“You don’t think that’s insane, do you? I told you, I’ve done a great deal of reading about alternative religious practices—and you’re a man who investigates the preternatural. Between us, we must have the skills, even if neither one of us is half so gifted at speaking to the dead as poor Ruth has become.”
“It’s dangerous.” He turned to me, his face more serious than I’d ever seen it. “The dead can lie as easily as the living, you know—and although they might know more than we do, they don’t know everything. We could scrounge up an improvised talking board easily enough, but there’s no telling who—or what—might answer our summons.”
“But we’re doing this blind, Simon. Even the wrong information could tell us something useful. Have you ever performed a séance before? I’ve only read about them. Do you know how it’s done?”
“I’ve watched several of them, and I’ve done some reading myself—but never participated. It feels . . . not dirty, exactly, but suspect. Too many questions, too many variables, too little certainty for my taste.”
“But we have all those things in abundance already, don’t we? What’s a little more thrown into the mix?”
“Ruth is waiting for us,” he said uncertainly.
“She’ll be waiting in another ten minutes, and we’ll be better prepared to help her.” I hadn’t convinced him, and I probably wouldn’t, not all the way. But there was always the chance I could wear him down. “We’re dithering, regardless. We could at least dither more productively.”
He sighed, threw the car into park, and left it running. “Fine. Let’s give it a try, though we might be better off asking for Father Coyle than Leonard. Leonard may have firsthand knowledge of the place, but James is more likely to tell us the truth. Of course, there’s always the chance that something will claim to be James, and we’d have no way of knowing . . .”
“Good heavens, have a little faith.”
“I should pull some out of thin air, you mean?” He opened his door and climbed out, and I did likewise, rather than wait for him to come around. These were not polite, civilized conditions, and we did not have all night, for all that I spoke of productive dithering. I was all too aware that we needed to keep this quick.
• • •
I could feel it, Emma. The weight of a cosmic clock, ticking, ticking, ticking . . . down to some awful resolution. It’s nonsense, isn’t it? Or I thought so at the time. Now, I guess . . . I don’t know. But I felt a desperate need to hear from someone, somewhere, that we were on the right path, and that we could help, and that we definitely weren’t too late. Because if we were too late, then it wasn’t just Ruth we’d failed—it was the whole world.
Insane, that’s what it was. But not untrue.
• • •
Together, we stood in the headlights. I held my hand up to shield my eyes, and peered around the trees. “Now, I’ve never done this before, and I’ve never even seen one,” I confessed. “But I know how it works in theory. We don’t really need a board, but we’ll need letters. I’ll just grab a stick or something . . .” I found one of a good length and size, and I used it to stand before the car and write out the alphabet, splitting the letters into three rows and adding the numbers zero through nine.
“Put down a ‘yes’ and a ‘no,’” he directed. “And that ought to be sufficient. If it’s going to work at all, that is.”
“Really, if you’re going to be so glum about the whole thing—”
“Really, you should be a tad less giddy about it, I think.”
I frowned, and pointed my stick at him like a wand. “Who’s giddy? I’m fascinated, but keenly aware that time is short. Your glumness does nothing to hurry things along, now does it?”
“Very well.” Defeated, or willing to pretend as much, he sat down cross-legged with his back to the car, and the makeshift board between us.
“We need a planchette,” I noted.
“It doesn’t matter what actual object we use; it’s the intent behind it. The stick will suffice. All right now, come sit down.”
I tried not to be too fussy about my dress and the dirt, and cross-legged isn’t a common position in which I find myself—but I managed to lower myself down with modesty, if not grace. I held the stick out to him, and he took it, then broke it into pieces until he had one about as long as my hand from wrist to fingertips.
“Hold the end,” he instructed. I did. He held the other end, took a deep breath, and began without further preamble. “If there’s anyone listening who might have cause to help Ruth Gussman, or anyone who bears a grudge against the Chapelwood Estate, then I would ask you: Spirit, show me your sign.”
At first, nothing happened. We sat there in the dirt, the auto’s headlamps glaring at us, and its engine rumbling smoothly in the background, almost drowning out the bugs and the frogs that clicked and squawked somewhere out of sight. The trees loomed tall overhead, so tall I couldn’t see their tops; and they seemed so thick around us that they might have been solid walls of stagecraft scenery.
Something like a fluttering mist appeared before my eyes, and I was momentarily encouraged. Then it tried to sting me, and I realized that I was merely an object of interest for a small cloud of mosquitos. I waved them away, telling them to shoo.
If the insects bothered Simon, he didn’t let it interfere with the business at hand. Again he tried, “Spirit, show me your sign. And, Lizbeth, both hands on the stick, please.”
I gave up defending myself, and did as he asked. The tiny winged things sparkled like fairies in the strong, straight light of the car.
This time, I felt a tug on the stick. It wasn’t a little tug, but it stopped short of being a yank—drawing the pseudo-planchette away from me, toward Simon. Then it pulled to the left, and toward me, and to the right . . . in a pattern like a large oval, drawn over and over again.
My breath caught in my throat. I looked hard at Simon’s hands, but he held the stick as lightly as I did, and the grim concentration on his face suggested he wasn’t out to test the limits of my gullibility. On and on, the stick swirled—a spoon stirring a pot, a toy train running around a track. It thrilled me, and gave me a wash of chills despite the sticky warmth of the Alabama evening.
“Spirit,” I said in a whisper that could scarcely be heard above the idling engine, the hoots of owls, the drone of stinging things that fluttered between the trees. “Give us your name.”
The pattern slowed, but didn’t quite stop. It changed shape and it changed rhythm long enough to draw our small stub of wood over to the letter “R,” then “U,” then “T” . . .
“Stop that! Leave us, trickster,” he commanded, and forcibly drew the stick over to the place where I’d scrawled “no.”
I was panting now, gasping as I breathed and watched, and felt the draw of the makeshift planchette ebb and then leave altogether. “That wasn’t Ruth. I don’t care what it said. It couldn’t have been Ruth.”
“It almost certainly wasn’t. I told you, the things that like to speak when a board is presented . . . as often as not, they’re liars and fiends. This kind of contact only works if the spirits of our friends are stronger than the little pests that hover about, drawn like moths to a flame—or those gnats to your nose. Let us try again.”
My hands shook, but I nodded.
This time, the pattern that emerged was more of a figure eight. When asked its name, it spelled out “George,” but Simon didn’t believe that was George Ward. By way of explanation, he told me that, as far as he knew, the newly dead can’t muster the strength for communication like that; for some reason, it takes time. Days or weeks, at least, and we knew that both Ruth and George had been alive much more recently.
I believed him because I had to, for the sake of my own sanity; but still I shook like the hood ornament on the car behind me, my bones knocking together in time to the fire and clang of the motor’s comb
ustion.
“Stay strong, Lizbeth. This was your idea, remember?”
“No, it was yours—but you were only joking. Don’t worry about me: I’m strong. I’m ready. One more time, and then . . . then we admit that this was a silly stunt after all.”
“Let the third time be the charm, eh? Spirit,” he said, directing his attention to the stick, and to the letters I’d scratched into the earth, “show me your sign.”
Slowly, jerkily, the sign began to form. This one had angles, or so it became apparent when it found its stride. It swooped up toward Simon, down toward me, then to his left, and off to my right. Once it’d created that jagged groove, worn in the fabric of whatever separated us, the gesture became smoother as it repeated itself again, and again, and again.
It looked familiar. It looked like what a priest does, or what a Catholic does, when he bows his head to pray.
“James.” Simon breathed. “Please, be James.”
The stick dragged us gently to the “yes.”
I jumped right in, afraid that my friend would banish this one, too—though the look on his face and the moisture in his eyes told me that, this time, maybe he wouldn’t. I began with a simple hello, like we were at tea and required a formal introduction. “Hello, Father Coyle? We haven’t met, and you don’t know me—but I’m Lizbeth Andrew, and we have some friends in common.”
The stick swung out of its pattern, and began to spell.
Borden.
“Yes . . . yes, that’s . . . that’s right,” I stammered. I don’t know why it surprised me. But then again, I had no idea how much the dead may know, or why they know it. “My name was Borden.”
Help her.
“We’re trying,” I told him with all my heart.
“But we don’t know what awaits us at Chapelwood. We don’t know how to save her.” He paused, and then with something like sorrow asked, “James, what do we do?”
Rush in.
My eyebrows aloft, I added, “Where angels fear to tread?” It’d come up once already.
Front door.
“Is that wise?” Simon frowned at the message, then said to me, “It might be some other fiend. Our third try may not be charming in the slightest.”
Front door, the spirit insisted. Facade.
The extra word stopped him from banishing the speaker, at least. “The front is all for show? Then where do they worship?”
Downstairs. Below.
I jumped in. “Is that where we’ll find Ruth?”
Find them all. Save her. Go.
The stick went slack between our hands. The car’s engine coughed and revved, and the headlamps flared—then went dark. The whole world was silent, and so were all the living things that crawled across it. Even us.
Ruth Stephenson Gussman
OCTOBER 4, 1921
I woke up in a room that was mostly dark, except for a handful of candles lit and dripping. One sat on a nightstand beside me, its base resting in a chipped saucer; one was stuck in a shot glass, sitting on a chest of drawers across the room; and one was on a windowsill, high above me. I’m not sure I could have reached that one, even with a stepladder—and that told me I was probably underground, because where else do you see windows set up so high? There was something about the way the place smelled, too, like a basement with a leak someplace.
The bed I was lying on had a summer quilt, but I was on top of it. It was hot in there, and muggy as hell even though it was night already.
I was pretty sure it was night. It was always possible someone had covered up that window to make it dark, but I was tired, as if I’d been asleep for hours anyway. The room was dark and bleak, and the candles didn’t help it because there were all these shadows, all these black corners that the flame light didn’t touch at all.
I sat up and swung my legs over the side of the bed. I was wobbly, and my head was stuffed with cotton, but I was getting clearer and stronger by the minute.
I stood up. My vision went all runny, so I reached out for the bedpost to see if it would steady me. “Stay calm,” I told myself. There was nobody else to do it. “Wake up.”
At least, I thought there was no one else. I’d been wrong before.
In one of those very dark corners, there was a chair with a pile of clothes on it, and the clothes shifted, rearranged themselves, and took the shape of a woman. And then it wasn’t a pile of clothes. It was my mother. Or it wasn’t her, exactly.
She leaned forward, so the edge of her face caught what little light the nearest candle offered. It outlined her: just the shape of her forehead, the curve of her nose, the divot above her lip. She didn’t blink, and her eyes were much, much darker than the muddy green they’ve always been. She was wearing a black robe, so that’s why I hadn’t seen her at first, or I’d mistaken her for part of the furnishings. Even her hands were gloved, I saw when she scooted to the edge of the seat. Her skin was so much whiter than I ever remembered, and her hair was bound back under the hood; you couldn’t see it at all. She was a face floating toward me, and the dim light made her look unreal, or maybe she looked unreal already—and she didn’t need any help from the candles.
“Ruth.” She said my name like a spell, but she’s never been that kind of witch.
I didn’t say anything back. I just stood there, holding the bedpost.
“They’re coming for you, real soon. You’ve got to do what they tell you.”
“I don’t got to do shit.”
She didn’t frown at me, or smile, either. She was unearthly—and I don’t mean she was like a ghost, not precisely. She made me think of something from much farther away than just the “other side.” She didn’t move like a person anymore. She moved like something born with different joints, different muscles, different habits and patterns of motion.
Even if she had been my momma, same as always, it wouldn’t have been any help to me. She never could protest anything or anyone, much less Daddy or anything he had in mind. She wouldn’t have let me out of that room or said anything to comfort me. She was just as bad as he was, and maybe worse—because she let him do whatever he wanted, to me and to everyone else. And she did it with her mouth clamped shut, and a smile, while she looked the other way on purpose.
Funny thing was, I couldn’t even get too mad about it. It’d be stupid to expect anything different from her after all these years.
She said, “I left out a dress for you. Put it on.”
“No.”
“Put it on, or they’ll put it on you. There’s no sense in resisting. You’ll make it harder on yourself than it needs to be.”
“Harder than getting stolen off the street? Getting drugged up, and locked in a dark room?” I didn’t know for a fact that it was locked, but I would’ve bet a bunch of money on it.
“Only if you fight it.” She sighed, at me or the world in general. “You’ve always done this, haven’t you? Got to fight everything, all the time.”
“Somebody has to.” I squeezed the bedpost. It felt good and solid between my hands. It reminded me that I was alive, and in a bedroom, and it was weird—but I wasn’t dead, and nothing too bad had happened yet. I was alive. I was standing.
They hadn’t killed me yet.
Were they going to kill me, or did they have something worse in mind? I knew there were worse things than dying, and whatever they’d done to Momma . . . I didn’t want them doing that to me. I wasn’t even sure what it was.
The word “unearthly” popped into my head again. But I don’t mean she was from heaven, that was for damn sure. Not an angel, not a saint. Nothing holy. Nothing sacred moves so smoothly, so silently, and without breathing or blinking. And when the candlelight hit her eyes just the right way, they looked black all around, not just in the center, where the color used to be.
She had changed, God, yes. But how? And into what?
“Leave me alone,” I told her, partly because I wanted time to wake up on my own, and maybe look around for a way to escape—and partly because I didn’t want her to touch me, and she looked like she was thinking about it.
“That’s not what you want.”
“Yes, it is. You’re not my mother anymore, and I don’t want you here.”
“Don’t say such things.” She didn’t say it like a command, or even a suggestion. It was just a preference on her part. I didn’t give a damn, and she didn’t expect me to—and that almost made the whole thing sadder, how she’d transformed into something else, and wasn’t even any stronger for it.
There’s more than one kind of strong, if you know what I’m talking about. There’s strong in mind, strong in body, and strong in spirit. She was never any one of those three, and no matter what became of her body, the other two lagged behind.
She was a monster, and I still wasn’t afraid of her. I was afraid of everything else, sure. But not this phantom, this weird haint that used to be a woman I knew and tried to love. “Get out of here. You’re not here to help, you’re just here to watch. Just like your whole damn life.”
I turned my back on her, deliberate-like, to show I wasn’t scared.
I looked down at the dress, folded at the foot of the bed. Even in the mostly dark, I recognized it from her hope chest: It was the one she’d got married in, a pretty yellow thing that Grandma had made for her. It’d probably fit. We were about the same size, but I wouldn’t put it on, not if my life depended on it. Same size or not, we weren’t the same otherwise.
Behind me, she said, “I wish you thought better of me.”
“I wish you’d give me a reason.”
She didn’t say anything back, and when I looked up, she was gone.
I jumped when I realized it, that she’d up and vanished like a puff of smoke—my first thought was that she’d left through the door, but I hadn’t heard it open or close. She couldn’t have reached the window any easier than I could, and if she’d tried I would have seen her. I ducked down and looked under the bed, shoving the dust ruffle aside and seeing nothing but darkness, but nothing to suggest that awful white face or weird gloved hands. I swept my own hand back and forth under there, not worrying about rats or dust. I found nothing.
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