Cobb, with Buckley's help, moved Vargas's chair closer to the table, so that his hands and wrists rested on the surface. Smiling, the medium asked the others to take their seats. As Quincannon sat down he bumped against the table, then reached down to feel one of its legs. As he'd expected, the table was much less heavy than it appeared to be at a glance. He stretched out a leg and with the toe of his shoe explored the carpet. The floor beneath seemed to be solid, but the nap was thick enough so that he couldn't be certain.
Vargas instructed everyone to spread their hands, the fingers of the left to grasp the wrist of the person on that side; thus one hand of each person was holding and the other was being held. "Once we begin," he said, "attempt to empty your minds of all thought, to keep them as blank as the table's surface throughout. And remember, you must not move either hands or feet during the séance—you must not under any circumstances break the mystic circle. To do so could have grave consequences. There have been instances where inattention and disobedience have been fatal to sensitives such as myself."
The professor closed his eyes, let his chin lower slowly to his chest. After a few seconds he commenced a whispering chant, a mixture of English and simulated Egyptian in which he called for the door to the spirit world to open and the shades of the departed to pass through and reveal their presence. While this was going on, the lights began to dim as if in phantasmical response to Vargas's exhortations. The phenomenon elicited a shivery gasp from Margaret Buckley, but Quincannon was unimpressed. Gaslight in one room was easily controlled from another—in this case by the assistant, Annabelle, at a prearranged time or on some sort of signal.
The shadows congealed until the room was in utter darkness. Vargas's chanting ceased abruptly; the silence deepened as it lengthened. Long minutes passed with no sounds except for the somewhat asthmatic breathing of Cyrus Buckley, the rustle of a dress or shuffle of a foot on the carpet. A palpable tension began to build. Sweat formed on Quincannon's face, not from any tension but from the overheated air. He was not a man given to fancies, but he was forced to admit that there was an eerie quality to sitting in total blackness this way, waiting for something to happen. Spiritualist mediums counted on this reaction, of course. The more keyed up their dupes became, the more eager they were to believe in the incredible things they were about to witness; and the more eager they were, the more easily they could be fooled by their own senses.
Someone coughed, a sudden sharp sound that made even Quincannon twitch involuntarily. He thought the cough had come from Vargas, but in such stifling darkness you couldn't be certain of the direction of any sound. Even when the medium spoke again, the words might have come from anywhere in the room.
"Angkar is with us. I feel his presence."
On Quincannon's left, Dr. Cobb stirred and their knees bumped together; Mrs. Buckley, on his right, brought forth another of her shivery gasps.
"Will you speak to us tonight, Angkar? Will you answer our questions in the language of the dead and guide us among your fellow spirits? Please grant our humble request. Please answer yes."
The silver bell inside the jar rang once, muted but clear.
"Angkar has consented. He will speak, he will lead us. He will ring the bell once for yes to each question he is asked, twice for no, for that is the language of the dead. Will someone ask him a question? Doctor Cobb?"
"I will," Cobb's voice answered. "Angkar, is my brother Philip well and happy on the Other Side?"
The bell tinkled once.
"Will he appear to us in his spirit form?"
Yes.
"Will it be tonight?"
Silence.
Vargas said, "Angkar is unable to answer that question yet. Please ask another."
There was a good deal more of this, with questions from Cobb, his wife, and Mrs. Buckley. Then Vargas called on Sabina to ask the spirit guide a question.
She obliged by saying, "Angkar, tell me please, is my little boy John with you? He was always such a bad little boy that I fear for his poor troubled soul."
Yes, he is one of us.
No, he is not here tonight.
"Has he learned humility and common sense, two qualities which he lacked on this earthly sphere?"
Yes.
"And has he learned to take no for an answer?"
Yes.
Quincannon scowled in the darkness. Although Sabina had been married once, she had no children. The "little boy John" was her doting partner, of course. Having a bit of teasing fun at his expense while at the same time establishing proof of Vargas's deceit.
"Mr. Quinn?" the professor said. "Will you ask Angkar a question?"
He might not have responded as he did if the heat and the sickly sweet incense hadn't given him a headache. But his head throbbed, and Sabina's playfulness rankled, and the words were out of his mouth before he could bite them back. "Oh yes, indeed," he said. "Angkar, will my dear wife ever consent to share my cold and lonely bed?"
Shocked murmurs, a muffled choking sound that might have come from Sabina, rose around him. The bell was silent. And then, without warning, the table seemed to stir and tremble beneath Quincannon's outstretched hands. Its smooth surface rippled; a faint creak sounded from somewhere underneath. In the next instant the table tilted sideways, turned and rocked and wobbled as if it had been injected with a life of its own. The agitated movements continued for several seconds, stopped altogether—and then the table lifted completely off the floor, seemed to float in the air for another two or three heartbeats before finally thudding back onto the carpet. Throughout all of this, the silver bell inside the jar remained conspicuously silent.
"Mr. Quinn, you have angered Angkar." The medium's voice was sharply reproachful. "He finds your question inappropriate, frivolous, even mocking. He may deny us further communication and return to the Afterworld."
Mrs. Buckley cried, "Oh no, please, he mustn't go!"
Cobb said angrily, "Damn your eyes, Quinn —"
"Silence!" Vargas, in a sibilant whisper. "We must do nothing more to disturb the spirits or the consequences may be dire. Do not move or speak. Do not break the circle."
The stuffy blackness closed down again. It was an effort for Quincannon to hold still. He regretted his question, though not because of any effect on Angkar and his discarnate legion; he was sure that the table-tipping and levitation would have taken place in any event. His regret was that he had allowed Sabina to glimpse the depth of his frustration, and into the bargain added weight to her already erroneous idea of the nature of his passion. Seduction wasn't his game; his affection for her was genuine, abiding. Hell and damn! Now it might take him days, even weeks, to undo the damage done by his profligate tongue—A sound burst the heavy stillness, a jingling that was not of the silver bell in the jar. The tambourine that had been on the sideboard. Its jingling continued, steady, almost musical in an eerily discordant way.
Vargas's whisper was fervent. "Angkar is still present. He has forgiven Mr. Quinn, permitted us one more chance to communicate with the spirits he has brought with him."
Mrs. Buckley: "Praise Angkar! Praise the spirits!"
The shaking of the tambourine ended. And all at once a ghostly light, pale and vaporous, appeared at a distance overhead, hovered, and then commenced a swirling motion that created faint luminous streaks on the wall of dead black. One of the sitters made an ecstatic throat noise. The swirls slowed, the light stilled again for a moment; then it began to rise until it seemed to hover just below the ceiling, and at last it faded away entirely. Other lights, mere pinpricks, flicked on and off, moving this way and that as if a handful of fireflies had been released in the room.
A thin, moaning wail erupted.
The pinpricks of light vanished.
Quincannon, listening intently, heard a faint ratchety noise followed by a strumming chord. The vaporous light reappeared, now in a different location closer to the floor; at the edge of its glow the guitar could be seen to leap into the air, to gyrate this way
and that with no hand upon it. The strumming chord replayed and was joined by other strange music that sounded and yet did not sound as though it were being made by the strings.
For three, four, five seconds the guitar continued its levitating dance, seemingly playing a tune upon itself. Then the glow once more faded, and when it was gone the music ceased and the guitar twanged to rest on the carpet. Nearly a minute passed in electric silence.
Grace Cobb shrieked, "A hand! I felt a hand brush against my cheek!"
Vargas warned, "Do not move, do not break the circle." Something touched Quincannon's neck, a velvety caress that lifted the short hairs there and bristled them like a cat's fur. If the fingers—they felt exactly like cold, lifeless fingers—had lingered he would have ignored the professor's remonstration and made an attempt to grab and hold onto them. But the hand or whatever it was slid away almost immediately.
Moments later it materialized long enough for it to be identifiable as just that—a disembodied hand. Then it was gone as if it had never been there at all.
Another period of silence.
The unearthly moan again.
And a glowing face appeared, as disembodied as the hand, above where Dr. Cobb sat.
The face was a man's, shrouded as if in a kind of whitish drapery that ran right around it and was cut off at a straight line on the lower part. The eyes were enormous black-rimmed holes. The mouth moved, formed words in a deep-throated rumble.
"Oliver? It's Philip, Oliver."
"Philip! I'm so glad you've come at long last." Cobb's words were choked with feeling. "Are you well?"
"I am well. But I cannot stay long. The Auras have allowed me to make contact but now I must return."
"Yes . . . yes, I understand."
"I will come again. For a longer visit next time, Oliver. Next time . . ."
The face was swallowed by darkness.
More minutes crept away. Quincannon couldn't tell how many; he had lost all sense of time and space in the suffocating dark.
A second phantomlike countenance materialized, this one high above Margaret Buckley's chair. It was shimmery, indistinct behind a hazy substance like a luminous veil. The words that issued from it were an otherworldly, childlike quaver—the voice of a little girl.
"Mommy? Is that you Mommy?"
"Oh, thank God! Bernice!" Margaret Buckley's cry was rapturous. "Cyrus, it's our darling Bernice!"
Her husband made no response.
"I love you, Mommy. Do you love me?"
"Oh yes! Bernice, dearest, I prayed and prayed you'd come. Are you happy in the Afterworld? Tell Mommy."
"Yes, I'm very happy. But I must go back now."
"No, not so soon! Bernice, wait —"
"Will you come again, Mommy? Promise me you'll come again. Then the Auras will let me come too."
"I'll come, darling, I promise!"
The radiant image vanished.
Mrs. Buckley began to weep softly.
Quincannon was fed up with this hokum. Good and angry, too. It was despicable enough for fake mediums to dupe the gullible, but when they resorted to the exploitation of a middle-aged woman's yearning for her long-dead child the game became intolerable. The sooner he and Sabina put a finish to it, the better for all concerned. If there was even one more materialization . . .
There wasn't. He heard scratchings, the unmistakable sound of the slate pencil writing on a slate. This was followed by yet another protracted silence, broken only by the faintest of scraping and clicking sounds that Quincannon couldn't identify.
Vargas said abruptly, "The spirits have grown restless. All except Angkar are returning now to the land beyond the Border. Angkar will leave too, but first he will free me from my bonds, just as one day we will all be freed from our mortal ties —"
The last word was chopped off in a meaty smacking noise and an explosive grunt of pain. Another smack, a gurgling moan. Sabina called out in alarm, "John! Something's happened to Vargas!" Other voices rose in frightened confusion. Quincannon pushed up from the table, fumbling in his pocket for a Lucifer. His thumbnail scratched it alight.
In the smoky flare he saw the others scrambling to their feet around the table, all except Professor Vargas. The medium, still roped to his chair, was slumped forward with his chin on his chest, unmoving. Quincannon kicked his own chair out of the way, carried the Lucifer across to the nearest wall sconce. The gas was off; he turned it, and applied the flame. Flickery light burst forth, chasing shadows back into the room's corners.
Outside in the hallway, hands began to beat on the door panel. Annabelle's voice rose shrilly: "Let me in! I heard a cry . . . let me in!"
"Dear Lord, he's been stabbed!"
The exclamation came from Cyrus Buckley. There were other cries overridden by a shriek from Mrs. Buckley; Quincannon turned in time to see her swoon in her husband's arms. He ran to where Sabina stood staring down at the medium's slumped body.
Stabbed, for a fact. The weapon, a dagger whose ornate hilt bore a series of hieroglyphics, jutted from the back of his neck. Another wound, the first one struck for it still oozed blood, showed through a rent in Vargas's robe lower down, between the shoulder blades.
Ashen-faced, Dr. Cobb bent to feel for a pulse in the professor's neck. He shook his head and said, "Expired," a few moments later.
"It isn't possible," his wife whispered. "How could he have been stabbed?"
Buckley had lowered his wife onto one of the chairs and was fanning her flushed face with his hand. He said shakily, "How—and by whom?"
Quincannon caught Sabina's eye. She wagged her head to tell him, she didn't know, or couldn't be sure, what had happened in those last few seconds of darkness.
The psychic assistant, Annabelle, was still beating on the door, clamoring for admittance. Quincannon went to the sideboard. The brass key lay where Vargas had set it down before the séance began; he used it to unlock the door. Annabelle rushed in from the dark hallway, her eyes wide and fearful. She gave a little moan when she saw Vargas and ran to his side, knelt to peer into his dead face.
When she straightened again her own face was as white as milk. She said tremulously, "One of you did this?"
"No," Dr. Cobb told her. "It couldn't have been one of us. No one broke the circle until after the professor was stabbed."
"Then . . . it was the spirits."
"He did perceive antagonistic waves tonight. But why would a malevolent spirit —"
"He made all the Auras angry. I warned him but he didn't listen."
Sabina said, "How did he make the Auras angry, Annabelle?"
The woman shuddered and shook her head. Then her eyes shifted into a long stare across the room. "The slates," she said.
"What about the slates?"
"Did the spirits leave a message? Have you looked?"
Quincannon swung around to the sideboard; the others, except for Margaret Buckley, crowded close behind him. The tied slates were in the center of the stack where Vargas had placed them. He pulled those two out, undid the knot in his handkerchief, parted them for his eyes and the eyes of the others.
Murmurs and a mildly blasphemous exclamation from Buckley.
In a ghostlike hand beneath the "John Quinn" signatures on each, one message upside down and backwards as if it were a mirror image of the other, was written: I Angkar destroyed the evil one.
"Angkar!" Dr. Cobb said. "Why would the professor's guide and guardian turn on him that way?"
"The spirits are not mocked," Annabelle said. "They know evil when it is done in their name and guardian becomes avenger."
"Madam, what are you saying?"
"I warned him," she said again. "He would not listen and now he has paid the price. His torment will continue on the Other Side, until his essence has been cleansed of wickedness."
Quincannon said, "Enough talk and speculation," in authoritarian tones that swiveled all heads in his direction. "There'll be time for that later. Now there's work to be done."
&
nbsp; "Quite right," Cobb agreed. "The police —"
"Not the police, Doctor. Not yet."
"Here Quinn, who are you to take charge?"
"The name isn't Quinn, it's Quincannon. John Quincannon. Of Carpenter and Quincannon, Professional Detective Services."
Cobb gaped at him. "A detective? You?"
"Two detectives." He gestured to Sabina. "My partner, Mrs. Carpenter."
"A woman?" Grace Cobb said. She sounded as shocked as if Sabina had been revealed as a soiled dove.
Sabina, testily: "And why not, pray tell?"
Dr. Cobb: "Who hired you? Who brought you here under false pretenses?"
Quincannon and Sabina both looked at Buckley. To his credit, the financier wasted no time in admitting he was their client.
"You, Cyrus?" Margaret Buckley had revived and was regarding them dazedly. "I don't understand. Why would you engage detectives?"
Before her husband could reply, Quincannon said, "Mr. Buckley will explain in the parlor. Be so good, all of you, as to go there and wait."
"For what?" Cobb demanded.
"For Mrs. Carpenter and me to do what no other detective, police officer, or private citizen can do half so well." False modesty was not one of Quincannon's character flaws, despite Sabina's occasional attempts to convince him otherwise. "Solve a baffling crime."
No one protested, although Dr. Cobb wore an expression of disapproval and Annabelle said, "What good are earthly detectives when it is the spirits who have taken vengeance?" as they left the room. Within a minute Quincannon and Sabina were alone with the dead man.
Quincannon turned the key in the lock to ensure their privacy. He said then, "Well, my dear, a pretty puzzle, eh?"
Instead of answering, Sabina fetched him a stinging slap that rattled his eyelids. "That," she said, "is for the rude remark about sharing your bed."
For once, he was speechless. He might have argued that she had precipitated the remark with her own sly comments, but this was neither the time nor the place. Besides, he could not recall ever having won an argument with Sabina over anything of consequence. There had been numerous draws, yes, but never a clear-cut victory. At times he felt downright impotent in her presence. Impotent in the figurative sense of the word, of course.
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