by Devon Glenn
Black Wave
A Novel
Devon Glenn
Copyright © 2018 Devon Glenn.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
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The author of this book does not dispense medical advice or prescribe the use of any technique as a form of treatment for physical, emotional, or medical problems without the advice of a physician, either directly or indirectly. The intent of the author is only to offer information of a general nature to help you in your quest for emotional and spiritual well-being. In the event you use any of the information in this book for yourself, which is your constitutional right, the author and the publisher assume no responsibility for your actions.
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, names, incidents, organizations, and dialogue in this novel are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
ISBN: 978-1-9822-0314-6 (sc)
ISBN: 978-1-9822-0316-0 (hc)
ISBN: 978-1-9822-0315-3 (e)
Library of Congress Control Number: 2018905146
Balboa Press rev. date: 05/23/2018
Contents
Preface
PART I
Prologue
Chapter 1 Pennies
Chapter 2 A Ouija board and a wedding veil
Chapter 3 A trap door
Chapter 4 Larkspur
Chapter 5 A straight razor
Chapter 6 Whales and a beacon
Chapter 7 Horseshoe crabs and a bathing machine
Chapter 8 A loosened corset
Chapter 9 Wet hair
Chapter 10 A red rose
Chapter 11 A severed head
Chapter 12 The balcony and the crawl space
Chapter 13 Deed and dowry
Chapter 14 A bicycle built for two
Chapter 15 Black wave
Chapter 16 A wreath for a gravestone
Chapter 17 The last will and testament
PART II
Chapter 18 Exit Zero
Chapter 19 Peaches
Chapter 20 A six-pack of beer, a book, and an old video
Chapter 21 Little balls of light
Chapter 22 Forget-Me-Nots
Chapter 23 Trapdoor
Chapter 24 Sons and daughters
Chapter 25 Pillbox, teddy, brooch
Chapter 26 A web video and an authentic chair
Chapter 27 Sitters, users, and orbs
Chapter 28 Peppermint and a Jet Ski
Chapter 29 A bed of flowers
Chapter 30 A bra, a boat, and a novelty pen
Chapter 31 Scented oils and a tracking device
Chapter 32 Rhododendron
Chapter 33 Second sleep
Chapter 34 Antibacterial soap
Chapter 35 A lighthouse and a pile of clothes
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
For Anonymous
and the real Darthilda
Preface
I moved to New York City in 2008 on the eve of the Great Recession. Disoriented, broke, and haunted by my questionable life choices, I would often wake up screaming in the middle of the night, paralyzed with fear and convinced that there were specters in my room. A doctor told me I had a sleep disorder normally reserved for children and that perhaps I should calm down, do some yoga. I wrote a novel instead. It’s made entirely of hallucinations, Ouija board conversations, and dreams.
PART I
Prologue
As she watched her body wash up on the beach that morning, Darthilda Crossing knew she looked like a fallen reveler, drunk on brine and flashing her bloomers at passersby. Even the policeman shook his head at the sight of her, nudging her ribs with his dirty boot before finally lifting her arm to check her pulse. Looking down at her body from above, Dar was in no position to defend her virtue.
The officer let her arm plop to the sand. He hadn’t found a heartbeat. That would explain why Dar didn’t feel any warmer after he’d draped a blanket across her bloated limbs. She wanted to tell the coroner kicking his way through the sand to do something about her hair before he showed her to her next of kin. But before she could say anything—not that she could’ve—the two men lifted her into the coroner’s buggy, and that was that.
Separated from its earthly vessel, Dar’s soul scrambled like a hermit crab without its shell. For as wriggly and vulnerable as she was, what most concerned her about her untimely death was the nagging sensation that she’d been left behind. She certainly hadn’t been the only person on the beach that night—so why hadn’t his body washed up next to hers, entwined forever in a kelp valentine? She scanned the shore for a pair of feet, a lock of hair—any sign of him poking from the rubble of seaweed and driftwood and broken bicycle wheels. How would she tell him where she was? The waves had wiped most of the letters off her Ouija board. And who was left to send a telegram on her behalf? All along the south side of Cape May’s peninsula that night, rows of sweet gingerbread houses had fallen to the sand, leaving behind a pitiable thicket of turrets reaching up like hands folded in prayer across a vast field of ruin, their window eyes pleading.
A lighthouse blinked from the horizon. Dar knew she should follow the beacon to where loose souls go to yawn and stretch awake after their bodies had been laid to rest. Instead, Dar turned to the sand, desperate for another set of footprints.
She couldn’t go to the Other Side.
Not without him.
CHAPTER 1
Pennies
The “Other Side” of Cape May: Tricky Medium Exposes Senator’s Secret Lair!
by Clark Cummings
Cape May, NJ: Jun 25, 1893—A psychic has confirmed the rumors that New Jersey sen. Robert Digges is conducting backdoor deals from his seaside resort, the White Cottage Inn, and the answers have indeed come from above. Darthilda Crossing, psychic medium and heiress to the Crossing Railroad Inc. fortune, conjured a scandal when Washington attorney Alfred Jones was nearly crushed to death by a hotel employee who crashed through the ceiling of her séance room, exposing the secret room’s entrance for all to see.
The timing was unfortunate for Miss Crossing, who claimed to have channeled the spirit of President Harrison’s goat, Old Whiskers, when she heard a bleating voice and a series of loud bangs. The “polter-goat” proved to be Stewart Goldstein, a desk clerk, who narrowly missed Mr. Jones as he descended feet-first to the ground below, raining plaster and paint chips on the other guests’ heads. Mr. Goldstein reportedly landed on a table, scattering a deck of tarot cards and smashing a crystal ball while Miss Crossing shouted, “Oh, fiddlesticks!” and other phrases that did not meet our editorial standards. Mr. Jones is expected to recover.
Lottie Digges, the hotelier’s wife, assisted Mr. Jones back to his room, assuring her startled séance attendees that Mr. Goldstein had
taken a wrong turn while cleaning the hotel’s ventilation system, a statement the man was too dizzy to refute. But our sources tell us another version of events.
Lottie snickered as Dar read the article aloud. “Stewart does have whiskers like a goat,” she said with a shrug. “I suppose, though, that we should have waited until after the séance to have him dust the vents.”
Dar, however, gripped the copy of the Washington Weekly Affairs, her fingers shaking with rage as she flipped through several pages of conspiracy theories, advertisements for whalebone corsets, and reviews of miracle cures to find the second half of the article. She located it on the second-to-last page, unfortunately placed next to the summer cottage listings for Cape May.
For years, our sources have told us that the guestrooms of the White Cottage Inn are connected to one another through a network of overhead tunnels. Could it be that Mrs. Digges uses them to spook her guests and send them running with their wallets open straight to Miss Crossing’s séance room? Or do they lead to the secret room where Senator Digges conducts his backdoor deals? Rest assured, Mrs. Digges, we will keep digging, so to speak, for the truth!
Locals describe Miss Crossing as comely but eccentric. Said one guest, who did not wish to be named, “She’s wasting her nights lifting pennies from the eyes of corpses. What she really needs is a warm body!”
“Lifting pennies?” Dar repeated. “Who would say such a thing to a gossip reporter?” But she knew the answer.
Lottie calmly coaxed the paper from her friend’s trembling hands. “If it’s any consolation, the article said Mr. Jones was expected to recover; it didn’t say he would.”
Dar gave her friend a half-hearted smile. She was supposed to be marrying Alfred Jones, not reading about him in the paper. He had even come to Cape May to help Dar move her belongings to Washington, DC. Then Stewart had fallen from the ceiling, raining plaster on his alleged stint as grand marshal for Senator Digges’s backdoor-deal parade. Nervous that his relationship with Dar would make his other clients guilty by association, Alfred had ended their engagement on the spot.
“Now look: it’s not the most flattering article about either one of us, but you have to admit that this photograph of you is glorious!” Lottie gushed. “Even the reporter said you were comely.”
The photograph was a reprint from two years ago, when Dar and her parents were listed among the attendees at one of Robert’s fund-raisers at the capital. It was a black-and-white version of her former self, trapped forever in the second dimension. Like the article it accompanied, the photograph was only partially true.
Just after her twenty-first birthday, Dar’s hair had faded from golden blond to pure white. Every morning since, her mother, Virginia Crossing, had nearly broken her brush as she raked her daughter’s hair into the tightest of buns to hide its unusual color, which Virginia took to be boys’ bane most foul.
“No one will notice a thing with all those combs in your hair,” Lottie said, intuiting her friend’s thoughts. “Maybe if we…oh. Or not.” She retracted her hand. The feathers, flowers, and pearls on Dar’s combs may have hidden her hair from view, but they did nothing to draw the eye away from the scowl on her face.
Dar no longer looked like her photograph, and even with her mother’s combs, she wouldn’t be able to hide the color for long. Lottie would never say it, but she knew it was true, and Dar half wished that her friend would just come out and tell her she looked like Martha Washington’s wig model and have a good laugh so she could stop pretending to be something she was not.
“Virginia was never good with a curling iron,” Lottie said instead. “Although, to be fair to your mother, it must have been hard for her to style your hair when you were fleeing her in a screaming panic.”
“She’s burned my forehead too many times,” Dar said. “It’s a survival instinct now.” Finally, the laughter came.
Dar glanced at her friend’s coiffure. “Your hair is perfect, at least.” She threw out the compliment like extra yards of rope, slackening the tension between them.
“Thank you for noticing.” Lottie patted the soft curls that framed her porcelain-doll face.
“How did you make your pompadour so high in the front?”
“It’s like making a meringue”—Lottie spun her hand in a tight circle—“you keep whipping until stiff peaks form.”
Dar laughed; Lottie Digges hadn’t baked a meringue since President Harrison checked into her inn one summer after elbowing his way in between President Cleveland’s two terms. Her pie tin had been collecting dust ever since.
Once, Dar and Lottie had been freckle-faced girls running along the summer beach, picking glittering stones from the sand and pretending they were diamonds. Now Lottie was the very picture of femininity—a real-life Gibson girl—while Dar had lost her freckles through the years without gaining many womanly charms. She still lived with her mother on a perpetual holiday in their sprawling summer cottage, while Dar’s father, a railroad executive, was away on a perpetual business trip.
“I’m already regretting wearing this dress.” Dar’s voluminous black gown had the kind of leg-of-mutton sleeves that women loved because they created the illusion of a slimmer waist and men loathed because they made women more difficult to grasp by the arm. The price she paid for such high fashion was a high collar that choked her at the neck and a skirt with a train long enough to polish the floor as she walked. The dress commanded her to sit up straight, to keep her distance from the person sitting next to her, and to mind the candles and china while she moved. On any other woman, the dress would have started a conversation. On Darthilda, it was more likely to start a fire.
“Nonsense,” Lottie argued. “You are making a fashion statement. This dress says I am here and I have nothing to hide.”
“No, your dress says I am here and I have nothing to hide.” Dar looked with suspicion at Lottie’s emerald-green taffeta gown. She was as intimate with her bosom friend’s wardrobe as she was with her own, and the green taffeta served no other purpose than to show how Lottie’s profile formed a perfect S from her backside to her bust—which happened to be bursting at the seams. Dar didn’t call Lottie her bosom friend for nothing.
“Oh, but it is hiding something.” Lottie batted her eyelashes. “It’s hiding the grass stains.”
“I thought Robert went back to the city.”
With a sigh, Lottie sank into the chair next to Dar’s. “He did. And he hasn’t spoken to me since the article came out. I’ll be lucky if I see him before the next election.”
“It’s my fault for trying to host a séance at the White Cottage,” Dar assured her. “Your husband never liked my ghosts.”
Lottie snorted. “Only because he can’t charge them for staying at his inn.” She fixed her eyes on the table. “Why is your séance room so austere this evening?” She walked a circle, inspecting. “What happened to your grandmother’s tablecloth?”
Dar eyed the tools of her trade: enough seats around the table to pull a few guests at a time from the crowd, candles resting on doilies to set the mood, a pen and parchment—and a Ouija board in case the guests wanted to speak to the spirits directly. “My mother says that no one who has read this article will think my ghosts are anything but parlor tricks. But ghosts there will be, and I’m leaving the table bare so that the guests can see there are no strings attached.”
Lottie frowned. “If she thinks your reputation is ruined, why would your mother host another séance and invite all her friends?”
“Well, the reporter said I could use a warm body,” Dar explained, tapping her fingers on the table. “So my mother said it’s high time I trade my ghosts for another buffoon with a handlebar mustache.”
Lottie raised an eyebrow.
“That’s not exactly how she worded it, but it’s the general idea.” Dar buried her face in her hands. “Why did she have to pick tonight of all nights t
o bring a bunch of judging eyes? The ghosts love the humidity. This may be the most paranormal energy I’ll see all year!” She felt a hard lump of resentment rising in her throat. Her séance room was supposed to be her sanctuary—the one place where she could turn the lights down low and let the spirit flow through the hollow vessel of her body, lighting her up like the filament in a glass bulb. There, she didn’t have to be anyone, not even herself. She could simply be.
Lottie pulled her friend’s hands away from her face. “Don’t rub your eyes—they’ll end up as puffy as your sleeves.”
Dar pulled her hands free and brought them back to her face. “I don’t care.”
“You should care.” Lottie yanked Dar’s hands away again. “Don’t you want to get married? Show Awful Alfred what he’s missing?”
Dar stuffed her hands in her dress pockets and shook her head. “I want to be left alone.” Right after he proposed, Alfred had groped her with his grubby hands while asking her under his fowl breath if she knew how lucky she was to be with him. She told him the truth—that she didn’t feel a flutter of affection for him and that she would feel much luckier if he would keep his hands to himself.
Alfred had been Virginia’s idea, not Dar’s. She had invited him over for tea one afternoon and would not let Dar back into her séance room until she had accepted his proposal. To this day, Dar did not understand how Virginia had gotten him to agree to ask her. It would take a lion tamer to get a beast like Alfred to get down on one knee.
But Dar was fierce, and she would be free. “I have been saving every penny I’ve earned from my séances,” she whispered to Lottie. “If all goes according to plan, this summer will be the last one I spend in this house.”
“Nonsense. You’ll be carried across the threshold in the arms of a handsome tourist, and you’ll forget all about this golden spinster life you’re dreaming of. You’ll see.” Lottie rummaged through her pockets. “You can still salvage this night,” she said, finally pulling out the small object of her search. She waved it before Dar’s face. “Lip rouge fixes everything.”