by Etta Faire
We nodded, but no one knew what to say. I didn't.
"I can't stay long either," Shelby finally said, breaking the tension. "I got my mom watchin' the kids, and she's not so good with little ones yet. She's only had nine years to get used to grandchildren."
"In her defense, you do have a whole gang of rowdy boys," Mrs. Carmichael said.
"And another one on the way," Shelby said, proudly.
Bobby grunted. "We gonna conjure up some strippers or what?" he asked. He leaned back and scratched at his belly. His tight t-shirt rose up with each scratch, showing the world he had thick dark hair all over. "I hope I didn't come up here for nothin'."
Rosalie lit the candles and smoothed her sticky note onto the table cloth. "Just so everyone knows, I don't have any control over who shows up tonight. We will communicate with the spirits who want to communicate with us." She motioned for me to turn off the lights.
I always knew Gate House was creepy, but I never felt it as much as I did at that moment. It was almost like a dark heaviness surrounded me, sitting on my chest, making me know it was there. I tried to breathe.
"Let's all hold hands," Rosalie said.
Chapter 17
The Seance
Seances are believed to have originated in the Victorian era right alongside the rise of spiritualism and ghost sightings, or at least that's what I found in the ten-minute research I'd done online before people came over.
A medium would lead a group in making connections to the dead, but it was all done as a fun kind of game, mostly for entertainment to scare yourself silly. Tables lifted, mediums levitated, and sometimes, if you were lucky, a medium would literally spit out something called ectoplasm, a weird gauze-like substance that came straight from her mouth, or other orifice. (Wikipedia did not specify what other orifices those might have been.) Of course, the purpose of the ectoplasm was for the spirits to drape over their nonphysical bodies so they could interact in our physical world.
This was my first seance, and I seriously hoped it wasn’t going to be anything like my research.
The only light in the house was the little bits flickering off the candles on the table as Rosalie said a short prayer, asking for guidance in leading the seance. The weird shadows that danced along her face made her look dead herself.
I tried not to pay attention to the heavy feeling sitting on my chest. The more I noticed it the worse it got.
"I see the number four," Rosalie finally announced to the group after about half a minute of silence. "I sense four, all right. Four, four, four."
"The four dead women from Landover," Shelby guessed.
"Yeah, let's hear from those strippers." Bobby sat up.
I wasn't sure why, and I really wanted to tell them to only talk to Rosalie, but the voices came to me, too. Or at me. I could hear them from all over the room, shooting out in various octaves. More than 10 or 20 voices, maybe even 100, overlapping in chatter, shouting in the kind of lilt that lowered and rose at strange intervals. I tried to concentrate on just one. Four people at the table, not five. She needs to leave. Leave. Leave. Now. Now. Four. Four. Four. Hurry.
"They want only four people at the table," I said, pretty confident I'd heard them right.
Rosalie nodded. "Carly Mae's right. They're reminding me we can have four or six, but not five. Five is a number that might bring us trouble."
I'd read about that in my brief research about seances too. It was considered a bad number, one that would bring up evil spirits, not sure why. Like the ectoplasm and the orifices, there didn't seem to be much explanation there.
"I'll go," Rosalie said, standing up from the table. The heaviness in my chest eased up when she said this. I couldn't help but feel something was rewarding me for interpreting things correctly. I took a deep breath while I could.
"What? Are you crazy?" I asked in between my breaths. "You're leading this thing. I'll go." The heaviness against my rib cage seemed to squeeze again, like an extra heavy lead apron they use for x-rays.
Rosalie handed me her pink sticky note before she scooted her chair back and walked away from the table. "I get the feeling they want you to lead this."
Mrs. Carmichael sucked in a gasp that got her smoker's cough going again.
"Don't worry," Rosalie said. "You're all in good hands with Carly Mae."
Bobby grunted. "I knew we came all the way up here for nothing."
I had no idea how to lead a seance. But, I went along with it, seeing how my new employer at the Purple Pony asked me to do it, and the weird heavy feeling had demanded it. I said a little prayer first, just like Rosalie, except mine went something like this, "Please God don't let me spit out any ectoplasm, from anywhere."
I looked at the pink note, and slowly read a name. And even though no one told me to, I found myself instinctively trying to make my voice spooky. "Candace Newman, are you here? Heather Telamario." I took a moment to try to feel the heaviness again. Nothing. "We welcome you here."
Apparently, absent today. After a beat or two, I tried the other names. "Trish Jenkins. Kelly Moore... Jasmine Truopp."
"Jasmine Truopp?" Shelby asked. "Who's that?"
I was just about to hand the seance back over to the real medium, when just like before, lots of voices came out at once. Many spirits all around.
No one here by that. Stop searching. Names no longer matter. You... you matter. You must save us.
I realized my head was tilted, as if I was listening intently to something I didn't quite understand. I tried not to let it show, but Shelby picked up on it. "What? Did you hear something? What did they say?"
"Nothing," I said, practically shushing her. I had no idea what the voices were talking about.
I continued. "Are the dancers here? The ones whose bones were found in this yard? Candace? Heather? Are you here?" I asked again.
No. No. No. No.
"Who is here? Who are you?"
It doesn't matter. You are here. The sweet, sweet living is all that matters now. The living will help the cursed. But the living must be careful. The living must tread lightly. You will figure out how to help us...
Other voices chimed in, higher pitched ones. Children-sounding this time.
Please. Help us. Help us. We are trapped here. The curse. You're the only one who can save us...
It felt like I was on a roller coaster, not in the moving sense but in the adrenalin rush one. I felt dizzy, drained, and ramped up all at the same time. My heart raced and my palms felt sweaty and warm. "It's okay," I said to the voices around me, even though I had no idea if it actually was. "I will try to help you." These were children. Scared children, and I wanted to hold them, protect them, but I had no idea how. The closest I ever came to children was a notebook full of names. "I'm very confused," I finally admitted to the scared voices.
Realizing the seance group thought I was talking to them, I focused my attention back to the table. "I've never even been to a seance. There are lots of voices, talking about some sort of a curse. They're telling me to tread lightly. They're trapped here. They're screaming for help. A lot of them sound like children."
Mrs. Carmichael smacked her hand on the table. "The Bowman curse is real. I knew it. This old house is haunted, all right. Haunted by all the women and children the Bowman family worked to the bone in their brothels."
Bobby mumbled. "No wonder the old professor liked his hookers. Runs in the family, eh?"
Shelby practically screamed from her seat. "What curse? What are y'all talking about?"
"Eliza?" I said, ignoring the fuss. I could feel them all leaving and I knew I needed to act fast. "Are you here? Eliza."
Rosalie's doohickey flickered crazily on the table. I felt fear more than anything, not my own, even though I was pretty afraid. Something cold passed through me, along with an almost unrecognizably soft whisper, right up next to my left ear. "Do not tell anyone I am here. Do not contact me by name again." The candles blew out, and the doohickey stopped flickering.
/> I shook my head. "I... I think the spirits left." Although my mouth formed the words, I didn't believe it. I knew some of them were still here, just not talking anymore, or not able to.
Rosalie turned on the lights and everyone blinked wildly, trying to breathe normally again. Inhale, exhale... we were almost in unison, smiling oddly at one another.
"Did you feel that?" Mrs. Carmichael said, rubbing her arm. "Goosebumps. I have honest-to-goodness goosebumps." She put her hand on Shelby's arm.
"That was creepy," Shelby said.
Bobby shook his head. "You mean crappy. I thought we were gonna connect with some dead strippers. Or, my dead Nana could've floated by to reveal her secret bratwurst recipe."
All I could do was sit motionless for a second. I'd just gotten off the roller-coaster and a part of me knew I needed to calm down and process things. The other part wanted to get right back in line and do it again. That last message had to be Eliza. We had a connection, a shared secret of sorts.
"What in the world was that all about?" Shelby asked, patting her belly. "The baby started kicking like crazy when you asked for that last person, Eliza, like he wanted to kick his way out. Who is Eliza? Or Jasmine? And y'all have to tell me everything you know about this curse."
Rosalie limped back over to the table. "It's believed the Bowman family was cursed way back when this house was first built, and Eliza is the woman said to have put that curse on them. But no one knows who she was."
"Oh-kay," Shelby said like she thought we were all crazy. "Who's Jasmine then?"
"She was the woman found in the bushes outside the Shop-Quik four years ago," I said. "I thought there might've been a connection between her death and the others."
Mrs. Carmichael scratched at her head, making her hair even puffier. "I remember that vividly. They found her a few days before Tina had her first episode." Her voice was low and croaky. I knew it was hard for Mrs. Carmichael to talk about that. It was hard for me to hear it, too. She went on. "I panicked at first. You can't get an official call from the police department in the middle of the night that doesn't make you panic. I tell ya that much for sure. I thought Caleb was sayin’ they'd found Tina's body, same as that girl. I was crying too hard to hear him. But thank God she was still alive."
I put my hand on Mrs. Carmichael's shoulder. It was the perfect time for me to ask for Tina's address or phone number. Somehow I couldn’t get myself to.
"Not bad for a first seance," Rosalie finally said, breaking the awkward silence that had come over the group.
"You're kidding, right?" Bobby groaned. "I cannot believe we drove all the way up here for that."
"I'll try to throw up some ectoplasm for you next time." I dead panned.
He raised an eyebrow at me. "Is that an exorcist thing? At least that would've been entertaining."
Shelby shook her head at her fiancé, trying to get him to shut up, but he didn't notice. He went on. "We were supposed to hear from your dead husband about how he strangled strippers, buried them in your yard. Or maybe hear from the skanks themselves about what it was like to have a crazy professor pull their fingers off one by one..."
"Okay. That's enough," Shelby said, her face almost turning as pink as her hair.
"You cannot tell me I'm the only one who feels that way."
Shelby smacked his arm. "Yes, that's what I'm saying." She turned to the rest of us. "Don't mind him. He's just mad 'cause they cut his hours again at the Starlight." Shelby got up and grabbed her basket full of samples.
"I didn't know you worked at the Starlight,” I said to Bobby.
Shelby handed me a lipstick and motioned for me to try it on. "I told him he needed to get a real job because we were gonna have a real baby soon," Shelby replied, kissing Bobby's thick cheek. "And he did. He's one of the best bouncers ever."
"It's not easy putting up with those people all day. The lowest of the low," he said, like he was expecting us to agree with his sainthood.
"Pretty soon," Shelby went on, "he's gonna be able to buy a new truck. Well, not a new-new truck, but new to him, and he's gonna contribute to the rent —“
Rosalie chimed in. "What happened to his old truck?"
"He crashed it four months ago coming home from work."
"Stop making a big deal out of it, Shelby. And stop treating me like I'm four. So, I looked down at the wrong time," he said. "Won't happen again."
"No. It can't. It better not. Not with a baby in the truck," Mrs. Carmichael said. "I'm glad you're doing good now, though."
Shelby and Bobby exchanged strained looks while the rest of us pretended not to notice.
Rosalie put her hand on my shoulder. "Did I tell ya, Carly Mae's gonna work at the Purple Pony? You can start tomorrow at noon if you want."
Shelby squealed. "I'll give you a stack of my business cards." She looked over at Mrs. Carmichael. "Just in case any tourists need makeup. Come on, now. You know those old Landover ladies have money."
Rosalie brought out her tarot cards and told Bobby he could go first, which seemed to make his tightened face relax into a half smile. But all I could hear was Destiny's voice talking about the creepy other bouncer who didn't seem normal at the Starlight. Bobby must've been the guy she was talking about, a man a little too angry with strippers.
Chapter 18
The Freak Show
Mrs. Nebitt unlocked the doors right at 9:30.
"Morning," I said. She didn't smile or respond, but she didn't shush me either. Progress.
She waddled back behind the incredibly high counter that separated us and climbed onto her stool without really looking at me. It was, after all, a Thursday again. I briefly thought about telling her I had a job now at the Purple Pony, but I knew she wouldn't be impressed. Her eyes were glued to her computer. I went over to the periodicals section.
After searching through Gazette after Gazette for anything on Jasmine Truopp and Tina's "episode" that happened around the same time, I gave up. I needed the older stuff. The good stuff.
The stuff that required help.
I stared at the little old lady sitting behind the counter and tried to will her attention to me.
She never looked up.
I approached her desk, and leaned into her. "Can you help me do some research?"
She scrunched her nose like she'd just smelled a burning septic tank. "Depends on what kind of research you're doing?"
She turned her head suspiciously to the side like I might ask for help finding the "Chronically Unemployed's Guide to Cooking Meth" or something to that effect. What I had to ask would be equally as horrifying in her eyes. "I would like as much information as possible about a woman murdered here four years ago. A prostitute."
She looked at the ceiling a second, and I tried not to care what the horrible old woman thought of me. I knew she was wondering if this was a colleague of mine or a friend. She thought of me as a prostitute too. I was just about to go back to the Gazettes when she scooted her stool forward.
"I think I know who you're talking about. She was from Chicago, actually, or so they thought." She tapped on her computer and turned the screen toward me. "Jasmine Truopp?"
"That's her."
"I'll bring the articles up on the microfilm machine,” she said, quickly making her way over to the large file cabinets against the far wall of the periodicals section. She seemed to have a swing in her step as she moved. Maybe she wasn't awful after all. Maybe she was just bored.
She finished setting up the machine for me. "Always ask for help with this. Got it?" she said. Mrs. Nebitt was one of those people who needed things done her way. Don't open the microfilm drawers without help. Don't try to put books back on the shelf yourself. Things must go in their exact spots and ordinary people are incapable of doing complicated things like alphabetizing.
I thanked the librarian then, before she turned away, I whispered. "You were right about Jackson all along."
She stared at me a second, her eyes the size of dinner plates un
der her coke bottles. "I don't know what you're talking about," she finally said, cracking a smile as she waddled away.
The Gazette was a weekly newspaper, so Tina's article was in the same edition as Jasmine's remains. I read Jasmine's article first. It really didn't offer anything new except that the body had been found naked by a resident who didn't want to be identified, which was strange. Most people in this town lived for publicity, no matter the reason.
It was only when I read Tina's article that my hunch the two might have been related really came to be a real possibility. The article was dated a few days later. Tina had tried “to take the store over,” whatever that meant, saying she had weapons of mass destruction.
"She was hollering something fierce," Mr. Joe Yelman, the owner of the Shop-Quik, said. "Something about grizzly bears and a naked princess. Of course, I called her mom right away."
Ms. Carmichael is in police custody, currently undergoing psychiatric evaluation.
I stared at the article, knowing how the evaluation went for my friend, knowing that she’d spent the last four years being evaluated, refusing meds, having episodes.
The articles themselves seemed a little too connected to be a coincidence. A naked princess. The Shop-Quik. Maybe Tina had been the resident who found the woman. That could’ve set her off. Or maybe I just wanted there to be a reason for Tina's break with reality. Sometimes, mental illness just happens. I knew that. It was just hard to accept when you desperately want there to be a reason why you can't go back to the way things used to be.