by Kat Ross
“Do you think he had something to do with Becky’s murder?” Rose asked.
“Inadvertently, yes,” I said. “But I don’t think he did it.”
“Who do you think did then?”
“We’re still working on that,” I said, rather lamely. “But I’m curious about the book. We believe it’s a grimoire. Did she ever talk about things like that? The darker aspects of the occult?”
Rose shook her head. “Becky was a sweet, simple girl. I still find it hard to believe she was involved in black magic.”
“How about this man who broke her heart?”
“She wouldn’t tell me his name.” Rose’s expression hardened. “The scoundrel. He promised Becky all sorts of things, including marriage, but of course as soon as he had what he wanted, he lost interest and tossed her aside. I warned her but she wouldn’t listen.”
“Margaret Fox thought he was rich,” John said.
Rose sniffed at the mention of Margaret. “Those women…it’s shameful the way they dragged Becky down with them, just to get back at Leah. Like a bunch of squabbling hens, without a thought of who they’d hurt in the process. It’s amazing how many people in this community still hold them in high regard. As if none of it ever happened.” She shook her head in disgust.
“But yes, Becky’s lover had money, lots of it. He bought her all sorts of things when they first met. She came up for a visit last Christmas and I couldn’t help but notice all the new dresses and expensive jewellery. That’s when she admitted she had a gentleman. She referred to him as her ‘fiancé,’ but I didn’t see any ring on her finger. She became annoyed when I pressed her about it.”
I shared a look with John.
“She never told you anything specific, anything at all we can follow up on?”
“No.” Rose poured herself a cup of coffee but didn’t drink it. “I’ve gone over our time together in my mind so many times. Every word she said. She was just so careful. His warnings—or threats—had clearly made an impression.”
I tried to suppress my frustration but I felt like kicking something. Hard. We would never find this man, I thought. There was no one left to interview. He’d covered his tracks too perfectly.
And then Mrs. Rivers spoke up for the first time.
“Why don’t we ask Becky?” she said.
10
We all turned to look at my housekeeper, who looked blandly back.
“Well, Mrs. Mason is a medium,” she said, toying with the strings on her bonnet. “She’s also Miss Rickard’s sister. That’s a powerful connection. And we may not have known Becky personally, but we care very much what happened to her. Why not hold a séance and ask her ourselves what happened?”
I opened my mouth to politely object but John cut in before I had a chance.
“I think that’s an excellent idea,” he said. “If Mrs. Mason is willing, of course.”
Rose looked at each of us in turn, although I can’t say what she was searching for.
“I’ve considered it,” she said. “Of course I have. But there are dangers in reaching out to spirits that died by violence. They’re unpredictable. Angry. And if they’ve failed to go on to the other side, if they linger in the twilight plane between our world and the next…Suffice to say that the restless dead are not the only ones who dwell in that place. There are other entities, far more dangerous. We run the risk that they too will answer the call.”
I didn’t trust myself to say anything, so I kept quiet. The poor woman had been through a great deal and I had no wish to insult her beliefs.
I also had had enough of séances. Just the memory of that day with Edward made my back ache.
But John was determined, and he had a staunch ally in Mrs. Rivers.
“We have to try, don’t you think?” he said. “I know it’s unorthodox”—this comment was aimed at me—”but we might actually find something out. Open mind, Harry.”
“I’ll confess, the idea does make me a tad nervous, but I’m willing,” Mrs. Rivers said.
“Are you certain?” Rose asked. “As I said, the risks are real. Most of the mediums here wouldn’t even attempt it. Not so soon.”
Privately, I felt the biggest “risk” was to my self-respect, but with the others staring at me, I finally nodded assent. It couldn’t do any harm, at least. And maybe John would be forced to admit that the whole thing was a load of eye-wash.
“We’ll hold it tonight,” Rose said decisively. “After the picnic. It’s only been a week since she died. Her spirit won’t have gone far from the first gate yet.” She stood. “I’ll begin the preparations.”
We made our goodbyes and walked back to the Grand Hotel. My feet felt heavy as lead. The more I considered it, the more reluctant I was to take part in the séance. It was ridiculous. The other séances hadn’t bothered me in the least. I’d found them by turns silly and boring.
The difference, I realized as we climbed the steps to the shaded veranda, is that we hadn’t been trying to summon a real person. A person who had been viciously stabbed and bitten. Who had died in just about the worst way it’s possible to die.
“Are you all right?” John asked, concern in his eyes. “You look awfully pale.”
“I’m fine,” I said. “I think I’ll just rest for a bit.”
We had two hours before the picnic, so I sat down at the writing table in my simple but comfortably furnished room. I added what Rose had told us to my notes and copied down Becky’s letter, which I’d memorized.
Rose was clearly pregnant, just as her sister had predicted. Her sorrow couldn’t dim the glow in her cheeks, and her dress had recently been let out to accommodate a swelling belly.
A lucky guess, I supposed, although it gave me an uneasy feeling.
Becky was without doubt a fraud. Margaret Fox had confirmed it.
But she was also a true believer.
Human beings are complicated creatures, I thought, looking out over the still, dark waters of the lake. We have the ability to hold two perfectly contradictory ideas at the same time, with untroubled consciences. Take the slave owners and their accomplices. They inflicted unimaginable horrors on their fellow man, and blithely went to church on Sunday like good, pious men. Those same slaves had been freed by the North’s victory in the war, and yet the highest court in the land refused to enforce the Civil Rights Act, explicitly placing its stamp of approval on racial discrimination.
The way I figured it, the people of Cassadaga Lake might be eccentric, but if they allowed Rose and Samuel Mason to live in peace, they were all right by me.
I reviewed my notes again, searching for something I may have missed, some connection I’d failed to make. Maybe it was just imagination, but I could feel it. A niggling sense that the break I sought lay right in front of me, written in my own hand.
The afternoon passed in this frustrating way, and I was no closer to a revelation when four o’clock arrived. I was hungry though, and the repast that the Masons had laid out on a blanket near the shore made my heart—and stomach—leap with joy. There was fried chicken and potato salad, corn on the cob and strawberry rhubarb pie. The kitchen staff at the Grand Hotel had also given us a dinner basket, which included iced tea, fresh-baked bread, and cold sausages with sage and apple.
We sprawled on the gently sloping grass, puffy white clouds sailing overhead, and I listened with half an ear as John and Samuel talked about baseball (they were both Giants fans) and their mutual disgust with the decision the previous year to ban black players from the national league.
John told a few amusing stories about his professors at Columbia College, leading Samuel to relate how he’d been one of the first students to enroll at Alabama’s Tuskegee Institute. The school had opened on Independence Day, 1881. At the time, it consisted of little more than a rickety one-room shack.
“I remember that in those first months, if it rained while Mr. Washington was teaching, I would have to go stand over him with an umbrella,” Samuel said ruefully.
“We planted our own crops,” Samuel said, biting into an apple. “We had to, if we wanted to eat. Clearing that land was not a pleasant task, but when some of the students complained, I remember that Mr. Washington would pick up his axe and lead the way into the woods.” He laughed. “No one felt equal to arguing with that.”
One of his classmates had told him about the Cassadaga Lake Free Association. Samuel was intrigued. After he graduated, he heard that the great orator Frederick Douglass would be appearing here so he hopped on a train north. Douglass spoke passionately about women’s suffrage, a cause he had championed for forty years since the Seneca Falls Convention. Rose Rickard was also in attendance, and the two had hit it off immediately. They courted for a year and married in the auditorium, with the blessing of their neighbors if not Rose or Samuel’s families.
As we sat on the grass together, I noticed a few curious and even hostile stares from whites, but most either paid us no mind or came over to greet the Masons with smiles and local gossip. It truly was an enlightened village. Interracial marriage was officially illegal in many states, and not tolerated in the rest, including New York.
I thought they must love each other very much to have risked so much.
I lay back, stuffed to the gills, and watched as darker clouds began to mound over the western edge of the lake. As they advanced, bringing a cool breeze that smelled of rain, everyone scrambled to pack up their picnic things before the arrival of the storm. Whitecaps churned the surface of the water, sending a pair of swans gliding for the safety of a sheltered cove. The first drops were just beginning to fall as we reached the Masons’ house.
It was black as night outside as we put the food away. Distant thunder rumbled and my apprehension returned. In fact, I was starting to feel downright ill. As though a fever was coming on.
“Is something the matter, Harry?” John asked. “You look flushed.”
“I feel a little odd, but I’ll be all right,” I said, summoning a wan smile. “I think I ate too many sausages. Let’s just get this over with.”
John helped Samuel light candles in the parlor. Then John, Mrs. Rivers, Rose and I sat around the table in the center of the room. Samuel, who was trained in shorthand, took a chair near the hearth. We placed our hands on a planchette set atop a “talking board.” It was made of wood, and painted with the letters of the alphabet. Rose explained to us that this was a fairly new device in the Spiritualist community, which allowed for swifter communication with the dead than the previous system of rapping out each word. We were not to guide the planchette ourselves, merely to allow it to move where the spirits wished.
In the center of the table, she placed a framed picture of Becky, taken when she was a child. It showed a solemn, unsmiling little girl of about ten, in a dark frock with a white ribbon around her neck. For a split second, the ribbon seemed to become a chain, its links cinched cruelly around her throat. I blinked and the image was gone.
I don’t trust myself to describe what followed accurately, as some of it invoked intense memories of the séance Myrtle staged for me as a child. Instead, I shall present to you the exact transcript of the proceedings as it was taken down by Samuel Mason. It has not been altered in any way. I will note that I also saw things which he makes no mention of, such as the black fog I witnessed rolling out of Mrs. Rivers’ mouth.
Here it is then, unredacted, and you may judge it as you see fit.
DATE: August 14th, 1888
SITTERS: Miss Harrison Fearing Pell, Mr. John W. Weston, Mrs. Ernestine Rivers
MEDIUM: Mrs. Rose Rickard Mason
COMMUNICATORS: Becky Rickard and Unknown
ROSE MASON: I begin this séance by asking the kind Spirits to protect us from evil. I beg their aid and shelter from the dark. Now I call to the Spirit of my sister, Becky, who passed to the other side a week ago. I wish to speak with her. Can you hear me, Becky?
[no response]
ROSE MASON: Are you there, Becky?
[no response]
ROSE MASON: I call on the spirit of Becky Rickard.
HARRISON PELL: Excuse me, but I don’t think this is—
c-o-l-d
ROSE MASON: Becky? It’s me, Rose.
[no response]
ROSE MASON: We want to help you.
h-e-l
ROSE MASON: Yes, is that you, Becky?
[no response]
JOHN WESTON: Is she saying hell?
ROSE MASON: We want to find out who killed you, Becky. Can you tell us that?
h-e-l-p-m-e-h-e-l-p-m-e-h-e-l-p-m-e-h-e-l-p
JOHN WESTON: [unintelligible]
ROSE MASON: Where are you, Becky?
c-o-l-d
ROSE MASON: Tell me who killed you. Do you know his name?
[no response]
ROSE MASON: Are you still with us?
h-e-i-s-h-e-r-e
ROSE MASON: In this room?
n-o-t-h-e-h-u-n-t-e-r
ROSE MASON: The hunter is with you?
h-e-w-a-l-k-s-i-n-t-h-e-d-a-r-k-t-h-e-c-o-l-d
ROSE MASON: Becky?
[no response]
ROSE MASON: Is he preventing you from speaking to us?
[no response]
ROSE MASON: Becky, is he with you now?
[no response]
ROSE MASON: I can help you, Becky, I promise. Tell us who he is. Who the hunter is. We’ll stop him. We’ll find him and stop him. Who did this to you, sister?
[planchette moves violently]
dgshflksieldjhssksidrfarrumohrrr
HARRISON PELL: Please, I can’t—
JOHN WESTON: I think it stopped.
ROSE MASON: Becky?
[no response]
ROSE MASON: Are you still there, Becky?
[no response]
ROSE MASON: Please answer me. If you’re there, give us a sign.
JOHN WESTON: She’s gone.
ROSE MASON: Wait, there’s something—
JOHN WESTON: Harry, I can see your breath.
HARRISON PELL: What’s happening?
ROSE MASON: I think we should stop now.
JOHN WESTON: Yes, I think so too.
HARRISON PELL: Let go.
JOHN WESTON: Harry?
HARRISON PELL: She won’t let go. It hurts—
ERNESTINE RIVERS: Burn them all.
ROSE MASON: What?
ERNESTINE RIVERS: I’ll eat them and then I’ll burn what’s left. BURN THEM ALL.
JOHN WESTON: [unintelligible]…Oh God.
HARRISON PELL: What is—
ROSE MASON: Who speaks to us? Are you the hunter?
ERNESTINE RIVERS: We are dust and shadow. [laughs] Abyssus abyssum invocat. Do you miss your sweet sister?
ROSE MASON: I command you to leave. I wish to speak to Becky.
ERNESTINE RIVERS: Your baby is dead. It rots in your womb.
HARRISON PELL: Do you see it, John? What is that? What is that?
JOHN WESTON: For God’s sake, help her!
ERNESTINE RIVERS: [unintelligible]
The séance ended at this point because Mrs. Rivers fainted dead away. I was screaming, and Samuel had jumped up to aid his wife, who was also hysterical. John is the only one who maintained any semblance of self-control, and even that was put to the test when the mirror over the sideboard fell to the floor and shattered.
He yanked open the heavy drapes and threw the talking board into the garden. It was still raining outside, but not hard. Greyish daylight flooded t
he room. The smell of wet roses followed it, and whatever had been among us fled.
A doctor was summoned and examined Rose in her bedroom. Ever helpful, Mrs. Rivers (whom John had revived with a glass of sherry) swept up the broken glass. The rest of us sat there, not speaking, and though I hardly knew Rose, I wept with relief when he came downstairs and said that the child she had carried for five months was perfectly fine. Samuel rushed to be with his wife and we let ourselves out.
My hands had stopped shaking, but I felt curiously disembodied, as though it had all happened to someone else. Mrs. Rivers remembered nothing after the start of the séance. John and I didn’t tell her. We couldn’t.
All the rest, the part with Becky, I could attribute to Rose pushing the planchette. Why she would do so, I didn’t know. But it was possible.
I could even believe that my housekeeper had suffered a bout of temporary insanity. It wouldn’t be much of a stretch, actually.
What I couldn’t explain was that when Mrs. Rivers spoke, her voice had sounded like…well, like several people speaking at once. An overlapping, echoing quality that is beyond the capability of human vocal cords to produce.
And then there was the black fog.
No one saw it but me.
“Do you believe now?” John asked as we reached the hotel, and though he didn’t say it in a gloating way, all my fear and confusion fused together in one hard, hot lump of anger. And aimed itself like a stone hurled from a slingshot at my friend.
“I don’t know what I heard,” I said, pushing past him. “It happened too fast.”
“You’ve got to be joking!” He followed me up the stairs. “For God’s sake, Harry. Mrs. Rivers—”
“Lower your voice, she’s just ahead.”
“Mrs. Rivers was…possessed by something. You saw it!”
“She could have known about the baby. I figured it out in two seconds flat.”