by Ami McKay
“Hello,” Adelaide said, greeting her as sweetly as she could. She knew how much Eleanor revered the woman.
The Bird Lady sidled near, so close that Adelaide could smell the rot in her teeth, and asked, “Sit with you?” She reached out to touch the scars on Adelaide’s face. “Sit with you?”
“All right,” Adelaide said, and when the woman sat, she took her grubby hand in hers and held it in her lap. “Sit with me awhile.”
The Bird Lady laid her head on Adelaide’s shoulder and heaved a pitiful sigh that shuddered and creaked through her tired body.
“He’s coming,” the Bird Lady whispered. “He’s coming for her.”
On the other side of the park, Reverend Townsend waited for Sister Piddock and the rest of the women from his congregation to finish their rounds. He’d promised that he’d escort them (and any other they’d found) back to the church for refreshments and prayers afterwards. Their clucking chatter annoyed him no end, but their devotion was a sure sign that he was winning the fight against sin.
Bringing in the sheaves, bringing in the sheaves.
We shall come rejoicing, bringing in the sheaves.
The Reverend turned his attention to a young girl who was making her way towards him (the same waif who’d read Adelaide’s cards). As she passed into the glow of the street lamp nearest to where he stood, he could’ve sworn for a moment the dishevelled child looked more otherworldly than human. Was she a demon? An angel in disguise? Another witch? Blinking away the vision, he figured he was seeing things. After all, he hadn’t slept last night. He’d stayed on his knees in fervent prayer just as the two men in black had instructed him to do. And at first light Lena McLeod’s body was gone. A miracle! A sign that all he’d done was right. Perhaps the girl standing before him was another test of his faith. Thy will be done, he thought, smiling down at her.
“Tell your fortune, sir?” the little soothsayer asked, staring up at the Reverend.
“Oh child,” Townsend replied, “that’s the Devil’s work.” Putting his hand on her shoulder he asked, “Why do you indulge in his deceptions?”
With a cheeky grin the girl replied, “I need to eat.”
“Come with us then,” Townsend said, guiding her towards the sisters. “The ladies of my church will give you food and rest.”
“And what will you give me?” the girl asked.
“All that you deserve,” Reverend Townsend replied.
With a lively skip the girl fell in line behind the women. As she did, a single card fluttered from her pocket and stuck between two pavers. The Ace of Spades, foretelling misfortune, difficulty and a treacherous path.
If you wish to upset the law that all crows are black, it is enough if you prove that one crow is white.
—WILLIAM JAMES
Dr. Brody’s Ghosts.
QUINN BRODY BEGAN the evening just as he’d hoped—snifter of brandy in his hand, new book on the table, fire crackling before him as he sat in a worn leather chair in his father’s study. Even as a boy, he’d preferred the dusky, bookfilled room above all others in the house. Back then, his mother had held sway over what did and didn’t make its way inside the Brody residence, except for the study. It was there that Quinn had first witnessed the wonder of electricity inside a Leyden jar, watched Pepper’s ghost get conjured via magic lantern, climbed the spiral staircase to the roof to view the moon through a refracting telescope. It was there that he had learned to love science.
After his mother died, Quinn’s father spread the tools of his trade throughout the house. The conservatory became a laboratory, the downstairs cloakroom a makeshift Wunderkammer. Before long there was little discernible difference between the dining-room table and a mad scientist’s workbench. Saturday mornings the lonely widower visited estate sales in the countryside to rescue vast caches of philosophical equipment from abandoned barns and tumbledown shacks. Crucibles, notebooks and leather-bound tomes were strewn on every surface. The smell of coal, sulphur and molten metal belched from every chimney, wafting up from the alchemist’s cauldrons that Mr. Brody kept bubbling over roaring fires throughout the year.
As the elder Brody’s obsessions grew, the world around him changed. The house, an exceptional example of the Italianate style just west of Madison Square, was suddenly on the edge of the Tenderloin, bordered by saloons, theatres, dance halls, clip joints, gambling dens and bordellos. To protect his possessions from questionable elements, Mr. Brody had affixed ironwork grates and bars to all accessible windows and doors, causing the house and his place of business to appear like a pair of giant birdcages.
During the last year of his life, the only people the old man trusted to cross the threshold were his son, his long-time housekeeper, Mabel Stutt, and the gentlemen members of the Unknown Philosophers. Identical signs placed on the front of the house and shop read, NO ADMITTANCE SHALL BE GIVEN TO PREACHERS, TAX COLLECTORS OR T.A. EDISON.
After his father’s death, Quinn conducted a meticulous inventory of the many items that cluttered the place, precipitated in part by the upcoming symposium of the Unknown Philosophers to be held at the Fifth Avenue Hotel. As a tribute to his father, they’d asked him to deliver the opening evening’s lecture and he’d agreed, figuring it was also a good place to share the latest findings of his own research: the finer points of his theories on spirit detection and communication with the afterlife (so long as he could gather satisfactory proof). With the symposium less than a month away, he’d turned the study into a space devoted to his work, adding to his father’s kit a working model of Holtz’s electrostatic influence machine, a Bennet gold-plate electroscope and a collection of various and sundry pendulums and planchettes. The greatest and perhaps most important item in the study, however, was something Quinn’s father had directed him to unearth from the back of the shop before he’d died—a strange-looking contraption he’d simply called a “spiritoscope.”
Made to be attached to the top of a table, it featured a wooden board fitted with casters that could roll freely under the hands of the operator and a “spiritual telegraph dial” (patterned after the cast-iron dials used on early telegraph machines). Letters of the alphabet were arranged around the circumference of the dial, which was a little larger than the face of a grandfather clock, with the numbers one through ten inside that ring. At the one, three, five, six, seven, nine and eleven o’clock positions the following words and phrases appeared: YES, NO, DON’T KNOW, THINK SO, SPELL OVER, MUST GO, MISTAKE.
“It’s for testing spiritual mediumship,” Mr. Brody had explained. “Any and all who claim they can speak with the dead are welcome to try it. The dial is positioned so the operator can’t see it. Any messages received from the Great Beyond are therefore free from bias.”
“Have you ever had any luck with it?” Quinn had asked, wondering why his father had never spoken of the machine before.
“Only in exposing frauds,” his father had answered. “It’s terribly accurate when it comes to detecting liars. Perhaps you’ll have better luck. I’ve placed a message in a bottle and stashed it in the rafters. Once I’m gone, see if you can get the machine to work. If the message comes through word for word, then you’ll know you’ve heard from the other side.”
Not long after his father’s passing, Quinn had sat himself down at the machine and waited to see if the board might move beneath his fingers, but nothing happened. He’d also taken a turn sitting opposite the dial with pen and paper, and invited his father’s spirit to move the needle on his own. On that occasion, the pointer had twitched ever so slightly to the left, and then gone still. That twitch may have been all his father could manage, but it’d been more than enough encouragement for Quinn. Now all he needed to do was find a medium through whom his father’s spirit might freely act. It couldn’t be just anyone, of course, but someone preternaturally sensitive to ghostly transmissions. Perhaps Miss Thom, with her uncanny knack for discerning the past, would be willing to give it a try?
Flustered by their bre
akfast conversation, he’d had an awkward parting with the soothsayer and they’d made no further plans to meet. Even when Quinn had been married, he’d never been quite clear on what it was women wanted from men (or to be more precise, from him). In fact, he’d often thought that his wife’s acceptance of his proposal had been an accident. Not that it mattered anymore. She’d been gone so long he barely remembered what their life had been like. Did he wish to be paired with anyone ever again? Maybe yes. Likely no. Who would take him in his current state—without youth, ambition or a right arm? Still, he had to admit he wanted to see Miss Thom again. Before he let himself be discouraged from the attempt, he sat down at his desk with pen and notepaper.
Dear Miss Thom,
I appreciated (No, that wasn’t quite right.)
Dear Miss Thom,
I greatly enjoyed our conversation (Too boring? Too trite?)
Dear Miss Thom,
I greatly enjoyed our enlightened exchange this morning at the Fifth Avenue Hotel.
May I converse with you again, at your convenience?
You name the time and place, and I shall obey.
Sincerely,
Dr. Quinn Brody
Laying his pen aside, Quinn sensed a presence in the doorway, the weight of a familiar, pressing gaze.
“May I help you, Mrs. Stutt?” The housekeeper had a terrible habit of standing in the shadows, as if she meant to catch him doing something he shouldn’t.
“Nein,” she said. “If you’re not needing me for anything, I’m off to bed.”
The grey-haired woman had been a fixture in Quinn’s life since his youth, and it seemed his father’s passing had affected her nearly as much as it had him. Earlier in the day, he’d caught her crying, hunched over a stray button she’d found in the bottom of her sewing kit. She’d meant to reattach it to his father’s favourite frock coat before he died, but hadn’t gotten the chance.
“Perhaps you’d like some time away?” Quinn had offered, wanting to make things better for her. “With pay, of course. I’d be more than happy to make all the necessary arrangements.”
“Nein,” Mrs. Stutt had replied, drying her tears. “What I’d like is for you to tell me what you want for supper.”
Unlike his father, who’d often invited Mrs. Stutt to sit with him to discuss knackwurst or the weather, Quinn preferred to dine alone, to think alone, without interruption. Mrs. Stutt could cook whatever she wanted, he didn’t care. He’d happily live on bread, cheese and cold cuts, day in and day out, if she’d allow it. He knew he was a disappointment to her.
Still standing in the doorway, Mrs. Stutt waited to be dismissed.
“You’re free to do as you wish,” Quinn said. “I’ve got a new book that wants to be read. I’ll be awake a while yet.”
“Very well then,” Mrs. Stutt said. “Guten nacht, Dr. Brody.”
“Goodnight, Mrs. Stutt. Pleasant dreams.”
As the housekeeper took her leave she muttered under her breath, “Geister zeugen Träume.” Ghosts beget dreams.
The novel Quinn had chosen for his evening’s entertainment turned out to be a bust. More romance than adventure, much of Dr. Heidenhoff’s Process concerned itself with a pair of young lovers who were, by turns, brooding, flippant, arrogant and insufferable. By the time Dr. Heidenhoff arrived on the scene, it was very near the end, and the character’s scientific reasoning, intriguing as it was, was highly flawed and unconvincing.
As he placed the book on the shelf, he felt a nasty pinch between his shoulder blades. The leather straps that fastened his false arm to his body never stopped chafing his back. He’d tried wrapping the straps in muslin, but no matter what he did, the buckles and fittings found new and cruel ways to dig into whatever soft flesh he had left. His father had planned to replace the arm with a more comfortable and useful limb, but had never gotten around to completing the project. Taking his watch from his pocket, he placed it on his father’s desk, then set about the task of unbuttoning his waistcoat, collar and shirt.
Tick-tick-tick-tick, the watch nagged.
He could hardly wait to be free of the weighty, wooden albatross tethered to his body. He would’ve removed the bothersome thing hours ago, but he knew it troubled Mrs. Stutt to see his sleeve limp without it. Tick-tick-tick-tick.
Thump!
His government-issued limb made a sickening thud as it dropped to the floor, causing Quinn’s heart to pound and race. In an instant he was overcome with a sense of dread, his thoughts descending into the chaos of the war. The desk turned into an operating table made from two barrels and a plank. The flames of the fire became a distant battlefield lit with flashes of orange and red. Rows of furrows lay before him, dotted with blue jackets soaked in blood. In a blink, a heap of sawed-off legs, arms, hands and feet appeared at his side. The smell of gunpowder and chloroform filled the air. The soldiers at the Stump Hospital circled around him—one with no legs, one with no eyes, one with a copper nose; a dozen more falling into fits and convulsions at his feet. Then he was staring at his own body, naked and writhing under the knife of a surgeon who was sawing, cutting and slicing him to pieces. Bit by bit, hunks of his flesh got tossed aside until there was nothing left.
Trembling and drenched in sweat, Quinn went to his father’s desk and tripped a lock on a hidden drawer. Why should he continue to be haunted when relief was so close at hand?
Tick-tick-tick-tick.
—
Stump propped on a tufted pillow, Quinn reclined on a woven mat and meditated on the opium pipe that sat on a tray beside him. Yen tshung was what the Chinese called the sleek, silver-saddled length of bamboo. Yen hop, the lacquered opium box. Sui pow, the sponge to cool the bowl. Yen dong, the small lamp that cast a friendly yellow gloom upon his face, reminiscent of the light from a waning campfire. Yen hock, the needle he used to tease and pull at the balled-up pill of chandoo until it turned soft. The substance reminded him of molasses taffy, yet its pleasures weren’t nearly so innocent. He made sure he was precise with the dosage, because he didn’t want to get hooked. He’d promised himself that he wouldn’t fall too far under the poppy’s spell. Still, he thought it a better choice than swilling a bottle of laudanum or getting piss drunk.
As he inhaled the nutty and sweet-tasting smoke, he did his best to allow the opium to ease his mind. The weight of him melted into the floor, his worries sinking down, down, down, along with it. Dancing skeletons and floating burial shrouds soon turned into a trio of rouge-lipped can-can girls in frilly skirts. Tick-tick-tick-tick.
One of the dancers broke away from her sisters to sit on the edge of the stage.
“Charlotte,” Quinn said, recognizing her at once. “My dearest wife.”
Her auburn hair fell to the small of her back, free from ribbons or pins. Leaning forward, Quinn tried to kiss her, but she averted her face.
He’d spent a blur of days keeping vigil at her bedside while she lay dying. Time and again he’d wondered, why couldn’t she have been blessed with a better end?
“Kiss me,” he begged, “I miss you.”
She shook her head and disappeared.
Tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick.
“Dr. Brody…” a second woman called. Another can-can girl come to taunt him.
“Dr. Brody,” she called again, this time from the corridors of the Salpêtrière, the asylum in Paris where he’d studied under Jean-Martin Charcot. “Aidez-moi!”
She was young, full of figure and far more affectionate towards him than she should’ve been.
“Nadine,” he whispered. “You got out again.”
Her mother had tied Nadine to the gates of the asylum with a note pinned to her dress: La fille de Lucifer. Professor Charcot was more than happy to take her into his care.
“Aidez-moi!” she’d cried as Charcot and his students poked and prodded, pricked and scratched her as she lay strapped fast to an examining table. Not Brody, never Brody.
“Elle est hystérique!”
“Ell
e est délirante!”
“Elle est une sorcière!”
On Tuesdays she’d been brought to the lecture hall to be hypnotized and observed by the public transfixed by Charcot’s musée pathologique vivant. The heat in the room was unbearable, the size of the crowd absurd. Hypnotized, she’d spoken of a handsome prince who’d fed her sweets, given her jewels and then repeatedly raped her. (On the ward, she wrote him lengthy letters filled with curses, and signed them “du diable.”)
“Aidez-moi, Dr. Brody!” she’d wailed. “Help me!”
Quinn had watched as the young woman’s ruffled skirts fell from her body, leaving her naked. Embarrassed, he’d given her his jacket.
In it, Nadine had slipped through the asylum gates unnoticed.
Tick-tick-tick-tick.
The last can-can girl gracefully straddled Quinn’s lap. Wrapping her legs around him, the pretty one-eyed dancer gave him a crooked smile and said, “Giddy-up.”
Quinn slipped his ghostly hand beneath her skirts and stroked her bare thigh.
Lips grazing his ear, Adelaide whispered, “How long has it been since you’ve been loved?”
Before Quinn could answer she was gone.
The little oil lamp twinkled before him, urging him back to his pipe. Another bowl would bring about another sweet release, followed by a pleasant stupor.
Then again, he could resist. He could pull on his coat and hat and go for a walk. The fresh air might do him good.
Before he could make up his mind, his belly lurched. Thank heavens there was a bucket nearby, waiting for the slippery lump that’d gathered in his throat. Those new to the pipe, like him, often suffered from surges of the fiend’s remorse.
Tick…tick.
Retching until his stomach was empty, he thrust his hand in his pocket to search for a handkerchief. Clutching the keepsake Charlotte had given him all those years ago, he wiped his nose and mouth on his sleeve instead. As he settled on his pillow, he thought of Adelaide Thom. Would she be the one to bring him proof of the afterlife? Would she be the one to ease his longing?