by Nina Dreyer
Marion groaned and clenched her teeth harder as her arm stiffened and jerked and tore with the traveller across the board. The movements became too wild, lashing and swerving like a raging drunk.
‘It can’t make it out anymore, I can’t see what he means,’ Brock’s voice became shrill, ‘it’s just the same words over and over again!’
The traveller jerked one last time, then flew off the table and dashed to the floor. Marion snapped her eyes open. ‘We have to end this now.’
John looked at her calmly and bent to pick up the fallen traveller. ‘We carry on. You’re just not accustomed to Ouija boards, that’s all. Nothing to worry about.’ He set the traveller back in the board. Marion hesitated, then laid her fingers on top of his again.
‘Wilfred Palmer, we need your help. Is there anything else you can to tell us about your murderer?’
Marion winced at this choice of word, but John looked as calm as moonlight on water. She took a deep breath and closed her eyes.
Stillness at first, and for a moment, she hoped the shade had dissolved back into the outer darkness. But the deep sense of unease grew, the pressure in her shoulder joint stiffened into fear.
A jerk, then another.
The traveller began to move slowly, dawdling almost, swinging in little circles and figures of eight. ‘I don’t think that spells anything.’ Brock’s voice was thin now, feeble almost. His breath grew more ragged.
The table itself jolted. Like someone had kicked it. Marion clenched her teeth, a clammy chill prickling over her face and neck. She knew the feel of those movements, those shoving, lashing movements. ‘John,’ she gasped, ‘no-’
The traveller was knocked from their hands with such force that Marion drew in a breath and grasped her wrist to her chest. The table jolted again, then moved with a sickening slowness to its side, and the little red petroleum lamp was hurtled aside, exploding against the far wall.
Brock yelped and sprang back, his face stiff with horror in the light of the fast-burning curtain behind him. John rose slowly, and for a moment Marion thought he was going to pull a revolver and fire it at the burning lamp, but of course he didn’t. He ripped down the curtain and methodically ground it under his heel on it until the room was restored to darkness.
‘John,’ Marion coughed, her eyes watering from the smoke. ‘This is Poltergeist activity. We must exorcise this room. We must-’
‘What in the hell was that,’ Brock screamed, his voice ringing out shrill and sharp as a saw. ‘What the hell was that! What was that! What…’ He grasped at his collar, tugging and clawing at it like a chained dog.
John turned to him slowly, pulling out a cigarette from his silver case. Marion stared at him, squinting in the dark to make out his facial expression.
‘Well. You got your results, Brock, didn’t you,’ he said calmly. ‘You said you didn’t care how they came. As long as they came. Now go catch your Limerick runt.’
Late the following evening, Marion drifted through her own front hallway, biting her thumbnail and clutching her medallion. The glow of a waning moon shimmered through the fanlight, and a chilled draft breathed in from the cracks in the old door.
Her arm still ached from the seance, a deep-burning cold searing through her shoulder socket. She drew her hands over her face and breathed deeply. John’s words echoed in her ears. You got your results, didn’t you? You said you didn’t care how they came.
As soon as that seance was over, she’d slipped out of the Salon while John was busy murmuring words of comfort and reason to the huffing Brock, a hand pressed earnestly to his chest. John was good at that, she thought. Reason. He made everything sound so reasonable.
But that seance had not been reasonable.
Throughout the following night and day, she’d paced through her house with all the lights turned on, blazing so brightly that she thought the bulbs might crack, and she’d listened to the house itself, to the winter winds whistling in the chimneys, to the cold night air. Listening, in case something had followed her home.
Hour after hour, her little maid Ethel had sidled up to her with notes from John, telephone messages from him, visiting cards, but Marion had turned her back and clenched her fists till her nails hurt her palms.
All she’d wanted was for John to come, to sit alone with him by the fire and wrap her arms around his neck and whisper to him about dangers in the dark. The tilting table. The burst of flames. The raging screams of murder and fire from the outer darkness. Her vision of No Man’s Land scorched forever onto the face of black eternity. John’s own dead face in the heart of that vision.
Bur he’d never believe her warnings. He had a mind like a diamond, bright and brilliant and harder than steel.
She ran a hand over her hair so hard that it hurt and stared at the pools of moonlight gleaming on the sea-green wallpaper.
Maybe this was all her fault. Maybe she was the cause of it. Tell me, do you attract a lot of violent deaths? John asked her that, once. Maybe the dark strain was still in her. The German strain. The taint of her past sins. All these dead who had come through in her seances. All so recent. All so violent. The young man with his face shot off. The dead lieutenant, Palmer. Hettie’s lost soldier fiancée. They were not supposed to follow you home. Joanna McKittrick’s dead husband, whom Marion had clawed from death-stupor and forced to speak. Drown, drown, drown, that was all his shade had said, gurgling mud through splinters of teeth. Maybe she had awakened something she shouldn’t have. Again.
She should tell John the truth. Tell him what she had done in the war.
Then he’d believe her warnings. He’d have no choice but believe her, then. But he would also shove her away, turn away from her in utter revulsion, as if she was a bloated plague corpse. Plague crow.
The thought of it made her flesh crawl, as if black tarantulas were creeping silently through her hair.
A shrill ringing jolted her.
Deep in the shadows of the hallway, the telephone rang.
Ring.
Ring.
Shrill and metallic.
Ring.
Fumbling, she took the receiver. It felt cold as ice against her ear.
A hissing on the line. ‘Marion?’
Her heart skipped a beat. It was John’s voice, distant behind a crackle like the scratching of fingernails on rusted metal. ‘Are you there?’ He sounded slightly drunk. Noises in the background, raised voices, music.
‘Yes, John. I’m here.’
‘I’ve tried reaching you all day,’ he said, ‘why didn’t you answer? Is something wrong? You’re not sick of me already, are you?’
She stared at the telephone. Her breath fogged the shiny black metal case, the brass dials.
‘Marion?’
‘Yes, John.’
‘I have to see you. Tonight. Right now. Come join me at the Imperial. It’s in Sackville Street, I’m calling from there. Will you come? Say yes.’
Marion swallowed. Maybe it was better this way. To speak to him among a crowd of other people, under bright lights, in a lively bar.
‘Marion? You have to come. I don’t really know why, but don’t feel so well when you’re not around.’
‘I’ll come.’ Marion closed her eyes and strained to listen for the sound of his breathing, but the line crackled and died.
Chapter Twenty
Half an hour later, Marion shielded her eyes from the rain and gazed up at the grey facade of the Imperial bar. Rain dripped from drainpipes and gargoyle snouts.
A doorman let her through, carefully patting down her coat and her purse.
She went through the hushed cloakroom and entered the bar with her heart in her throat, her silk evening gown rustling around her hips like a cold breeze. Officers crowded the room, lounging on red leather benches by the walls or hanging on the gleaming bar. Bronze chandeliers dazzled under stark mosaic ceilings, and mirrors covered every wall, a twisting kaleidoscope of glistening lights and sweating faces and grey-green uniform
s.
Marion clutched her purse to her chest and glanced around. By the bar stood John, leaning an elbow on the green marble counter with a tall cocktail glass by his hand. He watched her closely, smiling his crooked smile as she approached, trying to avoid bumping into any of the sharp-elbowed officers.
‘Marion,’ he breathed, reaching out to touch her silken waist, ‘you look fine. That shade of red suits you. What’s it called? Lamb of Heaven red, I’d say?’ He leaned in and grazed her cheek with his lips. ‘I missed you.’ His breath was warm on her face. Marion felt herself blushing and cleared her throat. ‘I need to speak to you,’ she said, stepping aside as a group of drunken officers careened by, cradling their bottles of bourbon.
‘Speak away,’ said John, inclining his head. Bright light shimmered in his ebony-black hair.
‘Our seances.’ Marion swallowed dryly. ‘Something is wrong, very wrong.’
John bit through an olive. ‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean,’ she said, ‘our seance with Colonel Brock, the lamp, the table…’ Just thinking about that slow lurch of the table, the lamp exploding in flames, it made her shudder. She glanced at John. He didn’t seem in the slightest disturbed by this. He clicked his fingers at the barman, who set two heavy snifters of whiskey on the counter.
‘Brock was just nervous. You know how nervous sitters can sometimes produce… irregularities at seances. Of course,’ he winked at her, ‘we mustn’t let on that good old Brock’s nerves failed him. Hurt his dignity, so it would.’ He took a long swig of whiskey and licked his lips.
‘No, but John, the anger that came through, the rage, that was not-’
‘Sure you know yourself,’ he said, ‘nervous sitters are a pest. Brock will come round, of course, but I’ve been giving it some thought, you know. Maybe we should start vetting clients. To weed out the ones who’re likely to take a hysterical turn.’ He smiled brightly. ‘Like your Mrs. McKittrick.’
Marion felt the blood drain from her face. She dug her nails into her purse. ‘About that…’
‘She seemed solid enough, in that drab, bull-headed Belfast way, but apparently not. I saw her this morning, actually. Half out of her mind with fright. I nearly thought to call an ambulance for her, have her sent to Richmond District Lunatic Asylum up in Grangegorman, but you know how busy the ambulances are these days.’ John drew out his silver cigarette case. ‘Tell me. What did you say to her, Marion? How did you make her howl so?’ He leaned closer. ‘Why did you scream?’
‘She wanted a message from her dead husband. She wanted it desperately. And I went very deep in my search for him, very deep.’
‘So? Why would that make you scream?’ He lit his cigarette with a blinding flicker and grinned. ‘I’ve never taken you for the screaming type.’
Marion took a quick gulp from her glass. Whiskey burned through her chest. ‘His soul has been shattered.’
John crinkled his nose. ‘That doesn’t make any sense. Souls can’t shatter.’
‘No, John, you must listen to me. We never thought that souls could be destroyed,’ she said, ‘but they can. They can be shattered. The men who decided that souls cannot be torn apart, they never saw a war like this. They never saw the desolation of No Man’s Land…’ She broke off and tried to wipe the sight from her mind, and the smell, piss-acrid.
John raised his brows. Not even a glint of doubt in his eyes.
In the far corner, a band began to play a frantic ragtime tune. Some of the officers shouted and whistled, lurching across the dance floor.
‘Here is what I wonder.’ John drew on his cigarette and looked thoughtfully at the gleaming mirrors behind the bar. ‘If you couldn’t find her dead husband, then who on earth were you communicating with? Why the screaming?’
Marion bit her lip, hard. ‘I did find him. In the end.’
He raised his black eyebrows and looked at her quizzically.
Marion lowered her head even further. ‘I forced him.’
‘What?’
‘I forced his shade.’ She didn’t look up to see the expression on his face. ‘I caught hold of it and forced it to hold itself together and to speak to her, through me.’
‘Marion…’
‘I went to the place where they are. The war dead.’ She raised her eyes to the blazing chandeliers turning in the draft, their glare reflected in all the mirrors, but it wasn’t enough light for her. ‘You must know it. No, please hear me,’ she leaned closer, whispering urgently, ‘it’s the place behind the outer darkness. Underneath it maybe. Where the slaughter fields are etched into the memory of time itself. It will be there forever. For those souls who were slaughtered in the war and who cannot move on, because they have been destroyed. Torn apart. Blasted and shelled. And that,’ she swallowed hard, ‘is most of them.’
John stood perfectly still, one hand cradling his glass, the other folded across his chest. His face had gone the shade of marble. ‘That is insane,’ he said, after a long pause. ‘That’s insane, Marion. First of all. No such place exists.’
‘John, it does, and-’
‘Nonsense.’ He turned his side to her and gazed at the veined green marble counter.
Marion stared at him, her eyes watering from the whiskey. ‘Hear me out. I have to tell you something…’
John set his glass down. ‘Oh God. This is my fault,’ he said, drawing a hand over his forehead. ‘You’ve had too much strain lately. I should’ve looked after you better, before you started seeing unreal…’ He shook his head, almost imperceptibly. ‘This is precisely the thing we don’t want, Marion. Strange, unsettling visions that aren’t real.’ He took her hand. ‘I’m sorry. It’s my fault. I’ll make it up to you, I will.’
She looked up at him with her chest in a hard knot. ‘John, you must listen, it’s not just Mrs. McKittrick, it’s not just the seance with Brock,’ she whispered, ‘they are not supposed to follow you home. The fallen. Just think of Hettie’s lost lover…’
He gazed at her mournfully. ‘Oh, darling, poor Marion. You mustn’t concoct these dark things in your mind, it’s not healthy, it’s not right. There are no reflections of any battlefields. The afterlife is a place of peace and light.’ He stroked her neck with his fingertips, and goosebumps shivered down her back.
‘But what about-’
‘There are no nightmares and no echoes of anything in the afterlife.’ He leaned closer. ‘They are all at rest, Marion,’ he whispered, his eyes gleaming, ‘all of them. There is no pain. There are no regrets. Do you understand me?’
Marion drew back slightly.
John ran a hand over his lapels, composing himself. ‘Now, what exactly do you mean when you say you forced the shade?’
Marion tightened her grip on her glass. Her mouth felt dry. ‘All you need is the edge of a memory. The smallest bit will do. From that, you, you can summon the spirit to you, force him to come to you, like a fish on a hook… or a…’ She clicked a fingernail along the crystal etchings in the glass.
John’s face went ashen. ‘Summon?’
Behind him, Hettie Brock came gliding towards them, her eyes sparkling, her throat framed by a soft cloud of ostrich feathers and pearls. ‘How marvellous! Here you are, the most gorgeous couple in town! Are you talking about Joanna,’ she chirped, ‘I’d say you are, and by God, she doesn’t have the constitution for seances at all, not like me.’ She smiled brightly and took Marion’s arm. ‘Do you want to dance, Marion? I say, John is making rather a gloomy face at present. We’ll leave the chaps behind, they don’t deserve us, with those long faces,’ she laughed. ‘Such fun, we shall be just like during the war, girls dancing with other girls!’
‘I think,’ began Marion, before trailing off.
John stared darkly at his glass.
‘My word,’ said Hettie, ‘but you both look as if you belong in a Grecian statuary, so pale and glum! Marion, you’re beautiful Queen Persephone, which would make you Hades, John,’ she cocked her head and hummed softly, ‘but no, I
think not, you’re clearly, hmmm, perhaps Endymion having a bad day?’
Brock emerged, patting his broad belt. Bits of hair oil melted at his temples under the glaring lights. ‘Ah yes, there she is, the woman of the hour!’ He beamed at Marion with his arm spread wide. ‘I must say, I had my doubts about you, young lady, but I am not afraid to admit it when I stand corrected, no indeed. Not only are you quite the thing, Miss Hahn,’ he looked her over with a broad smile, ‘but I see that you also do have your corsets on after all. Ha ha!’
‘I was just saying to Marion,’ began Hettie.
John raised his eyes and gazed intently at Marion. Unblinking.
Brock pretended he couldn’t hear his wife. ‘If I seemed a little,’ he sucked on his lower lip, ‘unsettled by the proceedings the other night, then, well, that’s only because it was my first.’
Marion nodded slowly, remembering his hoarse screams in the darkness.
‘Now, only this evening it occurred to me what you remind me of, Miss Hahn. My classical education wasn’t wasted, you see - now, what was the reference? Ah yes. The Pharsalia, Book Four, where we meet Erictho, the Witch Queen of ancient Thessaly, with her crown of black vipers and what was it, yes, the finger bones of men slaughtered on the battlefield. Commanding the legions of the dead, with the Lords of the Underworld bowing down before her feet. Quite the thing, I say!’
Hettie crinkled her nose. ‘That’s horrid, Cecil.’
‘Not Erictho,’ said John, still gazing at Marion. ‘You don’t do horrors, Marion, do you? It’s all peace and light with us.’ He smiled wryly.
Marion felt a lurch of sickness to her stomach. She thought of Eilis’ poem about the melancholy Irish god of the underworld, sighing, lovesick under starlight. It seemed more distant now than ever.
‘Now, I was meaning to tell you this,’ said Brock, rocking on his heels and surveying them both with a pleased glow in his face.
‘Don’t let’s talk work,’ Hettie sighed.
‘We have our results,’ Brock slapped the palm of his left hand, ‘our men have detained the suspect that you identified in the seance.’