The Other Side of Midnight

by Simone St. James

  Still she used the low, mannish voice. “There is one other at this table,” she said, her lips the only part of her to move, “who death comes for. Someone here will be dead before the year is out.”

  There was a beat of silence. I felt Rose’s fingers flinch in mine, her breath hitch. “Death knocks,” Ramona said, and as she spoke the raps sounded on the table again, hard and angry. “Death comes for someone in this room, someone who will not escape it. The spirits warn me. Death has its hand on someone’s throat.”

  “Stop,” I said.

  There was a cold beat of silence and everyone looked at me—everyone except Ramona, who stayed unmoving in her uncanny position. If she’d heard me, she gave no sign of it.

  Beside me, I could feel Rose quietly convulsing her breath, near to hysterical sobbing. “Just stop,” I said to Ramona, though she gave no indication she knew I was there. “You’re scaring—” I remembered I wasn’t supposed to know that Rose was dying. “You’re scaring all of us.” I forced the words out. I took my hand from James’s grip and ran it over my forehead, which was chilled with sweat. “You should leave, all of you,” I said. “Someone is coming and I don’t think I can stop it.”

  “What are you talking about?” said Rose’s mother. She squinted hard at me. “Who are you?”

  “Are you one of them?” The sad man was staring at me, his bottomless gaze devouring me in its pain. “You can call them, too, can’t you? I can see it. Give me your hand.” He dropped the hands he was holding and lunged across the table, grabbing for me, but another hand came down hard on his wrist, pinning it.

  “I’d think twice about that,” James said in a low, dangerous voice.

  I leaned back in my chair, dropping Rose’s hand. “Please,” I said to the man as his grief hit me again. Or perhaps it was the smell of the candle; I could no longer tell. The itch was bad now, a crawling sensation under my scalp. “You must leave. Sometimes, when they come . . . it’s better they didn’t. Sometimes—”

  But then the room dropped away, and there was only the dark, and the pinpoint of candlelight, and my breath rasping in my lungs. And sitting across from me was a woman.

  She made no sound. She wore a high-necked blouse and skirt in the fashion of ten years ago, her light hair tied back in a bun. She looked perhaps twenty. She stared at me, her eyes large in her pale dead face, her form flickering in the candlelight, yet somehow waxy and real. She held a small child in her arms, its face pressed to her chest, the delicate curls of its hair the same color as hers.

  Voices carried on around me, far away. I stared at the gaunt curve of the woman’s cheek, the long fingers pressed into the baby’s back. Her gaze on me held a consuming hunger that made my stomach turn again. The child’s feet dangled past the curve of her elbow, slack in their tiny shoes. It could have been a boy or a girl; it was so small, in a simple baby’s dress and a delicate dusting of curls, it was impossible to tell which. One of its arms rested against the waist of her skirt, pinned between the child’s body and hers. She held the small body tightly to her, unmoving.

  Behind me, a creak of wood. A rapping on the table. A breath of air blowing. The other participants were shadows, their lips moving, but I heard nothing. A slow, deep arch of pain made its way up the back of my skull.

  I mustered myself. Go, I said to the woman. Go. Not now.

  She only stared at me, avid and wanting, the baby clutched to her.

  Go! I commanded. It wasn’t working, and my own power was slipping from my grasp, like something warm and slimy and wet. I had been trained since that day when I was seven to keep my power under strict control, but all of that was gone now and I felt only monstrous panic as I tried harder and harder to grip it. Go away!

  Her hands moved on the child, slid eerily over its back. It lay with its face buried in its mother’s chest, unmoving and still. More raps sounded on the séance table and the draft on the back of my neck meant a door had moved. This is the worst kind of visitation, I heard my mother’s voice say. The kind that comes of its own volition, the kind that cannot be controlled by a medium. They are malignant and must not be allowed through. This woman had no message to give, only pain that I felt like an echo through my body. Tears stung my eyes.

  “It isn’t going to move, is it?” I said. “The baby.”

  “What?” I heard the sad man’s voice clearly over the rushing in my ears. “What did you say?”

  I summoned my strength. The only way to get rid of a visitation like this was to convince it to leave if you could. “I’m sorry about your baby,” I choked, a sob in my voice. “I’m sorry. Please leave.”

  “What did you say?”

  “Come any closer,” came James’s voice, “and I’ll lay you out. I mean it.”

  The woman did not seem to see anyone in the room; still she stared at me, and again her hands moved over the child’s back. The expression in her waxy eyes seemed to shift, like ink that has had water spilled on it. Her mouth moved.

  I jerked my hands up and jammed my palms over my ears. “No!” I shouted. “Please!”

  “Is that my Alice?” the man cried, and the woman’s lips opened, revealing a blurry set of awful teeth, a black pit of a mouth. She gripped her baby, her eyes gone mad, and screamed, a sound of unearthly agony that split through my brain. The stench was unbearable, the sound a high keen. I opened my mouth to scream over it, to drown it out, but the woman leaned over the table, her face gray and dead in mine, her baby dead in her arms, and then the candle went out.

  The scream stopped. I sagged in my chair, my hands still over my ears. A strong hand gripped my upper arm in the dark, warm and certain.

  “Ellie,” came James’s voice.

  The rushing sound vanished, and through my hands I could hear a flurry of voices—outrage, confusion, fear. Rose was sobbing, her face pressed into her handkerchief, her shoulders heaving as her mother soothed her. The sad man was shouting, glaring at James. The old widow had pushed her chair back and was staggering from the room, ghastly and silent. And Ramona had come out of her trance and was laughing in a throaty voice, a sound vicious and heartless and utterly without humor. James stared into my face, his concern overlaid with a mask of pure horror as he looked at me. I dashed the tears from my eyes. The woman had gone, taken her dead child and vanished into whatever hellish place she had come from.

  The séance was over.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Ramona sat at her séance table, lighting a cigarette. The other guests had left and the electric lights had been turned on, highlighting the bleary pallor of her face under the makeup. “That was quite a show,” she admitted to me in a tired voice. “I should have had them come see you instead. At least everyone paid me up front.”

  “Everyone always pays up front,” I said automatically.

  She raised a penciled eyebrow at me. I sat opposite her in one of the séance chairs as James prowled the room around us and poked and prodded the table legs. “You’re in the business, then. Come to steal my clients, did you?”

  “No.” I reached across the table without asking and flicked open her cigarette holder. Ramona’s cigarettes were a brand I didn’t recognize, narrow and dark with a smoky smell. I picked up her matches and lit one as she watched.

  “Have we met?” she said finally, her tone unimpressed.

  I took a drag of the cigarette—it sent a plume of pungent flavor down the back of my throat—and shrugged. The horror of what I’d seen was slowly falling away from me and my professional armor was starting to work. The panicked sensation of my powers slipping away from me was fading, along with the headache. As long as I did not think about that woman’s baby, I would be fine. “My name is Ellie Winter.”

  “The Fantastique?” Ramona rolled her eyes, angry and trying to hide it. She hunched her narrow shoulders farther forward under their flimsy wrap. “And what about your handsome f
riend here? He looks like police to me.”

  “I take offense to that,” James said, straightening from the crouching position he’d assumed under the table. “I’m not nearly competent enough for the police. I’m from the New Society.”

  Ramona glared at him, her pinpointed pupils seething with sudden hatred. “You,” she said to him, my presence forgotten. “You are utter scum.”

  “And you are a disappointment,” James replied, placing one hand flat on the table and leaning forward. “Two of the table legs are hollow, you have a pedal under each foot, and there’s an electric fan set up to be tripped by a switch over the doorway.”

  That explained the table knocks and the uncanny breeze. Ramona spat at him like a cat. “I’m just trying to make a living. Go away and get out of my business.”

  “Not until you answer some questions,” James replied.

  “About what?”

  “Gloria Sutter,” I broke in.

  Ramona turned at the sound of my voice and I watched her try to think through her chemical haze. Emotions crossed her face, frustration and anger and some kind of choking fear. “You think I killed her?”

  I held her gaze. “Did you?”

  She took a drag of her cigarette, and I admired how she summoned her composure. “I hated her, of course,” she said. She lifted her gaze to me. “But then, so did you. Everyone knew you were rivals.”

  I blinked, surprised, and then I glanced at James. He shook his head. “Where did you hear that?” I asked her. “Did Gloria tell you?”

  Ramona rolled her eyes. “Darling, I’ve been in this business longer than you think. I hear things. All about The Fantastique, and Gloria Sutter, and how they used to be friends cutting up London. How Gloria had your mother declared a fraud. How you’ve hated each other ever since. Which means I cannot figure out why—no matter how good-looking he is—you would associate with the likes of him.” She gestured violently toward James with her ashy cigarette.

  “I’m irresistible,” James said easily.

  “You prey on the likes of me,” Ramona shot back. “You have no mercy.”

  “I have as much mercy as you had for those poor grieving people tonight,” James said, “as well as everyone in the audience at your stage show.”

  “How much money did you lose?” I asked her as she furiously ground out the stub of her smoke. I doused my own, half smoked. “I assume the theater wouldn’t give you your share of the ticket take after that display.”

  “Philistines,” Ramona said in disgust.

  “What happened that night?” James pressed her. “At the Dubbses’. What did you see?”

  Ramona sat sullen for a moment, and when she spoke, her voice was bitter. “Not much. None of them wanted me there, but that was just too bad. I went anyway. We waited around—the marks seemed to be waiting for something. I got drunk as quickly as I could. The marks were clueless—I almost felt sorry for them, except they were shady types themselves.”

  I sat up. I hadn’t heard this before. “The Dubbses were shady?”

  “It’s a feeling you get, you know?” Ramona shrugged and looked away. “It takes one to know one, I suppose. All I know is that something about that house was all wrong. I would have backed out, but by then I was drunk and there was no way home.”

  “All right,” James said. “So you didn’t like the Dubbses. And you were drinking. Then what happened?”

  Ramona closed her eyes briefly and touched her fingertips to her forehead. “God,” she said. “I told the police everything, over and over, but they wouldn’t leave me alone. This is a bloody nightmare.” She dropped her hand and shifted in her chair, uncomfortable. “You two have to leave.”

  I glanced at James, but he stood unmoving. He did not speak.

  Ramona looked at us for another moment, then threw up her hands dramatically, the sleeves of her wrapper flapping. “God, I don’t know. Gloria said she had to get some air, and she left.”

  “If you weren’t invited, how did you know the séance was happening?” I asked.

  “Figure it out if you can,” she said, baring her teeth at me in a grin. “You just try it, darling—try not being able to pay the rent, wondering where the next meal is coming from. Try living on the few pennies I scrounge up and see whether you wait for a polite invitation. My guess is that you’ll follow the money, just like I did. I was sick of hearing about the great Gloria Sutter, the irreplaceable Gloria Sutter. I wanted a piece of her, and I would have done anything to get it.”

  James had rounded the séance table while she was speaking, and now he looked down at her, his gaze on the pinpoint pupils of her eyes. “It isn’t food you need,” he said, almost gently. “It’s money for your next fix. The stage shows and the séances don’t earn enough to buy what you’re taking. Where do you get the money, Ramona?”

  She only smiled up at him, and in that moment I could see the girl who had run away from home only to see her dreams of becoming an actress fall apart in bitter failure. Ramona was a survivor, even if the act of surviving was itself grim, and she no longer knew what she did it for. “Are you asking if I’m for sale?” she asked. “Name a price, handsome, and I’ll consider it.”

  I pushed my chair back and rose. My head was throbbing and I couldn’t stand it anymore in this awful little flat, with its close air and shabby furniture. “There’s no point, James,” I said. “Let’s go.”

  I had just reached the door when Ramona stopped me, leaning a hand on the doorframe. Up close, under the electric light, I saw that her forehead was damp. A single bead of sweat trickled down her throat to the neck of her wrapper. Her body sagged slightly, as if she fought off pain. “You,” she said to me. “You saw something tonight, something real. Don’t lie to me.”

  I shrugged, not wanting her to get her teeth into how it had upset me. “Perhaps.”

  “Such power,” she said softly, and even through the ache of craving her next fix, her voice carried a note of wonder. “You’re truly The Fantastique, then. You can see the dead, just like she could.”

  I put my hand on the arm that blocked me; it was chilled through the thin fabric of her sleeve. “Let me leave.”

  “It isn’t going to help you, you know,” Ramona said, and for a second I saw the woman I’d seen onstage, eerily commanding and pitiful at the same time. Her bleary eyes were half mad with fear, and for a second they reminded me of the inkblot eyes of the dead woman I’d seen. “Your power. It won’t help you—not with this. You have no idea what you’re dealing with.”

  “Then tell me,” I said.

  She only laughed and pulled her arm away from the door. “The devil is coming,” she called after us as we retreated down the hallway to the stairs. “He’s coming for you. He’s coming for me. He’s coming for all of us.”

  * * *

  I sat on the front stoop of Ramona’s building, the night’s chill seeping through the layers of my skirt and coat. The rain had stopped and the darkened street looked slick as a mirror, the few streetlights reflecting in yellow pools. It was late and the street was empty. I tilted my head back, breathing in the damp air and the pungent smell of rainy pavement.

  James lowered himself next to me, his body large beside mine. He set his forearms on his knees. He moved with a grace that was physically uncanny; I wouldn’t have been surprised if he could climb walls.

  “What exactly did you see in there?” he asked.

  I sighed. “James Hawley,” I said, letting the name circle on my tongue. “James Hawley wants to know what I saw.”

  “He does,” James agreed.

  “Will this go into a report for the New Society?”

  He looked away, his jaw tightening. “I thought we’d moved past that.”

  I cannot figure out, Ramona had said, why you would associate with the likes of him. Perhaps she was right, and he couldn’t be trusted. The
problem was that I could think of no one else to tell.

  “The man at the séance,” I said. “His child died. And his wife . . .” I slid my arms around my knees and hugged them. “She killed herself, I think. At least, it’s possible. It’s difficult to tell.”

  He was very still, and turned toward me. I knew he was looking at me but I could not look back. “What is it like?” he said at last. “Seeing the dead.”

  An old woman walked by, huddled into a thick coat, her footsteps splashing through the reflected lamplight on the street. “Like plunging your hand into a bucket of worms in the dark,” I said. “Except it’s inside your mind. It’s repellent, and cold, and you don’t know what you’re touching because you can’t see—you don’t know what it looks like, and you don’t want to know.”

  “Jesus, Ellie,” James said. I turned to him to find his face stark in the harsh lamplight. “Gloria did that for a living.”

  “So did my mother,” I said.

  So do I.

  He looked tired, but a curious light lit his eyes. “I have so many questions.”

  “I have no answers. At least, no one ever gave them to me.” I watched the shaky reflections of light on the street as I spoke. It was far past midnight, I realized. “I don’t know why I have the powers I have, or what they mean. I don’t know if there is anyone else like me anywhere else in the world right now—or how many there have been in history.”

  “None,” James interjected flatly. “Not in this country, at least, except for Gloria. I can tell you that firsthand.”

  I shrugged. “I only know who I am, and that with my mother and Gloria dead I’m alone.”

  He seemed to ponder this, picking through the questions he wanted to ask. “Can you see the future?”

  “No. My mother taught me that seeing the future isn’t possible, that no one can do it. She never told me how she knew.” I fought down the lump in my throat. “There were a lot of things she didn’t tell me, a lot of things I didn’t ask.”