The Other Side of Midnight

by Simone St. James

  My hand rested on my handbag. I could feel Gloria’s flask inside, and I wondered what it contained. Gin, perhaps. Whatever it was, I was looking forward to it.

  “I have a theory,” James said softly, “that you lied to us that day we did the tests. I don’t know why, but you did. You’ve been at it quietly for years, haven’t you? Taking clients, finding what they seek. No fanfare, no shows. No newspapers. I’ve investigated over two hundred claims of spiritualist powers since I came home from the war, but I now believe I’m sitting across from the second true psychic I’ve ever met.”

  A psychic, if she is to have a career, must deal with both skeptics and believers. They both bring their own set of problems—skeptics with their endless needling questions, believers with their suffocating faith. My mother taught me that, in the middle of the storm, the medium herself must have only one philosophy: Believe, or don’t believe. It is up to you.

  Most mediums hoped to convince their marks of their veracity, of course. But the true medium—the one who possesses powers, whether they are recognized or not—must walk away. Otherwise, my mother taught me, we are nothing better than circus acts, trying to create greater and greater feats in front of a disbelieving audience. And where is the peace in that?

  Gloria herself never cared who believed in her; she was always right, and she always knew it. In my own way, I was the same. Until now.

  This was James. Disappointing him, failing those tests, and having him see me as a liar had nearly crippled me three years earlier. I couldn’t have said why. We don’t always choose whose opinion matters to us. Sometimes there is no logic to it. Sometimes there is only faith.

  I let go of my handbag and put my hands on the table, my palms up, my fingers cool. I looked him in the eye.

  “James,” I said. “Give me your hands.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  My hands lay on the table, between my emptied cup of tea and the shaker of salt. I’d removed my gloves when we’d sat down, and my palms were vulnerable and bare. Without a word, James lifted his hands and placed them in mine, his arms flexing under the sleeves of his coat. His palms were heavy, the sliding of his skin against mine sending sparks along the surface of my flesh.

  I looked down at his hands. They were wide and masculine, the knuckles prominent, the thumbs strong. In a flash I remembered the feel of those hands sliding over my ankles, up my calves. They had been firm, certain, and warm. The memory sliced me like pain.

  I wondered whether he had a girlfriend, whether those hands ever touched her, stroked her back, her breasts. I had no idea.

  “What do I do?” he asked, his voice rough and uncertain.

  “Just let your mind go,” I said. “Let your thoughts come. Think of something you lost, something gone from you that you’d like to see again. Picture it. Picture how you lost it. Whatever floats to mind. Just let it come.”

  “How many people,” he asked after a moment, “think of a lost dog?”

  “Many,” I said. “If you think of a lost dog, you’ll believe I guessed it. So think of something else. Something only you would know.”

  He went quiet again. His hands were warm against mine, a fine charge of electricity moving between us. It was exciting and comforting at the same time. I closed my eyes. I had never done this in a public place before, outside my own sitting room, yet I shut out the world, the voices at the other tables, the clinking of china, the tinkle of a bell as the door opened, the sounds from the street. I let it all wash away. You are in control, Ellie, my mother always told me. Manage your power. Train it. It can be made to follow your will.

  And it could. I could feel it, could feel my mind opening, could feel something at the edges of my thoughts, like an itch. It was something powerful, something—

  “Ellie,” James rasped.

  “What is it?”

  “I’m sorry,” he said, and then I saw it.

  A forest. The trunks black and narrow, the tops of the trees heavy, everything dappled black and white in the intermittent light. The wind whistling in a low voice, the ground hard and cold, shapes moving through the trees, running. The heavy tang of smoke, in the eyes, in the throat, pulled into the lungs, the taste of it everywhere. And the smell . . . dear God, the smell . . .

  Geben Sie es mir.

  Give it to me.

  Someone was screaming.

  Geben Sie es mir.

  Pain as deep as a scalpel’s blade, overwhelming. Something wet and warm. My vision blurring. Deadwood in the undergrowth next to me.

  Geben Sie es mir!

  Shaking against the ground, the soles of my boots rattling on the hard earth as my legs convulse and shiver. Reaching into the front of my tunic, smeared with blood, my eyes watering in the wind, groping with fingers gone numb with cold. The deadwood in the undergrowth—don’t look at it. Don’t. Just give it to him, and quickly.

  Rifle shots crack through the trees. The German’s face is suddenly clear, gray with fear, the pimples on his skin etched in ink. His chin and neck are red with cold, red from the rough shave he gave himself in the ice this morning with a dull blade and no mirror. His hand grasps my numb wrist and pulls the thing from my hand, and he backs away. The smell comes again, sickening. And in the undergrowth, where the ground is wet with gore, something moves—

  I opened my eyes. My feet were pressing into the floor, pushing me back in my seat, my hands jerking away from James’s and into my lap. I did nothing but gasp for a moment, my pulse beating hard in my neck, my mouth dry. James’s dark-lashed eyes opened slowly and regarded me with a look that was utterly unfathomable.

  “Why?” I managed, my voice strangled.

  He blinked slowly, as if coming out of a dream.

  The vision still lingered like smoke, but from the edges of perception I began to hear the everyday noises of the restaurant around us. “Why did he want your canteen?” I asked.

  Shock rippled over his face. “What?” he said to me. “What did you just say?”

  “Your canteen. Why did he want it? What could he possibly want it for? Was it a trophy?” I swallowed, pressed my hand to my face. “The smell—I think I might be sick. And there was something—something moving . . .”

  His hand shot out and grabbed my upper arm, harsh and bruising. His face was utterly pale. “Ellie. What did you just see?”

  “I saw what you saw!” His hand was icy on me. Something awful moved in the depths of his gaze, and suddenly I was appalled beyond measure that he had actually lived through what I had just seen—lived through that, and more. Weeks, months of it. How could anyone come through such a thing with his sanity intact? “They were dying in the woods,” I said, knowing as I spoke that the words were inadequate, that everything was inadequate. “In the undergrowth. The man on the ground next to you was named Fenton, but I can’t see what happened to him. It was something horrible, and he was screaming.”

  “My God,” he said softly.

  “The German took your canteen. After the battle, after you’d been injured. I don’t know whether he was thirsty, or whether it was just a trophy. That’s the belonging you were thinking about—the canteen. Wasn’t it? A gift from your father. You lost it, and you wanted to know what happened to it.” My throat felt as though lined with sandpaper. “He lived barely sixteen hours after he took it. His body fell in a ditch; no one found it. Not until after the war, and it was so—so decomposed, they—”

  His grip tightened. “Stop it.”

  “They buried him in a graveyard with other unknown soldiers. I can’t see the name of it. I don’t know where it is. They knew it was an English canteen, but they buried him with it anyway. He’s in the sixteenth row, the seventh grave from the right. He—”

  “Stop it,” he said again, louder.

  People were looking at us now. I saw an older man, an apron tied around his waist, watching us with const
ernation and a trace of uncertainty, and I realized he must be the owner, wondering whether he should intervene. I pulled my arm gently, but James did not relinquish his grip.

  “James,” I begged softly.

  He looked at his hand on my arm, his fingers disappeared into the fabric of my sleeve, and he let me go. He looked sick.

  I nodded at the man in the apron. “It’s all right,” I said to him. “He’s upset. I’m sorry.”

  The man gave James a narrow look and reluctantly turned away.

  My headache loomed, insistent. I’d need to rest, and soon; I’d used my powers three times that day already, and this last vision was one of the strongest I’d ever encountered. “I don’t know what to say,” I said to James. “I’m sorry.” I searched his face for something, anything, to indicate that it was all right, but I found nothing. “I’ve never seen anything like that.” I was babbling now. “I can usually control it. The visions aren’t usually so complete. The smells, and the cold, and the screaming . . .”

  “Please go,” said James.

  His voice was soft, half choked the way a man’s is when he is struggling to keep control. But it was stronger when he raised his eyes to mine, his jaw set, the words he spoke enunciated with unmistakable clarity: “You’ve proven yourself. It’s done. Leave.”

  For a split second, I wanted to protest, to—what? Stay here and comfort him? Make it all better? I dropped my gaze to his hands, those hands I’d conjured in my memories, gripping the edges of the table, the fingers clenching, the knuckles white.

  My heart sank. I was a stupid, stupid fool. I’d wanted to prove something to him—to make him see me as I really was, perhaps. To have him notice me, believe me. All I’d managed to do was humiliate him and cause him pain.

  I stood, sliding out of our booth on unsteady knees, picking up my handbag. All around us was the quaint café with its peaceful patrons, the soft click of teacups, gentle swells of conversation, a simple English day under blue skies and early-autumn daylight. After what I had just seen, it all seemed unreal, as if the vision had been reality and what I saw before me now was the dream. The headache pulsed up the back of my skull.

  As I turned to leave, I saw the owner glance at me, and an older couple sitting at a nearby table wordlessly watched my progress. When he caught my eye, the husband gave me a nod, soft and solemn. I didn’t need psychic powers to know what he meant. A soldier, yes, we understand. Perhaps they had a son who had come home damaged, or who hadn’t come home at all. They were the right age for it.

  I blinked and looked back at James. He was staring down at the table, unmoving. A soldier, yes. I did not look at the couple again. Instead, I slipped out the door and let it fall shut behind me.

  * * *

  The dead don’t walk among us, peering invisibly over our shoulders or watching us as we sleep. There are such things as hauntings, certainly, but they are confined to certain spaces, tied to a place and often with a purpose, though they are in fact rare. Most such cases are actually the product of a living person with an unrecognized, or uncontrolled, power. The true dead, if you wish to speak with them, must be called.

  I saw my first ghost when I was seven years old. I was sitting in my accustomed space on the floor behind the plum curtain that separated the sitting room from the rest of the house, listening to my mother with a client. I knew my mother was wearing her black-beaded dress, the scarf tied in her reddish blond hair, but I had not seen the man who was her customer, only heard his voice. I flexed my toes as I listened to them, my legs sprawled out before me as I ate half a tea biscuit and tried not to spill the crumbs.

  “Mother,” the man was calling out as I licked my buttery fingers. “Mother! Please speak to me!”

  My own mother’s voice was a soft murmur. “Sometimes the spirits are reluctant. Sometimes they are far away and cannot hear. We must be patient.”

  “But I must speak to her,” the man moaned. “Mother! Mother!”

  “Mr. Carver—”

  “Mother!”

  I finished the tea biscuit and rubbed my fingers on my stockings. Something was bothering me, like an unpleasant itch in my brain. I pulled up my knees and hugged them.

  “Mr. Carver, you must be silent,” my mother said. Her voice sounded weary. “The sound— I cannot— Too much noise interrupts the communication.”

  The itch grew worse. It was cold and somehow crawling. I rubbed my fingers along the back of my head, under the hair, rubbing my scalp, trying to make it go away. It persisted. The man’s moans for his mother, and my own mother’s protests, faded as I rubbed. Then I looked up, and the lady was there, standing in front of me.

  She wore a heavy black dress adorned with thick braid, and her gray hair was pulled back from her face. Her hands hung limply at her sides, the gnarled fingers curled. Her skin was ghastly, mottled under the eyes and in the jowls. She stood just past the toes of my shoes, ignoring the voices beyond the curtain and staring down at me.

  I couldn’t move. I heard nothing but the heartbeat in my ears, felt nothing but the chilling throb in my skull. The woman’s face was a mask of disapproval and anger as she stared at me, her eyes livid with fury.

  “I feel something,” I heard my mother say. Her voice was uncertain, a tone I’d never heard her use with a client before. “I don’t—I don’t exactly know. I think it’s—”

  “Mother, is it you?” Mr. Carver called. “Please tell me you forgive me!”

  The lady made no acknowledgment, only stared at me, unmoved. Some awful sense radiated from her—misery perhaps, or just cold anger. I knew she was dead, that these were the clothes she’d been buried in. A rank smell wafted from her, a damp and clinging odor. I shrank back into the wall, pulling my knees tighter to my chest.

  “Forgive me, Mother!” Mr. Carver cried.

  I pointed at the curtain, trying to redirect her horrible attention. Go away, I thought in desperation, through the cold fog in my head. You’re dead. It’s them that want you, not me. My finger brushed the curtain and it rippled as if in a breeze.

  “She is here!” Mr. Carver said. “The curtain is swaying!”

  “I beg pardon?” my mother said, confused. “I don’t—”

  “Mother, are you here? Answer me!”

  I pointed again. Go away, I thought at the woman again. Please.

  For the first time, she moved. Her furious gaze left my face and crawled down to my pointing finger.

  Not here, I thought, able to keep calm now that she wasn’t looking at me. There. Not me—them.

  She did not move like a living person; it was something like it, and yet nothing like it at all. Her chin seemed to angle one way, her eyes another; her shoulders turned, but her waist did not. Her legs did not walk, yet the hem of her skirt brushed the floor in cold silence. The curtain did not stir with the slightest breath as she vanished through it. And then she was gone.

  “Wait,” my mother said, and even through the aftermath of my horror I could hear the relief in her voice. “She is here. She is here! Speak, spirit! Speak to your loved ones!”

  I didn’t stay for the rest; I’d had more than enough. I left my crawl space on silent feet, the tea biscuit a lump in my stomach. The itch was leaving my brain in a slow trickle, an uncanny feeling that left a throb in its wake. I went to my room and curled up on my bed, even though it was three o’clock in the afternoon and I was supposed to be doing my lessons. I fell asleep almost instantly.

  I awoke to find the sun setting and my mother in my room. She lowered herself onto the edge of my bed, as slow and exhausted as a woman a decade older than her thirty years. She was already untying the scarf from her hair.

  “That was you, wasn’t it?” she said to me without preamble.

  I rolled to my side, facing her, and pulled my knees to my chest. I still had my shoes on, which was absolutely forbidden in bed, but my mother di
dn’t seem to notice. I said nothing.

  She sighed, as if I’d spoken. “I felt something. Dear God, I’ve always thought . . . I’ve always wondered—” Her words seemed to choke her and she dropped the scarf into her lap, her narrow shoulders drooping. “I never knew whether I would be happy or horrified if it was true.”

  “That I’m like you?” I asked.

  I wanted badly for her to turn to me, to run her palm and her warm fingers over my cheek, to gently kiss my temple as she did when she put me to bed at night. But she stayed staring at nothing, her back turned to me as if she’d forgotten me. I stared at the line of her shoulders, the thin bones of her arms in the sleeves of the black dress, the mass of red-gold hair that she’d gathered at the nape of her neck.

  “You mustn’t tell your father,” she said at last. She ran her hand over the scarf in her lap, smoothing it against her legs. Then she squared her shoulders a little. “I’ll have to teach you. There are techniques you can learn. We can handle it at the end of your lessons, while your father is at work. You must not let on when he’s home—you must be normal. I expect you to practice and to follow my directions exactly. You will have to watch my sessions from behind the curtain. I expect you to be observant and obedient, and you must not be afraid.” She turned her head just enough to glance at me over her shoulder. “Do you understand?”

  “Yes, Mother.”

  “This will not be easy for you, so do not expect it to be. I admit I’ve anticipated this possibility, which is why I did not put you in school. Now I see I was right. A girl of your abilities cannot go to school.”

  I blinked away tears. Who needed school, anyway? I didn’t want the company of other girls, who would probably be mean and stupid. “Yes, Mother.”

  She looked away from me again, as if the sight of me, even from an angle, somehow pained her. “Once you begin to see the dead, Ellie, you must learn to maintain control. It is a doorway that has cracked ajar. The dead will take advantage of it; they cannot help it. It is in their nature, especially if they are being called. But the dead are dead, and they cannot hurt you. Do you understand?”