Séance Infernale

by Jonathan Skariton

  They were right there. Inches away.

  The four stayed crouched on the ground of the hollow, holding their breath.

  Then the sound of a match being struck, and the soft burning of the tip of a cigarette.

  McBride’s right hand felt for her mobile—she had to make sure it was on silent mode—but she only touched the emptiness of her pocket. Her eyes widened. She gave Whitman a look; he had seen her mobile was missing.

  She was tempted to rise. She could remain crouched, waiting for the voices to resume or leave. But she suspected she knew where her mobile lay.

  She made a movement toward the opening. Whitman shook his head, eyebrows slightly raised.

  She crouched toward the opening, trying not to make a sound. At last, as the muscles in her thighs and calves began to cramp, she eased up to the gap and carefully peeked out. She half-expected the men to be lurking there, guns ready.

  Only one of the men was still there, smoking his cigarette, his back turned to her under a blue haze. The other two were out of sight; presumably they had gone further into the darkness in search of them. She looked at the ground.

  The mobile was there.

  It was inches away from her. Within reaching distance.

  It would take only a slight turn of his head for the man to see it.

  Was there a signal down there? What if someone called her? Was the phone on silent mode?

  She half-glimpsed the goon’s shadow turning around, and she pulled herself back and tried to shrink into the darkness. Her muscles flared from adrenaline. Had he seen them? Had he seen the phone?

  The others stared at McBride. They had surmised what had happened. Their breath remained in their lungs. Silence swamped the passage.

  With her heart in her throat, she sneaked another look through the opening. The man was still there, back turned to them.

  She stretched out her hand, groping for the mobile; she only touched the stone floor.

  She reached out again.

  Just a little too short.

  Again. The only sound was the pounding of her heart, each beat coming after each realization of a miss.

  Miss. Beat. Her fingers barely nicked the phone.

  She moved forward and stretched her arm again.

  Beat.

  She hit a loose rock resting atop another.

  In slow motion

  she felt the rock

  slide out of place.

  The rock

  fell

  on

  the

  stone

  floor,

  And that was when the sound of her heart and the adrenaline rushed back into her eardrums. The whole thing came away, crashing into her brain on the inside of her ears. She grabbed the rock and ran toward the man, who by then had half turned around.

  She drove the blunt end of the rock into his face and heard the bone of his nose break. His hands covered his face, and that was when she delivered a careful kick to his knee. His kneecap moved. The man fell down, cowering, screaming in pain.

  She turned around and ran to the others. They had fled their hiding place for the corridor that led to the City Chambers.

  “Told you: three’s my lucky number,” she said to Whitman as they ran.

  In the distance they heard the voices of the other men, calling their comrade’s name from afar. She turned around and saw only darkness. They were nowhere in sight; groans and curses were swallowed by the tunnel.

  McBride thought they were safe.

  —

  Streetlamps flickered and a flash of lightning bathed the buildings in a sudden white. They had cascaded through the Upper Bow and Victoria Steps and rushed as far away as their energy permitted. There wasn’t a soul to be seen on the streets. They took refuge in a gallery under a series of arches. The fog had been scattered across the four winds, but the rumble of the storm could be felt through the city walls, through the arches, getting closer.

  “I think we’re safe for now,” Whitman said, catching his breath.

  McBride looked around, surveying the grounds. “We should head back. Lick our wounds and regroup.”

  Whitman shook his head. “There’s no time.”

  Charlie had already fished out his notes. He motioned them to examine the second line of the riddle: “ ‘I’ve hid it where dead men guard it,’ ” he said. “That’s easy, right? Where do you find dead people? Graveyards.”

  “Hold on,” Whitman said, pointing at Elena. “Aren’t we going to talk about what just happened? How Ida Lupino here’s been following us, and why?”

  “Remember,” Elena told Charlie, ignoring Whitman, “you’re in Edinburgh. Dead men are everywhere. Churches, tombs—putain!—even below the street we walk on.”

  “And who is this Alexander Seton?”

  “Un alchimiste.” She placed her finger on Charlie’s notes. “We must look at the names. They have something in common.”

  “And I suppose you just happened to know this? Where from?” Whitman said.

  “I’m helping you.”

  “For some reason, it doesn’t feel that way.”

  Elena shrugged.

  Whitman shifted his glare toward the notebook. “What about the names? What do the names tell us?”

  “I’ve never heard of them before,” Charlie said.

  “Me neither,” McBride said. “Except this guy.” She pointed at the first name. “George Mackenzie. He was a hanging judge. He persecuted thousands during the Restoration. He was so relentless in his pursuit that he was given the nickname ‘Bluidy Mackenzie.’ ”

  “Joy.”

  There was a roaring sound; they stared out at the curtain of white lightning traced across the sky.

  “Is his grave around?”

  “In Greyfriars.”

  Whitman seemed to consider this, nodding, stroking his beard. “What about the rest of them? There must be a pattern. What do they have in common?”

  “Are they all dead? I guess they have to be, by now.”

  Whitman nodded. “Are they all Scottish?”

  “Mackenzie was. He was famous. The rest I don’t know. They all sound like Scottish names. If they were all born in Scotland…”

  “Does that mean they died in Scotland?”

  “Maybe they’re all buried here, in Edinburgh.”

  “All those people are buried at Greyfriars Kirkyard,” Elena said.

  Whitman glared at her. She knew more than she was letting on.

  “Wild guess,” she said.

  “Soon you’re going to tell us what you know,” Whitman said.

  “Soon?”

  33

  The madness of a Gothic moon loomed overhead, shining on rows of uneven gravestones. Greyfriars Kirkyard was eerie, the kind of place nightmares are made of—the kind of place you encounter when you break into church grounds with a crowbar in the late hours of December’s darkness. There were wooden benches around the church and a low, shedlike shop of a structure at one end. Ragged trees and ferns were scattered around hundreds of gravestones and vaults. Naked branches formed a tracery that perplexed the eyes and clasped the heart. There was a rush of wings as a group of crows rose into the air as one.

  Charlie had been nervous about the cemetery. He had imagined smells and vandalism and eeriness. And that was all there; but there was also mossy stone and the soft tapping noises of the trees. A wonderland of the dead.

  The sounds of the graveyard itself filled the silence: the squish of their shoe soles on the path; the whisper of the wind in the trees; light traffic up and down the hill; the chirps of insects; Charlie’s overcoat flapping behind him.

  “We’ll get through this more quickly if we split up,” Whitman said.

  “What are we looking for?”

  “Dead people. A pattern: family, dates, anything. I’ll take the south end; Serpico gets the division adjoining this; Charlie will be over at the north side; and you”—he pointed at Elena—“you stay out of fucking trouble. West end.”
They parted ways, four shadows scouring tombstones in the dead of night.

  —

  Whitman used his flashlight to cover ground faster. There was a half-moon, but the lofty branches above him made the night raven-black. He switched off his flashlight and listened. He was pleased to be in the cemetery.

  He found Alexander Sterling’s tomb; it was the family grave of an Edinburgh merchant. He also traced the relic of Elizabeth Moncrieff, a reverend’s daughter. He took note of anything that might be of interest: the type of grave, the letters on the tombstones, their birth dates, death dates, their occupations, their families’ names.

  He decided to move to Mackenzie’s tomb, a well-documented tourist site. Through the bars of the iron gate, there stood the Covenanters’ Prison, where Bluidy Mackenzie was buried; it was a terrain of slaughter. As he busted the lock open with the crowbar, he wondered if the Covenanters were pissed off that a mutt on four legs had stolen their thunder in fame.

  The mausoleum was an octagonal, Corinthian-columned, domed neoclassic. The massive door featured a bas-relief of a pelican feeding her young with her own blood, a symbol of the Resurrection.

  With a crack, the lock busted open. He stood on the threshold of the gloomy structure. Dust had accumulated in the corners of the circular space. The coffin was lead-lined, for aboveground burial. Behind him, the wind continued to whisper in the trees.

  A twig snapped. Something was breathing in the dark directly behind him. He started to spin. The cold muzzle of a gun kissed the base of his head. Even before he turned, he knew who the gun belonged to.

  34

  Angela was unsure how long she had stayed restrained in the stuffy crypt-basement. It was a hateful, primitive place where the walls squeezed in on her and she kept listening for the man, all the while getting used to the silence and the always of waiting.

  By that time power had become real for her. The door bore no keyhole. It was not meant to open from her end. Every night she wished the door would open and that her restraints would magically vanish and she would rush at him and beat him senseless and escape into the light of day.

  And then the door with no keyhole opened. He walked in and untied her. He propped her over his shoulder and carried her out of that horrible place and into the flat proper.

  The first thing she did was cry.

  She was grateful to be alive. She was a coward and she didn’t want to die. She never knew before how much she wanted to live. I don’t care what he does, she thought, as long as he keeps my daughter alive.

  No sooner was the man standing over her than she remembered wanting to be sick and afraid of choking under the gag. And then being sick.

  When he came into the room, he just stood there looking gawky, and then at once, seeing him in the half-light of the still open door, she recognized who he was. Her neighbor. As if knowing what she was thinking, he went red. Blushing, Angela would find out, was a frequent occurrence for Elliot.

  Tall, skinny—gangly, more like it—with hands so pink and white you’d think they were a boy’s. Blank face, dull hair, receding hairline. All bland and meh. Even his speech was awkward, marred by the kind of words that require additional justification for oneself—“sorry” succeeding every sentence. He had been secretly following her for a long time, watching her and her daughter.

  The first thing he told her was that her daughter was safe. She was asleep. If she behaved herself, he would allow Angela to see her.

  And then she remembered the knock on the door, the man luring her out of her apartment by lying about his daughter’s asthma attack…

  Will anyone know if I die?

  He, on the other hand, was exhilarated at the capture of his prey, the beginning of the Grand Plan…

  Angela looked weak, flushed, but she seemed to know where she was all right and who Elliot was, her eye following him all the while around the room quite normally—that appeased Elliot. He thought the worst was past, the first obstacle. Acceptance and all that.

  She turned and squinted with the one eye that wasn’t swollen shut. She took in the room, dimly lit by an open fireplace. It could have been the spare room of an ordinary flat: tall-backed upholstered chairs stood in two corners, and table lamps rested on each side of a canopied bed.

  A tripod with an old wooden projector faced the fireplace.

  She looked quite the sight, almost out of it, like she was sleepy, with Elliot’s shirt too big for her, one shoulder exposed, her hair falling to one side. Nothing filthy, nothing like that. It got Elliot excited seeing her like that. Like she knew who her master was. It gave him ideas.

  She spoke in a low, hoarse voice. She said she was cold. Elliot got her jacket. He pulled it over her shoulders, smoothed it, and let it drop. As he did so, he gently touched her arms, and that sent shivers up both their spines.

  He applied the restraints. She did not protest. He said he would stay with her and that he would look after her from now on.

  She began to cry again. It wasn’t like ordinary crying; she just lay there expressionless, her eyes brimming with tears, as if she didn’t know she was crying. Then she said, “Please don’t kill me,” and Elliot said, “I’m not going to kill you.” He smiled at her.

  “Don’t be silly,” he said. “You are my soul mate. We are destined to live long and be happy together.”

  “I won’t tell anyone please let me go please I won’t tell anyone.”

  No reply.

  “Please don’t kill me,” and then again: “Please don’t kill me.” And another time, and each time Elliot told her to stop saying that, but she didn’t seem to hear.

  She didn’t understand.

  It seemed like the right moment, so he set up the old projector with the ancient movies he had found in the crypt.

  “I have a present for you,” he said. It took him a few attempts, but in the end he did it—the lights were dim, the projector chattered. Motes of dust danced in the light beam that swept through the darkness; like Dr. Frankenstein, the shaft of light touched the blank canvas of the wall and the screen sprang to life. Elliot hummed the duun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-duuun theme of the 20th Century–Fox fanfare. As the paper film clicked into action, the place transformed from bedroom to the Kingdom of Shadows.

  What a marvel it was, seeing the shadows on the wall, just being there, almost as alive as they had been at the time of its recording.

  “Have you ever seen anything so beautiful?” he asked.

  She started to move a bit, and finally saw the projections on the wall. They were grainy, as if they were projected on grains of sand, and they were slow, as if they, too, had been kidnapped and brutally forced to stay up there, constantly moving in spite of their own will.

  Angela was confused. On the wall, a little girl sat in front of a set of mirrors, watching herself, an expression of silent horror on her face. There was a man with a mustache sitting next to her, also looking into the mirrors. The girl looked frightened out of her mind; either she was a great actress or this was not a movie at all.

  What the hell is this?

  After a moment the girl went quiet, and both she and the man closed their eyes. Within seconds they opened them again. The girl looked fine now. The man seemed disoriented but quiet.

  Another man appeared in view. He was dressed all in black and looked young, with a boyish face. The man in black untied the girl. The girl then smiled as if this had been her plan all along and left the room to go out into the night. The man in black also left, leaving the mustached man alone. This was all very confusing.

  Another person appeared on the screen. He still had restraints on his hands, suggesting he had been tied up somewhere offscreen. He knelt down to the man with the mustache. They were both crying. The screen faded to black.

  Elliot stopped the projector and carefully took out the movie reel—it was as soft as paper. Something old and pure like that. It was the perfect opportunity. He stooped down next to her as if he was holding an engagement ring.
/>   “It is for you. Feel how warm it is, my love.”

  She looked confused. But beauty does that to people, Elliot thought.

  She whispered, “Thank you” and closed her eyes. Elliot placed the reel in her jacket pocket. It would be a token of their love and all the great things to come.

  The doorbell rang, echoing from one side of the hallway into the barred windows of their room, forcing its way into the darkened flat. Elliot’s heart caught in his throat and he almost jumped.

  He should have known it was coming.

  He had mentally rehearsed what he would do in this event. He was ready for it.

  What he didn’t expect was Angela’s response.

  Her eye sprang open and she suddenly lurched up from the chair. Her strength got her only to the point of managing to drop on the floor. Mustering all her strength, she began to crawl to the door, but she was so slow, the whole movement seemed comical. It was a kind of uninterrupted fright in slow motion.

  Her right foot swung into the fireplace, kicking a burning log out of the hearth and onto the carpet.

  Elliot grabbed her shoulders and pulled her out. He could smell the burning on her clothes, and that made his heart beat faster. She turned and tried to claw at him, but she barely managed to tug at his shirt.

  He propped her back up on her seat, pulled her arms behind her back, and tied them to the bars at the back of the chair. The restraints sliced into her wrists.

  As soon as she saw him grabbing the gag, she shook her head, pleading for mercy. She cried that she couldn’t breathe with the gag.

  He didn’t understand what all the fuss was about. After all, the hidey place was well aired, as was the rest of the house.

  The gag went on, and her throat constricted. Her scream became a whimper.

  Her head hung back, and Elliot imagined how, if it wasn’t for the gag, her throat would gape like a second mouth, caught in a silent, dark red scream. But it, too, would soon be silent.

  He kept listening for the door. And watching the log on the carpet—it was smoldering heavily, and it filled him with all kinds of nasty desires. Smoke was filling up the room.