Things Half in Shadow

by Alan Finn

  That was the moment I saw a figure appear inside the once-empty cabinet. A glowing, ghastly shade of white, it appeared to be half in this realm, half in the other. Its shape was that of a man, although I saw right through it to the darkness behind him. The figure, possessing arms but no legs to speak of, hovered in front of us. It turned its skull-like head back and forth, surveying us with sunken, eyeless sockets.

  “Oh, spirit!” Mrs. Collins said, her voice pitched to excitable heights. “Tell us your name and who you have come to see!”

  As the manifested spirit raised one of its spindly arms and pointed an extended index finger at the table, Mrs. Rowland squeezed my hand tighter than before. Once again, my first instinct was that something was wrong with her, and this time I was right. She swayed to the left, bumping into my shoulder before collapsing facedown onto the table.

  “Mrs. Rowland, are you ill?” I asked—a stupid question, considering that she clearly was.

  I stood, removing my hand from hers. Her husband did the same as he pulled her back into her seat. Within seconds, Mrs. Collins had brightened the lamp behind her, filling the room with much-needed light. I looked toward the cabinet and saw that it was now empty. The spirit was gone. Indeed, all of them were.

  “Millicent, my dear, say something!” Mr. Rowland fanned his wife’s face. “What’s wrong?”

  Blinking in the newfound light, I could tell clearly that poor Mrs. Rowland had fainted. I had witnessed it enough times in the ink-fumed Bulletin offices to know, and regretted not bringing along my smelling salts. Luckily, Mrs. Collins had her own, contained in an ivory snuffbox that she whisked from the folds of her skirt. One hearty sniff later and Mrs. Rowland was conscious.

  “Oh dear,” she said groggily. “Whatever happened?”

  Her husband did the honors of answering. “You fainted, darling.”

  “And the—” Her gaze moved to the cabinet, where the very thing that caused her to faint once floated.

  “It’s gone,” Mrs. Collins said. “It departed as soon as we broke the circle. All of the spirits have now left us.”

  Mrs. Rowland looked genuinely apologetic as she said, “I didn’t mean to make it go away. It was just so . . . startling.”

  “It’s perfectly fine,” Mrs. Collins assured her. “We’ve all had a very exciting night. As far as séances go, this was one of the finest I’ve ever presided over.”

  There was general agreement that, yes, it was an evening to remember, and then everyone prepared to take their leave. The Rowlands and Mr. Spencer departed first, the two men assisting Mrs. Rowland to a waiting carriage. Soon, Stephen’s mother left, holding back more tears as she thanked Mrs. Collins effusively for letting her hear from her son one last time.

  Then it was just the medium and myself, eyeing each other across the empty room.

  Mrs. Collins, her face flushed from all the activity of the séance, looked even prettier with some color in her cheeks. She seemed so warm and genuine that I felt a pang of guilt as I said, “Those were some very impressive tricks.”

  She laughed gaily. “Tricks, Mr. Green? Whatever are you talking about?”

  “There’s an interesting invention called the Aurolese phone,” I said. “It’s a listening device for women with a hearing impairment. Some are shaped like a small lily so a lady can wear it behind her ear without drawing attention to the fact that she needs a listening aid.”

  Mrs. Collins, still smiling, said, “I’ve never heard of such a thing.”

  “That’s very strange, then. Because there’s one sitting in the vase of flowers in the parlor. I assume the tube attached to it, modified to be longer than average, runs through the wall and into this room.”

  I approached the painting on the wall. From a distance, it looked like fine art. Up close, however, it was easy to see the sloppy brushstrokes and haphazard technique.

  “It’s hidden behind this painting,” I continued. “Also behind there is a hole in the wall. A hole of similar size is in the painting that hangs in the parlor, carefully obscured by a flower on the subject’s lapel. This allows you to not only see who’s about to attend your séance, but also to overhear who it is they’ve come to contact.”

  “That’s a ridiculous theory,” Mrs. Collins replied, although the flicker of fear in her eyes told me she thought otherwise.

  “Is it? In the parlor, the Rowlands, Mr. Spencer, and I all talked about who we wished to hear from tonight. And, lo and behold, those were the so-called spirits who arrived during the séance. Only the person who contacted me? My dear sister Daisy? She doesn’t exist, Mrs. Collins.” I offered her a sardonic smile. “Neither does Reginald the horse, for that matter. By eavesdropping, you also knew to place only four bells on the table, even though there were five of us present.”

  “Mr. and Mrs. Rowland were both here to speak to their daughter,” Mrs. Collins said. “Necessitating only four bells.”

  “Indeed, they were,” I replied. “But we were all strangers to you. There are only two ways you could have known they were a couple. One was by spying on us. The second is that they were both in on the scheme. It turns out, both ways are the truth.”

  “You’re mad,” Mrs. Collins said, chin raised in indignation.

  “Oh, but I’m not. You needed someone to start the conversation in your parlor. Who better to get people talking than an innocent couple who claimed to be there to contact their deceased daughter? Mrs. Rowland also acted as a stage director of sorts, didn’t she? With her shrieks and gasps indicating that something was happening. She’s the one who directed our attention to the floating gloves. While that was going on, I have no doubt that some other trick was being set up. When the grand finale occurred, it was Mrs. Rowland’s fainting that ended the show.”

  “I refuse to stand here while you accuse me of fraud,” Mrs. Collins said, her voice raising an octave. “I’ve never met the Rowlands before tonight. And as for tricks, well, what about the bells?”

  “You manipulated them, of course.”

  “Those bells were manipulated by spirits. They’re encased in glass! You saw with your own eyes that I didn’t touch them.”

  “No, you didn’t. But you did make them ring somehow.”

  “I think you should leave now,” Mrs. Collins said, adding, “before you make a further fool of yourself.”

  “I will in just a minute. Although I’m no fool. But I suspect you already know that, Mrs. Collins.”

  I moved to the table and crouched down until the bells were at eye level. All four of them were the same size, each one hanging from the center of identical tripods. A quick tap of each dome revealed them to be made of impenetrable glass.

  The obvious trick would have been to tie a string around the clapper of each bell. The strings would then run through holes in the table to a spot near Mrs. Collins’s seat, where she could pull them at will. Only no strings hung from the bell clappers. I would have been able to see them.

  Mrs. Collins, no doubt noticing my furrowed brow, said, “Not so sure of yourself now, are you, Mr. Green?”

  I ignored her, instead examining the four tripods. The legs of each met just above their respective bells and were topped with a wooden cap. Two legs of every tripod had a rounded bottom, while the third leg remained flat against the table.

  “Hollow legs,” I said, suddenly realizing the trick. “One leg of each tripod is hollow. The strings are attached to the top of the bells and run through each tripod’s hollow leg to a spot beneath the table. Very inventive, Mrs. Collins.”

  “You’re the inventive one, Mr. Green.” The edge in Mrs. Collins’s voice had grown sharper. “Clearly you’ve forgotten that you had your hand on one of my wrists the entire séance. Mr. Spencer did the same with my other wrist. At any point, did you feel my arms move?”

  “I did not,” I replied. “There was no movement at all, which doesn’t come as a surprise, seeing that it wasn’t your wrist I was touching.”

  “Then what was it? Do te
ll.”

  “It was a prosthetic arm,” I said, “wearing the same pair of gloves you have on now, kept hidden under the table and placed there after you dimmed the lamp. Mr. Spencer was touching a similar prosthetic, allowing you to have both hands free during the entire séance. After Mrs. Rowland fainted, you removed them from the table before brightening the lamp again.”

  Mrs. Collins huffed, wordlessly indicating that I was right.

  “What you couldn’t do yourself—such as the rapping and the brushes of air we felt—was the work of another accomplice.”

  That same accomplice, I figured, had made Mrs. Rowland’s gloves float in the air after she unclasped hands with her husband and both of them attached very thin wires to the gloves. The wires were affixed to two wooden sticks, which the accomplice used to manipulate the gloves like a puppeteer.

  “As for the table’s movements,” I said, “I have a feeling that if I examine the base of the table, I’ll see a mechanical device that allows you to raise and lower it using only your feet.”

  Mrs. Collins had started to look queasy by then, yet she refused to admit defeat.

  “Are you quite finished?” she asked. “Because I would like you out of my house, sir. Immediately.”

  “So, that’s it?” I replied. “No rebuttal? No words in your defense?”

  Mrs. Collins folded her arms across her chest and glared at me. “I feel no need to defend myself. In fact, it is you, sir, who should be accused of dishonesty. You came here as a skeptic and intend to leave that way, despite what you witnessed tonight.”

  “My dear Mrs. Collins, the only thing I witnessed is a swindler who took a great deal of money out of the hands of unsuspecting people.”

  “A swindler, am I? Allow me to share with you the many flaws in this grand accusation of yours. Take that poor, grieving mother who lost her son. If I was listening to you in the parlor—and I most certainly wasn’t—how could I possibly know about Stephen, who died during the war?”

  She was correct in that regard. While the rest of us were chatting in the parlor, the woman didn’t speak a word. Still, it wasn’t difficult for me to figure it out.

  “She mentioned her son to her husband this afternoon on the corner of Chestnut and Eighth,” I said. “I heard them talking about him and assumed, like you, that a son of parents their age was struck down in battle. I’m certain the boy you hired to hand out your leaflets heard them as well. I’m also certain that same boy is around here somewhere.”

  I approached the cabinet where the spirit had manifested itself. Up close and in better lighting, it looked far less exotic—more amateurish than ornate. The symbols had been haphazardly notched into the wood, most certainly by an inexperienced hand. The carved faces were nothing more than clay figures pasted onto the cabinet’s corners and painted brown.

  “I will ask you for the final time to leave my house, Mr. Green,” Mrs. Collins said.

  “This was your finest illusion, by the way,” I replied. “Quite convincing.”

  Standing at the open cabinet door, I clearly saw the large pane of glass that had been placed diagonally inside it. I rapped on the glass to indicate to Mrs. Collins that I knew it was there.

  “The Pepper’s ghost illusion,” I said. “Works every time.”

  Poking my head into the cabinet, I looked to my left, where a small nook sat just out of view from anyone in the main séance room. The nook had been draped with black cloth. In its center, sitting on a stool also painted black, was a figure cobbled together out of wood, leather, cloth, and parts of a model skeleton most likely stolen from a local hospital. All of it had been painted a silvery blue, which appeared white when reflected on the pane of glass. Behind it was a lantern, turned on when it was time for the “spirit” to appear.

  A boy dressed from head to toe in black huddled beside the figure, his face darkened with charcoal. I recognized his eyes as he glared back at me. It was indeed the boy from the street corner.

  “You can come out now,” I told him. “Your act has been discovered.”

  “Come on out, Thomas,” Mrs. Collins called to the boy. “It’s all right.”

  The boy burst from the cabinet, head lowered. He rammed his skull into my stomach so hard that I stumbled backward. All the breath stored in my lungs escaped in one rough grunt. The boy, meanwhile, began to pummel me from every direction. While beating me about the head and shoulders, he yelled a torrent of profanity no child his age should even know, let alone utter.

  “No-good devil! Dagnabbed whore stuffer! Goddamned cock biter!”

  The boy ceased his attack only after Mrs. Collins forcibly pried him off me. Even then he still threw punches, his tiny fists slicing the air.

  “I knew he was trouble!” he shouted. “Knew it as soon as I laid eyes on the son of a bitch!”

  Mrs. Collins held him tight against her side. While it appeared that she was comforting him, I believed her grip was mostly to keep him from lunging at me again. “Hush, Thomas. Everything will be fine. You go on up to bed.”

  Young Thomas glared at me. “I’m not leaving you alone with that filthy, rotten heap of shit. Leave him alone with me and I’ll kick him clean to hell, I will!”

  “I have half a mind to do that myself.” Mrs. Collins, too, shot a withering look my way. “But don’t worry about a thing. I can handle Mr. Green on my own.”

  She released the boy, who immediately ran toward me and kicked me in the shin.

  “Ow!” I yelled as pain shot up my leg.

  “Next time I’ll be aiming for your balls,” the boy warned. “If you’ve got any, that is.”

  With that, he exited the room with an impish strut, leaving me to stumble to the nearest chair and collapse into it.

  “Forgive my brother,” Mrs. Collins said. “He has a bit of a temper. I told him he needs to learn how to control it.”

  “He needs to be caged,” I said as I rubbed my throbbing leg. There was going to be a bruise there in the morning. I just knew it.

  “He’s only trying to protect me. But, as I said, I can take care of myself. So let’s be quick about this. How much would you like?”

  “How much would I like of what?”

  “Money, of course,” Mrs. Collins said. “How much will it take for you to keep quiet about this? I can give you one hundred dollars right now if you agree to walk away and not tell a soul what happened here tonight.”

  There were a great many people in this city who would have agreed to that offer in an instant. It was an astounding amount for anyone. But, as I had told Mr. Willoughby at lunch, my inheritance provided me with all the money I needed.

  “I’m not looking for a bribe,” I said. “For that matter, I’m also not Mr. Green. My real name is Edward Clark, and I’m a reporter for the Evening Bulletin.”

  Mrs. Collins seemed to crumple at the mention of the newspaper. She staggered backward a moment, fumbling for a chair. Upon finding one, she plopped into it, arms dangling, the once-voluminous skirt of her dress stretched flat across her lap.

  “A reporter,” she said. “I suppose you intend to write about this? An exposé detailing the tricks employed by the city’s mediums?”

  “That’s exactly my plan.”

  “Then I’ll make it two hundred dollars.”

  “Keep your money.”

  “Three hundred,” Mrs. Collins quickly added. “That’s the highest I can go.”

  I’m sure I looked as bug-eyed as a housefly on an apple dumpling. “Do you really have three hundred dollars that you can part with at the snap of a finger?”

  “What I do pays very well, Mr. Clark.”

  “Clearly,” I said. “But don’t you feel the least bit guilty? You’re taking money from people—huge sums of it, I might add—and offering them nothing but illusions in return.”

  “I offer them comfort, Mr. Clark. These illusions that you seem to know so much about are only a means to that end.”

  “But you’re using tricks to make people be
lieve things that aren’t real.”

  “I’m doing no such thing,” Mrs. Collins said. “They believe these things because they want to believe them. People come to me out of desperation. They’re grieving and lonely and have lost someone very dear to them. Take Mr. Spencer, for example. Or that poor woman who lost her son. All they wanted was the comfort of knowing their loved ones are in a better place. I could have been honest and told them I haven’t a clue what happened to his wife or her son.”

  “That would have been the decent thing to do,” I said bitterly.

  “Then they would have gone to another medium and paid more or less the same amount for similar results.”

  “So you decide to exploit their grief yourself and make a tidy profit in the process.”

  “Yes,” Mrs. Collins replied. “If that’s what I must do to support my brother and myself, then yes, I’ll do it.”

  “And what of Mr. Collins?”

  “He’s long dead,” she said. “The sole thing he left me is that wretched portrait hanging in the parlor. Trust me, I was all too happy to drill that spy hole through his heart.”

  “Surely there’s a better way to make a living.”

  “By all means, Mr. Clark, educate me,” Mrs. Collins shot back, fire in her eyes. “Tell me how a woman with no husband and no means is supposed to support herself. Servitude? Begging on the streets? Or perhaps you would prefer that I whore myself?”

  “A whore, at the very least, has some honesty about what she does.”

  I stood, unable to spend another minute in her company. My blood was practically boiling as I stormed out of the séance room and into the parlor. Mrs. Collins followed, not content to let me have the last word.

  “Wait just a minute, Mr. Clark!” she called out.

  But I refused to stop, grabbing my coat and top hat from the rack in the parlor without even slowing. I was unwilling to hear what she had to say, and afraid of what my response might be. Mrs. Collins seemed to bring out the worst in me.

  “I will not discuss this any further,” I snapped. “You can expect my report of this evening’s activities to appear in the Bulletin within the week. Hopefully, that will give you enough time to pack your things and move on to another, more gullible location.”