by Daniel Mills
Louisa must have slipped out as soon as I had fallen asleep. Departing in the dark, she had left me dreaming, even as the snow came down in glowing waves and the river subsided to froth and melt-water. She had left me nothing of herself, not even a card with her full name. Louisa. That was all I knew of her. How would I find her again?
During the following months, I gave myself over completely to the vices of this sleepless city, attending every banquet, ball, and function for miles. I stayed late, often through to dawn, sometimes engaging in conversation with the other ball-goers. More commonly, I simply lingered by the bar, a gin and soda in hand, and waited for her to pick me out again, to gather me up in her arms and take me home—wherever home might have been.
My lust for her was like a fever of the brain, a spell under which I sleepwalked the midnight streets of this city in spring, and then in summer.
Night after night I crossed and re-crossed the fog-wreathed river, unwilling to go home, unable to sleep. For months, I slept no more than a couple of hours each night. To sustain myself, I drank black coffee by the pitcher—an affectation at which Stevens sniffed in disapproval—and my health began to suffer. Those few activities that had once brought me joy now gave me no pleasure but served only to affirm an essential numbness, which I came to envision as a black and silent sea on which I floated facedown, a dead man.
My friends, observing these changes in me, begged me to leave off my mad quest, to forget about Louisa altogether and return to a respectable lifestyle. One evening in September, they confronted me in my bedroom and pleaded with me to see a doctor. Only then did I realize that they thought me insane. No one had seen me with Louisa at the ball, and they were solidly convinced I had imagined her. Perhaps I had. I confess the notion had occurred to me before, but I had quickly quashed it for fear of admitting to myself the same madness my friends saw in me. At the time, their suggestions enraged me. I snatched a platter from the table and chased them from the room, wielding the dish like a cutlass. When they were gone, I slammed the door so loudly that even the imperturbable Stevens jumped, juggled a teacup, and cursed under his breath when it shattered on the floor.
Later that night, after my anger had cooled, I reconsidered my situation from my friends’ perspective and saw they were right to be concerned. Viewed in the light of reason, my self-destructive behavior during the previous summer appeared, at best, irrational, and at worst, entirely mad. I resolved to take my friends’ advice.
That night, I stayed in and did not attend the ball being held across the river. Instead I retired early and slept deeply for the first time in months. In the morning I called on each of my friends in turn and apologized for my abominable behavior. Fortunately, I am a man blessed with the best of companions, and they welcomed me back into their lives without resentment, and indeed, with real joy. I still thought of Louisa, it’s true, but I quickly returned to my old habits with the same single-minded determination with which I had once left them behind.
*
By October, I believed my madness to be over. I felt once more myself and did not hesitate when my friend Nathan suggested we attend a séance at the table of one Miss Volkov.
The young medium had moved to the city in the spring of that year and caused no small sensation once tales of her abilities began to circulate. One man, a widower, claimed to have glimpsed the ghost of his wife at Miss Volkov’s table, while another woman, who had suffered many miscarriages, felt the touch of tiny hands in the dark.
“But they weren’t cold like I expected,” she told a gathered crowd. “I don’t understand it, but their flesh—it was as warm somehow. Soft and fragrant like the air they never breathed.”
All guests at Miss Volkov’s table reported on the music they had heard during the course of each circle. Whenever the medium entered her trance—and was thus oblivious to the world around her—the guitars and zithers that sat on the table behind her picked themselves up and began to play, first one instrument and then another, until three or four were being plucked together in an eerie cadence.
The resulting music proved utterly alien to the ears of its audience: slow and soothing in one moment, painfully dissonant in the next. “It was like the sound of your heart,” one man told me. “Late at night. If you lie awake and listen.”
These stories had circulated since the spring and I had heard many such tales during my months of ball-going. Naturally, I was curious.
Nathan and I arrived at the Volkov house shortly after nine in the evening. The medium’s residence proved to be an attractive house in the style of the Georgian Revival. We waited several minutes on the ornate stoop before being admitted by a servant in suit and tails.
The man appeared to be mute. He took our coats from us without speaking. From his hand gestures, we understood that we were to follow him into the parlor. There an assemblage of six women in widow’s black crowded about a circular table at which were three empty seats: one each for Nathan and myself and one (I gathered) for Miss Volkov. The manservant showed us to our seats, bowed slightly, and vanished into the hall.
The parlor was square and high-ceilinged, steeped in shadow. The windows were dimmed with black shawls, so that the only light came from a solitary lamp at the center of the table. Placed against the far wall was a rectangular bench that held an assortment of musical instruments. There were guitars and lutes, even a saw.
Nathan and I introduced ourselves to the gathered women. It quickly became apparent that they were spiritualists all, the intensity of their passion for theosophy and Christian Science matched only by the agony of their bereavement.
Almost immediately, I regretted our coming. Whereas I had expected the strange, the exotic, I had found instead the merely tragic. “Is this your first time at the table?” one women inquired of me. Her tone was eager, her eyes sorrowful, and the faces of the other women also bore the same curious mixture of grief and hope. Noticing this, I shifted uncomfortably in my seat and allowed Nathan to answer for the both of us.
After a quarter of an hour, we heard footsteps in the hall outside. The women fell silent, rapt with anticipation. The footsteps ended outside the parlor doors.
“Extinguish the light,” a voice commanded from the hall. “So that I may enter.”
There ensued a flurry of activity as three of the women tried to snuff the lamp simultaneously. Nathan looked at me and rolled his eyes.
The lamp went out, plunging the room into darkness. The double doors creaked open, and I shortly perceived the patter of bare feet on the floorboards.
This new visitor sat down in the chair opposite me. She wasted no time in joining hands with the mourning women, and I soon found myself a part of her circle, with Nathan’s hand clasped in my left and a widow’s hand in my right.
“Come to me,” Miss Volkov intoned. “O Empty Cup. O Face of the Nameless Dark. You who were with me at my birth. Who will be with me at my death. Speak to me of the forgotten path. Tell me of the un-trodden ways.”
The ensuing stillness magnified all sound so that my heartbeat came muffled through the veil of its echo, and the rapping of a hand beneath the table (for what else could it have been?) resounded with the sonic force of a rock-fall in a cavern. The rap came once, twice.
Miss Volkov spoke again. “We are not alone,” she said.
The fine hairs lifted from the nape of my neck. A tremor climbed my spine and lingered near the base of the skull.
“My spirit guide is present,” the medium continued, her words flowing together. “She says there is one here who has borne a great loss. One who has known too much of suffering and too little of joy. Listen. Do you hear? It is the voice of your sweet Rufus.”
With that, Miss Volkov’s intonation altered, taking on the tinny brittleness of a young child’s voice.
“Mama?” the voice said. “Are you there?”
“Rufus!” one of the sitters cried. “Oh, God, child. I’m here. I’m listening.”
“Mama. You must—”
“What, baby? What must I do?”
“He says you must learn to live without me.”
“Who does, Rufus? Who says that?”
“The Lord, Mama. He says you have grieved too long.”
“Rufus, I—Rufus, don’t go!”
“Goodbye, Mama,” the child said. By some trick of ventriloquism, the voice seemed to fade from the very air. “We’ll meet again. The Lord promises it.”
Another rap came from beneath the table, the blow striking the wood so violently that the table leapt into the air. Nathan’s hand went clammy in my own.
The medium's booming voice returned. “O Sainted Oblivion,” she chanted. “O Blackened Heart and Harbor. Do you see me, here, in the mouth of your nothingness? My soul’s music plays on your unending sea.”
From out of the darkness came the faint plucking of a guitar, repeating the same three dissonant notes that existed in no key. They were like music’s mirror inversion: utterly strange and unfamiliar. To the atonal plucking of the guitar was added another, which joined the first in a madman’s approximation of harmony. The two instruments played together for a time before being joined by the unearthly piping of a saw. The melody it played belonged to no school of music I could name, but its essential pathos could not be denied.
The music struck me at my soul’s center, and the resulting wound opened my mind to vistas of paralyzing emptiness, eclipsing all hope with wave upon wave of dizzying black. Inevitably, I thought of Louisa, and the sadness I had glimpsed in her: the consuming melancholy of one who has never been happy.
The music was beautiful, yes, but it was also corrupt, as her dress had first appeared to me, and I felt myself adrift on an ocean of alien sound that might drag me to its bottom as easily as it might bear me up, and carry me onward, and carry me home.
I did not hear the music stop.
All I knew was that the room was suddenly silent.
Minutes passed before Miss Volkov spoke.
“Bring up the light,” she said. “Our circle is ended.”
I sighed with relief. Nathan laughed nervously and wrenched his hand free of my grip. His palms were slick. Someone struck a match and the lamp flickered to life.
Opposite me sat the mysterious Miss Volkov, and at my first sight of her, I lost all composure. Here was the woman for whom I had searched so long in vain, the woman with whom I had spent a single night and whom I had known as Louisa.
With a strangled cry, I pushed back my chair and jumped to my feet with such clumsy violence that I nearly knocked the table on its side.
Miss Volkov—Louisa—regarded me with confusion. In her eyes I saw no sign of recognition. “Are you ill?” she asked kindly. “I will call for the doctor.”
“Don’t—don’t you know me?”
My heart was beating wildly. All eyes in the room were upon me and then upon Miss Volkov as she shook her head. Her denial cut deep, and I took a hesitant step toward her. She shrunk away, ill at ease, and Nathan caught my arm before I could approach any nearer.
“Louisa!” I cried. “It’s me. It’s Andrew.”
For the first time, the medium’s composure wavered.
“What name did you call me?” she whispered.
I did not have the chance to respond, for Nathan took me firmly by the elbow and spirited me through the double doors into the hallway. The mute manservant presented us with our coats and shooed us outside, slamming the door behind us.
It was raining, a chilling downpour. The northern wind sliced through our coats and turned the rain to hail. Nathan called us a hansom and helped me into the seat.
I wrapped my coat around me and listened to the rattle of ice on the canvas roof. Nathan sat beside me, saying nothing. I could tell my actions had embarrassed him profoundly, but he was a true friend, and I sensed his concern.
Half an hour later, the carriage deposited me outside my house. “I shall call tomorrow,” Nathan said as he helped me dismount. The driver rapped his whip against the horse’s flank, and the carriage drove off into the night, leaving me alone to cross the empty courtyard. Brown leaves whispered over the flagstones, forming tornadoes where the wind trapped itself against the brick walls. Cold rain plashed upon my head and snaked down through my hair.
Short of the doorway, I looked up into the sky, low and heavy with rain. In the mouth of the cosmos I saw the same darkness I had encountered at Miss Volkov’s circle, the half-seen shadow that gathered about me, even now, that threatened to strangle the life from me.
I forced myself to keep walking. Inside, I mounted alone the steps I had once climbed with her and collapsed onto the bed in my room. Shivering and cold, I waited up until dawn, listening to my heart as rain tapped at the window.
*
The days grew shorter, the nights frigid. My despair grew, as did my obsession, and in time, my darkest impulses turned violent. I was as a man drowning. Wildly I kicked from the depths I had glimpsed at her table, willing myself to surface, though the waves held me under.
On most nights, I watched her house from the shelter of a nearby overhang, hoping for a glimpse of her through the parlor windows. But the shawls remained in place—they were never removed—and the parlor remained as closed to me as the doors of my own happiness.
During the following weeks, I came to understand that Louisa’s routine was firmly established. Every night, at nine, the front door opened to admit the sitters. At midnight the door opened again to let them out. Following each séance, the mute manservant remained behind and typically did not depart until well after two. Not once did Louisa set foot from the house.
At eight o’clock on the evening of November 14th, I took up my nightly vigil at the Volkov house. Shortly after nine, the last of the sitters arrived and were ushered inside by the mute manservant. The doors were shut, the lamp extinguished, and the faint strains of music could subsequently be heard through the covered windows of the parlor.
Shortly after midnight, the séance concluded. The sitters began to slip out, and I retreated into the shadows for fear of being seen. As usual, the manservant was last to leave, departing well after two o’clock. He tugged the flaps of his coat to his breast and hurried to the end of the lane, vanishing into the gloom beyond the farthest streetlight.
Once he had gone, I emerged from my place in the darkness and rapped with my knuckles on the oaken door—timidly at first, but then with some assurance. I received no response. The house lay silent, the windows unlit. Suddenly desperate, I balled my hands into fists and pounded on the door. After a minute, I spied the glow of the gas lamps in the foyer and heard the muffled approach of rapid footsteps.
I swallowed. I let my hands drop to my sides. The door groaned inward, and there stood my Louisa, the woman known to the world as Miss Volkov. She was wrapped in a gray shawl, which she wore over a white nightshirt.
For a long time we did not speak. Now that she stood before me, I found I could not bring myself to utter the first word.
“It’s Andrew, isn’t it? Andrew Todd.”
“At your service,” I said, weakly.
“You’ve been watching me.”
I nodded.
“Earlier tonight, when I spotted you from the window, I nearly sent for the police. Surely it would have been the least that you deserve.”
She was right, of course. Standing on her stoop in the dead of night, I was thoroughly ashamed of my behavior during the preceding days.
“But something stopped me,” she continued. “Something you said.”
“What—”
She cut me off. “Why have you come here? Tell me the truth.”
“I—I needed to see you,” I said. “That night—the night we spent together. I’ve tried—Lord knows I have—but I cannot forget it.”
My words produced no change in her expression. The gas lamps flickered behind her head. “You needed to see me.”
“Yes.”
She sighed. Something slackened in her face, as though she
had bowed to some unavoidable end. “Then you’d better come in,” she said and motioned for me to enter.
I did not know what to say and so said nothing. I stepped over the threshold and made two tentative steps in the direction of the parlor. I had assumed she would receive me there, but she caught my wrist.
“No,” she hissed. “I don’t go in there.”
“But the séance—”
“Only then,” she said, releasing her grip. She mounted the steps and looked back at me pointedly. “Come,” she said. “We can talk upstairs.”
We ascended the two flights together. She led with me following close behind, as though in reverse reenactment of the night we met. The upstairs was entirely unlit and she carried no candle. Evidently I had roused her from bed. Probably the manservant waited for her to retire each evening before going home himself.
“In here,” she whispered, and ushered me down the hall to the master bedroom. A large four-poster lounged in one corner, its oaken frame hung with violet drapery. The coals of a dying fire languished in the grate. An ivory-faced clock sat on the mantle, its wooden frame carved into the shape of an elephant. The hands read ten to three.
“We can talk in here,” she said. “We’re safe here.” Her choice of words struck me as singularly odd. I realized then that she was distinctly uneasy, afraid. Her eyes darted from side to side, occasionally settling on the clock.
She sat on the edge of the bed. “Please,” she invited me, patting the clothes beside her. “Sit.” I sat. No sooner had I done so then she stood and began to pace the length of the bedroom, walking from bed to hearth and back again.
“Louisa,” she said. “That’s what you called me. That night you came to the circle.”
“Is that so strange?”
“It isn’t my name.”
I blinked. “But—”
“It’s Wilhelmina. Mina to my friends.”
“You said—”
“What did I say?”