by Rex Baron
“Do not break hands,” the Medium whispered. “There is danger from the other side if you break the circle.”
The little maid, in her unprotected corner, unscrewed the cap of the smelling salts and helped herself to a substantial sniff.
“I feel someone trying to get through,” the Medium moaned softly. “It is the voice of a man I hear.”
Lucy began to feel unwell. She listened as if through a thick fog as the woman from Texas conjured the departed spirit of a man with a cigar, who she described as surrounded by snow. The unseen entity was claimed by one of those present, a Mrs. Dodd from Michigan, who had been left a fortune in the cottage cheese business by her husband. She leaned forward expectantly, hanging on every word of commentary from the Medium, as the spirit of her departed husband reportedly bumped and thumped his way around various furnishings of the stifling room, rapping on the back of Chippendale chairs or tapping on the mantle of the fireplace, a habit that the woman insisted was customary of her husband.
Lucy's mind wandered in and out. She had hoped that an evening of watching the guests respond to the tricks of the charlatan Medium would be amusing, but it was not. Images, which only half materialized, along with those that she knew were not her own, took possession of her brain. She felt as if she had been buried in hot sand, drying her throat and baking her skin with its heat, paralyzing her under a great weight.
All the while, she felt an unsettling current of energy connecting her to the horrid little woman at her side. She tried to disengage her hand, but it was fused with the flesh of the murderess, like a high voltage current of information searing through to her brain.
Finally, after a seemingly endless time, once everyone else had made contact with the other side, the woman in black spoke up in a hoarse whisper.
“Is my mother at peace?” she asked, sending a surging charge up Lucy's arm. “She had been so ill. I mean... I wouldn’t want to think that she might be wandering about, appearing from the other world, talking to people. It's only that I feel the world is sad enough as it is. Don't you think so?”
Lucy felt the heat of the room increase. Her tongue was swollen and she struggled for air. She needed the smelling salts, an unspeakable distance away. She turned toward the servant girl who sat clutching the bottle, but no words would come.
She tried to pull her hand away, to leave the circle, but the insistent grip of the little woman would not allow it. She felt the breath come to her throat, but she could not speak. A sudden pain at the base of her skull seized her, a numbing, an opening of a door. Her head dropped back on her shoulders and her mind fell backwards in space, down a long channel of darkness into a pool of half memories, filled with horrid faces with flaming eyes and long forgotten children's toys that made her want to cry from recognition and longing.
The next voice the company heard was not that of the Medium or the Indian guide, but Lucy's. It spoke deliberately, without emotion.
“I see an old woman lying in a bed for many months, a cloth is wrapped about her chest. She complains of suffocation. There is no air. Her world is without light or compassion or love. She is surrounded in darkness and hatred. I see her drinking from a cup twice a day. The cup is kept buried under the cupboard, away from the others. It contains poison. I see murder. The old woman died in hatred.” The voice fell silent.
“What does this mean?” Mrs. Mullridge asked in confusion.
“I demand to know who is there,” the woman from Texas snapped, annoyed at the new element that usurped her control. “Remember everyone, DO NOT BREAK THE CIRCLE.”
Lucy's head bobbed back and forth before the voice was heard again.
“Those here, who are summoned by water shall be swallowed up, the great and the powerful, even as the weak. For water is the expression of emotion. Until one can master it, rise above and walk on it, it must surely take you down into the depths.”
With a shuddering sigh of breath, Lucy's head dropped forward against her chest in a dead faint.
“Put on the lights,” Mrs. Mullridge called to the servant girl.
“But the circle,” the Medium protested.
“Damn the circle,” the hostess snapped. “This nonsense has gone far enough.”
Lucy awoke, being patted on the face by the gentle hand of her hostess.
“This is most distressing,” she stated, clearly flustered. “I do hope that you are all right. Something seems to have got hold of you. How do you feel?”
“I'm fine,” Lucy smiled, “a bit dizzy. It just felt so warm. I suppose I fainted. I do hope that I didn't ruin the séance for you.”
Mrs. Mullridge's mouth dropped open in surprise.
“Then you have no idea what happened? No, dear girl, you have not ruined anything. In fact, I'd say you have rather made the evening.”
Long after the lights had come on, Lucy endured the suspicious glances of the woman from Texas, who sulked in a corner sipping a bottomless tumbler of sherry. For some time, the guests speculated over the murder of which the voice emanating from Lucy had spoken, but no one knew an old woman who had died recently, except for the long ailing mother of Miss Wainright, the strange little woman in mourning. But she had left immediately after the lights had been turned on, and had made no comment.
“Poor thing, she's been through so much in recent months,” remarked Mrs. Mullridge. “I suppose it has all been just a bit too much for her.” She sighed in sympathy, rattling the beads on her dress into action.
Lucy was frightened by the force that had taken her. Her mother's description of the Gift came into her head. Could it possibly be considered a gift, an attribute of the Chosen among women, to be possessed by a chilling awareness, taken by the throat and made to speak, ultimately to be cast down in a state of unconscious collapse... surely not. She had always hoped her inherited Gift would be more in the line of an active knowledge or strength that would allow her to conquer and possess, not to be possessed as a passive vessel to be filled with whatever libation the gods found suited their whim.
But she had not chosen to accept the Gift that had been bestowed on her by her birthright, Lucy reminded herself. When given the choice, as a young girl, she had chosen to honor her talent instead of being schooled in the Kraft that would have allowed her control of whatever this precarious and ominous Gift might be.
Why had she not decided to accept the Gift and become one of the Chosen? Until this moment, Lucy had never actually thought about it. The Gift and the Ways of the Kraft had always seemed so distant to her... as if they belonged to the world of her grandmother and other women, like her mother. She had always been given much attention by her father and distant relations because of the beauty of her voice, she never thought to need any other form of validation by being schooled in the Kraft. She had been treated as if she were a special and rare thing from the very day that she was born, but it had never occurred to her that this treatment might have been because she was the granddaughter of the queen of the wise ones, and not because of her singing. When her grandmother called her for the interview, in which she was given the choice, she had opted to cultivate her voice rather than learn the skills of the Chosen. It had seemed like a simple thing at the time, but little did she realize what she might be giving up in return.
Chosen among women, she repeated the phrase in her mind. There was almost a religious tone to it, conjuring the image of the Virgin or Magdalene, showered in light and beauty like the Helen of Troy she played in Faust. She had always thought the gifts of voice and beauty had been her worldly rewards. She had never considered that one day, without warning, a door in the back of her head would open and pull her down into a world of dark knowledge and inescapable truth. She knew that the true Gift was that passage, that right of entry through the portals that her mother and grandmother had entered before her. Gift, she repeated the word to herself. How peculiar to think that the same word in German means poison.
Mrs. Mullridge put Lucy in a t
axi and sent her home to David and Celia’s apartment across the park. She was feeling better by now, but the entire evening had been unsettling for her. She knew that she had reached a threshold of some kind, and if she dared cross it... or was forced to cross, there would be no turning back. It would seem that the powers of the Kraft and the Gift that she had inherited, whether she liked it or not, were making their presence known to her after a lifetime of lying dormant.
She crept into the apartment at well past ten o’clock, hoping to find Celia and David retired for the evening. She was relieved to see a single lamp lighted in the foyer, beside which, Celia had placed a note wishing her a good night and hoping that she had passed a diverting and amusing evening. Lucy folded the note in half and held it in her gloved hand as she made her way through the dim, unlighted hallway to her bedroom. She dared not switch on the light, for fear of waking Celia and having to cope with her questions about the dubious evening, of which she so disapproved. She did not want Celia to know what happened and have to endure her looks of concern... or worse yet, the little sigh of condemning superiority that she had been witness to so often since she had arrived.
CHAPTER FOUR
1921 New York
David crossed the carpet at Tiffany’s and tapped his silver cane against the glass counter. As was customary, the clerk turned and smiled with a familiarity that marked the exclusiveness of such places, a smile that conveyed neither the recognition of a previous acquaintance nor that of any real desire to be friendly or even pleasant. It was a professional smile and one that David had come to value as a mark of expedient service.
“I'd like to look at something suitable for a gift,” David stated.
“For a gentleman or a lady?” the clerk asked coolly.
He had long since been trained to ask indiscriminately. It was strictly against policy to inquire if the token was directed toward the wife or a younger woman. There was a guarantee of no questioning looks, an understanding that the high price of the store’s merchandise insured the customer of the discretion and silence of its staff as to the destination of its goods.
“Actually it's for a lady. I want something young and bright, with a few diamonds, but nothing too extreme... I find that most women think so highly of diamonds, but very few of them are suited to wear them,” David said with authority.
The clerk opened the case behind him and laid out several small clusters of diamonds and other precious stones on a blue velvet laminated card. David sighed as he scanned the offering.
“I'm afraid I find this difficult. They are only beautiful as objects in themselves. For me the coldness of diamonds contradicts the freshness of a young woman.”
“Is the lady fair-haired or dark?” the clerk asked with all the expected efficiency.
“Fair,” David answered.
“Then, may I suggest the diamonds with sapphires. They are often most becoming on a pale complexion with fair hair.”
“Yes, I do believe you're right,” David breathed a noticeable sigh of relief.
“Shall I send them or will you take them with you?”
“I'll take them,” David answered without reservation.
•••
For several nights Lucy tossed in her sleep. She slept deeply, what one might call profoundly, but her nights were filled with visions and information unlike ordinary dreaming; as if her mind was undergoing a change within itself, a shift in consciousness, perhaps in alignment with the forces that had possessed her at the séance.
When she awoke she was tired, sometimes confused, suspecting a strain of madness in her blood that she feared her mother had neglected to mention.
Then she would chuckle at her own paranoia and dismiss it as dreaming with enthusiasm, from the Greek word entheos, meaning to awaken the god within. She wondered what sort of gods had been awakened in her reveries, and what alliance they claimed, on the side of light or darkness.
She had dreamt of snakes and fire and other symbols of the Bible, their meanings surely dependent on one another, like the shorthand on a stenographers pad, yet consciously, the significance escaped her completely.
In one fretful dream, a young man appeared with fiery, cavernous eyes, deeply set into a pale complexion, so silvery and cool that he seemed to glow from within.
He tore a menacing snake from her throat, and smiled through sinewy lips as he took her in his arms and made love to her.
The entire experience was disturbing. She could feel the proximity of his body next to hers, the breath from his lips on her cheek, then at her throat. She felt his hand clasping the back of her neck, forcing her mouth on his, tearing at the hair at the back of her head, making the pain come, opening the door to that other world. What was she remembering? Who was this man, and why did he frighten her in spite of her pleasure at the closeness of his body?
In the morning, she jotted a note to Prince Henry, chatty and noncommittal, describing the intended course of her day. She had adopted an ingenuous and sincere style of writing, not wholly out of keeping with her present personality, but girlish. It had an innocence that was calculated to dilute the devotion of his longing heart, and make him see her forever as the young girl he had first met... barely a woman and still in need of the protection of a chaperone. But she was now twenty-one and longing to experience romance and desire... but not with him.
Her writing was interrupted by a group of boys from Yale, who stood under the Fifth Avenue window of the Montague apartment to serenade the young celebrity. Lucy leaned out the window and waved, much to the annoyance of Celia, who sat soberly at the breakfast table and deemed the whole business vulgar and undignified.
“They often call the theater vulgar and undignified,” Lucy laughed. “Since it has become my life, I suppose I am too. I don't mind telling you, I'm flattered.”
Celia raised her eyes toward an unreceptive heaven and sighed.
The boys called for a memento of the occasion, something intimate and personal.
“A souvenir,” Lucy called down at them, correcting them. A memento was meant for remembrance of tenderness and affection. What they required was a souvenir, a testament of conquest, to prove they indeed possessed the courage to assail the fortress and return with an appropriate prize for all of their eager comrades to goggle at.
She tossed a flower from an arrangement near the window and watched the boys descend on it like a pack of wolves. They tore at the fragile thing until it had been divided into satisfactorily personal pieces, before they trouped off to tell the tale back up the river at school.
“You shouldn't encourage them,” Celia scolded.
“I didn't give them much,” Lucy answered. “Besides, they are all rich boys from good families, and isn't that supposed to make it all right?”
•••
David smiled and nodded as the young model glided past him on the runway.
“That one should do just fine,” he said.
“That's one of our loveliest gowns,” the sales clerk returned his smile. “It's crêpe de chine with the overskirt in tulle, trimmed in monkey fur. It is an original of course.”
“Of course. That should do nicely for my wife.” He narrowed his eyes and locked in on the pretty young clerk.
“Very good,” she smiled. “Will you follow me please to the office to sign on your account.”
David followed, nodding to the ladies, familiar in their type, as he made his way behind the sales girl to the office. She closed the door, shutting out the fringed and beaded glamour of the pale blue showroom.
“How hateful you are sometimes,” she said, turning to David with teeth clenched. “You always have to make it so clear that you are buying something for your wife.”
David sniggered. “I'm a man of truth... and after all, truth is best. In any case, I would think you would be far more upset to learn that I was buying it for someone other than my wife, the competition, so to speak.”
He came towa
rd her and took her familiarly in his arms.
“I shall make you pay for taunting me,” the girl whispered deliberately, as she touched her finger to his chin.
“My dear little Molly, I can't decide whether you're more attractive when you're sweet or when you are being intentionally wicked.”
“Don't call me that.”
“Wicked?”
“No, Molly. You know perfectly well that I can't design my own line of clothes under a common name like that.”
“My apologies Madame Daphne. There, does that make you feel better?”
“I'm not sure.”
David produced a small velvet box from his pocket and handed it to the young woman. “There... does that help?”
She opened the box and breathed in the diamond and sapphire pin.
After an appropriate moment of endearments and soft words, Molly brought the matter back to the business at hand.
“Oh David,” she sighed, “I'll have such a lovely shop and design things as beautiful as this pin. I know I will. When can we begin? I've waited such a long time.”
“If this season at the theater is a success, then...”
“But you said that about last season,” Molly answered with a frustrated sigh.
“Yes, but I need a financial success, not just a pat on the head from the critics. That's why I've brought over this German girl. The public seems to find something special in her.”
“And do you find something special in her?” Molly asked, pulling away from his embrace.
“Hopefully money, and lots of it,” David answered. “That should make us all happy, and, I suspect, most of all you.”
“Let's not forget your wife,” she sneered, offering him a fountain pen. “Hadn't you better sign for her little offering?”
CHAPTER FIVE
1921 New York Theatre