The Other Side of Midnight

by Simone St. James

  On the stage, a dark shadow appeared from the wings. It took its place in the center.

  “Finally,” James said. “Here comes a hell of a show.”

  * * *

  The lights came up to reveal a woman with a sleek black bob in the distinctive style of Louise Brooks, dressed in a midnight black dress. Her eyes were lined with heavy kohl, but beneath the elegant fashion even I could see that her face had a haggardness to it, an age beyond her years. The hungry lines of her cheekbones and the sunken sockets of her eyes only made her look more commanding.

  The chairs had been removed from the stage, and Ramona raised her arms from her sides, as if beckoning to us. “Death,” she said in a husky, mannish voice that carried to the back of the auditorium, “is the final act. The final obscenity of our short, pointless lives. The brutality that ends it all. Or so we are told.”

  I felt James go very still.

  “What have you been told?” Ramona lifted her chin. “That you must do good deeds, and you’ll be rewarded in the afterlife? That angels watch over your soul? That you must pray to God, and read his book, to gain entry to heaven? That if”—her voice seemed to catch for a moment—“you went to war for your King and country, you would die a good death? A proper death? Is that it?”

  The room was silent. I could hear James breathing.

  Ramona lowered her hands again. She almost seemed to be swaying. “You have been lied to, all of you. By your country, by your religion. By your teachers, by your parents. By everyone. Death is not beautiful; it is brutal. Beyond life is only a wasteland, where souls wander in pain. The devil is coming for you. He is coming for me. He is coming for everyone.”

  There were a few quiet gasps in the audience, and one shocked sob.

  “Get to the show!” one of the drunk men shouted. The tension cracked. I turned instinctively and looked at the hard-eyed man with the mustache, the one I’d guessed was a plant. He was frowning at the stage, but he sensed my gaze and looked at me. I looked away.

  Beside me, James let out a breath. “Hell,” he said. “This doesn’t sound like a script. She’s improvising.”

  I turned back to the stage. “Who disbelieves?” Ramona cried now, her raspy voice cracking. “Which of you fools still believes in a happy afterlife, in heaven and hell? That you’ll be judged by your worth after death, that it is not just random biology that makes us who we are? Who here wants to summon the dead from their icy graves?”

  The plant did not speak. Instead, a voice came from the other side of the theater.

  “Take me!” it shouted. “Use me!”

  It was one of the drunken men. He leapt from his seat, tears streaming down his leathered face. When Ramona blinked slowly at him, surprised, he called to her: “You’re wrong, you cow. I know my Sam is happy. You call on him and you ask him, if you even can.”

  Ramona took a step and her gait wobbled. Perhaps she was upset, or perhaps she’d had a few drinks herself before the show. “Yes,” she said to the man. “I can summon him. Just close your eyes and let me try.”

  I glanced at the mustached man again, but he was gone. The seat was empty.

  The man in the audience closed his eyes, but his friends were jeering.

  “Think of the person you wish to speak to,” Ramona said over the noise. “Call to him. Give me your hands.”

  James flinched next to me. “What the hell?” he said.

  “What?” I couldn’t take my eyes from Ramona, wondering what she would do. “What is it?”

  “That’s how Gloria did it. In her séances. She would have people call to their loved ones while holding her hands.”

  I blinked. Ramona would never have attended Gloria’s séances; Davies would never have allowed it. There was a faint noise somewhere up in the balcony, where no one was sitting. I twisted in my seat to look.

  “Just think,” Ramona said to the inebriated man again. She had approached the edge of the stage and held out her hands, but the man in the audience stayed where he was. “Let the one you love hear you calling and—”

  Something flew through the air and landed on the stage. A man’s shoe. It missed Ramona but caught the edge of her skirt on its downward arc, brushing the side of her leg and tumbling onto the stage. Ramona broke her concentration and looked around, her gait stumbling again. There must have been a signal somewhere backstage, for just in that moment the curtain fell, the lights went down, and the houselights slowly came back up. The piano player was gone. All was silence.

  There were a few jeers, but something about the finality of it affected the crowd. They rose from their seats and began to file from the room, some of them grumbling, some of them dazed.

  James gave a low whistle. “Well,” he said, still in his seat. “That wasn’t bad. It was fake, but it wasn’t bad.” When I didn’t respond, he said, “Ellie, what is it?”

  “I don’t know,” I replied. I was still sitting turned in my chair, looking up into the balcony. The lights were on and the balcony was empty, just as it had been during the show.

  But someone had been there. As the lights had come up unexpectedly, I’d glimpsed a shadow of someone exiting, a dark figure who slipped from the balcony in silence. Someone who had been watching the whole time.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  We made our way through the thickening rain, from the Gild Theatre—where the thin crowd, exiting, quickly dispersed—down a succession of side streets, our steps clicking softly on the empty pavements. James led the way. He had taken me under his umbrella again, and in the intermittent light of the passing lamps his face was in grim shadow beneath the brim of his hat. I leaned into his familiar scent of shaving soap and damp wool, relieved to have him with me in the dark.

  He pulled a watch from his pocket with his free hand as we walked, tilting it under a lamp to check it. “The séance isn’t scheduled to begin until eleven o’clock,” he said, “but something tells me she’ll be early.”

  I shuddered, and not just with damp cold. I didn’t particularly want to attend one of Ramona’s private séances, not after that show, which had left me both depressed and strangely frightened. But there was no help for it; we had agreed to see Ramona in person to try to question her. I needed to hear for myself her account of Gloria’s death.

  Soon we were on the street that I recognized as Ramona’s. James stopped us under an awning, lowering the umbrella and checking his watch again. I turned and realized we stood in front of the wig shop I’d noticed on my first visit here. Dummy heads stared vacantly at me from the darkened window, adorned with Renaissance tresses, eighteenth-century Marie Antoinette curls, and modern pageboys. CLOSING PERMANENTLY, announced a sign on the door. I peered at the handwritten page attached beneath it and read:

  I am Retiring

  My only son died in the War and I have no one to take over the Shop

  Closing permanently end of month

  Thank You for your Patronage

  “There are others waiting,” came James’s voice. “At the door to Ramona’s block of flats. Let’s go see who our fellow seekers are, shall we?”

  I pulled myself reluctantly away and followed him. Four people huddled on the stoop where I’d stood two days before, a man and three women. James lifted the umbrella and nodded at the small knot of people as we approached. “Good evening,” he said.

  The man peered up at him. He was fortyish, with a face that sagged with premature age and, I thought, some saddening grief. “She hasn’t let us in yet.”

  “When will she begin?” James asked.

  “When she’s recovered from that disgrace of a show,” one of the women said.

  The younger woman who was with her, obviously the woman’s daughter, huddled under the umbrella and nodded her head. “It’s always a challenge when disbelievers are present,” she said. “I imagine she has to refocus herself in order to be abl
e to contact the spirits.”

  “What show?” said the man. “I didn’t know of any show. I just came here for the spirit session.”

  “I hope there are to be no more of us,” the older woman said, ignoring him. She gave James and me a disapproving look. “Six is plenty. Any more would ruin the session.”

  Perhaps, but six paying customers was a half-decent take for an evening.

  The young woman, who looked about nineteen, peered curiously at me through the rain. “What are you here for?”

  “Hush,” her mother said. “There should be no talking amongst the attendees.”

  “I’m paying my money,” the saddened man said a little loudly. “I say I can talk to whomever I please.”

  “Do you want to ruin it all for us?” the woman hissed at him. “It upsets the spirits. She’ll send us all home, and then where will we be?”

  The man went silent and looked away.

  The door opened and Ramona appeared. She had washed off her stage makeup and reapplied the kohl around her eyes. She was dressed in a silk wrapper, with strings of beads layered around her neck. She looked calm, as if the debacle at the stage show had never happened. She wasn’t even wet from the rain. I wondered how she had traveled from the theater so quickly, and how we hadn’t crossed her on our way. “Enter,” she said, and turned away.

  We followed her through the dreary vestibule and into the grim lobby. Ramona ascended the stairs, her wrapper luminous in the half-light, and I was glad we didn’t have to take the elevator. The sad man ascended after her first, followed by the girl and her mother, and finally an elderly woman who had not yet spoken. I held back, James at my elbow.

  “Are you all right?” he said softly.

  The yawning shadows at the top of the stairs swallowed Ramona, and then the others, one by one.

  “I’m fine,” I said, and started after them.

  Ramona’s silk-clad form reached the fourth floor and opened the door to her flat, beckoning us all in. She was strikingly underdressed in the wrapper, her body narrow and bony beneath it, and up close her face was strangely haggard, yet attractive, under its makeup. Her gaze skimmed indifferently over me as I passed her, then fixed on James with considerably more prurient interest.

  The flat was small, the electric light dim, and the main feature was a séance table—shabbier than Gloria’s, perhaps, but undoubtedly meant for the same purpose. It was impossible to tell at first glance where the contraptions, strings, and pulleys were hidden, but I had no doubt they were there. A small kitchen with yellowed linoleum lay through one door, and a second closed door presumably led to the bedroom. I had a brief, disturbing memory of standing in the hallway outside the door to this flat the day before, listening to the silence and wondering whether Ramona was dead. I sat hurriedly at the séance table with the others and pushed the recollection away.

  When we were seated, Ramona switched off the electric light and set a candle in the middle of the séance table. She struck a match and lit the candle, and when she lifted the match to her face to blow it out, I noticed her pupils were shrunk to small points. I gasped in a breath. Not drink, surely. Some kind of drug, perhaps?

  She stood facing us in the candlelight, still on her feet. She seemed to look us over for a moment. I glanced around the circle: the young girl and her mother, the sad man, and the older woman. And James and me. We all sat quiet, waiting. The candle gave off a thick, smoky smell.

  “The spirits shall come here tonight,” Ramona said. When she wasn’t shouting from a theater stage, her voice was low and husky, almost hypnotic. “We shall form a spirit circle. Join hands.”

  She held out her hands, palms facing the ceiling. The rest of us obeyed. To my right was the young girl; this close, I could see the ruffles on her ill-fitting silk blouse, the sullen turn of her lip, the blotches of acne on her chin and neck. Her hand was plump and clammy in mine.

  On my left side was James. He slid his hand in mine with no discernible hesitation, as if unconcerned about what I might see. He did not look at me.

  “Now close your eyes and concentrate,” said Ramona. “Speak to the spirits. Listen. I am your conduit. I am nothing but a vessel, built between this world and the next. Send your messages through the circle, through me. The spirits will seek my power and come.”

  Everyone closed their eyes. Ramona lowered her lids and flung her head back, as if listening to a signal from the other side; it was a timeworn trick, and she did it well. A medium who closes her eyes and throws her head back can watch the table from under her lashes and gauge facial expressions and body language—the priceless currency of the sham artist.

  I watched her for a moment, then closed my own eyes. If Ramona had any skill, she would identify me immediately as a threat and attempt to contain me, probably through the communication of the spirits. But if her brain was muddled by drugs, I had no idea what she would do.

  I waited. The scent from the candle on the table was pungent and strange, and in a split second I suddenly knew that the young girl who held my hand was named Rose, and that she did not seek any spirit in particular. She had come here for answers, because she was dying. She had a sickness—some sort of family illness, the name of which did not come to me—that would kill her within a year. Something about the dark, the candle, the spirit circle made my powers receptive, and I focused on controlling them, on shutting out messages, especially from James on my left hand.

  “The spirits are restless tonight,” Ramona said.

  The smell of the candle was strong in my nose. What sort of candle gave off a smell like that? If it was a trick, it was one I’d never heard of. Washes of emotion came to me from the circle—fear, anger, blackest grief. I inhaled a breath and sweat trickled down my back, cold and damp. Keep it under control, Ellie.

  A low moan arose from the table, deep and eerie, barely a human sound. The hairs rose on the nape of my neck. I opened my eyes to see that Ramona had slackened in her chair, her head slumped back. I could see the whites of her eyes in the slits of her eyelids.

  “I have awoken,” she said, her voice pitched at a low tenor, like a man’s. “Who has called me? Who calls?”

  Someone gasped. “What is your name?” This was Rose’s mother, gripping her daughter’s hand tightly and leaning forward into the circle. “Can you tell us?”

  “I remember not who I was in your world,” Ramona replied in her spirit voice. “I lived many thousands of years ago, under the hot desert sun far from here. My body is gone, but I remain. When my spirit guide calls, I awaken. I bring messages from the dead.”

  I calmed a little. I had never seen this particular trick up close before, though I had often heard of it. Many spirit mediums claimed to have a specific spirit they spoke to most often, who acted as their conduit to the other side. I’d heard of such spirits guised as ancient princesses, Indian chieftains, even aristocrats killed during the French Revolution. It sounded like this one was supposed to be from ancient Egypt, perhaps. James squeezed my fingers once, lightly and quickly, the equivalent of a wink. He’d likely seen this trick dozens of times.

  “We wish to communicate,” Rose’s mother said, excitement in her voice. She had easily taken over the session, and I wondered briefly whether she was a plant. If so, her daughter was unaware of it. “We welcome you and your messages. We are listening.”

  “There is a message from one who has departed and left his wife behind.” Ramona moaned. “He watches over her.”

  The silent old woman made a choked noise. That was an easy one, I thought: elderly woman, who attends alone. Very likely a widow, the spirit medium’s bread and butter. The noise she’d just made had given away that Ramona was on the mark.

  “My good and faithful wife,” Ramona said, pressing her advantage. “We will not be parted much longer. I will hold you in my arms again within the year.”

  “Oh,” came a stra
ngled sound from the old woman’s throat. Her face sagged. I watched her expression closely in the candlelight. She looked stricken, but not surprised. Ramona was telling her something she already knew.

  The smell of the candle, I thought, was positively putrid. Had no one else noticed? I breathed lightly through my mouth, but the smoky smell was so thick it almost had a taste. The emotions at the table roiled in my stomach like nausea.

  “What other messages do you bring us tonight?” urged Rose’s mother.

  Ramona’s head lolled back and she moaned as if in pain. I felt a breath of air on my neck, and from somewhere in the center of the table came three quick, staccato raps.

  “Speak!” cried Rose’s mother. “Oh, please, speak to us!”

  The sad man, across from me, spoke up. “Oh, be quiet!” he said to her. “You’re ruining it. What about me? I’ve been calling. I don’t want to hear about some stranger’s dead husband. I paid my money. What about me?”

  My stomach turned again. My attention shifted to the man and I felt the familiar itch at the back of my skull. It was coming from him, grief and rage, like a smell. I pulled my gaze away from him and glanced at James. He was tensed in his chair, his body flexed, his face scowling as the argument grew louder. The light, flickering down the line of his throat, seemed to be sliding its fingers under his collar.

  “Be quiet, you selfish man,” Rose’s mother said.

  “Mama, please,” whined Rose.

  “I paid my money and I want answers,” the man nearly shouted, making the old widow next to him jump. “I mean it. I want to see—”

  “Silence.”

  Ramona had straightened her shoulders, though her head was still lolling against the back of her chair, her eyes still rolled back in her head. As we watched, startled, she shifted slowly, her head sliding like a half-animated thing until it rested sideways on one shoulder. She looked, in that position, uncannily like a woman whose neck had been snapped.