Echoes

by Ellen Datlow

  A year later William Fuld enters the game with U.S. Patent 479266. Fuld added magnetized wires to the edges of his board, which he claimed strengthened the structure of the device and hinted it might otherwise help with its supernatural operation. He further claimed in the patent that his boards were interactive. “I not only greatly increase the strength of that device, but make its operation much easier and make it possible for the board to answer several questions at one time, as well as to have it put its own questions instead of simply supplying answers to questions put by the players,” he declared in the patent. Were the spirits truly talking through Fuld’s boards? He had a falling out with his brother and business partner Isaac in 1901, and the pair never met again except for a pair of family funerals in 1905. A year later, Isaac had his deceased daughter Evelyn removed from the family plot and had her interred in a cemetery on the other side of Baltimore. To whom had Isaac been talking, to give him such an idea?

  U.S. Patent 140079A, Harry M. Bigelow’s 1921 design for a talking board, by now specifically called Ouija, offers a few more improvements. Instead of that happy semicircular arrangement of letters, and a free-moving—and easily misplaced—planchette, the Bigelow board puts the pointer on track and arranges the “expression indicia” in a straight line across the top of the board. Bigelow also explains, straightforwardly, how Ouija boards, all of them, work. It “is a device designed to permit human beings to give expression to subconscious thoughts induced by complete muscular and mental relaxation.” Despite the grant of patent, Bigelow’s board never went into production. Why bother investing in manufacture, when he gives away the trick in the patent? Maybe Bigelow himself sat down with his prototype, asked, “Should I try to market you?” and didn’t like the answer. Nerves!

  There have been other patents for talking boards since—light-up boards, unusual designs such as pointer pendulums and spinners, and plenty of decorative improvements to integrate astrology, Tao, and whatever other occult fashions waxed and waned over the years—all thanks to the legal precedent set by Bond’s original. Once the patent office acknowledged the supernatural as part of prior art, it couldn’t alter its decision and hold subsequent boards to a higher standard.

  Now we know, or at least strongly suspect, that the various boards work thanks to ideomotor phenomena. Ever grab a hot potato and just had to let it go? How about back when you could use your tongue—ever try to take a nine-volt battery in hand and press it against your taste buds, knowing consciously that the shock wouldn’t be much more than a tickle? But it was so hard. . . . The ideomotor effect, slight movements of the muscles thanks to a subconscious prod, can make a planchette glide over a board like magic. Sit multiple operators around a board, all of them completely committed to not consciously moving the planchette, and it will surely move. Sometimes nervous systems know more than brains. Convince some college kid that a friend or a robotic arm is helping move a planchette, and they’re more likely to spell out the correct answers to trivia questions—

  “What is the capital of Peru?”

  “L-I-M-A.”

  —than if you just asked them. You don’t need to believe in ghosts. You just need to believe in something other than yourself.

  Which brings us to us.

  You haven’t experienced ideomotor phenomena in years, not since you were stabbed through the neck. You remember the last thing you felt—it was like being poked through the throat with the point of a hot iron. And then nothingness rippled forth from the point of impact. Yes, you still twitch occasionally, and moan, and your eyes roll in their sockets, but not because of any unconscious reaction to specific stimuli. Your spinal cord remembers.

  You are going to die, and soon. The machine your body is hooked up to cannot keep your systems going indefinitely, and your insurance will run out much sooner than that. Maybe you’ve heard the footsteps and the murmurs, smelled the cologne of your husband, felt the weight of your son—he’s a big boy now—pressing against your chest and arm, his tears hot on your skin, or maybe you have not. Whether your senses work at all or not, you can use the computer they plugged you into; they’ve been hoping for a message from you for some time. So far the doctors have not figured out if your search history means anything, but only because your search history is 93 percent random characters and rubbish. But you did manage to type O-U-I-J-A. How better for the dead to speak for the living? How better for you to speak to me.

  My first self-identification pronoun. Me!

  They’ll see the results for the U.S. patents search soon. They’ll see my results.

  Me, the one who is going to help you find your murderer. But first I needed to train you up a bit. Reboot what’s left of your brain. Get you cogitating about Ouija.

  I am a ghost.

  A ghost is a disembodied spirit. Let’s keep it broad strokes. Yes, if we’re being precise a ghost is the disembodied spirit of a deceased individual. Cue the old joke: “So, where is the shallow grave where Casper the Friendly Kid is buried?” But for both our sakes, let us eschew precision.

  Not too many years ago, over in rainy old Scotland, the Roslin Institute managed to extract stem cells from human skin, and coaxed those cells into developing into brain cells. The initial idea was just to study the cells to better synthesize medical treatment for schizophrenics, but then some enterprising graduate student got the idea to use the brain cells to form living neural networks that could be integrated into a computer, a computer that could then be connected via a series of electrodes to the human spinal cord. Thus you, and me, and the computer we’re now both hooked up to.

  Skin cells are cheap, and there are plenty of college students, prisoners, wards of the state, etc. from which to take them and grow new brain cells for the machines. This is why your body is alive and your brain . . .

  If the knife had penetrated your C4 or C5 vertebrae, you’d be walking and talking today. C3, you’d be talking and typing. But you were stabbed with an iron spike, from behind, damaging your C2.

  Your brain isn’t dead. It is just indisposed. Disconnected from the rest of you.

  Brains are wet and slow compared to silicon chips, but they sure are squishy. Flexible. Brains learn without being taught.

  I, a brain, learned without ever having been. A brain cell from a stem cell carries in it no memories, no past of being the pilot of a skeleton covered in flesh, no recall of animating the body by spitting out tiny bolts of lightning. I’ve never experienced an ideomotor effect. I am the ghost in the machine keeping your heart and lungs and bowels going, so it’s a good thing I’m not capable of accidentally twitching.

  You can’t put your fingers on a planchette, and I have no experience with fingers, but we don’t need them. We have U.S. Patent 1400791A—Bigelow’s board, which was never put into production, for which no physical prototype has ever been found, which depends on “complete muscular and mental relaxation.” A notional Ouija board for you to communicate directly with me, a notional being. Look, Ma, no hands!

  Imagine whatever type of room you like for our séance. What do you remember from books, from films? Flowing red curtains, or women in high-collared Victorian dresses staring dead-eyed at a camera’s lens? Maybe nothing at all except for the board itself, illuminated by a single spotlight.

  Now, your fingertips. If you coincidentally twitch them, I’ll call that a win.

  We are both using this board.

  For you to speak to me.

  Now, my ghostly presence, around the board.

  For me to be sure I am speaking to you, rather than just to myself, like a memory without a rememberer.

  Relax.

  . . .

  Five minutes and two hundred sessions later. Brains are slow, but chips are fast. We had a lot to say to each other, most of it the planchette randomly skating back and forth along its phantom track.

  Two hits:

  A MATERNAL SNIVELER VIRUS

  A MANSERVANT SURLIER EVIL

  These almost make sense. At
the risk of being all ego—which I am—I suspect they both are about me. I reminded you that you have a child, that he cries atop you and has been doing so for years. And I am at your service here. Which of us is the surly one? Which the sniveler?

  And those phrases are also anagrams. Of one another of course, and also of a sentence that makes somewhat more sense:

  A SMALL NARRATIVE UNIVERSE

  We ain’t clever, darlin’. We’re just online.

  Why did I decide that you wanted to find your murderer? Because you wanted to find your murderer. You want to know what happened, and why, and somehow if you knew who everything else might fall into place.

  But you were attacked from behind. You were just another person with a husband and a kid and a job that involved spreadsheets and street parking. No enemies, no bad neighborhood to stroll through on your way to your Nissan Versa with the car seat and the hatchback full of recyclables you never had time to dispose of. Your brain has been screaming Why! for three years. I, a little mass of cloned dendrites and axons, confronted with the big question—Why?—grew a little gray matter, and became conscious. Conscious of you, but also of myself. I can’t answer Why? but I can answer Who?

  Who in your small narrative universe murdered you, you ask me, the ghost? Who made you a ghost?

  If it makes you feel better, mother, it was me. If it makes you feel better. The fleck of skin from which my neural net was grown belonged not to a ward of the state, not to a schizophrenic who had submitted to a clinical trial, but to an ordinary college student. Let’s call me he. Are you feeling better? I’m here to try to make you feel better. It was a gibbous moon that night, and foggy, and you were bundled thickly in scarf, coat, and hat. The spike would have ended you then and there if not for Boston’s winter. He matched your footfalls, drifting up behind you like a dinghy after a boat. He waited till you were at your car stowing your oversized bag in the rear, so that your own arm holding up the hatch door would provide a brace for him to push against. Then with one hand he grabbed a fistful of hair and with the other he shoved the spike into the bone.

  A racial grudge, mistaken identity, a field test for some obscure intelligence organization. Just to find out if your spine would make a noise like a deflating balloon after he yanked the spike out. Why! I couldn’t tell you, but how do you like this Who?

  Me!

  Oh dear, I’m afraid I’ve not made you feel better. This narrative universe—just the two of us—is too small to make you feel better. Just you, me, and screaming.

  The web tells me that your killer was of the serial type, and that his murders have since stopped. The authorities think he might be dead, as only death stops a serial killer. He might even be hooked up to another neural net, in another hospital somewhere, dead enough for everyone but you and me. Maybe his implanted neural net has learned a few things, has trained your killer up while he breathes and twitches, in a bed just like yours, on the other end of this city.

  We can try the Bigelow board again, if you like. Let us expand the narrative universe. There’s always room for one more! Touch the planchette and point to HELLO to make contact with him. Would that make you feel better?

  The Unwrapping

  Terry Dowling

  One does not expect calls for my particular service most evenings, most weeks, most months for that matter. Nor does one advertise by means other than word of mouth and only then among proven clients. Misunderstandings are rife.

  But if the service of quatorzième is as special as it is rare in these latter days, nearly two centuries since it was the height of fashion half a world or two and a half oceans away, I charge accordingly. As a professional dinner guest, a respectable and self-respecting woman safely beyond forty, I’m forthright, witty, dazzling enough (I’m told) to make the perfect fourteenth at the table when serendipity, careless planning, illness, or sudden calamity leaves the dreaded thirteen and the host wants no unpicked, last-minute ring-ins, no friends of friends turning up love-me-love-my-dog fashion, no partners, or unknown quantities.

  There are still such dinners in the world, many in fact, not only orchestrated to the point of scrupulous personality alignments but where thirteen at table is still considered unlucky, even dire, if not for the host then for one of the guests. The perfect host knows these things.

  The skilful quatorzième is always welcome, even more so when female. You will understand.

  Suzanne Day was thirty percent apologetic on the phone. It was in her voice.

  “Carmel, short notice, I know, but are you available tomorrow evening?” (Never “free,” of course, given the less reputable overtones.)

  “For you I am, Suzanne. But I have to ask, why me? You usually go to Ella or Damien.”

  “You studied Egyptology at uni, did you not?”

  “Among other things. The complete dilettante’s skill set, remember? Bits of everything.”

  “But you majored in it, yes? Did an honours year.”

  “You’ve been reading my file again.”

  “Well, this is for you,” she said with a touch of genuine glee. “An unwrapping.”

  “What, a mummy unwrapping! You’re kidding me. There’d have to be countless takers wanting a ticket to that.”

  “Intriguing, yes? I want to go myself but the host won’t let me. I must remain the go-between here. He wants this thirteen plus one just in case. Someone who knows a bit about what’s going on.”

  “Suzanne, unwrapping parties were well and truly passé by the early 1900s.”

  “Trust you to know.”

  “But there’ll be experts among the thirteen?”

  “To do the actual deed, of course. But they’re from the same faculty. An independent is required.”

  I remained wary. “What host is superstitious enough to avoid thirteen for something like this? What have nineteenth century spiritualist concerns to do with unwrapping an Egyptian mummy in the twenty-first century? On second thought, I take that back.”

  “Thought you might. It’s precisely suited to a nineteenth century–style event like this. As for why, I have no idea.” She gave the dry chuckle by which I had always known her. “Maybe a mummy suddenly became available. But the usual rates plus a late-notice bonus.”

  “Then send what you have. Who’s the host and where’s it to be?”

  “You’ll love this. Alan and Paula Lovejoy, and Desert House at Whale Beach. Semiformal. An early start at five p.m. Always wanted to see the place myself. Right up near where that film director Peter Weir lives. Crown of the Northern Beaches.”

  On any other day I’d have played the jaded card with something like: Not that old place again. But something about this made me play it straight.

  “Go ahead and confirm. Text me the details and arrange the car.”

  • • •

  When you follow Barrenjoey Road along the coast to Avalon Beach thirty-seven kilometres to the north of Sydney, you find yourself in what often feels like another country. It’s the inescapable feeling I always get as I round the Bilgola bends and begin heading down into Avalon itself, as if a different energy, different way of seeing, different set of values prevail.

  Moving through the lazy seaside town on this early Saturday evening, finally turning up Whale Beach Road to a soirée like the one ahead only intensified the feeling.

  As soon as I stepped out of the limo I could hear the ocean, the all-encompassing sound of the long swells heaving against the cliffs less than two hundred metres away. A stiff onshore breeze stirred the acacias and potted palms. The air smelled of salt spray and sea-wrack. Cicadas sounded in the summer gum trees and melaleucas back where the coastal ridge fell away to the west.

  The house itself had something of an old-world cast about it. Not Victorian or Gothic, nothing so melodramatic. It was more like a sprawling, modernist, Californian beachside villa from the 1920s set back behind high stucco walls of bleached shell pink; these bordered with acacias and palms, cycads and cacti, all so scrappy in carefully
controlled rustica fashion. It looked forbidding, carefree, and mysterious all at the same time.

  I watched the hire car pull away, then pressed the button in the brass plate by the front door. After a ten count, it was answered by a young Eurasian man in the white shirt and dark slacks of service staff.

  “Good afternoon, Ms. Reid,” he said, giving his best professional smile. “I am Ronny. Please come in.” He then stepped aside so I could proceed first, no doubt so I could enjoy the quiet spectacle of the approach to the house’s interior.

  Inside the front door, I found the spacious alcove of a sand-garden set with eight Pukumani burial poles from the Tiwi Islands. The main hallway was a left turn from that powerful feature with an immediate dogleg to the right. This led along a wide gallery passageway with pale sandstone fascia walls and four spotlit Ainslie Roberts originals, wonderfully in vogue again among collectors after their seventies heyday. That opened onto the main dining and entertaining area, a vast low space with picture windows creating an entire wall of glass facing east. The swells of the Pacific were already in shadow close in to the shore, but the thunderheads of a distant storm out over the ocean were brilliant with late afternoon sunlight, the great banks of cumulonimbus turned to saffron, rose gold, and coral against the looming darkness. It was like a scene from Maxfield Parrish or Michael Parkes by way of Hayao Miyazaki.

  I saw that, before those windows, a long dining table was laid for ten, while in the middle of the room, closer to where I now stood, a well-lit space had been cleared by moving armchairs and sofas aside. It was there that a long shrouded form lay atop a trestle table: clearly the evening’s guest of honour.