Séance Infernale

by Jonathan Skariton

  The fire was visible from other windows now. He could hear the girl’s screams in his ear. He didn’t realize he kept calling her “Ellie.” He carried them up the steps onto the street as thick black smoke rolled up behind them, acrid with the smell of chemicals.

  A few neighbors and people from a nearby nightclub were assembled outside. Sirens were screaming out in the far distance, precious minutes away.

  He set the woman down. She leaned heavily against him. She opened her bloodshot eyes and saw her daughter standing next to her. “Thank you,” she said. Her voice was a ghost of a whisper.

  “Oh, my God, Alex!”

  He turned around and saw Elena Genhagger standing next to him. He didn’t have time for this.

  “Call 999. Now,” he told her.

  Then he ran back inside the house. Someone behind him shouted, “What are you doing? Are you insane?”

  42

  Whitman thudded on the basement flat’s door with his fist. The wood was red-hot. He felt the vibration of something from inside in response. He kicked the door and then shoved his body against it. The door yielded and he went catapulting in. The other side of the door was up in flames.

  Inside, the inferno was whirling down in strands, spattering the floor with veils of fire that seemed to be howling and reaching out to grab him. An updraft from the smashed window swung the bedroom door open and fanned the veils, making them break out further. The cathedral of upswirling flames danced with the fearsome grace of a beautiful being tipped with terror.

  The heat was intense, the flames rapidly mounting the walls.

  He moved through pouring billows of smoke, coat over his face. It was then that he heard the whispering. He looked around. The smoke was so dense, he could see only a few feet in front of him.

  The books were whispering to him. Footsteps, echoing away from him. A soft laugh, like that of a child. More whispers, indistinct, joined by others.

  Something slithered near him. He knew what it was before the shadow emerged from the smoke.

  Pluto passed in front of a set of library shelves and suddenly stopped. He licked his paws and stared into Whitman’s eyes as if beckoning him to approach. The flames around the cat reflected like emeralds in his feline eyes. Whitman knew the answers to his questions lay behind those shelves.

  43

  The Old Town lay under a blanket of noxious, dark, ocher-colored smoke that rose from the fire, ablaze with the burning of memory.

  From the hospital window, mirror-cast against the streetlights outside, Elena’s green eyes stared at the fires in the distance. Her throat still remembered the acrid smell—the combination of dampness, burnt wood, and smoke. A cacophony of sirens wailed from far away.

  What have I done? she thought. All she wanted was for Whitman and Elliot to keep each other busy so she would have the chance to get the frames from inside the flat. But she had been too late. And this…she never wished for this to happen.

  She heard a sound behind her and turned to see Angela waking up to sterile surroundings. Angela’s eyes took in the freshness, the white sheets, the pale green of the walls and floral curtains on the windows. And then she shifted her head to the side and registered Elena Genhagger’s presence next to her hospital bed.

  “Your throat is going to be sore for a couple of days, but you’re going to be okay,” Elena said. “They’re just keeping you here for observation before the police take over.”

  “Lily…”

  “Lily is doing even better than you are. She is keeping the nurses company at sick bay.”

  Angela looked like she wanted to cry.

  Elena pulled a grimy handkerchief from her pocket and wiped Angela’s cherry-red face.

  “They asked whether you have someone we can call for you. Family? I didn’t know what to say.”

  Angela opened her eyes and pointed at her jacket, hanging from the coat rack. Her voice was shaking. “Mobile…my mum.”

  Elena fumbled in Angela’s pockets. Her hands felt something paper-thin. It couldn’t be the phone. She fished out the object.

  It was a set of film frames. Paper film.

  Elena examined the frames in the light.

  A familiar face, that of Zoe Sekuler, from the fading film.

  She was tied up facing the mirrors, Carlyle Eistrowe next to her.

  And next to both of them, the man Eistrowe collaborated with to bring Sekuler to his demise. The Wizard of Menlo Park. The great Edison, inventor of the lightbulb, the phonograph, and the motion picture; the man with one thousand patents under his name. The man who electrocuted dogs, apes, and an elephant in front of an audience of hundreds to undermine Tesla’s alternating current system during the patent wars. The man who had forged a deal with Augustin Sekuler’s friend Carlyle Eistrowe.

  On the film frames, Edison’s face, half-leering, half in disbelief at what was before him.

  The final version of “Séance Infernale.” The evidence she’d been looking for—Thomas Edison and his involvement in the taking of Zoe Sekuler and the demise of Augustin Sekuler. Right there in front of her.

  44

  The shelves were wooden, with an ornamental mantelpiece facing around them. There was no sign of an entrance: no levers, no hinges—nothing to give a hint.

  Alex Whitman kept his head tucked inside the coat, all the while dodging scraps of flaming debris that spattered down from the walls and ceiling. He tried placing his hand on the spine of each book and moving it somehow; it seemed like a logical type of lever. None of them worked.

  The mantel.

  That was what the madman had said: they loved him behind the mantelpiece. It was made of wood and carved, and the more Whitman looked, the more he felt the absurdity of such a mantel in such a place. Finally, by sheer luck, he pushed one of the carved panels to the side. It moved easily, revealing a small brass knob.

  He heard a shuttering sound from the corner of the room. In sickening horror, he realized a part of the ceiling had collapsed across the doorway, trapping him inside the burning building.

  Frantic, he turned back to the knob, twisting it in fluctuations of hope and despair and an unspeakable terror of what he might find behind and beyond it. It moved, but nothing happened. He pushed the knob to one side, and the whole mantel swung loose from the wall almost a foot, revealing a cavernous space beyond.

  He was barely able to shut the door behind him. He held his weight against it, coughing and breathing heavily in the darkness. Just as he thought he was safe, tiny tangerine tongues protruded from below the door, rushing around him. As the flames whirled in, illuminating the space, he saw nitrate film sprawled all over the floor and lining the stone walls. He turned and ran into the blackness.

  He fished in his pockets for his flashlight and realized he must have dropped it during the struggle. His lighter would have to do. As he shone it into the dark space ahead, the fading flame lit up a spiral stairway carved into solid rock, descending into blackness. The long stone spiral carried him down. Behind him, the beams of fire shone close by.

  The staircase met a snaking passageway into the dark. There was only one way to go; he was half-stumbling, half-running now. After a sharp bend, he felt a cool breeze caress his face. He turned the lighter to his left, illuminating a passage with steps leading down. He pushed farther on.

  The passage was getting steeper and narrower, and he saw that he was surrounded on all sides by solid rock. It was getting colder, and wind was whistling around him even though the walls of the stairwell were close and tight. His fingers were burning as the steel of the lighter heated up, and he was worried about the flame dancing around in the wind.

  His foot missed a step, and he slipped and almost fell. He paused for a moment, his heart pounding. He let the scalding-hot lighter cool down, then relit it and climbed down. He slowly swept the flame around himself. Rows of skeletons, like blackened marionettes, some of them stacked on top of others; some were more fresh, their bones glinting in the flickering light
; others had been gnawed apart by rats, covered in dust and cobwebs. The skeletons were the size of children.

  The stairway soon ended, and Whitman found himself in a large chamber. Holding up the lighter, he saw the chamber stretch out far and wide on all sides.

  Small skeletons littered the floor. Scores of them. And around them: nitrate stock.

  A body of charred flesh and bones lay in the corner. The skull was barely clinging to the rest of the skeleton. Some internal organs could still be seen in the torso.

  He had been too late. He stood looking at her, a badly made doll. Her head bulged in strange directions.

  With a sudden whoosh, smoke and fire rose in thick gouts from the entrance of the vault.

  He turned around, back into the vault.

  It was the skeleton of a child, just one of dozens in the crypt. The cords that bound her little hands lay in white dust upon the sunken bones. The skeleton lay on its side in a flexed position. Some of it had crumbled away.

  Resting on top of it, a heart-shaped locket covered with silver filigree, white enamel at its center, on a thin silver chain. The silver plating had rubbed off in places, showing the base metal underneath.

  He knelt down and held the locket in the palm of his hand. The initials carved on the back were faded but still visible, engraved inside with a lovebird. He pressed on the tiny catch, flipping the locket open. He gazed at the images smiling at him from within. A faded snapshot on each side. On the left, a picture of Kate; on the right, a picture of Alex Whitman. Mama and Papa. His heart melted in his sadness.

  He reached with his hand toward the skeletal remains, then reconsidered. Should he try to touch it, her body might break apart and he would be left with the pieces. And that was how the flames would find him. He realized he could not remember what his daughter had looked like. Individual features came to him: her blond hair, so fine and light; her slanting eyes; her small, white teeth; the twist of a scar on her chin from the time she had fallen off her bike. He could visualize these details but could not integrate them into a coherent whole. He saw her cycling along the path in the Meadows, laughing, but her face was turned away. He tried to conjure her up as she had been on that day, the sun scoring her face, but he could see only darkness.

  Whitman reached and ran a hand across what had been his daughter’s face, and he closed his eyes. A crippling shudder of tears welled from within him.

  It came out of nowhere; he felt gentle fingertips slowly wipe the tears from the skin of his right cheek. Eyelashes softly brushed his face. She smelled like honeysuckle. He didn’t open his eyes; he didn’t want to move a muscle, for fear that the illusion would crumble away.

  The whispering had started again, yet he felt no fear. The whispers offered words of comfort and grace. It dawned on him that they had been telling the stories they had always loved, and now his own was among them.

  He told her how much he had missed her. How sorry he was. Then her nose brushed against his. Her fingertips moved from his cheek, delicately feeling his face.

  “I’ve missed you, too, Daddy,” she whispered in his ear.

  He opened his eyes and she was still there, holding him gently. He was sobbing now, telling her how much he loved her, how painful it had been without her.

  He stared into the blaze that had surrounded them.

  Children. Hordes of them, running around in the fire, laughing, playing, encircling them within the flames in a phantasmagorical Ring a Ring o’ Roses.

  He stared at the flames that were almost upon them. He wasn’t afraid. He thought he heard a sound in the far distance, shouting, the sound of an ax swung down on wood: they had come to save him. The thought of trying to escape crossed his mind. But then he would not be with his daughter.

  He placed his arms tightly around her. He understood then that he had been granted the opportunity to make her smile again. These flames would be their final memory until he poured out his last breath, staring into her eyes, and they would dance in the open meadows, where the gushes of wind still rush by, to fly together forever, and run away at last to a place where no bad dreams would ever be able to find them.

  Part VII

  December 9

  45

  Investigators were saying the first explosion had gone off above the La Belle Angèle nightclub, in Hastie’s Close, and had then spread through a shaft up the eight-story building. Elliot Berenger had positioned nitrate stock and bombs in at least three other locations within a stone’s throw of the Blair Street flat. Parts of the Old Town had been left in ruins after the fire raced through it. More than a hundred people had to flee their homes. The fire burned for days, almost reaching Adam House. More than eighty firefighters were employed to battle it. So many buildings destroyed: the Loca and La Belle Angèle nightclubs; the Gilded Balloon, a comedy venue for the Fringe Festival. The fire gutted part of Edinburgh University’s School of Informatics, taking valuable artificial intelligence research with it. Millions of pounds down the drain; millions of memories lost.

  “But that’s the trade-off, isn’t it?” McBride said. “You take a maze of underground tunnels beneath largely medieval buildings, spanning different levels, built on a crag topped by a castle. It’s beautiful, charming, and intricate. But it causes problems when the shite hits the fan. That’s what made it so difficult for the firefighters.”

  Charlie nodded but remained silent. Around them, several people were bidding their loved ones goodbye.

  This wasn’t the day for this job, McBride thought. Earlier, she had visited the Pearson household and notified Amanda’s parents that their daughter hadn’t made it.

  And then Charlie…poor Charlie. She had told him that onlookers had seen his best friend go inside that building and not come back out. The overweight film buff looked like he had aged thirty years in a single second. They had tried to piece together the puzzle: Alex had saved Angela and Lily, then gone back in, presumably to find Amanda Pearson. And his daughter.

  “What do you think Sekuler had stashed in there? What was the secret?” Charlie asked.

  McBride shrugged. She wanted to give Charlie an encouraging word, something to hold on to, but it felt misleading to do so.

  There was something she wasn’t sure how to tell Charlie, because she couldn’t make any sense of it herself. It had to do with one of the first two Edinburgh firefighters to have gone into Elliot’s flat, minutes after Whitman had entered the second time. The firefighter said his team had managed to make it through as far as the library hallway, at which point the barrier was impenetrable.

  A type of hatch door from the library in the hall led them into the vaulted tunnels below South Bridge. They had axed the wall and almost managed to get through. About thirty feet away, the firefighter could make out the shape of a man. He shouted at him, asked him if he could hear him, but there was no reply. The man was kneeling down. It looked like he was speaking to someone, hugging something. An explosion sounded from the depths of the house; the windows on the ground floor shattered. Their chief ordered them to evacuate immediately.

  “Whatever it was,” McBride said, “I think he found it.”

  A woman’s voice through the speakers announced the boarding of Charlie’s flight. He leaned in and gave McBride a hug, and they stayed that way for a while.

  McBride watched him head past the security area, picking up his walk to get to his gate.

  She walked through the automatic doors of the departures exit and breathed in the freezing air. God, she needed that cigarette.

  As she searched through her purse for the pack, she heard a voice call out to her.

  Leaning against the wall, Elena Genhagger gazed at her; she told McBride her flight was leaving in a few hours.

  “Back home?” McBride asked, but the Swiss woman shook her head.

  “It will take some time,” Elena said, “but it’s safe to say the credit for the invention is Sekuler’s. The presence of the frames should correct film history. Though you never know.
”

  Elena opened her purse and fished around for something. McBride eyed the contents. A compact, some tobacco, an old-looking pipe. Elena offered McBride a cigarette. She hesitated and then gave in. She was up to seven a day now.

  “I’m supposed to have quit,” McBride said.

  Elena smiled through the smoke. “Old habits…” she said.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I am indebted and grateful to the following individuals for their assistance, advice, or support during the different incarnations of this novel:

  Konstantinos Akrivos, Tim West, Emmanouil Christodoulakis, Maria-Elena Stefanou, Emily Upstill, Stavros Kaliontzoglou.

  Also: Rena Kontari, Olga Plemmenou-Danon, Maurice Danon and family, Kostas Chrysogonidis, Leena Subramanian, Fernando Garbuio, Alex Encore, Aitor Albaina-Vivanco, Audrey Silverman, Ryan Smernoff, Kathy Zuckerman, and everybody at Knopf.

  Thank you, Vicky Wilson, for unlocking the doors, for the vision, and for making this fun.

  Thank you, Harvey Klinger, for being a kick-ass agent, “awesome sauce,” and a champion.

  NOTES

  Valdano could have been: .—.-..—….——..-—….. / .-—. . /—..——…./—.—-—/—.-——. .-. / ..-—. .-………/—.———..—/ .—.-. . / .—/—.-……..…

  Intolerance: Love’s Struggle Throughout the Ages: Directed by D. W. Griffith. Triangle Film Corporation, 1916.