Séance Infernale

by Jonathan Skariton

  She placed the cigarette between her lips and bent closer to him. He brought the lighter’s flame just close enough to its tip. “A couple of weeks ago, a man phoned here asking questions. What I knew about Augustin Sekuler, whether I would have any material relating to his life, and so on. He seemed quite persistent. I was curious, so the next day I called the contact number he left. The line was dead.”

  That’s crazy, Whitman thought. Someone is looking for my film? Or was it just some random film historian, eager to add another trivial fact to another film encyclopedia on Victorian times?

  “Do you think there was foul play involved in your great-grandfather’s disappearance?”

  She smiled, her eyes penetrating his. “You’re asking me whether I think Thomas Edison murdered Augustin Sekuler.”

  Whitman nodded. “As opposed to ‘He ran off with the butcher’s wife—or the butcher himself.’ ”

  “Few men are virtuous when the reward is only a death away.”

  “What do you mean?”

  She shook her head. “My great-grandfather was dead from the moment he realized his invention. By capturing the moving image, he essentially captured a monster. It is no wonder that the evil men who surrounded him got to profit from his demise. Whether Edison was the culprit…I cannot say.”

  “It would be of great help if you could tell me anything more about Augustin than the few facts I would find in the books or reference materials,” he said.

  Her icy eyes glared at him as she thought it over for a second. “I could do much better than that, Monsieur Whitman. How would you feel about his wife’s memoirs?”

  “Elizabeth Sekuler wrote her memoirs?”

  “Unpublished memoirs,” Elena said, smiling. “She tried to offer them to a collection, but her husband’s disappearance wasn’t considered to be noteworthy. Apparently she felt helpless about the state of things, the disappearance, the incompetence of everybody around her, and the injustice resulting from it. I guess that was all she could do; when nobody understands, or when there is no one around, you can only put it on paper. It’s hardly James Boswell, but it could be of importance to your research.” She stubbed her cigarette, got up, and opened a cupboard in the vanity. He heard the ruffling of papers and boxes. After a second, she cursed out loud.

  “Something wrong?” Whitman called from the couch.

  “It’s not here,” she said. Her face peeked at him from the sideboard. “I keep everything related to Augustin Sekuler in here. Nothing valuable is missing—I checked. None of the jewelry, the paintings, the antiques…Given your current situation, I wonder if you know anything about that.”

  Someone was definitely following his trail. Someone who wanted the film. He could think of no candidate other than his own employer. Whitman stood in silence, the unfamiliar faces in the shadows crawling around his brain. “I have no idea who would be interested in this, apart from my client.”

  “And who might your client be?”

  “That’s confidential, I’m afraid.”

  “I’ll have to call the police,” she finally said.

  “Have you read the memoirs? Can you remember anything that would help my investigation?”

  “What do you want to know?”

  “An address, a clue, a location, anything. Also, anything suggesting that he was recording footage other than the material we know of.”

  “I have read and reread those memoirs, monsieur. No film is ever mentioned in there. She does mention Carlyle Eistrowe, though; he was a good friend of the Sekuler family.”

  “He was a talented man.”

  “Eistrowe? He was a leading mountaineer, a scandalous poet, and a double agent. He taught the man who would later go on to create the jet propulsion system. He influenced Huxley and Dahl and Fleming, the Beatles and Genesis, Ozzy and Bowie, Somerset Maugham and Hemingway.”

  “He also tried to raise the devil a few times, from what I hear.”

  “Dig into any modern occult or neo-pagan system of thought and you’ll find his name.”

  “Was he involved in Augustin’s recorded footage?” Whitman asked.

  “Not that I know of.” She leafed through Whitman’s final notes. She made a movement to cross her legs and Whitman glimpsed the luscious shape under her silk stockings.

  “It seems your investigation might have reached a dead end.” She smiled. “I think we should look more into the Edinburgh connection. If there’s any trace left, it’s there.”

  “We?”

  “I’m offering you my services. As a partner, an ally.”

  “I work alone.”

  “Surely you could use my help.”

  “Surely not.”

  “I might remember something from the memoirs.”

  “Call me if you do.”

  She laughed. “A man of considerable privacy, Monsieur Whitman. I’m starting to think we are the same, you and I.”

  He made a movement to get up and his eyes locked on the insides of her stockings. She caught his glance and flashed him a smile that was up to no good. Her green eyes were now sparkling, and Whitman had to do a double take; if there was such a thing as an ancient mystery, it was all in her eyes. By attempting to journey into their wild, he found himself entering uncharted territory.

  She shook her head, stood up to face him, unzipped her dress, and stepped out of it. She stood there in front of him in stockings and underwear, as though she was waiting for him to tell her to stop. He could only stare at her. Finally, he placed his hand on her thigh and ran it slowly upward. She moved like a cat, as if her body had learned to defy gravity. She pushed him back on the couch and straddled him.

  She attacked his mouth, biting his lower lip and then kissing him on the neck before returning to his mouth, and all the while they were taking each other’s clothes off and tossing them to the floor. They grabbed at each other in some sort of emotional desperation. Sweat dripped off their bodies as they went at each other, her hair in his face, her legs wrapped around his torso, her arm clasped around his neck.

  A beeping melody broke through their exchange. She didn’t want him to stop; she kept telling him to play with her, to touch her. He struggled to place his hand on her mouth, and with the other hand he fished his pants from the floor and reached for his cell phone. She slid off him, a disappointed look on her face.

  He apologized and retreated to a corner of the room, a part of him welcoming the phone’s interruption. A muffled, distant voice came from the other end of the line.

  “Who is this?” Whitman asked.

  There was a crackle and the noise of construction.

  “It’s Tony Dickson, from the stoor at Edinburgh Princes Street. You said I should call if anything came up. There’s been a situation here.”

  “What kind of situation?” he said.

  “Well, you knaw how this banger is being restored and renovated, you saw it yoorself.”

  “Go on.”

  “Aye, this is the thing. The people doing the renovation wark, they foond something.”

  Whitman smiled.

  “It looks like a trapdoor of soom kind,” the man continued.

  “Have you looked to see what’s in it?”

  “It’s roosted shut. We’ve got hold of a maintenance man coming later tonight.”

  “Have you told anybody about this?”

  “I’ll have ta. There’s a bloody hole on the flare.”

  “Can you stall it?”

  There was a pause, during which Whitman could smell the desire for British sterling emanating through the line.

  “You will, of course, be well compensated for your help,” Whitman said.

  The man complied.

  He took a look at his watch. “I’ll be there in a few hours,” he said, and hung up. In spite of the head rush, his eyes were restless. He turned to Elena.

  “Give me a call if you hear anything.”

  She looked flabbergasted. She could only muster, “I’ll call a taxi for you. Where
are you going?”

  —

  He spotted the ticket desk almost immediately. There was a flight for Edinburgh leaving in two hours, the woman at the counter told him. This left him with ample time for lunch.

  He called Valdano, who sounded ecstatic over the latest clue. He was certain the trapdoor contained something Sekuler had hidden, perhaps even the film. He urged Whitman to investigate it further.

  Whitman barely had time to gather his thoughts before his cell phone rang again. It was Charlie.

  “Believe me,” Charlie said, “I’m glad to hear the good news, but what about those 39 Steps?” Charlie had been calling Whitman from the Crypt regularly for the past two weeks. Their contact in Edinburgh still claimed she possessed a lost director cameo on the Hitchcock film.

  “Charlie, how much would the cameo be worth?”

  “Less than the ticket across the Atlantic,” Charlie replied.

  Amid Charlie’s reply, Whitman discerned the droning sound of bagpipes in the background. He then understood that Charlie had already planned ahead.

  “You’re already in Edinburgh, aren’t you?”

  Charlie laughed. “That obvious?”

  Whitman grinned. “Just meet me straight at Sekuler’s old workshop on Princes.”

  10

  Elliot had never really thought about women before he started this. He never had anything against them, but they were disgusting, the way some of them would look at him. He had girlfriends now and then; he had to get drunk to do the things they wanted, and even then he had to think about fires during the act. He just didn’t think that way—it was something he was born without—and he was pleased with this notion: if more people were like him, he reasoned, the world would be better off.

  Elliot was fourteen when his father was killed in an accident. He jumped off the Forth Road Bridge. Elliot was never told the details. Mother—this one time she was drunk—said it may as well have been herself who pushed him off that bridge. She left soon after. She was a promiscuous woman who ran off with a fellow addict.

  His uncle Emmett took him in. He was kind. He used to take him bowling. Elliot hated it, but he felt sorry for Emmett; he was alone, like himself. Emmett was around a lot, and that made it difficult for Elliot to do all the things he wanted, all those things he was thinking of. One time Emmett caught him setting fire to a dog. He was dead-on with it; he had a solemn talk with him about how it’s not right to do that to animals. After that, Elliot started taking precautions, and it must have worked, because that was the only time he ever came close to getting caught trying to set fires. Uncle Emmett died on Elliot’s nineteenth birthday. He didn’t care to go bowling again.

  When the man from the notary public called, Elliot didn’t right away understand. He thought the man was one of those people you must talk to after deaths. Even when the man held up the check for the money Emmett had left him, he didn’t right away understand it was his. This was Uncle Emmett’s money, not his, he reasoned. The amount was £203,000 and some pence. He got the flat on Blair Street, while Cousin—Emmett’s son—was left the house they lived in. Cousin was respectful on the surface, but that was all; he really despised him for having all that money and not knowing what to do with it. He eventually kicked him out of the house.

  Elliot hadn’t been to the Blair Street basement flat before; it had been in Emmett’s family for decades, but nobody had stayed there for as long as he could remember. Once he moved in, he knew he would hate it. So close to the Edinburgh city center; a pub across the street; a nightclub right next to the flat. The first nights he couldn’t sleep. But then things started changing. He considered the freedom he had. He was alone, but he was free to do as he wished. Then there was her: living across the hall from him, with her daughter, both of them radiant among the dirty clouds of this macabre city, like moths in a swamp.

  He had a job at some company called Boiler and Gas Services. He hated it, but it gave him access to gasoline and a van, which he eventually bought. The van was a great advantage; there was space down the long side in the back for a full-size bed. It could easily fit a little girl.

  As time went by, he thought he might forget about the Grand Plan, forget about the mother and her daughter. But forgetting is a process that is always uneven: you may forget a few things one day and forget a few things another day again, but some things never really leave you. Especially people: try to forget someone and you may wake up one night to find that the memory of the person has stayed with you all along, sitting on the foot of your bed, watching you while you sleep, and roaming your room like a ghost.

  It started when he was deep-cleaning the flat. It had been empty for so many years, gathering dust. At some point on that day, he’d decided to move the furniture in order to clean the floors. There was a huge chest in the hall, and once he moved that out of the way, he saw something peculiar. There were stone tiles among the bricks of the wall.

  The edges of the bricks bordered the outer parts of a mosaic pattern on the wall. Elliot knelt down. He rolled aside the end of the rug, and a hairy spider scuttled out and faded into the shadows. Clouds of dust hovered in the wavering light. He finally decided to roll the rug into a long tube and prop it against the wall. He blew the dust away, revealing the full length of the colored mosaic set into the stone of the wall and the floor. After brushing and blowing, he stepped back to look at it. The pattern was about seven feet long and took up the whole width of the hall. At first he was annoyed; he would have to call someone to come and fix this—or maybe he could put the chest back against the wall so it would cover this weird mosaic.

  But then it got him thinking: Was there anything behind this inconsistent, polymorphic pattern? He decided the wall was asymmetric anyway, and a little experimentation had never hurt anyone.

  Said experimentation started with gentle tapping, then continued with him trying to push that part of the wall. He ended up getting a hammer and smashing a bit off of it. It was hollow inside. By then curiosity had gotten the better of him, so he tore down the rest. A rush of cold air escaped from beyond.

  The moment he shone his flashlight into the hole, he knew that the fading beam would light something irrevocably beautiful. But he had no idea what until he saw it.

  11

  The fog had gripped Edinburgh. It carried the salt tang of the Firth of Forth, mixed with the sharp, nostalgic scent of ghosts and smoke buried within the city, a force both natural and supernatural. The gaslights along Princes Street flickered amid the fog like tips of ashen fire hovering uncannily in midair. They trembled in the wind, each in the sequence a little dimmer than the last, into the pale obscurity that enveloped it all.

  The wind was roaring its way down, snapping Whitman’s overcoat about his legs like a hefty flag caught on a fence. He crossed from the vast thoroughfare of Princes Street into the paved street that ran parallel; Rose Street gave a back-way entrance to the store.

  Tony Dickson’s voice greeted him from inside.

  “It’s amazing what you find in these auld biggins.”

  Whitman looked at the aging contractor: safety helmet propped on his head, a shirt and tie underneath his blue overalls. He was the chief, the go-to man; nothing surprised him anymore, not even what he was about to show Whitman.

  The air was a mixture of dirt, flooring particles, dust, and grime. It was a large main area with high ceilings. It had once been Sekuler’s workshop, then department store after department store; now, demolition debris lay in a rectangle of four big piles near the center of the room. Nails and litter covered the floors, punctuated with gaping holes. Long hairline cracks ran across the walls. Dotted across the room, metal post pins attached to baseplates and crossbeams provided an intermediary between the flooring and ceiling. Four fluted columns textured in faux stone plaster remained untouched in the corners of the room. It was a workman’s paradise; trowels, straightedges, framing squares, drills, circular saws, cat’s-paws, wood chisels, ratchet wrenches, gauge rakes, hammers, tap
e measures, all begging to be picked up and have a go at the place.

  “You ken wit a mean,” Dickson went on. “In my time I’ve found everything—fram ancient placks to a pocket watch.”

  “What about this hatch you found?”

  “Lad’s sawing off the lock reet noo.”

  They passed through the rusty nails and wire mesh to an empty, grimy back room, until recently a stockroom facility. The floors had been stripped to the underlayer. The floor bulged and dipped. A dead mouse lay in a forgotten corner.

  “Mind yer feet, big man,” he said. “This way.” Dickson explained how, during renovations, surprises often lurked beneath floors, behind walls, and above ceilings.

  “I mind we gart a manufacturing plant near Broxburn, aye, and we foond asphalt under the flare that we needed to blooter. Trying the big jessie way in constructing new flats and yer arse is oot the windae.” He shook his head. “It didnae work with old biggins. You know, a big pipe mee run through a room, the woolls may be of different heights, aye? And these heid bangers at the council didnae make things easier for us. But this…this I never seen before.”

  At the far end of the room, a man was stooping down a lowered part of the underlayment, using a chain saw on something at full throttle. They joined him.

  Dickson motioned at the man and introduced him as “Stan Lee.” Struggling with the saw, Stanley muttered something that sounded like a vowel under his breath.

  “We’re giving it the full warks, you see—gutted, new drainage system, rewiring,” Dickson explained. “We were gonna tak out the flare in the cellar to lay new cundies and also because there seemed to be damp—nae doot there was a fousty smell to the place, and we needed to find the ruit of the problem, you see. We thought we would find auld cundies, open cundies. Maybe even a trickle of a syke, you know these bangers mean damp. Instead the pneumatic dreels fund this.”

  It was an iron trapdoor, the size of a Danish casement window, halved in two cellar flaps with a metal handrail mounted on each of them.

  “Must be gey old, eh?”