I feel sick. The smell of the place is overpowering. It all seems so unreal, so ridiculous, but my heart knows what Madame Ada says is true.
“I’ve got to get rid of it,” I say weakly at last. “Please.”
The old woman shakes her huge head. “The spirit must be coaxed far enough into the light for you to see her clearly. Only then will she answer your questions, tell you who she is, what she wants from you. You need a séance. I am too old for such things. You need a good medium. I might be able to give you a referral.”
The yellow parrot shifts its weight on the perch and screeches, the first sound it has made in an hour.
Before I can ask another question, Chase stands behind the wheelchair and puts her hands on the old woman’s massive shoulders.
“I’ll do it,” she says.
Madame Ada twists backward, the coins on her forehead jingling.
“You will not,” she says, and appears to leave no room for argument, but Chase is adamant.
“You told me once that I had a talent with the dead, Auntie,” she says. “You told me they would speak to me if I tried. I’ve never really tried. Look in my face now. I’m halfway there already.”
The old woman studies her great-niece for a quiet moment, then takes her hand. After a while she lets it go, and her shoulders droop sadly. “Yes, I see,” Madame Ada mutters, and the bird shrieks again in its cage in agreement.
“All right, Ned,” Chase says to me. “You can take off. Auntie and I need to talk some shop.”
I am at a loss for words. Chase is making a sacrifice I do not understand. “Are you sure about this, Chase?” I say to her.
She smiles.
“Madame Ada, is this dangerous?”
The old woman shrugs. When I reach the door, she calls me back.
“You’re forgetting something, young man,” she says.
I look at her blankly.
“My fee. I am a psychic consultant. My services are not free. You owe me two hundred fifty dollars.” And she holds out one fat paw.
“It’s less than most lawyers charge,” Chase says. “Think of it that way.”
I have no choice. I walk out into the equatorial heat of the afternoon and wait in line for the money machine at the Chemical Bank on Flatbush. It is rush hour; cars inch by, radiators boiling over, bound for scattered unimaginable neighborhoods on the ocean side of Long Island. The acrid stench of antifreeze and burned brake lining fills my lungs. On the way back I squint up into the haze through my sunglasses till my eyes hurt. The light in the sky is so hot it makes me stupid.
My pocket is full of money to pay a woman about a ghost.
6
THE MORNING of the séance is pale blue and bright, with white fleecy clouds hanging high above Manhattan, Oz-like across the river, and the sun shining cheerily off the twin monoliths of the World Trade Center. I would prefer gray skies and rain, an unseasonable coolness in the air, but the weather will not oblige with such theatrics. It is a good day for the beach, reasonable humidity and temperatures in the low nineties, and I hear on the radio that routes to the Jersey Shore are jammed with cars and it’s standing room only on the LIRR to the Hamptons.
I spend the day cleaning the apartment, which has not been thoroughly cleaned since Molesworth’s departure. At about four o’clock I walk up to the Heights and purchase a bottle of wine and two twelve-packs of Genesee Cream ale, which is on sale at Key Food on Montague Street. A séance is a somber occasion, I know, but this one feels like a party. A séance, Chase has warned me, must be pursued sober and on an empty stomach, like holy communion during mass. I resist the temptation to buy buns and ground meat for the grill.
At six Chase rings the doorbell and comes upstairs. She is lugging a suitcase full of gear and is done up in Gypsy regalia—embroidered skirt, shawl, headdress of silver coins. She looks ridiculous and small in this elaborate outfit, but her eyes are clear, and she seems rested. I have already downed a couple of beers, and I give her two kisses on the cheek, French style, perhaps a little overenthusiastic.
She steps back, sniffing disapprovingly. “You’ve been drinking,” she says.
I shrug.
She sets her suitcase down and looks around the apartment. “And you’ve cleaned.” Her tone is sour.
“I figured since I’m having people over …” I say.
“It’s not good to clean. Better to have everything just as it was during the haunting.” She walks over to the windows and stares out at the power plant. The sheer brick wall of this structure extends up about thirty stories. High in the facade there is an opening the size of a garage door where workmen can be seen moving about at odd hours of the night, small as ants.
“I’m going to explain only once,” she says to the window and the beautiful afternoon. “This is not a game; this is not a party; this is not a little bit of summer fun. We are dealing with matters of ultimate seriousness here, life and death and the misery of souls trapped in the physical world unable to move to the next. Your apartment is possessed by an entity that has attached itself to you. If we weren’t having a séance tonight, I’d put the whole damned place under psychic quarantine—that is, no one in, no one out except you, because for you it’s too late. I don’t want any ghost jokes or cracks, and I don’t want any drunkenness. I have been working hard with Auntie for the last two weeks, I have been going without sleep and dinner, and I have been meditating and preparing for this thing, which is my destiny.”
When she turns to me from the window, her face is white and dramatic, and there is a peculiar drawn expression about her eyes. She gives me the benefit of this attitude by posing there in her black against the light of the window, stiff as a lady in a daguerreotype, but it doesn’t work. She doesn’t have the psychic power of her aunt, not by half. Embarrassed, I nod in agreement, but I know it is impossible to face this thing sober. When she is not looking, I grab another beer from the refrigerator, which I pour into a coffee mug.
“Coffee?” I say to her, waving the mug, but she shakes her head, annoyed, and commences a thorough inspection of the apartment. She raps on walls, opens doors, squats first in one place on the floor, then another. She goes into my bedroom, turns down my sheets, goes into the bathroom, and stands in the shower stall, her hands braced against the tiles.
“You may wonder what I’m doing,” she says from the bathroom. “But think of the Fox sisters. You have to be very careful.”
“Eh?” I say, and take advantage of her preoccupation with the shower stall to refill my mug full of beer.
“The Fox sisters were American spiritualists from upstate New York, the original mediums. They were the ones who started the whole spiritualist craze in the 1840s—you should know that, you’re the historian. The knocking noises everyone heard at their séances seemed to be coming from nowhere, true spirit voices. Then someone discovered that Kate, the younger sister, could make the noises by dislocating her knee and popping it back into place again. They had a series of other gimmicks, too. Wax hands, secret compartments in the floor. I just want to make sure you’re not pulling any of that stuff, that we’ve got a genuine case here.”
“Come on, Chase,” I say, but I let her continue the inspection. She finishes in Molesworth’s old room, where she lingers for a few minutes, then comes out a little red in the face.
“It’s definitely in there,” she says. “That’s where the presence is strongest. That’s where we’re going to have the séance.”
“What the hell,” I say. “Molesworth was such an utter pig. The stench! The man only washed his clothes every six months. This ghost must have a pretty strong stomach for filth.”
“You’ll have to move those boxes.” She points to a few boxes of junk Molesworth left when he skipped town. I move the boxes out onto the landing and pull in the threadbare rug from the living room because there are not enough chairs and we all will be sitting on the floor in here.
Chase continues to pace restlessly, and I notice now that t
here is a slight wobble in her walk and that she is favoring her left leg.
“Is there something wrong with your leg, Chase?” I ask her at last.
She stops pacing and sits down heavily on the gas heater. “No,” she says. “It’s my hip. It hurts.”
“Why?”
She hesitates and looks away. When she speaks, she does not look at me. “It’s part of my condition,” she says quietly. “It’s not just my face, you know. It’s the rest of me, too. It’s a bone thing.”
“Is it bad?”
“There’s work to do. I don’t want to talk about it now.”
I respect her wishes.
Chase takes her suitcase into Molesworth’s room and closes the door. An hour after dark she emerges and ushers me in. The walls are now hung with purple silk banners sewn with stars and moons and symbols like hieroglyphics.
I ask her what they mean.
“Those are just for effect,” Chase says, “to help create the proper mood. The proper mood is very important.” On the rug she has set a wide circle of white candles in elaborate holders. At the center of this circle sits a flat wooden board on a sort of swivel stand with a system of cogs and weights suspended underneath. A large pad of butcher paper is affixed to the old wood. Several grease pencils poke out of a brass holder.
“Do you know what that is?” Chase points out the board with obvious pride.
“No,” I say, though I recognize it immediately from my researches at Loyola.
“It’s a planchette,” Chase says. “Genuine nineteenth century, used for automatic writing. It once belonged to the famous Neapolitan medium Eusapia Palladino. Auntie says that I’m not experienced enough to have the spirit speak through me and that this is the best thing. With the aid of the planchette, the spirit will guide my hand and send written messages from the Other Side. Go ahead, check it out.”
I step carefully inside the circle of candles and press a thumb against the polished veneer. Under a bare minimum of pressure the board sways up and down and side to side in a fluid gyroscopic movement. Outside now, the square lit windows of the projects and the faint glow of light in the basalt sky. From the planchette comes the muted whir of gears that is the sound of a sinister and ancient machine at work.
7
THE SEANCE is scheduled for midnight. By eleven-thirty only five of the thirteen invited participants are present. There’s Rust and Todd and Mary, the vegetarians, and Ian, the Irishman from the basement, wearing a gaudy blue-and-yellow Hawaiian shirt, and Geoff, his dogs tethered and sniffing the wind in the backyard. None of Chase’s bohemian friends, unreliable as ever, has bothered to show. And despite her efforts, the gathering has taken on a distinct party atmosphere. The radio in my bedroom is switched to NPR’s “Bluegrass Saturday Night.” Jaunty fast fiddle music fills the apartment, followed by banjo picking and yodeling.
“It’s spook night at the Grand Ole Opry,” Rust says, and everyone laughs.
When the beer is gone, Ian, the Irishman, fetches up a bottle of whiskey from the basement. We pass this around the room as Chase, arms crossed, fumes silently on the couch.
Geoff, perched nervously beside her, his prematurely white hair pointing stiffly to the ceiling, upends the bottle and gags.
“Eagh!” he says. “I really can’t drink this without some sort of mixer. Do you have anything like Mountain Dew, Ned?”
The Irishman is scandalized.
“That’s good single-malt stuff,” he says, seizing the bottle. “Smooth as milk!” He takes a hit and offers it over to Rust, sitting in the orange Naugahyde chair. Rust shakes his head and points, grinning, to Todd and Mary, who squat at his feet wearing Guatemalan ponchos and thong sandals.
“I think I’ll go with a little of the wacky-baccy tonight,” Rust says. “In keeping with the occasion.”
I take a step closer and see that the vegetarians are in the process of fixing up a power hitter, and soon the seaweed bitter smell of pot fills the living room. After Todd and Mary smoke their fill, Rust takes the small inlaid box and brass screw in his hand and inhales. Then the Irishman kneels to join them, leaving his bottle of whiskey on the mantel. One toke suffices to make him a philosopher.
“You know, I don’t deny the existence of spirits and the like,” the Irishman says, rocking back on his heels, his pot-red eyes set off by the blue and yellow of his Hawaiian shirt. “Quite the contrary. Years ago in County Clare my grandmother was haunted by a Fer Darrig, a bog spirit—that is to say, the spirit of a man drowned in the bog and denied the comforts of consecrated burial. The bleedin’ thing tore slate off the roof, broke a lot of dishes and cups, and was responsible for all sorts of related mischief. Frightened the old woman half to death. But what puzzles me is the whys of it. Why the hell would someone come from as far away a place as death to rap on wood and make noises and break crockery and such? Don’t they have enough crockery of their own in the next world?”
This is a good question. We look at Chase, who shakes her head in disgust, pushes herself off the couch, and goes muttering into the kitchen. Just then there is the sound of automatic-weapons fire from the projects, matched a minute later by sirens coming down Knox. In the backyard Geoff’s dogs begin to howl.
“You’ve got to love this town,” the Irishman says. “Some poor bastard getting murdered every ten seconds.”
At a quarter to twelve Chase moves us into Molesworth’s room, and we take our places in a circle around her on the carpet. She wants us to spend a few minutes in quiet meditation before the séance to help sober up the atmosphere.
“Think about someone you love who is dead now,” she says when we close our eyes. “Think of cold nights in the tomb. Think of the work of the worm. Think of old bones in the ground so long they turn to powder. Think of moths fluttering in the twilight. Think of the mutilated bodies of children left to rot in the woods. Think—”
“Jesus, Chase.” I interrupt. “Do you have to be so gothic about this thing?”
“Shut up,” Chase says, and is about to continue, but then the buzzer sounds, and I go and bring Inge and Jillian up for the séance.
“Sorry we’re late,” Jillian says when they step into the room, smelling like cigarettes and the outside world. “We were at the Pyramid and lost track of time.”
“Ja,” Inge says. “Quite a scene tonight. Top-notch drag show. The Lady Bunny was there, and RuPaul was supposed to come but did not.”
“Gee, that’s too bad,” I say, and am about to make a crack about RuPaul, a tall gay black man whose sole skill consists of wearing high heels and a wig about as well as someone’s gawky aunt, but Chase narrows her eyes at me. When everyone is settled, she drops her head, puts her hands out in an oracular gesture, and kneels before the planchette for several minutes. I take this opportunity to get an eyeful of Jillian. She looks better tonight, wearing a sheer blue dress and dangly earrings. It seems she has put on a little weight. Her cheeks have regained some of their lost bloom; her breasts conform to a single supple curve beneath the blushed velvet.
“Been eating lately, Jillian?” I say.
Jillian ignores me, but Inge is her simple Bavarian self. “Eating is not so good,” Inge says. “I have been making her to drink beer. Good German beer. Makes you strong. Puts meat on the bones.”
“Yes,” I say. “Nothing like beer to make a human being out of you.”
Jillian scowls at this and is about to snap back when Chase rears up suddenly and screams. The sound is bloodcurdling. We all blink in her direction, startled.
“All right,” Chase says. “Now that I have your attention.” She proceeds to engage the company in what she calls a spiritual exercise. Each of us is to tell the very saddest thing that comes to mind. This will help the mood and make us think of death, which will in turn help summon the ghost. Chase starts with Rust, to her left, and goes around the circle.
“The Trinidad Massacre,” Rust says. “They were strikers protesting inhuman conditions in the copper mines of Trini
dad, Colorado. This is about 1914. One hundred and seventy-five men, women, and children shot down by federal troops with the cooperation of the United States government. They killed my grandmother, a fifty-caliber shell right through the forehead. She was a beautiful young woman, nineteen years old with two kids. No one remembers. But I remember. I’m writing a book about the whole thing. Been working on it for the last five years.”
I am surprised to hear the nature of Rust’s mysterious project so revealed, but do not have the time to comment. Chase moves her white finger to Ian, who looks up sad-eyed, his whiskey-red face sagging.
“My mother,” the Irishman says. “I never got to say good-bye to her. She died two weeks after I left for America.”
“The rain forest in Brazil,” Todd says next. “Millions of species are disappearing every day so they can raise beef for McDonald’s hamburgers. We’re eating the rain forest as Big Macs and Quarter Pounders with cheese. It’s like a fucking tragedy.”
“Yeah, meat is murder,” Mary says. “And that’s my big sad.”
“No, murder is murder,” Geoff says, in a strained voice. “What’s sad is we can’t walk the streets of New York without worrying about being shot by some thug with a Glock nine millimeter. I love this city, it’s the greatest city in the world, and it scares me half to death just to go out of my house every morning. That’s sad as hell.”
“I have nothing sad to say,” Inge says. “I am quite a happy camper,” but her lower lip trembles.
“I’ll tell you something sad,” Jillian says. “When I was ten years old, at the beach on Block Island, my father raped me. I was wearing a red bathing suit with yellow ducks on it. He tore it off and raped me in the changing cabin. My mother found the bathing suit and the bloodstains, and she must have known what happened, but she never said anything. Not a word, not ever.”
After this revelation there is an embarrassed lull, but Chase waves us on. “All right,” she says. “Now you.”
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