by Miles Gibson
Chapter Thirty
Mrs Clancy had spent the afternoon preparing herself for the seance. She had buttoned herself into a black silk dress that forced up her breasts, pulled back her stomach and fell, exhausted, in loose folds to her feet. She wore a gold chain, thin as a thread, around one ankle and sported a silver crucifix at her neck. The full weight of her chestnut hair spilled about her shoulders. Her mouth was painted and her fingers were crusty with rings.
In the consulting room the Chinese curtains had been drawn against the night. Sticks of incense wafted perfumed smoke across the heavy, polished table. A pair of church candles spluttered beside the door. The light from the candles flew madly about the room, touching everything and resting nowhere. It spun off the backs of chairs, ran along the bookshelves and sparkled in the eyes of the dragons. It spread in bright bursts, washing against the walls, flashing on china, winking on glass, flickered, lost strength and, smouldering, retreated. It leapt and spun and danced so that the whole room seemed to tremble, a mirage of shadows and reflections.
As her guests arrived, Mrs Clancy arranged them at the table until the magic circle was complete. The two little suitors, Hazlitt and Vine, sat with the clairvoyant wedged between them. Hazlitt, the Dorchester florist, looked splendid in a pink satin waistcoat. He had pinned a living rose to his collar and sprayed himself with sweet cologne. Vine the tailor had turned out his best suit and wore a tie pin shaped like a cutlass. The two rivals pressed forward in their chairs, glaring at each other as they crowded against the object of their devotion.
Mrs Reynolds sat next to Hazlitt. Silent, sulking, she sat with her head bent and a teardrop hanging from the tip of her nose. She had spent her time making a doll in the image of the darkie sailor and had speared the testes with needles. If she couldn’t catch him she hoped, at least, to slow him down.
Perched next to her was a very old and brittle lady who had been driven down from Swanage, carried up the stairs, sat down in the chair and wrapped in blankets by her chauffeur. He sat next to her now, a thin man in a grey uniform with gold buttons and tight leather boots. His face had all the dignity and charm of an undertaker and he had a nervous habit of reaching out to touch her wrist, searching for her pulse.
Next to the chauffeur sat an old man nursing a violin. He lived upstairs and, as soon as he’d heard that Mrs Clancy was planning a seance he had offered his services in the hope of being able to tempt the spirits out of the woodwork and into her perfumed lap. He had once played the part of a gypsy violinist in a Bournemouth hotel and this remote association with Romany folk lore had been enough to convince Mrs Clancy that his music might prove a potent charm in attracting ghosts. He sat, stiff as a bookend, waiting for her signal to begin the serenade.
The doctor had been squeezed between the violinist and Vine. He sat and stared at Mrs Clancy with a doubtful smile on his big, crumpled face.
Mrs Clancy smiled at each of her guests in turn and having paused long enough to be properly admired, began to explain the purpose of their meeting. A young girl had disappeared while under the influence of demonic possession. Mrs Reynolds, the mother of the child, had turned to them for help.
Mrs Reynolds squeezed several tears from her lovely eyes and allowed them to roll down her face. No one could understand the pain of a grieving mother. She would have done anything to prevent Polly from falling into the sailor’s hands. If it wasn’t too late, if there was hope, she would gladly offer herself in exchange for her daughter’s freedom. She would need time to pack a suitcase, of course, but she was ready and willing to make the sacrifice. Perhaps Mrs Clancy could make the arrangements.
It was dangerous, the clairvoyant reminded them, to trifle with the forces of darkness. But since, as members of the magic circle, they had all participated in calling up the spirits they must now feel responsible for the events that threatened to overwhelm them. Tonight she would attempt to conduct a seance to find her late husband. She believed that only the Captain would help them enter the twilight world of the walking dead and return the child to the land of the living.
‘Captain Turnpike Clancy disappeared under mysterious circumstances many years ago in Southampton Water. In a few minutes I hope to summon him into our midst,’ she announced nervously.
‘The ladies, of course, will be in no danger,’ said Hazlitt as he patted Mrs Reynolds’ hand.
Mrs Clancy frowned in disapproval. ‘He was my husband.’ she boomed.
Hazlitt and Vine both nodded miserably and hung their heads. They began to consider their own safety.
‘To help you better understand the phenomenon you will witness I feel I should give you a brief description of my late husband,’ Mrs Clancy announced and ran her gaze along the row of silent faces, pausing for a moment to stare at the doctor. Then she began to describe the Captain in the most extravagant terms. She laboured her audience with a detailed history of the man, recounting his generosity, his audacity and courage. Her eyes glittered with the fires of old glories. Her face flushed with passion. She described his virtues as a husband, his talents as a soldier and his reputation as a man of perfect and fastidious taste. She contrived to illustrate his qualities with short anecdotes, quotations and snatches of blank verse. She came very close to demanding that he be elected a saint.
The warmth of the room and the pulse of the candlelight drew her audience down into a soporific trance from which only the chauffeur managed to escape by cracking his knuckles and flexing his feet inside his boots. Vine stifled a yawn. The doctor scratched his chin.
During an account of the Captain’s early army service, which had started to take on the proportions of an epic ballad, the old lady fell asleep and began to sway dangerously on her chair, so that she had to be supported between Mrs Reynolds and the grey chauffeur. Hazlitt, reaching out behind Mrs Reynolds in an attempt to lend his own weight to the fragile dreamer, lost his balance and had to be rescued by Mrs Clancy.
When the audience was settled again, the clairvoyant threw out her arms and promised everyone that the Captain, once identified, would be able to answer their most personal questions, forecast the future and explain the past. This seemed to have the desired effect upon her guests. Spines stiffened, there was a general mutter of excitement and even the old lady was awake and trembling.
‘Ask it about Willie,’ she cried. ‘Ask it about Willie.’
There was an embarrassed silence. The chauffeur smiled thinly, slipped a long, cool hand beneath the blanket and after a few moments sobbing the ancient princess fell quiet again and closed her eyes.
Mrs Clancy nodded at the violinist. He cleared his throat, tucked the instrument under his chin and began to play a soft and mournful melody that seemed to rise and fall with the candlelight. Within moments the clairvoyant was lost to the world, her eyes closed and her mouth set loose and quivering. The audience linked hands.
‘Captain,’ whispered Mrs Clancy. ‘Speak to your disciples.’ The candles hissed and flared.
‘Captain,’ crooned Mrs Clancy. ‘Help us, we beseech thee, dear spirit, to rescue poor Polly from the gates of Hell.’ Around the walls the shelves creaked and ornaments rattled. Books sighed and puffed out their pages.
‘What’s happening?’ whispered the doctor.
‘She is communicating with the other world,’ whispered Vine helpfully.
‘How long does it take?’ the doctor demanded.
Mrs Clancy began to swell to twice her natural size. Her shoulders looked huge. Her breasts ballooned through the tight black dress until the silk stretched and the stitches squeaked.
No one noticed the bible floating towards the table. Everyone concentrated on Mrs Clancy as she heaved and sighed and continued her interrogation of the ether. But when the book had completed its journey and began to hover above the clairvoyant’s head the entire assembly gasped.
Mrs Clancy, eyes closed in concentration, knew nothing. But she sensed a sudden change in the mood of the audience. She opened one eye a fraction
and squinted furtively through her lashes. Everyone was staring in horror at a space a few inches above her head. She closed her eyes tighter and began to pray beneath her breath.
‘It’s flying,’ cried Hazlitt, unable to contain himself. ‘A miracle. It’s flying.’
The bible rose to the ceiling, spun in circles and then fell to earth with a great bang and a flutter of feathering pages.
‘We are your friends,’ called Mrs Clancy urgently. She tilted her head and stared at the ceiling. The crucifix flashed between her breasts.
The shelves rattled as a full set of encyclopedias shot from the shadows and flew, in alphabetical order, towards the magic circle.
‘Willie,’ screamed the old lady. ‘Willie, behave yourself.’
‘Hazlitt,’ shouted Vine. ‘They’re trying to kill Hazlitt.’ He waved his hand at his rival, hoping to direct the haunted volumes away from himself and towards the appropriate target.
‘Shut up,’ spat Hazlitt. He clasped Mrs Reynolds’s head in his hands and pressed it against his chest as if protecting a priceless glass bowl. She struggled for a moment, burst into tears and feigned a faint. The sound of her distress unsettled the old lady and the chauffeur, concerned for the safety of his charge, tried to pull the blanket over her head and wrap her into a parcel.
Everything in the room had begun to sprout wings. A pocket demonology whistled through the air and clipped the candles. A morocco-bound dictionary arched its spine and flapped clumsily against the curtains. The doctor couldn’t believe his eyes. ‘I don’t believe it,’ he muttered, again and again, until a book slapped his ear and abruptly changed his mind.
‘Stay calm,’ shouted Mrs Clancy. ‘Don’t frighten him.’
A small hymn book sliced past her head and caught Vine square between the shoulderblades.
‘He won’t hurt you,’ wailed Mrs Clancy. ‘He was my husband.’
But Vine had disappeared under the table. Mrs Reynolds felt him roll against her legs and screamed. Hazlitt released her head, jumped from his chair and was neatly chopped in half by a book of dreams. He capsized on the carpet, his legs kicking and his face black. Mrs Reynolds screamed again and fell upon him, shielding his head in the folds of her skirt.
‘The Captain will be pleased to answer your questions,’ bellowed Mrs Clancy through the barrage of books.
The violinist took this as a signal from the management to change the mood of the music and flew into a brisk selection of gypsy dances.
‘Polly!’ bawled Mrs Reynolds. ‘Polly, where are you?’
A book struck the fiddler in the face, bursting an eyebrow. He shouted in pain, dropped the violin, scrambled to retrieve it, trampled on it, dissolved in tears, and fled bleeding with the instrument hidden under his coat.
Mrs Clancy tore the crucifix from her neck and stood holding it high above her head. She closed her eyes and shouted the Lord’s Prayer. But it was too late. Below in the street the chauffeur was already trying to manoeuvre his priceless bundle back into the safety of the limousine. The doctor had managed to drag Mrs Reynolds from the fallen florist and was leading her away. The bombardment had ceased. No one screamed. Nothing flew against the furniture. There was silence. When the clairvoyant opened her eyes again it was just in time to see Hazlitt and Vine scuttle, hand in hand, out of the apartment and into the night, never to be seen again.
Chapter Thirty-One
The next morning a storm swept through Rams Horn. Rain rattled the rooftops and sizzled on the hot cobbles. The sky was the colour of mustard. When the storm lifted Sickly had gone. Mercy Peters didn’t miss him until late in the afternoon. She phoned his friends and checked his usual hiding places. When he failed to appear she organized a search party to comb the cliffs and beaches. At dusk, frightened by the rumours that had spread about Polly, she went to visit Mrs Clancy.
‘When did you last see him?’ asked the widow suspiciously. She sat her visitor at the parlour table and watched her light a cigarette.
‘Breakfast,’ confessed Mercy Peters nervously.
‘Was there anything odd about him?’
‘Well, he was a very ugly baby. He had a funny-shaped skull and no hair. He was so ugly I was ashamed of him. I used to keep the blanket over his head and say to people, no, don’t disturb him, he’s sleeping.’
‘And this morning?’ said Mrs Clancy patiently.
Mercy Peters shrugged. ‘He had a sore throat so I told him to stay in bed,’ she said and snorted smoke through her nose.
‘And you’ve looked everywhere?’
‘Yes,’ said Mercy Peters.
‘Have you asked all his friends?’
‘He doesn’t have many friends. I asked Vernie Stringer and he just stared at me with his mouth open. When I tried to talk to Smudger Austin he had hysterics and burst into floods of tears. I think they’re both simple.’
‘Did you try the beach?’ asked Mrs Clancy. ‘Did you ask the lobstermen?’
‘Yes,’ said Mercy Peters. ‘They told me to come to you.’
‘But how can I help?’ asked Mrs Clancy. She knew she was to blame for this nightmare. She had conjured up a devil, a demented pied piper who was out there now stealing children. Her parlour games had worked a magic she couldn’t begin to understand. The children vanished and the mothers came to her for help. But she had locked the consulting room and she wasn’t going to open it again.
‘They told me you had the gift of sight,’ said Mercy Peters. ‘They told me you had special powers over missing persons.’
‘I’m not a lost property office,’ chided the clairvoyant.
‘Please, he’s just a little boy,’ begged Mercy Peters.
Mrs Clancy sighed and hung her head. It was obvious she had no special powers. She had called for the Captain and half of Hell had crawled from the woodwork. But to please the woman she took a little ivory wand from a drawer and placed it between them on the table.
While Mercy Peters sucked smoke the clairvoyant closed her eyes and felt an exquisite cloud of pain drift across her face. Her eyes ached in their sockets. She wanted the nightmare to stop, she wanted to wake up in the safety of her bed with the sunlight on the windows. She wanted her husband. She hadn’t meant to hurt anyone.
When she found the courage to pick up the wand, the slender stick of ivory vibrated in her fingers. It jerked itself upright and pointed at the ceiling.
‘I see a child,’ she said at last. ‘I see a child with a troubled heart. He is burdened with sorrow. Or it might be a girl,’ she added cautiously.
‘What’s he wearing?’ asked Mercy Peters, her eyes as big as hen’s eggs. ‘I couldn’t find his pyjamas.’
‘The figure is obscured by mist. But the figure is reaching out to me, trying to speak …’
‘He mumbles when he’s frightened,’ warned Mercy Peters.
‘Yes, he’s mumbling something but I cannot … cannot under stand …’ She opened her eyes painfully and shook her head with a weary gesture of defeat. ‘It’s no good … I can’t see anything.’
‘Try again,’ encouraged Mercy Peters.
But Mrs Clancy was afraid to close her eyes, afraid of the creatures that staggered and crawled through the darkness. Her head was a plague pit, haunted by corpses. She thought she must be going mad.
‘It would be easier to ask you some questions,’ she said, letting the wand slip through her fingers.
‘Anything.’
‘Have you recently heard of the death of someone cherished?’ the clairvoyant asked gently.
‘No,’ said Mercy Peters, shaking her head.
‘Have you been given news of a sudden illness in the family?’ she asked after a pause.
‘No,’ said Mercy Peters.
‘Have you or any members of your family ever suffered from any serious illness or disability?’ the widow enquired darkly.
‘No.’
‘You have recently suffered from strange headaches, fainting fits or melancholia,’ insisted Mrs Clancy, picking
up the wand.
‘No,’ said Mercy Peters.
The little wand drooped.
‘I’ve felt very tired lately,’ volunteered Mercy Peters, anxious to encourage the clairvoyant.
The wand perked up again.
‘Have you been visited by peculiar dreams in your fatigue?’
‘No,’ apologized Mercy Peters.
‘Queer noises? Night visitors?’ she asked hopefully.
But Mercy Peters could not answer. The cushions had floated from the sofa and were rolling across the wall. The furniture groaned. The air bristled with dozens of tiny, flying objects.
‘Oh my God!’ she muttered through her teeth. She dropped her cigarette, jumped from the chair and began slapping at her skirt as if her clothes had been invaded by demons.
‘I can’t help it,’ whispered Mrs Clancy miserably. She could not move. Her fingers clutched the table edge. Her knuckles were white.
‘Oh my God!’ screamed Mercy Peters.
‘Help,’ whispered Mrs Clancy. ‘Help.’ She had attracted a curious halo of seashells, hairpins, spoons and pencils. She stared at the halo and burst into tears.
Chapter Thirty-Two
The doctor was eating breakfast when Mrs Clancy came running for help. He answered the door with toast crumbs on his waistcoat and a cup of coffee in his hand. When he saw the clairvoyant he blushed and tried to comb his hair with his fingers, spilling coffee on his shoes.
‘Have you found Polly?’ he asked, as he led her into the surgery.
‘No, I’m afraid it’s bad news.’
‘Has something happened to her mother? I didn’t like the look of her when I took her home. She wanted me to stay – I had trouble leaving the house …’
‘Another child has gone missing,’ interrupted the clairvoyant.
‘When?’ He dropped the coffee cup in the basin and sat down at his desk.
‘Yesterday,’ sighed Mrs Clancy, sitting before him. ‘A little boy.’