by Nina Dreyer
Marion rolled back her eyes and tumbled deeper into the darkness behind her mind. She searched deep. A child’s name is easily forgotten and faded. It has not caught hold yet. Only the parents cling to it. The dead child will not care, and neither will friends nor relations, for whom the death was a small domestic tragedy, not a world event.
‘Merry… Marie Kate…’
‘Mary Kate!’ Mrs. McKittrick smacked the table with an open hand. The candles rattled and spluttered. ‘Mary Kate! You never get it right! Nobody ever gets it right!’
‘She wants you to know she is well, and at peace,’ said Marion. This was not entirely true. Dead children rarely sent coherent messages. They exuded images of the memories they most treasured, memories that anchored them to life, garbled like nursery rhymes. Images of pony traps in a park flashed by Marion’s inner eye, large and distorted, and a brightly coloured clothes rack on a white wall in morning sunlight. Three brown coats, two red shoes. A fallen leaf on a flagstone floor. Dust moats swirling in morning sun. The smell of grass and bread and paint.
‘She asks if you remember the ponies in the park, trotting past under beech trees. There was a fountain in the park, a sparkling fountain… paper boats.’
‘Yes,’ Mrs. McKittrick gasped, ‘yes, oh, the park. The ponies. She loved to go and watch them go by in the park of a Sunday, so she did. Look ma, she’d say, the big grey one goes past there with all the bells on his head. She’d want to go every day, all summer long.’ Her voice was fraying at the edges. ‘She loved that, so she did.’
Marion heard her rustle with her handkerchief.
‘She says her father is with her.’
Mrs. McKittrick became very still.
‘She says she’s holding hands with her father,’ said Marion. She was speaking in rote phrases now, while she searched, deeper and deeper, for the shade of Mrs. McKittrick’s lost husband and the child’s dead father. Give me something, she thought, give me a fingertip or the edge of a memory to latch onto. Give me something, anything, where the hell are you?
‘Mary Kate says they watch the ponies.’
‘Don’t call her Mary Kate,’ growled Mrs. McKittrick, ‘youse got her name wrong, you don’t get to use her real name.’
Marion struggled to hold her focus. Some shades were harder than others to find, and an angry sitter tilted the odds against her. She leaned back and let her eyes roll back in their sockets until the dark burst with miasmas of swirling colour and light and her sense of the world tilted backwards.
‘What are youse doing?’ Mrs. McKittrick’s voice was brittle with fear now. But it was far away and distant, and Marion did not turn back to answer.
Silence.
Deep, dead silence. The outer darkness gaped open.
A faint smell began to rise. Marion opened her mind to it, followed it, let it fill her mind. The ways in were often scents, after all.
‘Loam,’ Marion said, her tongue dry as gravel. ‘Wet soil.’
‘My husband never gardened a day in his life,’ said Mrs. McKittrick sharply, somewhere far above, ‘so that’s not right, you better try harder, or you’ll-’
‘Wet soil… and rust… something… fermenting.’ The smell became stronger, overpowering, a rank, earthen stench enveloping her mind in shades of piss and pungent mud, but it was tinged with something else, something rank, something sickly-sweet. Rotting flesh. Gagging, Marion reached out a hand into the mental image.
Her fingertips touched on bone stumps. Her heart contorted.
This was not the outer darkness.
In her mind’s eye, she looked up.
In the blackness, a dead place unfurled.
Blasted trenches and gulping shell craters rippled out before her, match-stick stumps of burnt trees, bloated fingers rising from the yellow-grey mud, shredded legs, human flesh lacerated and torn. Strips of uniform blasted into trench walls. French uniforms. German. English. All mangled and mauled together.
They glided closer, the war dead, broken arms flung across chests glinting with frost, barbed wire curling over splintered bone and twisted, rusting rifles.
Imprints frozen in the sickly light of a dead sky.
Marion felt all heat drain from her. Her arms and legs grew numb, sluggish, prickling with nausea and fear. ‘I’m sorry,’ she tried to say, choking on the stench, ‘your husband cannot come to you now.’ She tried to back away from the sight. ‘He isn’t there.’ This was not true. She felt his presence. But something was wrong. Something was very wrong. Unnatural. A slithering dread made the hairs on her neck stand up. Goosebumps shivered down her arms.
‘No!’ Mrs. McKittrick tightened her grip on Marion’s hand. ‘You bloody well bring him to me, you bring him to me now, or I’ll, I’ll sue you for fraud, I’ll tell the press you’re a fraud, I’ll make Mr. Kilcoyne fire you, I’ll…’
Marion snatched a ragged breath. Grief could do unholy things, and she had seen worse grief than this. She had received more dangerous threats than these.
Grinding her teeth, she breathed deeply and let herself sink deeper into the vision.
The dead cannot harm you, after all. Not usually.
Marion stiffened her spine and touched the yellowish mud and she called for him, fingers sunk deep into the brackish sludge. This woman’s husband, she commanded with her mind’s voice, the lost husband of this woman, you will come to me now, I summon you here, I will catch you by the collar and drag you back if I must.
A presence began to coagulate and thicken in the mud. Marion dug her hands into it and clawed for him, come here, come here, I summon and command you. She clawed into the mud and searched deep in the sludge, leaning down with all her might, until finally her fingers touched a sharp edge, buried deep.
‘I can see him now, yes,’ said Marion, her mouth watering with rising nausea, ‘yes, I see him now, tall man, broad shoulders… with a… wearing…’ She clenched her teeth and pulled the presence to her.
But he was shattered. Blasted apart, scattered everywhere, a finger bone there, a strip of flesh there, singed, his mind and his memories, flayed into the churned mud.
This was not death. This was destruction. He’d been destroyed. She should not have pulled him back together again. He opened his torn mouth, teeth splintered, tongue shredded. ‘Drown drown drown drown’ came his voice, gurgling, lolling.
Marion was losing her grip on the shade. She gasped with exhaustion and every bone in her body ached as she dug desperately for the flickering splinters of his memories, trying to take one and hold it and see it. ‘He says that he remembers the,’ Marion heaved, ‘the red heath. He says the red heath.’ Low autumn sunlight, dawn or dusk, sweeping across a mountainside of shivering heather, sun glinting red on the horizon through silvery mist.
‘Yes,’ she heard Mrs. McKittrick gasp, ‘yes, yes, it was our honeymoon, we went to the…’ Her voice grated on, distantly, but Marion could barely hear it now.
She tried to pull her arms and her legs out of the sucking mud, struggling to free herself even as she felt her consciousness engulfed, sinking deeper down, deeper and deeper into a million dead dreams of No Man’s Land.
Mrs. McKittrick’s voice glowed dimly, like the beams of a faraway lighthouse. Marion kicked and clawed and struggled back towards the light, a sliver of panic slicing her spine.
Before her, dark against the tarnished sky, a figure rose.
He stood at the heart of the vision as the dead neared, raising bloated hands to him, reaching for him to drag him down into the mud. Yellow-brown gas billowed around him, and his long, torn coat hung ragged in the stale air.
He turned to her slowly.
His face was John’s. It was John. But his head was on all wrong, at a strange angle. His neck was broken. A white square of cloth was pinned to his chest. ‘Help me,’ he said in a dead voice, like a hoarse intake of breath under stale water. ‘Help me.’
Marion panicked, kicking, hurling herself back towards the surface of consciousness, her
head banging against the side of the table, her hands scraping against the pine wood floorboards as she fell, dry-retching and heaving for air and finally, finally feeling her eyes blinded by the light, and her ears ringing with Mrs. McKittrick’s screams.
Chapter Nineteen
In the small parlour with the moss-green carpets, Marion sat crouching in a hard old armchair, rubbing her aching forehead. Rain needled the windows. All evening she’d had waited there, struggling back to consciousness, staring at the flickering candles until they’d all burned down. Someone had pressed a cup of lukewarm, sugary tea into her hand, and she’d sat alone, struggling to swallow back that lingering stench of mud and rot and mustard gas that she knew only she could sense. None of the others would come near her. But she’d heard them. The hiss and flap of Georgie and Charlie arguing in the corridor, the echoes of Joanna McKittrick’s wails, the hushed whispers of other mediums nervously circling around in the outer parlours.
Outside in the darkened streets, church bells tolled. Marion plucked her watch from her pocket and tapped it, frowning. Its spindly black arms were frozen, as if the watch had suffered a sudden stroke. A hair-fine fracture spread across its glass face.
Rising unsteadily from the armchair, she cracked her fingers and went into the dark hallways.
He’d have arrived by now. John.
Rounding a corner under an old stuffed stag’s head, she glimpsed him, emerging in the dark doorway, a cigarette in one hand. The glow from the hissing gas lamp slanted across his face, leaving his eyes deep in shadow.
Marion clutched at her collar. She’d have to try to explain to him what had happened.
John sauntered over to her, drew an arm around her waist and kissed her cheek, just under her temple. ‘Stunning,’ he whispered into her ear, ‘I’ve been picturing you in a dress like that all day.’
‘I need to speak with you,’ said Marion, the back of her throat burning, ‘alone. Something has happened-’
‘We’ll speak later, I promise.’ He took her arm and walked along, smiling, a brief burst of light illuminating his eyes as he lit his cigarette. ‘Besides, I already heard. Seems you made quite an impression on Mrs. McKittrick? Whatever did you see to give you such a fright?’ His smile looked drained of colour in the weak light.
You, Marion thought, pressing her knuckles to her lips. Her heart was pounding.
‘Come along now.’ John held a door open for her. ‘Our sitter awaits. Now,’ he said, laying a hand on the small of her back and leading her along, ‘apparently our Mrs. McKittrick was in hysterics by the time she left. Georgie said he had to send for Dr. Grey. Let’s try not to upset anyone else tonight, shall we?’ He winked at her and grinned.
Marion lowered her head and followed him into the small octagonal room. The heart of the Salon. John closed the door quietly behind them. She heard the lock turn, and saw a quick glint of iron as he slipped the key into his pocket.
Marion glanced at the crumbling wallpaper with painted swallows tumbling in flight, at the oak table in the middle of the room.
The last time she’d sat here, she’d been with Eilis. Closing her eyes, she tried to feel the lingering scent of her perfume in the air, night-blooming flowers. But the scent was overpowered by something else. Rain, tobacco smoke. Wet leather.
Marion turned and felt her stomach hollow out.
In the corner stood Colonel Brock, wringing a handkerchief in his stubby fingers.
‘He’s the sitter? John? Why are we doing a seance for a-’
‘Oh, because that’s what old friends are for,’ said John brightly, ‘favours in times of need, and all that. Isn’t that right, Brock?’
Brock snorted, seated himself in a chair, fidgeted with his cuffs, and then got up again and tramped around the room, creaking the floorboards under his weight.
‘Now, don’t make yourself comfortable.’ John handed him a notepad and a pen. ‘We’ll need you to contribute to the proceedings.’
Marion turned and ran her fingertips over the table, furrowing her brows. She’d never noticed how scratched it was. On the table stood a Ouija board.
And beside the Ouija board lay a service revolver.
Marion stared at it, her knees weakening. ‘Why is there a gun on the table,’ she croaked.
Brock pointed at the Ouija board. ‘Is that some sort of joke? I thought those contraptions were just party entertainments.’
‘You live to learn,’ said John. ‘Sure it might be a bit old-fashioned, but an autoscope such as this is a fairly precise form of communication with the dead. The message from the dead travel through muscle and bone, you see, without filtering through the consciousness of the mediums. I’ll call out the questions. Marion and I place our fingers on the traveller, that’s that little triangle there on the board, and you, Brock, you take down the answer as it’s spelt out, letter by letter. Do you follow? Grand. There’s really nothing to be nervous about.’ John lit the small red petroleum lamp, then extinguished the gas lights.
The red-tinged flame glowed in the gloom.
‘Nervous,’ Brock huffed, ‘preposterous.’
Marion frowned at the Ouija board. The letters and numbers glowed faintly, a sickly green hue. She looked up at John. ‘This is not our usual board.’
‘An improvement. Radium,’ John exhaled smoke, ‘it’s luminous. They used it to paint the dials of wristwatches, so they’d glow in the dark in the trenches. Did you know that?’
Marion swallowed.
John pulled out a chair for her. ‘Are you ready?’
‘I can’t do a seance if there’s a gun on the table. Why is there a gun-’
‘Oh, never mind the gun,’ said John cheerfully, before Brock could reply, ‘sit you down.’
Marion seated herself at the table. John sat down opposite her and reached out his hand to Brock. ‘Give me the items you brought.’
Brock fumbled with a folder and handed him a stack of photographs. Marion saw them only briefly. A murder scene, arms splayed, a torn military greatcoat. Bleary outlines of bystanders against a white sky. The broken wheel of an overturned motorcycle. ‘Lt. Palmer,’ said Brock, pulling out his handkerchief again to dab his moustache, ‘gunned down by unknown assailants on the morning of the second of November. In Wexford Street, and that’s the fourth time this week we’ve had an ambush, the men are starting to call it the fucking Dardanelles, it’s bloody-’
‘First name?’
‘What?’
‘Your man who got shot, Brock. What was his first name.’
Brock hesitated. ‘William. No, Wilfred. That’s it. Wilfred.’
John nodded and laid his left hand flat on the photographs.
Marion met his gaze, and for a long moment, they looked at each other silently across the board. Then John inclined his head slightly. They placed two fingers each on the traveller. Marion’s on top. Like a wedding cake, she thought, like a knife slicing through a wedding cake, the bride must have her hand on top. The greenish glow from the Ouija board shone in the whites of John’s eyes.
Marion closed her eyes. That way, she couldn’t see the gun. Or the photographs. ‘John,’ she whispered under her breath, ‘we must be ready to stop immediately if something bad comes through.’
John didn’t answer her. ‘We ask help to discover a murderer,’ he called out. ‘Whoever is here with us this evening, will you bring Lt. Wilfred Palmer to this circle?’
They waited in perfect stillness.
The only sound in the room was the Brock’s laboured, moist breathing.
Marion felt a jolt running through her arm, tingling at first, then hardening. She felt her arm jerk, and John’s with it. The traveller glided across the board, moving in slow, uneven circles, as if feeling its way in an unfamiliar darkness.
‘Yes,’ Brock’s voice sounded, closer to Marion than she would have liked. His breath smelled of stale milk. ‘It just landed on the yes, is that normal?’
John ignored him. ‘Wilfred Palmer,’ he m
urmured, ‘are you present in this room with us now?’
Stillness.
Then a sudden, more forceful jerk.
‘It says yes again.’ Brock cleared his throat, and the floorboards creaked under him.
Marion began to feel a prickle of unease, like a cold breath down her neck.
‘Wilfred Palmer, did you see who murdered you?’
A pause again, like a breath held. Then Marion’s arm tensed, and the traveller began to move more swiftly, jolting and jerking over the glass in rapid, uneven seizures.
‘I can hardly make sense of this, this is just a jumble of letters, like the man was a bloody stutterer. No, wait… there’s something in here. Yes, I can make it out now. It says, three, one, red hair, wet, and long coat.’
‘Can you give us a clearer image, Wilfred?’
Marion’s arm began to ache. The traveller hurtled across the board, then back, in wild, lashing lurches.
‘Now it says something I can’t make heads or tails of, and then something I think spells, Limerick blood, broken nose, brother.. Ha.. Han.. hanged… Dear God,’ the floor creaked more heavily under Brock’s weight now, ‘by God, I think I know who he means. That little runt from the Limerick brood, we thought he’d escaped back to his dung heap! Good God. Good God.’
‘John,’ Marion whispered, ‘we should stop now.’
‘Is there anything else you want to say, Wilfred?’
‘John, don’t.’
A bottomless cold spread through Marion’s bones and lodged deep inside her shoulder socket. The traveller stood still for a moment, then hurtled across the board with such force that she nearly lost hold. It ripped and tore across the glass, jerking and changing directions. Marion clenched her teeth as the cold began to seep into her chest.
Brock’s breathing became strained and rapid. ‘It says… it just says kill, kill, kill and then the word burn over and over again…’
‘John, we have to stop now.’
‘Can you give us any more precise information, Wilfred Palmer?’