up.
No! I must put on a show, she decided. I cannot disappoint the Haslams a third time—they may send me away with a pittance. And then I would have to find someone else, perhaps without a letter of reference.
Helen peeped at her audience. All appeared to have their eyes closed. The candle flickered in a vagrant breeze then recovered. She needed total darkness for what she was about to do. She took in a deep breath then leaned forward and breathed out through her mouth. The candle flickered, and for a moment, she thought it was going out. But then it revived.
Damnation, she thought. Very well, more direct methods are needed.
“Oh, yes, I sense the spirits are very close now!” she declared.
Helen brought her knee up under the table and struck the wood a resounding blow. Her knees were well wrapped in cotton padding, and she was much stronger than she looked thanks to those years of scrubbing floors. The table jumped, and the candlestick fell over, extinguishing the flame. Both of the women holding Helen’s hands reacted in surprise and let her go. Helen quickly reached into a concealed pocket in her skirt and produced a small wax hand that was warm from her body. This she deftly placed in the questing hand of Rose, by far the least clever of the company.
“Please, we must remain linked—hold hands!” she insisted. “And keep your eyes closed.”
Now, she had a hand free, it was a simple matter to manifest something that poor Lady Haslam would believe was the spirit of her dead son. She took the prop from the pouch sewn inside her voluminous skirts and raised it slowly above the level of the table.
There were gasps as a tiny face appeared, glowing faintly in the pitch-darkness. Lady Haslam sobbed, tried to speak, but obviously could not form words. It was Sir Henry, the bluff old soldier, who managed to say something.
“Robbie? Robbie, my boy? Is that you?”
Helen felt her confidence returning as she replied, in a high-pitched voice.
“Yes, Daddy!”
“Oh God!” moaned Sir Henry.
Helen had no idea what Robert Haslam had sounded like, but every three-year-old boy sounded much the same in her experience. And the listeners in the dark, full of expectation, heard what they wanted to hear.
“Where—where are you, my child?” asked Lady Haslam.
“I am in a beautiful land, Mummy,” Helen said, pitching her voice high and speaking quietly. Hope and imagination would, as so often happened, do the rest.
“I am in a good place, with so many kind and gentle people!”
“Oh, my baby!”
Lady Haslam sounded as if she were about to break down into uncontrollable sobbing, and Helen felt a pang of guilt. It was enough, she decided. She had earned her money and gained more kudos. Her celebrity would be assured across the whole area and make it easier for her to find patrons in London when she made her next move.
Helen slowly lowered the glowing doll head inside its cloth “shroud”, moving it backward so that it seemed to fade into the distance. It would be easy to hide it in its special pouch and then bang the table again, remove the wax hand, and declare the visitation over.
“Not so fast, Robbie!”
The prop was snatched out of her hand, and she heard it crash to the floor. Someone screamed, possibly Rose Haslam, and then a match flared right in Helen’s face. Above it was the grinning visage of Dr. Palfrey.
“As I thought, Sir Henry, this woman is a fraud!”
Helen leaped up out of her chair but didn’t know what to do next. Her hesitation proved fateful. Palfrey righted the candle and lit it while the rest of the sitters gawked. Finally, Sir Henry found his voice.
“What—what is the meaning of this?”
“I can explain!” Helen exclaimed.
But Palfrey was already bending down to hold up the prop.
“I’d love to hear your explanation for this!” the doctor said. “Coated in phosphorus, I assume? And concealed in your clothing. A common trick, I believe. Just like that wax hand.”
Too late, Helen remembered the other prop. Rose was holding up the fake hand, gazing at it in total bafflement. But the others were in no doubt about what it represented. Helen felt her world crashing around her and started begging for mercy, insisting that she was not a fraud, but sometimes the spirits would not come.
“I didn’t want to disappoint you!”
Sir Henry drew himself up to his full height and pointed to the parlor door.
“You are no longer welcome here,” he said. “Pack up your—your items and leave this house tonight!”
Helen walked to the door, Palfrey following to hand her the props. She saw triumph in his smile but no sympathy or understanding. His sort would never listen to the Whys and Wherefores of her trickery. And soon, the word would be out. She would be ruined. Helen York, celebrated medium, would now be reviled as the fraudster Helen York, the woman who cheated the bereaved for money.
The staircase to the attic was steep and narrow. As she made her way up, she tried and failed to think of a way out of disgrace and penury. She would die in the workhouse or the gutter. How could she get a place as a servant now? Even that grim route was barred to her.
The little attic room seemed far bleaker now as she packed the props away in her ironbound trunk. Then she started to change into her traveling clothes, fine garments that she would have to sell or at least pawn in a matter of weeks. She stood in her underwear for a moment, studying herself in the dressing table mirror. She was not unattractive. Men had made advances, even gentlemen. She might conceivably make money that way…
“No! I will never be a harlot!”
The whispering shadows were back. This time, they were bolder, advancing into the light of her feeble lamp, forming into humanlike shapes. She saw faces now, incomplete but undeniable—faces with gaping voids where mouths and eyes and noses should be. And there was something else, something new. A smell of burning wood smoke predominating, but with another undertone. Burning meat. Burning fat. Sickening.
“What—what do you want?”
She was afraid now, but Helen also felt resentment. Why didn’t these strange foreign-sounding ghosts perform when they were most needed? Why didn’t they intervene to save her reputation downstairs ten minutes earlier? Why must the ghosts of Haslam House, so many of them, refuse to play by the rules?
“Go away! I don’t want you, you’re—you’re just useless!”
The whispering was growing louder, though. She knew it was given to very few to hear those who had passed on. She was privileged since ordinary folk could never see or hear what she perceived. But Helen still felt a sudden need to stop being alone with the spirits, to appeal to anyone for refuge from this swarm of dark phantoms. She jumped up and made for the door. But the shadows rushed to surround her, and she felt the touch of cold fingers on her limbs, her torso, and against her face.
She then understood that these were not the harmless departed souls she had spoken with so often. These were spirits of another sort. She had misjudged the ghosts of Haslam House, and now they had her. With the whispering shadows was an ancient malevolence.
With their icy tou
ch came a wave of utter despair, a sense of total powerless futility. It brought with it understanding—the evil that whispered and flowed and gathered in corners had been waiting for this moment, for Helen’s mind to become weak and vulnerable, her spirit to lower all its defenses. Her exposure by Palfrey had opened the way for something far worse than any troubled soul.
She was their ideal prey. Her talent, the gift she had thought would make her rich and famous, had opened the way to something monstrous. An old darkness was rising, and the whispering ghosts were part of it.
Helen watched, detached, floating above her own body, as she turned from the doorway and walked to the bed. Her hands picked up a scarf, a fine one of shot silk that had been a gift from the wife of a wealthy industrialist. It was nearly new, long, and strong. Helen watched as her body climbed up onto the rickety chair by the dressing table then flung one end of the scarf over a roof beam. She fought to regain control of herself, but the darkness had her in thrall. She watched in horror as her fingers formed a noose and placed it over her head.
The chair was already wobbling. It was the matter of a moment for her possessed body to kick it away.
Dying seemed to take forever. The whispering throng grew louder, its collective voice combining with the pounding of blood in her ears to become a great agonized yell of pain. The stink of burning meat was intense, and Helen could also feel heat and hear the crackle of flames. The screams of dying men were all around her, and at the last moment, as her feet swung limply above the threadbare carpet, she understood the monstrous evil which had her in its grasp.
And that dying really would take forever.
* * *
Haslam House has no shortage of restless spirits prowling its dusty halls. And they whisper their pleas to be saved from a dark presence, whose hunger for souls has grown ravenous over the centuries… Will Mortlake’s tricks and Tara’s fledging psychic abilities be enough to stop a being who has preyed on humanity since the dawn of time?
Wolfsbane: Supernatural Suspense with Scary & Horrifying Monsters (Mortlake Series Book 1) Page 18
