Embers

by Antoinette Stockenberg

  Stan had met Cara exactly once, in the newsroom. At the time he'd called her a silver-spooner. Now all of a sudden he was talking as if they'd been raised in the same orphanage. He knows I'm up to something, she thought, dismayed. How did he do it?

  "I'll tell her you said hi," Emily said with a tight smile, and fled.

  She shrugged off the thought of Stan Cooper the way she would a wet sweater. He could guess all he wanted, but he'd never actually know, not before she was good and ready to let him know.

  By the time she'd grabbed a hamburger and shifted the Corolla into fifth gear on Route 128, her mind was focused completely on the evening ahead of her. It seemed to her an extraordinary thing that a U.S. Senator was willing to risk looking like a jerk a week before a scheduled interview. Where was the angle here? He couldn't be hoping to impress her with his sincerity. Being a sincere believer in ghosts wasn't exactly a character asset.

  Was he hoping to make her a believer? Impossible. He must know that. Unless .... A wildly irrational fear seized her. What if he belonged to some kind of cult, and they were going to brainwash her, and she'd come out of the haunted house some kind of, whatever, some kind of zombie or something ....

  Get a grip, girl. He's a senator. You're a journalist. You're not driving into the Twilight Zone; you're headed for Westford, Mass., a no doubt nice little bedroom community to a bunch of yuppies from Boston.

  Still, a person couldn't underestimate the hypnotizing power of sheer personality. The senator had it to spare. And more. What a charismatic man, she thought, a little depressed. So that's what people really vote for: the smile, the voice, the low chuckle. He'd certainly caught her off guard once. Well, twice. But he wouldn't get away with it a third time. She was ready for him tonight.

  Which led her to another possibility. What if the evening were set up as an elaborate hoax--screens and rapping tables and flying trumpets, that kind of thing? Obviously some of these people were really good; too many otherwise intelligent observers had been sucked in by them. She smiled grimly to herself. Try pulling a fast one, Senator, and our gentlemen's agreement is null and void.

  She played around with various scenarios in her head, and by the time she turned off Route 495 onto the road to Westford, she was actually hoping for something outrageous to happen. A haunted house and a debutante medium -- it gave whole new meaning to the phrase coming out.

  Emily found Easton Lane, which was unmarked, but she had an awful time finding the house. She travelled the mile of potholed road up and then back down again before she noticed a car turn into a driveway that was all but hidden by overgrown shrubs. The car was a BMW. The senator had said he'd be in one. She turned in after it, sidled around a huge exposed rock in the center of the winding drive, rolled up her window to keep out the scratchy branches that were poking their way in, and fetched up in a kind of clearing, in the middle of which stood a slate-roofed farmhouse made of stone.

  The house was at least two hundred years old and closer to three. At both ends huge crumbling chimneys, cast in silhouette by the setting sun, stood like brooding sentinels. A towering pine loomed over the heavy Dutch-door entry to the house, throwing it into premature darkness. Massive shutters, their black panels peeling, hung unused and uncared for. The only light was lurid light -- streaks of red sunset, cutting across the tattered, overgrown scene. From high overhead a purple finch warbled notes of piercing sweetness, a simple song of renewal amid continuing decay.

  Emily tried hard to resist being affected by it all, but it wasn't easy; the atmosphere of foreboding was overwhelming her. She touched her hand to the crystal she wore -- she'd begun to regard it as a good-luck charm -- and looked around for the BMW. It must have gone alongside the house, because suddenly the senator emerged from there with a smile and a wave. Her heart lifted unreasonably in her breast.

  A human being, she thought gratefully. "I'm definitely glad I saw your car, Senator," she said, her spirits rising. "I could never have found this place on my own."

  The senator, dressed in khakis and blazer, seemed grateful that she came. "I was here once before," he said, taking her hand in a warm grip. "The house was just as shabby then, but the owner was keeping the grounds up. The woman was an avid gardener right up until the time she died, at ninety-six."

  "Is she the one who's supposed to be haunting the place?" Emily asked with an awkward giggle. The truth was, she was feeling very nervous and ill at ease.

  "You continue to be amused," the senator answered in the deepening twilight. "I suppose I can't blame you. No, it was the old woman herself who complained about the hauntings. At first no one took her seriously. She was in her seventies at the time and people sometimes get a little paranoid at that age. She was living here with her grandson. The grandson was twelve when he moved in with her, after his mother died of pneumonia. The hauntings apparently began two years later."

  Emily glanced at the door to the house. It did not open for them, and the senator seemed in no hurry to approach it. So she said, "Maybe the boy resented being stuck out here, and was just trying to frighten his grandmother."

  "That's the obvious conclusion. The boy really was angry and resentful, about a lot of things--the death first of his father, then his mother; having to leave Boston and his pals. That's a tough age, anyway," the senator added, sounding as if he remembered it well.

  "But," he continued, "credible witnesses said they were in the house when objects flew off shelves, pictures fell from walls of their own volition, windows blew out from their frames--"

  "A poltergeist?" She tried to look scientific.

  The senator shrugged. "Some say that. There's another theory going around: that any so-called poltergeist is really a manifestation of a kind of nervous energy in a disturbed child. Either way, it's intriguing, don't you think?"

  He was baiting her. He couldn't be serious. And when where they going in to the damned séance, anyway? The bugs had turned fierce. Suddenly Emily was annoyed. "So you're saying a disturbed child either attracts destructive energy or projects it from his subconscious. Fine. What happens when the kid grows up? What happened when this kid grew up?"

  The senator was leaning against her Corolla, perfectly at ease, as if he'd chanced upon her at a Washington soirée. "The hauntings stopped."

  "There you are," Emily said, triumphantly. "Can we go in now?"

  "They'll let us know," he answered, and went back to his train of thought. "Trouble is, there've been new disturbances since the old woman's death two years ago. A young Boston couple bought this place with all its furnishings, intending to renovate it. Two weeks later they moved out. The place is for sale and there are no takers."

  "The market's flat all over," she said, just to be perverse. "Is that why we're here tonight? To identify the ghost?"

  Again he shrugged, only by now it was dark. Emily had a sensation of broad shoulders shifting, but that was all. It really was eerie, and she really did not like it. She saw thin slits of dim light through slightly parted drapes. It was all so obvious now: first the senator would frighten her out of her wits, then they'd pull her inside for some stunt. Maybe the senator thought it would be funny. Maybe it was all a practical joke. Maybe Stan Cooper was inside. Ha-ha-ha. Very amusing.

  Suddenly the door to the stone house opened wide and Emily jumped. A stout middle-aged woman, perfectly pleasant, appeared in the doorway and said with a friendly wave, "Hello. I hope we haven't kept you waiting, senator."

  Emily and the senator approached her and she held out her hand. "I'm Mrs. Lividus. You must be Emily Bowditch. I'm so glad you agreed to come. Come along, and I'll introduce you to our Kimberly."

  She led the way. Emily turned to the senator with eyebrows raised. "Kimberly?" she whispered.

  The senator whispered back, "Her mother wasn't psychic."

  "Well, that explains it," she murmured dryly.

  She looked around curiously at the darkly ornate Victorian furnishings, half expecting to see Vincent Price tucked i
n a wing chair somewhere. But when they reached the sitting room they found only a young, very pretty girl and two gentlemen. Emily learned that the man with the beard was a professor of philosophy at Harvard. The other--from San Francisco--was a publisher and editor of New Age books. It was impressive company--if they were who they said they were.

  As for the girl: she looked exactly like a Kimberly. She had fair skin, straight blonde hair and long legs set off by an emerald shirtwaist dress of silk.

  But Emily had been expecting a gypsy, someone with dark hair and eyes and called Allana or Sabrina. "I look more like a medium than she does," she managed in an aside to the senator as they approached the girl for introductions. She stole a sideways glance at her companion and saw him frown. It occurred to her for the first time that she could push the skeptic thing too far with this man.

  Kimberly turned out to be as sweet as her name. She was remarkably attractive. She wore not a trace of makeup, only some pale lip-liner. Her porcelain skin and pale green eyes gave the impression of openness and naiveté, and nothing in her brief exchange with Emily changed that impression.

  "What a pretty necklace," said Kimberly, singling out the pinkish crystal that Emily wore. Her hand reached out, as Emily's had so often in the past week, to stroke the crystal.

  "Thank you," Emily said. "I bought it on a whim. I shouldn't have. I'm not at all the type for it, but you know how it is: you're feeling like you just ought to get something, and --" Emily felt a slight pressure from the senator's elbow and stopped mid-babble. What was she doing? No one in the room wanted to hear about her shopping spree.

  Except maybe Kimberly. "Oh, I know what you mean," she said in her gentle, childlike voice. "Sometimes I do that and I get home and I wonder what I was thinking of. Once I bought a live parrot --"

  "Kimberly -- should we begin, dear, do you think?" It was Mrs. Lividus, moving things along with a brusque but not unkindly push.

  "Oh, okay, Aunt Lois. Should I sit in the big chair again?"

  "Why don't you, dear."

  The girl nestled into an overstuffed armchair that had its back to an enormous brick fireplace. Emily and the senator sat side by side on a painfully hard horsehair sofa opposite. Mrs. Lividus stood behind them for the moment, while the two others sat on each side of Kimberly in oak spindle chairs. There was no table to rap, no trumpet to speak through. The professor from Harvard produced a writing tablet, the publisher a yellow pad. Emily jerked her head around to the senator, hoping for permission also to take notes, but he frowned again and shook his head imperceptibly.

  Disappointed, Emily turned her attention back to the girl. She had no idea what to expect. The senator had said that Kimberly was a trance medium---that disembodied voices might speak through a spirit "control" that took possession of her. Assuming the poltergeist felt like talking, would he speak through Kimberly directly, Emily mused, or did he have to speak through a control?

  Probably there's a certain protocol, she thought wryly.

  Kimberly laid her head back into the dark green armchair and became quiet. She let her half-closed eyes fall on Emily's rose crystal and murmured, "Pretty." Then her eyelids fluttered shut. Mrs. Lividus dimmed the lights, which put Emily instantly on the alert. Kimberly began to yawn repeatedly. Soon after, her body fell into a slump. Her breathing became heavy and even; she seemed to be asleep. Emily had an impression, nothing more, that a trickle of tears flowed down the girl's pale cheek.

  The lights dimmed even more. Emily strained to see. As soon as her eyes adjusted to the darker room, the lights were turned down yet again, forcing her to adjust again. It was distracting--and worse, disorienting. She felt drugged, but she'd taken no refreshment there. She tried to focus on something, anything--the paisley pattern of the oriental carpet. But it was no use; the paisley spiraled madly beneath her, a Persian maelstrom pulling her down, down into its depths.

  What saved her at last was a sound she knew well: the scratching of pencils on tablets. Yes, yes, notes! They were taking notes! Two men--educated men, rational men -- were taking notes! They were watching a girl take a nap and calmly recording their observations. She clung to the sound of the pencils as a drowning sailor would to a floating log, miserably grateful for its existence.

  And then the pencil scratching suddenly stopped, as a low moan came from the girl, followed by a voice -- a shockingly male and angry voice -- that said, "I'll damn well go where I please and do what I damn well want!"

  There was a pause, and then the man's voice again, now melancholy: "Merciful God ... I cannot stand it any more." And then a cry -- a piercing, blood-curdling cry that ripped through the hushed and darkened parlor. Kimberly shuddered and awoke.

  Immediately Mrs. Lividus turned up the lights and went to her niece. Pressing her cheek to the dazed and tear-stained face of the girl, she murmured reassurances. The New Age publisher let out his breath in a rush, as if he'd been holding it all night. The Harvard professor nodded quietly to himself and resumed his note-taking. The senator was leaning forward with furrowed brows and his elbows resting on his knees, the fingers of his hands tented together, forefingers pressed against his lips, as he studied Kimberly in the arms of her aunt.

  And Emily? She saw everything in incredible detail. She missed none of it, from Aunt Lois's apparent distress at her niece's pain, to the chip on the Majolica plate that stood on the mantle behind them. It gave her mind something to do while her body remained frozen In place on the horsehair sofa. The temperature in the parlor seemed to have fallen thirty degrees; she had goose bumps on her arms.

  I don't like this, she thought. This is sick and unkind, to the girl if nothing else. She's obviously deeply disturbed.

  Mrs. Lividus had whipped out an enormous hanky and was handing it to the girl to blow her nose. She placed her substantial bulk between her niece and the audience, and that broke the spell for Emily. She turned her attention back to the senator, who seemed still entranced, and wondered: Why does he bother with this stuff? He's not old; he's not suffering from terminal disease. He doesn't lead a dull and hopeless life. He continued to amaze her. Here was a man with looks, brains, charm, money and power, who still needed to believe that after death we'd all truck merrily along in some slightly altered astral form.

  The senator turned just then and gave her an ironic and utterly charming smile. Her heart fell down to the floor and when she picked it up again, she thought it might be broken. She listened for the beat. Ta-thump ta-thump ta-thump. Nope. Everything was still okay. But the incident gave her a fresh new slant: of course he'd want himself to go on; how could he bear to see himself end?

  The senator locked his fingers and thrust them outward in a quick stretch. He stood up and turned to Emily. "I've seen enough. Have you?"

  Chapter 4

  Emily glanced back at the small group. Kimberly was pretty much out of her trance; the men were packing up their things. The séance was over.

  "Will there be tea and cookies?" she asked the senator with an innocent smile. She wasn't about to let him know that she'd been shaken by the event.

  His grimace was reasonably good-humored. "Don't be a snot. C'mon. Let's say good-night to our hostess." He took Emily by the arm -- she was very aware that it was the first time he'd ever touched her -- and guided her towards Mrs. Lividus.

  The girl's aunt was upset, or acting that way. Her brow was furrowed and she seemed distracted. "Oh, yes, Senator, hmmn, well, it was good of you to come," she said, almost mumbling the words. "I -- could I see you for just one moment, Senator?" she added in an earnest voice.

  The senator acquiesced and she took him aside, where the two spoke in quiet undertones. Emily was left to create small-talk with Kimberly. What could you say to someone who'd just been taken over by a demon, inner or outer? "At least it wasn't for long"?

  The Harvard professor and the New Age publisher were making no attempt at all to join them. Maybe they were all going out afterward to a late supper. Maybe they were Kimberly's handl
ers or agents or whatever. Maybe they were afraid of the girl; Emily was.

  So she treaded water while she waited for the senator. Afterward she remembered saying inane things like: "I hope this wasn't too much of an imposition." And: "Have you been doing this for very long?" And worst of all: "I had a really interesting time."

  To everything that Emily said, Kimberly just shook her head in sad silence. At the end she fixed her pale, tear-stained eyes on Emily and said only, "I'm sorry."

  Puzzled and flat out of chit-chat, Emily decided to wait in silence for the senator. She saw him put his hand on Mrs. Lividus's shoulder and saw the elderly woman impulsively take his other hand in both of hers, clinging to it and murmuring emotional good-byes.

  Yep. The man had her vote. And probably a campaign contribution as well. These guys ran for office from one end of the year to the other. She wondered if there was a Political Action Committee for Psychics, and whether he'd ever taken an honorarium from them for a speech. An interesting angle for a story.

  Mrs. Lividus let the two of them out with a warm smile and a friendly good-bye, and despite everything, Emily found herself liking the woman. She said so to the senator as he walked her in near darkness to her Corolla.

  "Lois Lividus isn't actually Kimberly's aunt," he explained, "but a second or third cousin by marriage. She's Hungarian, and in her village she was considered to be something of a psychic healer. She was the first to recognize Kimberly's so-called abilities. When she came back East from her visit with Kimberly's family in California, the girl came with her."

  "Kimberly's parents didn't mind?" asked Emily, incredulous.

  "They minded," the senator answered cryptically. "Watch your step here," he warned.

  Almost as soon as he said it Emily tripped on a rock and fell forward. The senator grabbed her and kept her from going head over heels; she ended up more or less in his arms. Emily had considered a dozen different endings to the séance, but she hadn't considered this one. She felt herself blushing furiously -- both because of her clumsiness and his nearness -- but in the light of the two-watt bulb that bleared over the entry door it was impossible to read the senator's face.