Séance Infernale

by Jonathan Skariton

  “We’re right below Cockburn Street,” McBride said.

  The uneven passages were narrow and dark, with floors of packed earth and walls lined by tiny unlit oil lamps. They peered through a window: The room was vaulted, with whitewashed walls anchored to an earthen floor. There were blunt objects everywhere. Iron hooks suspended from the ceiling. Saws hung from the walls.

  Charlie almost let out a whimper.

  “Grow up,” McBride said. “Probably a butcher shop.”

  “Are you sure?”

  She shook her head.

  “Henri said that when the plague ravaged the city, they sealed up the close with all the people inside and set fire to it.”

  “Sounds too macabre to be true,” McBride said.

  Whitman cringed at the mere possibility of people having been burned alive in there. Either way, frightened, sorrowful wails had once pierced this air, victims falling to the dreaded plague around the serpentine passageways. Chilling figures in birdlike masks, dressed in heavy leather cloaks, tending to the sores and boils of bedridden children while their mothers lay alongside them, their skin covered in black patches. Bodies already succumbed to the plague awaiting collection from the “foul clengers,” the cleanup crew. The plague had immobilized Edinburgh and claimed more than half of its population.

  “According to Henri’s map, we should take a right…here.”

  “Be on the lookout,” Whitman said.

  “So we’re looking for…bells, I suppose?”

  “Bells that never ring, whose knells make the…whatever the rest of it was.”

  “Sounds ritualistic. Something from a church or a place of burial.”

  They entered the rooms. Shelves, ladders, and stairs. Glass glittered. Dust abounded. Sections of the crumbling walls were papered, three-hundred-year-old floral and other displays stenciled on the lavatory closets. Astragals on the oval windows also remained, surrounded by flat fillets and topped by jambs or worked stone; a number of moldings and tapestries adorned the hallways. Around everything, the remains of fireplaces and built-in cupboards. The carved oak paneling had rotted away.

  Charlie ran his fingers over the plaster. “Original. Nice.”

  McBride inspected it closely. “Yeah. They used to make these out of human ash.”

  “Fucking hell.”

  “What about this hole in the ground? What was it for?”

  “Guess.”

  “Oh, shit.”

  She nodded. “ ‘Oh, shit’ is right.”

  “He said ‘behind Allan’s Close,’ right? It’s in there.”

  They made for the threshold and then stopped. What had once been Allan’s Close was now a shambles roofed over by the toppled building; mounds of dense rubble, worn into a grotesquery of angles, and stone. Hard, dense, solid whinstone, sheathed in a film of dirt. Compacted. Impenetrable. Failure was staring them straight in the eyes.

  Whitman placed his palm against the solid mass. Pushed. It was immovable. He closed his eyes.

  “We have to get in there. There has to be a way around this,” McBride said.

  Whitman slowly shook his head, eyes still closed. “Not unless you’re packing a diamond drill.” And then: “Look at the map. This is the only way in there. And there’s nothing here. Absolutely nothing.”

  “We can’t give up,” McBride said. “We can find something, someone. Some help. I can call someone who knows construction; maybe we can get some excavation equipment down here.”

  Whitman scowled at her, shaking his head. “No dice, Serpico. What do you think is going to happen when they figure out that someone’s broken into this fucking place? New locks, security, you name it. We’re screwed, underground style.”

  He walked out of the room with his hands on his head. He hadn’t visualized the possibility of defeat. Not like this. Not when they were so close.

  He ran his hand through his hair as he considered his options. Surrender to the police? That was out of the question. They wouldn’t stand a chance. Take the ferry to Zeebrugge? Thoughts of possible extradition crossed his mind, and he tried to wave them away. They had to escape. Ditch the cop; get out of this fucking place.

  A stab of nausea ran through him. He steadied himself, his hand against the plastered wall.

  God, he was tired.

  How do I get out of this? he thought. How do I get Charlie out of this? Once more he was failing his daughter.

  On the other side of the room, McBride stood thinking. Charlie was sitting on the ground. “What do we do?” he whispered.

  “I don’t know, Charlie.”

  Whitman took his hand off the plaster, the dust flying in all directions. He felt the urge to sneeze, and positioned his hand closer to his mouth. He realized he wasn’t going to sneeze after all. And he saw that a dust imprint had come off on his palm. It was the imprint of the floral pattern from the wall.

  The flower.

  A bluebell.

  A bell that never rings.

  “Motherfucker,” he said.

  “Dust is bloody awful down here,” McBride said.

  He shook his head, smiling. “No, no, dust is beautiful, Serpico. I’m telling you, it’s beautiful.”

  McBride and Charlie edged closer to him. He showed them his palm.

  “What?”

  “Don’t you see? They’re bluebells. Goddamn bluebells. Flowers.”

  “Bells that never ring,” Charlie said. “Damn it, Alex, you’re a genius.”

  “What does this mean?” McBride asked. “Assuming you’re right.”

  “It means that our next key word is fucking ‘bluebells.’ ” Whitman snapped his finger. “Let’s work our magic, Jabba.”

  Charlie had already opened his folder and was scribbling furiously. His injury seemed long in the past, and his hand was working across the lines of the notebook without a hint of tremor. Sekuler would whisper to them again.

  My dear viewer, you will soon encounter the burden that I have hidden. I am terrified by the notion of those who wish to take my invention away and claim credit for themselves; in such situations, alliances between the greedy and the evil are formed easily. I plan to board a train, but I am unsure whether it will reach its destination. In the event it does not, this moving picture will be irrefutable evidence of what occurred.

  I still remember that forsaken night. After having been seized by the evil itself, I awakened to the darkness, restrained, unable to move. But as my eyes adjusted to the dark of the room, a circumstance of frightening nature attracted my attention. I was in my own workshop. Before me was my sweet, beautiful daughter, restrained in a chair. Carlyle Eistrowe stood next to her. But a man, dressed entirely in black, was next to them where none had been perceptible before. In my confusion I mistook him for a priest. He had a boyish face and bloodshot blue eyes and a head crowned with snow-white hair falling over his forehead. The man conferred with Eistrowe in hushed tones and I realised that the both of them had conspired in my demise. They had kidnapped my Zoe. Eistrowe motioned him to advance as he wished. The man then proceeded to extract an object from the table and place it into his bag. I realised that the object was one of my projectors! And as the man turned, his face entered the light. It was Thomas Edison himself. He was stealing my work—my cameras, my projectors. He nodded at me familiarly, a greeting from his strong chin, an acknowledgement from his dark eyes—and I realised the two men had perpetrated this act as part of an agreement: Edison desired my invention and Carlyle could provide it by betraying me. I demanded at once that they release me and my daughter. Edison laughed. My Zoe was crying.

  Zoe’s small, delicate feet were gleaming in the glass across from her. Carlyle was smiling. He left his pipe aside on the floor—he was always smoking it incessantly—so that his hands were rendered free, and took seating next to her. One of my cameras stood next to me, recording the terrible ordeal.

  There was a rabid frenzy in my thoughts—a hideous and insatiable clamour. In the darkness I saw that the whol
e structure had been re-laid before my eyes: they were both seated in front of a small assembled chamber. I realised what they were facing inside was not a window; it was a mirror. I reasoned it was a transparent mirror, one that allowed you to see through it. Another mirror had been positioned at the wall of the chamber so it was directly facing them and the first mirror. I had come to know those mirrors, as Carlyle had previously relayed to me their mystical properties; he had purchased them from a warlock residing on Candlemaker Row, and he claimed that the materials used for their construction had been taken from the staff of Major Thomas Weir himself. Weir was a retired soldier, a serious man of grim countenance, who always carried a black staff and led prayers with a fervour that inspired much awe in the community. He was attending a religious service when he suddenly stood up and began to confess to being in the service of the Devil and to an incestuous relationship with his unmarried sister. Eventually he was sentenced to be strangled and burnt. His staff was taken from him, for they claimed that he had been given it by none other than the Devil himself, and it was an instrument of terrible power.

  Edison seemed as terrified as I. He gathered my inventions and finally exited the basement, leaving my daughter and me at the mercy of the fiend. The camera next to me was still capturing the ordeal.

  Carlyle was whispering in a language I could not understand. His voice grew tender and low—yet I would not wish to dwell upon the feral sense of the softly whispered words. My mind staggered, entranced, as I became aware of a refrain more than mortal—of longings and passions which the living had never before known. Then, Zoe appeared to be fainting and gradually closed her eyes, and Carlyle closed his eyes in turn.

  I knew what he was planning to do. I knew, my friend! I could not believe it. Not that the contour of each hurried reflection failed, at any time, to imprint its own idiosyncratic outline upon the fiendish mirror—but that mirror, un-mirrorlike, retained more than the vestige of the reflection, as each departed into infinite alcoves of further reflections, stretching into infinity. And at its heart, at the heart of the infinite reflection: the unity of an exchange.

  My daughter stirred—and now more strenuously than hitherto, although arising from an integration more atrocious in its absolute nature than any other. And as she slowly opened her eyes, through the adversity of horror and of dread, I saw these were not the eyes of my daughter—and an undeniable helplessness, fostered by horror, charged every fibre of my being.

  Its eyes! Its eyes, my dear friend! They were blacker than the coal chambers of midnight! She smiled at me and I recognised that smile! It was Carlyle’s!

  Minutes elapsed before any event appeared to throw light upon this anomaly. My daughter finally rose from the chair, picked up the pipe from the floor, and placed it in her mouth. She smiled again at me, and I was certain beyond any doubt that she was not my daughter, that the man who had been standing next to her had taken residence inside her. It may have been her skin and her body, but that was not her. She—it—immediately ran out of the cellar, and I never saw it again.

  Carlyle opened his eyes and was staring inside the mirror, lost, seemingly unable to fathom what had happened. I then realised I had been watching, with feelings half of disquiet, half of terror, the workings of my daughter’s countenance. As it came to my rescue, untying my hands and feet, and crying, crying endlessly, I understood.

  “Now at last,” I cried, “I am certain—more certain than I breathe—that these are the brimming, and the blue, and the innocent eyes of my own daughter; of my Zoe Sekuler!”

  I have tried to make sense of the unspeakable horrors of that night and I cannot.

  In the following days, I would look at the fiend’s eyes, and I would see that my daughter was in that body. I knew she would never return from this dreaded purgatory, the result of this “Séance Infernale.” I asked around if anyone had seen a little girl with a sardonic smile, but to no avail. On occasions I have heard laughter echoing in the dark closes, and that is when I fear most for my life. I have no choice over what I shall do next.

  Thus I have tried to cover my secret, embed it within these frames, unperturbed by the passage of time and, alas, by the burning of memory. I implore you, my dear friend, to be careful. Perhaps Edison and his men will come to realise the evidence that has been left behind in the form of moving pictures. They can make sure I am no more. You will hear no more of me after this riddle, which will lead you to the location of the remaining moving images and the irrefutable proof which they hold.

  From Alexander Seton it started

  I found it, hid it where dead men guard it

  though Time slips in the hourglass of life

  men of wisdom know not when they must die

  but if you so wish to find my secret

  you must count the grains remaining in it

  they forgot in time what you must not

  find the secret knot

  George Mackenzie. Alexander Sterling, Esq Elizabeth Moncrieff William Boswell Esq X – Christine Gilbert. George Joseph Donaldson Margaret Reid Jane Bennet

  Standing in front of the jaws of a murky opening that seemed to corkscrew deeper into the ground, Whitman hesitated, looking behind them. He couldn’t be sure, but he thought there had been movement in the darkness.

  Silence.

  “Sounds like your filmmaker friend was seriously deranged,” McBride said.

  “Maybe.”

  “What do you mean ‘maybe’? The guy thought his daughter switched bodies with another person. And what about that sentence near the end? ‘I have no choice over what I shall do next.’ It sounds like he killed his daughter in the end.”

  Whitman felt his forehead. “What do you care, Serpico?” he finally said. So it had been a case of betrayal all along—Sekuler’s friend, the occultist Carlyle Eistrowe, had forged a deal with the inventor Thomas Edison. “The girl you’re after is getting her freak on with your perp.”

  “You don’t believe what he wrote in that letter is true, do you?”

  Whitman turned and looked behind them again. This time he could swear he’d seen movement.

  There was a sound. Charlie and McBride turned, and Whitman knew he wasn’t imagining things.

  Whitman felt his blood drain. He was ready to dart into the tunnel, to flee like an animal.

  The figure walked into the dim light and drew its hood back, revealing its face.

  32

  Elena Genhagger stared at them, as if giving them time to take in the surprise. Exactly what she was doing in underground Edinburgh or how she had ended up there from the French part of Switzerland was unclear. “That hardly matters,” she said. “You know you’re being followed.”

  “Who?”

  “You know who.”

  “Who is she?” Charlie asked.

  “Swiss chick.” Whitman quickly explained how he had found the Lausanne address to Sekuler’s last known descendant; how Elena Genhagger had proved to be Sekuler’s great-granddaughter; the circumstances under which Whitman had found her unconscious.

  Whitman brushed past Elena into what had once been the door of a close. He listened. Noise suddenly amplified in the underground space, somewhere in the far distance behind them. He crept around the corner, watching. He could hear footsteps, and voices echoing. He tiptoed down a wooden ramp until, crouching low, he could see silhouettes in the distance heading toward him.

  “How did you know they were coming for us?” he said.

  “I followed them here.”

  “You followed us, too.” Whitman stared at her in the dim light. Her face was expressionless.

  “Who is this?” McBride asked.

  Charlie moved forward, farther into the tunnel, but Elena stopped him. “It’s a dead end. You’ll be trapped before you know it.”

  “Okay, I’ll bite,” Whitman said. “What do we do?”

  “We don’t have much time.”

  Elena moved forward into the alcoves before them. Whitman and McBride looked at e
ach other.

  “When did she become leader?” Charlie said.

  McBride flicked her flashlight on. Whitman and Charlie followed, trailing a few feet after her. The light dimmed behind them, giving in to blackness. The effect was uncanny, Charlie thought, as if the tunnel were alive. In the darkness behind them, the voices were drawing nearer.

  Shining the way ahead, Elena led them through the passageways toward a large cylindrical rock standing on its edge against the wall. “This way.”

  “Behind that?” McBride asked. “They’re going to pass right in front of us!”

  “C’est ça,” Elena said. “It’s hollow inside.”

  Whitman gave Charlie a look. Charlie raised his shoulders. The voices from behind were almost upon them.

  Grunting with effort, they rolled the stone back through a groove cut in the stone wall. McBride lost her footing and fell. “I’m all right,” she told Charlie, who offered her a hand up. She rose and dusted herself off.

  As the stone turned back on itself with a grating sound, the cold air rushed out of the chamber.

  The rock covered the entrance to a short tunnel. Through the mouth of the cave, they could see only darkness.

  “What is it? A passageway?”

  “Another dead end, I’m afraid,” Elena said.

  What if she’s in on it? Whitman thought.

  They rolled the stone back, leaving just enough space for them to squeeze out if necessary.

  McBride clicked the flashlight off. “We’re right below the City Chambers,” she whispered.

  —

  The cavity was like a sensory-deprivation chamber, a dark, barren confine in a stone-walled burrow. They listened.

  Faint voices, rolling echoes taking form in the stillness.

  Approaching footsteps.

  Boots stomped past the opening. Then stopped.

  McBride heard distinct voices.

  The silhouettes of the men loomed like exaggerated specters against the wall.