by Kim Wilkins
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
The heat of the afternoon hit Adrian like a wet slap as he left the cool rehearsal studio and headed for his car. The suffocating air weighed heavily on him; the sun mercilessly pounded down on the windscreens in the car park. He worked up a sweat walking ten metres.
As he unlocked his car, he heard a rumble in the distance. He pushed his sunglasses back on his head and looked up. Behind him, the sky on the horizon had turned black with storm clouds. Their underside was sickly green-grey. Hail. He’d have to get his car under cover quickly.
Traffic in the city was congested. The following day was Australia Day, a public holiday, and people were knocking off early. He took a shortcut up through Spring Hill and hurried home through suburban streets, racing against the storm. A news report came on the radio, a severe storm warning issued for the metropolitan area. He ran an orange light and nervously eyed the clouds. When he pulled into the garage, the black had nearly eaten the whole sky, and a gusty wind had sprung up. He let himself into the house and closed the door behind him. Janet sat in the kitchen with a glass of wine, gazing out the window.
“It’s going to be a big one,” Janet said. “It’s been a stinker of a day.”
“Where’s Roland?”
“He’s meeting with some people at the Heritage. The car’s under cover so he thought he’d wait there. It looks like hail.”
Adrian dropped his car keys and came to stand by the window next to Janet. “Sure does.”
Janet looked up and gave him a smile. “How was rehearsal?”
“Good.”
“Would you like a glass of wine?”
“Um…Yeah, sure.”
Janet stood and went to the fridge, pulled out a half-finished bottle of chardonnay. Adrian wondered if she’d drunk the other half just that afternoon. She looked a bit unsteady.
“My mother’s solicitor called me today,” she said, concentrating very hard on pouring the wine.
“What did he want?”
“Now that Maisie’s coming back, he’s asking me about selling the cottage.” She corked the wine again and returned it to the fridge. “In fact, somebody has already made an offer on it.”
“That’s good,” Adrian said, pulling up a chair. The wind had wound up. Tree branches lashed madly back and forth outside and the guttering rattled.
“Is it good?” she asked, settling next to him and handing him a glass. “I find the whole business rather confusing.”
“Why?”
“Because I had long ago given up on the idea that I could benefit from my mother in any way.”
“I don’t know if I understand you.”
A massive flash of lightning jerked out of the sky, on its heels a crack of thunder. Luciano, their canary, cowered in the bottom of his cage. Adrian stood and pulled the cover over it, took Luciano out of the window.
Janet spoke carefully, weighing each word. “If I take money from my mother, I might have to forgive her.”
Adrian didn’t answer. One hailstone, two, clattered on the roof. The chunks of ice grew larger, more frequent, within a few moments were hammering down.
“That’s a very polite silence you’re maintaining,” Janet said, and he almost couldn’t hear her over the hail.
“I don’t really know what to say,” he replied. “I’m sorry that you and your mother didn’t get along, but Maisie seems to have developed a fondness for her.”
“Sybill would be easier to like dead than alive. It’s hardly Maisie’s fault.”
And although he felt a bit wild and presumptuous for asking it, the question came to his lips, “Just what did Sybill do to you that was so terrible?”
Janet smiled tightly. Indicated the fridge with a tilt of her head. “Get the wine.”
Adrian did as she told him, noticed the fridge light was out. “Power’s gone off,” he said. The clouds had turned the sky to premature night-time. “Do you want me to get out some candles?”
“No, it will be fine.” She held out her glass and he tipped the wine bottle up. “Thanks,” she said. “Leave the bottle here.”
He sat down again. She took a gulp of her wine then placed the glass on the table. “My mother didn’t love me,” she said, her voice strained.
Adrian was embarrassed, didn’t know what to say.
“I don’t even know who my father was,” Janet continued. “Sybill came to Australia to be with him, but he left when I was about six weeks old. I think she blamed me for his leaving. She was very cold towards me. I tried everything to get her attention, but it didn’t work. When I began piano lessons at my neighbour’s house, she ignored it, pretended to forget about it from one week to the next. And then, as soon as I went away to music school – I was only ten years old, mind you – she left the country. Oh, she wrote to me sporadically, but I didn’t see her again until I was twenty-one, and even then I had to go to her. She never came back here.” Her voice trailed off. She gazed into her glass.
“I’m sorry,” he said, because he knew he had to say something.
“You know, Maisie was a surprise. We never intended to have children. We were too busy with our careers. But I had her, and I raised her the best I could and I loved her, because I didn’t want her ever to feel like I felt. Like her mother didn’t love her. Can you imagine how much it hurts me that she’s gone in search of Sybill?”
The hail had turned to pelting rain. Thunder rolled nearby. “Yes, I suppose I can imagine that.” They sat without speaking for a few minutes. The sky was dark. Twilight gathered in the kitchen. “I guess I can understand now why you didn’t want her to go. But at first you were talking about Maisie being in some kind of danger.”
“She is,” Janet said.
“How can she be if Sybill is dead?”
“Do you believe there is anything beyond the grave?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think about it.”
“Let me tell you a story.” She ran her long fingers through her smooth hair. “I grew up in a town called Skyring in rural Victoria. We had a little brick house on a dirt road, and our garden backed on to a huge park. There was an empty shed on our property which Sybill didn’t use. I had turned it into a playhouse, and a lot of the local kids came by to play with me. I remember there was a bush of brown and yellow flowers – I still have no idea what kind of flowers they were, but we called them bacon and egg flowers because of the colours.” She smiled, a little embarrassed. “Anyway, all this is beside the point, and I don’t want to bore you with reminiscences. I always promised myself I wouldn’t be one of those boring people when I was old. Do you think of me as boring, Adrian?”
“No, of course not. I don’t even think of you as old.” Not with that glossy black hair, that sleek figure, those shrewd eyes.
“The war was still going at the time, perhaps a year away from ending,” Janet continued. “So I guess I was eight or nine. I had long grown used to the house being full of strangers. Sybill liked to have people around – not because she needed friends, but because she needed acolytes. She needed to be told a hundred times a day that she was wonderful, talented, wise. It became a regular thing on Wednesday nights at our house for my mother to hold quite long and involved seances. Don’t look shocked. This was her business – she earned money from telling fortunes and contacting the dead. Good money, for she was considered one of the best.
“I had a secret crush on one of her regulars – a young man named Brian who was in his late teens, or perhaps early twenties. He was always very kind to me, while most of the others, taking their lead from Sybill, acted as though I wasn’t there. Of course, I was just a little girl, and he had no interest in me beyond the interest one takes in a child, but I had interpreted his attention for love and would dream very earnestly about being a grown-up and being married to Brian.”
The rain continued to pour, driven diagonal by the wind. The dark sky fluttered on and off with brightness as lightning circled them. “My mother would send me to bed while t
he seances were taking place, and I went quite happily because her friends were noisy and drank and smoked too much. But one Wednesday, I had worn my best dress to greet Brian at the door, and he had said to me, ‘Janet, you look so pretty tonight.’ This set my imagination on fire. I was very rarely disobedient – the boundaries Sybill laid down for me were either non-existent or so arbitrary as to defy logic. So I had become, very early on, a self-regulated child. This Wednesday night, I was probably asleep by nine o’clock. But around midnight I woke up needing to go to the toilet, and on the way back I could hear Brian’s voice. In my childish silliness, I suspected he might be talking about me, so I crept up the hallway to the kitchen – which is where Sybill held the seances – and hid behind the door to listen.
“Of course, he wasn’t talking about me. I peeked around the corner, my face hidden by a potted plant, and watched the seance.
“The table was round and made of dark wood. My mother said she had brought it with her from England. During the day it was quite an ordinary kitchen table, with a checked tablecloth over it, and that’s where I’d eat my eggs for breakfast. But if you pulled the cloth off, you could see the table top was carved in the design of a ouija board. A single candle burned in the centre. The planchette, which is a pointer with a glass eye in it, was at the ready. My mother was only in her mid-twenties at the time, very young and pretty with blonde hair rolled up stylishly. All the sitters, six of them including Brian, had their hands placed lightly on the table, their fingers touching. They breathed deeply and silently.
“As I watched, Sybill lifted her head and said, ‘Are there any spirits here who wish to speak with us?’ A long silence followed, during which time I studied Brian’s face and wondered if he loved me as much as I loved him. After a few minutes I heard the sound of the planchette scraping across the table. Nobody was touching it, all their hands were joined. Sybill began to read what the planchette spelled out.
“‘No Name,’ Sybill said. Then, probably because she had a well-paying client at the table expecting more than nameless spirits, she said, ‘Can you tell me if Lydia’s mother is there?’ I could hear the planchette scratching two firm letters. I could guess they were N-O.”
Janet paused to refill her wine glass. Water gushed over the gutters outside. The wind howled. Adrian waited for her to resume, transfixed.
“Sybill asked, ‘What message do you have for us?’ A loud popping noise followed, and I saw the planchette flip up into the air and disintegrate. Just as though it had been blasted to pieces. Sybill’s face was pale in the candlelight. ‘Whatever happens,’ she said quietly to the others, ‘do not lift your hands from the table.’
“‘What is it, Sybill?’ one woman asked, frightened.
“Sybill didn’t answer. I could hear our kitchen clock ticking off the seconds. I was rooted to the spot. I knew I should have returned to bed, but I wanted to see what was going to happen. The sitters held their breath. When all had been silent for nearly five minutes, however, they began to relax, to murmur their relief to each other. Sybill looked shaken, but she managed a smile.
“‘Well,’ she said, ‘it looks as if –’
“Her sentence was broken by a horrific bellow. It seemed to go on forever, though it was probably only a few moments. Above the table, as though rising out of the middle of it, appeared a swirl of pale light. It began to spin slowly at first, then gathered speed. The bellowing stopped, but the room was soon filled with the sound of a howling wind. As the thing spun, it seemed to create a tornado. Books started to fly out of shelves, papers were cast up into the air, Sybill’s neat hairdo was whipped into a mess. I dropped to the floor and clung to the corner of a rug as though it could save me from being sucked up into that wind. Some of the sitters cried out. Sybill told them not to move.
“‘I command you to be gone!’ she shouted at the spirit.
“At once, the spirit stopped spinning in the middle of the table. There was a sound like a sharp intake of breath, as though it were gathering its energy – and the thing leaped off the table and headed in one shrieking movement towards me.
“It struck me full force and knocked me flat on my back. I heard Sybill call out my name, but she didn’t leave the circle. I could feel a strange buzzing sensation on my skin as the thing clung to me, and I madly tried to brush it off, but even as I did so, I could feel it seeping into my pores, into me. My body suddenly felt curiously swollen and I could no longer see. Like a dark cloud had been pulled over my eyes. I could hear sounds beyond my own body only faintly, while the sound of my heartbeat was magnified extraordinarily. The joints of my arms and legs began to ache. No, ache is the wrong word. The pain was sharp and hot and agonising. This all happened in a matter of seconds. I must have screamed, though I don’t remember hearing it. I do remember hearing Sybill telling the others that under no circumstance were they to break the circle. Something about ‘energy holes.’ Her maternal instinct was not as robust as her craving to master her magic. Rather than attending to me, she continued her attempts to command the spirit.
“When I finally felt the spirit withdraw from me, I was convinced that weeks or months had passed. But when I could see again, it was still the same night, the same seance. Confusion reigned. The pale light had begun to spin again, causing the rushing wind. Sybill tried to raise her voice against it, but it seemed all but hopeless. Then the thing took aim again and launched itself at another one of the sitters. At Brian.”
Janet lifted her wine glass to her lips. Adrian saw her hand tremble, then still as though by a force of will. Three claps of lightning and thunder sounded before she continued.
“Brian’s body began to jerk and then to move in uncanny, unnatural ways. As though he were becoming disjointed under his skin. It was too much for most of the sitters. They were pushing their chairs back and breaking the circle before Sybill even had time to comprehend what was happening. I watched as Brian’s face became distorted and he hissed and spat, and said foul words.
“‘Keep the circle together!’ Sybill shrieked. ‘We can’t send it back unless we keep the circle together!’
“But it was too late. Two people had already made for the door. Others were cowering in corners, unable, like me, to take their eyes off Brian. He stood and began to scream the foulest things you can imagine – sexual things, toilet things. Sybill rose from her chair also and said, ‘I command you to be gone. I command you to be gone,’ and Brian spat at her and laughed in a voice that wasn’t his own, and said, ‘You cannot command me.’ He put his hands under the table and flipped it over as if it were made of paper. There were more screams and the sound of objects breaking, and a curtain caught fire when the candle flew at it. Sybill was trying to put it out when Brian stalked to the door and left.
“‘Don’t let him leave!’ Sybill shouted desperately. But nobody would move. Nobody wanted to touch him because they were afraid that they would be next. The curtain was still burning as Sybill stood there stupefied. I found my wits and went to the sink for water and extinguished the fire before it could spread. The remaining sitters were looking to Sybill for advice, for reassurances. But she couldn’t speak.”
Janet drew a long, shuddering breath. Adrian was dumbstruck. “The following night,” she continued, “I was getting ready for bed when I heard a sound outside my window. When I went to look, Brian stood there. My blood froze. He spotted me before I could hide, and he began to shout things, obscene things at me. ‘Little fucking whore. How would you like to fuck me, you little whore. How would you like to suck my cock.’ That kind of thing. But in far more detail than I can comfortably relate to you. I screamed for Sybill who came to my room and merely shut the window and the curtains, and took me to the lounge room to sleep.
“‘Are you going to do anything?’ I asked her.
“‘There’s nothing I can do,’ she replied. But not hopelessly, not remorsefully. She was angry, and she directed it at me. ‘I hope you’ve learned your lesson.’”
�
��What did she mean?” Adrian asked.
“She tried to infer that it was my fault the spirit had come, because I had been watching the seance. Brian showed up outside our house regularly until we finally moved. Sometimes he would knock on the door or beg to be let in. They say that people who are possessed by spirits will continually try to break free. Even though they are not themselves any more, some kind of residual sentience will keep driving them back to the place where the possession first took place, seeking help. But when Brian turned up, Sybill always handled it the same way – by ignoring him. At times, when I was supposed to be asleep, I would creep to the window and peek out, and he would be there, standing inhumanly stiff by the letterbox, his eyes staring at some unfixed point. For all I know, if he’s still alive, he’s still possessed. Sybill never tried to help him.
“And for years I believed it was my fault. Well, Sybill had said as much, how could I think otherwise? My entire childhood I carried around that burden. Then when I was about twenty-five I found out that it couldn’t have had anything to do with me. I wasn’t part of the circle, none of my energy contributed to the seance – I was wholly innocent. Yet she let me believe I wasn’t. No comfort was extended to me during one of the most harrowing experiences of my life, and somehow on top of that I was blamed for what happened. That is the kind of woman my mother was.”
Janet sat back, twirling her empty wine glass in her fingers. Adrian was aghast. Janet was the last person he would have expected to hear this kind of story from. She tilted her head to one side and he thought she looked at him, though in the dark it was hard to say for sure. The thunder and the wind had eased now. The rain fell steadily, almost soothingly.
“Do you think I’m crazy?”
He shook his head.
“Because I’m not making it up you know,” she continued.
“I don’t know what to say.” He thought of Maisie alone in the cottage, experimenting with psychic powers.
